Kaputt

by Curzio Malaparte

  La dracu Domniscoara Mica, la dracu the goats, too. A few passers-by slunk cautiously along the walls and brandished their passes in their right hands held high above their heads. There was really something in the air. My friend Kane was right. Something was about to happen. One felt that some misfortune was imminent. One felt it in the air, in one's skin, in one's finger tips.

  When I arrived in front of the druggist's shop, it was seven sharp, and Mica was not there. The shop was closed. Mica had closed it early that evening, much earlier than usual. I could have wagered that she was not coming, that she had become frightened at the last moment. La dracu all women, they are all alike, they all become frightened, and always at the last moment. La dracu Domniscoara Mica, la dracu the goats, too. I walked slowly up the street toward the cemetery. Groups of German soldiers were passing by dragging their boots along the sidewalk. The owner of the lustrageria, on the corner of Strada Lapusneanu, just in front of the Corso Café-Restaurant, was wielding his last brush strokes on the shoes of his last patron for the day, a Romanian soldier seated high on his brass throne.

  The glow of the sunset penetrated to the very back of the dark shop, causing the tins of shoe polish to glisten. From time to time I met a group of manacled Jews who trod along, their heads low, under the guard of Romanian soldiers in their sand-colored uniforms. "Why don't you polish the boots of those unfortunate ones for the last time?" laughed the Romanian soldier seated high on his brass throne. "Can't you see they are barefoot?" replied the owner of the lustrageria raising his pale, sweaty face. He was gently panting as he swung his brush with amazing lightness.

  The aristocrats of Jassy were looking out of the windows of the Jockey Club—those fat, round-bellied Moldavian gentlemen, sweetly and tamely adipose, their faces smooth and flabby, their gloomy deeply circled eyes shining humid and languid; they looked like figures by Pascin. The houses, the trees and the carriages that stopped in front of the Fundatia Palace also looked as if they had been painted by Pascin. Farther away in the sky, toward Skuleni, toward the Prut sluggishly flowing between its muddy banks thick with reeds—there burst little red and white clouds of flak. The owner of the shoe-shine parlor, while putting on the shutters of his shop, glanced upward at those little clouds in the far-off sky, as if he were watching the approach of a storm.

  The Jockey Club, standing where the Hotel d'Angleterre had been, at the crossing of the Strada Brocuraru and Strada Carol, was a fine neoclassical little palace, the one modern building in Jassy that could lay claim to some artistic distinction in its architectural design, its decorations, and even its less conspicuous adornments. Doric columns in bold relief seemed to move in front of its ivory-colored façade. Its side walls were grooved with closely set niches, in which stood stucco Cupids, half-way between ivory and pink in color, with bow and arrows in hand. The shop windows of the Zanfirescu confectionery and the large windows of the Corso Café-Restaurant—the smartest in the city—ran the length of the ground floor. The entrance to the Jockey Club was at the back of the building, across a loosely cobbled courtyard. Here and there groups of Romanian soldiers in full war equipment, their brows hidden by steel helmets, were stretched out on the cobblestones, sleeping in the sun. Under a glass canopy two large, fat-breasted sphinxes stood guard at the entrance.

  The walls of the hallway were wainscoted in dark polished wood; the inner door frames were carved in the French style of Louis Philippe; oil paintings and etchings hung on the walls— Parisian landscapes, Notre Dame, the Ile St. Louis, the Trocadero, and portraits of women typical of the French fashion magazines of the period from 1880 to 1900. In the card room, around the tables covered with green felt, the old Moldavian gentlemen played dismal bridge games and wiped their brows with big handkerchiefs on which large coronets were embroidered. A carved-wood gallery, its banister decorated with a neoclassic band of alternating harps and lyres, extended along the wall facing the windows which look out on the Strada Brocuraru. It was the gallery used by the musicians during the gay entertainments given by the nobility of Jassy.

  I stopped by a table to watch the game; the players lifted their perspiring faces and nodded their greetings. Stooping slightly, old Prince Cantemir crossed the room and limped through a door in the rear. Swarms of flies like roses whirled about in the air and buzzed persistently at the windows; a warm scent of roses wafted up from the garden and mingled with the odor of the zuica and the Turkish tobacco. The gilded youth of Jassy were looking out of the windows facing the street, those fat Moldavian Beau Brummels with swarthy, morose eyes. Before going out I stopped a while to gaze at their vast, round, soft behinds, around which swarms of flies traced delicate circles in the smoky air.

