While they waited for a decision from the Chancellery, the watchers from the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution keep the subject under surveillance. In the main room of the house the PA continuously relayed messages from walkie-talkies, a whole network of them in a ring around the suspect and the people he talks to. He’d been given a code name, Blanchot, this gave rise to exchanges like ‘Big Loaf, Blanchot now with Granny’, Granny would say ‘understood, Blanchot under wraps’.
And in the cortege, men in mourning clothes or sometimes a woman, would take up positions according to instructions relayed by the command unit set up in the house.
A man has come up to Frédérique’s daughter, medium build, monkey-arse beard, he kissed the young woman, she begins to introduce him to Max.
‘Oh, I know Monsieur Poirgade very well,’ said Max.
A nod in Lilstein’s direction:
‘Monsieur Lilstein, import and export. Monsieur Poirgade, specialises in strategy. So, Poirgade, still with the Foreign Office?’
‘Still there, Monsieur Goffard.’
Poirgade and Frédérique’s daughter have moved off.
‘How amusing,’ said Max, ‘the Valréas baton picked up by the likes of Poirgade, when I say amusing ‘Are they engaged?’
‘At least that would explain why they made off like thieves. But Poirgade converted to women? Now that would be something. Still, why not? A pretty girl, and her address book full of the names of the old European aristocracy. You didn’t answer my question about the Ivans, young Lilstein.’
‘Look, Max!’
Lilstein’s hand points to the river, the sun is raising backlit mists all over the landscape, the movement of his hand is awkward, Lilstein turns away and looks at Max:
‘I don’t see Soviets very often these days, we’re getting old, Max, we are consulted less and less. I don’t read much from you at the moment either. Started keeping your distance? Thinking of retiring?’
Max’s reply is instant:
‘Never! I want to kick the bucket like Albert Londres, in harness, one day, in the middle of a story, a liner, a hole in the water, that’s the way a journalist should go, it would be grand!’
Max has just finished writing a long article about concentration camps, the collusion, the Nazis, and the collaborators who fled in 1945, their escape channels, the Italian monasteries, but he has problems, no one wants the piece, three chief editors already, all telling him:
‘Max, it’s too long, too detailed, time’s not right, everybody knows about this stuff, best wait for a more favourable moment, readers don’t give a damn.’
Max went back to the camps, Buchenwald, Birkenau, he also traced survivors, here and there throughout the world.
‘People who knew you, Misha, they were pleasant with me, an honest conversation, I talk to them so they trust me, when they trust me then they talk, good cordial talk, and rereading my notes I see they told me only what I’d said to them.’
One woman agreed to talk, she asked Max not to add any adjectives, there are the things they did to us, Monsieur Goffard, it was monstrous, they can be talked about but don’t write monstrous, just be direct, and then there are the things they made us do, for those the word is unspeakable and I’m not sure I’ll be able to speak to you about them, she tried to tell Max, she still felt guilty for a crust of bread she had hidden, for not offering her shoulder to someone on a forced march, for having stayed in the infirmary, she believed she owed her life to the death of others, she found great difficulty speaking, others told Max he’d be adding grist to the mill of Bolshevik propaganda, reminding the Poles about what the Germans had done to them or what they themselves didn’t want to know, a few photos, a few phrases, a row of women and kids on the left-hand page with an SS officer, and on the right a photo of the new Bundeswehr, the Soviets are very good at this type of montage, this isn’t the moment, it’s a very good piece about the Nazi camps, but later, when things have settled down, there are times, young Lilstein, when I can’t come up with any subject that’s suitable for the times.
‘Want to give me your piece for one of our papers?’ asks Lilstein.
‘Never!’
‘Max, why not write a biography.’
‘You mean, like Ulbricht’s? Got any unpublished material? On the early thirties?’
‘You wouldn’t fancy a few leads about Beria, would you, Max? It would go down very well, I don’t know much myself but I’ll give you whatever I can find, how you get to be someone like Beria, you set out in life to be an engineer and you end up being Beria, a biography, you could reconstruct a whole slice of history, and you’d tell me everything you found, you’d know the life of Beria inside out.’
They have now emerged from under the trees, the air is cooler, wind from the Rhine.
‘Misha, let’s save time, you tell me now what it is you want me to find on Beria. Are you planning some propaganda job?’
‘No, Max, really, it’s personal.’
‘A woman? Misha, you’re in love with Beria’s wife! Does she live in Berlin? Can you arrange an interview for me?’
‘Max, this is serious, it’s just between the two of us, if you were working on a biography of Beria and you could let me know why and how I managed to survive, how it happened, the son of a German Bolshevik Jewess eliminated in Moscow for Trotskyism who outlives his mother. I survived Auschwitz and Stalin, didn’t get a bullet in the back of the head in ’46 or in ’51, I wonder if the explanation isn’t somewhere close to Beria, at least up until the time of his death, why did Beria let me live?’
‘Maybe because you were like him? Even so, he put you behind bars in 1951, Misha, you have a selective memory.’
‘Surely, but at the start it wasn’t so hard, I mean compared with the Nazis, hours and days on a stool, it didn’t seem like out-and-out torture, they called it the endless screw, the hardest thing to bear about the whole business is that they don’t hit you, if you hurt it’s because it hurts to remain sitting all that time on the edge of a stool, hurts more and more, but you can’t honestly say that these men who are talking to you are hurting you on a level with beating you with a length of hose pipe, that’s the clever bit, you think that if you’re hurting then it’s the fault of your backbone, no way can you use hatred as a way of resisting.’
‘So how did you manage it?’
‘I needed to hate, I kept thinking this doesn’t come from Stalin, nor from Beria, it must come from someone else, that bastard Abakumov, the swine who gets his vengeance in first, Max, I’ll give you a few leads on Abakumov, you must always have someone available to hate, that’s how I never buckled, and because they weren’t trying to destroy me, I could hear other noises in the corridor, it was horrible, but they never did anything like that to me, why?
‘And with my leads, Max, you could write a fine biography of Beria, full of detailed facts, for example their favourite game, when the small inner circle got tanked up with Stalin, at least four times a week, you don’t know what their favourite game was? Everyone played, except the victim, it consisted of putting a tomato on Mikoyan’s chair before he sat down — sometimes they pulled the same stunt on Malenkov — he gets up to go for a leak and they stick a tomato on his chair, he might glance down at his chair just as he is about to sit down, but Stalin chooses that precise moment to shout “Anastasius, what are you plotting these days?” and Anastasius makes very sure he’s looking Stalin straight in the eye.
‘He forgets everything else, and splatt! goes the tomato, like schoolboys, but no one ever tried it on with Beria, too scared, Stalin wasn’t, but Stalin was never the one who placed the tomato, Beria had too much on him that he could spill, you’d need to stress the serious side of Beria, Max, the way he managed things, you could never stress Beria’s managerial skills enough, you do realise that in the United States he could have been head of IBM or United Fruit?’