Kaputt

by Curzio Malaparte

  The armored cars, supported by the attacking units, had already penetrated deeply into the deserted plain. After the first rifle shots a heavy silence had fallen on the rolling ground covered with stubble and grass withered by the first autumn frost; the Russians apparently had abandoned the battlefield, fleeing beyond the river; several flights of large birds took wing from the acacia groves, clouds of little gray birds that resembled sparrows rose and twittered over the meadows, their wings throwing off dull flashes in the flame of the rising sun; from a far-off pool two wild ducks took to the air, paddling with their slow wings. Suddenly a few black dots darted out of a forest in the distance, then more and still more; they moved quickly, disappeared in the bushes, turned up nearer and rushed rapidly toward the German Panzers. "Die Hunde! Die Hunde!—The dogs! The dogs!" cried the soldiers around us in terrified voices. A gay and ferocious barking came to us on the wind, the baying of hounds on the track of a fox.

  Under the sudden onslaught of the dogs the Panzers began to rush about zigzagging and firing wildly. The attacking units back of the armored cars stopped, hesitated and scattered; they fled here and there across the plain as if in the throes of panic. The rattle of the machine guns was clear and light, like the tinkling of glass. The baying of the pack bit into the roar of the motors. Now and again came a faint voice smothered by the wind and in the widespread rustle of grass. "Die Hunde! Die Hunde!" Suddenly we heard the dull thud of an explosion,- then another, and another. We saw two, three, five Panzers blow up, the steel plates flashing within a tall fountain of earth.

  "Ah, the dogs!" said General von Schobert passing a hand over his face. They were "anti-armored-car dogs" that had been trained by the Russians to look for food under the armored cars. Kept without food for a day or two, they were brought to the front line whenever an attack was impending. As soon as the German Panzers appeared out of the woods and spread out fanlike on the plain, the Russian soldiers shouted "Pashol! Pashol!—Off! Off!" and unleashed the famished pack. The dogs carrying cradles on their backs loaded with high explosives and with steel contact rods like the aerials of a radar set-up, ran quickly and hungrily to meet the armored cars, in search of food under the German Panzers. "Die Hunde! Die Hunde!" shouted the soldiers around us. General von Schobert, deathly pale, a sad smile on his bloodless lips, passed a hand over his face, then looked at me and said in a voice that was already dead, "Why? Why? Even the dogs!"

  The German soldiers became daily more ferocious. The hunt for the dogs continued with a merciless rage, while the old Cossacks laughed and slapped their knees. "Ah, bednii sobachki!— Ah, poor dogs!" they said.

  One night barking was heard over the black plain, and the anxious scratching around the fences of the orchards. "Who goes there?" shouted the German sentries in strange voices. The boys awakened, jumped out of their beds, opened the doors with extreme caution and called softly into the dark: "Idi syuda! Idi syuda!—Come here! Come here!"

  One morning I said to the Sonderführer of Melitopol: "When you have killed them all, when there are no more dogs in Russia, Russian boys will squeeze themselves under your armored cars."

  "Ach, they are all of a breed," he replied. "All sons of dogs!" and he walked away spitting on the ground with great contempt.

  "I like Russian dogs," said Westmann. "They should be fathers of brave Russian boys."

  X. Summer Night

  AFTER the endless winter night, after the cold clear spring, summer had come at last. The cool, frail, rainy Finnish summer had the smell and taste of green apples. The season for krapu was approaching and the first sweet crayfish of the Finnish rivers, the summer delicacy of the North, were already reddening the dishes. And the sun never set.

  "Alas, that a Spaniard like myself should be doomed to travel as far as Finland to find the sun of Charles V!" said Count de Foxá gazing at the night sun blossoming on the windowsill of the horizon like a pot of geraniums. In the transparent night the girls of Helsinki strolled about in their green, red and yellow dresses, their faces white with powder, their hair molded by curling tongs and scented with Teo's Eau de Cologne, their foreheads shaded by paper hats bedecked with paper flowers bought at Stockmann's. They walked along the Esplanade in creaking paper shoes.

