Kaputt

by Curzio Malaparte

  The group assembled on the right laughed contentedly; those who had passed looked at their less fortunate companions with a bantering air; they pointed their fingers at their own breasts saying, "Clerks!" Making grimaces, they pointed at those who had failed and said, "Stones on the back!" Only the prisoners who looked like workmen and who, one by one, went to swell the ranks of those sent to the left, kept silent and gazed at the colonel who, chancing to meet their eyes, blushed and shouted with a gesture of impatience, "Schnell!—Quick!"

  The examination lasted for about an hour. When the last batch of three prisoners completed the two minutes of reading, the colonel turned to the Feldwebel and said, "Count them!" The Feldwebel began counting from a distance, pointing at each man with his finger, "Ein, zwei, drei..." On the left were eighty-seven, on the right were thirty-one who had passed successfully. Then, at the colonel's bidding, the Sonderführer began to speak. He seemed like a schoolmaster dissatisfied with his pupils. He said that he was disappointed, that he was sorry to have flunked so many, that he would have preferred to pass them all. At any rate, he added, those who had not succeeded in getting through the examination would have no reason to complain, provided they worked and displayed a greater skill than they had displayed at school. While he spoke, the group of the successful prisoners gazed at their less fortunate comrades with a compassionate air, and the younger ones dug their elbows into each other's ribs and giggled. When the Sonderführer had finished speaking, the colonel turned to the Feldwebel and said: "Alles in Ordnung. Weg!" and he walked off toward his headquarters followed by the other officers who looked back occasionally and exchanged whispers.

  "You'll stay here until tomorrow, and tomorrow you will start for the labor camp," said the Feldwebel to the group on the left. Then he turned toward the group on the right who had passed and harshly ordered them to fall in line. As soon as the prisoners formed a close line touching one another's elbows—they looked pleased, and laughed, glancing at their companions as if making fun of them—he counted them again quickly, said "Thirty-one," and made a sign with his hand to a squad of SS men waiting at the end of the courtyard. He ordered, "Right about, turn!" The prisoners turned right about, marched forward stamping their feet hard in the mud and, when they came face to face with the wall surrounding the yard, the Feldwebel commanded "Halt!" Then turning to the SS men who had lined up behind the prisoners and had already raised their tommy guns, he cleared his throat, spat on the ground and shouted, "Fire!"

  When he heard the rattle of the guns, the colonel who was within a few steps of the office, stopped, turned abruptly; the other officers stopped and also turned. The colonel passed his hand over his face as if wiping away sweat and, followed by his officers, entered the building.

  "Ach, so," said the Melitopol Sonderführer walking past me. "Russia must be cleared of all this learned rabble. The peasants and workers who can read and write too well are dangerous. They are all communists."

  "Natürlich," I replied, "but in Germany everyone, whether they are peasants or workers, can read and write well."

  "The German people are a people of high Kultur."

  "Naturally," I replied. "The German people have a high Kultur."

  "Nicht wahr!" said the Sonderführer laughing, and walked toward headquarters.

  I was left alone in the center of the yard facing the prisoners who could not read well, and my whole body was shaking.

  Then, as their mysterious fear grew, as that mysterious white stain spread over their eyes, they began killing prisoners whose feet were blistered and who could no longer walk. They began setting fire to the villages that were unable to hand over a fixed number of loads of wheat and flour, a certain number of loads of corn and barley and of heads of horses and cattle to the requisitioning platoons.

  When only a few Jews remained, they began hanging the peasants. They strung them by their necks or by their feet to the branches of trees in the little village squares, around the bare pedestals where the white statues of Lenin and Stalin had stood only a few days before. They hung them side by side with the rain-washed corpses of the Jews that had been dangling for days under the black sky, side by side with the dogs of the Jews that had been strung up on the same trees with their masters. "Ah, the Jewish dogs—die jüdische Hunde!" said the German soldiers as they passed along.

