Kaputt (7 page)

"La dracu!"
exclaimed the corporal, which means "to the devil."

"What are you going to do with the prisoner?" I asked.

"We have to take him to Balta," replied the corporal, "but nobody goes by here; we are off the beaten track; we shall have to walk him there. If no truck passes today, we shall take him to Balta tomorrow, on foot."

"It would be quicker to kill him, don't you think?" I asked the corporal gazing at him. All burst out laughing, watching the corporal.

"No,
Domnule Capitan,"
replied the corporal blushing slightly. "I cannot. The orders are to bring at least one prisoner to headquarters when we capture any. No,
Domnule Capitan."

"If you take him on foot, you'll have to give him his boots back. No one can walk barefoot as far as Balta."

"Oh, he can walk barefoot as far as Bucharest," said the corporal laughing.

"If you like, I'll take him to Balta in my car. Give me a soldier as an escort and I will take him with me."

The corporal looked pleased; the other soldiers also looked pleased.

"You'll go, Grigoreseu," said the corporal.

Private Grigorescu strapped on his cartridge belt, took the rifle that was leaning against the wall (they were French cartridge pouches, wide and flat, and the rifle was a French Lebel with its long triangular bayonet), he took his haversack from a nail on the wall, flung it across his shoulder, spat on the ground and said, "Let's go."

The prisoner continued to sit in his corner. He looked at us with his glazed eyes.
"Podiom
—Let's go!" I told the prisoner. The Tartar rose slowly to his feet; he was tall, as tall as I am,- his shoulders were rather narrow, his neck thin. He followed me stooping a little, and Private Grigorescu kept behind him with his rifle ready.

A fierce wind was blowing; the sky was gray, as heavy as a cast-iron plate; the wheat's voice rose and fell with the wind, like the voice of a river. From time to time, the forests of sunflowers were heard squeaking in the hoarse dusty gusts.

"La revedere
—See you again," said the corporal shaking my hand. The soldiers came up one by one, to shake hands. "
La revedere, la revedere, Domnule Capitan, la revedere
." I started the motor, left the village, and drove along a track full of holes and ploughed in deep furrows (the tracks of the caterpillar tanks were sharply imprinted in the yielding mattress of dust). Private Grigorescu and the prisoner were sitting behind me, and I felt the fixed gaze of the Tartar boring into my back.

The storm was approaching from the end of the vast plain,- little by little it covered the breadth of the sky like a huge frog. It was a green cloud, spotted white here and there; the soft frog's belly could be seen throbbing with labored breathing. From time to time a harsh croaking reached us from the edge of the horizon. In the fields, by the roadside, there lay hundreds of burned-out machines, carcasses of lorries, steel carrion stretched out sideways with legs apart, miserable and obscene. And lo! by degrees, I seemed to recognize the road, I had certainly driven through there before, a few days before, perhaps that very morning: there were the river and the pools, their shores thick with reeds and willows. The reflection of the whitish belly of the huge frog, swallowing the sky with raucous croaks, floated on the livid surface of the water. A few drops, slow, hot and heavy, pierced the dust on the road sizzling like a red-hot iron dropped in water. At last I made out some houses through the dusk, and I recognized the houses of Alexandrovska, the abandoned village where I had spent the night.

"We had better stop here," I said to Private Grigorescu. "It's too late to go on; Balta is still far off."

I stopped the car in front of the house where I had slept. The rain had begun, it fell heavily with a subdued thud, raising a thick cloud of yellow dust. The mare's carcass still lay at the edge of the road in front of the wooden gate. Its wide-open eye was filled with a white light. We entered the house. Everything was as I had left it in the morning, in the same motionless, ghostlike disorder. I sat down on the bed, looking at the Private Grigorescu, who removed his cartridge belts and hung his haversack on the door handle. The prisoner was leaning against the wall, his arm hanging by his sides, and he gazed at me with his small, slanting eyes.

I stood in the door; the night was as black as coal. I went into the orchard, pushed the gate open and sat down on the edge of the road close by the mare's carcass. The rain drenched my face, ran down my back. Greedily I took in the scent of wet grass, and little by little the soft, greasy stench of the carrion penetrated that fresh and exhilarating scent, conquered the odor of rotting steel, dissolving iron and putrefied metal. I felt as if the ancient law of war—human and animal—was mastering the new law of mechanical war,- I felt at home in the odor of the dead horse as if in an old fatherland, a fatherland that I had found again.

