Kaputt

by Curzio Malaparte

  "Hitler's eyes," said Ilse, "are full of dead people's eyes. They are full of dead people's eyes. There are hundreds, thousands of them." She seemed like a baby, Ilse. She was a baby full of odd whims and strange fancies. Perhaps because her mother was English it occurred to me that Ilse was a picture of Innocence such as Gainsborough might have painted it. No, I was wrong. Gainsborough painted women as if they were landscapes, with all the candor, the proud sadness and the languishing decorum of the English landscape. There was something in Ilse, something whimsical, a sort of fanciful madness, that is lacking in the English landscape and in Gainsborough's paintings. Ilse was more like the portrait of Innocence as Goya might have painted it. That blond hair, short and curly, that milk spreading over the face amid the roses of dawn, those lively blue eyes with gray specks around the pupils, that graceful habit of tilting her head on her shoulder with mischievous yielding made her look like a portrait of Innocence painted in the Goya style of "The Caprices," against the background of a pink and gray horizon of a deserted Castilian landscape, parched, swept by a high invisible wind, stained here and there with the reflection of blood.

  Ilse had been married three years and still looked like a girl. Her husband had left for the front two months before and was lying in a field hospital near Voronezh with a splinter in his shoulder. Ilse had written to him: "I'm going to have a baby. Heil Hitler!" Expecting a child was the only way to escape the decree about compulsory work. Ilse did not want to work in a factory, she did not want to be a factory hand. She preferred to have a baby. "The only way of making Hitler a cuckold," said Ilse, "is to expect a baby." Louise blushed and shyly reproached her, "Ilse!" And Ilse said, "Don't be so Potsdam, Louise!"

  "Eyes are made of horrible stuff," I said, "of slimy, dead stuff. You cannot hold them in your fingers. They slip through your fingers like snails."

  During April 1941, I was traveling from Belgrade to Zagreb. The war against Yugoslavia had been over for several days, the Free State of Croatia was just born,- Ante Pavelic was ruling in Zagreb with his ustashi bands. In all the villages large portraits of Ante Pavelic, Poglavnik of Croatia, were pasted on the walls, along with the notices and decrees of the new national Croatian state. The first spring days were here and a transparent silvery mist rose from the Danube and the Drava. The Fruska hills were melted into slight green waves spread with vineyards and wheat fields. The light green of the vineyards and the darker green of the wheat followed one another, alternated and mingled in a play of light and shade below a silken blue sky. We were having the first clear days after weeks of rain, the roads looked like streams of mud. I was forced to stop for the night at Ilok, midway between Novy Sad and Vukovar. In the only inn in the area, supper was served on a large common dining table, around which sat armed peasants, policemen in Serbian uniforms with Croatian badges on their breasts, and refugees who had been ferried across the river between Palank and Ilok.

  After supper we left the room and went out to the terrace. The Danube glistened in the moonlight and the lights of the trawlers and barges could be seen appearing and disappearing among the trees. A vast silvery peace sank into the green Fruska hills. It was curfew. Patrols of armed peasants knocked at the doors of Jewish homes for the evening checking, calling out names in monotones. These doors were marked with a red Star of David. The Jews came to the windows and said, "We are here, we are at home." The peasants shouted, "Dobro! Dobro!" and banged the butts of their guns on the ground. The large three-colored posters of the proglas of the new Zagreb government pierced in vivid red, white and blue splotches the moonlight on the walls of the houses. I was dead tired and toward midnight I stretched out on my bed. I lay on my back watching through the open window the moon climbing gently over the trees and the roofs. A huge portrait of Ante Pavelic, the chief of the new Croatian state, was posted on the house across the street in which the Ilok ustashis were housed. The portrait was printed in black on thick paper faintly tinted with green: the Poglavnik stared at me with his large black eyes, deep-sunk below a low, stern and obstinate brow. His mouth was wide, thick lipped, his nose straight and fleshy, his ears huge. I never would have thought that any man's ears could be so vast or so long. They came halfway down his cheeks, ludicrous and monstrous; they surely were drawn in the wrong perspective—a mistake of the artist who had drawn the portrait.