  In the evening, when we halted in the villages for the night— we were by then in the heart of the ancient Cossack land of the Dnieper—and fires were lighted to dry the soaked clothes on our backs, the soldiers cursed softly between their teeth and greeted one another scornfully saying, "Ein Liter!—One liter!" They did not say "Heil Hitler!" They said "Ein Liter!" and they laughed as they stretched toward the fire their swollen feet, covered with the little white blisters.

  Those were the first Cossack villages we saw on our slow, laborious and endless march east. Old bearded Cossacks sat in the doors of their houses, watched the columns of German transports go by and occasionally glanced upward at the sky gently arching above the huge plain. That wonderful Ukrainian sky, light and delicate, supported by lofty Doric columns of spotless white clouds rising on the skyline from the far end of the crimson autumn steppes.

  "Berlin raucht Juno," said the soldiers, and laughingly threw the last empty packages of Juno cigarettes at the old Cossacks sitting in the doorways of their houses. Tobacco was becoming scarce and the soldiers cursed. "Berlin raucht Juno!—Berlin smokes Junos!" they scornfully shouted. I thought of buses and trams in Berlin bearing the inscription Berlin raucht Juno, of U-Bahn{13} stairways with the words Berlin raucht Juno painted in red on every step. I thought of the clumsy, leering, badly washed Berlin crowd with their ashen-colored faces glistening with grease and sweat, of the disheveled women, with red eyes, swollen hands and string-darned stockings, of the old people and of children with hard, spiteful faces. In the midst of that leering and frightened crowd I saw again the soldiers on leave from the Russian front— those silent, lean, stern soldiers, almost all bald, even the youngest among them. I watched that mysterious stain widening in their eyes, and I thought about the Herrenvolk and about the useless, hopeless heroism of the Herrenvolk. "Aus dem Kraftquell Milch," said the soldiers scornfully throwing the last empty cans of Milei milk-egg at the old Cossacks sitting in the doors of their houses. Aus dem Kraftquell Milch was written on the empty cans thrown into the mud, and a shiver ran down my back as I thought about the Herrenvolk and about the Herrenvolk's mysterious fear.

  At night I sometimes left the bivouac or the house in which I had found shelter and, taking my blankets with me went and lay down in a corn field, close to the camp or to the village. There, stretched out among the rain-sodden stalks, I waited for the dawn and listened drowsily to the noises of passing transports, troops of Romanian cavalry, columns of armored cars. I listened to harsh, brutal German voices and the merry high-pitched Romanian voices calling, "Inainte, baiatsi, inainte!—Forward, boys, forward!" Herds of starving vagrant dogs came close to me and sniffed, wagging their tails—those small Ukrainian mongrels, with yellowish hair, red eyes and bandy legs. Some of the dogs often huddled beside me licking my face, and whenever a step sounded on the neighboring path or the wheat rattled in a strong gust of wind, the dog would growl softly and I would say: "Down, Dmitri!" I felt as if I were talking to a man, to a Russian. I said: "Shut up, Ivan!" and I felt as if I were talking to one of those prisoners who had tried so hard to read well, who had passed their examination and now lay in the mud, their faces gnawed by lime—over there by the wall encircling the yard of the kolkhoz in the village near Nemirovskoye.

  One night I spent in a sunflower field. It was really a sunflower forest—a real forest. Bending on their tall hairy stalks, their large, round black eyes with long yellow lashes misty with sleep, the sunflowers slept with drooping heads. It was a clear night, the sky steeped in stars shone with blue and green reflections, like the hollow of a huge sea shell. I slept hard and I was awakened at dawn by a gentle, soft crackling. I
t sounded like the rustle of people walking barefoot through grass. I listened holding my breath. The faint coughing of motors came to me from the near-by encampment—faint voices calling to one another in the wood by the brook. A dog was barking in the distance. Down on the skyline the sun was breaking through the black shell of the night, rising warm and red over the plain glistening with dew. That rustle spread and became louder every minute. It was by now like the crackling of a brushwood fire. Now it was like the subdued creaking of a vast army marching cautiously through a field of stubble. Lying on the ground, I held my breath, watching the sunflowers slowly raising their yellow eyelids and gradually opening their eyes.

