The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared

said:
    ‘Herbert, you should stay at home.’
     
    The luncheon guests were gathered and waiting for their host, who in turn was sitting in his office waiting just for the sake of waiting. And he intended to keep on waiting a few minutes more, in the hope that it would put that man Johnson in a very bad mood.
    De Gaulle could hear the noise of the demonstrations from far away, as riots raged in his beloved Paris. The Fifth French Republic had started to wobble, suddenly and from nowhere. First, it was some students who were for free sex and against the Vietnam War. As far as that went, this was OK with the president because students will always find something to complain about.
    But the demonstrations became bigger and bigger, and more violent too, and then the trade unions raised their voices and threatened to take ten million workers out on strike. Ten million! The whole country would grind to a halt!
    What the workers wanted was to work less for a bigger wage. And that de Gaulle resisted. Three wrong out of three, according to the president who had fought and won much worse battles than that. Leading advisors at the Ministry of the Interior told the president to treat tough protests with equal toughness. This was not about anything big, for example a communist attempt orchestrated by the Soviet Union to try to take over the country. But, of course, over coffee Lyndon Johnson would speculate that this was the case given half a chance. After all, the Americans saw communists hiding in every bush. To be on the safe side, de Gaulle had taken along Interior Minister Fouchet and his especially knowledgeable senior official. These two had been responsible for handling the current chaos in the nation and so they could also be responsible for defending themselves if Johnson started to stick his nose in things.
    ‘Ugh! Damn and blast! [but in French],’ said President Charles de Gaulle and got up from his chair.
    They couldn’t delay the lunch any longer.
     
    The French president’s security staff had been especially careful when it came to checking the Indonesian ambassador’s bearded and long-haired interpreter. But his papers were in order and theyhad made certain he was not carrying a weapon. Besides, the ambassador – a woman! – vouched for him. Thus, the bearded man was seated at the dining table between a much younger and more smartly dressed American interpreter and, on the other side, a French copy of the same.
    The interpreter who was worked hardest was the bearded Indonesian, since Presidents Johnson and de Gaulle directed their questions to Madame Ambassador instead of to each other.
    President de Gaulle started by enquiring as to Madame Ambassador’s professional background. Amanda Einstein said that really she was rather a blockhead, that she had bribed her way to the position of governor of Bali and then bribed her way to re-election in two subsequent elections, that she had made pots of money for herself and her extended family for many years until the new President Suharto had, quite out of the blue, phoned and offered her the position of ambassador in Paris.
    ‘I didn’t even know where Paris was; I thought it was a country, not a city. Have you ever heard anything so crazy,’ said Amanda Einstein and laughed.
    She had said all of this in her mother tongue and the long-haired and bearded interpreter translated it into English, taking the opportunity to change almost everything Amanda Einstein had said into something he felt more appropriate.
    When the lunch was coming to a close, the two presidents were in agreement over one thing, even though they weren’t aware of the fact. They both thought that Madame Ambassador Einstein was entertaining, enlightened, interesting and wise. She might, of course, have shown better judgment when it came to her choice of interpreter, because he looked like the Wild Man of Borneo.
     
    Interior Minister Fouchet’s especially knowledgeable senior official, Claude Pennant, was born in 1928 in Strasbourg. Hisparents were convinced and passionate communists, who had gone to Spain to fight against the fascists when war broke out in 1936. With them they had their eight-year-old son, Claude.
    The entire family survived the war and by a complicated path fled to the Soviet Union. In Moscow, they offered their services to further the interests of international communism. And they presented their son, now eleven years old, and announced that he already spoke three