Lilstein would stare at the phone as if he were expecting a message, sometimes his eyes were completely focused on the effort of watching the phone, a toad made of black bakelite, circular dial pad, very ugly, one day the man in charge said to him:
‘Obviously this is only a side issue, but do you really like my phone?’
The answer would have been very complicated. In normal life Lilstein feels increasing loathing for the telephone, especially at work, you think there’s just the two of you talking, and an army of men in headphones are recording your every word, it’s a gruesome instrument, suitable only for people who won’t find the time to deal with each other face to face, but when he was young he’d been mad about phones and radio, and telephone sets, the genuine article, the kind that had a personality, Berlin, 1925, an exhibition devoted to the history of the telephone — and one of the ways he had of holding firm at tricky times in his life, outside that is of reciting his favourite poems silently to himself, was to review in his mind his collection of old phones, the ones he had started buying when he was twelve, plus all those he had acquired later, the whole lot having disappeared during raids by the Gestapo and the KGB, his collection having disappeared twice, the memory of it having grown increasingly faint, he never tried to build it up again.
Henceforth he makes do with catalogues, all the catalogues he acquires whenever the opportunity arises, the ones his colleagues bring back for him from missions, as souvenirs, certain missions coincide sometimes splendidly with an exhibition or sale, no, that’s just a piece of friendly libel, he no longer collects telephones, they take up too much room, the loss is too great when the cops come on heavy-handed and take them off you — catalogues you can find in a library — he also has sets of old instructions, and plans discovered in factory archives for installing and repairing equipment.
Besides, after all, it was with catalogues, designs, photos that he’d started, with pictures of women on the phone, one of them, from a very old magazine dating from around the turn of the century, a young woman standing, waist pinched tight, a low-cut dress, a V accentuated by the forward thrust of her bosom, she is holding the ear-piece of a phone to each ear, her arms are raised as required by the action, while below the belt which picks out her waist, her pose, which shows her turned slightly to one side, enables the viewer to devine the delicious swell of both her abdomen and rump, Lilstein recalls the words underneath which said that the girl was ‘romantic’, and there was also another woman, less beautiful, it was a photo of her, she had a definite edge over the bright young people of the time since she posed in a nightdress, with no corset, the result being a generous fullness which concealed her figure but let you sense nakedness underneath, the nightdress had a lower neckline than the other girl’s dress, it had sleeves which allowed perfectly bare forearms to project, when you were thirteen the thing was to imagine the first girl with the tight corset wearing the other one’s costume, and with the appropriate curves.
There was a third engraving, a greetings card, a source of further fertile elaborations of the image, an English drawing room, a young lady of fashion, her back three-quarters turned to the viewer, she was holding out with both hands and considerable grace a telephone receiver about fifteen centimetres long, her dress left the upper part of her back naked, the top of her shoulders, nape of her neck, ears, the pendant at her throat, arms bare from the shoulder-joint to the elbow where her gloves stopped, the eye returned to her back whose dynamically arched line launched sweet reveries, the arch ending at its most prominent point in a bow from which cascaded the folds of an ample satin skirt, Lilstein did not dare lock his bedroom door.
‘Your son,’ Herr Lilstein remarked to his wife, ‘is for some incomprehensible reason obsessed by Belle Époque telephones.’
It was true, a magnificent model with magneto and cranking handle, in the style of a sewing-machine, with a plinth made of cast-iron, black cast-iron, lacquered, the combined receiver-and-speaker slung horizontally on a cradle which acted as a switch when the receiver was lifted, the cradle was nickel-plated and embellished with symmetrical bows and medallions, there were gold filaments running horizontally along each side of the plinth, or rather it was a framing strip, yes, an Ericsson 1907, and another model, a Sauerwein 1913, his favourite, a base of fine mahogany, darkened and French-polished, on which stood a chrome-plated lyre, I’m sure the upper part was decorated with laurel leaves, no, it was acanthus, and the fixed microphone was located in the top of the lyre.
Lilstein can no longer say how the receiver was held, he loved phones and the radio, the crystal set he and friends from school had made together, he was still dreaming about it in 1929, radio, telephones, you turn a knob or a handle and someone far away becomes your brother in a few words, another voice telling Lilstein not to mix things up, the telephone is not society, the society which advances by class conflict, but even so, if everyone is enabled to talk freely to everyone else, then there’s hope.
‘You know,’ said the KGB officer who had searched his house in Potsdam in 1951, ‘all these handsets and catalogues and telephone literature, it’s what they call a hobby, it’s a very English thing, you have very English tastes, they could cost you dear.’
But no one ever raised the matter again. Lilstein tried to stop thinking about his phones and start concentrating on his poems.
The Gestapo, the camps, fealty, the KGB, the water torture, the stool, the telephone, his poems, May, the merry month of May in a boat on the Rhine, the excursion turned out badly, the telephones with their moulded materials, box, mahogany, each kind of wood carefully polished, walnut, pine, and also ivorine, he’d had to look up what ivorine was, plus the chrome, brass and nickel used for the cross pieces and uprights, shapes like stretching necks, patterns picked out on a small teak stand perched on four claw-and-ball feet, or on the contrary a thing of flight and fancy like the Siemens which looked like an ampersand or a treble clef, a simple metal chrome-plated stem braced itself at an initial loop before thrusting upwards, like a curved serpent, an arched and watchful serpent, and then steadied itself and ended in a scroll inside its own swirl, but allowing a budded branch to escape on which the receiver came to rest, this was his favourite, a treble clef, a snake, the colonel, the big office in Berlin, the minister who scratched himself, Pravda, the slide, frozen up or not: had Kappler foreseen all this when he’d advised him to read Lenin?
What is Lilstein to Kappler? Lilstein, an adolescent encountered once again after an interval of almost thirty years with all the allowances he’d made for the adolescent, thirty years, when exactly did bakelite replace ivorine? Someone who had survived everything, still ‘wearing a halo of progressive light’? Or one of those types that officials in Bonn described to Kappler when they tried to dissuade him from returning to Rosmar, fair enough, OK, Herr Kappler, men of Lilstein’s sort have been through a lot, Auschwitz or Stalin’s camps or both, they’ve been put through the mangle but they’re no angels, they’re killers too, they have people killed to defend the purity of their Democratic Republic, they like having flowers on their desks but they kill, wound, break people for life, don’t take our word for it, Herr Kappler, we’re policemen, you can despise us, you can tell us the only reason we’re here is to keep an eye on the money in the bank vaults but over there it’s worse, they keep an eye on everything, not money, there isn’t any, but everything else, at least reread Koestler, or go and listen to what two or three exiles are saying, we know you’re not afraid of anything but don’t give your backing to those bastards, no, we’re not alike, we don’t go that far, we don’t need to, we don’t have an empire to hang on to, like those idiots the French, our hands are clean, have been for the last ten years, at least.