She asked Soro for the latest Warsaw gossip, and gazing at the German officers and soldiers who passed along the platform, she said, "Ces pauvres gens" in an indescribable tone, an ancient tone, as if she disliked to make them uncomfortable by her presence and she felt sorry for them, as if Poland's destruction was a terrible misfortune that had befallen those poor Germans.
After a time a German officer approached carrying a chair and, bowing to Bichette, he silently offered it to her. Bichette drew herself up, and with a most gracious smile, in a delicious tone in which there was no suspicion of contempt, she said: "I thank you; I accept favors only from my friends." The officer was puzzled, he did not at first dare to show that he had understood; then he blushed, set the chair down, bowed and strode off without a word.
"Come, look," said Bichette. "A chair! Can you imagine that!" She gazed at the forsaken chair in the rain and said: "It is amazing how those pauvres gens—poor people—feel at home."
And I thought of the old Polish lady standing in the rain, of that solitary and deserted chair in the rain, and I sided with the goose, with Princess Bichette Radziwil and with the chair—both alone in the rain.
"Fire!" shouted Frank again, and the goose fell backward shot against the ruined walls of the station of Warsaw, smiling at the firing platoon. Ces pauvres gens.
Everybody laughed. The Queen alone did not laugh. She sat in a rigid, solemn attitude, as if on a throne. She was gowned in a sort of bell-shaped beltless, green velvet dress, edged at the bottom by a wide band of crimson. The long wide sleeves, of an ancient Gothic cut, were joined at the shoulders with billowing folds that seemed to be puffed up by air, and rose above the shoulders in a noble arch, falling over the arms in ever greater abundance as they descended toward the wrists. Over that green bell was thrown a vast lace cape of the same color as the wide crimson band. The Queen's hair was dressed very simply in a bun at the top of the head. Her forehead was twice girded with a string of pearls as if with a tiara. Fat, thick-set, with wrists aglitter with gold bracelets, with hands be jeweled with rings that fitted her too tightly and sunk deeply into the flesh, she sat in a Gothic pose, weighed down by the velvet bell and the lace cape as if it were a heavy coat of armor.
Her glistening, flushed face was masked with insolent sensuousness. There was, however, something pure, sad and absent-minded shining in her eyes. Her whole face was thrust forward toward the food heaped on precious Meissen plates, toward the scented wine glittering through Bohemian crystal, and on it, around her nostrils quivered an expression of insatiable greed, almost of gluttonous rage. It throbbed on her thick lips, it engraved her cheeks with a network of spidery wrinkles that tightened and expanded around her mouth and her nose to the rhythm of her labored breathing. I felt something between disgust and pity for her. Perhaps she was hungry! I should have liked to help her,- to get up, bend across the table, thrust a large slice of goose into her mouth with my fingers; gorge her with potatoes. At any moment I feared lest she might flop down, overcome by hunger, within her green bell and rest her head on the dish filled with greasy food. But each time as I gazed into her flushed face, at her swelling bosom pressed under the heavy velvet armor, I was stopped from helping her by her vague, pure gaze, by that virginal, clear and transparent light that shone from her humid eye.
The other guests, as they greedily ate and drank never withdrew their eyes from the Queen's face,- they watched her with glistening eyes, as if they also feared lest, conquered by hunger, she would repose her head on the dish heaped with greasy slices of goose and roast potatoes. They lingered occasionally, gazing at her in a tremulous abstraction, the tips of their forks resting on their lips, their glasses hovering in mid-air. The King, too, followed every movement of his Queen with an attentive look, ready to anticipate her every wish, to guess at her more secret promptings, to interpret the most fleeting impression on her face. But the Queen sat stolid and motionless, from time to time letting her pure, abstract look wander over the guests,- she gazed at the Governor of Cracow, young Wächter, or at the abbot-like face of Emil Gassner, another Viennese, with his deceitful and ironical smile, who never met any glance, and timidly, almost fearfully, drooped his lashes whenever the virgin eye of the Queen rested on him. More frequently it rested on the head of the German National-Socialist party in the Government of Poland, on athletic Stahl, whose cold sharp Gothic face with its brow, crowned by an invisible oak wreath, thrust forward toward the Queen—that motionless statue of flesh, clamped within her heavy armor of green velvet, who clutched the slender crystal glass in her fat fist and listened with an absent-minded air wrapped in her thoughts, secret, lofty and pure.
