The Brides of Solomon

by Geoffrey Household

  The less one knew, the better. But I had occasionally to deliver material to another organisation—a suicidal outfit of Poles, led by a Colonel Lipski who passed himself off as a sturdy blacksmith from Posen. Communication with him was difficult—we were taking our orders from different sources—and I had recourse to Dina. She could disappear into the wet, black streets and become part of the drifting smoke and drifting masses. It was quite natural for Poles to foregather. We all had so much freedom.

  That’s an odd view of wartime Germany, isn’t it? But sometimes, after working hours, the streets seemed to hold more foreigners than Germans. The situation must have been a nightmare for the Gestapo. They did their best. Efficiency was impossible, so they made up for it by terror. In our factory alone they tortured and shot four men for sabotage. Two were loyal Nazis. One was their own agent. And the fourth, a very conscientious foreman. A little too conscientious. In that fog of suspicion we were remarkably successful at faking evidence against anyone who was better dead.

  Still, human nature was on the Gestapo side. Their agents, sharing a street corner or a café or just a damp patch of shadow with weary foreigners, were bound to make friends. Those war slaves were simple people, straight from tenements or villages. Five per cent would betray whatever they didn’t understand for money; and twenty per cent couldn’t keep a secret without telling a neighbour. That made a full quarter whom it was lethal to trust. And into that sullen, formless mass I had to send Dina. She must have felt a little like your Victorian vicar’s daughter then.

  Some such murderous rumour, something whispered and overheard in the dusk at the factory gate, enveloped Lipski and his organisation. I don’t suppose the Gestapo knew at first what would come out of the arrests. But Dina and I knew. Lipski hated too passionately. If they really went to work on him, he was likely to spit in his interrogator’s face and boast of his past and what he had done—naturally taking all the blame on himself. He was a very gallant man, but not clever. A trained Gestapo expert, with such a spirited confession to work from, could lead the blacksmith-colonel much farther along his line of contacts that he ever meant to go.

  It was then that Dina came to my workshop. She had every right to be there. She was employed in the storekeeper’s office, and I used to pass my indents through her. My assistants just grinned whenever I invited her into my little private office. Not unpleasantly. The smiles merely commented on the sentiment of a middle-aged Austrian for a waif as tense as the glass on which he worked.

  ‘I shall be next,’ she said.

  She gloried in it. Think of your own daughter in her most unaccountable and resolute mood—that was Dina! She might have determined to run away and get married. A grim bridegroom. Not to be feared if he embraced her instantaneously. But the Gestapo might ensure that the honeymoon was protracted.

  It was a wonder that she had not been arrested already. Lipski was possibly unconscious for the time being.

  ‘Try to believe that you know nothing,’ I told her. ‘Why shouldn’t you have taken messages for me? My assistants, the foreman, the office boy—they are always trotting about the works with notes from me. I have a passion for writing notes. Forget down to the bottom of your soul that what I gave you had any more significance than what I give them!’

  She refused to be put off.

  ‘It’s not the messages among ourselves,’ she answered. ‘I am the only person who could lead the police from Lipski to us.’

  ‘But you will not,’ I assured her.

  ‘How can you know I won’t?’ she cried. ‘How can I know? We must make sure—both of us.’

  I pretended not to know what she wanted. She was so young, and death is so irrevocable.

  ‘You promised,’ she said.

  Well, I had—to all of them who worked directly under me. Yes, I had explained to them that instant death was quite painless, reminded them that soldiers seldom had that much luck, told them that the only thing to fear was betrayal of a comrade. All very suitable. No doubt there were thousands of commanding officers handing out the same line on both sides of twenty different fronts. But that did not make it less true.

  I had the pills locked up with my personal instruments, marked Aspirin. Hold one in your handkerchief, male or female, convey it to your mouth and crunch. A remedy that no one should be without, as the advertisements say. It was a pity that the establishment behind Lipski had never distributed free samples. But they were doing sabotage on a shoe-string.

