Lilstein looks out towards the Rikshorn and gives a sigh:
‘“Scientifically sacred”! That’s going to cost us very dear. In Vietnam, we put an end to one war, now they’re about to start another, in Afghanistan, perhaps it should be my turn now to give you information but I’m not sure if we could prevent this one, they’ve just appointed a new Minister for me to answer to, an oaf, dimmer than any I’ve had before, he’s never seen a shot fired in anger, knows nothing about suffering or culture, he’s one of Stalin’s old informers, very interesting the career paths of those snitches, I wangled a seat for one of them in the Bonn government, and given what I can do with him, I’m not keen on having somebody else as Minister.
‘But in Paris you too are scared of being the victim of an informer, I’m trying to put your mind at rest, but did you know that in Paris a list has been drawn up of seven hundred names and that yours is on it? Don’t worry, it also contains dozens of ambassadors, prefects, ministers and former ministers, eat up, your tart’s getting cold, you’ll miss the aromas. Even the proprietor of Paris-Match is on the list as is the owner of Détective magazine, that says how serious it is! All the same, you are ready to jump ship and so am I, we’re both in the process of having our Great Adventure shot from under us, they’re going to win, they’ve set a woman on our trail, with a couple of eager blood-hounds, you can’t get a decent dessert spoon anywhere, and here am I bewailing my lot, like a cat on hot cinders, that woman won’t find anything but she’s going to make the atmosphere unbreathable.’
Lilstein has resumed his tussle with his portion of tart, when he manages to cut it he ends up with pieces that are too small, he turns to you and complains:
‘What’s required is a spoon with a longer handle, for better leverage and more pressure, to help cut pieces from the slice, and one side of the spoon should be serrated, a kind of dessert spoon specifically designed for short-crust and puff pastry, otherwise we’ll be like everybody else, have to eat with our fingers, one ritual fewer and one barbarism more, we do good work, but we do it for masters who don’t deserve us, take mine: my first boss in the GDR, a weak and vindictive sort, and further down the line, yonder in the land of the bears, a second, master of all he surveyed, old, pot-bellied, you know he had himself appointed Marshal of the Soviet Union? And was awarded the Lenin Prize for Literature! Makes you feel sorry for Russian literature! Tolstoy, Gorky, Brezhnev, come one come all! Fortunately there are also Pasternak, and Solzhenitzyn, as you see I have tastes of my own. The old man, with his big belly, ensconced in the Kremlin, he spends his time arranging his medals in rows on his chest, he’s got the medals already and would very much like to have his own war, in Afghanistan!
‘But you also have two masters, one’s in the Élysée Palace, a vain clucking peahen, doesn’t bother much with medals, he worries about his baldness and his accordion, and such vanity, very touchy because he knows that in the long run he’ll always have to kow-tow to a peanut farmer on the other side of the Atlantic.
‘Even if we passed information to Mr Vanity in the Élysée, I haven’t a clue what he would do with it, he could use it to put a spoke in the peanut farmer’s wheel instead of giving him a helping hand, indeed he could, your chief has a lot of problems just now, because of us, we’re working too well, the Americans are getting riled, we’re really working well, but I don’t know what we’re doing any more, and here I am, no smarter than before.
‘And no smarter than a fool, you remember, in 1956,1 told you that we were going to work to let in the light, a rather portentous turn of phrase but there’s always been a touch of that in the way I understood my role in spreading Aufklärung, and today I find it hard to see where the smallest glimmer of light would come from, I’d forgotten one thing though, wherever there is a lot of light, there is also deep shadow and that can be worse, a story about the death of Goethe: a play on words, on his deathbed the great man didn’t say, as reported, mehr Licht, ‘more light’, but mehr Nicht, ‘more nothing’, I was a man of the Enlightenment and I produced more nothing.
‘What information could I pass to your chief, dear boy? What would be the point? Our trade no longer serves a useful purpose, but listen, if your President were to forward a couple of choice details about Afghanistan to the Americans, it would calm them down and maybe call some of the dogs off us.’
*
No, in the Embassy people didn’t start talking again overnight, and there’s talking and talking, one word, two, a sigh, nothing definite, but as the days turn into weeks, Bantam Bum who had required people to talk to him has stopped asking, he no longer leans on people, is not so aggressive, sometimes he looks discouraged, stooped, human, not that long ago people would gladly have pushed him and his ball point with four colours down the stairwell, but now, just because the days have turned into weeks which have ticked by, when Berthier sits down yet again to question someone he looks so weary, so shrunken, that you throw up your hands then let them fall on your desktop saying: what do you want me to say?
Nobody tells him anything, they just ask one question: what do you want me to say? They ask it so that he understands that the answer is ‘nothing’, so that he will go away, but at the same time the question you think you’re asking him you are also putting to yourself.
It’s just what people need to make them start talking, not a question that you asked to be put, you don’t answer that one, you have your pride, especially when the person asking it walks like a bantam cock, no, the real question, which is the one you ask yourself when you put it to Berthier: what do you want me to say? You put it to him so that in the end he’s forced to answer ‘nothing’. But you’ve also put this question to yourself, and you’ve got to find an answer, and neither the word ‘nothing’ nor any amount of generalities will do, your self-respect requires you to come up with an answer that is true, and confronted by Berthier you start to answer your own question with generalities some of which are more specific than others.
Besides Berthier isn’t that bad, for example, he didn’t report the naval attache, the aircraft carrier pilot who thought he was a piece of shit, or Mazet over the business of the biro and his records, no, Berthier understood certain things, and among the people who said that there were some things that he understood are some who said afterwards that if all this hoo-ha about a mole is true, then you need a lot of people to smoke him out, dirty work maybe but it has to be done, and to catch big fish you’ve got to get your arse wet, it’s not about denouncing, Berthier actually loathed denunciation, he’d said so to two or three people, what he needed were pointers, generalities, some but not all needing to be more specific than others.
So that’s where we stood, right, with ‘generalities some of which are more specific than others’, some generalities might give him a lead, he had packed up his questionnaire, now he seemed to be asking for help, he chatted, he still said he was ‘extremely sorry’ but did so without the earlier emphasis or menace, in the end he’d even put his four-spangled ball-point away, and when he was sitting, face drawn, eyes blank, he seemed to encapsulate the misery of a servant in a house facing ruin. He was becoming human.