Kaputt (49 page)

"To Spain!" de Foxá repeated.

"
Nein, nein, Spanien nicht!
"
General Mensch shouted.

"The Spanish Blue Division," de Foxá said, "is fighting alongside the German soldiers on the Leningrad front."

"
Nein, Spanien nicht!
"
Mensch shouted.

All looked at de Foxá who, pale and firm, faced General Mensch and fixed him with a wrathful and proud glare.

"If you do not drink to Spain," said de Foxá, "I shall say
merde
to Germany."

"
Nein
,"
shouted Mensch, "
Spanien nicht!
"

"Meide
to Germany!" de Foxá shouted raising his glass, and he turned to me, a flash of triumph in his eyes.

"Good for you, de Foxá," I said. "You've won your bet."

"
Vive l'Espagne, merde à l'Allemagne!
"
de Foxá shouted.

"Ja, ja,"
Mensch shouted, raising his glass, "
Merde à l'Allemagne!"

"Merde à l'Allemagne!"
they all repeated in a chorus, raising their glasses.

They embraced each other and some fell to the ground. General Mensch was dragging himself on all fours, trying to catch a bottle that was slowly rolling across the wooden floor.

XVI. Siegfried and the Salmon

"ARMCHAIRS covered with human skin?" Kurt Franz asked incredulously.

"Yes, they were covered with human skin," I repeated.

Everybody laughed. Georg Beandasch said, "They should be very comfortable."

"The skin is very soft and thin," I said, "almost transparent."

"I have seen old books in Paris bound in human skin, but never armchairs."

"Those armchairs are in Italy," I said, "in the castle of the Counts of Conversano in Apulia. It was a Count Conversano who, toward the middle of the seventeenth century, had his enemies killed and skinned—priests, noblemen, outlaws, brigands— in order to cover the armchairs in the large hall of his castle. There is one, the back of which is covered with the skin taken from the belly and the breasts of a nun. One can still discern the shape of the breasts and the nipples polished and worn with use."

"With use?" queried Beandasch.

"Just think of the hundreds of people who have sat in that armchair during the course of three centuries," I said. "I fancy that is enough to wear out even a nun's breasts."

"Count Conversano," Victor Maurer said, "must have been a monster."

"I wonder how many hundreds of thousands of armchairs could be covered with the human skins of Jews whom you have killed during this war?" I asked.

"Millions!" Georg Beandasch said.

"A Jew's skin is no good for anything," Kurt Franz said.

"The German skins are no doubt of a better quality," I said. "Gorgeous upholstering can be made out of them."

"Nothing is as good as Hermes leather," said Victor Maurer whom General Dietl called "the Parisian." Victor Maurer was a cousin of Hans Mollier, the press secretary of the German Embassy in Rome, and he had spent many years in France. For him France meant Paris and Paris meant the Ritz Bar.

"After the war," Kurt Franz said, "the German skins will be worth nothing."

Georg Beandasch laughed. He was stretched out on the grass, his face covered with mosquito netting. He was chewing a birch leaf and now and then he lifted the net to spit. He laughed and said: "After the war? What war?"

We were sitting on a bank of the Juutuanjoki, near the lake. The river rushed violently by, twisting between the great boulders. Blue smoke rose over the Inari village where Lapp herdsmen were cooking their reindeer soup in copper pots hanging over the fires. The sun swayed on the horizon as if it were blown by the wind. The forest was warm, green and bluish, traversed by brooks of wind that rippled beautifully through the grass and the tree branches. A flock of reindeer was grazing on the opposite bank. Through the trees glittered the silvery lake veined with pink and green, like beautiful old Meissen ware. Those very green and pink tints, those shy and warm tints of Meissen china, those warm and shy greens, those warm pinks that here and there coagulated into little drops of glistening purple. It was beginning to rain—the everlasting summer rain of the Arctic lands. A slight and continuous buzzing was flowing through the forest. Suddenly a sunbeam struck the pink-green of the lake and a prolonged tinkle ran through the air, that sweet sorrowful tinkle of cracking china.

"The war is over for us," Kurt Franz said.