  Toward dawn a company of Hungarian Honved, braced in their yellow uniforms, passed singing beneath my windows. The Hungarian soldiers have a fragmentary distracted way of singing. From time to time a single voice rose, began a song and fell silent. Twenty, thirty voices responded briefly, and also fell silent. For some minutes only the rhythmic steps and the bouncing of rifles on leather were heard. Then another voice took up the song again and broke off; twenty, thirty voices hinted at a response and fell suddenly silent. Again the hard and heavy cadence of steps, the bouncing of rifles on leather. It was a sad and cruel song; there was something lonely in those voices, in those responses and sudden silences. They were voices full of bitter blood, those sad, cruel, distant Hungarian voices that rise up from the deep, remote plains of men's sadness and cruelty.

  Next morning in the streets of Vukovar patrols of Hungarian policemen armed with rifles stood on the corners—the square of Vukovar near the bridge was crowded with people; groups of girls walked along the sidewalks and gazed at their own reflections in the shop windows; one girl dressed in green moved back and forth, slow and light, looking like a green leaf in a breeze,- the portraits of Ante Pavelic stared at me from the walls with those eyes of his, deep-sunk under the low hard brow.

  The Danube and the Drava breathed forth a sweetish smell of rotting grass into the rosy morning. All the way from Vukovar to Zagreb, across Slavonia, rich with pasture, green with woods, watered by rivers and brooks, the Poglavnik's portrait greeted me with its black glances. By then it had become a familiar face— that of Ante Pavelic; it seemed to me a friend's face. I felt as if I had known it for a long time; it was the face of a friend. The posters pasted on the walls announced that Ante Pavelic was the protector of the Croatian people, the father of Croatian peasants, the brother to all those who were fighting for the freedom and independence of the Croatian people. The peasants read the posters, shook their heads and turned their faces toward me with their thick hard protruding bones, gazing at me with the same black deep eyes of the Poglavnik's.

  And so when I saw Ante Pavelic for the first time seated at his writing table in a palace in the Old City in Zagreb, I felt as if I were meeting an old friend, as if I had known him from time immemorial. I noticed his wide, flat face with its hard coarse features. His eyes shone with a deep black fire in his pale, earthen-colored face. An undeflnable air of stupidity was stamped on his face, perhaps stemming from his huge ears, that seen closely, looked even more vast, ludicrous and monstrous than in his portraits. But little by little it occurred to me that maybe that air of stupidity was only shyness. The sensuous look that his fleshy lips lent to his countenance was practically obliterated by the odd shape and unwonted size of his ears, which, as compared with those all too fleshy lips, seemed two abstract things, two surrealistic shells drawn by Salvador Dali, two metaphysical objects. They aroused in me the same impression of deformity as is produced by listening to certain musical compositions by Darius Milhaud and Eric Satie—perhaps the association of ideas between music and ears was responsible for this.

  When Ante Pavelic turned his face, offering his profile to my eyes, those huge ears seemed to lift his head sideways, as if they were wings striving to soar into the air with that massive body. Then, a kind of delicacy, an almost graceful leanness, such as appears in some portraits by Modigliani, became delineated in the face of Ante Pavelic like a mask of suffering. I gathered that he was good-natured, that the fundamental trait of his character was a simple and generous humanity, resulting from shyness and Christian charity. He appeared to me a man who would be capable of bearing unflinchingly atrocious physical pain, terrible torture and toil, b
ut who would be unable to stand the slightest moral pain. He appeared to me a good-natured man,- his stupid air seemed to me shyness, goodness, simplicity and a peasant-like way of facing facts, people and things as if they were physical elements—material, not moral elements—belonging to his physical, not to his moral world.

  His hands were broad, thick, hairy; and his knuckles knotty with muscles. One realized that his hands bothered him, that he did not know where to put them. First he placed them on the table, then he raised them to stroke the lobes of his huge ears, and then he stuck them into his trouser pockets, but most of the time he rested his wrists on the edge of the writing table and, crossing his thick hairy fingers, he kept stroking and rubbing them against each other with a coarse, shy gesture. His voice was deep, musical and very sweet. He spoke Italian slowly with a slight Tuscan accent. He spoke about Florence and Siena where he had spent many years in exile. While I listened to him I thought that he was the terrorist who was responsible for the murder of King Alexander of Yugoslavia, that he was the man on whose conscience was Barthou's death. I was inclined to believe that, perhaps, while unhesitatingly countenancing extreme methods for the defense of his people's freedom, he was horrified by bloodshed. He was a good-natured man, I mused, a simple and generous man. Ante Pavelic gazed at me with his deep black eyes and, setting his monstrous ears in motion, he said, "I shall rule my people through goodness and justice"—moving words in a mouth so oddly shaped.

