Kaputt

by Curzio Malaparte

  "Pogroms are a Slavic specialty," said Wächter.

  "In all things, we Germans are guided by reason and method and not by bestial instincts; we always act scientifically. When necessary, but only when absolutely necessary," repeated Frank stressing each syllable and glaring at me as if to imprint his words on my brow. "We use surgeons as our models, never butchers. Have you perchance ever seen a massacre of Jews in the streets of a German city?" he went on. "You never have, have you? You might have witnessed some demonstrations by students, some harmless rowdy boyish pranks. Yet, within a short time, not a single Jew will be left in Germany."

  "All a matter of method and organization," said Fischer.

  "To kill Jews is not the German method," continued Frank. "A futile labor, a useless waste of time and of strength. We deport them to Poland and shut them up in ghettos. There they are free to do what they like. Within the Polish ghettos, they live as in a free republic."

  "Long live the free republic of the Polish ghettos," I said, raising the glass of Mumm that Frau Fischer had graciously offered me. I was slightly giddy and I felt amiably disposed.

  "Vivat!" they all repeated in a chorus and raised their glasses of champagne. Laughing they drank and looked at me.

  "Mein lieber Malaparte," pursued Frank resting his hand on my shoulder with cordial familiarity, "the German people are the victim of an abominable slander. We are not a race of murderers. When you go back to Italy I hope you will tell them what you have seen in Poland. Your duty, as an honest and impartial man, is to tell the truth. You will be able to say with a clear conscience that the Germans in Poland are a great, peaceful and active family. Look around you; you are in an unpretentious, simple, honest German home. That's what Poland is—an honest German home. Just look—" and so saying he made a sweeping gesture with his hand. I turned and looked around me. Frau Fischer had taken from a drawer a cardboard box from which she took a big ball of wool. With a slight bow to Frau Brigitte Frank, as if she were asking her permission, she put on a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles and calmly began plying her needles. Frau Brigitte Frank meanwhile opened a skein of wool and having hung it on Frau Wächter's wrists, began to roll it up into a ball, moving her hands with graceful lightness and speed. Frau Wächter, sitting upright, bosom high, with knees close together and arms bent, was helping to smoothly unwind the thread from the skein by a delicate motion of her wrists. The three ladies were smiling; they were a picture of gentle homeyness. Governor-General Frank rested his glance, glowing with affection and pride, on the three smiling women busy with their work. Meanwhile Keith and Emil Gassner were slicing the cake and pouring coffee into large china cups. From the slight exhilaration of the wine, the homey scene and the rather dull tone of that provincial German interior—the click of the knitting needles, the crackling of the flames in the fireplace, the smothered crunching of teeth chewing the cake, the soft rattle of the china cups—a subtle uneasiness slowly seeped into my consciousness. Frank's hand on my shoulder, though it was not heavy, oppressed me. Little by little, disentangling and considering each feeling that Frank aroused in me and attempting to understand and to define the meaning, the pretexts and the reason for his every word and gesture, and trying to piece together a moral portrait of him out of the scraps that I had picked up about his character in the past few days, I became convinced that he was not to be judged summarily.

  The uneasiness that I felt within me in his presence was born precisely because of the complexity of his character—a peculiar mixture of cruel intelligence, refinement, vulgarity, brutal cynicism and polished sensitiveness. There had to be a deep zone of darkness within him that I was still unable to explore—a dark region, an inaccessible hell from which dull, fleeting glows flashed unexpectedly, lighting his forbidding face—that disturbing and fascinating mysterious face.

  The opinion I had formed of Frank long ago was, unquestionably, negative. I knew enough of him to detest him, but I felt honor-bound not to stop there. Of all the elements that I was conscious of in Frank, some a result of the experience of others and some of my own, something, I could not say what, was lacking—something the very nature of which was not known to me but which I expected would suddenly be revealed to me at any moment.

  I hoped to catch a gesture, a word, an involuntary action that might reveal to me Frank's real face, his inner face, that would suddenly break away from the dark, deep region of his mind where, I instinctively felt, the roots of his cruel intelligence and fine musical sensitiveness were anchored in a morbid and, in a certain sense, criminal subsoil of character.

  "This is Poland—an honest German home," repeated Frank embracing in a single glance that middle-class scene of domestic simplicity.