The war was far away from us. We were outside the war, in a remote continent, in abstract time, outside humanity. For over a month I had been roaming through the Lapland forests, through the tundra along the Liza, across the lonely, frozen and bare rock-fields of the Petsamo fjord on the Arctic Sea, through the red pine woods and the white birch woods, along the shores of Lake Inari, over the
tunturit
of the Ivalo region; for over a month I had been living among a strange people: the young Bavarian and Tirolean
Alpenjägers,
toothless and bald, with wrinkled yellow faces and the humble, despairing eyes of wild beasts. And I wondered what could have changed them so completely. They were still Germans, they were still the same Germans whom I had met before Belgrade, Kiev, Smolensk and Leningrad, with the same hoarse voices, the same hard brows, the same broad and heavy hands. But there was something wonderful, something pure and innocent about them that I had never before discovered in any German. Perhaps it was that bestial cruelty of theirs, that cruel innocence, like the innocence of children and beasts. They spoke about the war as if it were something past and distant, with an inward contempt, a grudge against violence, hunger, destruction and murder. They seemed to be content with the cruelty of nature, as if the lonely life in those limitless forests, the remoteness of civilization, the boredom of the everlasting winter night, the darkness of long months, ripped from time to time by the fire of the aurora borealis, the torture of everlasting summer daylight, the sun staring by day and by night through the window of the skyline—as if all this had driven them to a cruelty characteristic of mankind. They had acquired the despairing humility of wild beasts, that mysterious feeling for death. They had reindeer eyes, those dark, deep and glistening eyes,- that mysterious animal-look that the eyes of the dead have. A few nights before, I had gone out into the woods. I could not sleep. It was past midnight; the white sky was wonderfully translucent, it looked like a sky made of tissue paper. There was not a sign of a cloud, or so it seemed to me; the sky was so clear and translucent that it looked like a vast, deep space, bare and void. Yet an invisible drizzle was falling from that clear sky and penetrated my bones and awakened a sweet murmur of music among the leaves of the trees, in the thicket and on the light carpet of lichen. I had walked through the forest for over a mile when a hoarse German voice summoned me to stop. An
Alpenjäger
patrol, their faces covered with masks of mosquito netting, approached me. It was one of the many patrols, specially trained for guerilla warfare in the Arctic forests, which searched the woods and the
tunturit
of the Ivalo and Inari regions for Russian and Norwegian partisans. We sat down in the lee of some boulders by a fire of twigs, and smoked and talked under the light drizzle that smelt of resin. They told me they had found the tracks of a wolf pack; they had been aware of its presence for some days, long before they discovered the tracks, because of the restlessness of the reindeer herds. Those soldiers were mountaineers from the Tirol and Bavaria. From time to time a branch crackled in the depths of the forest or a bird called. While we talked in low voices—one always speaks in a low voice in those climates where the human voice sounds alien to man, where it sounds false, artificial, unrelated to man and full of despair, where it really is the voice of an inner anguish that finds no way of expressing itself and exhausts itself in itself, in its own sound, in its own echo—we saw amid the trees, about a hundred paces away, some animals that looked like dogs, short-haired, grayish, the color of rusty iron.

"The wolves," the soldiers said.

They passed close to us and looked at us with their red glistening eyes. They seemed to have no fear, no suspicion of us. There was something in their confidence that was not only peaceful, but detached—a kind of sad and noble indifference. They ran noiselessly, fleet and light, with their long, nimble, soft gait. There was nothing of the beast in them, but a kind of noble shyness, a kind of proud and most cruel tameness. A soldier raised his gun, but one of his comrades pushed it down. The gesture was a renunciation of that cruelty characteristic of man. It was as if in those inhuman solitudes, even man found no other means of expressing his humanity, except by acknowledging a sad and tame wildness.

"For some days," Georg Beandasch said, "General von Heunert has been beside himself. He cannot catch a salmon. All the strategy of German generals is powerless against the salmon."

"The Germans," Kurt Franz said, "are poor fishermen."

"Fish are not fond of the Germans," said Victor Maurer.

