Hedi Kaddour - Waltenberg

‘Joker or not,’ says Malraux, ‘I never made you say anything uncouth.’

‘Monsieur Goffard, just let Madame tell us about the kangaroo,’ said the pink diplomat.

*

‘Is it more serious than I thought?’ Lilstein asks you. ‘Is it more than just doubts you’re having? You want to stop? It’s entirely up to you, I’ve always told you that you were perfectly free, let me set your mind at rest: your withdrawal, you will note that I do not talk of defection or betrayal, your withdrawal would not make life difficult for me at all. I could replace you in Paris immediately. You can withdraw, and if some day you ever wish to renew contact, if you need information, I shall always be there.

‘How would I replace you? Perhaps I already have, maybe you have had a double from the beginning, not a double exactly, an understudy, someone who works with me in the same way, not with your friend the Minister but with somebody else who is also destined for high office, a man, a woman I’m having meetings with elsewhere, by the seaside, for a change, you have fears, doubts, you want to stop because you have still not got the point, you still think that I’m asking you to spy on a decision-making centre, you have no ambition, stand back, look at the wider picture: we are the centre where the decisions are made.

‘The two of us, nobody else, when we’re together and decide to do something nothing can stand in our way, and nobody can identify us, no gizmos to connect us, no phone, no radio, no codes, no cover, no letter-box, sleeping or otherwise, no go-betweens, no invisible ink, no cryptic grids, no microdots, no underhand stuff, if I ever stop coming here without letting you know beforehand, drop everything, at once, it will almost certainly mean that the ideas we support are going through a tough time, and me with them, never leave anything lying around that could look like evidence, everything in your head, traces yes, that’s unavoidable, but never leave evidence, they have an obsession with evidence, and never admit anything, if I disappear don’t try to find someone else to work with, “no longer mourn for me”, no regular habits, no gizmos, you buy old recordings and sell them, from time to time you place an advertisement in the Figaro, and mind, you must buy and sell for real, five or six times a year, it’s not a lot.

‘All I need is the classified ad, three days before the meeting, you speak English, German and Spanish, you travel a lot, you’ll have plenty of reasons, you like opera, it’s expensive, isn’t it? Opera is excellent, given the price of decent seats you can improve your general culture at the same time as cultivating your hatred of the rich, get yourself known as the sort of man who will go a thousand kilometres to hear a singer or a violinist, a few trips each year, West Germany, Austria, and you often go via Switzerland, in Zurich there are some famous record dealers, excellent second-hand bookshops, and a direct train for Waltenberg, if you decide you don’t like all that travelling any more remember you can stop whenever you like, you have an understudy, though maybe you are his understudy, suspicion falls on you, among others, nothing can ever be proved against you, which allows me to shelter your understudy who is more vulnerable behind your more high-profile self, I’m only joking.’

*

‘The kangaroo is sitting on Valérie Serge’s bed in Shanghai’s biggest hotel,’ says the young woman.

‘Madame Serge,’ says Max, ‘good name for a high-class couturière, most ingenious.’

‘Baron,’ says Malraux, ‘let her speak.’

‘This happens at the point,’ the young woman resumes, ‘where Ferrai arranges for Valérie’s room to be filled with uncaged birds, to pay her back for the business with the rabbit, on the bed a pair of soft pyjamas, all that’s left of the woman he loved, red and gold silk, he picks them up, brushes them lightly against his cheek and starts to daydream.’

‘About kangaroos,’ says the pink diplomat who, as he looks towards the grey diplomat, turns a deeper shade of pink.

‘No,’ replies the young woman, ‘about violence, as men do who like imagining what women secretly want to have done to them, anyway, he daydreams, while on the bed where they’d made love is a handsome, real, live kangaroo, a kangaroo with eyes like a terrified doe.’

‘Shush! don’t say a word!’ cries Max, ‘a hairy little kangaroo, superbly constructed, my dear fellow, that’s exactly what your novel is, it’s the locomotive and the kangaroo, a kangaroo with a moustache!’

‘But no one,’ the young woman says, ‘apart that is from a few female readers who do not like empty beds, ever notices the kangaroo in the book, but it’s there.’

‘Maybe that’s why it has fewer readers today,’ Malraux observes, ‘and why journalists find me lacking in humour, don’t deny it, de Vèze.’

‘Ah,’ says Max, ‘it’s the absence of humour that explains why we have such large print-runs, revolutionary readers, moralists, the Classiques Larousse, right, left, Trotsky, Maurras’s faithful, but those people don’t need kangaroos, the rest of us do, I mean the fiction-reading public, in the end it all comes out, shush! don’t interrupt! that’s enough about kangaroos, today, Master, you’re on your way to the land of the talapoins, and you’re not taking me!’

‘Who are these talapoins?’ asks the grey diplomat.

‘Asian monks,’ answers Morel.

‘Who are Voltaireans,’ says Max.

‘There’s a word I’d forgotten,’ says Malraux.

And Max:

‘It was me who taught you it, you want to forget because a week from now you’re scheduled to have a meeting with the great Mao, in the land of the talapoins, serious stuff in the offing, serious stuff is so depressing, I told you that Chiang Kai-Shek was going to dress the Chinese up in talapoin habits, but that was in ’27, missed the boat, it was Mao twenty years later who dressed them like that, blue talapoins, I was twenty years ahead of my time, that’s the joke, a machine for defragmenting time, just let it run, everything eventually turns into farce without any help from anybody.’

*

‘I never asked you for any sort of bureaucratic involvement,’ Lilstein tells you, ‘you can put an end to it whenever you wish, it’s a man-to-man relationship, Menschheit, young gentleman of France, do you know what my department is called? it’s the Aufklärung, where you come from they say Lumières, enlightenment, what is my role in the Aufklärung. I never told you? I never hide anything from you, I have no official role in the set-up, don’t really have an office, but all the big files pass through my hands, I answer only to the Minister who knows that I don’t really answer to him at all but to a direct line, further to the East. Officially, my area of responsibility is international trade, I work hard at it, especially with our cousins in Bonn, they rather like me, I hint that I do more than just trade, that I am a man of shadows, that I have power, they think I’m either a boaster or a stirrer.

‘Ever read the letter Kant wrote on the Enlightenment? Wonderful stuff! “Dare to think!” You and I are Enlightenment Men, you too have an ideal, like all these people who are monkeys dangling on the stick of their particular ideal, but you are no monkey, you are an actor, you ask me how I’d translate Menschheit ? As something between humanity and virility, not to worry, the sort of virility that has nothing to do with fascism.

‘Though actually not virility, that’s a bit strong, it’s rather the simple fact of being a man, you could just say “humanity” but with an element of “integrity”, think I’m exaggerating? There’s also a notion of “fellowship” to it or again … not easy … it’s daring to stand up and be counted as a man, to take that risk, it’s somewhere between human and hero, between artifice and being true to your word … but not a halfway house, it’s rather a third shore, everything we do is third shore.