Kaputt

by Curzio Malaparte

  They were the hands of a young recruit of the Piatiletka, of an udainik of the third Five-Year Plan, of a young Tartar who had become an engineer, a tank driver. Softened by the incessant thousand-year-long rubbing against the silky coats of horses, against manes, tendons, hocks, muscles of horses,- with reins, with the smooth leather of saddles and harness, they had passed within a few years from horse to machine, from flesh to metal tendons, from reins to controls. A few years had been enough to transform young Tartars of the Don and the Volga, of the Kirghiz Steppe and the shores of the Caspian and the Aral seas, from horse-breeders into qualified workers of the U.S.S.R., from horsemen into stakhanovtzi of the labor Sturm Truppen, from nomads of the steppe into udarniki and spets—specialists—of the Five-Year Plan. I undid the last knot and offered him a cigarette.

  The prisoner's hands hurt, his fingers were numb; he could not take a cigarette from the package. I placed the cigarette between his lips, and lit his and my own.

  "Blagodariu—Thanks," the Tartar said and smiled at me. I smiled at him too, and for a long time we continued to smoke in silence. The stench of the carrion filled the room, greasy, soft and sweetish. I inhaled the stench of the dead mare with a strange enjoyment. The prisoner also seemed to breathe with a delicate, sad pleasure. His nostrils quivered, they throbbed strangely. And I became aware only then that all the life in that pale, ashen face in which the untroubled, slanting eyes had the fixed glassy stare of a corpse, had gathered about his nostrils. His old homeland, the homeland he had found again, was in the odor of the dead mare. We looked into each other's eyes, in silence, and inhaled with a delicate and sad enjoyment that sweetish smell. That carrion odor was his homeland, his ageless and living homeland, and now nothing stood between us any longer. We were brothers living in the ageless odor of the dead mare.

  ... Prince Eugene lifted his face, turned his eyes toward the door; his nostrils quivered as if the dead mare's odor stood on the threshold and looked at us. It was the smell of grass and leaves, of sea and woods. Dusk had already set in, but an uncertain light still wandered across the sky. In that spectral light the faraway houses of Nybroplan, the steamers and sailing boats moored along the quays of Strandvägen, the trees of the park, the ghostly shadows of Rodin's "Penseur" and of the "Niké of Samothrace" were reflected, deformed, on the light landscape as in the drawings of Ernst Josephson and of Carl Hill, who were driven by their gloomy madness to see animals, trees, houses and ships reflected by the landscape as in a distorting mirror.

  "He had hands like yours," I said.

  Prince Eugene glanced at his hands. He seemed slightly ill at ease. His were the white shapely hands of the Bernadotte—pale slender fingers.

  And I told him: "The hands of an engineer, of a tank driver, of an udamik of the third Piatiletka are no less beautiful than yours. They are the hands of Mozart, Stradivarius, Picasso, Sauerbruch."

  Prince Eugene smiled and, blushing a little, said, "I am all the prouder of my hands."

  The voice of the wind gradually had grown stronger, shriller, like a long doleful neighing. It was the north wind, and its voice made me shudder. The recollection of the frightful winter I had spent in Karelia, between the Leningrad suburbs and the shores of Lake Ladoga, called up the vision of the silent, white, endless Karelian forests, and I shuddered as if the wind that caused the panes of the large windows to rattle was the merciless, frozen wind of Karelia.

  "It is the north wind," said Prince Eugene.

  "Yes, it is the Karelian wind," I said. "I recognize its voice."

  And there flashed through my memory the horses of Lake Ladoga.

  III. Ice Horses

  THAT MORNING I went with Svartström to see the horses freed from their prison of ice.

  A greenish sun in the pale blue sky shone like an unripe apple. Since the thaw had set in, the icebound surface of Lake Ladoga had begun creaking; it wailed, at times it shrieked shrilly as if in pain. In the deep of night, from the end of the korsu{3} we could hear it suddenly crying out, wailing for hours at a time, until the dawn. It was already spring; the lake exhaled its fetid breath into our faces, that lean smell of rotten wood and wet sawdust that is typical of the thaw. The opposite shore of Lake Ladoga looked like a thin pencil stroke on blotting paper. Now the sky was a cloudless faded blue: it seemed a sky of tissue paper. Yonder, toward Leningrad—a gray cloud of smoke hung over the besieged city—the sky was slightly dirty, slightly crumpled. A green vein cut across the horizon, it seemed at times as if it could be seen throbbing, as if it were full of hot blood.

