‘I got on a train, I ran the errand for Lena, she wouldn’t listen, she stayed in Budapest, she had a lot of guts, she was giving a master-class for singers, and between lessons she busied herself with various small matters concerning well-meaning people, to move things on, she loves that city, the weather was fine.
‘She took me and three Hungarian friends to a spot a few kilometres out of the city, on the banks of the Danube, a boat house, they took a boat which could carry several people, not a rowing-skiff, one of those very narrow jobs they use for racing, for coxed fours, the three Hungarians row well, I try not to make a fool of myself, she’s cox, she pretends to be our trainer, giving us the tempo as if she were conducting an orchestra, we laughed liked kids, we turned when we reached the Parliament building, it was great, the return was slower, rowing to our starting point but this time against the current, couldn’t sit down for a week.
‘Another evening we went in a gang down to the water’s edge, she laughed a lot, a riverside eating place, she swallowed a bellyful of fried gudgeon, she ate them as they were, bones and all, she dipped the gudgeon in the mayonnaise then gulp, and a swig of red to help them down, afterwards she asked the accordionist to play a tango, she danced, at her age, no one said anything, magnificent legs, she was very much admired, also had a big following, marked out, the people she mixed with were being watched by the Hungarian security services, and those people didn’t go in for half-measures, a hundred kilos of explosives, but she was long gone. A great lady, de Vèze, a great lady. At Arlington I cried my heart out, and I wasn’t the only one.’
In the large house in the middle of Grindisheim, after it was all over, the head of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution did an operation assessment of sorts, as a consolation for the men who were about to disperse:
‘It’s as well that Monsieur Goffard left with his Ambassador, he was already dining with Prime Ministers before you people were born, he’d finish the evening with them, played poker, and he’s still at it, you never know what he’ll say next, he’s opened too many cupboards, I’d bet that before the week’s out he’ll be invited to dine with the Chancellor. Why? To understand that you need long memories, in 1945 the Americans had a plan for us, Germany would become one big farm, the Morgenthau Plan, you’d all have grown up in the shadow of cows’ backsides, and de Gaulle wanted to be given the right bank of the Rhine, the very same as where we’re speaking at this moment,
Goffard wrote two long articles saying that the mistakes made in 1918 should not repeated, in his view Morgenthau was making the same stupid blunders as Poincaré.’
On the side of the Americans and Walker, things didn’t go as well. When he was told that Max and de Vèze had taken a touring plane he blanched, he ordered cars heading for Winzig to stop, lovely late afternoon on a road over the tops, looking down on the Rhine, he cursed, traitors the lot of them, he even kicked a tyre, he demanded an immediate line to the Schiltighaus airbase, to speak into the microphone he recovered his clear, soft voice, it’s only an air-taxi, no diplomatic status, got to show them what happens when you try to make monkeys out of people, no, not fighter planes.
‘I want three attack helicopters, Cobras, his Aero is a slowpoke, and I want live ammo, yes, I’m fully authorised, and this French Ambassador isn’t clean, warning salvo with live rounds, I want pilots who’ll go the whole nine yards, we’re going to make him so scared he’ll land on the first piece of level ground he comes to! Hear this, he must land on the German side! And I want live ammunition!’
*
In the lounge at the Waldhaus, Lilstein continues to abuse your patience, he talks as though he were confiding in you, as if you were his last hope, he asks if you know what it was that had been scaring him most these last few weeks, prior to setting off for Waltenberg.
‘It was in one of those very attractive French magazines of yours, a story about your force de frappe, the pilots of planes that carry atomic bombs, no, they didn’t look very threatening, clean-cut boys, soldiers from the abyss with short back and sides, very wholesome manner, but two of them are ready to scramble, ready to jump into their Mirages, in the photo they’re all reading issues of the same magazine, you can make out the title, I asked my research department to find out about the magazine your pilots read, I was told that Planète is a parapsychology magazine, UFOs, Inca bas-reliefs showing a figure holding his erect penis in his hands, fertility gods, the sort of thing you get everywhere the moment men started making images, but for Planète they are real, authentic extraterrestrial pilots clutching broom handles, Gott verdamnt, young gentleman of France, those boys fly around with hell between their knees and they read magazines written by morons who confuse a large Pimmel with the handle of an extraterrestrial’s broom, what scared the living daylights out of me was the fact that it’s the same on the Russian side.
‘An evening with the Russians in Berlin, a dinner, all went smoothly until midnight, and then they started telling stories about fortune-telling, magic, Martians, they all were members of the Party, the KGB, and the Red Army, two generals, a half-century of Marxism and that’s all these morons can think of to talk about after midnight, stories about extraterrestrials, clairvoyance, thought transmission, at the time it made me laugh, to myself.
‘But when I saw that your pilots were reading the same sort of rubbish, I started to feel scared, you’ve already seen photos of Americans, each of the men whose job is to fire the rockets has a military policeman standing behind him holding a gun to the back of his head, just in case he goes mad, we’ve got the same thing, it’s reassuring, but what happens if the general who gives the orders to all these men, or his Soviet opposite number, or the Frenchman in his Mirage hears an extraterrestrial telling him go ahead, lad, do it? Our work as cultivated, serious people is to prevent that kind of accident, to pass round rational information, we regulate the tension, that’s what we are, regulators!
‘It’s not even in your interest to remain an orthodox Marxist, I mean deep down, if you cling to all your ideals and all your thoughts life will become impossible, there’ll be no one left you can talk to frankly, except me, and I’m becoming more and more sceptical as I grow older.’
*
Seen from the plane, the Rhine is beautiful, altitude three hundred metres, vineyards, woods, bends in the river, villages, the great floodgates, the slanting sun lights up the river bank on their left.
‘Look, Max,’ says de Vèze, ‘to the west, where the Moselle joins, makes you think of some pretty little valley, it was the great highway for invasions, massacres, we’ll soon be passing Bacharach.’
A dreamy look in de Vèze’s eye:
‘Don’t speak, Ambassador, concentrate on flying the plane, if you tell me about the Lorelei and her lilac-coloured comb, I’ll denounce you.’
De Vèze smiles, allows Max a lot of latitude.
‘I don’t give a damn for legends, Max, nor for the wild beauties of the river.’
He points to one of the engines through the plane’s window:
‘Intake stroke, compression, combustion, outlet stroke, thousands of times every minute, long live technology, Max! There’s a thousand times more crazy beauty in the pistons of that rig there than in the entire history of the Rhine.’