‘Did you know, young Frenchman, there was a lot of dancing here, before the war? I even cut my first dance-floor dash here, ballroom of the Waldhaus, sixteen, less than, I looked older than my age, there were balls, dancing parties, they opened all the doors wide, it made a very large room, during the day seminars and ideas, in the evening mixing with the ladies, I believed I was capable of doing all kinds of things, I was changing the world, but when I found myself in the arms of a woman it turned out to be no fun at all, tall she was, very straight shoulders, voice rather serious and husky, she asked me to dance, me!
‘She wanted to avoid making some of the others jealous, but I didn’t admit that to myself straight away, a waltz, fine, I had some vague idea about twirling round and round, but next up was a tango, I managed the first few steps rather grandly, going on how I’d seen it done and read about it in books, but as for what came next I hadn’t the faintest, she led me, grip of steel, she did it as though she was being swept off her feet but in truth she was leading me, there was only one thing I could do, go limp like a rag-doll and follow her movements, one moment she was the woman who has been dominated, the next the woman who fights back, and it was she who directed the whole thing, it was great art, she was very lady-like but when she danced the tango she behaved like a bitch, she made it clear that it wasn’t her but the dance which required her to grind her thigh against my hip and send her backside to hell.
‘And later that evening, a friend of mine, a French journalist, came up to me, we watched her dancing with other men who were sleeker and more expert than I, my journalist chum said we’ve made a very famous friend there, but you get the feeling she’d give it all up and go some place where she could slit the throat of goat or fawn and tear it to pieces and chuck the pieces up in the air, look at her feet, Lilstein, she always keeps one in shadow.
‘At one point during the ball, an Austrian girl told me I looked as if I’d been taught to dance the tango by Frederick II’s soldiers, it wasn’t true, I felt weak at the knees, the tall woman smiled, but she held me firmly with one hand, I came on strong, arch look in my eye, I was ludicrous, never come on strong, young man, just be someone who’s indispensable, so indispensable that you won’t need to have to impose your personality, it will simply be unthinkable that you’re not there, the unthinkable empty chair, they won’t be able to start without you, they call you to come, they wait for you and while they wait they sneer at the cheap shoes you wear, dark brown, to go with everything, this makes them warm to you, they’ll poke affectionate fun at you, you won’t need to scratch around for invitations, you’ll have become indispensable, the man they’re waiting for.
‘Did I ever see that woman who danced the tango again? I don’t know whether or not I’ll tell you some day, what I do know is that I can see her now, here, all I have to do is shut my eyes, or even if I keep them open, just now as I was coming up, I walked past the swimming pool, which hasn’t changed at all, it was very nice.’
Lilstein will go on telling you about the girl who danced the tango, a part of what he sees as he speaks will be for you, the rest stays with him, he is sixteen, an unlocked cubicle, no one screams, a silhouette in the shower, with the passage of the years he sees the face less and less clearly and what remains is what you sometimes find in museums, breasts, abdomen, thighs, perfection is the word for it, he closed the door, he did, he stayed outside, and for years he dreamed of what might have happened if he’d stepped inside and closed it after him, and even his dreams grew less torrid, he has a book at home which he never opens, wouldn’t part with it, he’d lost it every time the police arrested him, the first time he’d bought it back, the next time one of his colleagues returned it to him together with a large part of his library, I took them home and kept them safe, I knew you’d talk your way out of trouble.
Lilstein said thanks but nothing else, he never opens the book, he’s just happy to check that it’s still there, in the binding of the copy which the Nazis burned he had hidden a letter, in the replacement he’d bought all he knows is that on a certain page he will find a picture of exactly what he’d seen that time in the shower, haunches, thighs, he is certain by comparing both memories, the shower and the page of the Dictionary of Greek Sculpture, that the two images are identical, haunches firm and long, breasts held high, thighs, how shall we put it, not fish, under me her thighs slipped away like trout, I had her on a river bank, not a river, not a poet, besides I never had her, sharp-buttocked, she cries out when you open the door, turns, three-quarter back view, sharp-buttocked, already you’re not absolutely certain any more, what must have changed is your criterion of beauty, nowadays you’d find the Aphrodite pictured in the Dictionary too slim, her breasts not quite ripe, best not look in the book.
‘In Paris, people in counter-espionage will have their suspicions,’ Lilstein tells you, ‘the same way you have doubts. They have to have suspicions, I mean to say we’re in a risky business which operates on constructive fear and the charm of those frantic crises, no purpose is served by making yourself unsuspectable, one day someone will ask why you are so unsuspectable, so you’re wasting your time staying whiter than white, because in the end somebody will say: “the man’s too clean, if he isn’t a Soviet agent he’s burying his talents.”
‘There have to be blots on everybody’s record, otherwise it’s too good to be true, all the people I’ve ever known who were above suspicion came a cropper in the end, whereas everybody bears the mark of sin, they have to suspect people in sensitive jobs where suspicion is more dangerous than actual leaks, so they relax the pressure, they say that the cost-benefit ratio of hunting moles is too high.
‘That’s what the English thought, all those moles, even had a mole as head of their own espionage service, of course they suspected something, they spent years trying to nab them, not to protect old Cambridge chums or their little playmates in queerdom, there’s real pleasure to be had in eliminating old friends, no, if the English hesitated for so long it was because the whole thing was so gross that it looked like a trap.
‘The English have a memory for the wholesale traps, it all looked too much like the Tukhachevsky business, you’ll never understand why moles operating in England were so successful if you forget Tukhachevsky. ’
*
In front of everyone sitting round the table in the Consulate, out of the blue, Malraux suddenly asks de Vèze:
‘Bir Hakeim, how did you manage to walk out of there in the middle of the night?’
‘Our navigation point was five stars in the constellation Corbus.’
Malraux:
‘What did you all reckon at the time?’
De Vèze:
‘We reckoned it was perhaps a bit risky.’
Max:
‘Is it true that at the time Berlin and Vichy both wanted you court-martialled and shot? you and your ragbag gang of French whites and blacks and the Judaeo-Bolsheviks of the Legion?’
‘True,’ said de Vèze, ‘de Gaulle went on radio quick as a flash with his answer: he’d treat German prisoners the same way, and Radio-Berlin back-pedalled, they’d treat us as soldiers, but that didn’t make us any more enthusiastic about the idea of being taken prisoner.’