Secret Protocols

by Peter Vansittart

  He had leant forward, adding to his brief. ‘Consider your opportunities in these puny countries. I am seldom resident here but have a nose for projects more or less respectable. Some areas of Poland and Romania have reason to be grateful. There are areas I suggest you avoid. In democratic Russia, violence and corruption spread on a Hollywood scale, worse even than French export concerns, particularly, you may know, in titanium. I scarcely see you selling plutonium from Pakistan to Afghans. But you must look further than this hole-in-the-corner. My consortium assists financing peaceful nuclear projects favoured by Gorbachev. Only the delightful Raisa can be tempted to call him Gorby.

  ‘We have Middle East oil interests to protect, though, unostentatiously, I am withdrawing my private stakes. I see no hope there. Summits, Camp David handshake, lamentations, signatures by mediocrities, will settle nothing between Arab and Jew. People of the Book, though a book ill designed for peace. You ask my solution …’ I had not. ‘It will be unpopular, dangerous. Denounced as fascistic. But I can place hope only in some charismatic prophet … a Mr Mandela, Dr Luther King, a Roosevelt, a Gandhi. Someone to rouse people above lunacy, tradition, above history. Still, we are not planning to remould the world but to invest in your future. Extraordinary creatures are on the loose, laundering their stacks in Swiss and Cypriot banks. Their rings and counter-rings will soon stretch along the Baltic. The Russians have left vast deposits in Estonian finance houses, which will not be allowed to rot. Much is available to intelligent outsiders like yourself.’

  Signalling for liqueurs, seen through tremors of wine and thickly spiced food, he had simian grins. I was marooned in cloudy bubble-wrap, the hubbub swelling, though he was distinct, persuasive as an adept seducer.

  ‘Erich, I am not, as far as I know, God. I lack the deformity of obsession. I never luxuriate in giving orders but am often compelled by default, by other’s inadequacies. Many, perhaps most, for whom each day threatens emergency, enjoy orders as they do sex or this very passable brandy. Enveloped in the Gestalt, they enjoy the trumpet. A certain freedom exists in slavery. I admit sometimes desiring escape to simplicity, not only to quiet libraries but to graceless brigands. You remember Marinetti? So let them come, the cheerful arsonists with charred fingers. Though he ended licking the Duce’s boots. I am, of course, no arsonist and was horribly bored by Nietzsche’s dictum that great ends justify the most frightful means. My ends are merely to ensure survival, yours and mine. I do not trust other people, remembering the fate of Aristides the Just, exiled not for crimes, vainglory, incompetence but merely from people tiring of hearing him called the Just. Socrates and, I suppose, Christ, certainly Robespierre, though you know more of him than I do, held that crime results from ignorance. Forgive them, Father … though surely a forgery. I have seen no evidence for this. Well-informed extremists share identical psychology, the Stalin–Hitler Pact the most obvious example.’

  He was appeasing, inviting trust, though at times his eyes lost clarity, stumbling, doubting my reaction, his face, though granite, showing more cracks.

  Squaring shoulders, he was back on the square, cheered by his own orders. ‘Have you recently reread The Brothers Karamazov? One character believes that if two are genuinely righteous the third can never become criminal. Another questionable thesis. The reverse may often, almost inevitably, be true. The third may scupper the others from sheer delight at being different.’

  The brandy, doubtless strategically ordered, was further weakening me while I forked into a creamy bombe, multi-layered as the Päts Car Park. Overloaded, I was grateful for a jug of dazzling water, then for black coffee, attempting to rally, realizing he was again talking of myself.

