‘We liked walking along the beach, she denounced me in 1951, just then it wasn’t a very good idea to be called Lilstein or Meyer, I could stroke her breasts for hours on end, I brought her bunches of irises, and she denounced me, or rather she signed a paper in which she said that I had said this and that and so on.
‘In the Nazi camps I’d seen comrades die who could have obtained a stay of execution by denouncing me, and lo! my very first real woman managed to betray me! Unbelievable depths indeed!
‘They hadn’t even threatened her, they’d asked her questions, they’d dictated her replies, courtroom, men in uniforms, she was a good German citizen, she signed, I discovered everything together, love, Realpolitik, and vaginal follies, to me there are only follies, she denounced me, funny isn’t it? I shed hot tears, but I had done some denouncing too, a general in the Red Army, but I wasn’t sleeping with him at unbelievable depths, and the man who later asked me over and over to denounce myself while he kept turning the endless screw could easily have been one of the group who liberated me from Auschwitz where I hadn’t been denounced, I really thought my number was up, do you know how people died in those times?
‘Pneumonia, obviously, but you also got killed, young gentleman of France, from behind, as you walked along a corridor, never attempt to turn round, otherwise the bullet will shatter the bones in your face and then you can’t be made presentable for the coffin, everyone wants to be present at their own death and they mess it up, you understand, the time I felt most scared was when I was in the corridor, I only breathed again when I got to the interrogation room, you have to do it, what saved me was the death of the Big Man with the moustache which also happened just in time to save the lives of his Jewish doctors from a walk down the corridor, I was much less frightened than they were, I soon realised that for reasons I couldn’t understand they weren’t going to kill me, they sent me to a camp, then the death of the Big Man with the moustache meant that I was released from one of those camps no one talks about.’
Sure, Lilstein saw the girl again, not very long ago, she came to see him in his big office in Berlin.
‘I didn’t feel I had anything to forgive her for, I said it wasn’t anything to do with her, the investigation had been fixed from the start, and it’s always better to be denounced by someone who knows you, there are fewer inconsistencies in the record, and therefore fewer beatings. It is a sweet feeling, having an ex-lover there in front of you torn between fear and remorse, it’s a moment you’ve dreamed of a thousand times and when it happens you sit there and look, ten years on, the woman has not changed much, she is beautiful, deep breaths make her breasts rise, your hands remember her breasts, it’s a very delicious position to be in, but you tell yourself you could have done without the circumstances which have brought it about, and that makes you change your mind as you watch the woman with such feeling.
‘Are you absolutely sure you wouldn’t care for a spot of philosophy, young man? I mean to say: Waltenberg! The famous Seminar, the intelligentsia of Europe reading the last rites over Aufklärung, such a rich word, and in its place proclaiming that we must inhabit the world poetically, go back to the earth, to the Urwald, to the great forest of Authentic Being, while the brownshirts were beginning to occupy the hearts of cities! The earth which does not lie, the forest tall with trees! Still, it was bound to get out, that in the end the tall trees always march in step with the warriors, across the earth that never lies. I was young, the people I loved called me young Lilstein, I liked that, I was sixteen in 1929, I had an older brother who was a philosopher and wanted me to understand it all, very taken he was with the new thought, that is the philosophy of Being, away with your concepts and your Enlightenment! In 1934, the Nazis grabbed him by the hair and beat his head against a kerbstone.
‘Ten times or so, that was enough, "erst wenn sie steht, die Uhr … it’s only when the clock stops, im Pendelschlag des hin und her… between the swings of its pendulum, hörst Du, that you hear", the clock’s a lovely touch! “sie geht, und ging und geht nicht mehr … that it’s going, was going, has stopped going, never heard that before? It was said by Merken, the great philosopher of Being, the victor of Waltenberg, a poem he dedicated after the war to his friend René Char, one of the very few genuine writers in the Resistance, Malraux of course was another, weapons at the ready, yes, Malraux was a bit later but he knew what strong links were, knew the best moment to forge strong links, you know, I always had a liking for Malraux, from time to time I discuss him with Hatzfeld, with old friends. Anyway, Merken dedicated these lines to his friend Char, a swing of the pendulum.
‘Merken and Char, there’s a magnificent photo, the two men walking along a forest path, taken from the back, they’re walking side by side, Merken is short, Char is big and beefy, it’s very moving, you really don’t want to hear the rest? No philosophy? No poetry? My surprise when I saw the photo of these two men together, knowing what had happened to Merken after the Nazis took over? Later perhaps?
‘Well shall we talk about the woman who brought all that splendid company together here at the Waldhaus? Madame de Valréas, French, an aristocrat, early forties, with a quite splendid derrière, you know, “the royal rear-guard when amorous battle is joined”, no? You’re so good at saying no, fair enough, I’m not here to put any sort of temptation in your way, not even Madame de Valréas’s derrière which has changed significantly since those days, with or without the help of Verlaine, stick to serious matters, won’t you try a glass of white wine with it? sure? Not even the story of my mother? Later?
‘And you really wish to part company with your idealism? You don’t care for my two-soul scheme? Turns your stomach? I can understand that, all those dead workers, that’s right, workers, we’re not going to start telling each other in full view of the Rikshorn that the Americans parachuted a hundred thousand imperialists into Budapest in one night, let’s leave all that to the virgins, the eunuchs and our popular democratic press.’
A provocateur, Lilstein is just a provocateur, but where does he come from? an East German who can pass for Swiss when he wants to, but talks like this, does he believe what he says? He pretends to when he’s talking but surely he can’t believe it, and yet it sounds so right when he says it, is a German capable of telling a lie without believing it? But what else does he believe if he believes what he’s been saying since we’ve been sitting here? In the omelette, in the broken eggs it is made of? Is Lilstein just a plain cop? But why should anyone be sending you to see a cop? Because in Paris you told two or three close friends that some Hungarian demonstrators were true socialists? And that not everything was false in Khrushchev’s report? Or alternatively, is Lilstein a traitor? In which case Roland Hatzfeld has sent you to see a traitor, a traitor who is using his cover as a cop to say what he really thinks of the regime?
Or a cop who has stayed a cop but who is at least for once getting whatever is bothering him off his chest by playing the role of traitor they’ve told him to play? You can’t get your head around any of this, you don’t know if you should nod agreement at what Lilstein is saying, you rest your chin on your thumb with index and middle fingers aslant your mouth, you mutter sounds which might pass for assent or be taken as indications that you are paying attention, but from time to time you take your hand away from your cheek.