  That morning we went to see the icebound horses being freed. The night before Colonel Merikallio, sniffing the wind, had said, "The horses caught in the ice crust will have to be buried. Spring is beginning."

  We went down to the lake through a thick birch wood in which were scattered huge stones of red granite. Suddenly, in front of us lay the vast dark expanse of Lake Ladoga.

  The Soviet shore showed vaguely on the horizon behind a silvery mist, veined with pale blue and pink. From time to time the monotonous call of the cuckoo, the sacred bird of Karelia, reached us from the thick of the vast Raikkola forest. Wild beasts howled among the trees, mysterious voices called, answered, called again—persistent, mournful sounds, filled with a sweet and cruel entreaty.

  Before leaving the korsu of Finnish headquarters to descend toward the lake, I had searched for Lieutenant Svartström. I had knocked in vain at the door of his little room in the korsu behind the stables. The forest around headquarters looked deserted. And there was everywhere that lean smell, that tepid smell in the cold air. I approached the korsu of the horses. A girl in a lotta{4} uniform was preparing a pail of cellulose horse fodder for the Colonel's horse.

  "Haivää päivää—Good day," I said.

  "Haivää päivää."

  She was the daughter of Colonel Merikallio, a tall fair girl, a Finn from Oulu in East Bothnia. She had followed her father to the front, as a lotta during the first Finnish war, in the winter of 1939. She saw to the headquarters mess, and under her father's eye served at the table, a few hundred yards from the Russian trenches.

  Her hands were livid from the cold as she chopped a large sheet of cellulose paste into a pail filled with warm water. The horse was tied to a tree and was twisting its neck toward the pail filled with the cellulose. The winter had been frightful; the terrible cold, hunger, hardships and toil had shrunk the faces of the Finnish people. The hard, bony features of the Kalevala heroes, as painted by Gallen Kallela, were showing again in the pale fleshless faces.

  Soldiers, children, women, old people and animals, were all hungry. There was not a shred of hay, or of straw; not an oat to feed the horses; dogs had been slaughtered wholesale; the soldiers' gloves were made of dogs' skins. The people fed on cellulose bread, and horses relished the sweetish taste of that cellulose mash—the taste of cooked paper.

  The girl untied the horse, grasped the halter and, carrying the pail in her left hand, moved toward a wooden tub sitting on a bench. She poured the cellulose mash into the tub and the horse began to eat slowly, gazing round from time to time. It looked toward the lake that shone dully through the trees. A cloud of steam rose from the tub, the horse sank his nuzzle into that cloud; then it raised its head, looked toward the lake and neighed.

  "What's the trouble?" I asked the girl. "He seems to be restless."

  Colonel Merikallio's daughter turned her face to the lake. "It smells the horses," she said.

  I smelt the horses, too: it was a warm, greasy odor, mellowed by the resinous scent of the pines and by the lean odor of birches. The cuckoo gave its call at the edge of the forest; a squirrel, his tail erect, scampered up a tree trunk. The girl picked up the pail and went into the horse korsu. I could hear her talking to the horses with that slow sweet intonation of the Finnish language,- I could hear the dull thud of the horses' hooves on the litter of birch branches, the twinkle of the iron rings, the short impatient neighing.

  I made off to
ward the lake. Svartström was waiting for me at a turn in the path; he was leaning against a tree trunk, his high sheepskin cap tilted back toward the nape of his neck, his legs sunk halfway to his thighs in Lapp reindeer leather boots with upturned points like Persian slippers. His eyes were lowered and he was slightly stooped as he tapped the bowl of his empty pipe on the palm of his hand. When I reached him, he raised his face, looked at me smiling, and said, "Haivää päivää."

  "Haivää päivää, Svartström."

  He was pale, his brow damp with the sweat of fatigue and lack of sleep. As if apologizing, he told me that he had been in the forest the entire night with a ranger patrol.

  "Where is Colonel Merikallio?" I inquired.

