“What will they do to me? Tell me, please. What’s going to happen to me?”
“Nothing,” Hana said gently. “We are all speaking for you, all your prisoners. We shall get you off.”
She took the bread from her handbag, the guard looking the other way, and gave it into a hand which grasped and thrust it out of sight in a gaping bodice. The German woman was still crying like a child or an idiot. With a barely perceptible hesitation, Hana put an arm round her and kissed her; the German clung to her meagre shoulders, sobbing noisily, and smiling. Then shuffled back up the stairs, pressing the slice of bread to a body which must have been grotesque in uniform, it was so helplessly the body of a comfortable sluttish housewife.
As they moved away Hana said, without contempt,
“We Czechs did not cry.”
She shrugged her shoulders and went on in a meditative voice,
“She was kind, she did little things for us, but you should have seen the chief woman guard — she was a born killer. She was in bed with the prison governor, we knew it. She was consumptive. When you looked in her eyes you saw only death, death, death. One day about five o’clock they went to Terezin in the car, the two of them, and killed, and came back and were merry together. The Germans always showed this prison to the Red Cross when these tall amiable gentlemen came from Sweden to look at the political prisoners. They were so so delighted, and praised everything they saw. And why not? They couldn’t know what went on in the lovely hygienic cells. They held spectacles to their innocent eyes, but the poor blood spilt everywhere was quiet.”
They were now two floors underground, in another of the broad corridors. The guard unlocked a door.
“This is the small bathroom,” said Hana.
A dingy little room, with a cracked wash-basin, lavatory seat, and a single naked electric bulb.
“Prisoners were hanged with wire, from the pipe of the cistern. I think they haven’t shown it to the Red Cross. . . even if they did, who would guess how many Czech lives which began in the republic ended in this shabby room in a basement?”
The room would have been less unpleasant if it had not been so like a wash-room in a cheap hotel. And less ridiculous. Nothing of death remained here except its absurdity and frightful meanness. Renn saw a spider run at an incredible rate across the wall; involuntarily he moved back, and shuddered. He had said nothing; any words would have been useless or foolish: moreover, he resented as much her calmness, the boyish smiles of the Czech guard, and the horror, the self-disgust, he felt when he looked at the rough dirty walls and reflected that he, too, was a human being. In the room they went into next, he felt only a cold curiosity. Designed — by a German — to terrify, it gave away not only the cruelty and obscenity of his German mind but its deep innocence. It was a large room, hung with black curtains in thick smothering folds; the only light came from an electric bulb hanging over a desk set in the middle of the floor. There was nothing else in the room.
Hana’s eyes gleamed suddenly with anger; as if to hide it she lowered the lids over them, and stood looking round the room in silence. Her thin body trembled. She began a sentence, broke down, and began again in a harsh voice.
“They brought him in here, pretending that he was going to be judged. But of course he had been judged already, and all they did was glance at him from behind the desk and say: You have not been reprieved. Three of the four S. S. guards took him. They lifted the curtain. . .”
Smiling, the Czech guard pulled at the black folds which covered the wall facing the desk. There was no wall. The other half of the room contained the guillotine. A thin hose lay on the floor ready to clean up afterwards: the room was white-tiled, with a concrete floor, easy to clean. For use when the caprice of the judges preferred it, there were steel girders grooved for the easy running of hooks like those in a modern butcher’s shop. It could not have been more crazily unlike the mediœval mummery of the other half of the room. Austere, full of light, with the angular skeleton of the guillotine planted in the centre, it reminded Renn of those landscapes, empty except for a few nakedly geometric objects, in which surrealist painters hide from their fear of life. . .
“They led him into this place and drew the curtain again. But, of course, the judges, and the next one of our people who is being told: You haven’t been reprieved, can hear everything going on behind the curtain.”
Renn did not speak. He was relieved to see that in her devouring contempt and anger she did not notice that he was silent. The young guard in the meantime had been fiddling with the guillotine. Anxious to do something to entertain the visitor, he said eagerly, in halting German,
“You’d like to see how it worked —”
And released the heavy steel blade. It fell like a stone, with a loud dull clatter.
Renn ate an atrocious lunch in the Alcron. He went out afterwards and walked down to the river. On the other bank, an arc drawn on the summit of the hill in front of the arrows of the cathedral, Hradcany had kept its air of serenity and balance. The invader had left no marks on it. Nowadays, he thought, when greatness is becoming more and more a simple matter of technics, history has withdrawn into things. So long as Hradcany has the luck to survive it will have infinitely more to say to us than any tongue: it’s not likely to survive so many more years; those who come after us will have to content themselves with something a little more modest in the way of history — a broken cup or page 18 of The Waste Land found in a cellar.
He stared at it. A light the colour of silence, the colour of warmth, the colour of forgetfulness of tortures, fell on it from a young sky. A great many youths and girls walked, hurried, along the embankment; it struck him that nowhere else had he seen so many of these: they moved with a brusque energy and lightness, as though they knew for certain where they were going. Is it true? he wondered. Is there really one city which has memories of a future?
