Kaputt

by Curzio Malaparte

  "So far," said Baron Wolsegger, "Polish romanticism... there is a Viennese saying that well describes our position in respect to the Polish people: Ich liebe dich, und du schläfst."

  "Oh yes," said Frau Wächter, " 'I love you, and you sleep'; very funny, isn't it?"

  "Yes, very amusing," said Frau Brigitte Frank.

  "In the end the Polish people will certainly awaken," said Wächter, "but so far they are asleep."

  "I rather think that they pretend to be asleep," said Frank. "At heart they ask for nothing better than to be loved. Every people can be judged by its women."

  "Polish women," said Frau Brigitte Frank, "are famous for their beauty and elegance. Do you really find them so pretty?"

  "I find them worthy of admiration," I replied, "and not for their looks and their elegance alone."

  "I cannot see that they are really so pretty as they are supposed to be," said Frau Brigitte Frank. "Female beauty in Germany is more severe, more genuine and more classical."

  "Nevertheless some are very pretty and very smart," said Frau Wächter.

  "In the good old days in Vienna," said Baron Wolsegger, "they were considered more elegant even than the Parisian women."

  "Ah, the Parisian women!" exclaimed Frank.

  "Are there any Parisiennes left?" asked Frau Wächter, gracefully tilting her head.

  "I think that the elegance of the Polish women is dreadfully provincial and old-fashioned," said Frau Brigitte Frank, "and it is surely not all the fault of the war. Germany also has been two and a half years at war, and in spite of it, German women are today the most elegant in Europe."

  "It appears," said Frau Gassner, "that Polish women do not wash much."

  "Oh yes, they are terribly dirty," said Frau Brigitte Frank swinging her velvet bell, that sent forth a long green sound across the room.

  "It isn't their fault," said Baron Wolsegger, "they have no soap."

  "They will soon be unable to plead any excuse," said Frank, "they have found a way in Germany to make soap out of a substance that costs nothing and is very abundant. I have already placed a large order for Polish ladies so that they may wash. That soap is made out of dung."

  "Out of dung?" I shouted.

  "Yes, naturally, out of dung," replied Frank.

  "And is it a good soap?"

  "Excellent," said Frank, "I have tried it for shaving, and I was enchanted with it."

  "Does it make a good lather?"

  "A wonderful lather. It gives a perfect shave. It is a soap fit for a king."

  "God shave the King!" I sang out.

  "Only—" added the German King of Poland.

  "Only—" I said holding my breath.

  "It has one fault: the smell and the color are as they were."

  A shout of laughter followed his words. "Ach, so! Ach, sol Wonderful!" they all shouted. And I discerned a voluptuous tear running down the cheek of Frau Brigitte Frank, the German Queen of Poland.

  V. Forbidden Cities

  I HAD REACHED Warsaw at night from Radom, having motored through the vast Polish plain buried under the snow. And as I entered the city, its squalid, bomb-riddled suburbs, the Marszalkowska flanked by the skeletons of palaces charred black by fire, the ruins of the railway station, the black disemboweled houses that the livid light of the evening rendered more forbidding, became almost a welcome refuge and relief to my eyes blinded by the dazzling snow.

  The streets were deserted, a few passers-by scuttered along the walls; German patrols stood at the corners, their tommy guns cradled in their arms. Saxe Square seemed vast, ghostlike. Raising my eyes to the first floor of the Europeiski Hotel, I looked for the window of the apartment where I had lived for two years in 1919 and 1920, when I was a young attaché with the Royal Italian Legation. Light showed through the window. I halted in the courtyard of the Brühl Palace, crossed the hall, and set my foot on the first step of the main staircase.

  Fischer, the German Governor of Warsaw, had invited me that evening to the dinner he was giving for Governor-General Frank, Frau Brigitte Frank and some of the principal collaborators of the Governor-General. Brühl Palace, formerly the seat of the Foreign Office of the Polish Republic and now occupied by the German Government of Warsaw, stood unscathed two steps away from the ruins of the Hotel d'Angleterre, the old hotel in which Napoleon had lodged during one of his stays at Warsaw. It had been hit by only one bomb that had crumbled the ceiling of the main staircase and the inner loggia leading to the luxurious private apartments of the former Minister of the Polish Republic, Colonel Beck, and was now occupied by Fischer. I set my foot on the first step and before starting up, raised my eyes.

