Nuns and Soldiers (8 page)

The Count was used to nightmares. He wooed them and they left little trace. It was the waking horrors that left him exhausted and afraid. It was as if, at such times, as he lay in his narrow bed in his small bedroom and gazed up at the darkened ceiling his father’s spirit came and stood beside him, eager to conduct the argument into which, while his parent lived, the Count had been so unwilling to enter.
What went wrong?
They were living in a dreamland. Eastern Poland ought to have been conceded to Stalin while there was still something to concede. They thought the Western troops would reach Warsaw first. The Count’s father had many times described the hour when he realized that the Russians would arrive first. So they were to see off the Germans and then resist the Russians! Were they
mad
? What was the point of the Warsaw Rising anyway? To ‘stir the conscience of the world’? To assert Polish independence by possessing Warsaw before the Russians came? What a nemesis. They wanted their fight and the Russians left them to it. Why did they not
wait
until the Red Army was bombarding the city? Accidents, accidents, mistakes, mistakes. The men in London bemused by years of agonizing diplomacy, the men in Warsaw worn out by years of secret organization and nerve-destroying terror. The crucial hours it took to decode messages. The vain hopes of Moscow diplomacy, of Anglo-American help, of German collapse. Two men who were late at a meeting. A false intelligence report. Desire, desire, desire for the longed-for end, the crown of so much scheming and suffering. The inability to wait. Then the catastrophe, humiliation worse than anything dreamt of in their wildest fear. The Count could think of nothing like it in history except the Sicilian Expedition. (The comparison was his father’s.) It was a strange fact that his father had never talked to him about the fight in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943 when the Jews of the city had risen in inspired courageous hopeless rage against their tormentors. They fought without hope or calculation like rats in a trap and forced their enemies to tear them to pieces. Like rats in a trap; rats in other traps had not fought. His father’s silence was not anti-Semitism, it was envy. He envied the absolute simplicity of that fight, the purity of its heroism. There was no doubt where the unsmirched flag of Poland was flying in those days of 1943.

But why did the Red Army not cross the Vistula? The sleepless Count thus continued his argument with his father. Were the Russians really waiting cynically for the Germans to destroy their own prospective foes, the flower, the élite of a passionately independent Poland? When the Red Army entered Warsaw it was empty. Indeed it was scarcely there, the ruins were level with the ground. There was no sign of human habitation except for thousands and thousands of hasty new-made graves. His father had been unjust to the Russians, their lines of communication were stretched to breaking, it was an accident of war, the Count thought sometimes as he tossed sleeplessly to and fro. (Why had Hannibal not marched on Rome? For the same reason.) His father had been unjust to Gomulka. Those men were patriots who had tried, who still tried, to construct ‘a Polish way to socialism’. What else could they do but play the precarious game which kept the Russian tanks from revisiting Warsaw? The Church still existed, a precious evidence of a freedom kept. Ought his father to have returned home? What was this ‘ought’ and this ‘home’? The eternal ‘what should have happened’ of the human being in the face of morality and chance and the eternal malice of events. But then the Count returned to the horror of it all. What did it avail, the suffering of the virtuous, the death of the brave? Had any country ever been so malignantly vowed to destruction by its neighbours? The English had ruined Ireland, but casually, thoughtlessly. While History, like Bismarck, seemed dedicated to ‘tear up Poland by the roots’.

The Count had, he felt, no illusions about the present state of his country, no sentimentality about what was in obvious ways a bad state. Fear of Russia had to be lived with, life under communism was another world where moral problems appeared with a difference. All states have a background which is partly evil. There the evil was evident, stronger. He saw the corruption, the hardened heart, the bureaucratic cruelty which could not be simply blamed on History or Russia. He constantly endeavoured to know who was in prison and why, who was trapped, who was intimidated, who was silenced. He could not have endured to live in Poland. But he could not help believing (perhaps this
was
sentimentality?) that his country had in spite of everything a spiritual destiny, an unquenched longing for freedom and spirit. There was some old unique indestructible entity over which the red and white flag could still proudly fly. (Often it appeared that that proud flag was being firmly held in the capable hands of the Roman church.) And he connected in his mind this ideal symbolic Poland with the sufferings of oppressed people everywhere, and the dogged dissenters who refused to compromise with tyranny, who wrote pamphlets and made speeches and carried posters until they were put away in prisons and labour camps where after their brief and apparently useless struggle for freedom and virtue they rotted quietly away into a slow anonymous death.

