Hedi Kaddour - Waltenberg

‘Picture Iago,’ Lilstein goes on, ‘an Iago who turns into an enlightened minister, an expert in maritime growth, he dies twenty years after that unfortunate business with the handkerchief, mourned by all, a statue facing out to sea for the centuries to come, I have a very bold hypothesis: what does Beria do when he succeeds Yezhov? What does Beria do after Stalin dies? He was always close to Bukharin’s programme, a man of the right, work, profitability, a few market mechanisms, the Party worries about ideology and leaves the managers to manage things, let’s have done with anti-Semitism and all that “Greater Russia” rhetoric, when he died some of the people implicated in the white-collar plot had to wait two years before they were freed, simply because the order for their release was signed by Beria.

‘Each time he was fully in charge of security he ordered the doors to be opened, and in ’53 he goes very far, he is ready to accept a form of German reunification on condition that it stays neutral, he has a clear idea of what growth means and what nationalities are, we’ll speak of that later, yes, it’s dangerous to talk about such matters, even today, that is why they went to so much trouble to kill Beria, one death but several versions, we can’t make different models of the same motor car, but when it comes to death there’s no one to touch us.

‘So there is a fourth version, more fanciful, Beria attends a party at the Polish Embassy, shield decorated with a white eagle on a red background, we can add without fear of error that the Ambassador’s wife has skin like a peach, and dimples and that she’s wearing Chanel, Beria came in his own car, with Voroshilov and Bulganin, first-rate cuisine, meat that melts in the mouth, vast amounts of drink, Polish vodka obviously, end of the reception, they drive off into the night, the car, Beria, Bulganin, Voroshilov, everyone’s pissed, they go to the Lubyanka, to Beria’s flat, a drunken farce, with Malinovski and Konev in the car behind, Beria’s driver has been changed, he’s a colonel, three minutes later Beria is standing before a court presided over by Marshal Konev, judged, sentenced, executed in a cellar with which he was intimately acquainted.

‘There are other versions, I’ll tell you those another day, stories of bullets in the back put there by his friends, but we run no such risk, we trust each other.

‘And then times started to change, between the two of us we made terror take a step back, we contributed in our modest way to push back the shadows of unnatural death, and your Minister friend cannot dispense with your conversation, we are moving forward, so you’re rereading Faust ? Now why did you tell me that?

‘Because you have doubts? It’s only to be expected, you’re French and if you had fewer grandiose sentiments you’d have fewer doubts.’

*

The wives of the Consul and Morel are having cross words over a hoop, the young woman has quickly got the idea that you mustn’t let people get away with anything:

‘You went through four the wrong way, didn’t you?’

Max, Morel and de Vèze watch them, the pink diplomat joins them, bald, ruddy complexion, an inane, unforgiving expression in his eye, a face descending in ledges towards his thick lips, he lisps:

‘It’s a very feminine game.’

‘You look worried,’ says Max.

The pink diplomat whines:

‘It’s so hard finding honest domestic help in Singapore, they don’t know anything and they steal. There’s this one I’ve got, this morning, in order to make him return a dinner jacket the police had to teach him a harsh lesson, like the English do, with a cane, it was painful to see, eighteen he was, skin very smooth, hardly smelled at all, for a minute he didn’t understand what was happening, held face down on the table, he started struggling, they tied his feet to the legs of the table, white buttocks, he confessed at the fourth stroke but the sergeant said to go up to fifteen, I didn’t care about the jacket, but you’ve got to have law and order, as the Anglo-Saxons say.’

The diplomat’s chin rises and points to the horizon, tautening the fat on his neck which settles back into its regular folds when his chin comes down again.

Weird, de Vèze thinks, a sodomite singing the praises of law and order. They do it as a cover, a friend of his told him one day, but de Vèze thinks there might be more to it than that, there must be a visceral pleasure to be got from defending law and order in a society which puts you behind bars each time it catches you with a squaddie in a public toilet, de Vèze has known officers who were, as they say, limp-wristed but nevertheless laughed like drains, and quite genuinely, whenever they heard repeated what Clemenceau said about Lyautey, ‘at last we’ve got a general with balls up his arse, though unfortunately they’re not his’, as though they gladly accepted the fact that they had two existences, one led in the dancing dark and the other in the light of day, in a society which dealt ruthlessly with the dancing shadows of which they were the — often heroic — guardians.

Morel, followed by the pink diplomat, walks away from Max and de Vèze towards his wife.

‘They make a lovely couple,’ says Max to de Vèze, ‘I mean the husband and wife, but she must find him a bit of a bore at times, even if he does take her round all the embassies, did you know he used to be a member of the Communist Party? Actually, he’s not the only one here this evening who came up via the Party, not you, you never had the time, anyway all these young people here this evening did, yes, I’m very well informed, it’s my job, there isn’t one of these youngsters who resisted the temptation, even the bearded chap in grey, likewise his pink chum, and maybe the young woman too, but Budapest, ’56, went deep, they all jumped ship and then explained more or less why to the “bourgeois press”, yes, I was there too, Budapest, I’ve seen a bit of everything.

‘The hardest part? With those Russian tanks you’re spoiled for choice. But if you want the biggest funk I was ever in: youngsters, a bridge over the Danube, just before the Russians arrived, a gang of kids, none more than thirteen, nobody knew where they came from, looked dirt poor, I was talking to passers-by who were carrying loaves of bread home, one of them shouted laughingly to the kids: aren’t you a bit young to be playing with those? A quick burst of gunfire, the kids had sub-machine guns, the man I’d been talking to lying there in his own blood, breathing his last, the kids continue pointing their guns at us, they have the eyes of chicken-thieves.

‘The people who had loaves put them down on the ground for the kids to see and then we all backed away, very slowly, you couldn’t get to those kids, I’ve seen as much real war as you, but I never felt as scared as I did that day, so anyway, Budapest, for these young people who are here with us this evening, marked the break with their classless dreams, and today they’re all Gaullists or congregate in the centre or belong to the “wait-and-see” brigade, that’s why they think so much of this man who’s keeping us waiting, he did exactly what they did, or rather they did what he did, though without the risks and the fanfares.

‘Me? I never really felt tempted, never read Marx, I prefer Shakespeare, history always barks like a mad dog. By the way, Ambassador, were you aware that we’ve met before? Obviously you don’t remember.’

Max leaves de Vèze, zigzags his way across the lawn, the sky has cleared, now and then the wind carries a few fading drops of rain or sea-spray, in the distance a few weak attempts at rainbows, a pale look to everything, the ocean and the moist air dilute and flatten, absence of anything to catch the eye, of high ground, ars, in Morocco there was more contrast, they called it ars abu lhawa, the clouds drift away, a still damp sun, the brown land shiningly wet, a rainbow against the sky, very bright, the agent for Native Affairs had translated for Max, ars is marriage, so ‘the jackal’s wedding’, the jackal is truly their animal, their Reynard the Fox , and it also defines their politics, a jackal and a lion were sleeping on the edge of a ravine, the jackal says to the lion move over please, and the sleeping lion starts to fall over the edge, at the last moment he reaches out with his claws, pulls the jackal’s tail clean off and as he falls cries I’ll recognise you when we meet again! The jackal, minus tail, lopes off, gathers all the other jackals together, says let’s go and eat apricots, they reach the apricot-tree, how do we get at the apricots? I’ll tie all your tails to the apricot-tree, you shake it, then we’ll eat the apricots, so he ties all their tails, then goes to keep watch while they shake the tree. He races back shouting, hunters! dogs! every man for himself!