The deer, the partridges, the tawny owl, the young wild boar, the heron, the pheasant, the rabbits, the dogs march past beneath Lilstein’s fingers, see how the duck leads them all to an old abandoned farm, they are going to build the house of peace.
When things were going well in the country which Lilstein calls home, they called it the house of peace and socialism, the duck and his friends haven’t got to the socialism bit yet, good for them, just plain peace, not a bad start though, peace, the end of savagery, in the poem by Becher, the one with the bust of Stalin and the deer on the park bench with Lenin and Thälmann, there was also an accordion, ‘an accordion will play to say thank you to them and they, grateful and modest, will smile’, here there’s no accordion, no bust, but there’s food, Gédéon arranges for them to be fed.
‘Grub and lots of it’, actually it’s practically the route to socialism, we’d almost succeeded on the grub front, not like the Russians or Poles, our cars were pathetic but the grub wasn’t that bad, ‘made with all the kitchen left-overs garnered throughout the land’.
Now that’s not socialism, that’s sabotage, or shall we say a malfunction of the bodies responsible for forward planning, ‘left-overs’ indeed!
This will be corrected for the next mobilisation campaign, we’ll rectify, add a few abstract words.
The alleyway outside is too quiet, my young French friend hasn’t a clue about organising a meeting, the bookshop’s too quiet, it’s like the block of flats in Moscow in 1945, some evenings everything would seem normal except there were no kids making a racket, no slanging matches between neighbours, too quiet, somewhere up on one of those floors everyone knew there was a flat that was going to be raided, during the night or around dawn, no one had said anything but everyone knew, does the girl at the counter, with her turned-up nose, know anything?
And here come the real enemy, the hunters, feathers in their hats, leather breeches, genuine Bavarians, the swine, a slaughter in the farm of peace, when no one’s expecting it, they rush in altogether and start shooting, that being said, animals who live in the forest can’t afford to forget about hunters, just because you say you’ve moved into the farm of peace doesn’t mean you’re safe from attack, from an Operation Barbarossa, buckshot, that’s for the head and belly of deer and partridge, though in the drawing there aren’t any deer or partridge.
But there were, in the house of peace, only a little while ago, but there are none now in the slaughter, there’s no blood either, just green, ochre and pale blue, a boar lying on the ground, a stag, a bear, a big one, they’re not bleeding, they’ve crumpled, exactly right for tough-looking victims, no kids on the ground, no women, just the death of the big males, that’s all, no sign of blood anywhere, an expertly executed massacre.
Hunting, first light, my first time, trudging, the hinterland around Rosmar, the dog, a wire-haired dachshund, the friends, the field of carrots, schnapps, the dachshund disappearing among the carrot leaves, when he stops to point, all you saw was the end of his tail wagging vertically above the greenery, I shot my first hare, bravo Misha, my comrades congratulated me, I put my hare in the back pocket of my jerkin, I went on, lovely country, the plain, a light headwind over the ploughed fields, the occasional knoll, a spinney against the sky, and the hare started moving against my back, very disconcerting.
I must tell my young French friend, he’s always talking about skeletons in cupboards, it sounds sinister but at least inside a cupboard a skeleton doesn’t move, whereas a rabbit that starts kicking you in the spine when you thought it was good and dead is quite something, not to mention that you have to get him out so you can break his neck.
‘No, not with a stone, you must learn to do it cleanly, a chop with the side of the hand!’
The sole effect of comrade Gédéon’s militant naivety has been to provide an easy target for the class enemies of the workers of the forest, a fine old slaughter, that’s what you get when you build the house of peace before wiping out the class enemy, in our case we wiped out the class enemy, when I say we I include everything that’s happened since ’17, and then we went on wiping out so that we wouldn’t be wiped out ourselves, that’s what we used to say when we felt the need to talk about it.
In this unhappy hour, the denizens of the forest have one last piece of good fortune, which is that it’s the enemy who is killing them, not their friends who have turned into public prosecutors, these Gédéon books are so sweet, very educational. I don’t like being here, it’s a rat-trap.
Gilles didn’t like my idea about the keys falling into the dustbin, in the middle of the night, two overcoats over our T-shirts, shoes but no socks, the outhouse where the dustbins are kept at the far end of the courtyard, I hate all this nonsense with keys, no light in the outhouse, the bin’s full, did you bring the torch? He dared asked me that, and it’s a month since he was supposed to buy a battery.
We pulled the dustbin out into the yard, under the timed light, we heard a window go up, whoever opened it didn’t put the light on, Gilles said in quite a loud voice:
‘I bet he’s going to phone the Gestapo.’
We didn’t hear another peep, we took the bags out, they smelled.
On the right in the hallway, Gilles had left his keys on a bookshelf, on the right as you go in, I found them there when we went back up, lying on the cut edge of The Critique of Dialectical Reason, there’s nothing worse than bookshelves for swallowing things, even books, day before yesterday I lost my Kojève again, I need it for my essay, historical reason can be the opposite of pure reason, of the faculty for generating principles, you see what’s at issue here, the link between pure reason and Revolution, do away with pure reason in order to do away with the idea of Revolution itself, Ortega y Gasset-style historical reason, it’s the end of reason-in-History, is historical reason still reason? How am I going to pull all this together? Go back to the two notions, reason and History, and examples, got to have examples, references, reason of State for instance, and against that the reason that gave the Rights of Man, State reason as a negative example against the requirements of law, yes, but can there be human rights where there is no State? State against instinct, man as a reasonable animal, reasonable or rational? going to have to dig deeper.
Poor Gédéon, ‘he who was so happy to see the rabbits dance the foxtrot to the sound of a harmonica, he whose soul had thrilled with delight to see the chicks disporting themselves on the sweet grass of the meadow’, very flowery turn of phrase Gédéon old man, but you must learn to grow up, to stare disaster in the face, the disaster that comes after the fox-trot.
We used to dance the fox-trot at the Waldhaus, Lena danced the fox-trot, Kappler would say, go ahead, young Lilstein, I’m too old for that sort of thing, but he wasn’t really that old at the time, Fox-trot in Waltenberg, could be the title of a sophisticated novel, late twenties, Lena also danced the tango, she held me very close to her, she lifted her thigh against my hip, she was American so people waited to see her do the fox-trot and she would deliberately kick off with tangos, Gédéon wanted a ballroom, and he got a disaster, it took me a long time to grow up, when you looked at Lena’s fox-trot, it was as good as her tango, of disasters I’ve seen a few, starting in the thirties.
The worst is when the spring uncoils, when it was you who screwed up because you didn’t see it coming, no, that’s too easy, too many people about nowadays who say I never saw it coming, I was still a child, the age of illusions, I had too much to do with the enemy, I went on believing too long, no, the illusions were inertia, I’ve never had illusions.