Kaputt (41 page)

Axel Munthe, in Capri, was the one who had told me a few days previously about Eddi Bismarck—that Eddi had left Capri to spend a few weeks in the small house owned by the Bismarcks in Switzerland, and that unexpectedly he had been called back to Germany by the military authorities. Eddi was now despairing in a Strasbourg barracks and, as Veronica put it, "very uncomfortable." In telling me about Eddi Bismarck's military vicissitudes, Axel Munthe had smiled, showing his sharp pointed teeth. Upright, leaning on a stick, his cloak thrown over thin shoulders, his head shook with laughter,- the entire vast seascape of rocks and olive trees against which he leaned, as though it were a wall, seemed to have been shaken by a dry thunderstorm. We had stood on the top of his Materite tower,- Axel Munthe's mischief spread like a solitary tree under the blue sky of Capri. Not a blade of grass grew around him in his parched and dusty shade. Only the soil all yawning with deep fissures surrounded him, and out of the cracks some lean lizards, green as despair, peeped occasionally.

The man, the soil, the trees, the lizards looked as if they had been painted by El Greco. Axel Munthe had taken Eddi Bismarck's letter from his pocket and had begun reading it aloud, purposely stumbling over the words and stopping at the end of each sentence to grin through his little gray beard, the color of worm-eaten wood. Now and then he became angry, repeated a word two or three times and pretended he could not pronounce it, with the air of an actor who loves to make fools of his audience.

"Eddi Bismarck a soldier! " shouted Axel Munthe raising his arm and waving the letter as if it were a flag—"Eddi Bismarck a soldier! Forward, march!
Für Gott und Vaterland!
Ha, ha, ha!"

"It is right and proper," said the Italian Ambassador, Dino Alfieri, in his silly, gentle voice, "that Germany should appeal to all her best children. It is fine that a Bismarck will fight as a plain soldier in the army of the Reich."

Everybody laughed and Dornberg, with deep seriousness, said, "Thanks to Eddi, Germany will win the war."

A few days previously, before leaving Capri to return to Finland, I had gone to the Grande Marina and, strolling through the narrow lanes shut in by high walls stained white with brine, I had passed in front of the Fortino, the villa of Mona Williams in which, during her absence in America, Eddi Bismarck played the jealous housekeeper. It was raining and the Fortino had a sad, sick look.

"The Count has gone to the war," said the Capri gardener as he saw me go by. The thought of the blond, delicate Eddi peeling potatoes in the Strasbourg barracks filled me with mischievous glee. "The Count has gone to the war. Forward, march!
Für Gott und Vaterland!"
shouted Axel Munthe, shaking with dry laughter as he brandished Eddi's letter with a gesture of spiteful joy.

"Eddi on the battlefield will certainly be a magnificent soldier, worthy of the name he bears," said Alfieri in his gentle fatuous voice, and everybody laughed.

"Eddi is a very nice boy, and I am very fond of him," said Anna Marie Bismarck. "Without him this war would be only a war of ruffians." Anna Marie is a Swede; she married Eddi's brother, Prince Otto von Bismarck, Councilor of the German Embassy in Rome.

"The name he bears is too fine for a battlefield," said Count Dornberg in an ironical tone.

"I cannot imagine anything more ridiculous than for a Bismarck to be killed in this war," said Anna Marie.

"Oh, yes, it would be truly ludicrous," said Princess Agatha Ratibor in a playful voice.

"Wouldn't it?" said Anna Marie, casting a sweet and scornful glance at Agatha.

