You try but fail to think of something other than the way the man’s looking at you, you’ve tried reading but that didn’t work, the man’s hand grips the back of your neck, you’re with him on a bridge, he slams your face against a wall, hurts you, the other hand reaches for your trousers, his hands are hard, he does not look at the woman, he sits facing her but does not look at her, the basilica of Chaumont recedes into the distance, a man selling refreshments pushes the compartment door open, in your pocket your grip tightens on the coin the woman gave you, suddenly the man speaks to her, very direct, anything but polite, the woman chooses a fruit juice, she has accepted the man’s offer, the man has a beer.
You tell the vendor you don’t want anything, the man holds up a note of large denomination to the vendor, the vendor can’t change it, why don’t you come back later, the woman laughs, takes out her purse, no, no, we’re living in a modern world now, the man gets cross, he looks very annoyed, the woman calms him with a smile, I’m enjoying this moment, allow me, all right, but only on condition that I pay you back later, the woman smiles at the man as she pays.
The vendor says thank you and is about to move on, you say just a moment, please, you hadn’t wanted anything but now you ask for a bottle of Vichy, and you pay with the warm, perfumed coin the woman gave you, you say keep the change, the vendor takes the metal cap off the bottle, gives the top a wipe, passes it to you, the man and the woman get out together at Mulhouse.
It was late at night when you reached Klosters, the hotel owner couldn’t find your name on the register, he hurried off and woke his wife, she never told me we were expecting a young French gentleman, must have slipped her mind, but it’s all sorted out now, one night in the hotel, already at altitude, you can’t get off to sleep, the sheets are scratchy, you didn’t abandon the magazine after all, you know it by heart, in Budapest a Russian officer reaches for his holster as he strides towards the photographer’s lens, as if he was about to draw his pistol, ‘Camels, no other cigarette is so easy on the throat’, you’ve no more cigarettes, the soldiers in blue helmets have entered Alexandria, Eisenhower is a man with a Quaker background, he has allowed himself to be manipulated by the under-developed countries, the magazine dislikes Americans, not all of them, but it sure doesn’t like Eisenhower.
He’s an ally who forces the French and the English to get out of Egypt, the magazine doesn’t care much for Cabot Lodge either, ‘On colonial matters, Monsieur Cabot Lodge has ideas, ideas which he didn’t get from the history of his native Massachusetts, where the price of Indian scalps ranged from a hundred dollars for the scalp of a warrior to five for the scalps of girls under ten, Monsieur Cabot Lodge believes that the new nationalist pressures are legitimate,’ there are also pictures of Guy Mollet and Anthony Eden, Eisenhower has refused to meet the French and English ministers who’d come for the UNO session, the President’s diary is too full to receive all the ministers of every delegation, ‘the Americans are treating us as if we were the Sudan,’ says the magazine.
An American official is talking about the French and the English, these people want to rebuild their empires, they still think it’s 1910, they’ve got to learn, the Soviets had issued an ultimatum, they too could pounce on Alexandria and deal ‘strategically’ with the Franco-British fleet, for the military ‘strategically’ includes nuclear weapons, Puskas has not returned to Hungary, his wife has managed to flee to Austria, she phones him, at night, the Russian Vladimir Kuts has won the 5,000 and 10,000 metres in the Melbourne Olympics, in the 10,000, he makes twenty-three attempts to shake off Pirie, his great rival, twenty-three spurts in a 10,000 metres, the magazine shows him crossing the line but says nothing of the applause, as you turn the pages you find a high percentage of everything that’s been happening these last few weeks but from a rather stomach-turning angle, a point of view that you do not share but which you soon might, you look for details of the deaths of the three militants killed during the fascist demonstrations against the Party in Paris.
You carry the names of the three men in your head, Ferrand, Le Guennec and Beaucourt, less has been said about Beaucourt because he was a member of Force Ouvrière, Le Guennec was wounded in the fascist attack on Party headquarters, on the Wednesday evening, he was a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, it was more complicated with Ferrand, he died of his injuries on the Wednesday evening, the same evening as Le Guennec, but with him it was a gun butt, at Montmartre Metro station, a gun butt, that meant the flying squad, at the time Humanité did not distinguish between the three, it just spoke of ‘victims of the fascist riot’ but didn’t say anything else about the flying squad.
Next morning, you are cold, a long walk by yourself around Klosters, bus for Waltenberg in the early afternoon, an hour’s climb up a road which must have been built by the Devil himself, you’ve still got your magazine, you reread it knowing full well that doing so will make you feel sick but you don’t want to see the drop, another walk at the top, you feel tired, you shouldn’t have agreed to this meeting.
*
And at tea-time you are back at the Waldhaus sitting opposite Lilstein, without knowing how or why, and it is now a bit late to ask yourself that, and Lilstein has left you no time to think about your own position, he promised to tell you a tale, and he goes off on endless tangents, like some Oriental story-teller or an alcoholic:
‘With me, young gentleman of France, you won’t be a spectator but a one-hundred-per-cent participant. What you ask your common or garden spy to do is to occupy a place in the sun while remaining a shadow, which is in itself very difficult, but you, you shall do much, much more, you are about to realise an ideal, you will not be simply the eyes or ears which perceive the drama, you will be the actor, you will play the lead in the great scenes.’
The woman with red hair has reappeared in the deserted lounge of the Waldhaus carrying a Linzer Torte on a large plate, she cuts two generous slices and warns that it is still hot, Lilstein thanks her in a quiet voice then carries on, removing his spectacles, an action which makes the look in his eyes childlike, avid.
‘An actor is exactly what I mean! And it gets even better: on occasions you will actually be the author of the drama, you’ll devise the whole thing, I pride myself that I never ever spy on events, I create them, and you’ll reach the stage where you don’t know if you are talking about some incident in which you participated or if you yourself created what you want to talk about, like some very keen scholar, like a creator, the artist of one’s own life, we are going to fight against the warmongers, and in order to do that you are going to become one of them, “a hardliner”, as the Americans say.’
Lilstein stares at his portion of tart but does not touch it.
‘Are you getting the smell of vanilla and cinnamon? It’s so faint as to be almost undetectable, it’s absolutely essential not to be heavy-handed with these things, I promised you a story? No, I haven’t forgotten, it’s a story which means a great deal to me, it’s the story of my mother, I need time. I’ve already told you that in 1945 the Soviets had put her in a very nice two-roomed flat in Moscow. A fierce militant, starting in 1916, she’d taken up the cause in the days of Zimmerwald and Kienthal, during the pacifist congresses which were staged while the Great War raged around them, women could circulate more easily than men, does that ring any bells? An ardent militant and a brilliant doctor, she knew a lot of people, she was widely respected, two rooms all to herself in Moscow in 1945 was quite something, when I was recalled to Moscow after my little trip to Kazakhstan, I was so pleased to see her again, she showed me round Moscow, then I started to get very busy.