Waltenberg Read online

  Hans is not a very good skater, she smiles, you look like someone wading through mud, at first he put his right hand on Lena’s waist but it was really she who wedged her hip against his, he dares not make too much of this, she has put her hand on Hans’s right hand, the hand that holds her waist, and again she presses, presses herself against Hans as is required when two people skate together, around them are other couples, they brush past each other with a smile, the birches drop fine ash, Hans and the young woman are gliding, each leaning upon the other, the increasingly regular hiss of skates.

  Sometimes to within kissing distance of Hans’s lips come curls of red hair which escape from beneath her bonnet, Lena leans on Hans, then moves away from him, turns on the ice, faces him, he looks at her, her cheekbones are high, her mouth wide, he releases one of the young woman’s hands, she begins to spin on the spot, the point of her skate, Hans’s hand, her long-sleeved pelisse, black velvet, a short skirt which stops above the ankle, an unblemished quartz-blue sky, a peaceful morning, intermittent rook calls arrive on the breeze, a light, continuous icy breeze, a background of faint metallic sounds.

  Suddenly at the edge of the lake a loud crack, Hans feels a stab of fear, he slows but Lena forces him to continue, the crack of frozen water, everyone has heard it, sees the dark water beneath the ice, a land of snow but there is no snow on the lake, only ice, everything just froze very fast and very hard, needles of cold prick cheeks, sting throats, lustrous dark blue water beneath the ice, Lena draws Hans away, a mist of breath from Lena’s mouth, Hans tries to inhale the mist.

  Another long cracking sound. Something angry stirs below, the birches white with frost, Lena has let go of Hans’s hand, she skates off towards the far end of the lake, weaving about, Hans follows her, Lena’s skirt and pelisse deliciously enhance her buttocks, Hans recalls a sentence from a fashion magazine aimed at skaters, we recommend that ladies should not take posterior flatness to extremes, Lena is far from taking posterior flatness to extremes, Hans is afraid, a cracking sound which lasts longer than the others, Hans moves closer to the shore, there is a reed-bank frozen solid and a boat with a blue prow trapped in the ice, the firs are encrusted with frost, a jay fights with a clod of frozen earth.

  Hans calls out, Lena comes back towards him looking beautiful, a quick turn, her hip slides up against his, he rests his right hand on her waist, he does not dare apply pressure, Lena clamps one hand on his, the young woman does not wear corsets, we’d better go back, no, she forces Hans to make for the far end of the lake, the waterfall, every time she puts her weight on her leg Hans feels her muscles flex hard, and then a moment later the softness returns, another loud crack, the ice, the accident.

  Hans deduces from the sound of the engine that the plane has managed to get airborne, one metre, two. The pilot begins a shallow turn to get round the trees, the lieutenant of the fourth troop of dragoons has dispatched two men in pursuit.

  At full tilt, one rider finally succeeds in attacking the aeroplane’s tail, slicing cables which control chord and rudder with his sabre, the Taube starts spinning on its axis, starts falling, the propeller slices open the side of the horse which rolls on the ground and likewise chases its own tail, legs flailing, entrails exposed and blood spurting, with his sabre the other cavalryman runs pilot and observer through, slashes the bracing wires, then backs away and stands his horse on its rear legs.

  The rest of the squadron has begun cutting the Tauben to pieces with bare steel, canvas first and the bracing-stays, then the balsa struts, so fragile, the whole a miraculous balance of weights, volume, tension, resistance, female flesh, the other machine gun has stopped firing, the dragoons slash the wooden propellers, make the propellers pay for the deaths of their comrades, the aeroplane is the future of the world, you’ll see what a cavalryman can make of the future of the world, a man with a leather flying helmet is skewered by a lance by the side of his plane, another lance pierces a fuel tank, a dragoon tosses a cotton-waste fuse on to it, other dragoons get the message, within moments all eight dreams are reduced to heaps of burning wreckage.

  The meadow looks so beautiful, the reflections of red and gold from a sunset are prolonged by the flames, like a Midsummer’s Day. A few shots are still heard, and shouts, bugles sound again, the surviving cavalrymen, barely a third of the company’s strength but all the Tauben have been destroyed, they head as quickly as they can for the corner of the wood from which the jay fled, ‘Lieutenant, what do we do with the prisoner?’

