Kaputt (12 page)

Himmler's man was silent: he gazed at me in silence, and, by degrees, I perceived a strange smile, shy and very sweet, playing on his thin, pale lips. He gazed at me smiling; and I thought at first that he smiled at me, that he really was smiling at me; but I saw suddenly that his eyes were empty: he did not listen to the words of the guests, he did not hear the sound of voices and of laughter, the tinkling of forks and of glasses—he sat transported into the loftiest and purest heaven of cruelty—that "suffering cruelty" which is the true German cruelty—of fear and loneliness. There was no shade of brutality in his face, rather something shy, vague, like a wonderful and moving loneliness. His left eyebrow was raised at an angle that loftily expressed cold contempt and cruel pride. What knit all his features together, all the traits and the tricks of his face, was that suffering cruelty, that wonderful, melancholy loneliness.

After a time it seemed to me that something began to melt in him, something alive and human—a light, a color, perhaps a look, a child's look, was being born deep down in those empty eyes. He seemed to me to be swooping down as gently as an angel from that lofty, remote and very pure heaven of his; he came down like a spider-angel, gliding slowly along a very high, white wall. Like a prisoner escaping along the sheer wall of his jail.

By degrees there spread a consciousness of deep humiliation over his pallid face. He issued from his loneliness as a fish emerges from its watery den. He swam toward me gazing fixedly at me. And all unknowingly I felt drawn, as well as repulsed by his naked face and his white gaze, until I caught myself watching him with a kind of pity, a kind of morbid compassion for the very repulsion and attraction which that pitiful monster inspired in me.

Suddenly Himmler's man, leaning across the table with a shy smile, said softly, "I am also a friend of the Poles,- I like them very much."

So shaken was I by those words and by the strangely sweet, sad voice of Himmler's man, that I did not realize that the King, the Queen and all the guests had risen and were looking at me. I also arose and we all followed the Queen. Standing, she looked fatter—  she had the appearance of a good German
hausfrau
; even the green hue of her velvet bell seemed faded. She strode forward slowly with good-natured dignity, and she lingered a moment on the threshold of each drawing room as if to fill her eyes gloatingly with the cold, insolent and stupid magnificence of the furnishing inspired by that
Dritte Reich
—Third Reich style, the purest example of which is to be found in the Chancery at Berlin. Then she crossed the threshold and stopping again a few steps farther along, she raised her arm to point out to me the furniture, pictures, carpets, hanging lights, statues of the Heroes of Breker, the Führer's busts, tapestries bespangled with Gothic eagles and swastikas,- and she said to me with a gracious smile,
"Schön, nicht wahr?—
Beautiful, isn't it?"

All the vast pile of the Wawel that I had seen twenty years before in its royal bareness, was now crammed full, from the subterranean caves to the top of its highest tower with furniture stolen from the palaces of the Polish gentry, reaped during the crafty raids through France, Holland and Belgium by the committees of antiquarians and experts from Munich, Berlin and Vienna who followed on the heels of the German armies through Europe. A glaring light flowed down from the great lamps hanging from the ceiling, and it glittered back from the walls covered with panels of shiny leather onto the portraits of Hitler, Göring, Goebbels, Himmler and of other Nazi leaders; and the marble and bronze busts (they were scattered everywhere along corridors, on landings, in the corners of rooms, on furniture, on marble pedestals and within niches in the walls) representing the German King of Poland in his several attitudes, inspired by the decadent esthetics of Burckhardt, Nietzsche and Stefan George,- by the heroic esthetics of Beethoven's
Third Symphony
and of the "Horst Wessel" song, and by the decorative esthetics of the humanist antiquarians of Florence and Munich. There lingered a cloying odor of fresh paint, new leather and newly polished wood in the airless atmosphere.

Finally, we entered a large hall, generously adorned with
Dritte Reich
furniture, French carpets, and leather wall hangings. It was Frank's study. The gap between two large glass doors opening on the outside loggia of the Wawel (the internal loggia faces on the beautiful courtyard designed by Italian artists of the Renaissance) was taken by a vast mahogany table that reflected the flames of the candles fixed on the arms of two heavy candelabra of gilt bronze. The vast table was bare. "Here I think about Poland's future," said Frank opening his arms wide,- and I smiled. I was thinking about Germany's future.

