Lifting two fingers (as if to bless),
“Don’t let me find you, with your sacred conscience, in any part of our world. I should hate to have to kill you. Do you know, I like you.”
He leaned forward, so that Renn saw the flecks of gold in his black restless eyes.
“Tell me one thing. All rhetoric apart — if you knew — I say, knew — that by sacrificing one, two, three generations — or by liquidating a million or even ten million men and women — you would save the rest and the children for ever . . . you’d do it, wouldn’t you?”
“No.”
“Coward!” Kalitin said gaily.
Renn’s fatigue had vanished, driven out of him by excitement and a cold self-recollection very like that he had felt in the moments (during the war) before a parachute jump.
“No, you are the reason,” he said coolly. “When I listen to you — I realise what is happening. Has happened. You belong to the new caste of masters. An abyss divides you from the common man you — not you, you’re too young — set out to free. The abyss between users and used is. . . unbridgeable. That’s your betrayal...”
He saw that Kalitin was smiling. In an ironical voice he added,
“If a woman you were living with, or your son, began to hold heretical opinions, would you denounce them?”
“Certainly,” answered Kalitin.
“Even though you knew it meant they would be put to death?”
Kalitin’s smile held a friendly mockery.
“Rhetoric! Because they were, let’s say, intimately known to me, I ought, you think, to let them go on betraying?”
His excitement had died: he became aware again of the room, the smell in it of dust and leather, of Kalitin’s hand lying on the desk, and its remarkable delicacy and strength. He had an impulse — ridiculous — to lay his own beside it. Except that there was less force in his, they were much alike. They would make the same gestures. Apart from this (the rhetoric, perhaps, of the body), he and Kalitin had nothing in common, scarcely a sentiment, scarcely an idea. The idea of fraternity, the idea of men’s quality, their title as human beings: in this, the millennial language of Europe (only of Europe?), they were dumbly unable to talk to each other. Even, he thought ironically, though we are both policemen. He said calmly,
“I couldn’t do it. It feels — to me — an infinitely more evil treachery than theirs to the State.”
Kalitin was silent. Abruptly, with a jerk of his head,
“Perhaps it wouldn’t be so easy to denounce a son. All the same, I should do it. . . You are no gentler than I am. It’s only that you care more for your peace of mind than for peace.”
Like a young animal slipped off the leash, his gaiety broke out.
“More for your own miserable soul than for the people, which is more important than any of its single souls. Than even a million of them!”
The telephone rang. He listened a moment, and said,
“Yes. Rechberg has gone back. Half an hour since.”
“Thank you,” Renn said.
He stood up. This time Kalitin did not walk with him to the door. He stood, smiling, behind his desk. When Renn reached the door, Kalitin spoke again.
“Your friend Rechberg,” he said lightly, “is a poor sleeper.”
On the point of asking what he meant, Renn changed his mind. He thought he knew.
His first sight of Rechberg, two hours later when the man was brought into his room, showed him that he was right. Rechberg’s eyes were inflamed, as if he had not slept for a great many nights, the eyelids swollen; he was a bad colour. He had shaved, or been shaved, and his skin looked sore. He walked, his crippled ankle forcing him to move slowly, with exaggerated care, as if he were very drunk. With all this, he was not pitiable, and not clumsy.
Renn did not tell him to sit down.
He asked him about Kalb. As if it were not a question but a reminder: on August 12th, he had been with his cousin, Dr Lucius Gerlach, when Kalb came with a letter; he had left the house with Kalb, walked to the Kurfürstendamm with him, and there left him with a Dr Gustav Leist.
Rechberg said quietly,
“Kalb? Who is he?”
“I’ll recall him to you. . .”
Rechberg listened with an absent politeness: under their reddened lids, his eyes remained unwavering, blankly soft.
“No,” he said at last, with a gentle coldness: “I have never seen him. I’m not in the habit of knowing Jews.”
“Have you mistaken me?” Renn paused. “Dr Gerlach’s statement is precise. Shall I repeat it to you?”
