One man with a mind to change before lunch.
Another to convince this afternoon, two separate meetings but strikingly symmetrical.
Lilstein tells himself that it will be intellectually very gratifying if he can bring it off. It’s a bit much to fit into one day but just now he can’t afford to spend much time away from Berlin and the Stalinallee.
Mountains, sensations, ideas, this is where it all began a quarter of a century ago, in the spring of 1929.
He’d come from Rosmar, he was almost sixteen, he can still remember the first time he came up here, it wasn’t anything like nowadays, a bus with the same hunting-horn depicted on the forward door but much less comfortable than today’s, a very bumpy ride, very narrow road, ruts, ravines, all much harder going the higher you went, sometimes barely thirty centimetres between the tyres and a precipice, wonderful memories, would the trees just here break our fall? Will I have time to jump out of the window?
The bus skidded, lurched, Lilstein jumped out through the window, clutched at branches, the branches snapped, blood, screams. False alarm. He didn’t jump because the bus went on climbing, small red flowers stared at him, saxifrage poked through the snow, the ravine was full of them, a series of bends, horns blaring, he shook, how stupid, felt sick, the nausea made worse because at the age he was then he did not want to admit to being afraid.
The nausea had not lasted, at Waltenberg, it never does. Quite extraordinary this sensation of having transparent lungs, pure air, it stings, beware nose bleeds.
These last few years, Lilstein has come back to Waltenberg quite often, yes, with dangerous frequency, but he knows the area well, has friends here, he’d be warned instantly, though actually he doesn’t care, besides, the level of risk is the same every day, and his large East Berlin office is hardly the safest of places: the last time he felt at ease there, with a sense that he was making a success of his life, in 1951, two cars had come to get him.
A blindfold over his eyes, long hours in a plane, another car. At their destination, they removed the blindfold, sat him down on a stool a metre from the wall, allowed him to sit only on the edge of the stool, no way he could support himself against the wall, must sit up straight, he wasn’t beaten, dunked in a bath, no electric wires.
They didn’t want to leave any visible damage. Days and days spent on that stool, twenty hours a day: they took turns in teams of four, they call the approach the endless screw, the edge of the stool, a few punches, just to correct his posture, the feeling the stool reaches up to the back of your neck.
When Lilstein sags they drag him upright by the ears, they say they never saw anyone put up so little resistance, thump him in the kidneys, pinch his cheeks. But never in the presence of a superior.
A few days of this reduces a man to an aching pile of vertebrae, lots of questions, some of which he was unable to answer, but they didn’t seem to want very detailed answers, not like the Gestapo when they’d demanded the names of the men in the network. In the Lubyanka, the questioning never stopped, an immense exhausting pain, for which Lilstein believed in the end that he alone was responsible. Then the blindfold again, the car, the plane, a new prison, a camp, in the cold.
When he was released, after the death of Stalin, he met the man who’d directed his interrogation, colonel’s uniform, decorated like a hero.
‘I had my orders,’ the Colonel said.
A good training if the fascists ever manage to get me again,’ Lilstein said.
‘You sound bitter, comrade, and you have every right to be.’
‘Bitterness helps a man to grow old gracefully,’ said Lilstein. ‘It also makes a man efficient. You stop having illusions.’
Ever since Lilstein lost his illusions, he always does what he wants to do, whatever the risk, and he thrives on it. All the same, he remains cautious, he has come to Waltenberg circuitously, via Austria and Sweden, the Colonel was quite a decent man, he’d told Lilstein in an expressionless voice:
‘Some of the men you denounced in 1947 did not have your luck, or protection.’
For a few hours here at Waltenberg, Lilstein can forget all about Warsaw, Budapest, such folly, and Suez, fortunately there’s been Suez, that other folly, Lilstein hates events which just happen all by themselves then link up, gang up on you. He’s had his fill of it these last few months.
Here at least he can breathe freely for a few hours, Switzerland, peace.
The little bridge at the edge of the village has not changed, in 1929 he used to spend every evening on it smoking his first pipefuls of dark tobacco cut with a Dutch honey mixture, numberless stars, the stars of deep mid-winter, the gurgle of the stream under the bridge is the same, things look smaller now than they did twenty-seven years ago but they’re just the same, the bridge marks the entry to Waltenberg, Lilstein scrutinises the field of snow to his left, as far as the edge of the wood. Sometimes, if there’s no noise from the village, you might spot a scampering stoat, but all is quiet just now.
Anyway, Lilstein hasn’t time to stand there and keep watch, he makes for the houses, in the middle of the village are the church, the Hotel Prätschli, the grocery-cum-ironmonger’s-cum-café with its large sign Konditorei, the garage, the red and gold petrol pump, and two large cowsheds. From the square, another hotel, the Waldhaus, can be seen on the distant side of a mountain, just where the ski slopes begin their descent to the north.
The Prätschli is a family hotel, the Waldhaus is much grander, a huge eight-storey double chalet, oversized, a bogus chalet trying to be a chateau, it disguises its inner structure of steel and concrete under wood cladding, beams, pantiles, rafters, joists, it dwarfs the valleys with its size, more than 400 rooms, a piece of Belle-Époque flummery, an hotel which draws its life from elsewhere, from people who travel hundreds, thousands of kilometres to live cocooned for a week or two in a land of chocolate, ski-lifts, simple joys and secret banking, it was built in the first years of the century, it started as a luxury sanatorium, with a bobsleigh run, it was accessible only by cable-car, in 1910 it was turned into a hotel and after 1918 a road was made, a heated garage was installed in the hotel basement together with an annexe which added a further hundred very modern rooms. The cable-car is still there, Lilstein read somewhere that in the days when it was a sanatorium coffins were sometimes brought down by bobsleigh, though that’s probably a joke.
The Waldhaus quickly turned into a hotel catering for the winter sports and conference trade, Lilstein knows the owners quite well, has known them for ages, a couple who came from Alsace in the twenties, no money, a great deal of experience, became managers in 1939, were able to buy it in 1943, the darkest of the crisis years for tourism.
Lilstein strolls but he’ll have to work fast, it’s risky, two meetings in the same place, but the idea had caught his fancy and wouldn’t let him be. The purpose of the first meeting is to make Kappler change his mind, Kappler, the great writer, the man who before the war had given him advice about life but that’s all in the past.
The other meeting, with the man who needs to be convinced, a young Frenchman, from Paris, not yet thirty, if he accepts my proposal it could mean a very bright future for him.
That lands me with a very neat antithesis, it’s dialectical, no, not dialectical, there’s no synthesis, these two meetings form a symmetry, a thing and its obverse not its opposite, but what happens if it’s the opposite that comes up?