‘I read your stuff,’ says Hans.
No, Hans didn’t read anything, it was copy for press consumption only, what could be printed, not everything, Hans, you couldn’t say everything if you wanted to stay in the field and not get sent home courtesy of the military, not easy being a reporter in the Riff with the military around, you stay on willy-nilly, rotten job, a month or two, you leave, you go back.
For four years, Max made the round-trip at least twice a year, each time I told myself I’d write about it later, I kept my eyes open, for my articles I kept mostly to the beauty of the branches of acacia in the beds of the wadis and the doctors who treated trachoma. When you write like that, you cut anything that oversteps the mark; the more you cut, the less your eye sees, what you preferred not to see resurfaces in the night, so don’t let anyone tell us that the war should have acted on us like a vaccine, it was a soldier’s world, now I hear screams in the night, no not in the night, in my dreams, and I wake up screaming, Hans I’m sick and tired of being a war correspondent, you get to see too much of what happens to the civilian population, or maybe I should take up sports reporting.
‘And the best you could manage after the Riff was to swan off to Shanghai?’
Max had wanted a change of scene, Shanghai, the floating brothel, the first time he’d read about it was in his father’s favourite paper, Paris-Soir, he was thirteen, he burst out laughing, it was in the drawing room, there were guests, he was sitting by himself in a corner, he giggled.
‘What’s so funny, Max?’
His father is very proud of having a son who reads newspapers.
‘I’m reading an article about Shanghai, papa.’
The two words were hidden in a paragraph, ‘floating brothel’, Max reads them out to the whole drawing room, time for bed, in another family it would have been a clip round the ear and get up to bed, in our house no clip on the ear, just time for bed, an infinite iciness in my father’s voice and no newspapers for two years.
Instead Max took up the piano, he played Bach, and Wagner arranged for keyboard, it helped him when he became a journalist, a real asset in any drawing room, in the best families, throughout the whole of Europe.
China also means painting with a fine brush, people who spend three years learning how to draw a rock, the five shades of black ink, a waterfall as a living thing, the brush which makes the wind flow between the mountains, that’s what Max was looking for, not floating brothels, but rather the scroll that is opened in the back of a shop, time which stops devouring the minutes, recapture time, before painting a bamboo first give it time to grow inside you.
Three weeks after Max arrived in China, Chiang Kai-Shek started liquidating his revolutionaries, Shanghai, stationary locomotives, boilers, screams, yes, the world’s press reported it, the absolute height of horror said the papers, there were also more classical forms of giving quietus, the main square, men in single file, women too, the majority civilians, decapitation by sword, not easy, even when people have their hands tied, they lie down, they just won’t kneel, some crawl around screaming, especially the innocent, they don’t get far, scream hard enough to shatter their larynxes, not enough blocks to put heads on, the blade does not always strike clean, Chiang Kai-Shek’s troopers roll up their sleeves, work in groups, yank them by the hair, use their bayonets, the work hardly progresses, the prisoners are lined up one behind the other by the hundred, occasionally one is calmer, steps forward without having to be pushed or pulled, shouts out a few words, no one will translate the words for Max, and Chiang’s officers beat the more ineffectual troopers with English-style canes, they turn to Max, English-style jibes directed at those about to die:
‘They’ll never have toothache again!’
Not enough sand, not enough sawdust, men slip in the blood like in a Chaplin film, the officers put their side of the argument:
‘No, no coups de grâce, we have to save money, my dear fellow, it’s war, let’s hope it’s all over soon, no, you can’t leave now, the streets around the square have not been made secure, yes, all afternoon, still, you’re not too badly off here, I’d gladly change places with you, neither victim nor executioner, and this evening you’ll have hard words for us in your despatch.’
*
In Max’s story set in Savoie, there won’t be any little chimney sweeps, and not too much fondue, and nor of tartiflette, tartiflette is less well known but if you use the best potatoes it’s a dish fit for kings. Max searches for a simple turn of phrase, as simple as the air up there, simple as a Jules Renard anecdote, to forget Shanghai, to forget the Riff, sunset of an evening over dun-coloured hills that ripple like a horse’s chest, in the Riff too prisoners had their throats cut, thousands of Spanish soldiers in the hands of Abd el-Krim, no, not officers, and the Spaniards gassed Riffian villages, three waves of bombers at dawn, green-fingered dawn, the chemicals work more efficiently in the morning dew, put all that behind you and tell a story set in the Alps, a couple, they walk through fields on the edge of a village, they have a dog on a lead.
‘And in the background,’ says Hans, ‘we’ll hear the soughing of the wind, the rich earth, smells of the underwood, and a few clouds over the mountain tops to catch the last flames of the sun, French-style Alpenglühen?’
That’s about the size of it, it would be good if Hans would agree to write the descriptive bits, Max would include beneath the title ‘Sets and props by Hans Kappler’, very smart, but don’t give me any of those meandering sentences with endless ramifications, subordinate clauses, interpolated clauses, antepositions, breast-beating, details, twenty lines of self-torment before we reach a full stop or the end of the paragraph, exactly the sort of thing that goes down so well in Germany, here readers are on the lazy side.
Hans smiles, Max does not realise that Hans is currently struggling with a fit of melancholia, he shouldn’t have mentioned meandering sentences, he searches for a word that will correct his lapse, but Hans goes on as if nothing had happened:
‘You know, talking of descriptions, Colette went on writing descriptions for Willy’s books long after they went their separate ways, one day he ordered a few pages of Mediterranean landscape for a novel, she started and then stalled, though she knew the Côte d’Azur well, she asked if she could change it for Franche-Comté, it didn’t bother Willy, and when the book was going to press someone asked if it was true that if you looked out of a window in Franche-Comté you could really see the sea.’
Actually, Hans would do it much more seriously, look, we’re being watched, Max and Hans are in a dark, unused corner of the Jardin du Luxembourg, a few badly parked wheelbarrows, a great heap of dead leaves and, in the middle, staring out at them, on a small plinth, a rather unprepossessing bust, an awkward-looking customer, a bronze done by some second-rater, modelled in haste, Flaubert.
Max and Hans immediately drop everything and start talking about Flaubert, there were moments when he loathed descriptions, the ridiculous accuracy, the lumbering effort, art lies in the imprecise, true but what about Madame Arnoux and her ribbons right at the beginning, pressing against her temples, and her grey hair at the end, and also in his correspondence, old Gustave, when he speaks of the detail which draws attention away from the larger picture but must be retained because ultimately everything falls into perspective, wonderful details, Hans has raised one finger, a scholarly gesture, then he blushes.