 

 

The Count went into the kitchen and put on some potatoes to boil. He liked potatoes. He opened a tin of ham, and when the potatoes were almost ready he made some soup out of a packet. At the table in his sitting-room he drank the soup out of a mug, ate the ham and potatoes, and finished up with a slice of ginger cake. He drank a little red wine mixed with water. He read some more of Carlyle’s
Frederick the Great.
The slaughter-house of history, mediated by Carlyle’s style, could be an object of contemplation. ‘The war was over. Frederick was safe. His glory was beyond the reach of envy. If he had not made conquests as vast as those of Alexander, of Caesar and of Napoleon, if he had not, on fields of battle, enjoyed the constant success of Marlborough and Wellington, he had yet given an example unrivalled in history of what capacity and resolution can effect against the greatest superiority of power and the utmost spite of fortune. He entered Berlin in triumph ...’ The radio was telling the Count what was going on in Cambodia. Then it told him about the life-cycle of the fruit fly. Then there was a programme of Renaissance Music. Then there was a Labour Party political broadcast on race relations, the Count even knew the man who was speaking, an M.P., a friend of Stanley Openshaw. After that there was a funny programme, then the news. The Count was apparently able to listen to the radio and to read Carlyle at the same time. He was also able to do all this while thinking throughout the whole evening about Gertrude.

Guy and Gertrude between them had performed some sort of miracle for the Count by introducing him to their ‘set’. The very extension of their generosity made it seem less intense, less in need of definition. What was more natural than that Guy’s discovery, his ‘phenomenon’, should be made welcome, even petted a little? He had not at first wondered, and they had perhaps never thought, just how they saw him: a silent man without a country and without a language, an awkward shy man who had to be jollied into the conversation, a thin pale tall man whose hair might be blond or might be white without anyone caring to determine which. ‘Where did Guy dig up our Count?’ ‘Whatever was he doing before
we
discovered him?’ These would be perfunctory inquiries. They were infinitely kind to him but they did take him a little too incuriously for granted. They might even take him for a calm man, a placid man! They had rescued him from nonentity, from a narrowing loneliness, and still he remained a shadow in their lives, a footless ghost. Yet all this, which the Count now frequently rehearsed, was unjust. Gertrude and Guy were undemonstrative English people, but they were also unconventional enough to take friendship very seriously. If he was often in their house it was because they often wanted to see him.

The Count was well aware of the crucial difference between loving someone and being in love. He had loved Guy and Gertrude out of gratitude, out of admiration, out of an amazed pleasure at the sudden welcoming ease of their company. He had now a house to visit, a warm bright significant place, people to see regularly, who were connected with each other and had readily, almost casually, bound him into their company. Then suddenly the absolute preciousness of Gertrude had come upon him in a dazzling transfiguring flash. She was absolutely precious, absolutely necessary. Hitherto his life had had a Polish meaning but no sense. Now Gertrude became the sense of his life, its secret centre. His impoverished soul turned in dumb wonderment to this sudden radiant source. The Count was changed, every particle of his being charged with magnetized emotion. His flesh glowed, his body waked from dull sleep, and quivered. His love endowed his life, every day, every second, with thrilling purpose. It was a happy
activity
, a little crazed, deeply inherently painful, and yet, as happiness must be, steady, invulnerable, eternal. The situation was impossible, but at the same time it was absolutely secure, and the impossibility and the security and the secrecy were one. He could see Gertrude often, easily, in company. He did not even
want
to be alone with her. And when accidentally, when he had arrived early or stayed late, they were briefly alone together it was as if they were not alone. He could see Gertrude often, he could
go on
seeing her often, they were familiar affectionate friends, connected together forever; and yet the barrier between them was as absolute as if he had been her servant. And of course her servant, with joyful brooding pain, he saw himself eternally destined to be. It was moreover also part of the Count’s impossible security that it was inconceivable that he should feel jealous of Guy. He felt no jot of jealousy, even of envy, so high above him was the whole concept of Gertrude’s marriage. It was in a curious and precious sense a remote mystery which did not concern him. He revered Guy as Gertrude’s consort, and continued to love and admire him on his own account. Having Guy as his office chief had transformed his work, his day. Guy, so clever, so cordial, so dotty, had touched and stirred up something in the Count which was becoming dull and selfish and old. And when the Count had stopped being afraid that his clever friend would suddenly drop him, Guy had become a stronghold. That stronghold remained, now become an inextricable part of the absolute secret safety of the Count’s love for Guy’s wife.

