by Vera Caspary
“Do you feel twisted and filthy? All I mentioned was your friend’s charm in that costume. One can’t so easily forget the absurd,”
“You don’t have to keep repeating it.” He turned again, head bent, shoulders rounded under an invisible burden. He seemed less tall.
I weakened, tried to speak more gently. “Really, what did I see? You danced with a man. It would not be so shameful if you did not feel that way.”
“Forget!” All of his energy was given to the effort to show himself master. “You’ve got to forget it all.”
I was not in the mood to flatter. “Try to understand that I am not reproaching you. Even if you’ve had an affair…” My voice hit false notes. What I meant to tell him was the lies and evasions and promises to forget were false snares, but I was too stirred up to speak clearly,
“It’s impossible to talk to you. You seem to think it’s a joke.”
“A very bad one. I only want to know why you married me.”
“I thought I’d made it quite clear to you.” He tried to sound remote. Translucent lids fell over pale eyes. By shutting me out he hid himself. “At the time,” he added.
“If you had been honest with me then…”
The idea appalled him. “Impossible. You’d have run off in disgust.”
“I might not. If you had asked my help, perhaps…” It was not possible to continue. The words were hollow. How could I know what direction I would have taken at a different time in other circumstances? In the fury to make clear what was not certain in my own mind I became so intense that my voice sounded vindictive. “Try to see what I mean. If you had the courage to be what you are, it would not always be necessary for you to be so moody with me and so cruel…”
“I believe you loved me, Leonora.”
“What for? Why did you want my love? To spite your devil’s bitch!”
In a tone of sad admonishment he reminded me that I had promised never to recall or speak of that incident. This, of course, heightened my fury. “Are you God to command me to forget, to tell me what I am to remember?” My eyes were drawn to the moss-colored curtains hiding his secret books. “Your errors I am to forget, while you command me to remember all those horrors. Why? To feed your ego, to make you my master? You are the one, my dear husband, who had better forget.”
“I wish to God I could!” He looked about like a man in search of a hiding place. “Forget? They won’t let me.”
“You seem to enjoy their company, whoever they may be. Was he…last night…one of them?”
“The Count von Mefistdorf.” The name was spoken in an aloof manner as though it were too holy for common ears.
Feeling snubbed I responded with a jeer, “A noble gentleman, a true aristocrat, so elegant in black satin. And in that red domino.” I watched a white mask form over my husband’s features, a grimace and tightening, but ruthlessly went on, “I should have enjoyed seeing him in the Merry Widow’s pink. He must have been enchanting in the hat…”
“Leonora, please…”
“Perhaps, Gerhard, if you would be truthful with me…”
An unsteady hand poured cognac. For me as well, but I did not drink any more as I did not want my mind dimmed. I was very alert so that I seemed not only to hear words but saw in bold color the scenes evoked by his story.
We talked for a lone time.
As a boy Gerhard had learned to keep all passions secret, dreamed constantly, of his mother and sister and of his father’s mistress, a lady he had never seen but imagined in black silk, diamonds and many veils; of the little Jewish neighbor who had moved away, of cinema stars, great athletes, artists and heroes. At school he had been intimate with no one. He went through boyhood without a friend, always afraid to show love or dependence. His living spirit was bottled, corked and sealed. To his mother the hard surface had signified growing strength, to schoolmates arrogance. He had been so rich, so self-conscious and shy that he had never dared speak aloud of anything that mattered to him.
“Not even at the cadet school,” he told me, sadly.
Among the cadets there had been many love affairs. Such practices were not extraordinary. There had always been a sort of underground tradition. Male love was taken for granted. Many cadets, away from home and girls, turned the turmoil and passion of adolescence into love for each other. Although the masters could not publicly encourage this point of view, it was generally believed that female influences weakened man’s warlike nature. In the study of classical history emphasis was given to tales of heroic love. Gerhard had been affected by these attitudes, but was never able to achieve the state of sweaty adoration with which most of his classmates regarded a rosy-cheeked teacher of military tactics. He believed himself frigid and without talent for affection. It was not until several years later, when he was in Paris as an officer of the Occupation, that he fell in love.