Something small, arrogant and evil had entered the conversation that Veronica and Agatha were leading with a dry grace which lacked brilliance. Listening to those handsome young women I thought of the women workers on the outskirts of Berlin. This was just the hour when they walk back to their homes or their
Lägers
after a long day's work in the war factories of Neuköln, Pankow and Spandau. They don't all belong to the working classes. Many belong to the upper middle class or are the wives of civil servants and officers, but they have been caught in the cogwheels of compulsory work. Many are "slaves" from Poland, the Ukraine, White Russia or Czechoslovakia, and
P
or
Ost
is embroidered on their shirtfronts. But one and all, workers, middle-class women and slaves procured from occupied territories respect, help and stand up for one another. They work ten, twelve hours a day under the eyes of SS men armed with tommy guns, each of them within a narrow space between lines chalked on the floor. At nightfall they go out tired, dirty, black with engine grease, their hair rusty with iron shavings, the skin of their hands and faces burned by acids, their eyes circled with livid signs of hardship, fear and anxiety. The same anxiety and fear, though defiled and abashed by an arrogant sensuousness, a shameless pride, a sad moral indifference, I saw again that evening in the young German women seated at the table of the Italian Ambassador. Their dresses had been smuggled from Paris and Rome, from Stockholm and Madrid in the dispatch cases of the diplomatic couriers, as had their perfumes, their powders, their gloves, shoes and lingerie. Not that they were proud of the privilege of their elegance. They were well brought up and took pride in those small things that belonged to them by right and were due them. But their elegance undoubtedly was a considerable part of their patriotic feeling.
Of their patriotic feeling.
They felt proud of the suffering, the want and the losses of the German people, of all the horrors of the war, that they—owing to an old or recent privilege—held it to be their right to share with the people. And this was
their patriotic feeling
—a heartless complacency in their own fear, in their own anxiety and in all the hardships of the German people.

In that warm room, thickly carpeted, lighted by the cold, honey-colored moon and the pink flames of candles, the words, gestures and smiles of those young women evoked with envy and regret, a happy, immoral, pleasure-loving world, servile and satisfied with its own sensuousness and vanity, a world called back to life with a macabre sense of rotting flesh by the scent of dead roses and the dull glow of the silver and the ancient china. Veronica von Klem, the wife of a German Embassy official in Rome, had returned from Italy only a few days before and was still bubbling over with the most recent gossip gathered in the Excelsior Bar, at the dinners of Princess Isabelle Colonna and at the Acquasanta Golf Club—gossip mostly concerning Count Galeazzo Ciano and his political and social affairs. The manner with which Veronica repeated the latest Roman scandal, and the way in which the other young German women—Princess Agatha Ratibor, Maria Teresa, Alice, Countess von W— , Baroness von B— , Princess von T— commented on it—had a shade of contempt that the other ladies—Italian, American, Swedish and Hungarian—Virginia Casardi, Princess Anna Marie von Bismarck, Baroness Edelstam, Marquise Theodoli, Angela Lanza, Baroness Giuseppina von Stum—countered with a mischievous and ironical charity, both bitter and pointed.

"There is a lot of talk about Filippo Anfuso lately," said Agatha Ratibor, "it seems that the handsome Countess D— has passed from the arms of Galeazzo Ciano into those of Anfuso."

"'That shows," said Marquise Theodoli, "that at the moment Anfuso is in great favor with Ciano."

"Could one say the same about Blasco d'Ayeta?" asked Veronica. "He has inherited little Giorgina from Ciano and that gave rise to the rumor that he had fallen into disgrace."

"Blasco will never fall into disgrace," said Agatha. "His father, a court chamberlain, defends him from the King; Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini's son-in-law, defends him from the Duce; his wife, a devout Catholic, defends him from the Pope. Blasco will always have some Giorgina within reach to protect him against Galeazzo."

"Roman politics," said Veronica, "are in the hands of four or five playboys who are busily engaged shifting among themselves the same thirty silliest women of Rome."

"When those thirty women are over forty," said Princess von T— , "there will be a revolution in Italy."

"Why not when those four or five perennial bachelors are over forty?" asked Anna Marie von Bismarck.

"Ah, it's not the same thing," said Count Dornberg. "It is much easier to get rid of politicians than of thirty old mistresses."

"From a political point of view," said Agatha, "Rome is nothing but a
garçonnière
—a love-nest."

"Why are you complaining, my dear?" asked Virginia Casardi with her American accent. "Rome is a holy city, the city God has chosen to keep a
pied à terre."

"I have just heard a nice story about Count Ciano," said Veronica. "I don't know whether I should repeat it. It comes from the Vatican."

"You may repeat it," I put in. "There are back stairs, even in the Vatican."

'"Count Ciano is engaged in making love,' they say in the Vatican, 'and thinks that he is engaged in politics.'"

"Von Ribbentrop told me," said Agatha, "that when they met in Milan to sign the Pact of Steel, Count Ciano looked at him in a way that made him feel uncomfortable."

"You sound," I said, "as though Minister von Ribbentrop has also been Ciano's mistress."

