When you do this you uncover your mouth which is half open, a sign of denial, then you revert to your pose as Lilstein’s docile audience, you’re on your best behaviour, nor do you allow yourself to bite off bits of skin around your fingernails, sometimes you press your index finger into your cheek and hold it from the inside between your teeth, picking gently at the skin, taking care not to draw blood, Lilstein could also be a real traitor to the Party, a traitor in the pay of the English, so were you sent to see him by mistake or was it to cook a Frenchman’s goose? A British Intelligence Service ploy? And why does the idea of being with an enemy of the Party you are intent on quitting make you feel sick to the stomach? No, Lilstein is a politician, a peevish communist but a real communist for all that, so why did you agree to come here to meet him if you are so keen to leave the Party?
‘And so, young gentleman of France, the Red Army has just killed workers, including women workers, who were members of the Hungarian Communist Party, fact, it also killed fascists who were killing communists, not many fascists, they got out fast to Austria and Germany before the tanks came back into the city, it was the working-class suburbs which held out longest, all of which raises some very awkward questions for you, and because you have also read extracts from a “report attributed to comrade Khrushchev” in the bourgeois press, you are now thinking of resigning from the Party, of turning your card in, as they say.
‘Why? to restore your innocence? to make yourself believe again? Your father would be overjoyed, don’t get angry, don’t get up, spare me the dramatic gestures, I never found it very helpful being the son of a heroine of the resistance and I suspect it can’t be easy to have a father who was a Pétainist and a collaborator, that may put me ahead morally but at least your father is still alive, stripped of his French nationality but alive, he plays boules in Barcelona, he’s good at it, he lives in the Barrio Chino, am I correct? odd sort of exile for an ex-Vichy stalwart, in Franco’s Spain yes, but in a red-light area of town, Work, Family, Pimmel.
‘Pimmel?. In German it means willy, all right, I didn’t want to be coarse, I apologise, but don’t be so combustible, sit down, my mother fought against Trotsky, she fought against him but she’d known him, the Party gave her a splendid funeral, in the photos there was not a single person of her generation left, I thanked the Party, our fragile organisations need grateful, gullible followers, who live longer, does it make you wince to be told all this? Learn to take life easier, I’ve been around, been around too much, seen too much History, you want some of mine? Leave the Party? The Party doesn’t give a shit! There are hundreds, thousands of people ready to worship at the feet of the idol believing that they are thinking dialectically, but if you still have any ideas and ideals left, and if you want to fight for them, you’re going to have to learn to stop being the kid who answers back.’
Lilstein looks at you, you hold his gaze and tell yourself that the Waldhaus is a trap, they can denounce you now whenever they want to, in Paris Hatzfeld said this trip would be like the journey to Zimmerwald, in 1917, in the middle of the war, when French pacifists travelled to meet their German and Russian comrades, but Lilstein is no pacifist, he’s a stirrer, you look towards the dining room, empty, you look out at the Rikshorn, at Waltenberg down the mountainside, a small drowsy village, the boules, they know everything, what is your role in the drama, what audience are you performing to? the son of a French collaborator who is plotting in Switzerland with someone big in the Stasi? or the member of the editorial board of La Nouvelle Pensée who is having talks with a double agent of the Intelligence Service, less than a month after having discussions with a deputy member of the Politburo of the French Communist Party? Which newspaper, and on which side, will run the story first?
All you can do now is hand back your card, Lilstein has just one more thing to ask you, a small thing, and then he will let you depart in peace:
‘Why did you join the Party which you now seem so anxious to leave? Didn’t you know that the Party had done some terrible things long before this latest business in Budapest? In Berlin, not that long ago? In 1936, the show trials? And the “kulaks taken as a class”, were they just a handful of parasites in evening dress as portrayed in some Eisenstein film? Or Cronstadt, a workers’ council, like the one in Budapest, but you must know what the Soviets have always made of workers’ councils, and the Lumpen, there are various books about it, are you an intellectual or a grand Lady Bountiful from some charitable organisation? Do you know by what means, as recently as three years ago, convicted persons were still leaving Moscow for camps — yes, camps — which don’t exist, so it’s hardly surprising that people find it so difficult to come back from them? In bogus refrigerated trucks, there were so many of them roaring through the streets that French journalists wrote glowingly of the abundant supply of butcher’s meat! Fairy stories, the lot of it, one day we’ll come back to them.’
Lilstein’s eyes look larger now than they did a little while ago, his face less pink, the cheekbones more pronounced, you see more clearly the two inwardly curving lines running down from each nostril to the sides of his mouth, they are the lines that come to people who laugh, who consistently use their faces and expressions as pawns in the conversation, the better to impose on the person they’re talking to.
A metre behind Lilstein, in the tall dresser, is a collection of decorated plates, mountains, lakes, goose-girls, old châteaux, group scenes, the late evening light floods through the window and warms the porcelain and the colours which decades of washing have turned pinkish, greenish, pastel-ish.
In the middle of the collection, two rectangular dishes, much bigger than the plates. The one on the left shows women emerging from a house and walking into the foreground in a swirl of snowflakes, severally carrying a lantern, distaff and gun, while in the background a group of men linger by the door holding straps and halters, it is the end of one of those country gatherings at which people would congregate around a ceramic stove and tell stories about the Devil, the lady of the lake or grapes, when the buds swell on the nodes of vine-shoots ravaged by the secateurs, everyone listened, the girls spun and wove their wedding trousseaus, the boys greased the horses’ harness with goose-fat, Lilstein is calmer now, he resumes in a steady voice:
‘At least your father is alive, and you’re not obliged to smile nicely for his murderers.’
Lilstein is going to speak to you at some length, he will mix confidences, philosophy, crude words, the edge of tears, the thoughts of Bukharin, best of the Bolsheviks, the only one capable of coming up with ideas other than the knout and watchtowers, Schubert’s Lieder, ah, you like them too, Fischer-Diskau, yes, but there’s also Hans Hotter, it’s an English company that distributes the recordings, the state of workers’ pay, more Bukharin, the songs of Yves Montand, I particularly like the early Montand despite his legato, Schubert, I must get you to listen to the Winter Journey sung by a woman, rather unusual and quite magnificent, the death of Beria or rather the seven deaths of Beria, at least seven, in the Bolshoi they’re performing The Decembrists by Yuri Shaporin, it’s 27 June 1953, all the Party chiefs are there, Pravda prints all the names except Beria’s, the approach road to the Bolshoi is closed off by tanks for the limousine bringing the comrade first deputy Prime Minister of the USSR and the Minister for State Security, he is shot in the prison of Lefortovo the same evening, the first of his seven deaths.