  A thin smell of the sea came up from the end of the Esplanade. The faint shadows of the trees rested lightly on the smooth pale fronts of the buildings; they were extremely pale green shadows, as if the trees were made of glass; young, convalescent soldiers with bandaged heads, with arms in slings, with feet swollen by dressings, sat on the benches listening to the music played by the small orchestra of the Café Royal and watched the blue-paper sky being crumpled by the sea breeze along the edges of the roofs. The shop windows reflected the cold, metallic, ghostly light of the "white night" of the North on which the twittering of the birds seemed to cast a warm shadow. Winter was far away now; it was no more than a memory,- but something of the winter seemed still to be floating in the air, perhaps it was the white light resembling the reflection of snow, perhaps a recollection of dead snow that lingered in the tepid summer sky.

  Country parties at Krankulla had begun in the villa of the Italian Minister, Vincenzo Cicconardi who was seated before the fire with his old dog, Rex, curled up at his feet and his mad valet standing stiffly, with wide-open eyes behind his chair. Cicconardi spoke Neapolitan with a strong Berlin accent—it was his idea of speaking German—to the German Minister von Blücher. He twisted his mouth overshadowed by a huge Bourbon nose, and joined his hands as if he were praying. I liked Cicconardi because of the clash between his Neapolitan indifference and irony, and the aspiration for power and glory that the odd shape and the exaggerated size of his skull, his forehead, his jaws and his nose seemed to express. Facing him, von Blücher, long, thin, stoop shouldered, his gray hair cropped very closely, his pale bluish face creased by thin wrinkles, listened, and monotonously repeated, "Ja, ja, ja!" From time to time Cicconardi glanced through the window at his guests who were walking through the wood in the rain and at the violet hat of Madame Blücher that clashed with the green of the foliage as a Renoir purple might clash with one of Manet's green landscapes.

  Suppers at Fiskatorp, by the lakeside had begun,- suppers with the Romanian Minister, Noti Constantinidu and Madame Colette Constantinidu, with Count de Foxá, with Dinu Cantemir, Titu Michailescu, also the evening parties at the Spanish, Croatian and Hungarian legations. The long afternoons around the tables of the open-air café at the end of the Esplanade or at the Kämp Bar with Minister Rafael Hakkarainen and the musician Bengt von Törne had begun,- also the strolls along the Esplanade sidewalks under the green trees thronged with birds; also the long hours on the veranda of the Swedish Yachting Club, on the little island anchored in the middle of the harbor, where people watched the waves gliding like white lizards over the green water. The delightful week ends in the stugas{14} on the lakeshores or on the seashores of the Barösund, in those villas that the French, ever boastful, call châteaux, and the Finns, ever modest, more simply call stugas.

  They are old country houses built of wood and stucco on neoclassical lines inspired by Engels—the Doric order of the portico covered by a slight green mold. The happy days in the villa the architect Saarinen, who designed the Parliament House in Helsinki, has built for himself on the islet of Bockholm in the middle of the Barösund—there at sunrise we went picking mushrooms among the silver birches and red pines, or else fishing between the islands of Svartö and Strömsö. At night one heard the sirens of the ships mooing plaintively through the mist and the seagulls shrieking harshly with childish voices.

  The light days and the white nights of the Finnish summer had begun, and the hours in the front and communication trenches before Leningrad seemed endless. Under the night sun the vast gray city cast metallic reflections on the green background of woods, meadows and marshes. At times Leningrad seemed like a city of aluminum so deadened was its glow and so mellow; at times a city of steel, so cold and cruel its glow,- at ot
her times the glow was so vivid and deep that the city seemed as if it was made of silver. On certain nights, gazing at it from the low hills of Beli Ostrov or from the edge of the Terioki woods, it really looked to me like a silver city etched on the delicate skyline by the burin of Fabergé, the last great silversmith of the St. Petersburg Court. The hours seemed endless to me in the front and communication trenches along the sea, facing the fortress of Kronstadt that rises from the waters of the Gulf of Finland among the Totlebens, the artificial steel and concrete islets that encirle it.

  I could not sleep at night, and I roamed about the trenches with Svartström, lingering now and then by a loophole to look at the Leningrad parks and trees on the Vasilii Ostrov, beloved by Eugene Onegin and by Dostoevski's characters, or to gaze at the domes of the Kronstadt churches, at the red, green and blue lights of the aerials, the gray roofs of the arsenal or at the flashing glint of the Soviet fleet moored in the harbor in front of us, almost within arm's reach. It really seemed to me that by stretching my hand out toward the parapets of the Beli Ostrov and Terioki trenches, I could touch the Leningrad houses, topped by the dome of St. Isaac's, and the bastions of the Kronstadt fort, so transparent was the air during those white summer nights.