  Dina was bound to be questioned. Lipski would not give her away—not even spitting at them. Poles are always chivalrous. But nothing could prevent them finding out, by a process of elimination, that she was among three or four suspects who came into the story out of darkness and vanished back into darkness. And Dina, of course, could lead them to me. Not that I mattered. I had cyanide, too.

  I gave her what the situation demanded, remembering—oh, that she was alive and all she wouldn’t be if she were dead.

  Dina was arrested next day. She did her duty. Only eighteen she was when her teeth met in the pill. Don’t they say that all his past life revolves before a drowning man? Well, before her, in the second that was left to her, revolved all the future she might have had. The lovers, the husband, the children, the peace which somehow, some day, would bring long unimaginable years.

  Less than a second, I had told her. But there was time in it for a moment of truth when the fifty or sixty years which might have been could advance her, on account, their visions of fulfilment.

  Just as real, perhaps, as a glimpse of heaven to the old and pious. But she was too young. No harps or angels or Nirvana for her. Life—that was the heaven which Dina saw unfolding. Yet she crunched and she swallowed, and her heart raced so that she thought its last fluttering was on her. But still the heavy boots marched on each side of her, and she with them.

  All men are much the same. My duty was to see that she died before she could talk. Theirs was to exterminate the saboteur. Yet they were quite content to question her decently for a day, and then put her in Ravensbruck Camp as a highly suspicious character against whom nothing definite could be proved. Even in Ravensbruck the commandant made a sort of pet of her. When for a few seconds you have longed to live with a passion that most of us never know in our whole existence, your joy thereafter is bound to make its mark on those around you.

  And so on to this day. What we see in her is a woman whose every cell is still rejoicing because it is alive. There’s little room for hurt after a rebirth like that, and none at all for guilt. And love of husband and children is an unexpected Gift of God that goes far beyond the hackneyed phrase, even beyond her dreams of them while crunching cyanide. That is the explanation of Dina.

  A miracle? No, I gave her real Aspirin, of course. There are times when the preservation of an individual is more important than any good reason of state. Isn’t that what we were fighting about?

  Salute

  MADAME CLÉMENCE was in her neat office at the back of the shop. She did not enjoy selling. Her prosperity depended upon a flair for buying and her own adventurous taste. She trusted to the the little window which overlooked the silver-white counters and the blue carpet to enable her to keep an eye on the tastes and nationalities of her customers.

  Waiting to be served was a tall woman, elegantly Swedish or German, who examined the hand-woven silks with a leisurely grace in which was no impatience or indeed the slightest suggestion that patience was demanded. As she looked upwards to follow the stroll of an embroidered mandarin across his willow-pattern bridge, the light fell full upon the strong angles of her face. Clémence exclaimed, and ran down the five steps from her office.

  At the bottom, with an impulsive, merry gesture, she flicked the imitation of a French army salute. The other, instantly recognising her, responded by a joyous exaggeration of a Prussian officer and then held out both her hands. A ten minutes’ conversation, begun fifteen years earlier in the office of the Gestapo at Lille, had been picked up ex
actly at the point where it left off.

  ‘Madame,’ said Clémence, ‘still carries herself like a young Countess.’

  ‘And you, Madame, have changed in nothing,’ answered the German.

  She spoke good international French with a cool, neutral accent which was as restful to Clémence as the familiar voice of a sister.

  ‘I was just about to leave,’ the Frenchwoman said. ‘It would give me great pleasure if Madame were free to lunch with me.’

  ‘I should be delighted.’

  As the two walked down a short, sun-chequered street to the restaurant where Clémence entertained such business acquaintances as cared deeply what they ate, the men who were walking up it turned their heads—in tribute to distinction rather than in hope of response. It was a tribute which neither, if alone, could have been quite certain of receiving. The German was lithe and long-legged with classic features which life and summer suns had dried nearly to severity. Clémence, though she had preserved the leaf-brown hair and cream complexion of her teens was aware—with as much humour as regret since she was most happily married—that her figure had begun to share their luxuriance. She was thirty-two, and supposed that the German was about ten years older.

