A Train of Powder (4 page)

But it was astonishing that there had been so much sadism. The French doctor in charge of these exhibits pondered, turning in his hand a lampshade made of tattooed human skin, “These people where I live send me in my breakfast tray strewn with pansies, beautiful pansies. I have never seen more beautiful pansies, arranged with exquisite taste. I have to remind myself that they belong to the same race that supplied me with my exhibits, the same race that tortured me month after month, year after year, at Mauthausen.” And, indeed, flowers were the visible sign of that mystery, flowers that were not only lovely but beloved. In the windowboxes of the high-gabled houses the pink and purple petunias were bright like lamps. In the gardens of the cottages bordering a road which was no longer there, which was a torn trench, the phloxes shone white and clear pink and mauve, as under harsh heat they will not do, unless they are well watered. It is tedious work, training clematis over low posts, so that its beauty does not stravaig up the walls but lies open under the eye; but on the edge of the town many gardeners grew it thus. The countryside beyond continued this protestation of innocence. A path might mount the hillside, through the lacework of light and shadow the pine trees cast over the soft reddish bed of the pine needles, to the upland farm where the wedding party poured out of the door, riotous with honest laughter, but freezing before a camera into honest solemnity; it might fall to the valley and follow the trout stream, where the dragonflies drew iridescent patterns just above the cloudy green water, to the edge of the millpond, where the miller’s flax-haired little son played with the grey kittens among the meadowsweet; it would not lead to any place where it seemed other than plain that Germany was a beautiful country, inhabited by a people who loved all pleasant things and meant no harm.

Yet the accusations that were made against the leaders in the Palace of Justice at Nuremberg were true. They were proved true because the accusers did not want to make them. They would much rather have gone home. That could be seen by those who shamefully evaded the rules of the court and found a way into one of the offices in the Palace of Justice which overlooked the orchard which served as exercise ground of the jail behind it. There, at certain hours, the minor Nazi prisoners not yet brought to trial padded up and down, sullen and puffy, with a look of fierceness, as if they were missing the opportunity for cruelty as much as the company of women or whatever their fancy might be. They were watched by American military guards, who stood with their young chins dropped and their hands clasped behind them, slowly switching their white truncheons backwards and forwards, in the very rhythm of boredom itself. If an apple fell from the tree beside them they did not bend to pick it up. Nothing that happened there could interest them. It was not easy to tell that these guards were not the prisoners, so much did they want to go home. Never before can conquerors in charge of their captives have been less furious, more innocent of vengeance. A history book opened in the mind; there stirred a memory that Alexander the Great had had to turn back on the Hydaspes because his soldiers were homesick.

2

The journalists who reported the Nuremberg trial were lodged in a vast villa a couple of miles or so outside the city. It was the home of a pencil manufacturer, and, according to an old custom which persisted in Germany long after it had been abandoned in England and the United States, it was built beside the factory from which the family fortune was derived. The road to it ran across flat fields, and it was visible, though not credible, a long way off. It spoke of wealth in the same accents as the palaces of Pittsburgh, but it was twice the size of any of them and showed a more allusive fantasy. The spires and turrets, which looked particularly strange when the morning mists were thick about them, were fussy as lobster claws; its marble entrance hall and grand staircase were like a series of huge ascendant fish shops; it had a vast dining room decorated with a bosomy and gold-encrusted fresco representing the phases in the life of German womanhood, and a smaller dining room, used for less formal occasions, could at a pinch seat two hundred and fifty people. Much space was eaten up by spiral staircases and vaulted corridors, not for any functional reason but out of loyalty to the Meistersingers.