He had come to Paris unhappily, believing himself a failure as an officer and sensitive about having been kept in a hospital for six months. Not honorably wounded, but sick with nerves. Nerves. The word still shamed him. He spoke it with his back to the portrait of his mother who had all those generations of tradition behind her. Womanish complaints had not been understood nor tolerated by her people; wounds to the spirit were dismissed as cowardice. To save the family honor, von Richtgarten influence was exercised to keep him in the Army, but far from the physical side of war, at a desk like a businessman; a communications officer in occupied Paris.
In spite of occasional outbursts of rebellion, street fights, threats, underground resistance, street-corner killings, Paris remained lively. Musicians played, artists painted, actors performed and, while many works of art had been removed to Germany, there were still great exhibitions. In the misty light of a late spring afternoon, among the bronze and marble figures of the Rodin Garden, he met Konni. Darkness fell like gentle rain. The two men were caught in a mysterious net of intimacy. Neither spoke yet each felt the other’s presence potently, like an extension of himself. They left at the same time, walked at the same pace toward the boulevard. The young lieutenant allowed the older officer, a Sturmbannführer of the S.S., to walk ahead. At the corner this man waited to invite the lieutenant to take an apéritif with him.
Warm friendship followed an ardent all-night session of talk in Konni’s small, elegant apartment on the Avenue Niel. “I came alive!” said Gerhard. As he told me this he came alive, raced across the room, faced me fully. In warm light I saw him as one sees a painting, but no longer El Greco’s tormented saint. Pallor and the long head were transformed by vitality, unexpected and robust, as in a Rembrandt portrait. “I adored Konni.”
I said nothing. Silence lengthened. In the linden tree below the window a bird sang. Gerhard noted my wandering attention. “Does all of this bore you?”
“Oh, no. No, indeed. Please go on.”
“Perhaps you find it shocking.”
“Me? Have you forgotten that I was not educated by a governess behind a stone wall? I did not have to go to any school to learn about the sins of men and women.”
Then, said Gerhard (but in much greater detail), I would understand the perverse drive that led him simultaneously to worship Konni and abhor certain of his practices.
“He had curious ways of arousing passion.”
I can still hear the shivering notes of the twilight bird.
“Until then I had never Known that people can enjoy cruelty.”
I had learned that early, too. It is a deep and primitive emotion. There had been as much eagerness as fear in me when I watched the guards in the prison beat their victims. My rages had often reached such ecstasy that the women had to smother my mouth against their bodies lest my screams angered the brutal female wardens.
My unprotesting acceptance gave him courage to boast of late hours, amounts of wine consumed, adventures in cafes and music halls, introductions to exotic bordellos and new experiences. Occupied Paris offered many entertainments to its conquerors. Can you imagine that with
the war going on, reverses on the Russian front, sudden deaths and constant danger, German officers vied in amusing each other at luxurious parties? Competing with lavish costumes? Concerning themselves with the vintage of a wine, smuggled jazz, confiscated jewelry, rich fabrics and fine perfumes? Gerhard’s spirit had no more to be contained in a narrow vial, corked and closed up, with all originality and joy sealed in. The wine had been heady, this his vintage year.
Like a blow came the order for a transfer to the battle-front. Suffering large reverses in Russia, the Reichswehr demanded the active service of every able-bodied man. Older officers and cripples could serve at desks. A nervous collapse could no longer be considered an honorable wound.
When Konni heard the news he leaped from a chaise longue and cried out that he would not allow it. To hear him one would have thought this S.S. major was Napoleon; or Hitler. But it was not merely the defiance of a man filled with champagne, nor hollow arrogance. Konni’s strong will and overwhelming charm could influence persons more important than a young lieutenant. Before many weeks had passed Gerhard received the news that he had been promoted to Oberleutnant in charge of communications at a railroad junction in the Protektorat.