  "Buna sear a, Domnule Capitan," said Marioara, the little waitress in the Corso Café-Restaurant, when I entered the room thronged with German officers and soldiers; it was a large well-designed room on the ground floor of the Jockey Club. Along its walls ran narrow, horse-hair seats that were broken here and there by wooden partitions, inclosing little booths. Marioara was still a child—thin, unripe and gentle. She smiled at me tilting her head on her shoulder, as she leaned both her hands on the marble slab of the table.

  "Won't you give me a glass of beer, Marioara?"

  Marioara moaned as if she were ill, and said, "Ohi, ohi, ohi, Domnule Capitan, ohi, ohi, ohi."

  "I am thirsty, Marioara."

  "Ohi, ohi, ohi, there's no beer, Domnule Capitan."

  "You're a naughty child, Marioara."

  "Nu, nu, Domnule Capitan, there's no beer," said Marioara shaking her head and smiling.

  "I will go away, and I shall never come back, Marioara."

  "La revedere, Domnule Capitan," said Marioara with a mischievous smile.

  "La revedere," I replied moving toward the door.

  "Domnule CapitanI"

  "La revedere," I said without turning.

  Marioara was calling me in her childish voice from the door of the Corso Café, "Domnule Capitan, Domnule Capitan!"

  It is not far from the Corso to the ancient cemetery, not more than fifty steps. Walking between the tombs I heard Marioara's voice calling me, "Domnule Capitan!" But I had no intention of going back at once, I wanted to make her wait, to think that I was angry with her for not giving me a glass of beer, well knowing that it was no fault of hers, that there was not a drop of beer to be had in Jassy.

  "Domnule Capitan!" I was just opening the door of my house, when I felt a hand slightly touch my arm, and heard a voice say: "Buna sear a—Good evening, Domnule Capitan." It was Kane's voice.

  "What do you want, Domnule Kane?" In the evening twilight I made out three bearded, black-coated figures behind Kane's back.

  "May we come in, Domnule Capitan?"

  "Of course," I said.

  We climbed the steep stairs, entered the house, and I turned on the switch. "La dracu!" I exclaimed.

  "The current has been cut off," said Kane.

  I lighted a candle, closed the windows so the light would not be seen from without, and looked at Kane's three companions. They were three old Jews, with reddish hair covering their faces. Their foreheads were so pale that they shone as if made of silver.

  "Be seated," I said pointing at the chairs scattered about the room.

  We sat around the table and I looked inquiringly at Kane.

  "Domnule Capitan," said Kane, "we have come to ask you whether you could—"

  "—whether you would help us," broke in one of his companions. He was an old man, incredibly thin and pale with a long, reddish-gray beard. His eyes behind a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles shone with a flickering red light. He was resting his fleshless hands, the color of war, on the table.

  "You can help us, Domnule Capitan," said Kane, and he added after a brief pause, "you may perhaps be able to tell us what we should do—"

  "—to remove the grave danger threatening us," broke in again the same man who had interrupted Kane before.

  "What danger?" I asked.

&nbs
p; Deep silence followed my words,- suddenly another of Kane's companions—his face seemed familiar; I thought I had seen him before, but I could not say where or when—rose slowly to his feet.

  He was a tall, bony old man with tawny hair and a beard streaked with white; his white eyelids stuck to the lenses of his spectacles,- his fixed and blank eyes were like those of a blind man. He gazed at me for a long time without offering a word, then he said in a low voice: "Domnule Capitan, a frightful danger is hanging over our heads. Can't you feel the menace hovering over us? The Romanian authorities are preparing a merciless pogrom. The slaughter may begin at any moment. Why don't you help us? What are we to do? Why don't you act, why don't you come to our aid?"

  "I cannot do anything," I replied. "I am a foreigner, I am the only Italian officer in all Moldavia. What can I do? Who will listen to me?"

  "Warn General von Schobert. Tell him what they are planning to do to us. He can, if he wishes, prevent the massacre. Won't you go to General von Schobert? He will listen to you."