  One morning he asked me to go with him on a quick tour through Croatia, in the direction of Karlovac and the Slovene frontier. It was a fresh clear morning, a morning in May. Night had not yet disentangled its vast green mantle from the woods and thickets along the Sava; the green May night was still covering the forests, the hamlets, the castles, the fields and the misty banks of the river. The sun had not yet peeped out from the glistening edge of the skyline, sharp as a piece of glass. A multitude of birds swelled the foliage of the trees. Suddenly the sun lighted the wide sweet valley, a pinkish vapor arose from the fields and the woods, and Ante Pavelic ordered the car to stop, alighted on the road, and embracing the landscape with a wide gesture, said to me: "This is my fatherland."

  The gesture of those hairy hands, their knuckles knotty with muscles, was perhaps too brutal for so gentle a landscape. That tall, massive, herculean man standing on the side of the road against the green of the valley and the dusty blue of the sky, that large head of his and those huge ears stood out from that gentle and sensitive landscape as roughly as the statues wrought by Mestrovic stand out against the backgrounds of the luminous squares in the cities of the Drava and the Danube. Then we climbed into the car again and drove all day through the gorgeous country stretching from Zagreb to Ljubljana. We climbed the slopes of the Zagrebska Gora, the woody heights above Zagreb, and every so often the Poglavnik alighted, and lingered talking with the peasants. He spoke of the seasonable weather, the sowing, the crops which looked promising that year, the cattle, the days of peace and labor that the country's freedom would bring to the Croatian people.

  I liked the simplicity of his manner, the kindness of his words, the humble way in which he approached the poor, and I listened with pleasure to his deep musical voice, that very sweet voice. We drove back through a damp evening, streaked with purple rivers spanned by airy bridges of crimson clouds, flecked with green lakes amid blue woods. The memory of that very sweet voice, those deep black eyes, those monstrous ears against the delicate Croatian landscape has lasted a long time.

  A few months later, toward the end of the 1941 summer I was returning from Russia weary and ill, after spending long months in the dust and mud of the huge plain between the Dniester and the Dnieper. My uniform was worn, discolored by the sun and rain, soaked in that smell of blood and honey that is the odor of war in the Ukraine. I spent a few days at Bucharest to rest a little after the toil of the long journey through the Ukraine, Bessarabia and Moldavia, but, on the very evening of my arrival, a secretary of the President of the Council rang me up at the Athenée Palace to warn me that the Vice-President of the Council, Mihai Antonescu, wanted to speak to me.

  Mihai Antonescu welcomed me kindly, gave me a cup of tea in his vast light study and began talking about himself in French, with a vainglorious air that reminded me of Count Galeazzo Ciano. He wore a morning coat with a starched collar and a gray silk tie. He had the appearance of a director of a maison de couture. The rosy face of a woman, who resembled him like a sister, seemed to be painted on his round, fat face. I told him that he looked handsome and he thanked me with a smile of profound complacency.

  He spoke, staring at me with his small black, glittering snakelike eyes. No other eyes in the world resemble a snake's eyes more than Mihai Antonescu's. A bunch of roses were blossoming in a vase on his desk. "I'm very fond of roses," he said. "I prefer them to laurels." I mentioned that his policy threatened to be as shortlived as the roses—the length of one morning. "The length of a morning!" he answered. "That's eternity!" Later, gazing fixedly at me, he advised me to start immediately for Italy. "You have been indiscreet," he said. "Your war reports from the Russian front have been the subject of much criticism. You are no longer eighteen. It is not consistent with your age to play the enfant terrible. How many years have you already spent in prison in Italy?"

  "Five years," I replied.