  At the top of the stairway, flanked on both sides by two rows of slender white-stuccoed columns without base or capital, belonging to the lean and offensive modern classicism, there were revealed to me, crudely illuminated by lights ranged along the stairs between one column and the other, like stage footlights, two massive statues of flesh, that weighed down threateningly on me as I slowly went up the pink marble steps. Clothed in gold lamé, with stiff deep pleats resembling the flutings of a column, Frau Fischer rose solemnly, her brow crowned by a lofty castle of blond hair with glints of copper—so queerly arranged that it resembled a Corinthian capital superimposed on a Doric column. From beneath her skirt protruded two enormous feet, two rounded legs with fleshy calves that the shiny gray silk of the stockings made glisten like steel. Her arms did not rest limply at her sides, but were stiffly stretched down as if loaded with a great weight. Next to her stood the imposing mass of Governor Fischer, fat, Herculean, garbed in a tightfitting black dress suit of Berlin cut, with sleeves that were too short. His head was small and round, his face pink and swollen, his eyes protruding and rimmed with red lids. From time to time, perhaps as a means of overcoming his shyness, he ran his tongue over his lips with a slow and studied deliberation. He stood with legs wide apart, arms stiffly hanging a little away from his sides, his big fists clenched; he looked like the statue of a prize fighter. As I was slowly going up the stairs, owing to a trick of perspective, those two massive figures appeared to me to be leaning backward as statues look in a photograph taken from below: precisely as in a photograph, the hands, the feet, the legs appeared to be enormous, out of proportion to the rest of the bodies—strangely swollen and deformed. With each step there rose in me a vague feeling of fear that overcomes me whenever, from a seat in the first row, I behold a singer step to the front of the stage and hang over me, with wide-open mouth and a raised arm, in order to gargle an aria. Just at that moment the two massive statues of flesh lifted their right arms and said in loud voices: "Heil Hitler!" (Suddenly, Governor Fischer and Frau Fischer melted before my eyes into the cold bluish light of the lamps, and in their place there rose before me the two tall, slender shadows of Madame and Colonel Beck. Madame Beck was smiling, bending forward a little to stretch out her hand to me, as if she meant to help me up the last steps, and Colonel Beck, tall and lean, with his small birdlike head, bowed with the dry elegance of an Englishman, almost imperceptibly bending his left knee. They seemed two pale pictures far removed in time and memory,- and yet it was only yesterday; they moved with ghostlike grace against the background of the ruins of Warsaw amid which padded its way a starving throng, livid with rage and suffering, raising their arms and screaming. Madame Beck seemed to be unaware of the throng at her shoulders and she smiled, stretching her hand out to me. But Colonel Beck, pale and harassed, every now and then seemed about to turn, twisting his scrawny neck with its birdlike head—the blue glow of the lamps was reflected on his polished skull and on his prominent nose—throwing his shoulders back, he gave the impression of pushing away from himself the ruins of Warsaw, the streets crowded with unkempt people dressed in shabby furs, in worn and faded raincoats, hatless or wearing headgear that was discolored by the rain and snow. Snow was falling; and from time to time, out of the throng slowly filing along the sidewalks, a living glance—a flash of hate and despair—amid th
e thousands of dull glances, followed a German soldier crossing the road in hobnailed boots. Groups of women turned to exchange tired and hopeless looks in front of the Bristol and Europeiski hotels, in front of the Nowy Swiat cinema and St. Andrew's church, where Chopin's heart is preserved in an urn, in front of the smashed shop windows of Wedel and Fuchs. Swarms of boys running and sliding on the ice stopped to watch the bustle of German officers and soldiers in the courtyard of the Potocki Palace, housing the Kommandatur. Silent clusters of women and men crouching in the snow stretched out their hands toward the heat of the great bonfires in the center of the squares. All turned, staring at the two pale shadows gracefully remote at the top of the marble staircase of the Brühl Palace. From time to time someone lifted his arms, screaming. Groups of manacled prisoners escorted by SS men passed, and all turned their faces toward Madame Beck who smilingly stretched out her hand to me—toward Colonel Beck, who restlessly twisted his small birdlike head on his scrawny neck, seeming to push away from himself the squalid background of Warsaw ruins, that gray and dirty landscape like a wall stained with blood and riddled with the bullets of firing squads.)