It would have been pedantic not to enjoy it in the same way that one enjoys an old-fashioned opera set. Yet it was a cruel house, for it had turned out of doors the founders of the firm which had paid for it. They could be discovered in the immense grounds, which were laid out as what is known in Germany as an “English park,” though no park in England is so closely planted with shrubs and trees, and which contained a pleasant old-fashioned German villa with many wooden balconies, the original home of the family, and, in remoter spots, several pavilions. One, built like a temple, could be entered. Its heavy cedar door had been battered open. The interior was panelled with carefully chosen marble, some the colour of meat, some of gravy; and in an alcove, on a pedestal bearing the family coat of arms, was a mid-nineteenth-century group of life-size statues, representing the founder of the firm playing with a little son and daughter. On his abundant beard, on the little girl’s ringlets, on everybody’s buttons and boots, the sculptor had worked with particularly excited care. Two orange marble benches were provided on which his descendants could sit and, if they could forget the probable consequences of spending any length of time on such a chilly seat, contemplate the image and the memory of their progenitor. He looked a self-respecting old gentleman of vigorous character, and surely it was the meaning of this pavilion that he had loved these children very much. There were no signs here that the fruit of this old gentleman’s loins would later fantasticate his prudently acquired acres with a mansion dropsical in whimsy, and would thus show themselves victims of a mania that was to force their country to the edge of an abyss.

For the German passion of overbuilding must have done much to bring the Nazis to power. It engendered high taxation and a quicksand instability in the financial structure of Germany, and it laid on German industry and commerce an obligation to pay their executives on a scale excessive by the standards of any other European country. It also meant an increasing burden on municipal finances, for the multiplication of villas standing in their own large grounds meant that the water and gas and electricity and sewage systems had to cover an extended area, and that transport and the upkeep of roads were a larger problem. These were curious results of an excessive preoccupation with fairy tales; for that was the dream behind all this villa-building. It revealed itself clearly in this
Schloss.
Its turret windows were quite useless unless Rapunzel was to let down her hair from them; its odd upper rooms, sliced into queer shapes by the intemperate steepness of the tiled roof, could be fitly occupied only by a fairy godmother with a spinning wheel; the staircase was for the descent of a prince and princess that should live happily ever after. It was perhaps the greatest misfortune of the German people that their last genius, Wagner, who flowered at the same time as their political integration, their military conquests, and their industrial hegemony, and who has never had his domination over them so much as threatened by any succeeding artist, should have kept so close to the fairy tale in his greatest works. It is as if Shakespeare had confirmed the hold of Dick Whittington and Jack and the Beanstalk on the English mind; and it means that the German imagination was at once richly fecundated and bound to a primitive fantasy dangerous for civilized adults.

“I remember this hall so well,” said an old French writer, looking about him as he entered the Schloss. “I visited this house often. I know many Bavarian families, and these people were among the most agreeable of them. They were not Nazi, but the last time I came here a most unpleasant incident occurred. I was staying near here, and my friends brought me over to dinner, and I entered this hall at the same time as the young wife of a German whom I had known since he was a boy, whose father and grandfather I had known. They were remarkable people, with a fine record of academic distinction and public service. She stood there looking charming in a beautiful sable cape; and something she said at once reminded me that I had heard a rumour in Berlin that she had become the mistress of Goebbels, and made it seem certain that the rumour was true. I never came here again.” One’s mind went out into the English park, to the marble old gentleman who stood with his son and daughter in the memorial pavilion, the founder against his will of this fantastic house, and its violated victim.

Now the villa was taking its due punishment. During the trial it could count itself a haunted house; the handful of correspondents who reported the sittings day in day out grew as wistful as ghosts in their exile. But as the time for the verdicts and the sentences came nearer, it was invaded by a crowd of journalists of all nationalities, their spirits undiluted by tedium, who poured over its threshold, mocking the architectural fantasy that was to shelter them; and indeed it was ironical to cross a dreaded frontier in order to report the last convulsion of a German crime and find oneself housed in a German fairy tale. Many of them were shabbily dressed—indeed, only the Americans were not, for there were still no clothes in Europe—and they brought squalor with them, for there were so many of them that every bedroom had to be crammed with hospital beds for their use, and there were queues outside the bathrooms and the lavatories.