  "Why don't you, too, take up some kind of feminine work?" I asked. "Your dignity as Governor-General would not be impaired. King Gustav V of Sweden also takes pleasure in feminine accomplishments. In the evenings, among his close relatives and friends, King Gustav V does embroidery."

  "Ach, so?" exclaimed the ladies with incredulous and amused wonder.

  "What else can a neutral sovereign do?" laughed Frank. "Do you think that the King of Sweden would have time for embroidery if he were Governor-General of Poland?"

  "No doubt the Polish people would be much happier if their Governor-General embroidered," I replied.

  "Ah, that is one of your obsessions!" said Frank laughing. "A few days ago you had me believe that Hitler is a woman, and today you would persuade me to take up feminine work. Do you really think that Poland can be ruled by a set of knitting or embroidery needles? Vous êtes très malin, mon cher Malaparte— You are very malicious, my dear Malaparte."

  "In a way, it can be said that you are embroidering," I went on. "Your political work in Poland is a piece of embroidery."

  "I am not like the King of Sweden who takes up schoolgirls' hobbies," said Frank proudly. "New Europe is my tapestry." He crossed the room with slow, regal steps, opened a door and disappeared.

  I moved to an armchair by the window from where by turning my head I could see at a glance all of huge Saxe Square and the roofless houses behind the Europeiski Hotel and the wreckage of the palace that stood beside the Bristol Hotel at the corner of the street leading to the Vistula.

  That landscape of the several backgrounds against which I had enacted my youthful experiences was perhaps the closest to my heart; and at that moment I could not look at it from that room in the Brühl Palace amid that company without feeling moved to a sad humiliation. After a lapse of over twenty years, that landscape was rising before my eyes again with the worn-out realness of an old faded photograph. The Warsaw days and nights welled up from the distant shore of the past, of 1919 and 1920, with the same features and the same feelings as before—

  In the quiet rooms smelling of incense and vodka, in the little house where Canoness Walewska lived with her nieces on the lane leading from Theater Square where the bells of the hundred churches of the Stara Miasto could be heard ringing in the clear, icy air on a winter night—smiles rippled on the red lips of the girls while the old dowagers, gathered before the Canoness' fireplace, chatted softly in mischievous secrecy. In the Malinowa Hall of the Bristol, Uhlan officers tapped their feet to mazurka rhythms as they moved toward a row of lovely girls dressed in white, their eyes aglow with a chaste fire. Old Princess Czartoriska, her skinny neck encircled seven times by a huge pearl necklace that reached to her lap, sat silently in front of the old Marchioness Wielopolska in her mansion on Aleja Ujazdwska and looked at the windowpanes reflecting the trees of the avenue. The reflection of the lime trees spread through the warm room and touched with green the frail Persian rugs, the Louis XV furniture, the portraits and the landscapes of the French and Italian schools painted in the style of the Trianon and of Schönbrunn, the old Swedish silver and the Russian enamels of Catherine the Great's day. Countess Adam Rzewuska, the golden-voiced Boronat, stood by the piano in the white drawing room of the Royal Italian Legation in the Potocki Palace of the
Krakowskie Przedmiesce and sang gay Warszawianka songs of the days of Stanislas Augustus, and the sad Ukrainian songs belonging to the age of Ataman Chmielnicki and of the Cossack rebellion. I sat next to Yedwiga Rzewuska and she looked at me in silence, pale and remote— The swift sleigh parties under the moon as far as Wilanow— The long evenings spent in the Misliwski Club amid the mellow perfume of Tokay wine while we listened to old Polish noblemen talk about hunting, horses and dogs, women and travels, duels and loves,- listened to the "troika" of the Misliwski Club—Count Henry Potocki, Count Zamoiski, and Count Tarnowski—debate the merits of wines, tailors and ballet girls,- talk in old voices about St. Petersburg and Vienna, London and Paris. The long summer afternoons in the cool dimness of his residence with the Nuncio, Monsignor Achilles Ratti who later became Pope Pius XI, and with his secretary, Monsignor Pellegrinetti who later became a Cardinal— In the dusty stifling heat of sunset along the banks of the Vistula, Soviet machine guns were rattling and the horses of the Third Uhlans clattered under the palace windows as they marched toward Praha to meet Budenny's Red Cossacks. The crowd thronged on the pavement of the Nowy Swiat singing:

  Ulani, Ulani, malowanie dzieci

  Niejedna panienka, zawami poleci...

