‘Really? You never heard about it? But the French were there, there was a Madame de Valréas who financed the whole thing, gnarled hands, lips often dark red, violet eyes, very efficient, people said “the Waltenberg Seminar” or “the Valréas Conference”, present also were Europe’s lunatics, Wolkenhove, Van Ryssel of the steelworks, and Moncel, the great Christian metaphysician who is mad about theatre.
‘He was young at the time, not as young as me, but a tyro, clenched, very reactionary, much more so than he is today, the philosophers asked one question, what was to be done about Kant’s legacy ten years after the butchery in the trenches? “Dare to think”, a small self-sufficient world of thinkers and writers, Hans Kappler, Edouard Palude, and politicians, Briand was there, it was the time of his “away with the cannon, away with the machine guns” and the United States of Europe, and scientists, wonderful lectures on the theory of relativity, the whole of Europe, the economists drew blood as they argued about the theory of value and their talk of hot cakes, in the end everything clashed, mingled, a whole world, along with the wives, the children, the mistresses, the catamites, they also knew how to have a good time, some went at it enthusiastically, and on occasions there were the imprints of knees in the snow.
‘The coats of the women were fawn, grey, black, the hems, collars and cuffs trimmed with magnificent soft white fur, I found them very arousing, they wore small hats, and the men carried tomes bristling with bookmarks, between them in the space of a few days they redrew the intellectual map and reconfigured their wonderful Europe while they strolled, really major confrontations!
‘And as usual behind the war of ideas lay questions of jobs, the presidencies of learned societies, arguments about finance and reputation, the sort of thing that drives the frailer brethren mad, and that’s not reckoning with what was going on behind the scenes, in the streets of Germany, there was even one of the leading participants who had a manic outburst, a man who rushed into the hotel lounge shouting, “Infamy, infamy!” like something out of King Lear, there were also snowball fights, I was there with my brother, I was just sixteen, my brother had brought me, it was supposed to be good for my lungs, any excuse was enough for a snowball fight, I slipped, a woman was chasing me, she fell on top of me, I’ve been about a bit since then but I can still recall her breath on my neck, my brother was keen on the new philosophy, like many good people who “dared to think”, not knowing that they were baring their throats for the dogs.’
Outside the window, the jackdaw was still visible and holding his own against the wind, suddenly he wheels on his right wing, rocks and dives, Lilstein closes his eyes as he chews a mouthful of tart:
‘She’s put something else in it, she’s changed the recipe today, what can you smell, over the raspberry, apple, butter, vanilla and cinnamon? Something else, try hard, trust yourself, say what’s this on my tongue, ah yes, rum, a very good rum, you know what that back taste of rum means? No? What happened to the Russian general after I submitted my report? Are you really that fond of the army? Wouldn’t you prefer to know the secret of the presence of rum in the Linzer, or a brief philosophical interlude or the story of my mother? The general first? Very well!
‘The general disappeared, perhaps just as he walked round a bend in a corridor, they’ll explain all that to you one day, the Russians sent another general, a hero of the Soviet Union, twice a hero of the Soviet Union, but this time he was the one nearly wetting his pants in my presence, he’d been at Stalingrad, panzers with hand grenades, he told me he would have attacked them with his bare hands if he’d had to, in the end the guy saw off the Reich’s divisions, temperatures of twenty below, he faced me, a low-grade informer, and nearly wet himself, we became firm friends.’
Why is Lilstein saying all this? these are secrets and you shouldn’t tell secrets unless you are about to trade them for other secrets, but Lilstein has got into his stride, he says that after the business with the first general he hadn’t felt any the better for it, to be perfectly honest, at the time he even considered taking French leave, as they say in England, some of his friends had managed to get away from Rosmar in ’46.
‘Once across the border, they stuck skull-caps on their heads and killed the language of the people who had killed them, they left, young gentleman of France, so that they might become strong once more, by moving rocks around for Ben Gurion, a new Sparta, they succeeded, nobody will ever make them disappear again, why didn’t I leave? Because I can’t stand the heat nor the Middle East, nor messianic missions, not messianic missions of any kind, you’ll see, I’ve become very pragmatic, the Red Dawn, Promised Lands, that sort of thing is so mortiferous, personally I prefer fog, quiet brasseries, boring newspapers, waitresses with long legs, a world without God, and internationalism, but above all I love my mother tongue, I am an internationalist infatuated with his mother tongue.’
Lilstein can’t stand the Middle East but it’s just like being in the Middle East, the talk will go on for hours touching on every subject but carpets, and it will categorically not be about money, in the window no more jackdaws are visible, lower down the mountain isolated chalets can be seen, you imagine another life: the stone sill at the door, at dusk a last cloud over the tree-line, and the hearth, all the resources of the mountain coming benignly together, the gurgle of a brook beneath the snow, a woman in a large woolly jumper, you need silence, Lilstein has caught your eye as it wanders towards the woman with red hair who is now unhurriedly busying herself in the room, he asks you if you think she’s beautiful, yes, at first Lilstein also wanted to kill the language of the people who had killed him, he stayed in Germany but he never spoke German except to give orders:
‘I used to joke in Russian, you have to!’
And as a precaution, Lilstein pretended to have forgotten his French and English, whereas he knows kilometres of poems in several languages, that means he can drive a thousand kilometres reciting poems non-stop or as good as, Shakespeare, Valéry, Baudelaire, Donne, Mandelstam, in particular he knows reams of Goethe, Heine, Rilke and Apollinaire, he’d almost killed all that off too, and then one day a book came his way which he had to read for professional reasons.
‘Some bastard bourgeois scribbler! Listen, this too I know by heart, “German will remain the language of my mind, because I am a Jew, I intend to hold on to all that’s left within me of a devastated country” that’s good … “the fate of its sons is also my fate but I bring an additional legacy”, that is generous, it’s humanist! “I bring!” Now mark well the end: “I want to help the world to feel grateful to them for something”, a double distillation, the catch in the back of the throat, if I were a great, strong Aryan, nothing would make me feel more humiliated than that sort of irony.’
So Lilstein decided he would stay, that he would help, he stayed with them, that is, he stayed at home.
At the time he read that forbidden author in bed at night, he would lie on one side with, against his back, a beautiful woman.
‘It’s wonderful, young comrade, no, too irritating, I can’t go on saying comrade, you’re about to leave the Party, it’s wonderful to read a good book and feel against your back the breasts and legs of a woman who holds you close, her face was sweet and there were the rings of pleasure under her eyes, I did all I could to protect her, she loved me, she whispered in my ear that I took her to unbelievable depths.