“It’s not necessary. I haven’t mistaken you. The mistake is my cousin’s.”
He hesitated, seemed to decide, and added softly,
“Since he was in Buchenwald so many years, his memory — even his mind. . . It’s not surprising. I myself was in prison for eight months, and I know that the effects can be severe. I say: severe.”
Renn looked at his eyes. They were without light or reflection, as though their substance had changed and thickened; if they held any expression, it was of an uneasy sadness. There was no fear. Of the thoughts moving behind that opaque jelly, not a shadow. If, Renn thought, he has reached that degree of exhaustion when no threats can frighten him, it might be better to let him rest a little.
“Do you know Leist?”
A long hesitation. It was the first sign of uncertainty. “Yes. I employed him as an expert on paintings. Before the war.”
“Not during the war?”
“During the war Dr Leist was in Government service.”
Rechberg swayed, and steadied himself by touching the desk. His eyes closed. At once, his face became that of an old woman, with sagging cheeks and soft wrinkled mouth. In the instant when he opened his eyes, Renn caught in them a gleam of contempt.
“Excuse me, I am tired.”
No, I shall not let him sit down: he is in control of himself.
“I am sorry I have to go on questioning you,” he said, with a deliberate indifference: “your cousin’s statement, and Dr Leist’s very precise statement...”
He waited. The effort Rechberg was making was perceptible. He answered as if he were speaking to an annoying servant: rather more plainly than in words, his tone said: You are a low fellow, a policeman.
“If Dr Leist has said anything that contradicts or involves me I shall be surprised. I should like him to be questioned in front of me.”
To be insulted gave Renn a perverse satisfaction — but he was not amused by Rechberg’s ability to treat him as if he existed in some other and inferior sense of existence. He felt a moment of stupefying rage. He dismissed it, easily enough, and was about to answer: the door opened with great energy and Colonel Brett came in.
“Sorry I couldn’t come at once,” he said. He stared at Rechberg. “Is this the fellow? Has he explained why he was in another sector of this place than he’s allowed to be?”
“Not yet,” Renn said.
“Well, ask him.”
He sat down, stretching his legs out, and went on staring at Rechberg with a hard curiosity, as he might have examined a unicorn. It was not an indecent nor overbearing curiosity. The thought brushed Renn’s mind that Brett’s distaste for what he called “these poor sacred devils of Boches” was more human than his own, deeper, less cruel.
“What reason had you for going into the Russian sector?
“I didn’t go,” Rechberg said quietly, “I was taken.”
“What does that mean?”
“Exactly what it says. I was in the Tiergarten that evening — five weeks ago — about eight in the evening: a group of Russian soldiers — I suppose they were soldiers, they had guns on their backs — hustled me into the Pariser-platz, and then into a lorry. In the lorry one of them struck me on the head and I fainted. When I recovered they were pushing me into a room, I believe, no, I feel sure, a room in a large policestation. . . I have been in that room until ten o’clock this morning.” He paused, and went on in the
same colourless voice, “I imagine that, as a German, I have no redress.”
Renn smiled.
“You were kidnapped?”
“That, I think, is the right word.”
“Why? I take it that you discovered why.”
Slowly, with a weary precision, Rechberg said that he had been examined on a number of personal documents to do with his business as head of the Gessler Steel firm. He added unemotionally,
“During the last five days, the examinations took place in front of a very powerful lamp. It was like looking at molten steel. In fact, it was impossible to look at it, and I felt the heat through my eyelids. Also — I was not allowed to sleep during the last days, except for an hour or two.”
He had told the truth in every point, except his pretence that he had been kidnapped. After a moment’s hesitation, Renn said so to the colonel, adding: “And of course it’s the only important point — why he went. The rest is quite unimportant.”
Rechberg took as little notice as if he were deaf.
Abruptly, Brett said,
“You intend to stick to it that you were kidnapped?”
Rechberg looked at him with a barely noticeable air of surprise.