  Clémence chose from the menu for her companion’s unknown tastes, asking with lifted eyebrow if her guesses were correct and receiving unspoken confirmation. They discussed Paris and—a little—politics. In spite of their strange certainty of friendship, facts compelled reticence. Her guest had been a secretary to the Gestapo.

  ‘This Vouvray is so refreshing, Madame.’

  ‘I am enchanted that you like it. Your vines have recovered from the winter of 1956?’

  ‘They are accustomed to the stupidities of our land,’ answered the German with a smile which was half melancholy, half invitation.

  ‘You were really—just a secretary?’

  ‘Nothing more. I wrote French well, you see. That is not so common.’

  ‘All the same,’ Clémence protested, ‘when I think of those files—’

  ‘They were not as you imagine. Every army must look after its security. Your own deuxième bureau would have used controls and records like ours.’

  ‘Dear madame, I do not even know what to call you,’ said Clémence, noticing the nervous movements of her long fingers.

  ‘Herta. I saw your name for the first time in the shop, Clémence.’

  ‘And … a family?’

  ‘A widow. He was on the Russian front when I was in France.’

  ‘There is nothing else but to serve too—wherever we can.’

  ‘Clémence, I knew nothing of the treatment of prisoners. That was the unforgivable horror. But in our office there was no brutality. We had no cells. We were only investigating commercial offences.’

  The Frenchwoman made a quick, shy gesture towards her, the strip of feather and velvet on her hair hovering like a crimson humming bird at the brim of her guest’s gallantly twisted felt.

  Commercial offences! And that easy, affectionate old fool of a father of hers need never have broken the invaders’ law. It was not for motives of patriotism; just for money, of which, anyway, they had enough. The Boches had requisitioned the whole output of the Lille cotton mill for which he was chief salesman, but a small trickle of goods managed to get out to retailers by the back door. Her father met a supposed Dutch buyer. No sooner had the documents and the cash changed hands than he found a pistol in the pit of his stomach. The penalty was indefinite imprisonment, and could be death.

  Clémence, then seventeen, called at the office of the Gestapo. The Major in command had a reputation—well not exactly of a woman hunter, but of over-sentimentality. He compensated for his brutal trade by a tenderness for youth, especially if it were feminine. Clémence knew his character. They all discussed and studied the weak points of their individual oppressors with devotion as meticulous as that of a university professor trying to recover meaning in a text hopelessly corrupt.

  ‘He did not exist,’ Clémence said.

  ‘No,’ agreed the German, following her train of thought though the Major had never been mentioned at all. ‘He was the kind of man who can persuade himself every week that he is in love.’

  Clémence was allowed to see him, perhaps because it never occurred to her that she would not be. Even then she had the Frenchwoman’s medieval gift of arousing chivalry and passion. The Major emerged with an air of military courtesy from behind his desk and sat down beside her.

  What she intended—but at seventeen it was hard to analyse what one intended. If the Major were to kiss her, she would not resist, but what did one do then? And whatever one did, would it make any difference? She supposed that there ought to be a promise to release her father. Or would that be too much to ask at once? Prices and promises were never, surely, very direct. The thing to do was to excite his interest and soften it, not buy it, into pity.

  The Major was slimily correct. He pretended to be amused by her visit in a patronising, almost paternal manner, but his eyes were uncomfortably admiring. It was going to be easy to make him believe that he attracted her. He sent for the file on her father.

  This woman, now lunching with her, had brought it in and, for a little while, remained. In her presence Clémence behaved with the dignity proper to a jeune fille of good family. She was not sure whether the cause was just shame before an older woman, or whether it was the sudden example of a grace and maturity which, German or not, she envied. Instinct cried out to her that to exploit her seductive youth was not the right way, that to the secretary it would appear a betrayal of—of whatever affinity they had.