  The athletic Princess Woroniecka, patroness of the Third Uhlans, marching at the head of the regiment and holding a sheaf of red roses in her arms.

  Niejedna panienka i niejedna wdowi

  Za ami ulani poleciec gotowi...

  My quarrel with Lieutenant Potulicki and the three-day celebration that marked our reconciliation. The pistol shot fired one night at Princess W— 's by Marilski at Dzierjinski across a room thronged with couples dancing to "The Broken Doll," the first fox-trot that had reached Poland in 1919. Dzierjinski stretched out on the floor in a pool of blood with his throat punctured. And Princess W— telling the musicians: "Jouez donc, ce n'est rien—

  Play, it is nothing." And Marilski, pale and smiling, clutching the pistol in his hand surrounded by the young women excited by the frenzy of the dance and by the sight of blood. Then a month later Dzierjinski, his face still pale and his throat bandaged, arm in arm with Marilski in the Europeiski bar.

  At the dances in the British Legation, Princess Olga Radziwill, with blond curly hair cut short like a boy's, yielding laughingly to the arms of Cavendish Bentinck, a young secretary of the British Legation who resembled Rupert Brooke and brought to mind the young Apollo of Mrs. Cornford's famous epigram, "Magnificently unprepared for the young littleness of life"; Isabella Radziwill, tall, with long, silky black hair and eyes like a clear night sky, standing by the window with a young English general, blind in one eye like Nelson and like Nelson with only one arm, who spoke to her in a low voice with sweet and loving laughter. He was certainly a ghost, a gentle ghost of a far-off Warsaw night, that British General Carton de Wiart, blind in one eye and one-armed, who commanded the British forces that landed in Norway in the spring of 1940. I, too, was certainly a ghost, a dull ghost of a remote age—perhaps of a happy age, perhaps of a dead age, perhaps of a very happy age—

  I was a shadow, uneasy and saddened, standing by that window, gazing on that landscape of my youthful years. Out of the depths of my memory rose the gentle shadows of that far-off age, and I laughed sweetly. I closed my eyes and looked again at those pale phantoms. I was listening to those voices that were dear to me and had scarcely been faded by time, when the sound of sweet music reached my ear—the first notes of a Chopin prelude. In the next room through the half-open door, I saw Frank seated at Madame Beck's piano, his face bowed low on his chest. His forehead was pale and damp with sweat. An expression of deep suffering humbled his proud face. His breath was labored; he was biting his under-lip. His eyes were closed; his eyelids were trembling. He is a sick man, I thought. And that thought irritated me.

  Everyone around listened in silence and held their breath. Those notes of the "Prelude," so pure and light, floated in the warm air like propaganda leaflets dropped from a plane. On each note was printed "Long live Poland!" in large crimson letters. From the window I saw the snowflakes slowly falling in the vast Saxe Square, and on each snowflake was written "Long live Poland!" in large crimson letters.

  I had read the same words, printed in the same large crimson letters twenty years earlier, in October 1919, on the pure, light notes of Chopin that escaped from the white, fragile, precious hands of the Polish Premier Ignace Paderewski, as he sat at the piano in the large, red hall of the Royal Palace in Warsaw. Those were the days of Poland's resurrection; the Polish aristocracy and the members of the diplomatic corps often assembled in the evening around the Premier's piano. Chopin's gentle ghost passed smiling among us, and a shiver ran along the arms and bare shoulders of the young women. The deathless angelic voice of Chopin, like the distant voice of a spring storm, conquered the frightful shriek of revolt and slaughter. The pure light notes floated in the murky air above the livid and fleshless throngs until the last notes gradually faded away. Paderewski slowly lifted his great white head from the keyboard and revealed a face bathed in tears.

  Now in the Brühl Palace, only a few steps away from the ruins of the Royal Palace, in the warm, smoky air of the middle-class German interior, Chopin's pure, seditious notes broke into flight from the white, delicate hands of Frank—from the German hands of the Governor-General of Poland; a feeling of shame and rebellion brought a flush to my face.