  ‘Some of your writings came my way.’ The face again tightened, almost to ugliness. ‘You compared the Führer to a mad oboe. Just so.’ He deliberated, withholding full approval. ‘I, too, once contemplated a literary career. In 1915, I saw a gigantic wooden statue of Hindenburg, like a medieval father-figure giant, guarding the Volk. People were paying a mark, for war bonds, to buy a nail to hammer into it. Herr Doktor Freud would have found this confirming one of his central beliefs. For me, it suggested a novel or epic. But, alas …’

  He dismissed such folly as he might a delinquent sergeant or deprecate the White Rose. ‘Survival depends on fresh starts. Do not the Gospels teach just this? Now, to return to the Baltic States. There is no reason for you to avoid local politics, which can actually be advantageous. But more than the extravagant finances of the EU will be needed. Estonians are a perverse breed. You will remember their tedious hero, Starkad, always wavering between living in dull, prolonged virtue or dying splendidly, if uselessly, but doing neither. They have consented, with few words and less thought, to our purchasing the Soviet Military Hospital at Narva, at bargain rates. Underworked metals, aluminium, titanium, all await attention. Particular exports will be chemical cerement and textiles. More pointedly, my position in European Pharmaceutical Federation allows me to co-opt anyone I choose.’

  I could see only a succession of heavy lunches with European conquistadors with pudding faces and many-tyred chins and consciences like axes. The shimmering Independence a desert of dead trees leaning together, grunts over dried wells, a blight of spirit.

  ‘This is all,’ I heard through daze, ‘related to world peace, the environment, the cessation of national hooliganism.’

  He was explaining that Estonian wage liabilities would remain quiescent for two years, the new plants thus more manageable than the German and Belgian, especially when East Germany became an almost ruinous handicap. Tallinn and Riga were marked for model harbours, with speedboats to counter the considerable charms of contraband, themselves never approximately those of the Kwamasi Syndicate once prominent in Chiang’s Lotos-Land China. Here, capital had been siphoned off, undercover, from Russian industrial and military schemes. ‘In all this the kroon remains almost the most marketable commodity in Europe. The citizenry will welcome our products, though their grudging and suspicious faces will not change. Estonians will not loot, merely look on, work hard, scowl. Their humour, we must agree, is decidedly cryptic. Apparently crude, though with peasant shrewdness, bleakly sardonic. Suggestive of minor poets who have not learnt to write. Painters without hands.’ He nodded, pleased with his observation. ‘However, should you be more adventurous, I could introduce you to comfortable, even luxuriant regions of Brussels. Your languages give you superiority. You will see French skills at grabbing key departments and flouting regulations. The misruled and under-developed require more primitive measures, children needing direction.’

  He sipped his brandy, with an air of having dispensed elementary truths. I wanted to talk of Mother, while knowing he would be, at best, misleading, and, whatever I asked, much would be concealed or evaded. His eyes had become less direct, from sockets depleted, bonier, as if again outraged by the sound of a noisy pager.

  He had not ceased enjoyment of resurrecting earlier remarks. ‘Shakespeare, Goethe … and Rimbaud, Baudelaire, with more jaundiced estimates of human nature … in all of them, death, so to speak, becomes life. And has not Herr Doktor Jung informed us that nothing matters save self-completion? For myself, diverse experience has immunized me from penile fantasies, also from what your mother would call the humdrum. I was never a Tristan, needing to earn my commission through death. Incidentally, Erich, I have not yet completed arrangements for my funeral. Whether to have played Schönberg’s F-sharp Major Quartet, ensuring that I will be long remembered, though with hatred, or some song of Mr Gershwin, so that I will earn much gratitude but be soon forgotten. But, returning to your future …’

  In one of my rare courageous decisions I stood up, rudely, to depart, before he might spread out his plans for, perhaps, rescheduling Forest for development of rare value.

  8

  Disillusion, like loss, can be purged, what Wilfrid called Reinigung. The Herr General has departed to Budapest, as Special Adviser to a privatization board.

  Life, H
olan wrote, is such a liar. Meetings with Eeva are still seldom planned but seldom wholly accidental. Ageing, I have sexual unease, however, despite her ragged otter-fur cap, heavy masculine jacket and docker’s jeans, she is desirable, though not one to be clumsily seduced. A treaty must be on equal terms. Nadja would have galvanized hesitations by a sly joke. Eeva’s tactics, if tactics they be, are very simple. She is candid, disdaining life’s frills. Her clear blue eyes reach towards me, encouraging.

  ‘You still don’t realize how you helped us. It’s not forgotten. You’ve place here. You will enjoy working for us.’

  Exaggerating her native guttural, she says, ‘If I tell you untruth, may bears devour me!’