Occasionally, I too broke away from the contemplation of the Queen, and allowed my eyes to wander over the guests, lingering on Frau Wächter's smiling countenance, on Frau Gassner's white arms, on the red perspiring forehead of the Chief of Protocol of the Government, Keith, who was talking about boar hunting in the Lublin forests, the fierce hound-packs of Volhynia, and the beasts in Radziwilom woods. I looked on the Staatsekretärs— State Secretaries—Böpple and Bühler, in their tight-fitting gray uniforms with the red armlet and the swastika, their flushed cheeks, perspiring temples and glistening eyes, as they said, and almost shouted, "Ja, ja!" from time to time, whenever the King called out "Nicht wahr!"
I gazed on Baron Wolsegger, an old silver-headed Tirolese gentleman with a dashing white pointed beard and clear eyes in a flushed face, and tried to recollect where I had seen that proud and gentle face before; traced my memory back from year to year, from place to place, as far as Donaueschingen in Würtemberg, where in the park of the Princes Fürstenberg the source of the Danube gushes into a marble basin encircled by white statues of Diana and her nymphs. I bent over the side of the new-born river, gazed for a long time at the slow, uncertain rise of the gushing water; then I knocked at the castle gate, crossed the great hall, climbed the marble stairs, and finally entered the vast gallery on the walls of which the canvases of Holbein's famous "Way of the Cross" are hung; and there, against the clear wall I saw the portrait of the seventeenth-century adventurer. I smiled at that far-off recollection of the German condottiere; I smiled at Baron Wolsegger. Suddenly my gaze rested on Himmler's man.
I felt as if I saw him for the first time at that moment, and I was startled. He was looking at me, too, and our eyes met. That man was in his middle years, not more than forty; his dark hair was already graying at the temples, his nose thin, his lips drawn and pale, his eyes extraordinarily light. They were gray eyes, perhaps blue or white, like those of a fish. A long scar cut across his left cheek. Suddenly something began to worry me: his ears; they were extremely small, bloodless, waxlike, with transparent lobes—the transparency of wax or milk.
There came to mind a tale by Apuleius, in which the ears of one Ambrose had been gnawed by lemurs while he watched a corpse, and they had been replaced by waxen ears. There was something softish, almost naked in the Gestapo man's face. Although his skull was strong and rough hewn, and the bones in his forehead looked solid, well-knit and extremely hard, the face seemed, nevertheless, that it might give way at the touch of a finger, like the head of a new-born babe,- it looked like the skull of a lamb. His narrow cheekbones, his long face and slanting eyes were also like a lamb's; there was something at the same time bestial and childish in him. His brow was white and damp, like a sick man's,- and even the perspiration oozing out of that soft waxen skin recalled the perspiration that feverish sleeplessness brings to the foreheads of consumptives as, lying on their backs, they await the dawn.
Himmler's man was silent: he gazed at me in silence, and, by degrees, I perceived a strange smile, shy and very sweet, playing on his thin, pale lips. He gazed at me smiling; and I thought at first that he smiled at me, that he really was smiling at me; but I saw suddenly that his eyes were empty: he did not listen to the words of the guests, he did not hear the sound of voices and of laughter, the tinkling of forks and of glasses—he sat transported into t
he loftiest and purest heaven of cruelty—that "suffering cruelty" which is the true German cruelty—of fear and loneliness. There was no shade of brutality in his face, rather something shy, vague, like a wonderful and moving loneliness. His left eyebrow was raised at an angle that loftily expressed cold contempt and cruel pride. What knit all his features together, all the traits and the tricks of his face, was that suffering cruelty, that wonderful, melancholy loneliness.
After a time it seemed to me that something began to melt in him, something alive and human—a light, a color, perhaps a look, a child's look, was being born deep down in those empty eyes. He seemed to me to be swooping down as gently as an angel from that lofty, remote and very pure heaven of his; he came down like a spider-angel, gliding slowly along a very high, white wall. Like a prisoner escaping along the sheer wall of his jail.