  "He has gone to the lines," he replied. He glanced at me as he tapped the empty pipe in the hollow of his hand, and from time to time he turned toward the lake. I saw his nostrils quivering. He breathed through his nose as woodsmen do, as sissit—the Finnish rangers—do: a thin, cautious, suspicious breathing, just a thread of air.

  "You really want to go and see them?" asked Svartström. "It would have been better for you to follow the Colonel to the lines. He purposely went to the trenches not to see them."

  The wind was charged with the odor of the horses, that greasy, sweet odor.

  "I should like to see them for the last time, Svartström, before they take them away."

  We walked on toward the lake. The snow was sodden; it was already spring snow; no longer white, but ivory colored, with those green and yellow spots found in old ivory. Here and there where it filmed the red granite rock, it was the color of wine. And where the trees were thinner, it seemed to be covered with a thin coating of ice like a glistening piece of Orefors crystal through which pine needles, colored pebbles, blades of grass, scales of that white skin that clothes birch trunks could be seen. Twisted tree roots broke through the crystal sheet like frozen serpents,- it seemed as if the trees drew sustenance from the ice, that the young leaves of a more tender green took their sap from that dead, glassy matter. Strange sounds ran through the air,- it was not the wail of beaten iron, nor the sonorous shudder that bells make in the wind, nor the drawn-out soft note of a stroking finger on glass; it was not even the high, round hum of wild bees swarming in the thick of the woods, but it really was a wail; it seemed the moan of a wounded beast, the call of a lonely and despairing agony that crossed the sky like an invisible flock of doleful birds.

  Winter, that terrible winter of 1942, that had been the great scourge, the great plague of the Finnish people, the white plague that had filled the hospitals and churchyards of the whole of Finland, lay now like a huge naked corpse across the lakes and the woods. That huge decomposing body tainted the air with its lean smell of rotten wood, and the first spring breeze was already bringing its tired scents, its tepid odors, its intimate and bestial dog's breath—the very snow seemed to be lukewarm.

  For some days the soldiers had been less sad, more lively; their voices were a little louder, and during certain hours of the day a peculiar restlessness was creeping through the lines in the korsus, among lottalas,{5} through the trenches and the dugouts scooped into the thick of the wild Raikkola forest. To celebrate the return of spring, which is their sacred season of the year, the men of the North light great fires on the mountains, sing, drink and dance all night. But spring is the insidious disease of the North; it rots and dissolves the life that winter has jealously guarded and protected within its prison of ice, and brings its fatal gifts—love, the joy of living, the yielding to light thoughts and gay feelings, the enjoyment of strife, of idleness, and of sleep, the fever of the senses, the deluding weddings with nature. It is the season in which the eye of the man of the North is lighted with a turbid flame, and the proud shadow of death that winter sweeps clean and free, sets on his brow.

  "We have taken the wrong way, Svartström."

  I no longer recognized the path I had so often followed during the winter on my way to the lake to see the horses. It had become narrower, more winding; the forest had grown thicker. As the snow thaws and changes color and the spring chrysalis bursts into flight out of the shining icy cocoon leaving the bare dead slough of winter, the forest regains mastery over the snow and the frost and becomes thick again—entangled, secretive—a green, mysterious and forbidden universe.

  Svartström stepped slowly and cautiously; he stopped now and again to listen, detecting in the rhythmical silence of the forest, in that musical silence of nature, the crackling of the branches, the patter of the squirrel in a pine tree, the darting rustle of the hare, the anxious sniffing of the fox, the call of a bird, the whisper of a leaf, and far away—diseased and defiled—the voice of man. The silence around us was no longer the dead silence of winter, frosty and transparent as a block of crystal. It was a living silence, shot through by warm streams of colors, sounds and odors. The silence was like a river that I felt flowing around us; I thought I was being carried down the current of that invisible river, between the banks that were like warm, moist lips.

  The mellow heat of the rising sun was pervading the forest. As the sun gradually climbed up along the arch of the horizon raising a slight pink mist from the silvery surface of the lake, there came with the wind a far-off rattling of machine guns, solitary rifle shots, the rapt song of the cuckoo; and at the end of that landscape of sounds, colors and odors, within a break of the forest, there flashed something opaque, something shiny, like the shimmering of an unreal sea—Lake Ladoga, the vast frozen expanse of Lake Ladoga.