  Our laughs chime. We keep a sort of vigil, beneath broad leaf, unchecked sun, and disperse wraiths.

  The future is no longer haphazard. I have place.

  ‘There are difficulties.’ She has a habit of clapping, to reinforce a statement. ‘Freedom has not made us more gracious or given what Paris can show you. Our minorities – Russians, Poles, Germans, Jews – are being treated badly. A strike is promised, against immigrants. Grouses everywhere. Moscow, sulky beast, still threatens reprisals. We’re realizing fearful damage to air, water, soil, becoming a black hole. We’re too small to need drums and bass, only the land itself.’ Usually so cool, she had reddened, losing breath. ‘Everyone can help. With a garden, tree, patch of grass.’

  Father had quoted Herder’s belief that nationalism should be rooted in traditions, literature, regional speech, and I regretted having lost my copies of the Miscellany.

  ‘But they’re in the Central Library, Erich, and in the University. Specially bound. How lazy can you be!’

  Apt to over-bolster her respect for me, she laughs, swiftly returns to attack bigness and remote controls.

  I prepare for my official duties. In rummagings familiar to all journalists, unexpected recollections revive, frescoes retrieved from whitewash. The gypsy child at Meinnenberg muttering ‘I will listen but won’t be your best friend’, Wilfrid remarking that a school should be judged not by its classrooms but its playground. Lust in the Bois; eccentric postcards perking a dull morning; Mr Kaplan about to arrive; Malraux, Nansen; a queen accused of incest with her son, ‘I appeal to every mother here’; Madame Elena Ceausescu, Graduate; the voice from Moscow, admitting guilt for Katyn; love demanding rare selfishness, rare knowledge; a crazed knight on a donkey; quicksilver Loki chuckling.

  ‘On dry land,’ Alex said, ‘we need not cling to the wreckage.’

  I look back to Nadja in a mood of Rilke’s, when he saw dead roses, their hereafter now beginning between our favourite pages. Final truths are unreachable, all ends in semi-colons. Nadja was one from the hordes wounded by a terrible century. Love can flourish on memories. For several years I may have helped pull her free. Greater men have done less. I believe that we remain in each other. Her tale is made banal by novels, movies, charity appeals, but for me she is a classic, out of print, but with my own copy periodically reread.

  From the Ministry, books, memoranda, requests arrive daily. For respite, I attend concerts, watch birds, inspect swan-ringing, explore countrysides, see herons return, listen to villagers. ‘Small as the scales on a roach,’ a buckwheat seller confided. Far away, a new Chinese cult claims that devotees, for a fee, would find levitation commonplace. A two-billion-year-old nuclear reactor apparently existed in Central Africa. Plans for new Europe promise a supra-national Public Prosecutor. They do not detract from the dusky moment of the white owl and the invitation to translate for a magazine, revived after forced closure, 1939. Aleksis Rannit’s verse restores a summer afternoon on ‘Ogygia’, the sun laying slats of light across dark blue water, Mother, perched on a tree, hat askew, tossing me bon-bons.

  Singing unawares! Late streamers

  Flutter, swelling in the bay.

  Sands and rocks deserted. Headlands dreaming

  With distant Calypso. Far away,

  Deep inside yourself you hear it – voice of

  Far silence. Yet you knew,

  You knew and still know; discarding, not resistance,

  Makes true your Ithaca.

  Fate, the past, should be discarded, like the silvery, elusive lure of distances that might have enchanted Nadja, who had once said that sleeping princesses needed a jolt. And Wilfrid, whose quiet amusement concealed sermons, considered inevitable dangerously deceptive.

  Today, a manic cyclist, careless electrician, sex-trafficker threaten more than gauleiter, commissar or prospecting for titanium. Lately, my clapboard room, dusty, stuffy, blazed with a pot of flowers – purple, red, blue – that implies, just possibly, nothing inevitable, that Eeva, in her shrugging, matey way, might suggest we go home. Meanwhile, I must cope with the importunate stranger who regularly stops me in the street. ‘Come for a drink, sir. My treat’, wistful or cunning, lisping. ‘I’ll pay. Don’t worry.’

  And then.

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