  The crack of the ice, Lena lets go of Hans’s hand, detaches herself, gains speed, leans forward, thrusts out her free leg, completes one loop, returns to Hans, skates off, noise of the engine still audible, bumps and jolts, the exasperated chicken bouncing over the tussocky field, the noise fades, the picture fades, then returns, on the ice the mark of the loop is perfect, think of what you love, don’t be afraid, just a few cracks, we’ll go like a train, get up steam, keep your skates in parallel lines.

  Don’t be afraid, Hans, you’ve got to know the lake, lift our skates together keeping in step, you understand, it’s like a choo-choo, a train going full pelt, she laughs, detaches herself from Hans, speed, Lena legs apart, toes turned outwards, feet aligned along the same axis, a wide curve, legs and arms spread out, she leans back, the centre of the circle is at her back, she is at the very end of the lake, the ice cracks, she shouts out: it’s called a spreadeagle.

  She returns to Hans who’s still moving as if he’s wading through mud, we must get back, this girl takes crazy risks, no, we’re staying, there’s nothing to be afraid of, I know all about this cracking, it happens when the lake continues to freeze, it’s not dangerous, it’s not thawing, it’s all very simple, the ice also goes crack when it continues to freeze hard, like this morning, north wind, we’ll stay, come and see the waterfall, it’s all frozen, it’s wonderful. I was looking at Lena and I was happy. Something stupid, later.

  As night fell, they beat Hans senseless with the butts of their rifles. Later his comrades came for him, he was trepanned under chloroform, sent to convalesce, then was returned to the front in early December 1914, they posted him to the infantry this time, without really punishing him for letting himself be taken off guard, but they deprived him of the things he loved, the open air, Mercedes engines and flying at 120 kilometres an hour.

  The French dragoons fell back in disorder, pursued by a detachment of cyclists newly brought in as support. Between them and the French lines were von Klück’s three hundred thousand men. Dragoons decimated, fleeing in knots along forest tracks, in the soft damp night, their wounded comrades left at farms, the rest made their way warily, strayed into in marshy bogs, turned back, got lost, starving, night marches, they halt on the edge of a level plain, their horses are lathered, heads drooping between their legs, lungs working like a blacksmith’s bellows, German infantry attack on foot at dawn, they come creeping through the lucerne.

  The dragoons rally, to die a more honourable death, one group succeeds in reaching the heart of the forest, half the men ride barebacked, they strike their horses’ flanks with the flat of their swords, they wander, they recross deserted fields, a horse never complains, it goes on until it drops.

  Suddenly, there, just in front of me, hardly able to stand, a big mare, it’s heartbreaking, she’s lost her saddle, been abandoned, that speckled-grey coat, it can’t be, it’s Kolana, Kolana out of Esquirol, Thailhac’s horse, he was killed two weeks ago, wonderful Kolana, a big-sized animal, holds herself well, plenty of muscle, good-natured, intelligent, so amenable in training, she won at Auteuil, twice, it was an honour to drill her, she trembles, she’s finished, she was born to do so many things, war was not one of them.

  The Monfaubert dragoons were mentioned in regimental dispatches, then were permanently dismounted: unsuited to trench warfare, the cavalry was forced to resign itself to watch while flying took over the role it had played for centuries. The airmen adopted the title of ‘knights of the skies’ and many cavalry office
rs applied to serve in this new arm, in which they could keep their boots.

  Everywhere, from the Vosges to the Channel, battle was joined for points on maps, and Gilberte Swann wrote to Marcel to inform him that both the hillock at Méséglise, with the hawthorn hedge, and the cornfield through which the winds of adolescent love had blown, was now Hill 307 of which the newspapers talked so much.

  May 2001, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Ludwig Harig reporting from Saint-Rémy. Monsieur Louis, one of the men who found the grave, showed him lot 357 and the spot where Alain-Fournier and the Frenchmen were shot.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Monsieur Louis, ‘shot for attacking a dressing-station. The clash of two companies of very young soldiers.’