“I’m sure you don’t expect me to invent a detail.”
He laid the faintest possible stress on the “you ”, implying without any awkwardness that a man who seemed to be well-bred would have no difficulty in believing him. This time Renn was amused. He waited. A little drily, Brett said,
“Shall we leave the fellow to think for an hour?”
He was left for two hours — in a room where he and the policeman watching him stood against opposite walls. During the whole of this time (the guard said), Rechberg did not lean against his wall.
He was fetched back, and questioned, this time by Brett. He made the same answers, gave the same details of his endlessly involved examinations by the Russian police. Once only, he answered with emotion. Brett had asked him if the Russians had taken anything from him.
“A small photograph of my two daughters,” he said.
He lifted his hands, in a pitiful gesture of loss and exhaustion. Brett ignored it. He repeated his questions implacably during an hour. At the end he said curtly,
“Put him away in some room where he can sleep as long as he likes.”
“Thank you,” Rechberg said.
He swayed, and fell forward over the desk.
Chapter Twenty-five
“You have done everything, all possible. I am very grateful,” Kalb said.
Gerlach did not answer him. He was revolted by the cell, by its unpleasant smells — worse than any of them, the smell of fear. He had noticed this on the way back from the court: Kalb’s clothes, or his thin arms when he moved them, gave it off. Standing as far as possible from him in the narrow space, he caught it again now. In the same instant, he saw Kalb in the court-room, standing rigid and attentive between his two young guards: seen like this, from the table at the side where Gerlach was sitting, he was an unprepossessing insect. He had wanted to give evidence, and in cross-examination afterwards had so betrayed himself that a murmur in which there was a note of amusement rose among the Germans crowded behind him. They had not come to see a wretched Jew found guilty and sentenced to death. Why, then? To hear and watch Lucius Gerlach trying — and failing — to convince an English court.
He realised with a light shock that Kalb was in tears. Seated on the edge of his bunk, elbows pressing his thin knees, face buried in his hands, he cried without a sound. The tears forced their way between his fingers. Gerlach spoke to him. He looked up: his face was so ugly with his crying that it was hardly the face of a man. Dr Gerlach felt a sharp and involuntary contempt. He tried to keep it out of his voice.
“Come, you’ve been brave until now. Why give up?”
“I’m sorry. I must cry,” Kalb murmured.
“Why?”
A silence. Kalb said in a low voice,
“Because of the unkindness.”
Gerlach felt closing round him the cold of this solitude. At this moment he was sorry for Kalb, with a sorrow he would have felt also for a guilty man. He was still certain that Kalb was innocent.
“I don’t want you to hope anything,” he said slowly. “There is still, however, one very — infinitely small — chance. The sentence might be. . . reduced.”
Kalb took a ragged and disagreeable handkerchief out of his pocket, and rubbed his face: he dried his spectacles and put them back. Quietly and stubbornly, he said,
“No, it will not be reduced.”
“It’s impossible to be sure.”
“I am sure.”
He was like a child who has cried himself into an exhausted peace. A timid friendly smile skipped across his face. For no reason except to fill the few minutes before he could decently leave him alone, Gerlach began to explain to him what would happen now: the record of the trial, with the evidence, would be sent to the Legal Division at the headquarters of the Control Commission; its Director General, a lawyer in uniform, would review it and send it on again with his findings to the Chief of the Division, also a lawyer, of higher military rank — “I think, yes, a Major-General. He in his turn forwards it. . .”
He felt himself being invaded by a bitter sense of failure; turning his eyes from Kalb, he walked up and down the cell, five paces from wall to wall: it was only now that he realised the walls, and that when he left, their weight would rest on Kalb’s narrow shoulders. A light and curiously startling sound, like wings, caught his ear. He turned. Kalb had dropped off to sleep, falling sideways on his bunk in a dilapidated little heap of bones and cloth.