He was, he knew it, putting off going to the internment camp. If it were true that Marie was there he had no idea yet what to say to her, and no idea what he dare promise her. It might be worse than difficult to get her away.
Worse still, he thought suddenly, horrified by himself; do I want to get her away and burden myself with her?
It was between four and five when he got out of the taxi at the gate of the camp. He showed his permit and walked through the barbed wire into the compound.
He saw half a dozen long huts, close together, and a shabby brick building. Since his permit said he was to see the camp, the elderly guard led him directly to one of the huts. Renn went with him in silence. The young woman who had given her name as Marie Pieck was, he knew, still in the camp hospital, but he felt a shameful curiosity. No — it was not that. In his heart, he shrank nervously from knowing how men and women lived in these places; he was forcing himself to feel curiosity. In fact he felt angry, humiliated, almost degraded.
They stepped into a narrow ante-room. A group of women, carrying tin mugs, stood listlessly before the official who had brought them the last meal of the day: pieces of dark bread, one for each man, woman, or child, and pails full of the thin, bitter, nearly tasteless “coffee”. When Renn came in, their heads turned towards him with the avid humility of a dog who thinks he has found his master at last.
“Speak to them,” the guard said, in German, “we’re not jailers, they’re free to speak.”
Awkwardly — it was as difficult to speak to these women as to a caged animal — Renn glanced at the one nearest him, then at the bread she was clutching in a bony hand, and asked,
“Is this your supper?”
They burst out talking, all together, a loud shrill clatter of Czech and German; skinny arms were thrust in his face to show him the bread and the wretched tins. A voice rose above the rest, speaking in English, a piercingly harsh and jeering voice.
“Yes, and our breakfast, too. And at midday we get watery soup and no bread. And that’s all we have — nothing else. And we’re hungry.”
Renn looked at the
speaker. She had a long dark face, like a horse, with gentle dark eyes; their gentleness, and the violent expression of scorn on her face, disconcerted him. He did not answer. At least, they’re not afraid to complain, he thought. He glanced at the guard, who shrugged his shoulders and said,
“They don’t get much. It’s true. And neither do we Czechs.”
An old woman pushed herself in front of the others. When she opened her mouth he saw that she was toothless. A twist of white hair clung to her wrinkled neck. Tears were running over her cheeks, and she talked, quavering, in Czech, looking eagerly into his face.
The guard translated.
“She wants to go home. She’s done nothing wrong, she says, and they need her to cook for them — she doesn’t know who can be doing it now.”
He spoke to her, with an air of indulgence, and patted her shoulder. Turning to Renn,
“I’ve told her, don’t fuss yourself, the neighbours come in every day and do the cooking for them, whoever they are.”
“Why is she here?” asked Renn. “What has she done?”
The guard spoke to her again: she lifted trembling hands and let loose another torrent of tears and gabbled words. He listened smiling.
“She doesn’t know. She must have done something. Perhaps she gave somebody away to the Germans — out of fear or spite. Who knows which? Or said something she shouldn’t. Or maybe one of her neighbours had a grudge against her and denounced her. It’ll come out when she’s examined, and they’ll probably send her home.”
“When will she be examined?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” the man said indifferently. “I dare say in a month, or six months. So many of our judges were killed by the Germans, and the rest have too much to do. Come, please.”
He moved forward. The women pressed themselves against the wall to make room; as Renn passed her, the woman who spoke English leaned forward and stared into his face with an expression of defiance and mockery: her lips were trembling, and she closed her eyes.
Inside the long room, rows of three-tiered bunks, from ceiling to floor, filled every foot of space except a narrow passage down the centre of the room. It was nearly dark in here, and for the first moment Renn had the sense that he was walking through a liquefying heap of bodies, the livid faces alone recognisable. His disgust almost drove him to rush out. Men, women, children, were standing and squatting, alone or in groups, pressed against each other and against the bunks. A few of the older children were amusing themselves by rolling in and out of the bunks, other children sat in them, doing nothing, or crawled about between the legs of adults. It struck Renn with a shock that even during the day, when they were let out of the huts, these children would see nothing except the mud and barbed wire of the compound, not a tree, not a single blade of green. At least, he thought, they will breathe air outside, not this heavy fœtid damp.
“Whole families,” the guard said, “are living here, waiting to be deported. Many of the women are Czechs who married Germans. Some of the Germans were born in the country.”
“Then why must they leave?” Renn asked. He knew the answer.
“Why? They’re Germans, aren’t they?” In a lower voice he added, “Germans killed my sister and her husband by slow strangling. Do you think I want any of them here, with their murderers’ hands?”
Renn had halted half-way down the passage squeezed between the rows of bunks; he was not able to force himself any farther. He felt bitterly ashamed to be here. At once, as if they thought he had come to help them, women pressed round him: most of them had very young children in their arms. They wanted him to look at these. A young woman unwrapped the strip of worn blanket round her baby, and said quietly,
“Look — all he has. He’s not warm enough. And what will become of him in winter?”. . .