  A week later, a letter to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung from Gerd Krumeich, a historian with an expert knowledge of Joan of Arc: ‘That Fournier was sent to face a firing-squad cannot be stated with absolute certainty.’

  And Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, a specialist in the history of cruelty on the battlefield:

  ‘In the matter of the incident at Saint-Rémy, both the excavation of the site and the archive evidence indicate clearly that something extremely violent happened, but not that it was accompanied by any particular cruelty.’

  Further along, another cemetery, at Vaux-les-Palameix, other remains, those of eight German stretcher-bearers, killed the same day as the Frenchmen.

  Max Goffard and Hans Kappler, one left with cauliflower ears, the other with the memory of a woman, had marched off to war full of hope. They had very quickly heard the din of a conflict which was to be the last before the great leap forward and it did not strike them as being in any way different from the thunderclaps at Christmas which frighten the children and promise them all presents on the big day.

  Chapter 3

  1956

  A Remarkable Symmetry

  In which Michael Lilstein remembers Hans Kappler and offers you a job as a Paris spy.

  In which we learn what Lena owed to an easy-going American named Walker.

  In which Lena disappears in the middle of Budapest.

  In which Max tells several stories including the one which ends: ‘We already know…’

  In which Michael Lilstein unveils his theory of twin souls and introduces you to Linzer Torte.

  Waltenberg/Paris, early December 1956

  So it would seem you have a taste for espionage.

  Faust to Mephisto

  Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust. A tragedy

  ‘Why so set on going back, Herr Kappler?’

  It is with these words that Lilstein will make his approach to Kappler. Destabilise Kappler, force him to doubt, waste no time, make him change his mind.

  Lilstein has just arrived at Waltenberg in the heart of the Swiss Alps. He strolls through the village until it is time for his first appointment, he walks across the powdery snow, slowly, each footfall a muffled sigh, walking slowly is such luxury, a layer of powdery snow, ten centimetres, a little less, which has fallen on lying, frozen snow, the air is dry, very sharp, Lilstein likes it.

  This village in the Grisons is not his home ground, but he was born here, at Waltenberg, not born exactly but he spent his adolescence in this place: looking at women, having ideas, talking, onward and upward, drinking, smoking, always in a hurry, he loved speed, he completed the five-year plan in four, comrades! he smiles and slows down even more as he walks over the snow, looks at the forest which climbs up the side of the mountain and stops just before the sparkling cap of snow, quite a coup, two appointments today.

  One man with a mind to change before lunch.

  Another to convince this afternoon, two separate meetings but strikingly symmetrical.

  Lilstein tells himself that it will be intellectually very gratifying if he can bring it off. It’s a bit much to fit into one day but just now he can’t afford to spend much time away from Berlin and the Stalinallee.

  Mountains, sensations, ideas, this is where it all began a quarter of a century ago, in the spring of 1929.

  He’d come from Rosmar, he was almost sixteen, he can still remember the first time he came up here, it wasn’t anything like nowadays, a bus with the same hunting-horn depicted on the forward door but much less comfortable than today’s, a very bumpy ride, very narrow road, ruts, ravines, all much harder going the higher you went, sometimes barely thirty centimetres between the tyres and a precipice, wonderful memories, would the trees just here break our fall? Will I have time to jump out of the window?

  The bus skidded, lurched, Lilstein jumped out through the window, clutched at branches, the branches snapped, blood, screams. False alarm. He didn’t jump because the bus went on climbing, small red flowers stared at him, saxifrage poked through the snow, the ravine was full of them, a series of bends, horns blaring, he shook, how stupid, felt sick, the nausea made worse because at the age he was then he did not want to admit to being afraid.

  The nausea had not lasted, at Waltenberg, it never does. Quite extraordinary this sensation of having transparent lungs, pure air, it stings, beware nose bleeds.

  These last few years, Lilstein has come back to Waltenberg quite often, yes, with dangerous frequency, but he knows the area well, has friends here, he’d be warned instantly, though actually he doesn’t care, besides, the level of risk is the same every day, and his large East Berlin office is hardly the safest of places: the last time he felt at ease there, with a sense that he was making a success of his life, in 1951, two cars had come to get him.

