Max has also put Hans on his guard, he didn’t want to see him go back to the GDR, those are gang bosses they have over there, they give an order, Hans, and people disappear, in the fog, those people keep an eye on everything, even in the fog, you might think I’m going over the top with this, with my big words, tyranny, terror, a journalist’s words, you might not give a toss, but you can at least listen to a story, a very short story, you’ve always liked symptoms, six months ago I was in Dresden, with some English journalists, two English communist journalists, yes there are such things, and an official minder, a car, one of the Englishmen drove it, it was his own car, a privilege, drove very carefully, accompanied by the minder with hobnail boots, in the fog the Englishman strays on to tramlines, Hans, it wasn’t anything, not even doing twenty, catches a low cement road-divider, no need even to straighten a bumper.
But the minder insists that the incident be reported to the police immediately, they start to laugh, eleven at night, suburbs of Dresden, fog, a minor bump, not even necessary to fix the bodywork, plus the fact that it’s the Englishman’s car, I say to the minder if you must you can put it in your report tomorrow, but now it’s bedtime.
But the guy won’t let it drop, ‘Telefon, Telefon’, he spots a light, a kind of Weinstube, very glaucous, when we go inside we realise our kraut is white as a sheet, he asks for the number of the police station, he’s shaking, then the Englishman — a big noise in the British Party — takes the phone, he has seen the greasy smears on the mouthpiece, he takes it all the same, dials the number, talks to the cops, just a scratch, just the paintwork, not worth bothering with, you know what the reply was? At the other end, someone said, ‘Yes, we already know.’
Max took Hans by the shoulders, Hans, it’s the land where everything is already known, if you go either you’ll blow your brains out inside two weeks or you’ll become like them, you really think ‘knowing everything already’ is worth it?
When Lilstein and Kappler meet shortly in the Konditorei, Kappler will definitely see Lilstein coming, he knows everything, Lilstein won’t be able to keep anything from him, they’ll resume their conversation at the point where they’d left it in this selfsame place twenty-seven years ago, Kappler is the only man with whom Lilstein can speak in a different way, because Kappler remembers. From the very first minute they are together again Kappler will be confronted by two Lilsteins, not the adolescent and the adult but two adults, the adult that Lilstein has constructed and the adult Kappler will identify, the one who took over from the adolescent, the one the other Lilstein has suppressed, no, camouflaged, the one who goes on thinking filthy swine when faced by his Interior Minister, or moron when confronted by an article by Suslov. Actually, it’s the best part of Lilstein, the part which still knows what a Minister is and what a Suslov is worth.
Or else this best part which is camouflaged not suppressed is dialectical, as they say, it allows the other part to exist and act, the part that lets Lilstein say ‘close the file’ as he holds out a list of three names to a subordinate, he can behave like a bastard because he knows that at any time, without much mental effort, he can reconnect with Lilstein the good, the clear-headed, the Lilstein who wants the good and the true, the one who rereads What Is Englightenment? and has the moral law inside him.
Perhaps those two Lilsteins are as nothing beside a third, older than both of them, who goes back a long way, further even than the adolescent, the one Kappler had sensed, he of the rebellious gesture, who from the start had always thought get lost the lot of you, as when he was small, he’d tried to repair his toy car, he’d taken the mechanism to pieces, then it didn’t work at all, and he’d thrown the whole mess to the far end of the room shouting:
‘Bugger and piss and shit!’
And he’d got a good hiding, because his father and mother and all their guests had heard him, despite the distance separating the drawing room from his nursery room.
‘Bugger and piss and shit!’
It seems a pretty inventive verbal construct to him whenever he thinks about it, it was also a pretty good hiding, a father and a mother both eminent doctors with left-wing leanings, extreme left-wing, a damn good hiding, because such behaviour, such swearing, it’s unacceptable, it’s fascist, he’d taken a larruping from a belt, no not a belt but the dog’s braided leash, to beat the fascism out of him, and he’d lost for good two small components of the clockwork car he’d taken apart, a sophisticated piece of clockwork it was, with two settings, the first made the car turn in a wide circle, the second made it do figures-of-eight, you wound the spring up with a hollow key which looked like a uniformed chauffeur, a real gem, fantastic outings, hotels like hotels are in dreams, in one of his dreams it was a limousine chrome-plated all over and he parked it outside the Adlon Hotel, but the car had had it.
Lilstein has no idea what became of that car, he drew a small lesson from the episode, became very meticulous when mending things, he soon learned how to put any clockwork car back together again, he can open the backs of watches and take apart lighters, musical-boxes, pens, locks, taps, Bunsen burners, telephones too, though that’s not very interesting, but he can put them together again and often manages to mend them, there’s a screw missing from the gramophone belonging to the camp guards, the one that immobilises the drive unit which prevents it moving when the spring is being wound up, he uses a nail instead held by a match splinter inserted into the hole, he remembers seeing a nail that very morning, just the right size, a nail not serving any purpose, in another barrack block, he asked permission, a real gift for make do and mend, he can work out the way things are designed, he doesn’t need to use force to open the back of things, not watchmaker’s hands exactly, but very clever even down to the nail of his right thumb which he uses as a small screwdriver, a handyman, in Buchenwald they spared Lilstein the most gruelling jobs, and there was always an extra piece of bread for him.
Which Lilstein is it who wants to say to Kappler whatever you do don’t go back, and will tell him, despite the orders of the Minister and the directives of the General Secretary of the German United Socialist Party, comrade Walter Ulbricht:
‘Don’t go back, Herr Kappler.’
What’s got into you, wanting to say something like that to a bourgeois writer who presents one of the finest opportunities our propaganda machine can hope to come by? Don’t be a fool, just settle for doing what you’re supposed to. If a tenth, a hundredth of what you want to say to Kappler should ever reach any one else’s ears, you’ll find yourself facing a real charge of high treason, and you won’t be sitting on any stool this time, it’ll be over very quickly. Or maybe that’s exactly what makes you want to do it? The fact that where you live you can’t say ‘don’t go back’ to an old friend without ipso facto putting your life in deadly danger?