  At Governor Fischer's dinner in Colonel Beck's apartments, besides Governor-General Frank and Frau Brigitte Frank, I met again the whole court of the Wawel in Cracow: Frau Wächter, Keith, Emil Gassner, Baron Wolsegger and Himmler's man,- in the confusion I scarcely noticed three or four of Fischer's assistants, gray and distracted looking.

  "Here we are all together again," said Frank turning to me with a hearty smile. And he added, repeating Luther's famous words: "Hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders—Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise."

  "Aber ich kann stets anders. Gott helfe mir!—But I can do otherwise. God help me!" I replied.

  There was loud laughter at my words, and Frau Fischer, frightened at this unaccustomed "ouverture of convivial conversation," as Frank called it in the flowery language he always affected at the beginning of a dinner—smiled at me, opened her lips, almost broke into speech, blushed and glanced round at the guests, saying, "Have a good dinner! "

  Frau Fischer was a young, buxom woman, stupid and sweet in manner. Judging by the way the men gazed at her, she must have been good-looking; and apart from a vulgar strain, perceptible only to non-Germanic eyes, she certainly must have been a very refined woman. Her hair, golden and smooth with coppery tints that gave evidence of the use of curling irons, was twisted into long curls that dangled on her forehead like Medusa's head, bristling with flexible springy little snakes that the hairdresser had propped up with a rat of human hair of a darker shade. She smiled shyly, resting her fat white arms on the table in a childish attitude, and she kept silent, only answering with a sweet Ja whenever someone addressed her. Frau Brigitte Frank and Frau Wächter who, at the beginning of the dinner, had watched her with a persistent and ironical dislike, ended by ignoring her, concentrating all their attention on the food, and on the conversation over which Governor-General Frank presided with his usual conceited eloquence. Frau Fischer listened silently, staring at him dreamily with her large doll's eyes, and she did not awake from her dream until the roast deer appeared on the table. Governor Fischer recounted how he had killed the deer with a bullet between the eyes,- and Frau Fischer said with a sigh: "So ist das Leben—Such is life." It was a dinner, as Frank said, dedicated to Diana the Huntress, and he smiled with a gallant bow to Frau Fischer. First pheasants appeared on the table, then hare, and lastly deer; and the talk that had at first turned to Diana and her wild loves, to the chase as sung by Homer and Virgil or as painted by medieval German artists or as toasted by Italian Renaissance poets, switched to hunting in Poland, to the game preserves of Polish noblemen, to Volhynian hound packs, and to the question as to which were better—German, Polish or Hungarian packs. Then little by little, the talk slipped, as it always did, to the subject of Poland, of the Poles and thence, as always, it ended by falling onto the shoulders of the Jews.

  In no part of Europe had Germans appeared to me so naked, so exposed as in Poland. In the course of my long war experience, the conviction had grown within me that the German has no fear of the strong man, of the armed man who faces him with courage and stands up to him. The German fears the defenseless, the weak and the sick. The leitmotiv of fear, of German cruelty as a result of that fear, had become the principal keynote of my entire war experience. In an attentive observer with a modern and Christian mind, this "fear" arouses horror and pity, and nowhere was I moved to such horror and such pity as in Poland, where the morbid, feminine quality of its nature was revealed to me in its full complexity. That which drives the German to cruelty, to deeds most coldly, methodically and scientifically cruel, is fear. Fear of the oppressed, the defenseless, the weak, the sick; fear of women and of children, fear of the Jews. Although the German strives to hide this mysterious "fear," he is forever driven to talk about it, and always at the least suitable times, particularly at the dinner table where, either because he has been warmed by wine and food, or because company gives him self-confidence, or because he has a subconscious urge to prove to himself that he is not afraid, the German exposes himself—lets himself go on talking about hunger, shooting, slaughter—with a morbid compassion that not only reveals rancor, jealousy, frustrated love and hate, but also a pitiful and wonderful passion for self-abasement.

  I listened to the words of the guests with a horror and pity that I strove in vain to conceal; when Frank, noticing my emotion, perhaps with a view to making me share his own morbid feeling of abasement, turned to me and smiling ironically, asked: "Have you been to see the ghetto, my dear Malaparte?"