  The sunflowers were raising their heads and gently twisting on their stalks, turning their large black eyes to the rising sun. It was a slow, even, vast movement. The entire sunflower forest was turning to gaze at the young glory of the sun. I, too, raised my face to the east and watched the sun rising little by little amid the rosy vapors of the dawn, above the bluish clouds of smoke from the far-off fires on the plain.

  Then the rain ceased and, after a few days of strong, cold winds, the frost suddenly set in. Not snow, just a sudden, fierce autumnal frost. During the night the mud hardened, the pools of water were covered with glistening glass as thin as human skin. The air turned limpid; the sky, blue-gray in color, looked cracked like a broken mirror.

  The German march toward the east became more rapid; the bark of the guns, the rattle of rifles and machine guns sounded sharply and clearly, unbroken by echoes. The heavy armored cars of General von Schobert that had crawled laboriously during the rainy days, like clumsy toads, through the slippery, sticky mud of the plain between the Bug and the Dnieper, began roaring again over the frost-hardened ruts. The bluish smoke from the exhausts etched faint clouds that melted away at once over the trees and yet left something of their mysterious presence in the air.

  This was the most dangerous moment of the great Russian crisis during the autumn of 1941. The army of Marshal Budenny, the Russian Murat, was slowly retiring toward the Don, leaving as a rear guard, units of Cossack cavalry and groups of those small armored cars that the Germans called Panzerpferde—armored horses. The Panzerpferde were nimble little cars, mostly driven by young Tartar workmen, stakhanovtzi and udarniki from the Soviet steelworks of the Don and the Volga. They used the tactics of Tartar cavalry; they turned up suddenly to worry the flanks, they disappeared into the bushes and thickets, hid in the folds of the soil and turned up suddenly again in the rear, drawing wide curves across the stubble fields and the meadows. They used light cavalry tactics, of which even Murat would have been proud. They circled the plain like horses in a riding school.

  But even the Panzerpferde became less frequent. I asked myself where Budenny was, where the whiskered Budenny with his huge army of Cossack and Tartar cavalry was hiding. At Yambol, soon after we had crossed the Dniester, the peasants said, "Eh, Budenny is waiting for you behind the Bug." When we had crossed the Bug, the peasants said, "Eh, he is waiting for you behind the Dnieper." Now with a very knowing air they said, "Eh, Budenny is waiting for you behind the Don." Thus the Germans penetrated ever farther into the Ukrainian plain, like a knife, and the wound was already hurting—it was festering and turning into a sore. During the evenings in the villages where the column halted for the night, I listened to the raucous voices of the gramophones. Invariably, there was always a gramophone and a pile of records in the offices of the Soviet, or of the kolkhoz, or in the local Univermag shop. They were recordings of the usual factory, kolkhoz and rabochii club songs, and among them there was always the "Budenny March." I listened to the "Budenny March" and wondered, What the devil is Budenny doing? Where has the whiskered Budenny buried himself?

  One day the Germans began to hunt for dogs. I supposed at first that because of numerous cases of rabies, General von Schobert had ordered the extermination of all dogs. Later I realized that there was some other reason behind it. As soon as the Germans entered a village, even before they looked for the Jews, they began a hunt for the dogs. Squads of SS men and of Panzerjäger ran through the streets firing their tommy guns and throwing hand grenades at those poor mongrels with yellow hair, red shiny eyes and bandy legs. They were routed out of the orchards and hedges and pursued relentlessly through the fields. The poor brutes fled to the woods, crouched in the ditches, in the hollows, behind orchard fences, or else they sought refuge in the houses, huddling in the corners, in the beds of the peasants, behind the ovens, under the benches. The German soldiers entered the houses, drove the dogs out of their hiding places and slew them with rifle butts.

  The armored-car men were most fierce in these hunts,- the Panzerjäger seemed to have a personal grudge against the poor brutes. I asked the armored-car men, "Why?" The faces of the Panzerjäger darkened. "Ask the dogs," they replied, and turned their backs on me.