“Wardenthal?”
He looked up with a reproachful expression. “How do you know that?”
“You told me about your post in the Sudetenland.”
“Yes, I suppose I did mention it.” His mouth disappeared. Almost immediately it was spewed up again. “What else have I told you?”
“Only that you were there when the war ended, and there was terrible panic and a lot of bloodshed and you had a hard time getting back to Berlin.”
“Did I…” his voice died.
I filled a glass and carried it to him. He took it but did not look at me. “Perhaps,” I said after another strained pause, “you’d rather not tell me any more,” and started toward the door.
“Don’t leave me, Leonora.”
When a person has locked a secret within himself and at last begins to speak aloud, the compulsion becomes irresistible. Less for my information, I think, than for purgative reasons he cried out, “Do you know what it is to be in love so entirely that every thought, every breath, every moment is dedicated? To give yourself so entirely that the things you most hated and avoided, you…” his voice became gritty, “you seek with eagerness and lust?”
The railroad junction had not been at Wardenthal, but at a village sixteen kilometers from the village where the concentration camp was located. It was to this camp that Konni, promoted to Obersturmbannführer, came as Kommandant. “It was not so much a camp for Jews, Leonora. There were other enemies—criminals, gypsies, deserters, partisans from different countries. Not many Jews.”
He had grown restless, walked to the window, stood before it with the glass shining dark behind him, red curtains giving the effect of a frame. Resting on the blackened oak of an old chair, his slender hand looked strangely adult. In almost forty years the hand had only played at being useful. Nothing in the room seemed real, neither the hand, nor his sigh, nor the portrait of a man framed by red curtains. Wealth had given this play-acting quality to his life; he had avoided many distressing realities. Now there was a reality to be accepted; as there had been at Wardenthal.
“Wardenthal,” he said with shoulders drawn back, head high, a soldier standing at attention and speaking in a clear voice as though addressing a court, “was one of the smaller camps. It had an experimental unit where various drugs were tried out and certain new methods…”
“Tortures?”
“The Kommandant carried out the orders of superior officers. As head of the communications center nearby I received and transmitted many messages from his superiors in Berlin. I knew him to be a man of complete probity and honor in the performance of his duties.”
The speech was uninflected and sounded as if it had been rehearsed. I saw the Kommandant carrying out the orders of his superiors with complete probity and honor…
The officer walks with precise steps in his glittering boots. Shining eyes look right and left in search of someone he cannot find among prisoners standing in line with bent heads and shoulders rounded in fear. They have come off the night trains, my friends, Ceci and the pockmarked whore, the Communist teacher who showed me the shape of North America in the clouds, the gypsy with the torn earlobe, the cruel woman who begged for the names of girls who played the Nile horse game, Sister Martha. The three-thonged whip flicks the air, the shining eyes rove back and forth in search of someone. Not Mutti, she has died, but there is someone else among those cowering in fear of the three-thonged whip. Are there no children at Wardenthal? The officer is looking for me…
“I knew him to be a man of complete probity and honor in the performance of his duties.” Gerhard repeated in the voice of a man who has rehearsed a statement he may be required to repeat in court. One eyelid twitched and his face was pulled as tight as it must have been in those tormented nights of the later years when he had repeated these words like a magic incantation.
At Wardenthal, officers lived like victors in the unholy war. Gerhard’s post at the railroad junction was only sixteen kilometers away. Without the amenities of Paris, vintage wines, luxurious bordellos, elite army officers to provide competition in gaiety, Konni found other diversions for himself and his beloved companion. Gypsies danced and sang for them, prisoners who had worked in theatres and cabarets were dressed in improvised costumes and came to Konni’s suite to perform. This apartment was on the top floor of the old Schloss Wardenthal and was furnished with Oriental carpets, featherbeds, Bohemian crystal, embroidered linens. It also contained a splendid receiving machine which picked up the forbidden programs of jazz broadcast for American soldiers. Velvet draperies of a deep plum color covered the windows. When these were opened, the entire camp was in view, its parade ground brilliantly lighted like a theatre. In the window the spectators, occupants of the royal box, watched activities below.
