The second is Khrushchev saying ‘One day Beria came to a meeting without a bodyguard and I killed him’, Beria is the most interesting character of that generation, you shall hear all about him, young gentleman of France, Beria as a skirt-chaser, the guy has a reputation for having women brought forcibly in from the street and raping them in his office, over his desk, Bluebeard. When I was in prison I heard some hair-raising stories about him, a very complicated death.
Then there’s the version by Sergo Beria, his son, ‘my father was killed in his house’ on 26 June.
Lilstein continues to jumble everything up, he drops the deaths of Beria, before he’s done he’ll tell you about the others, they’re even more lurid, he switches to the atomic threat, comes back to his mother, Berlin, January 1919, she stumbled across the corpse of Rosa Luxemburg, he reverts to the atomic threat, back to Clara Zetkin, then something new, the colonial wars, Schubert’s Lieder and his Winter Journey, I know a woman who used to sing it, marvellous, the story of the hunter and the bear, Beria’s frolickings, his wife saying he had mistresses but not all that many, wouldn’t have had the time, I must make time to tell you the story of the bear and the hunter, young gentleman of France, Picasso’s paintings, I’m a noted expert on Guernica, the horse which turns round is fascinating, a whole story complete in itself, have you read the articles Blunt wrote about it, Anthony Blunt?
Lilstein raises his glass and begins to talk about a wide beach on the Baltic, you must be able to trust people with secrets, his life had begun again on a beach, everything had begun on a beach, it was 1948, he’d only just met the young woman, and when I think she denounced me!
He couldn’t say now which of them had suggested the stroll along the shore, the sand and the sea, the desert that was the sea, the spume, the salt, the smell of seaweed, the cry of albatross and petrel, a small, low-roofed house loaned for their picnic, they’d walked for hours, defying the cold wind blowing in off the sea, walked without speaking, the wind stripped them of words, of any desire to speak, losing all sensation except that of a body walking into the wind, a body reduced to the sum of its movements and tears brought on by the cold and the brutal light, confronting spume and wind, walking over sand littered with mussels, sea-shells, seaweed, trident shapes left by the feet of curlews and gulls, seeking out the solid sand at the sea’s edge to walk on as fast as they could to keep warm, they walked to where the sand is already sufficiently loaded with water to be firmer but not yet so saturated that shoes sink into it, just before the line where the wave dies, when its foam is simply froth and seems to be no longer liquid, when it is no more than a fringe of expiring bubbles at the extreme edge of all that water which continues to endure in its seething and rasping surges.
An immense beach, Lilstein tried to position himself so that he sheltered his companion but he was puny, made hardly any difference, even by walking backwards in front of her, he was buffeted by squalls and it was the young woman who, with a laugh, was first to set herself against the wind from the sea, at an angle, she swapped places, to protect him, saying, shouting into the wind, that she could stand up to the wind better than he could and as they changed places they grabbed each other by the shoulders, from time to time they passed little old men who were gathering firewood to warm themselves by, watching this floating plank or that end of a beam which in its own good time the sea would fling on to the beach, but it was that or nothing, sometimes there was more than one old man following the same piece of wreckage, they eyed each other warily and seemed relieved that Lilstein and the young woman did not represent youthful competition, and looked at them the way you’d expect them to look at people who did not need to rescue driftwood from the waves of the sea.
Lilstein and the young woman waved greetings, but did not stop to talk, bowled along by the expenditure of their combined energies, keeping in step, walking fast to keep warm, fighting sand and wind and the fierce flurries of stinging air which are on permanent duty for kilometre after kilometre under a storm-racked sky, lashed by gusts of wind which threatened to whip the hoods off their oilskins at any moment, forcing them to clap a frozen hand on the crown of their heads to prevent it, if they wanted to see around them they had to turn their shoulders or else partly swivel their heads inside their hoods, the wind was relentless, it blew at an angle, it swirled, always adversarial, finding a way in everywhere, laying its metal grip on everything, blasting, chilling, rending.
Yet for all that, their sweetness continued to seek the object of its desire, the cold wind denied it each time they exchanged a glance, forcing their heads down, making them bury their chins in their shoulders at an angle, the sweetness forced to retreat into eyes that looked out from lowered heads, sweetness suspended by the pummelling which left nothing in their thoughts except the wind, left them with no feeling but weariness, lungs raw, a kind of frozen-fingered intoxication, tears cold and salty, with nothing else for it but to go on walking, and when they returned in the middle of the afternoon to the white and blue room of the low-roofed house, once they were sheltered behind the closed door, they went on staggering for several moments from the fading effects of the wind.
What’s to be done with Lilstein in this mood who insists on telling you about Picasso, Guernica, Winter Journey, and regales you with the promises he once made on a beach? You don’t have a woman in Paris, at least not one sufficiently interesting for you to do the same and turn her into a story, you’re going to have to find something else to tell, but for the moment Lilstein goes on talking, like a man who has decided to tell all, with no thought for prudence, and you are turning into the one who listens to his secret outpourings, who’ll have to denounce Lilstein and Hatzfeld, to officials of the Party you are bent on leaving? Or to the Ministry of Internal Security?
‘The girl I walked with on the beach, young gentleman of France, denounced me, it’s funny, I can’t stand the thought that I was denounced and you cannot stand the thought of having denounced, yes, the charges you made were solid, I mean the ones you brought four years ago against the comrades in your cell, you remember, communists who met unofficially, there were seven or eight of them, and held endless discussions of books by Rousset and Kravchenko, and the “alleged Soviet camps”, and the Slansky trial and Tito and how to make the Party democratic? You got them thrown out of the Party by quoting Stalin and Thorez and lumping together Tito, Trotsky, Kravchenko, Slansky, the English, the police, Zionism, sorry, make that cosmopolitanism! Actually, a little too good to be true, if you will permit me a professional comment, which is why today you feel that what you did was squalid but that all you really did was cover up other things that were even more squalid, it must feel odd now to think of those you got excluded from the Party when at long last you know as much as they, Poletti, Warschawski, did.
‘What about the Monclars? did you ever see Monclar’s widow again? Nowadays you think like her, but the result of the charges you brought is that she’s a widow, did you really need to be so thorough? Did you have to say that there was no proof that her husband did not have any contact with the Germans during the war? No proof that he did not have! That’s good, very good, you could have kept a low profile, settled for saying that, objectively speaking, they were playing the same game as the Bonn revanchists, but you decided to add a clinching argument, to add that one basic issue was worth considering, the possibility that there’d been some contact between Monclar and the Germans in 1943 when a part of the network was blown, and by raising that question you made Monclar terminally suspect, tarred him with a suspicion “which unfortunately his current attempts to sabotage Party policy could only corroborate”, this was tantamount to telling him you disapproved of the Party line in 1952, ergo you “very probably” did a deal with the Gestapo in 1943, and since we are now fighting a war we cannot afford the luxury of doubt.