The Count had always known that he was not a gentleman volunteer in the army of the moral law. If ever a soul was conscripted he was. He intensely feared disgrace, loss of honour, loss of integrity. He stood, in his mind, as still and as expressionless as the soldiers at the Unknown Warrior’s grave in Warsaw. Indeed he
could
do nothing wrong, since the situation held him in a merciful steely grip. Sometimes he imagined how he might one day defend Gertrude from attack, rescue her from danger, sleep across her doorway like a dog. Die for her. Indeed Gertrude was somehow to be there ‘at the hour of his death’ as he departed from her in gentleness with his secret intact. He had, in these flashes which were too swift and physical to be pictures, occasionally imagined a touch, an embrace, a kiss. But these were the involuntary lapses of a man attentive to the beloved in the whole of his dedicated watchful body. He never permitted any extended fantasy. It would have been wrong, it would also have been torture. He knew which way madness lay. Reason and duty commanded him to desist. So he had lived, happily enough, in the cast-iron safety of her marriage. It was a house that would surely last forever.

But now his life was about to change utterly. He felt grief, terror, and a more awful hope. He tried to banish hope, to banish the desire which breeds the illusion which breeds the hope; as the long long nourished desire to free Warsaw had fed the illusory hopes of those who fought and died in the ruined city. He must not think of ... anything which he might want to have ... as being in any sense ... a possibility. Rather he must think of it as remote, as receding, as
lost.
He thought, my happiness was an oversight, a mistake made by fate, and is now over. Behind almost every misfortune there is a moral fault. I am like Poland, my history is and ought to be a disaster. I am guilty because my father fled, because my brother died, because my mother pined away in a cell of solitude. I can expect nothing now but to be returned to the grey loneliness from which I came. Ah, how I have lived on illusions and fed myself with dreams! And I thought at least that my secret was harmless, to others of course, but also to me. Guy, it all depended on Guy, and soon Guy will be gone and my world will be a dead planet. Without Guy there was no way he could be near to Gertrude and safe, near to Gertrude and happy, near to her forever. No way ... except one way ... and of that ...

He tried now to think of Guy, to grieve for Guy, Guy propped up in bed with his gaunt old face and his unimaginable thoughts, reading
The Odyssey.
Guy had spoken of himself as Odysseus. But it was a different story now. Odysseus was setting sail upon his last journey and he would not return again to his house and his home. And Penelope ... Suddenly the Count saw it: Penelope and the suitors! The siege of Penelope by the suitors; but no master ever to return now to claim her as his true wife. She was to be the prey of lesser men. And they were all there ... already ... round about her ... The Count turned off the radio and buried his face in his hands.

 

 

While the Count was listening to the Renaissance music programme on the radio, Gertrude had already had her supper (soup and cheese) and had said good night to Guy. The Night Nurse was sitting reading in her bedroom which adjoined Guy’s room. Gertrude could not read. No book could serve her now. She walked to and fro. She thought about cigarettes, but there were none in the house. (Victor had persuaded most of them to give up smoking.) She readjusted the chrysanthemus in the green vase. She looked out of the window. It had stopped snowing. She was sorry about that. She wanted extreme weather. She desired tempests, mountains of snow. She desired screarning winds and floods, a hurricane which would destroy the house with her and Guy in it. She wished that his death could be her death. How can I endure so much misery, she thought, without dying of it. She looked at her watch. It was still too dangerously early to go to bed.