  "General von Schobert," I replied, "is a gentleman,- he is an old soldier and a good Christian, but he is a German and cares nothing about Jews."

  "If he is a good Christian, he will listen to you."

  "He will answer that he does not interfere with the internal affairs of Romania. I might go to Colonel Lupu, the Military Commander of Jassy."

  "Colonel Lupu?" said Kane. "It is Colonel Lupu himself who is planning the massacre."

  "But do something, do something quick!" said the old man softly with a repressed urgency.

  "I have lost the ability to act," I replied. "I am an Italian. We are no longer able to act; after twenty years of slavery, we are no longer able to assume responsibility. Like all Italians, I have a broken back. During the last twenty years all our energies have been spent on the effort to survive. We are no longer good for anything. We are only able to applaud. Do you want to go and applaud General von Schobert and Colonel Lupu? If you want, I can go as far as Bucharest and applaud Marshal Antonescu, the 'Red Dog,' if you think that it will help you any. I cannot do anything else. Perhaps you want me to sacrifice myself uselessly for you? Should I have myself shot in Unirii Square defending the Jews of Jassy? If I were capable of it, I would have had myself shot in an Italian square defending the Italians. We no longer dare to act, and we no longer know how, that is the truth," I said, turning away to conceal the color of my face.

  "All this is very sad," murmured the old man. Then he leaned across the table and thrust his face toward me, and in a voice that was extraordinarily humble and sweet, in a faraway voice said, "Don't you recognize me?"

  I looked closely at the old man. The long reddish beard streaked with silver, those blank fixed eyes, that high pale forehead, and that sweet, sad, faraway voice called back to my mind Dr. Alesi, the director of the Regina Coeli prison in Rome. It was his voice above all that made me recognize him again in the flickering candle-light. Doctor Alesi had been the director of the Mantellate, the prison for women, but while I was incarcerated in Regina Coeli he temporarily took the place of the regular director who had been ill for several months,- and owing to his long habit of dealing with the women of the Mantellate, he had trained his voice to an extraordinary almost feminine sweetness. That very sweet, sad voice—a voice evoking serene days, harmonious curves, green and rosy twilights—coming from an old bearded man as solemn as a patriarch seemed like a window opening onto a springlike countryside. And at that moment there also rose before my eyes the same vista of trees, water and clouds that came to me in my cell in Regina Coeli, whenever I heard his sad, sweet, faraway voice in the passage. It was a voice like a landscape; the eye lost itself in the limitless freedom of that view of mountains, valleys, woods and rivers, and the feeling that moved me, the anguish that oppressed me, the despair that sometimes pushed me down onto the straw mattress, or drove me to hammer with my fists the walls of my cell, all were gradually allayed, as if they found some compensation for the humiliation and the suffering of a slave, in the presence of freedom and of the peace of nature. To the prisoners Alesi's voice meant the gift of that marvelous landscape for which all of us yearned and which we tried to imagine beyond our bars; it was the gift of an imaginary landscape penetrated furtively into the narrow cell, between those four white walls—blinding, bare, impervious, inaccessible. Hearing Alesi's voice the prisoners saw opening before their eyes that free, limitless view, lit by a clear, even, mellow light which, falling from above, tinged the valleys with transparent half shadows, pierced the secret of the woods, revealed the mystery of the shining silvery rivers and lakes at the end of the plain and the delicate tremor of the sea. For a moment, for a moment only, each prisoner had the illusion of being free, as if the door of the cell had opened mysteriously and noiselessly, and after a brief moment was slowly closed again as Alesi's voice died away little by little in the crushing silence of the Regina Coeli corridors.

  "Don't you recognize me?" asked the old Jew of Jassy in a voice that was extraordinarily humble and sweet, in the sad, faraway voice of Alesi. I looked fixedly at him, trembling, my brow sweating with anguish and fear. I wanted to rise and to flee, but Alesi stretched out his arm across the table and held me back.

  "Do you remember the day you tried to kill yourself in your cell? It was Cell 461 of the fourth block—do you remember? We were just in time to prevent you from slashing your wrist. Did you think we had not noticed that a piece of glass from the broken tumbler was missing?" and he started laughing, drumming with his fingers on the table to the lilting rhythm of his laughter.