  The old Cossacks sitting in the doors of their houses laughed in their beards and slapped their knees. "Ah, poor dogs," they said, "Ah, bednii sobachki!" and they laughed maliciously, as if they felt sorry not for the poor brutes, but for the poor Germans. Old women peered over the orchard fences, the girls who went down to the river balancing two pails on a yoke over their shoulders, the children who mercifully went to bury the murdered dogs in the fields—they all smiled in a way that was both sad and malicious. At night through the fields and the woods one heard scattered barking, whining howls, the dogs scraping and scratching in the orchards and under the houses in search of food, and German sentries shouting, "Who goes there?" in strange voices. One sensed that they were afraid of something terrifying and mysterious—that they were afraid of the dogs.

  One morning I was at an artillery observation post, watching the attack of a Panzer division at close quarters. The detachments of heavy armored cars sheltered in the woods, waited for the order to attack. The morning was cold and clear, and I looked at the fields glistening with frost and at the sunflower forests yellow and black in the rising sun. The sun was like the sun described in the Third Book of Xenophon's Anabasis,- it rose from the rosy vapors on the skyline in front of us. It was really like a young god of the ancients, nude and rosy in the vast blue-green ocean of the sky; it rose lighting up the Doric columns of the Piatiletka, the columns of glass, concrete and steel, the Parthenon of the U.S.S.R. heavy industry. Suddenly, I saw the column of armored cars stealing out of the forest and spreading fanlike on the plain.

  A few minutes after the beginning of the attack, General von Schobert arrived at the observation post. He searched the battlefield through his field glasses and smiled. The armored cars and the attacking parties marching in the furrows of the caterpillars seemed to be cut with a burin on the huge copper plate of the plain stretching to the southeast of Kiev; there was something of Dürer in that vast scene drawn with harsh precision, in those soldiers monstrously wrapped in camouflage nets, resembling ancient gladiators and ranged like allegorical figures along the margins of the print, in that open and vague perspective of trees, cars, guns, motors, men and horses variously placed and poised in the foreground along the slope descending from the observation post toward the Dnieper, farther away, and deepening and opening as the view became more distant; it also was in the men squatting behind the armored cars with their tommy guns cradled in their arms and in the Panzers scattered here and there among the high grass and the clusters of sunflowers. There was something of Dürer in the purely Gothic care for detail that at once caught the eye, as if the artist's burin had lingered for a moment and the hand had cut a deeper groove in the copper plate on the gaping jaws of a dead horse, on a wounded man crawling through the undergrowth, or over there, on a soldier leaning against a tree trunk, his hand held open above his forehead to shade his eyes against the glare of the sun. The raucous voices, the neighing, the occasional, sharp rifle shots, the harsh creaking of caterpillars seemed also to have been engraved by Dürer on the clear cold air of that autumn morning.

  General von Schobert was smiling. The s
hadow of death was already hovering over him—an extremely light shadow like a spider-web; and no doubt he felt that shadow weighing on his brow. No doubt he knew that a few days later he would fall in the Kiev suburbs, that his death would have something of the whimsical Viennese grace that appeared in the rather frivolous elegance of his manner. No doubt he knew that he would die a few days later landing in his small plane, a "Stork" on the airport of newly occupied Kiev; that the wheels of his "Stork" gliding over the grass of the landing field would touch off a mine, and he would disappear among a cluster of red flowers in a sudden explosion, and only his blue linen handkerchief with his white embroidered initials would drop intact on the grass of the airport. General von Schobert was one of those old Bavarian noblemen to whom Vienna is but a loving nickname for Munich. There was something ancient and youthful, something old-fashioned in his sharp profile, in his ironical and sad smile, a kind of strange fanciful melancholy in his voice, when at Baltsiu in Bessarabia he said to me, "Alas, we are waging war against the white race," or in his voice when in Soroca, on the Dniester he said to me, "Wir siegen unsere Toten—We conquer our own dead." He meant that the last, the final laurels of the German victories would spell the death of the German people, that the German nation and all its victories, will win death as the only reward. That morning he watched the column of armored cars spreading out fanlike on the Kiev plain; on the margin of that Dürer engraving—Wir siegen unsere Toten was written in black letters.