Later I went back to the house and stretched out on the bed. I was dead tired; my bones ached; sleep was throbbing in my head as in a pulsing artery.

"We will take turns watching the prisoner," I said to the soldier, "you must be tired too. Wake me in three hours."

"Nu, nu, Domnule Capitan,"
said the soldier, "I am not tired. I am not sleepy."

The prisoner, whose hands and feet Grigorescu had tied with a knotted rope, sat in a corner of the room against the wall between the window and the cupboard. The thick stench of the carrion stagnated within the room. The yellow light of an oil lamp swayed along the walls; the sunflowers squeaked in the orchard under the rain. The soldier faced the prisoner and squatted on the floor with crossed legs—his rifle with a fixed bayonet rested on his knees.

"Nopte buna
—Good night," I said closing my eyes.

"
Nopte buna, Domnule Capitan,"
said the soldier.

I was unable to sleep. The storm had broken and raged furiously. The sky split with a roar, sudden light flooded from the clouds and pelted onto the plain; rain fell as hard and heavy as if it were raining stones. And the stench of the mare's carcass, whipped up by the rain, penetrated fat and slimy into the house and stagnated beneath the low ceiling. The prisoner sat motionless, the back of his head leaning against the wall, and gazed at me fixedly. His hands and feet were tied; his hands, small and pale, ash-colored, with the rope knotted tightly round the wrists, hung loosely between his knees.

"Why don't you untie him?" I asked Grigorescu. "Are you afraid that he might get away? You might at least free his feet."

The soldier bent forward and slowly undid the feet of the prisoner who was gazing at me with his stony eyes.

I woke up a few hours later. The soldier, his rifle across his knees, was still sitting on the floor opposite the prisoner. The Tartar, the back of his head resting against the wall, gazed at me.

"You sleep now," I said getting out of bed. "It's my turn now."

"
Nu, nu, Domnule Capitan
, I am not sleepy.
"

"Go to sleep, I tell you."

Private Grigorescu rose, crossed the room dragging his rifle along the floor, and still clutching the rifle in his hands threw himself on the bed and turned toward the wall. He looked dead. His hair was white with dust, his uniform torn, his shoes worn. Coarse black hair bristled on the skin of his face. He looked dead.

I settled on the floor opposite the prisoner, crossed my legs and shoved my automatic between my knees. The Tartar gazed at me with his veiled, narrow eyes, slanted like a cat's; they looked as if they were made of glass. They had the gaze that dead people's eyes have,- the eyelids, curled up under the brows, formed two scarcely visible sepia-colored folds. I leaned forward to untie the prisoner's hands. I studied his hands while my fingers fumbled with the knots on the rope; they were small, smooth, ash-colored, with nails that were almost white. Although they were marked by short deep lines, the skin was so porous that it looked as if it were seen through a microscope. The palms were thinly coated with calluses but were soft, smooth and almost tender to the touch. Hanging limply, they yielded to my hands as if they were dead, but I sensed that they were strong, nimble, tenacious, and at the same time as light and delicate as a surgeon's, a watchmaker's or a skilled precision worker's.

They were the hands of a young recruit of the
Piatiletka,
of an
udainik
of the third Five-Year Plan, of a young Tartar who had become an engineer, a tank driver. Softened by the incessant thousand-year-long rubbing against the silky coats of horses, against manes, tendons, hocks, muscles of horses,- with reins, with the smooth leather of saddles and harness, they had passed within a few years from horse to machine, from flesh to metal tendons, from reins to controls. A few years had been enough to transform young Tartars of the Don and the Volga, of the Kirghiz Steppe and the shores of the Caspian and the Aral seas, from horse-breeders into qualified workers of the U.S.S.R., from horsemen into
stakhanovtzi
of the labor
Sturm Truppen,
from nomads of the steppe into
udarniki
and
spets
—specialists—of the Five-Year Plan. I undid the last knot and offered him a cigarette.

The prisoner's hands hurt, his fingers were numb; he could not take a cigarette from the package. I placed the cigarette between his lips, and lit his and my own.

