‘We’ll need to be cautious, not go too fast, do nothing robust, just look at what we’ve achieved in ten years, you’re no longer a nobody, Cuba, I gave you good information, “the Soviets will withdraw their missiles”, you used it to submit a first-rate analysis of the situation, your friend the Minister liked it, today he is respected and he is grateful to you, not excessively so, he has a talent for forgetting services rendered, but he knows you can be useful to him, he regurgitated your analysis in a full Cabinet, with de Gaulle in the chair, hold firm whatever the cost, be strong, he’s no Gaullist but in a tight corner he’s sound, stand up to Khrushchev, give full backing to the Americans, Khrushchev will withdraw his missiles, you saw the result, we forced death on to the back foot, that’s our only reward, so let’s carry on, with all due humility.
‘Our only reward is the outcome, your friend backed the Americans and he impressed de Gaulle, it must be done, and moreover comrade Nikita, a dangerous amateur, got the chop, nothing drastic, a five-roomed flat in Moscow, not to be sneezed at, and when people in the street ask him how things are, Nikita says, so-so, amateurs get the chop, I’m not sure that between Beria and him we gained much by the change, yes, I recall very clearly hearing you talking about the various deaths of Beria, you have a good memory, three deaths was it? no, at least six, and you are quite right, in the notes the doctor made about my mother’s ravings the name of Beria did not appear.
‘Not once. At first I thought it was the ultimate precaution, we’ll have to come back to that, Beria, a sadist, a psychopath, a man sexually obsessed, the Russians love to frighten themselves by kicking their corpses in the ribs. If the Soviet Union is the kind of country that could be dominated by a man like him, then it isn’t much of a country, or else Beria is much more than a man who ripped the panties off women, just think, Peter the Great died before he became Peter the Great and it was the great nobles took it on themselves to write the story of his life, or take the Emperor Augustus, he died before being Emperor Augustus, and it was Antony who wrote his portrait, Octavius the psychopath, which he most certainly was, like Beria, who was nothing like Augustus, or Iago, picture Iago, it’ll cheer you up.’
Lilstein’s digressions are of course intended to cheer you up and also to impose his ways on you. You’ve decided that you would go on looking grim to make him ask you what was wrong, you’ve thought hard about what you are going to say to him, that you’ve just reread Faust, that it’s not working any more, and then he manages to make you listen again to his anecdotes or fantasies, by the time he’s finished it’ll be too late, he will have taken you by the hand once more, you will want to speak but won’t be able to get the tone right, you’ll sound hesitant or brusque, and appear to be missing the point.
‘Picture Iago,’ Lilstein goes on, ‘an Iago who turns into an enlightened minister, an expert in maritime growth, he dies twenty years after that unfortunate business with the handkerchief, mourned by all, a statue facing out to sea for the centuries to come, I have a very bold hypothesis: what does Beria do when he succeeds Yezhov? What does Beria do after Stalin dies? He was always close to Bukharin’s programme, a man of the right, work, profitability, a few market mechanisms, the Party worries about ideology and leaves the managers to manage things, let’s have done with anti-Semitism and all that “Greater Russia” rhetoric, when he died some of the people implicated in the white-collar plot had to wait two years before they were freed, simply because the order for their release was signed by Beria.
‘Each time he was fully in charge of security he ordered the doors to be opened, and in ’53 he goes very far, he is ready to accept a form of German reunification on condition that it stays neutral, he has a clear idea of what growth means and what nationalities are, we’ll speak of that later, yes, it’s dangerous to talk about such matters, even today, that is why they went to so much trouble to kill Beria, one death but several versions, we can’t make different models of the same motor car, but when it comes to death there’s no one to touch us.
‘So there is a fourth version, more fanciful, Beria attends a party at the Polish Embassy, shield decorated with a white eagle on a red background, we can add without fear of error that the Ambassador’s wife has skin like a peach, and dimples and that she’s wearing Chanel, Beria came in his own car, with Voroshilov and Bulganin, first-rate cuisine, meat that melts in the mouth, vast amounts of drink, Polish vodka obviously, end of the reception, they drive off into the night, the car, Beria, Bulganin, Voroshilov, everyone’s pissed, they go to the Lubyanka, to Beria’s flat, a drunken farce, with Malinovski and Konev in the car behind, Beria’s driver has been changed, he’s a colonel, three minutes later Beria is standing before a court presided over by Marshal Konev, judged, sentenced, executed in a cellar with which he was intimately acquainted.
‘There are other versions, I’ll tell you those another day, stories of bullets in the back put there by his friends, but we run no such risk, we trust each other.
‘And then times started to change, between the two of us we made terror take a step back, we contributed in our modest way to push back the shadows of unnatural death, and your Minister friend cannot dispense with your conversation, we are moving forward, so you’re rereading Faust? Now why did you tell me that?
‘Because you have doubts? It’s only to be expected, you’re French and if you had fewer grandiose sentiments you’d have fewer doubts.’
*
The wives of the Consul and Morel are having cross words over a hoop, the young woman has quickly got the idea that you mustn’t let people get away with anything:
‘You went through four the wrong way, didn’t you?’
Max, Morel and de Vèze watch them, the pink diplomat joins them, bald, ruddy complexion, an inane, unforgiving expression in his eye, a face descending in ledges towards his thick lips, he lisps:
‘It’s a very feminine game.’
‘You look worried,’ says Max.
The pink diplomat whines:
‘It’s so hard finding honest domestic help in Singapore, they don’t know anything and they steal. There’s this one I’ve got, this morning, in order to make him return a dinner jacket the police had to teach him a harsh lesson, like the English do, with a cane, it was painful to see, eighteen he was, skin very smooth, hardly smelled at all, for a minute he didn’t understand what was happening, held face down on the table, he started struggling, they tied his feet to the legs of the table, white buttocks, he confessed at the fourth stroke but the sergeant said to go up to fifteen, I didn’t care about the jacket, but you’ve got to have law and order, as the Anglo-Saxons say.’
The diplomat’s chin rises and points to the horizon, tautening the fat on his neck which settles back into its regular folds when his chin comes down again.
Weird, de Vèze thinks, a sodomite singing the praises of law and order. They do it as a cover, a friend of his told him one day, but de Vèze thinks there might be more to it than that, there must be a visceral pleasure to be got from defending law and order in a society which puts you behind bars each time it catches you with a squaddie in a public toilet, de Vèze has known officers who were, as they say, limp-wristed but nevertheless laughed like drains, and quite genuinely, whenever they heard repeated what Clemenceau said about Lyautey, ‘at last we’ve got a general with balls up his arse, though unfortunately they’re not his’, as though they gladly accepted the fact that they had two existences, one led in the dancing dark and the other in the light of day, in a society which dealt ruthlessly with the dancing shadows of which they were the — often heroic — guardians.