At a nod from Frank the two tall glass doors opened and we walked out onto the loggia. "This is the German
Burg
," Frank said pointing with his raised arm to the imposing pile of the Wawel, sharply cut into the blinding reflection of the snow. Around the ancient palace of the Polish kings, the city settled low, shrouded in her winding-sheet of snow under a clear sky faintly lit by a beam from the thin scythe of a new moon. A bluish mist rose from the Vistula. On the horizon, far away in the distance the Tatra mountains appeared delicate and transparent. The barking of the SS dogs guarding Pilsudski's tomb, from time to time broke the deep silence of the night. The cold was so biting it filled my eyes with tears. I closed them a moment. "It seems like a dream, doesn't it?" said Frank.

When we walked back to the study, Frau Brigitte Frank approached me, and placing her hand familiarly upon my arm, she said softly, "Come with me. I want to reveal his secret to you." Through a small door in the wall of the study we entered a small room with walls that were totally bare and whitewashed. There was not a single piece of furniture, no carpets, no pictures, no books, no flowers—nothing, except a magnificent Pleyel piano and a wooden music stool. Frau Brigitte Frank opened the piano, and leaning her knee on the stool, stroked the keyboard with her fat fingers. "Before taking a crucial decision, or when he is very weary or depressed, sometimes in the very midst of an important meeting," said Frau Brigitte Frank, "he shuts himself up in this cell, sits before the piano and seeks rest or inspiration from Schumann, Brahms, Chopin or Beethoven. Do you know what I call this cell? I call it the Eagle's Nest."

I bowed in silence.

"He is an extraordinary man, isn't he?" she added, gazing at me with a look of proud affection. "He is an artist, a great artist, with a pure and delicate soul. Only such an artist as he can rule over Poland."

"Yes," I said, "a great artist; and it is with this piano that he rules the Polish people."

"Oh, you understand so well!" said Frau Brigitte Frank in a voice full of emotion.

Silently we left the Eagle's Nest; and I don't know exactly why, I felt shaken and sad for a long time. We were gathered in Frank's private apartment, and sprawling on the deep Viennese settees and in the large armchairs upholstered with soft doeskin, we began chatting and smoking. Two valets with coarse hair cut short in the Prussian manner, and dressed in blue livery, were passing coffee, liqueurs and sweets,- their footsteps were muffled by the thick French carpets spread over the entire floor. Small green-and-gold lacquered Venetian tables were crowded with bottles of old French brandy with famous labels, boxes of Havana cigars, silver trays heaped with candied fruit and those celebrated Polish chocolates of Wedel.

In this homey atmosphere accentuated by the pleasant crackling of the open fire, the talk by degrees grew cordial, almost intimate. And as always happened in Poland when the Germans gathered together, they all ended by talking of the Poles. They spoke of them, as usual, with vicious contempt; but it was strangely blended with an almost morbid, feminine sense of spite, of regret, frustrated love, unconscious envy and jealousy. There rose up in my mind dear old Bichette Radziwil standing in the rain amid the wreckage of the Warsaw station, and the old-fashioned tone in which she said, "
Ces pauvres gens."

"The Polish workmen," said Frank, "are not Europe's best, but neither are they the worst. They can work very well, if they want to. I think we may count on them, particularly on their discipline."

"They have, however, a very grave fault," said Wächter, "that of mixing patriotism with the technical problems of work and output."

"Those are not technical problems alone," said Baron Wolsegger, "they are also moral problems."

"The modern technique," replied Wächter, "does not allow for the intrusion of extraneous elements into the problems of work and output. And the patriotic feelings of the workers are the most dangerous element interfering with output."

"No doubt," said Frank, "but the patriotic feeling of the workers is very different from that of the aristocracy and of the middle classes."

"The fatherland of the workman is the machine; it is the workshop," said Himmler's man softly.

"That's a communist conception," said Frank. "I think that it is one of Lenin's slogans. But after all, it expresses the truth. The Polish workman is a good patriot; he loves his own country, but he knows that working for us is the best way to save Poland. He knows that if he refused to work for us," he went on gazing at Himmler's man, "if he resisted—"

"We know many things," said Himmler's man, "but the Polish workman does not know them, or would prefer not to know them," he added with a shy smile.