“Mine — he’s two now — has nothing under what you see. You see, he’s grown out of what he had when we came. And he has no shoes. . .”
The guard interrupted.
“We have shoes for some of them,” he said softly, “but not the smallest sizes.”
Opening the rags it was rolled in, another young woman held out to Renn a baby covered over all its skinny body with raw places. She cried bitterly over it, stammering a German dialect he scarcely followed.
“She’s dirty, a peasant,” the guard said, contemptuously; “she doesn’t keep it clean.”
Renn tried to turn back to get out. The women stood in front of him with their children, imploring him. With fear, he thought that each of these voices he was listening to had come up through centuries, the cries uttered by any mother in any moment of a past of hunger, the pillage of towns, war, the incomprehensible cruelty of men towards what their loins engender.
“I tell you, my children are hungry. Only a few drops of milk for the little girl, and for the boy, because he’s six, no milk at all — only the soup and bread and coffee. . .”
“Feel his hands, he’s always so cold. . .”
“Why are we here? How much longer will it be?. . .”
“Do something for us. . .”
Pushing with his arms, the guard forced a way between them. Renn followed him. A woman holding her child in one arm seized his hand, and kissed it. Another, younger woman, who was pregnant, caught hold of his arm and clung to it, smiling and crying.
“Help us, please,” she stammered.
“We’re hungry. . .”
When they were outside the hut, the guard asked him, with an ironical smile, if he wanted to go into the others. He shook his head. Coldly, he asked the man to take him to the hospital.
It was the brick building, a house of two floors, bare and decayed. The whole place, the guard said in an apologetic voice, had once been a Jewish sports ground; the Germans had turned it into an internment camp for Jews and Russians, they had left it infested with lice and falling down: it was now just habitable.
He had sent for the doctors. They came. There were two, a young man, dark, haggard, and a middle-aged woman with a broad good face. Both of them were interned in the camp, Germans. Hesitantly, uncertain whether he were doing the right thing, Renn shook hands with them. The young man did not speak: the woman smiled warmly and took his hand in a firm clasp. He felt that her hands were stronger as well as a good deal larger than his. To make it clear at once that he was neither an official nor a person from whom she could expect anything, he told her that he had come here only to look at one of the prisoners — “a young woman called Pieck, Marie Pieck. It’s possible —” he hesitated — “that I used to know her. You have her, I think, in the hospital.”
She looked at him with a smiling directness, as though asking herself what his illness was; he had an uncomfortable sense that he was being judged and found less impressive than he thought he was.
“Yes,” she said, at last, calmly. “If I show you all the women here you can be certain you haven’t missed her. Besides, it seems a pity to visit hell without seeing every circle.” She glanced at her colleague. “No need for you to come with us, Joachim.”
The man did not answer. He was staring in front of him vacantly, as though he had ceased to attend to what went on round him. With an awkward friendliness, Renn offered him all the cigarettes he had. He took them in silence, with the same indifference, as though they were nothing, and turned his back.
Touching Renn’s arm lightly, the woman doctor took him up the stairs, to the upper floor. The guard went with them. This place — in comparison with the overcrowded stinking huts — was bearable, yet unspeakably depressing. It was dark and sordid. On the landing, she hesitated outside a door, then said firmly,
“You would give me great pleasure if you’d speak to four colleagues of mine who are here. Being men, they suffer more than I do from their — their humiliation.”
In the small room, their beds touching, were four men who might be any age from eighty to a hundred: too little flesh remained on their skulls to tell. The doctor introduced each of them formally to Renn, by name a
nd profession — “the distinguished brain surgeon. . . the well-known heart specialist. . .” They lay completely still: each appeared to be keeping alive a different part of himself, eyelids, an index finger, tongue, a vein on the surface of the skin — concentrating in it the last flicker of energy. He whose tongue was still living said with a weak bitterness,
“A nice way for people like us to die — of hunger.”
“Nonsense,” the doctor said, smiling, “you’ll live to operate on a great many more brains.”
A faint contortion passed itself off as a smile on the old gentleman’s face.
“Next time,” he murmured, “I shall remove the whole brain, it’s nothing but a nuisance.” He looked angrily at Renn. “When you came in, how old did you think I was? I’m fiftyeight, I could have worked another ten years at least, and in a month or two I shall be dead. What a world, eh? Why is it like this? Why does a new era have to begin by new deportations, new killings? You don’t know. I’ve looked at a great many men’s brains, and I never found in them the nerve that makes a man take pleasure in inflicting pain. I shall die without knowing. And no other knowledge is of the least importance, not the least. My life is a complete failure.”
Outside the room, the doctor said,
“They really were well-known, and they really are dying — of hunger. They can’t swallow the dry bread and there’s nothing else for them. And we have no drugs. It’s the same with these.”
She opened the door of a larger room, in which seven or eight old women lay quietly waiting. The oldest was asleep, with the abandon of a piece of rag thrown down; the others, when they saw Renn, discovered in themselves a remains of coquetry, and smiled, or withdrew under the thin harsh blanket a disagreeably thin arm. None of them complained.
The Black Laurel Page 36