By degrees there spread a consciousness of deep humiliation over his pallid face. He issued from his loneliness as a fish emerges from its watery den. He swam toward me gazing fixedly at me. And all unknowingly I felt drawn, as well as repulsed by his naked face and his white gaze, until I caught myself watching him with a kind of pity, a kind of morbid compassion for the very repulsion and attraction which that pitiful monster inspired in me.
Suddenly Himmler's man, leaning across the table with a shy smile, said softly, "I am also a friend of the Poles,- I like them very much."
So shaken was I by those words and by the strangely sweet, sad voice of Himmler's man, that I did not realize that the King, the Queen and all the guests had risen and were looking at me. I also arose and we all followed the Queen. Standing, she looked fatter— she had the appearance of a good German hausfrau; even the green hue of her velvet bell seemed faded. She strode forward slowly with good-natured dignity, and she lingered a moment on the threshold of each drawing room as if to fill her eyes gloatingly with the cold, insolent and stupid magnificence of the furnishing inspired by that Dritte Reich—Third Reich style, the purest example of which is to be found in the Chancery at Berlin. Then she crossed the threshold and stopping again a few steps farther along, she raised her arm to point out to me the furniture, pictures, carpets, hanging lights, statues of the Heroes of Breker, the Führer's busts, tapestries bespangled with Gothic eagles and swastikas,- and she said to me with a gracious smile, "Schön, nicht wahr?— Beautiful, isn't it?"
All the vast pile of the Wawel that I had seen twenty years before in its royal bareness, was now crammed full, from the subterranean caves to the top of its highest tower with furniture stolen from the palaces of the Polish gentry, reaped during the crafty raids through France, Holland and Belgium by the committees of antiquarians and experts from Munich, Berlin and Vienna who followed on the heels of the German armies through Europe. A glaring light flowed down from the great lamps hanging from the ceiling, and it glittered back from the walls covered with panels of shiny leather onto the portraits of Hitler, Göring, Goebbels, Himmler and of other Nazi leaders; and the marble and bronze busts (they were scattered everywhere along corridors, on landings, in the corners of rooms, on furniture, on marble pedestals and within niches in the walls) representing the German King of Poland in his several attitudes, inspired by the decadent esthetics of Burckhardt, Nietzsche and Stefan George,- by the heroic esthetics of Beethoven's Third Symphony and of the "Horst Wessel" song, and by the decorative esthetics of the humanist antiquarians of Florence and Munich. There lingered a cloying odor of fresh paint, new leather and newly polished wood in the airless atmosphere.
Finally, we entered a large hall, generously adorned with Dritte Reich furniture, French carpets, and leather wall hangings. It was Frank's study. The gap between two large glass doors opening on the outside loggia of the Wawel (the internal loggia faces on the beautiful courtyard designed by Italian artists of the Renaissance) was taken by a vast mahogany table that reflected the flames of the candles fixed on the arms of two heavy candelabra of gilt bronze. The vast table was bare. "Here I think about Poland's future," said Frank opening his arms wide,- and I smiled. I was thinking about Germany's future.
At a nod from Frank the two tall glass doors opened and we walked out onto the loggia. "This is the German Burg," Frank said pointing with his raised arm to the imposing pile of the Wawel, sharply cut into the blinding reflection of the snow. Around the ancient palace of the Polish kings, the city settled low, shrouded in her winding-sheet of snow under a clear sky faintly lit by a beam from the thin scythe of a new moon. A bluish mist rose from the Vistula. On the horizon, far away in the distance the Tatra mountains appeared delicate and transparent. The barking of the SS dogs guarding Pilsudski's tomb, from time to time broke the deep silence of the night. The cold was so biting it filled my eyes with tears. I closed them a moment. "It seems like a dream, doesn't it?" said Frank.