  In the Raikkola forest along the shore of Lake Ladoga, I spent long hours in the front-line korsus listening to the Finnish officers talking about Colonel Merikallio's death—my friend Merikallio who, before dying, had asked his daughter to convey his last greetings to de Foxá, Michailescu and me. Or else I went to a lottala in the depth of the forest to drink raspberry sirup with the pale and silent sissit—the rangers with their sharp knives hanging from their belts, under the distant and attentive eyes of the young lottas dressed in gray linen, their sad faces resting lightly on white collars. Toward evening I walked down with Svartström to Lake Ladoga and we spent long hours sitting on the shore of a small bay where, during the winter, the heads of the horses gripped by the ice had emerged above the glistening crust of ice, and where a little of their jaded odor still lingered in the damp air of the night.

  After I left the front and returned to Helsinki, de Foxá would say to me: "Tonight we will go to have a drink in the cemetery." One night, after leaving Titu Michailescu's house we walked to the old Swedish churchyard that has remained unscathed though it was in the heart of Helsinki between the Boulevardi and the Georgkatu. We sat on a bench that stood by the tomb of a certain Sierk. De Foxá drew a bottle of Bordsbrännvin from his pocket and, while we drank, we argued the relative merits of several Finnish brandies—whether Bordsbrännvin, Pommeransbrännvin, Erikoisbrännvin or Rajamaribrännvin was best. In that romantic churchyard the tombstones stand in the grass like the backs of armchairs,- they really seem to be old armchairs ranged on a stage with a wood for a backdrop. Under the large trees shadowy soldiers sat motionless and dismal on the benches. The high trees with their tender green foliage, the blue reflection of the sea trembling on their leaves, rustled sweetly.

  Toward dawn de Foxá glanced around suspiciously and asked me softly, "Have you heard the talk about the ghost of Kalevala Street?" He was afraid of ghosts and insisted that the time for them in Finland was the summer. "I would like to see a ghost, a real ghost," he said in a low voice and he shook with fear, glancing suspiciously around. As we came out of the churchyard and passed the Kalevala monument, de Foxá closed his eyes and turned his head away so he would not see the ghostly statues of the Kalevala heroes.

  One evening we went to see the ghost that appeared every night, punctually at the same time, on the threshold of a house at the end of Kalevala Street. It was not so much his childish fear of apparitions that drew my friend de Foxá to that squalid street, as his morbid curiosity to see a ghost not in nocturnal darkness, the traditional setting for ghosts, but in the full glare of the sun, in the dazzling light of a Finnish summer night. For some days all the Helsinki papers had been talking about the ghost of Kalevala Street. Every evening close to midnight, the elevator in a house at the harbor end of the street started suddenly by itself, went up to the top floor, halted and, after a brief pause, came quickly and noiselessly down again; the door of the elevator was opened with a gentle sound; then the handle on the outside door turned a little and a woman stood on the threshold—a pale, silent woman who gazed for a long time at the small crowd gathered on the opposite sidewalk; she withdrew quietly, closing the door very slowly; shortly afterward the sound of the elevator door was heard followed by a noise of the elevator as it went quickly and quietly up the steel shaft.

  De Foxá walked cautiously, taking hold of my arm from time to time. Our figures seemed ghostlike in the reflection of the shop windows,- our faces had the white glitter of wax. A few minutes before midnight we stood opposite the ghost's house in the weird glare of the nocturnal sun. It was a new house, built on the most modern lines and glistened with light paint, glass and chromium steel. The roof bristled with radio aerials. On the jamb—it was one of those doors that can be opened from the inside of each flat by pressing a button—was an aluminum plate with a double row of black, metal bell-buttons and, in a double column a list of names of the tenants. Beneath the aluminum plate gaped the mouth of a speaking tube with its nickel-plated lips by means of which every tenant could speak with his visitors before admitting them. To the right of the door was the window of an Elanto department store in which canned fish was displayed—two very green fishes standing out on a pink label evoked an abstract world of symbols and ghostly signs; a combined barber shop and beauty parlor was on the left with the inscription Parturi-Kampaamo painted in yellow on a pale blue background; a waxen female bust, two or three empty bottles and two celluloid combs glistened in the window.

