‘Did she make a scene?’
‘Frédérique!’
‘Did my mother make a scene?’
‘That’s not the point…’
‘Why “sad”? It’s insulting! Dogs? The bitch salutes you, Professor! Go sleep with the bitch!’
Frédérique leaving the terrace, departing in disarray, Merken catches up with her.
‘Frédérique, the situation…’
‘You’ve got nothing to lose! Everyone assumes I’m still running after you, you are sad, it’s all over, let me be!’
‘It’s not those people who are at issue, it’s deeper than that.’
‘I don’t like this sadness of yours, it’s out to get me.’
Frédérique is mistaken if she thinks it’s that easy, Frédérique will not listen to reason:
‘Picture it, Sir comes back from his walk, Sir meets up with his sweet Frédérique and Sir’s sad! What a shame!’
The poor man begs Frédérique not to shout, in vain.
‘Sad are you? When a man is sad it’s because he’s found another woman, you’re sad because you’re forcing yourself to stay here with me, you don’t like me making a noise any more, you didn’t always say that!’
‘Please, Gretchen, don’t shout, there’s no one else.’
Each of them says ‘no one’, Frédérique so that she can go on yelling, her anger feeding off her anger, and the poor man also says ‘no one’, he means his life in general, without anyone else but Frédérique.
‘Don’t shout, I need you.’
‘He needs me and he’s sad, though you’re really quite attractive with those creased trousers and the feather in your hat, come here, nearer, there’s nothing to be sad about, your cheeks are red, a pleasing mix of melancholy and the heat, and you’re unhappy, come along now, let’s have this little chagrin out in the open, let’s wrap it up in ribbon for the lady, let’s take a walk under the trees, the cool Alpine air blowing on your little chagrin.’
‘Frédérique, we’re becoming ridiculous.’
It’s Merken’s turn to try to walk off the terrace. Then Frédérique: ‘Has the Professor really got no more bullets left to shoot?’
‘Don’t be crude.’
‘And who started calling the other person “my little beaver”?’
She has shouted the last word.
It’s at this exact moment that La Valréas came out on to the terrace, she understood.
‘Frédérique, you will never convert the professor to your silly nonsense, stop pestering him with your revolution and stop shouting, young women nowadays are insufferable, they want everything, and they want it straight away, has she been annoying you?’
‘Certainly not, my dear.’
‘We were talking about Thought, mama, and about the sadness of the tasks it requires us to perform.’
Chapter 12. 1969, Twice as Strong
In which Lilstein tries to worm out of Max secrets of his private life.
In which the net tightens around the spy who is there at the funeral.
In which the man named Walker comes up with a muscular plan to capture the spy.
In which Max pieces together the life of his friend Lena in the years between the two wars and during a short period after it.
In which Lilstein again warns you to beware of noble sentiments.
In which a clear idea emerges of Lena’s talents as a singer of Lieder.
The girl that he loved
Walked into the night
With the man she loved
Grindisheim, October 1969
In the hotel at Grindisheim, Max and Lilstein sit in a secluded corner, next to a sideboard on which the head waiter has just carefully set down a large bilberry tart, sprinkling it with sugar from an antique-style sugar-shaker, crystal cut-glass sides and silver spout, the dark surface of the sideboard, the silver, the transparencies of the glass, the ochre rim of the tart dish, the dark red of the bilberries, the golden sheen of the shortcrust pastry. Lilstein:
‘That tart might just reconcile me with this place, I loathe this new fashion for putting neon and plastic everywhere, they tear out old wood panelling to make way for it, you remember the Waldhaus, Max, the lounge-cum-library, Hans loved it, he used to arrange to meet Frédérique there, the french windows opened on to the terrace, the lake, the mountains, with the coffee and bilberry tart on low tables, they hadn’t started serving Linzer at that stage, the bilberries covered with icing sugar in the corner by the glass door, wooden floor, Hungarian marquetry, the settees, the worn club chairs, instead of all this formica rubbish!’
‘Misha, in those days you called it bourgeois comfort, you wanted to destroy it, you despised teak-lined walls, the engravings of William Tell, the wire-fronted bookcases full of Balzac, Goethe and Dickens.’
‘And the books about botany, Max, do you remember the books about botany? And bound sets of L’Illustration and the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. It was so restful, and how about the piano? The grand piano on the small stage? The room with the red and gold easy chairs, a dark brown piano, marquetry also, always well-tuned.’
Max has sneered at Lilstein’s nostalgia for bourgeois values, the comfort of the privileged. Lilstein protested, library, piano, old armchairs, no one rates that kind of privilege any more, the privileged now have different tastes, they want loudspeakers and screens, things you have less need to learn, they finance them, they sell them to the masses and they borrow them back from the masses, it promotes the idea that privilege is no more, they no longer need long novels, engravings, teak, the piano, all that, and icing sugar on bilberry tart will become a thing of the past.
‘Look, Max, here they’ve kept just one piece of furniture to give the impression of a library but it’s pathetic, I had a look, full of drivel, large-print, conspicuous by its absence is anything literary, Reader’s Digest, would you believe, a library that contains no literature, a brand of literature which has been stripped of literature so that a place for it will be found in libraries where there’ll be no literature.’
‘Misha, don’t they ever censor literature where you come from?’
After a few minutes, a waiter comes round, he has nodded discreetly to Max and Lilstein, he stares at the board, the sugar which the head waiter had poured has been absorbed by the bilberries, the waiter now sprinkles the tart generously, six waiters in the room, each as scrupulous as the next and all enthusiastic sugar-sprinklers, six turns with the sugar-shaker in a few minutes, when the head waiter recommended his bilberry tart after giving it one last sprinkle Lilstein declined, the head waiter suggested the Linzer but I don’t see why I should order a portion of Linzer from oiks who sabotage their bilberries.
Max and Lilstein have not spoken any more about Hans, Max was not keen, Lilstein did not push it, they changed the subject, Max hasn’t asked questions about the expulsion of dissidents and the interest-free loans, no doubt because he already knew all he wanted to, really they talked only of Lena, plus a little about the death of Stalin, because of Beria, Max insisted on telling Lilstein the tale of Stalin’s death and Lilstein felt like letting him talk, not because Max was about to tell him anything new but because he thought it might be interesting to see if Max believed he was telling him something he didn’t know, and also because if Max was willing to hold forth best let him get on with it so that maybe later on he’d be as forthcoming about Lena.