  "Isn't that enough for you? I advise you to be more careful in the future. I have great regard for you,- everybody in Bucharest has read your Technique du Coup d'Etat and everybody likes you. Let me tell you that you have no right to maintain that Russia will win this war. Besides, you are wrong. Sooner or later Russia will collapse."

  "She will collapse on your back," I replied.

  He looked at me with his snakelike eyes, smiling. He offered me a rose and saw me to the door. "Good luck," he said.

  I left Bucharest next morning without even having had time to call on my dear Parisian friend, Princess Martha Bibescu, who lived the lonely life of an exile in her villa at Mogosoëa. I spent only a few hours at Budapest and journeyed on to Zagreb where I stopped to rest for a few days. On the evening of my arrival I was on the terrace of the Esplanade Café with my friend Pliveric and his daughter Neda. The vast terrace was crowded with people who seemed to be kneeling around the iron tables. I gazed at the handsome and languid Zagreb ladies, dressed with that provincial smartness in which all the grace of old imperial Vienna, the grace of 1910 and of 1914 still survives, and I thought about the peasant women of Croatia who are naked under their ample, starched linen skirts that resemble the shells of crustaceans or the hard wings of crickets. Beneath that hard, crackling linen crust the rosy, smooth, warm flesh of nakedness can be imagined.

  The Esplanade orchestra was playing old Viennese waltzes,- the gray-haired musicians were perhaps the same who had seen Archduke Ferdinand riding by in his black coach drawn by four white horses, and the violins were perhaps the same that had been played at the wedding of Empress Zita, the last Austrian Empress. The women and young ladies, including Neda Pliveric, were "alte Wien." They also were "Austria felix", they were also "Radetzky Marsch." The trees glistened in the warm night; the pink, green, and blue sherbets were slowly melting in the glasses,- feather fans and those silken fans bespangled with glass beads and specks of mother-of-pearl swayed to the rhythm of the waltzes; thousands of languishing eyes, light or dark or moon-like, flashed in the night on the terrace of the Esplanade, flashed above the trees of the avenues, above the roofs, like birds in the green, silk sky slightly worn at the edge of the horizon.

  After a time an officer approached our table. He was Major Makiedo, Count Makiedo, formerly a captain in the Imperial Austrian Army and now adjutant of Ante Pavelic, Poglavnik of Croatia. He walked swaying his hips between the tables and the iron chairs, and from time to time he raised his hand to his kepi, gracefully bowing right and left. Languishing feminine eyes glanced at his high, hard, ancient Hapsburg-style kepi. He approached our table with an ancient, faded, out-of-date smil
e that lighted his fat face with its small mouth shadowed by a clipped dark-blond mustache. It was the same smile with which he welcomed foreign diplomats, high civil servants and the chiefs of the ustashis in Ante Pavelic's waiting room, where he sat behind a typewriter, bending over the black keys, his hands covered with spotless white gloves, such as were once worn by the officers of the Imperial Austrian Guard, and, his lips tight, he hit the black keys with a single finger of his right hand—very slowly, with concentrated gravity, while his left hand rested on his hip as if he were dancing a quadrille. Count Makiedo bowed before Neda, raised his white-gloved hand to the shiny visor of his kepi and stood leaning forward and smiling silently. Then he straightened out with a sudden snap and turned to me, after expressing his pleasure at seeing me in Zagreb once again. In a tone of amiable reproach, scanning his words as if he were singing to the rhythm of the Viennese waltz that the orchestra was playing—"Why didn't you let me know at once that you had arrived in Zagreb? Come and see me tomorrow morning at eleven. I will add your name to the list of callers. The Poglavnik will be pleased to see you again." And in a low voice, bowing as if he were making a loving confidence, he added, "He will be very, very pleased."

  Next morning at eleven I was seated in the waiting room of Ante Pavelic. Major Makiedo, bending over his typewriter, his left hand resting on his hip, was very slowly tapping the black keys with a single finger of his right hand faultlessly encased in a white kid glove.

  Several months had passed since I had seen Ante Pavelic and when I entered his study, I noticed that he had changed the arrangement of the furniture. The last time I had called on him, a few months before, his desk was at the end of the room, in the corner farthest from the window. Now it stood directly in front of the door, with just enough room between the door and the desk to allow one man to get by. I went in and almost knocked my knees against the desk.