"Blagodariu
—Thanks," the Tartar said and smiled at me. I smiled at him too, and for a long time we continued to smoke in silence. The stench of the carrion filled the room, greasy, soft and sweetish. I inhaled the stench of the dead mare with a strange enjoyment. The prisoner also seemed to breathe with a delicate, sad pleasure. His nostrils quivered, they throbbed strangely. And I became aware only then that all the life in that pale, ashen face in which the untroubled, slanting eyes had the fixed glassy stare of a corpse, had gathered about his nostrils. His old homeland, the homeland he had found again, was in the odor of the dead mare. We looked into each other's eyes, in silence, and inhaled with a delicate and sad enjoyment that sweetish smell. That carrion odor was his homeland, his ageless and living homeland, and now nothing stood between us any longer. We were brothers living in the ageless odor of the dead mare.

... Prince Eugene lifted his face, turned his eyes toward the door; his nostrils quivered as if the dead mare's odor stood on the threshold and looked at us. It was the smell of grass and leaves, of sea and woods. Dusk had already set in, but an uncertain light still wandered across the sky. In that spectral light the faraway houses of Nybroplan, the steamers and sailing boats moored along the quays of Strandvägen, the trees of the park, the ghostly shadows of Rodin's "Penseur" and of the "Niké of Samothrace" were reflected, deformed, on the light landscape as in the drawings of Ernst Josephson and of Carl Hill, who were driven by their gloomy madness to see animals, trees, houses and ships reflected by the landscape as in a distorting mirror.

"He had hands like yours," I said.

Prince Eugene glanced at his hands. He seemed slightly ill at ease. His were the white shapely hands of the Bernadotte—pale slender fingers.

And I told him: "The hands of an engineer, of a tank driver, of an
udamik
of the third
Piatiletka
are no less beautiful than yours. They are the hands of Mozart, Stradivarius, Picasso, Sauerbruch."

Prince Eugene smiled and, blushing a little, said, "I am all the prouder of my hands."

The voice of the wind gradually had grown stronger, shriller, like a long doleful neighing. It was the north wind, and its voice made me shudder. The recollection of the frightful winter I had spent in Karelia, between the Leningrad suburbs and the shores of Lake Ladoga, called up the vision of the silent, white, endless Karelian forests, and I shuddered as if the wind that caused the panes of the large windows to rattle was the merciless, frozen wind of Karelia.

"It is the north wind," said Prince Eugene.

"Yes, it is the Karelian wind," I said. "I recognize its voice."

And there flashed through my memory the horses of Lake Ladoga.

III. Ice Horses

T
HAT
MORNING
I went with Svartström to see the horses freed from their prison of ice.

A greenish sun in the pale blue sky shone like an unripe apple. Since the thaw had set in, the icebound surface of Lake Ladoga had begun creaking; it wailed, at times it shrieked shrilly as if in pain. In the deep of night, from the end of the
korsu
{3}
we could hear it suddenly crying out, wailing for hours at a time, until the dawn. It was already spring; the lake exhaled its fetid breath into our faces, that lean smell of rotten wood and wet sawdust that is typical of the thaw. The opposite shore of Lake Ladoga looked like a thin pencil stroke on blotting paper. Now the sky was a cloudless faded blue: it seemed a sky of tissue paper. Yonder, toward Leningrad—a gray cloud of smoke hung over the besieged city—the sky was slightly dirty, slightly crumpled. A green vein cut across the horizon, it seemed at times as if it could be seen throbbing, as if it were full of hot blood.

That morning we went to see the icebound horses being freed. The night before Colonel Merikallio, sniffing the wind, had said, "The horses caught in the ice crust will have to be buried. Spring is beginning."

We went down to the lake through a thick birch wood in which were scattered huge stones of red granite. Suddenly, in front of us lay the vast dark expanse of Lake Ladoga.

The Soviet shore showed vaguely on the horizon behind a silvery mist, veined with pale blue and pink. From time to time the monotonous call of the cuckoo, the sacred bird of Karelia, reached us from the thick of the vast Raikkola forest. Wild beasts howled among the trees, mysterious voices called, answered, called again—persistent, mournful sounds, filled with a sweet and cruel entreaty.

Before leaving the
korsu
of Finnish headquarters to descend toward the lake, I had searched for Lieutenant Svartström. I had knocked in vain at the door of his little room in the
korsu
behind the stables. The forest around headquarters looked deserted. And there was everywhere that lean smell, that tepid smell in the cold air. I approached the
korsu
of the horses. A girl in a
lotta
{4}
uniform was preparing a pail of cellulose horse fodder for the Colonel's horse.