  ‘What a bizarre thing is friendship!’ Clémence murmured.

  ‘But we had everything in common,’ the German answered decisively. ‘Everything which matters, that is.’

  ‘I could not count on that. It never occurred to me. You were just—of my world, when nothing else was.’

  Yet there had been no challenge or appeal whatever in the meeting of eyes. Both had been completely neutral. But when the secretary left the room Clémence treated the Gestapo major as if he had been a French civil servant—a police commissioner whom one expected to listen without interposing any personal relationship beyond a formal compliment. He responded with a detached politeness. The extenuating circumstances which Mademoiselle had been good enough to bring to his notice would be considered, but the law must regrettably take its course.

  On her way out, accusing herself of cowardice, of an idiotic squeamishness, she passed through an ante-room where the secretary sat at her typewriter among shelves of files.

  ‘When I left the Major’s office, how did you know?’ Clémence asked. ‘Or did you know?’

  ‘Of course I did! It was obvious that—how shall I put it?—that you had broken your sword over your knee. The face of a girl after a little triumph, even if she were disgusted with herself—wouldn’t you recognise it?’

  ‘You asked me if you could help.’

  ‘Did I? So openly?’ the German smiled. ‘I suppose it was essential to be frank quickly.’

  ‘I loved the way you carried yourself, Herta.’

  ‘For me it was your voice.’

  The conversation had been, then as now, all composed of omissions. The secretary had complimented Clémence upon the beauty of her hair. Clémence offered to send her a packet of shampoo of pre-war quality, forgetting that it was impossible legally to buy it. The German accepted gladly.

  ‘But don’t tell me where it comes from,’ she reminded the girl.

  It was extraordinary that on so short an acquaintance the reminder should have been necessary.

  ‘What am I to do?’ Clémence had asked.

  The secretary glanced contemptuously through her father’s file.

  ‘These penalties are so stupid,’ she exclaimed. ‘At the most he deserves a fine of fifty thousand francs.’

  Clémence was again compelled to think in terms of the unfamiliar. She had heard, like everyone else, tha
t some of the employees of the Gestapo were not above adding to their pay. She had decided nearly at once that this splendid older woman did not intend a hint.

  The maître d’hotel presented in its copper chafing dish the woodcock ordered for her guest. Clémence inspected it closely, and raised three fingers in approval.

  ‘One is very doubtful at seventeen,’ she said. ‘All that one is going to be is already there, but one cannot know it.’

  ‘I was so angry with myself.’

  ‘We are thinking of the same thing, Herta?’

  ‘Fifty thousand francs? One makes such remarks forgetting what they might mean. And when I saw you hesitate I could have killed myself. There was no time for explanations. Either we trusted each other or nothing mattered.’

  The woodcock flamed under the match. Clémence composedly withdrew her immense and charming sleeves. She heard her own strained voice at seventeen asking if a fine were impossible, and dreading the answer.

  ‘Impossible. But, my dear, your father will be home tomorrow.’

  The secretary pinned the papers together and transferred them bodily to another file.

  ‘Release and keep under surveillance,’ she explained. ‘There are so many of them who give orders. No one will ever question it.’

  ‘Oh, thank you! Thank you!’

  ‘Try to keep him from being a fool. I could not do it twice.’

  ‘What shall I tell my father?’

  ‘I should not tell him anything. He would only misunderstand.’

  ‘They find it so difficult to believe that women can be friends.’

  ‘My dear,’ said the secretary, opening the door for her, ‘they do not even know how to salute one another without using their hands.’

  Constant Lover

  HAVE you ever insulted a man without speaking to him, without anything more than a casual meeting of eyes? I did, and the injustice of my thoughts about him still haunts me. I will give you the evidence just as it was presented to me. You may be cleverer than I was.