"By now," said Agatha, "he has passed into the arms of Filippo Anfuso."

Veronica mentioned that Countess Edda Ciano, for whom she had a sincere liking, lately had often expressed her intention of having her marriage to Ciano annulled so she could wed a young Florentine aristocrat, Marquis Emilio Pucci.

"Is Countess Edda Ciano one of those thirty women?" asked Princess von T— .

"Edda, politically, is the least successful one of those thirty," said Agatha.

"The Italian people worship her as a saint. They never forget that she is Mussolini's daughter," said Alfieri in his silly gentle voice.

Everybody laughed, and Baroness von B— , turning to Alfieri, said that the most handsome of ambassadors was also the courtliest of men. They laughed again and Alfieri, bowing graciously said, "I am the ambassador of the thirty best-looking women in Rome,"—a remark that was greeted with hearty laughter by the guests.

Countess Edda Ciano's pretense of wanting to marry young Marquis Pucci was at the time only a trivial piece of gossip. But in Veronica's words, in the comments of those other young German women, in the fact that Alfieri, greedy for gossip and particularly for Roman gossip, sometimes preferred to be considered the ambassador of the thirty best-looking women in Rome, rather than Mussolini's ambassador—the piece of gossip assumed the importance of a national event, of a fundamental event in Italian life; it implied an unspoken judgment of the entire Italian people. The talk revolved for a long time around Count and Countess Ciano; they described the young Minister of Foreign Affairs in the midst of the gilded band of beauties in the Colonna Palace and among the dandies of the Chigi Palace. They amiably poked fun at the rivalries, intrigues and jealousies of that elegant and servile court to which Veronica herself felt flattered to belong and to which Agatha Ratibor would have belonged if she were not an old maid, something Galeazzo Ciano, something of a spinster himself, abhorred above anything else in the world. They dwelt on the whole Roman smart-set, made it march in procession before our eyes with its interested servility, its greed for favor and pleasure and its moral indifference—the true mark of a deeply rotten society. The corruption of Italian life, the cynical and hopeless passivity of the entire Italian people toward the war were proudly and continuously compared with the "heroism" of German life. Veronica, Agatha, Princess von T— , Countess von W— , Baroness von B— , all seemed to say: Behold how I suffer, behold what hunger, hardship, toil and the cruelty of war have done to me; behold, and blush! And the other young women, feeling themselves foreigners in Germany, were actually blushing, as if they had no other means of concealing the smile which that worldly eulogy of the "heroism" of German life, the luster of those precious jewels, called forth to their lips, or as if deep down in their hearts they felt themselves on the same level with the others and equally guilty.

Opposite me, between Count Dornberg and Baron Edelstam, sat a lady no longer very young, who listened with a tired smile to the frivolous and mischievous words of Veronica and her friends. I knew nothing about her except that she was Italian and that her family name was Antinori, that she had married a high official in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Reich, whose name often appeared in German political columns, Minister Baron Braun von Stum. Drawn by a common sadness my attention lingered on her tired, wan features that for fleeting moments could still be youthful; on her light eyes filled with a veiled sweetness and an almost secret shyness; on those thin lines on her temples and around her sad, bitter mouth. The Italian gracefulness of her face had not faded completely and that sweet fantasy Italian women have in their eyes that resembles a love glance had not been lost between half-raised eyelids. From time to time she looked at me and I felt her glance resting on me so confidently and yieldingly that I felt inwardly troubled. I realized after a while that she was the object of hostile attention on the part of Veronica and her friends who, with female irony, kept gazing at her simple dress, unpainted nails, eyebrows neither plucked nor painted and unreddened lips, as if they felt a malicious pleasure in discovering in the face and in all of Giuseppina von Stum signs of an anguish and fear different from theirs, of sadness that was not German, that lack of pride in other people's distress of which they seemed so blatantly proud. Little by little the hidden meaning of that look in which I discerned a mute appeal for my sympathy and help was revealed to me.

Through the misty windows, the frozen Wannsee looked like a huge slab of glistening marble on which the marks made by skates and iceboats had cut mysterious inscriptions. The high wall of the woods, black in the glow of the moon, surrounded the lake like a prison wall. Veronica was talking about the winter sunshine on Capri and the Capri days of Countess Edda Ciano and her frivolous court.