  "Oh, he plays like an angel!" whispered Frau Brigitte Frank. At that moment the music ceased and Frank appeared on the threshold. Frau Brigitte jumped up and tossing aside her ball of wool, went up to him and kissed his hands. Frank, full of humility and religious fervor, let her kiss his hands with an austere expression of priestly dignity as if he were at that moment descending from an altar after having performed a mysterious ritual; I almost expected to see Frau Brigitte kneel in worship. Instead, she grasped Frank's hands and raising them, turned toward us. "Look!" she said in a triumphant voice, "look at the way hands of angels are made!"

  I looked at Frank's hands. They were small, delicate and very white. I was surprised and relieved not to see a single drop of blood on them.

  For some days I had no occasion to see either Governor-General Frank or Governor Fischer of Warsaw whose time was taken up with Himmler who had suddenly arrived from Berlin to study the delicate situation that was developing in Poland—it was then the beginning of February 1942—since the German defeats in Russia. The personal relations between Himmler and Frank were notoriously bad: Himmler despised Frank's "theatricals" and his "intellectual polish"; Frank charged Himmler with "base cruelty." Great changes among the highest Nazi officials in Poland were mentioned; even Frank's position seemed in jeopardy. But when Himmler left Warsaw and returned to Berlin, Frank appeared to have won the day. The "great changes" had boiled down to the substitution of a close relative of Himmler— the Stadthauptmann of Czestochowa—for Wächter as Governor of Cracow, and the appointment of Wächter as Governor of Lwöw.

  Meanwhile Wächter went back to Cracow with Gassner and Baron Wolsegger. Frau Wächter remained behind to keep Frau Brigitte Frank company during the few days that the Governor-General still had to spend in Warsaw. And I, while waiting for permission to leave for the Smolensk front, had taken advantage of Himmler's presence—while the Gestapo was being diverted from its usual work to the crushing responsibility of protecting Himmler's sacred life—to secretly distribute letters, parcels of food and money that Polish refugees in Italy had asked me to give to their relatives and friends in Warsaw. The delivery of clandestine correspondence, even a single letter from abroad to Polish citizens, was punishable by death. I had to be, therefore, extremely cautious to escape the watchfulness of the Gestapo, so that I would not endanger other lives; and thanks to my caution and the providential complicity of a German officer—a highly cultured and generous-minded young man whom I had met in Florence years before and to whom I was bound by a close friendship—I succeeded in performing the delicate task that I ha
d so lightly undertaken. The game was dangerous and I had been playing it in a sporting spirit with entire honesty—for I have never failed, even against the Germans, to play cricket according to the rules—and I was fortified by the feeling that I was performing a task affirming man's solidarity and in the best tradition of Christian mercy, as well as by a desire to hoodwink Himmler, Frank and all their police machinery. I had enjoyed the game and I had won,- had I lost, I would have cheerfully paid the penalty. But I had won only because the Germans, forever undervaluing their opponents, had not imagined that I would play according to the rules of the game.

  Two days after Himmler's departure I met Frank again—at a luncheon he gave for Max Schmeling, the prize fighter—in his official residence at the Belvedere, that until Marshal Pilsudski's death had been his residence. That morning as I slowly strolled to the court of honor of the Belvedere along the avenue that leads through the charming eighteenth-century park landscaped with a rather sad and autumnal listlessness by some late pupil of Lenôtre, it seemed to me that the German flags, the German sentries, the German steps, voices and gestures imparted something that was hard and cold and dead to the old noble trees of the park, to the musical gentleness of that architecture that had been devised for the pompous leisure of Stanislas Augustus, to the silence of the fountains gripped in their prison of ice. More than twenty years earlier when I had strolled under the limes of the Aleja Ujazdowska or through the Avenue Laziencki I had discerned at a distance through the branches, the white walls of the Belvedere, and had felt that the marble stairways, the statues of Apollo and of Diana, the white stucco of the building were made of a delicate living material, almost I should say—of rosy flesh. Now on the contrary, when I entered the Belvedere, everything seemed cold, hard and dead. As I crossed the great halls filled with a clear frosty light, halls that once had resounded with the violins and harpsichords of Lulli and Rameau and with Chopin's lofty, pure melancholy, I heard German voices and laughter. I stopped on the threshold, uncertain whether to go in; then Frank's voice called to me and he met me himself with that proud cordiality of his that always surprised and deeply perturbed me.