  A few days earlier I had gone to the ghetto in Warsaw. I had crossed the threshold of the "forbidden city" inclosed by the high red-brick wall that the Germans raised in order to inclose as if in a cage those miserable, defenseless wild beasts. SS sentries armed with machine guns were guarding the gate to which was affixed an order signed by Governor Fischer making it a capital offense for any Jew to attempt to leave the ghetto. And as with my first steps through the "forbidden cities" of Cracow, Lublin and Czestochowa, I felt aghast at the frozen silence that weighed upon the streets thronged with squalid, ragged and terrified crowds. I had tried to go to the ghetto alone, free from the escort of the Gestapo agent who followed me everywhere like a shadow, but Governor Fischer's orders were strict, and this time I was again compelled to put up with the company of a Black Guard—a tall, fair young man with a fleshless face and eyes that were clear and cold. His face was handsome, his brow high and pure, darkened by the helmet as if by a hidden shadow. He moved among the Jews like an Angel of Jehovah.

  A transparent silence seemed to float without weight in the air, and in that silence the soft crunching of snow under thousands of feet seemed like the grinding of teeth. The throng, stirred to attention by my uniform of an Italian officer, lifted bearded faces and gazed at me with eyes reddened by cold, fever and hunger; tears glistened on the lashes and rolled down into grimy beards. If I happened to jostle someone in the crowd, I apologized; I said prosze pana—beg your pardon—and a face would be raised to me in wonder and disbelief. I repeated: prosze pana,- for I knew that my courtesy was a wonderful thing for them to hear. I knew that after two and a half years of anguish and of bestial slavery, it was the first time that an enemy officer—I was not a German but an Italian officer,- yet it was not enough that I was not a German officer, perhaps it was really not enough—had said a kindly prosze pana to a poor Jew of the Warsaw ghetto.

  From time to time I had to step over a dead body. I walked in the throng without seeing what my feet trod on, and every once in a while I stumbled over a corpse stretched out on the sidewalk between Jewish ritual candelabra. The dead, lying abandoned in the snow, waited for the cart that was to take them away, but the death rate was high and the carts were few; time was too short to take away all the dead, and they lay there for days and days stretched out in the snow between extinguished candelabra. Many lay on the floors in the halls of the
houses, on the landings, in the corridors, and on beds in the rooms thronged with pale and silent people. Their beards were sodden with mud and slush. Some had wide-open eyes that followed us with a blank stare as they watched the passing crowds. They were stiff and hard, they looked like wooden statues. Just like the dead Jews in a Chagall canvas. Their beards looked blue in those fleshless faces made livid by frost and death. It was so pure a blue as to recall certain seaweeds. It was a blue so mysterious as to recall the sea, that strange blue of the sea during certain mysterious hours of the day.

  The silence in the streets of the forbidden city, that frozen silence, like a shudder, like a slight crunching of teeth, preyed so heavily on me, that there came a moment when I began to talk aloud to myself. Everyone turned to look at me, their eyes filled with deep wonder and fear. Then I began to notice the eyes of the people. Almost every face was bearded; beardless faces were frightful, so greatly had hunger and despair ravished them; the faces of the young were sparsely covered with a curly blackish or reddish down; the skin seemed of wax,- the faces of women and children seemed made of paper. In every face there was already the bluish shadow of death. The eyes, in those faces the color of gray paper or white chalk, seemed like weird insects busily rummaging with their hairy little legs in the pits of the sockets and sucking what little light still shone in the hollow of the orbits. When I approached, those loathsome insects became restless, they broke away from their prey for a moment, came out from those sockets as out of a lair, gazing at me in fear. They were eyes of extraordinary alertness, scorched with fever, or else wet and sad. Other eyes glittered with greenish reflections, like scarabs. Others were red, others black, others white, others lightless and opaque—almost clouded by the thin veil of a cataract. The eyes of the women were courageously steady; they held my glance with an insolent contempt; then they turned their gaze to the face of the Black Guard who escorted me, and I saw them darken suddenly with a shadow of fear and revulsion. But the eyes of the children were terrible,- I could not look at them. A sky of dirty wadding, a sky of cotton wool stagnated over that black throng clad in long black caftans with black skull caps on their heads.