The Victorian villa in the grounds was not spared, and was as overfull. In its principal bedroom there slept nine women journalists, one a lovely North African girl, with crenellated hair and skin the colour of cambric tea; another a French girl, manifestly so ill that she ought to have been in hospital but quite unconcerned about herself, for she had spent all her adult life in the resistance movement and had no experience of well-being by which to check her state. Nothing can have been so offensive to the spirit of the Schloss as these women correspondents. Its halls had been designed for women who lived inside their corsets as inside towers, whose hair was made into a solid and intricate artifact halfway towards being a hat, whose feet were encased in shoes that prevented them from hurrying and advertised their enjoyment of infinite leisure. Now Madeleine Jacob burned the air in the corridors, she rushed so fast along them; her long black locks, so oddly springing from the circle of white hair in the centre of her scalp, hung about her shoulders; she wore a crumpled white blouse and a pleated skirt of a tartan which struck a Scottish eye like a misprint; there were beach sandals on her feet because there were still no leather shoes in France; her superbly Jewish face was at once haggard and bright with contentious intellectual gaiety. It would have been very hard for the builders of the Schloss to grasp the situation: to understand that these ink-stained gipsies had earned the right to camp in their stronghold because they had been on the side of order against disorder, stability against incoherence.

There was nowhere in the Schloss where one could be alone. Everyone’s bedroom became full of people sitting about because their own bedrooms were full of people sitting about because they too had found their bedrooms full. There was much talking round the bar, though never about Germany, which was known to be dead and buried. It seemed good in the golden autumn evening to walk in the garden; and when the setting sun discovered a greenhouse roof, to go and see how the Germans had kept that form of luxury going. It would presumably be like most greenhouses in England, haunted by red spider, a desert place of shabby and unpainted staging, meagrely set out with a diminished store of seed boxes, for it was not large enough to have been used for any extensive scheme of food production. It seemed probable that the only view of it would be through the glass, since surely the door would be locked, as it was now late in the evening. But the door was open; and it admitted to a scene far distant in time and space. This might have been a greenhouse in one of the great English or Scottish nursery gardens, before 1939; or one might push the date back further, to a time when labour was still cheap. There was perfect cleanliness and perfect neatness here, and it was full of plants, each of which had that simple and integrated appearance which meant that the gardener who grew it understood many things and never wearied in applying his wisdom. There was a row of canna lilies, scarlet and orange and crimson, bright with health; there were many obconica primulas, which perfectly exhibited their paradoxical character of being open-faced and brilliant and yet recognizably members of a shy and cool family; and there were rows upon rows of beautifully grown cyclamen which would have done credit to a specialist firm. Amateurs of this plant often liken its flowers to butterflies, for the petals are like wings; and it could be imagined that these might suddenly flutter on the sober foliage and soar in a red and white and rose swarm. One of the white varieties, with large white ruffled petals that gave especially strongly this sense of arrested motion, was like a known face; and, indeed, one of the American lawyers had several of these in his office in the Palace of Justice. But of course one had seen these cyclamens all over Nuremberg; and when a girl of twelve or thirteen laid down her watering can and came forward, she had the air of a practised saleswoman and knew the names of the plants in English.

It might seem that it would never be very interesting that somebody had started a brisk business in potted plants. But this was Germany, this was 1946, and it was as if one were in a lock, and saw the little trickle of water between the gates which meant that the lock was opening. The war had burned trade off Germany as flame burns skin off a body. This greenhouse was on the outskirts of a large town in which it was impossible to buy anything at all except foodstuffs, except in the second-hand market; there was no way of acquiring even such necessities as shoes or kettles or blankets or chairs or tables. This had come about automatically when the civil structure of Germany collapsed and the transport and postal and power systems ceased to operate. It was obviously the aim of the Allies to restore German trade, for they had rejected the Morgenthau Plan for the reduction of Germany to a needy agricultural state; but at present the power of buying and selling consumer goods was exercised only by the occupying forces within the enclaves of PX and the English and French equivalents. But here in this greenhouse the trading genius of the Germans was reasserting itself in what was probably an amusing and impudent way. For it seemed likely that this greenhouse had been kept going during the war in defiance of Hitler’s rules and regulations, and that it was now defying the Allies’ rules and regulations, since certainly they could not wish that German fuel and labour should be used for flower-growing.