‘Looking up and including the other students present she added “you use the fact that Blacks have a way to go as a lesson to white students that all they have to do is be white, your ideas encourage laziness; but Blacks have got the message, only real work should count, this country doesn’t need easygoing ways, ten years from now being an easygoing White won’t be enough”.
‘She also spoke about the strength of the individual, about personal will and the help of God which is offered to all, they didn’t clap, not with the professor sitting there, but you could hear “yeah” and “hear hear” like in the House of Commons, all very discreet, it made its impression on people’s minds and the professor didn’t like it one little bit.
‘At the end of the year, for her oral exam, the Dean of the Faculty and a couple other members of the Board sat in the public seats, she performed brilliantly, passed with the highest honours, summa cum laude’
They crossed the Seine, and bore left along the Quai towards Notre-Dame. Lilstein tries to think while listening to Morel. If the people in Berlin have put out a warrant for him, he’s going to need the Americans to get out of Europe. Who would make the best jailers? Morel says he needs Lilstein, but if that’s not true he’ll drop Lilstein like a hot potato the moment he confirms his statements to the Americans. And then the Americans will drop Lilstein. They’ll send him back to Berlin. Lilstein will have allowed himself to be caught in a trap consisting of a story about an American woman and some cassoulet, Morel has turned out to be an excellent pupil.
‘That said, Misha, Maisie may very well be a woman, but she has a man’s weakness, she works for the CIA but she wants better than that, she wants to be a politician, today she listens but some day she’ll only want to hear what she chooses to hear, she’ll insist on it, she’ll be our friend, first she’ll try to catch us out, we’ll look as if we’re in the wrong, so inferior to her! We’ll give her what she wants, Misha, she has a little weakness: masculine ambition.
‘She defended the United States to my face, she doesn’t like my scepticism, it’s the land of “just do it”, when she was young her father told her over and over “this is the country where they can refuse to let you into a diner but you can also get to be President of the whole country”.
‘Only once did she ever remind me of that to my face, the presidency, “just do it”, that’s why she’s settled into the role of unlikeliest republican, with a faultless European culture, consistent stance, rights of the individual, “I’d rather be ignored than helped”, Lena fascinates her, she wonders if she lived alone, did she have a man in her life? Did she like women? American questions, Misha you must have lots to tell her on that subject.
‘Maisie ate her profiteroles and went right on drinking the Madiran, putting off the moment when she’d ask her bodyguard for a cigarette, amazing woman, not at all the type of African-American you get in magazines, more the feminist who specialises in the folk-tales of Zimbabwe, her thing is the history of the USSR, the Komintern, and Europe, from Talleyrand to Bismarck, and Schubert, yes, “like Madame Hellström, but I can’t play Schubert’s sonatas, just the accompaniment to some of the Lieder”.
‘She’s a Presbyterian, so was Lena, in the Toulouse restaurant in Washington she ate her profiteroles with a mixture of hunger and gluttony, you should have seen her, especially after the hole she’d made in the cheese board, never mind, forget the gym we’ll go and listen to her play the piano.
‘Her father thought, if you’re black you got to be twice as good, the same thing old man Hellström must have said to his daughter, he was white, from the South, a Presbyterian democrat from the South, “when you’ve got a name like Hellström you’ve got to be twice as good”, and those good little girls with ribbons in their hair, one Black and one White, start doing their very best, piano, singing, giving twice their best, sixty years apart, and with big, big differences, in the sixties Maisie was still a nigger, in a school for niggers.
‘Nigger part of town, with buses for niggers, restrooms ditto, that said there are niggers and niggers, the father for example was a teacher and a Presbyterian minister, there were also Baptists, one day in the Baptist church an explosion, four little girls died, KKK, never did find out who did it, one of the girls was Maisie’s best friend at school.’
Morel has stopped. He has grabbed Lilstein’s arm. He looks him in the eye, tells him there’ll be no trap, that there’ll be no car to lift him, Lilstein must trust him because it’s the only way out for both of them, because the solution is called Maisie, whether Lilstein likes it or not.
‘Maisie’s father isn’t a democrat, Misha, he’s a republican, a black man registered as a republican voter in the deep south of the United States, because the first time he tried to get his name on the electoral roll he came across a good southern-thinking democrat who made him sit an aptitude test for Blacks, a great big salad bowl full of dry beans, to get your name on to the electoral roll they had to guess how many beans there were in that bowl.
‘The father walked out, went back another day and came across a republican who said he’d register him but only if he could register him as a republican voter, one long childhood, for a little African-American girl, of being told “you can get to be President”, Maisie told me she’d like to have met Lena, that she was fascinated, an American fascinated by Europe now that’s fascinating, “Europe” Maisie would say, “interests me, but it doesn’t fascinate me”, Maisie with this very methodical approach to the profiteroles, didn’t pour all the hot chocolate sauce at once, poured it on the first one to begin with, sheeny black topping, Maisie brings her nose down real close so she won’t miss any of the chocolate aromas, she laughs, starts telling a story, “in Toulouse there was this other pâtisserie, it was called ‘Au Bon Nègre’, I used to make a point of going there.”
‘Misha, she’s every bit as greedy as you are, wouldn’t I just love to see all three of us in a Washington salon de thé. The patron had brought the hot chocolate sauce in a small silver dish, it had the logo of the General Transatlantic Company on it, Maisie serves herself very methodical spoonfuls.
‘Each time a little chou pastry, a little ice-cream, a little chocolate sauce, “you want a taste? No? Chocolate gives you a headache? Me too, but if I’m good and careful I manage to avoid it, what you mustn’t do is mix alcohol, chocolate and lack of sleep, when I’ve managed to get a good night’s sleep I know I can eat a good dinner, with wine and chocolate, provided I can work it off afterwards at the gym, I studied the decline of European diplomacy in the twentieth century, I was taught by a great Austrian professor, Madame Hellström interests me a lot, she really seems to have known everybody, I would have spent hours listening to her, we’d have gotten ensconced at Demel’s, in Vienna, over a Linzer.”
‘Maisie seemed to say Linzer in all innocence but I suspect she knows a great deal, Misha, she talked about Lena and Linzer, lost the urge to interrupt me? Feel like you want to run away? I find your silence disloyal. Is it because we’re talking about Lena?
‘Maisie asked if I knew that Lena had been buried at Arlington, I said yes, there’d been a piece in Newsweek, I haven’t told her yet that your friend Max gave me the whole story, the low hill, Arlington, bagpipes, dress uniforms, shiny medals on a cushion, triple salvo, all the razzmatazz, no they didn’t do the body-on-the-gun-carriage routine, but it seems people got pretty emotional, top brass and ordinary citizens, music-lovers, women in veils, students, they all admired her, Madame Hellström was a big draw, the occasion even had a humorous side.