Lieutenant Georg Beandasch, adjutant to Cavalry General von Heunert, was the first German I had met when I reached Inari. In civilian life Georg Beandasch was a judge in the Berlin courts. He was about thirty, tall, broad-shouldered, with a bony jaw. He stooped a little in walking and looked at people with a crooked glance. "A rather unsuitable glance for a judge," he said. From time to time, with a look of deep contempt on his dark face, he spat on the ground. His face was the color of leather. It was because of the leather color of his skin that we had begun talking that day about Count Conversano's armchairs covered with human skin. The habit of spitting on the ground—Georg Beandasch acknowledged—was rather unbecoming for an adjutant of a German cavalry general, "but I have my reasons for doing it." At times it seemed as if he were spitting on all the German generals. Although he was guarded in his speech, I never felt that he rated Hitler and his generals very highly. Given a choice between General von Heunert and the Lapland salmon, he preferred the salmon. But in the end, like all Germans, judges or whoever they are, he obeyed the generals. That is the tragedy of the salmon in Europe: although the Germans side with the salmon, they obey their generals.

As soon as I had reached Inari, I had gone through the village looking for a place to sleep. I was dead tired and knocked out by the lack of sleep. I had driven four hundred miles across Lapland to reach Inari, and I longed to stretch out on a bed. But beds were scarce there. There are only four or five hundred wooden houses in the village, all grouped around a country general store, the
sekatavara kauppa,
the owner of which, a Finn, Mr. Juho Nykänen, welcomed me with a cordial smile. He displayed before my eyes his best goods: celluloid combs,
puukkos
with handles of reindeer bone, saccharine tablets, dog-skin gloves, cream for mosquito bites.

"A bed? A bed to sleep in?" asked Juho Nykänen.

"What else would I want with it?"

"And you come to me for it? I am not selling beds. Once I had an army cot in my shop, but I sold it three years ago to the manager of the
Osaki Pankki
in Rovaniemi."

"Couldn't you direct me to someone," I said, "who might be willing to lend me a bed for a few hours?"

"Lend you a bed?" Juho Nykänen said. "You mean someone who will give up his turn to you? Uhm, I think it most unlikely.

The Germans have taken our beds and we take turns in sleeping on the few beds that are left to us. You might try Mrs. Irjaa Palmunen Himanka. She may have a bed free in her hotel, or she may talk some German officer into allowing you to use his bed for a few hours. If so, while waiting for your turn to sleep, you might go fishing. I can provide you with everything that is needed for salmon fishing at a reasonable price."

"Are there many salmon in the river?"

"There were a great many before the Germans began building the bridge across the Juutuanjoki. The carpenters make a great deal of noise with saws, hammers and axes, and the noise disturbs the salmon. The Germans are building another bridge at Ivalo and the salmon have left the Ivalojoki. And that's not all! The Germans use hand grenades for fishing. That's slaughter! They not only destroy salmon, but every other kind of fish. Do they imagine that they can deal with salmon as they deal with Jews? We shall never allow it. I told General von Heunert the other day: If the Germans, instead of fighting the Russians, keep on fighting the salmon, we shall defend the salmon."

"It's simpler to fight salmon than the Russians."

"You're mistaken," Juho Nykänen said. "The salmon are very plucky, and it isn't easy to beat them. To my mind, the Germans have made a great blunder in waging war against the salmon. A day will come when the Germans will be afraid even of the salmon. That's how it will end. That's how the last war ended."

"Meanwhile the salmon are deserting your rivers," I said.

"Not because they are afraid," Juho Nykänen said with a tinge of resentment in his voice. "The salmon are not afraid of the Germans. They snub them. The Germans are unfair, particularly in the matter of fishing. They have no inkling of what fair play is. They slaughter the salmon with hand grenades. They think fishing is not a sport, but a form of
Blitzkrieg.
The salmon is the most noble animal in the world. It would rather die than break the laws of honor. Like the gentleman it is, it fights to the last breath and it faces death like a hero, but it will not demean itself to fight an unfair foe. It prefers exile to the dishonor of fighting an unworthy foe. The Germans are furious because they no longer find salmon in our rivers. And, do you know where the salmon are migrating?"

"To Norway?"

"What? Do you imagine the Norwegians are better off than the salmon? There are Germans in Norway too. They migrate to beyond Fishermen's Island, toward Archangel and Murmansk."

"Oh, so they are going to Russia?"

"Well, yes, they are going to Russia," Juho Nykänen said. His pale, Finnish, high-cheekboned face crooked into a thousand little wrinkles like an earthenware mask in the sun. "They are going to Russia," he said, "and let's hope that they will not come back some day with red ideas."