When we walked back to the study, Frau Brigitte Frank approached me, and placing her hand familiarly upon my arm, she said softly, "Come with me. I want to reveal his secret to you." Through a small door in the wall of the study we entered a small room with walls that were totally bare and whitewashed. There was not a single piece of furniture, no carpets, no pictures, no books, no flowers—nothing, except a magnificent Pleyel piano and a wooden music stool. Frau Brigitte Frank opened the piano, and leaning her knee on the stool, stroked the keyboard with her fat fingers. "Before taking a crucial decision, or when he is very weary or depressed, sometimes in the very midst of an important meeting," said Frau Brigitte Frank, "he shuts himself up in this cell, sits before the piano and seeks rest or inspiration from Schumann, Brahms, Chopin or Beethoven. Do you know what I call this cell? I call it the Eagle's Nest."
I bowed in silence.
"He is an extraordinary man, isn't he?" she added, gazing at me with a look of proud affection. "He is an artist, a great artist, with a pure and delicate soul. Only such an artist as he can rule over Poland."
"Yes," I said, "a great artist; and it is with this piano that he rules the Polish people."
"Oh, you understand so well!" said Frau Brigitte Frank in a voice full of emotion.
Silently we left the Eagle's Nest; and I don't know exactly why, I felt shaken and sad for a long time. We were gathered in Frank's private apartment, and sprawling on the deep Viennese settees and in the large armchairs upholstered with soft doeskin, we began chatting and smoking. Two valets with coarse hair cut short in the Prussian manner, and dressed in blue livery, were passing coffee, liqueurs and sweets,- their footsteps were muffled by the thick French carpets spread over the entire floor. Small green-and-gold lacquered Venetian tables were crowded with bottles of old French brandy with famous labels, boxes of Havana cigars, silver trays heaped with candied fruit and those celebrated Polish chocolates of Wedel.
In this homey atmosphere accentuated by the pleasant crackling of the open fire, the talk by degrees grew cordial, almost intimate. And as always happened in Poland when the Germans gathered together, they all ended by talking of the Poles. They spoke of them, as usual, with vicious contempt; but it was strangely blended with an almost morbid, feminine sense of spite, of regret, frustrated love, unconscious envy and jealousy. There rose up in my mind dear old Bichette Radziwil standing in the rain amid the wreckage of the Warsaw station, and the old-fashioned tone in which she said, "Ces pauvres gens."
"The Polish workmen," said Frank, "are not Europe's best, but neither are they the worst. They can work very well, if they want to. I think we may count on them, particularly on their discipline."
"They have, however, a very grave fault," said Wächter, "that of mixing patriotism with the technical problems of work and output."
"Those are not technical problems alone," said Baron Wolsegger, "they are also moral problems."
"The modern technique," replied Wächter, "does not allow for the intrusion of extraneous elements into the problems of work and output. And the patriotic feelings of the workers are the most dangerous element interfering with output."
"No doubt," said Frank, "but the pat
riotic feeling of the workers is very different from that of the aristocracy and of the middle classes."
"The fatherland of the workman is the machine; it is the workshop," said Himmler's man softly.
"That's a communist conception," said Frank. "I think that it is one of Lenin's slogans. But after all, it expresses the truth. The Polish workman is a good patriot; he loves his own country, but he knows that working for us is the best way to save Poland. He knows that if he refused to work for us," he went on gazing at Himmler's man, "if he resisted—"
"We know many things," said Himmler's man, "but the Polish workman does not know them, or would prefer not to know them," he added with a shy smile.
"If you wish to win the war," I said, "you must not destroy the workman's fatherland. You must not destroy the machines, the workshops and the industries. It is a European problem, not only a Polish one. Also in all the other countries of Europe you have occupied, you may destroy the fatherland of the nobles, the fatherland of the middle classes, but you cannot destroy the workman's fatherland. The very meaning of this war or at least a great part of it, seems to me to be found in this."
"The peasants," said Himmler's man.
"If necessary," said Frank, "we shall crush the workmen with the weight of the peasants."
"And you will lose the war," I said.
"Herr Malaparte is right," said Himmler's man, "we would lose the war. It is necessary for the Polish workmen to love us. We must endear ourselves to the Polish people." As he spoke he looked at me and smiled; then he stopped and turned toward the fire.
"The Poles will end by loving us," said Frank, "they are a romantic people. The next Polish romanticism will be their love for the Germans."
Kaputt Page 9
