‘Yes, that’s good, young Misha, when Stalin dies Beria seeks asylum in the United States, locked up for a few months, many debriefings with the top brass, as there’d been for some Nazis, his abilities as a manager are spotted, turn him loose, but for business purposes only, as to personal preferences he is made to conform, no more teenage girls, not so? Mistresses yes but not underage girls brought in off the street? Even your wife could confirm this? What she says is that she can’t see where you could have found the time, rumours, vulgar rumours? Agreed, but we don’t want any rumours either, if you feel the slightest urge ask Ted, your driver, no, that’s not what I mean, Ted knows the right people, want to make love? Buy it outright. And Beria becomes vice-president of United Fruit, chief of operations, you can forget the rest, exactly the same as with Gehlen or von Braun, that’s the way to do it!’
‘Yes, Max, it surely is, Beria as a Yankee manager, I like it! Beria crazy about development, becomes the world number one in the banana business, and like all world number ones he hates taxes, a five per cent tax is slapped on his bananas by a Guatemalan president, so Beria dines in town, plays golf, poker, maybe with you, and the CIA sets up a military regime in Guatemala to protect his plantations of untaxed bananas, thousands dead, heavy hand of the military, dirtier and dirtier as the years roll by, but no Gulags, just safeguarding free enterprise and top-grade bananas, and Beria, a top-grade manager, keeps his hands clean.
‘A biography, Max! True, false, plausible, you would tell it very well, you’d discover why he protected me, include stories about little girls if you want, help make it sell.’
‘I don’t want,’ says Max.
At Grindisheim at around five in the evening, everyone gathered again around the grave, a thousand people in a semi-circle.
At a sign from the funeral director a man steps up to the microphones, from his pocket he takes a book, opens it, in accordance with the last wishes of our friend I shall now read, in French, a passage from the chapter headed ‘The Picnic’, which is chapter five of the third part of Le Grand Meaulnes, through the gathered crowd runs a ripple not of hostility but of sporadic surprise, merely what happens whenever certain people in a crowd recognise the person who is the object of every gaze and circulate an unexpected name, yes, you can see it’s him, it really is the French Ambassador, not Monsieur Gillet, no, this one’s the French Ambassador at Berne, Monsieur de Vèze, I wasn’t aware they knew each other, it’s odd, a Frenchman reading Le Grand Meaulnes in the middle of a German cemetery, with the president of the Bundestag here, and de Vèze has begun: ‘Everything seemed to have come so perfectly together with a view to making us happy, and yet we have known so little happiness…’
Through de Vèze’s slow, careful delivery is evoked a world of small meadows, grey hills, the baying of hounds and turreted castles … ‘how beautiful the banks of the Cher looked…’ hedges, copses, a lawn … ‘a wide, closely cut lawn where it seemed there was room only for endless games…’ knowing Kappler, old man, I was expecting something more acerbic than this old picture postcard stuff, he traversed the century and he got a Frenchman to read out bits of an adolescent novel, it doesn’t surprise me, you know, there are at least two Kapplers, the man who wrote those virtually unreadable great works between the two wars, crisis of values, crisis of the novel, a martyr to chiaroscuro, and the bestselling author after ’45, the easy turn of phrase, realist transparency, his last period, stories that everyone can read, he even wanted to launch a literature series which rewrote great books in everyday language, they would have been condensed, pruned, he even wanted to do it with Ulysses and The Magic Mountain, I think he’d even have simplified his beloved Grand Meaulnes, tell me, any idea what will happen to French foreign policy now de Gaulle has gone?
Then the same funeral director said:
‘I now call upon Monsieur Max Goffard.’
Three days earlier, the notary had summoned Max:
‘Your name is expressly mentioned in connection with one of your friend’s last wishes, Herr Kappler requested that you read out a brief passage from the Scenes from the Life of a Good-for-Nothing, he specifies, I quote, “Once Max has stopped protesting you might add that the passage from Eichendorff is to be read in German, he’ll like that very much, from the time we first met all our discussion were in French, now it’ll be my turn to listen to him speaking German and have a good laugh.” Herr Kappler only wants these two readings, Monsieur de Vèze and you.’
*
At the Waldhaus, Lilstein’s face is calm, you have both finished your portions of tart at the same time, like an old married couple. He gives you a kindly look, then he stares out at the cable cars and the village below the hotel, those large pale eyes come back to you, he yawns, a little laugh:
‘The advantage of big funerals like Herr Kappler’s on Friday next is that they allow the expression of deep feelings. In our line of business, that’s refreshing, I shall be burying one of my two greatest friends and I will have every right to be red-eyed, whereas in normal circumstances we must unfortunately avoid showing fine sentiments, our fondest hopes, gush can lead to disaster, I mean to the catastrophic dashing of illusions, I don’t want you to end up like that, I don’t like it when you’re discouraged, but I surely do not want you going in for displays of fine feelings, speaking for myself I have learned to show my feelings only at funerals, you can’t do our kind of work with an artichoke heart. Shall we order more wine?’
You don’t really want to take up Lilstein’s suggestion. White wine doesn’t particularly agree with you. But you’re feeling anxious. You say yes. Lilstein raises one hand, a young Waldhaus waitress arrives with the new drinks, sets them down, leaves, you want to look at her legs, Lilstein watches you, you reach out your hand to your glass to avoid catching his eye, good legs that waitress, you turn back to face Lilstein, his eye has not wavered, he smiles.
‘You must be wary of the finer feelings, young man. A woman I knew before the war, Austrian, fought against Nazism, old aristocratic family, became an administrator for the Soviets, she had fine feelings, one May Day she’d paraded in Red Square, tears in her eyes, a Marxist with an artichoke heart, you’ll see if I’m right, she worked for Red Army intelligence.
‘One day in 1937 or ’38, in Frankfurt, the leader of her network showed her a letter from Voroshilov, that’s right, already the absolute head of the Red Army, a handwritten letter, this happened by a small lake, in a public park, to the casual observer a women is reading a moving letter, she reads it, reads it again, tears in her eyes, her network boss averts his gaze modestly, a fine letter, “I wanted particularly to thank you in the name of the USSR and comrade Stalin for all the sacrifices you are making, for your devotion to the cause of proletarian internationalism and the cradle of socialism”, her network leader speaks to her again, must tear up the letter, small pieces, for the waters of the lake and the little ducks who at first think they are bits of bread and then swim off, dive and show their backsides.