  Kalevala Street is narrow and the front of the house when seen from below, appeared to be off balance, as if it were suspended dangerously over the little throng that had gathered on the opposite sidewalk. It was a most modern house, built with great lavishness. The radio aerials bristling on the roof, the bare, smooth, white front in which the countless glass sockets of windows mirrored a clear night sky, with a frosty aluminum glint, made an ideal setting not for one of those lugubrious nocturnal ghosts, horrible and pitiful with livid and fleshless faces, that, wrapped in chilly shrouds, exhale a tainted odor of tombs in the ancient streets of Europe, but for a most up-to-date ghost such as would be evoked by Corbusier architecture, Braque and Salvador Dali paintings and Hindemith and Honegger music—for one of those streamlined, nickel-plated ghosts that appear on the funereal threshold of the Empire State Building, on the lofty pediment of Rockefeller Center, on the deck of a luxury liner or in the cold bluish light of a central power station.

  A small crowd waited silently before the ghost's house—people belonging to the working and middle classes, several sailors, two soldiers and a group of girls in Lottasvärd uniforms. Now and again a streetcar passed along a near-by street and made the walls shake and the windowpanes tinkle. A bicycle dashed around the corner, rushed by us, and for a few moments the rustle of tires on the damp asphalt lingered in the air. Something invisible seemed to pass before our eyes. De Foxá was extremely pale. He stared at the house with a greedy look, pressing my arm, and I felt him trembling with fear and impatience.

  Suddenly we heard the elevator start—a slight, prolonged hum; then came the sound of the elevator door opening and shutting up on the top floor—the hum of the descending cage. All at once the door of the house opened and a woman stood on the threshold. A tiny, middle-aged woman dressed in gray, with a black felt hat—it may have been made of black paper—balanced on her blond hair streaked with silver. Her very light eyes made two dull blotches on the pale lean face with its high cheekbones. Her hands were concealed in a pair of green gloves. Her arms hung at her sides, and those green hands against the grayness of the skirt seemed like two withered leaves. She stopped on the threshold, gazing at each of the inquisitive onlookers gathered on the opposite sidewalk. Her eyelids were white, her stare lifeless. Then she turned her ey
es to the sky and slowly raised one of her hands; she rested it against her forehead to screen her eyes from the sharp glare of the light. She scrutinized the sky for several moments, lowered her head, let her hand drop by her side and fixed her glance on the crowd that watched her with a cold, almost evil attention. Then the woman withdrew and closed the door. We heard the elevator start with a slight, prolonged hum. Holding our breath, we kept on listening for the sound of the elevator door up there, on the top floor. The hum ascended, growing more distant, and faded away. It seemed as if the elevator had melted into the air, or that it had pierced the roof and risen to the sky. The crowd raised their eyes peering into the clear sky. De Foxá pressed my arm hard; I felt that he was shaking from head to foot. "Let's go," I said to him. We moved off on tiptoe, gliding through the stupefied crowd absorbed in watching a small white cloud high up above the roofs. We walked the length of Kalevala Street and entered the ancient Swedish churchyard, where we sat on the bench next to Sierk's tomb.

  "It was not a ghost," said de Foxá after a long silence. "We, ourselves, were the ghosts. Did you notice how she looked at us? She was afraid of us."

  "It was a modern ghost," I replied, "a northern ghost."

  "Yes indeed," said de Foxá laughing, "modern ghosts go up and down in elevators." He laughed nervously to disguise his childish fear. Then we left the churchyard; we walked down the Boulevardi and crossed Mannerheim Street back of the Swedish Theater. Men and women were stretched on the grass under the trees of the Esplanade and were offering their faces to the white, nocturnal light. During the "white nights" of summertime the people of the North are a prey to a queer restlessness, to a kind of cold fever. They spend the nights walking by the sea, or they stretch out on the grass in the public gardens, or they sit on the benches by the harbor. Later they walk home skirting the walls, their faces turned upward. They sleep only a few hours lying naked on their beds, bathed in the cold glare that penetrates through the wide-open windows. They lie naked in the nocturnal sun as if under a sun lamp. Through their open windows they can see moving through the glassy air, the ghosts of houses, of trees and of the sailing boats rocking in the harbor.