  At last we stepped out of the forest onto the shore of the lake and saw the horses.

  It happened last year in October. The Finnish vanguard, after crossing the Vuoksi wilderness, crossed the threshold of the wild limitless Raikkola forest. It was full of Russian troops. Almost the entire Soviet artillery of the northern sector of the Karelian isthmus had rushed toward Lake Ladoga to escape the stranglehold of the Finnish army. It had hoped to ship the guns and the horses and to bring them to safety across the lake. But the Soviet lighters and tugs were late in arriving; every hour of delay could prove fatal for the frost had set in, gripping and savage; the lake was likely to freeze at any moment, and the Finnish troops, formed of ranger detachments, were gliding through the thick forest and pressing the Russians on all sides, attacking them from the flanks and the rear.

  On the third day a huge fire flared in the Raikkola forest. Men, horses and trees clutched within the circle of fire sent out awful cries. The rangers, firing through that wall of smoke and flames, blocked every avenue of escape. Mad with terror, the horses of the Soviet artillery—there were almost a thousand of them—hurled themselves into the furnace and broke through the besieging flames and machine guns. Many perished within the flames, but most of them succeeded in reaching the shores of the lake and threw themselves into the water.

  The lake is not deep there, not more than six feet; but a hundred yards from the shore the bottom suddenly drops. Pressed within that narrow space (the lakeshore curves inward there forming a small bay) between the deeper water and the barrier of fire, the horses clustered, shuddering with cold and fear, their heads stretched out above the surface of the water. Those nearer to land were scorched by the flames and reared and struggled to hoist themselves onto the backs of the others, tried to push a way open by biting and kicking. And while still madly struggling, the ice gripped them.

  The north wind swooped down during the night. (The north wind blows from the Murmansk Sea, like an angel of doom, crying aloud, and the land suddenly dies.) The cold became frightful. Suddenly, with the peculiar vibrating noise of breaking glass, the water froze. The heat balance was broken, and the sea, the lakes, the rivers froze. In such instances, even sea waves are gripped in mid-air and become rounded ice waves suspended in the void.

  On the following day, when the first ranger patrols, their hair singed, their faces blackened by smoke, cautiously stepped over the warm ashes in the charred forest and reached the lakeshore, a horrible and ama
zing sight met their eyes. The lake looked like a vast sheet of white marble on which rested hundreds upon hundreds of horses' heads. They appeared to have been chopped off cleanly with an ax. Only the heads stuck out of the crust of ice. And they were all facing the shore. The white flame of terror still burnt in their wide-open eyes. Close to the shore a tangle of wildly rearing horses rose from the prison of ice.

  Later winter came; the hissing north wind swept the snow away; the surface of the lake was as clean and smooth as an ice-hockey rink. During the dull days of the endless winter, toward noon, when a little faded light rains from the sky, Colonel Merikallio's soldiers used to go down to the lake and sit on the heads of the horses. They were like wooden horses on a merry-go-round. Tournez, tournez, bons chevaux de bois—turn, turn, good wooden horses. The scene might have been painted by Bosch. The wind through the black skeletons of the trees played a sweet, childish, sad music,- the sheet of ice seemed to turn, as the horses of that macabre merry-go-round tossing their manes would curve to the sad tune of the sweet childish music. The soldiers would shout, "Hop la! Tournez, tournez, bons chevaux de bois."

  On Sunday mornings the rangers gathered in the Raikkola lottala, and after drinking a cup of tea, walked toward the lake. (The rangers—sissit—are the wolves of forest warfare. They are mostly young, some are very young; some mere boys. They belong to the solitary and silent Sillampää{6} breed of heroes. They spend their entire lives in the depths of the forest. They live like trees, rocks and wild animals.) They used to go down to the lake and sit on the heads of the horses. The accordion player would start a laulu, the "Vertiossa," which is the song of the lookout. Wrapped in their sheepskin coats, the rangers would sing together the sad laulu. Then the player, sitting on the frozen mane, would run his fingers over the keyboard and the rangers would take up the Reppurin laulu, the song of the cuckoo, which is the sacred bird of Karelia.