‘Moscow! I’d dreamed of it all through my youth, the future was already there, and I was made welcome, a few months of specialised training, then I was sent back to my own country, to my home town on the shores of the Baltic, I said goodbye to my mother and left for Rosmar, fog, dockside cranes, a handsome sea front and a quite superb brandy, finished your tea? Shall we order a small brandy apiece? No? The French don’t really much care for brandy. Never been to Rosmar? One day I’ll take you there and you can taste our brandy, ein Kümmel, two salmon on the label, double distillation, forty-five degrees of pleasure and guile, flecks of gold in a flaxen robe, but no vulgar overtones.
Lilstein can wait no longer, he cuts a small piece of tart with his dessert fork, blows on it gently and consumes it slowly.
‘It’s still too hot, it doesn’t burn the mouth but it’s still too hot for you to get the full benefit of the aromas, when I was a boy, at Rosmar, I was always too impatient to wait for the tart to cool sufficiently, I really must take you to Rosmar, we’ve rebuilt everything, excellent, sometimes I wonder how we did it because at the end of the war the only people still there were the halt, the hand-wringers and the thieves.
‘Look, isn’t that superb? the lattice on the tart, it gives the design added strength, it holds the jam, and it’s not absolutely regular, that’s important, you should never forget to have enough scraps of short pastry left over to make the lattice for the tart. The day I got back to Rosmar, a Russian general sent for me, in his office there were shelves, thousands of index cards, not all of them recent, he loved flicking through them himself, out of the window you looked down on the world, 1947, let battle commence, Rosmar!
‘But let’s not get carried away, I was pissing my pants as I stood before the general, those were days when it was more useful to have been an officer in the Wehrmacht than a communist in one of Hitler’s camps, some memories are hard to live with, his office stank of orthodox pigsty, my Russian said “that lot need a boot up the arse!” His referring to the people of my home town as “that lot” presented me with a problem, if I also called them “that lot”, what did that make me? Different? They were the ones who wanted to make me different, they would have even gassed me or similar if that’s what it would have taken, the bastards. I wanted nothing to do with their difference nor with the Russian’s difference, I was working with the breath of the dead blowing down my neck, “a boot up the arse”, I was prepared to do that to the adults, I did it, you soon get sick of doing it, but the children? I wanted something new, “risen from the ruins and with face turned to the future”, to rebuild with the children, and I even put one over on the general.’
Lilstein interrupts himself for a moment to look out of the window, a jackdaw, almost motionless, it is so near that you can make out the yellow of its eyes, it is flying into the wind, it pitches, rolls, adjusts its feathers to counteract the power of the rushing air.
‘Childhood, young gentleman of France, does not interest you, not yet. Have you read Trakl, Georg Trakl? No? “Grodek”, a war poem, written in 1914, captures the whole of the gangrene in a few lines, and at the end the poem becomes still and passes the baton to children against a background of golden leaves on a field of midnight black, the children who will be born and grow big, and Trakl dies and it’s the war that grows big, our entire world was born in 1914, I was born in 1914.
‘What did I put across the general? Don’t you want me to tell you any more about my mother? Afraid you’ll lose the thread? I’m very fond of digressions, still, too bad, I’m in Rosmar in 1947 with the general, I’ve reconstructed the adults and the kids I’ve turned into “Pioneers”, quite delightful, the Internationale sung by corncrake voices along country lanes just before harvest-home, children returning with their little baskets full of poppies, a few wheat stalks, berries red and blue, and in town there were no more beggars on the streets.
‘What? There weren’t under Hitler either? That’s not funny, I had no idea you’d sunk so low, you’re being provocative, I’m not against it, and you wouldn’t be wrong, factually, no more beggars, but I persist in believing that it wasn’t the same, and so do you, of course. You know what the law was called that gave Hitler full powers to act, I know all about it, when the wonderful German elite went over wholesale to him, it was “the law for the elimination of poverty”, how had this poverty come about? I’m getting back to the point, digression is my besetting sin, with my general in 1947 I digressed, I digressed for nights on end, I digressed with the aid of vodka and Kummel and one day I wrote a report, in it I said that the general was too fond of the army.’
Again Lilstein cuts a morsel of tart, raises it to his mouth, slowly, turning his dessert fork around to examine it, he tastes it, then sets about his portion in earnest. You do the same. The tart crumbles easily when bit, the shortcrust is firm in your mouth but also yielding, it breaks up and scatters amid the taste of apple and raspberry. Lilstein looks at you:
‘You’ve tasted it before? Wasn’t as good? You know, the secret of good shortcrust pastry is to take your time, don’t go at it with too much vim, it must be left to prove for at least three hours, and you too, you must allow as long as it takes, I don’t want you to get all tensed up, people who live in a state of anxiety make bad workmen, you must be the absolute master of your own rhythm, no emergency stations, that’s what ruins the whole damn shoot, you really like this Linzer Tone? It’s very delicate, hand movements precise but never vehement, the proprietor’s wife does it without thinking, that’s why she always succeeds.
‘If you’re heavy-handed your shortcrust goes rubbery, don’t let the egg yolk be absorbed by the flour, it must first be beaten into the icing sugar, mix the flour and butter together lightly, ensuring that the flour is thoroughly coated in the butter to prevent it sticking, make a well in the middle for the egg yolks and add a mixture of sugar and vanilla, then you mix them together in the well with the tips of your fingers, lightly, like a cat’s paw playing… Do you like Waltenberg, the French people I ask usually answer “The Swiss Alps! Ah, Thomas Mann, those were the days!” But do you know what else happened here, in 1929, the year you were born?
‘The Waltenberg European Seminar? Great thinkers, philosophers, writers, politicians, industrialists, economists, beautiful women, a week on a tall mountain, great debates, seminars within the Seminar, economists at each other’s throats over the question of value, fiercest were the ones who talked about hot cakes, they sickened me, value was not work but what they called marginal value, the price of bread when you’re not hungry, and then there were the philosophers, a great philosophical tug-of-war between what bourgeois Europe had taken centuries to develop, the ideal of forms, the operation of rules, and, in the red corner opposite, a philosophy of Being, the notion of Being-in-the-World, which called for forms, rules and irony to be consigned to oblivion, while the participants stuffed themselves with chocolate creams, delicacies of the nouveaux riches, and tasteless, I personally have always been on the side of the Enlightenment.’
You can agree with Lilstein about the lure of the chocolate cream yet find it amusing that a communist should take up cudgels on behalf of the bourgeoisie of the Enlightenment, you might even smile a sceptical smile, but that doesn’t stop Lilstein droning on about the Waltenberg European Seminar, Regel, Merken, Maynes, 1929, the fur that flew.