"If you wish to win the war," I said, "you must not destroy the workman's fatherland. You must not destroy the machines, the workshops and the industries. It is a European problem, not only a Polish one. Also in all the other countries of Europe you have occupied, you may destroy the fatherland of the nobles, the fatherland of the middle classes, but you cannot destroy the workman's fatherland. The very meaning of this war or at least a great part of it, seems to me to be found in this."

"The peasants," said Himmler's man.

"If necessary," said Frank, "we shall crush the workmen with the weight of the peasants."

"And you will lose the war," I said.

"Herr Malaparte is right," said Himmler's man, "we would lose the war. It is necessary for the Polish workmen to love us. We must endear ourselves to the Polish people." As he spoke he looked at me and smiled; then he stopped and turned toward the fire.

"The Poles will end by loving us," said Frank, "they are a romantic people. The next Polish romanticism will be their love for the Germans."

"So far," said Baron Wolsegger, "Polish romanticism... there is a Viennese saying that well describes our position in respect to the Polish people:
Ich liebe dich, und du schläfst."

"Oh yes," said Frau Wächter, " 'I love you, and you sleep'; very funny, isn't it?"

"Yes, very amusing," said Frau Brigitte Frank.

"In the end the Polish people will certainly awaken," said Wächter, "but so far they are asleep."

"I rather think that they pretend to be asleep," said Frank. "At heart they ask for nothing better than to be loved. Every people can be judged by its women."

"Polish women," said Frau Brigitte Frank, "are famous for their beauty and elegance. Do you really find them so pretty?"

"I find them worthy of admiration," I replied, "and not for their looks and their elegance alone."

"I cannot see that they are really so pretty as they are supposed to be," said Frau Brigitte Frank. "Female beauty in Germany is more severe, more genuine and more classical."

"Nevertheless some are very pretty and very smart," said Frau Wächter.

"In the good old days in Vienna," said Baron Wolsegger, "they were considered more elegant even than the Parisian women."

"Ah, the Parisian women!" exclaimed Frank.

"Are there any Parisiennes left?" asked Frau Wächter, gracefully tilting her head.

"I think that the elegance of the Polish women is dreadfully provincial and old-fashioned," said Frau Brigitte Frank, "and it is surely not all the fault of the war. Germany also has been two and a half years at war, and in spite of it, German women are today the most elegant in Europe."

"It appears," said Frau Gassner, "that Polish women do not wash much."

"Oh yes, they are terribly dirty," said Frau Brigitte Frank swinging her velvet bell, that sent forth a long green sound across the room.

"It isn't their fault," said Baron Wolsegger, "they have no soap."

"They will soon be unable to plead any excuse," said Frank, "they have found a way in Germany to make soap out of a substance that costs nothing and is very abundant. I have already placed a large order for Polish ladies so that they may wash. That soap is made out of dung."

"Out of dung?" I shouted.

"Yes, naturally, out of dung," replied Frank.

"And is it a good soap?"

"Excellent," said Frank, "I have tried it for shaving, and I was enchanted with it."

"Does it make a good lather?"

"A wonderful lather. It gives a perfect shave. It is a soap fit for a king."

"God shave the King!" I sang out.

"Only—" added the German King of Poland.

"Only—" I said holding my breath.

"It has one fault: the smell and the color are as they were."

A shout of laughter followed his words.
"Ach,
so!
Ach, sol
Wonderful!" they all shouted. And I discerned a voluptuous tear running down the cheek of Frau Brigitte Frank, the German Queen of Poland.

V. Forbidden Cities

I
HAD
REACHED
Warsaw at night from Radom, having motored through the vast Polish plain buried under the snow. And as I entered the city, its squalid, bomb-riddled suburbs, the Marszalkowska flanked by the skeletons of palaces charred black by fire, the ruins of the railway station, the black disemboweled houses that the livid light of the evening rendered more forbidding, became almost a welcome refuge and relief to my eyes blinded by the dazzling snow.

The streets were deserted, a few passers-by scuttered along the walls; German patrols stood at the corners, their tommy guns cradled in their arms. Saxe Square seemed vast, ghostlike. Raising my eyes to the first floor of the Europeiski Hotel, I looked for the window of the apartment where I had lived for two years in 1919 and 1920, when I was a young attaché with the Royal Italian Legation. Light showed through the window. I halted in the courtyard of the Brühl Palace, crossed the hall, and set my foot on the first step of the main staircase.