Stooping, Gerlach tried to make him comfortable. When he took hold of the stick-like arms and legs, he felt a shudder of unwilling repulsion. He was afraid, too, of wakening Kalb.
The door of the cell opened noisily, and he turned on the intruder in anger.
“Be quiet.”
He looked quickly at Kalb. A jerk passed through his body when the door was slammed shut, but he did not wake up; his sleep was too heavy.
The man who had come in in this abrupt way was a Lutheran pastor. At first sight his face was confusedly familiar, but only, Gerlach realised swiftly, because he had seen so many of these peasants’ sons turned priest. The focus of an expression of sturdy benevolence, his eyes, narrow and deep-set, had the peasant’s irony and slyness. He had immense hands, covered with a red down.
“I beg your pardon,” Gerlach said, “but don’t rouse him, please. Perhaps you’ll wait?”
Vexed, he decided instantly that he must wait himself: he could not trust the fellow, if he left them alone, not to wake Kalb as soon as he had gone — perhaps roughly.
The other nodded. Straddling his legs, as though his large well-fed body were difficult to balance standing, he stood for a moment silent. He wanted to talk: he was, Gerlach saw, bursting his overcoat with words. At last, in an actor’s whisper, he said,
“My name is Dücker. Tell me, did he do it?”
“What?”
“Is he guilty?”
“Certainly not,” Gerlach said drily.
Dücker nodded again.
“If you, Dr Gerlach, tell me so, I must believe you — in spite of the evidence.”
Gerlach found this offensive; he gave way to a malicious impulse.
“I think I have met you somewhere. Let me see — were you in Buchenwald?”
“No, no.”
“Ah, it must have been before that. You were probably in the army. . .”
“No. I was fortunate. I remained in my parish.”
Yes, I know you, thought Gerlach. You made your peace with the Nazis in good time: when others of your faith were got rid of, or fled for safety into the army, you kept your pay and your manse.
“Are you still in your parish?”
“Of course,” the other answered, surprised. His voice since he forgot to whisper had become more and more authoritative, pastoral. Eyeing Gerlach inquisit
ively, almost inimically,
“I heard your latest address — I may say, your sermon. Forgive me if I say that I couldn’t wholly approve of it. It struck me that you said too much about guilt, while taking too little pains to discriminate between guilty and innocent. To those of us Germans who are not guilty, it seems that you are a little — almost a malady — obsessed.”
“You take comfort in your innocence?” Gerlach said drily.
“In all modesty, yes. But that’s not important. I am not important. I feel, excuse me, that a man with your name, your power for good, should use your authority to stiffen our spirit, not to sadden many innocent people whose error — forgivable, like the errors of young children — was that they obeyed the criminals.”
Gerlach watched curiously the activity of his hands; the fingers, long, with a shrewdness of their own, were making slight restless movements, as though (Gerlach thought) arranging the smaller rotten apples out of sight at the bottom of the basket. He was ashamed of his loathing of the man. He forced himself to speak as if he were talking to an equal:
“The crime — our German crime — I mean the intention, in the camps, to debase man himself — and the killing, as if they were not human at all, of so many people... I include those of our own whom we called ’useless lives’ and got rid of. . . is a gross version — we Germans are a little coarse — of the contempt all men who have power without love, and without the fear of God, feel for human beings. It is also, I say also, a guilt of all Germans. Expiation. . .” he smiled — “speaking only for Lucius Gerlach, I believe that poverty and obscurity. . .”
Dücker stared at him, now openly hostile.
“A refinement of scruple,” he said.
Gerlach’s anger blinded him.
“I ask no one to share my scruples.”
With a sly smile, sly and at the same time curiously severe, Dücker said,
“Yes, yes, I see. You come of a good family, every German of any education has at least heard of you. That is to say, you’ve transformed what you think of as your right to power into spiritual power. . . As for living obscurely — in the first place, my dear sir, you are not obscure; in the second, perhaps what would tempt you to live differently — more in harmony, that is, with your real position — has not yet been offered.”
The Black Laurel Page 27