Gerhard had never overcome sick sensitivity at the sight of blood, nor the rise of chilled flesh in looking at animals and humans in acute pain. Konni always provided extra treats, fruit in season, confiscated wines and liqueurs, pastries, marmalade along with broken bones, open wounds, flogging, burning, freezing, medical injections and death. Gerhard did not offer a simple catalog. He suffered over every word, at times licked white, dry lips, murmuring,
“You know, you know.” In distaste he had found a kind of enchantment.
At some time during the recital Imre came to the edge of the room, saw us preoccupied, went off silently. He had probably meant to remind us that supper waited. The room was airless and smelled of tobacco. How long had we been contained within these walls? His voice afflicted with a rattle, Gerhard asked, “You know what happened when the Russians came?”
He had already described the retreat before the advancing Russians, but only from the viewpoint of an Army officer who had escaped in defeat. Like a man dying and cautious of breath, he now spoke of the massacre of the Wardenthal staff by peasants and villagers as well as those prisoners who had strength enough to wield axes and fire guns. Gerhard had tried to find Konni, had waited hiding and in peril, close to starvation, until there was no more hope.
When by a devious and dangerous route Gerhard got back to Berlin there were Russian soldiers at the gate of the family house which had become some kind of official headquarters. All around was ruin, and there was no one to tell him what had happened to his mother and sister. Late that night he found them in the flat of Irene’s old governess. Frau Irmengarde had waited, sure of her son’s survival. Irene was having an affair with an American soldier (merely a sergeant) and brought PX delicacies to her disapproving mother. After her daughter married Sergeant Flood and went with him to America, Frau Irmengarde and her son managed to get to Switzerland where they found not only sufficient food but such conveniences as numbered bank accounts and sanitariums for the benumbed.
The story my husband told was accep
ted as a confession of perversity which it was, also truthful so far as that part of the past was concerned. “I came to life,” he had said, “I adored Konni.” Evidences produced by such phrases, the quickening of physical movement and boyish blushes made me see it as a love story, twisted and tragic. I suffered as though I were reading a sad novel when he told me of hopeless days and endless nights in the mountain clinic above Zurich. For almost two years he saw no one but doctors, nurses, servants and his mother, read books on art and history, listened to no radio broadcasts, looked at no newspapers. The war criminals trials were history before he heard about them. “I knew nothing.”
After he was discharged from the sanitarium he traveled with Frau Irmengarde. The relationship deepened. He found her witty and spirited, far less lofty than she had seemed in his childhood when every icy word and every imperious gesture had been calculated as a snub to her husband. As a widow with a handsome son as escort she traveled in great style for those shabby days. Gerhard would have liked to settle in Portugal in the suburb of Esteril where they had occupied a splendid villa in the hills above the sea, but his mother was tired of foreign languages, unable to digest the oily foods. She longed for her native tongue. Seeking a home in the Bavarian Alps, they had heard of the bargain castle in Austria, had come to look and fallen in love.
Liebhofen had given their life direction and purpose.
I had heard this part of the story many times, and about his dear mother’s death, but I listened quietly this time because the telling gave him relief.
“But you have not told me about Konni,” I said. “What happened to him? Didn’t you ever try to find out?”
Once more the mood changed. With his hand screening his mouth he whispered, “I tried. From the clinic. But it was difficult, a dangerous business then. Our enemies were everywhere. No German was safe.” He looked around the room as if he suspected eavesdroppers. “I had to be careful, not communicate with the wrong people. You can’t imagine the difficulties.”