  "Why do you revive those memories? You were very good to me then. But I don't know whether I should be thankful that you saved me."

  "Was I wrong in saving you? " asked Alesi. And after a long silence he asked me in a low voice, "Why did you want to die?"

  "I was afraid," I replied.

  "Do you remember that day when you shouted and beat your fists on the door of the cell?"

  "I was afraid," I replied.

  The old man began to laugh and closed his eyes a little.

  "I, too, was afraid; the warders were also afraid. Isn't it true, Picci? Isn't it true, Corda," he added turning around, "that warders were afraid, too?"

  I raised my eyes and I saw the faces of Picci and Corda, my two warders at Regina Coeli, materializing out of the darkness behind the old man. Their smiles were shy and kindly, and I smiled too,- I looked at them with sadness and affection.

  "We were also afraid," said Picci and Corda.

  Picci and Corda were Sardinians—two short, lean sons of Sardinia, with jet-black hair, slightly slanting eyes and dark faces that expressed centuries of hunger and malaria; framed within the jet-black hair that grew down the temples as far as their eyebrows, the faces resembled Byzantine saints in silver frames.

  "We were afraid," repeated Picci and Corda, melting little by little into the darkness.

  "We are all cowards, that's true," said the old Jew. "We have all shouted and applauded. But perhaps the others are also afraid. They want to slaughter us because they are afraid of us. They are afraid of us because we are weak and defenseless. They want to slaughter us because they know that we are afraid of them. Ha, ha, ha!" he laughed and he shut his eyes, lowered his head to his chest and gripped the edge of the table with his fleshless waxen hands. We all were silent as if overcome by an unexplainable anguish. "You can help us," said the old man raising his head, "General von Schobert and Colonel Lupu will listen to you. You are not a Jew, you are not one of the poor Jews of Jassy. You are an Italian officer."...

  I began to laugh without speaking. I felt rather ashamed at that moment. I felt ashamed of being an Italian.

  "... You are an Italian officer, they will listen to you. Perhaps you can still prevent the massacre."

  Thus speaking the old man had risen with a deep bow. The other two old Jews and my friend Kane had also risen and bowed low.

  "I have little hope," I said, seeing them to the doo
r.

  In silence, one by one, they shook hands with me, they walked out and went down the first steps. I watched them sinking down the steep stairs, disappearing bit by bit—first the legs, then the backs, then the shoulders, their heads last. They disappeared as if they had sunk into a tomb. I threw myself onto the bed and fell asleep almost at once. In the dimness of the room, faintly lit by the flame of the glittering candle, I saw the four Jews sitting around the table. Their garments were torn, their faces bloody. The blood dripped slowly down from their wounded foreheads into their long reddish beards. Kane was also wounded, his forehead was split open, his eyes were clotted with blood. A terrified cry escaped my lips. I found myself sitting up in bed unable to move; an icy sweat dripped down my face, and the frightful sight of those pale bleeding ghosts sitting around my table remained long before my eyes, until the muddy light of dawn, the color of dirty water, crept slowly into the room and, exhausted, I fell into a deep slumber.

  I awoke late, - it must have been after two in the afternoon. The lustrageria at the corner of the Strada Lapusneanu was closed. The windows of the Jockey Club were shut for the sacred hours of the siesta. A group of working men, street cleaners and the coachmen who ply from morning till night in front of the Fundatia, were eating in silence, sitting on the tombstones and on the steps of the adapost. The greasy smell of brenza wafted through my windows followed by swarms of flies.

  "Good day, Domnule Capitan," said the coachmen and street cleaners raising their eyes and nodding their heads in greeting. By then everybody knew me in Jassy. The workmen also raised their eyes, pointing to their bread and cheese with gestures of invitation. I shouted, "Multzumesc—Thanks!" pointing to my own bread and cheese. But there was something in the air, something was certainly in the air. The sky, overcast with black clouds croaked quietly like a muddy pool. Romanian policemen and soldiers were posting large posters on the walls with Colonel Lupu's proclamation: "All the inhabitants of houses from which shots are fired on the troops and those of the neighboring houses, men and women alike, will be shot on the spot, fara copii—except the children."