  A blindfold over his eyes, long hours in a plane, another car. At their destination, they removed the blindfold, sat him down on a stool a metre from the wall, allowed him to sit only on the edge of the stool, no way he could support himself against the wall, must sit up straight, he wasn’t beaten, dunked in a bath, no electric wires.

  They didn’t want to leave any visible damage. Days and days spent on that stool, twenty hours a day: they took turns in teams of four, they call the approach the endless screw, the edge of the stool, a few punches, just to correct his posture, the feeling the stool reaches up to the back of your neck.

  When Lilstein sags they drag him upright by the ears, they say they never saw anyone put up so little resistance, thump him in the kidneys, pinch his cheeks. But never in the presence of a superior.

  A few days of this reduces a man to an aching pile of vertebrae, lots of questions, some of which he was unable to answer, but they didn’t seem to want very detailed answers, not like the Gestapo when they’d demanded the names of the men in the network. In the Lubyanka, the questioning never stopped, an immense exhausting pain, for which Lilstein believed in the end that he alone was responsible. Then the blindfold again, the car, the plane, a new prison, a camp, in the cold.

  When he was released, after the death of Stalin, he met the man who’d directed his interrogation, colonel’s uniform, decorated like a hero.

  ‘I had my orders,’ the Colonel said.

  A good training if the fascists ever manage to get me again,’ Lilstein said.

  ‘You sound bitter, comrade, and you have every right to be.’

  ‘Bitterness helps a man to grow old gracefully,’ said Lilstein. ‘It also makes a man efficient. You stop having illusions.’

  Ever since Lilstein lost his illusions, he always does what he wants to do, whatever the risk, and he thrives on it. All the same, he remains cautious, he has come to Waltenberg circuitously, via Austria and Sweden, the Colonel was quite a decent man, he’d told Lilstein in an expressionless voice:

  ‘Some of the men you denounced in 1947 did not have your luck, or protection.’

  For a few hours here at Waltenberg, Lilstein can forget all about Warsaw, Budapest, such folly, and Suez, fortunately there’s been Suez, that other folly, Lilstein hates events which just happen all by themselves then link up, gang up on you. He’s had his fill of it these last few months.

  Here at least he can breathe freely for a few hours, Switzerland, peace.
r />   The little bridge at the edge of the village has not changed, in 1929 he used to spend every evening on it smoking his first pipefuls of dark tobacco cut with a Dutch honey mixture, numberless stars, the stars of deep mid-winter, the gurgle of the stream under the bridge is the same, things look smaller now than they did twenty-seven years ago but they’re just the same, the bridge marks the entry to Waltenberg, Lilstein scrutinises the field of snow to his left, as far as the edge of the wood. Sometimes, if there’s no noise from the village, you might spot a scampering stoat, but all is quiet just now.

  Anyway, Lilstein hasn’t time to stand there and keep watch, he makes for the houses, in the middle of the village are the church, the Hotel Prätschli, the grocery-cum-ironmonger’s-cum-café with its large sign Konditorei, the garage, the red and gold petrol pump, and two large cowsheds. From the square, another hotel, the Waldhaus, can be seen on the distant side of a mountain, just where the ski slopes begin their descent to the north.

  The Prätschli is a family hotel, the Waldhaus is much grander, a huge eight-storey double chalet, oversized, a bogus chalet trying to be a chateau, it disguises its inner structure of steel and concrete under wood cladding, beams, pantiles, rafters, joists, it dwarfs the valleys with its size, more than 400 rooms, a piece of Belle-Époque flummery, an hotel which draws its life from elsewhere, from people who travel hundreds, thousands of kilometres to live cocooned for a week or two in a land of chocolate, ski-lifts, simple joys and secret banking, it was built in the first years of the century, it started as a luxury sanatorium, with a bobsleigh run, it was accessible only by cable-car, in 1910 it was turned into a hotel and after 1918 a road was made, a heated garage was installed in the hotel basement together with an annexe which added a further hundred very modern rooms. The cable-car is still there, Lilstein read somewhere that in the days when it was a sanatorium coffins were sometimes brought down by bobsleigh, though that’s probably a joke.