Kaputt

by Curzio Malaparte

  "It's a plan of my own devising," said Ante Pavelic, shaking my hand and laughing. "Anyone coming in here with criminal intentions, bumping into the desk and facing me suddenly, will lose his composure and betray himself. Hitler and Mussolini favor a different plan; they interpose the empty space of a very large room between themselves and their visitors."

  I watched him while he spoke. He seemed to me greatly changed; tired, marked with fatigue and worry. His eyes were reddened by lack of sleep. But his voice as it had been before—deep, musical and very sweet—was the voice of a good-natured, simple and generous man. His huge ears had grown strangely thinner. They had grown transparent. Through the right ear that was turned toward the window, I could see the pink reflection of the roofs, the green light of the trees and the blue sky. The other ear that was turned toward one of the walls, was in the shadow and seemed to be made of a white, soft and fragile substance—an ear of wax. I studied Ante Pavelic, his thick hairy hands, his low, hard, obstinate brow, his monstrous ears, and I was overcome by a kind of pity toward that good-natured, simple and generous man, endowed with such a delicate sense of humanity. The political situation had become considerably worse during those few months. The rebellion of the partisans raged throughout Croatia from Zemun to Zagreb. The pale, almost ashen face of the Poglavnik was marked with a sorrow that was deep and sincere. How grievously this excellent heart must suffer, I thought.

  After a while Major Makiedo came in to announce the Italian Minister, Raffaele Casertano. "Let him come in," said Ante Pavelic. "The Italian Minister must not be kept waiting."

  Casertano came in and we spent a long time discussing simply and cordially the gravity of the situation. The partisan bands had pushed by night into the very suburbs of Zagreb, but the loyal ustashis of Pavelic would soon squash those tiresome guerrillas. "The Croatian people," said Ante Pavelic, "wish to be ruled with goodness and justice. And I am here to provide them."

  While he spoke, I gazed at a wicker basket on the Poglavnik's desk. The lid was raised and the basket seemed to be filled with mussels, or shelled oysters—as they are occasionally displayed in the windows of Fortnum & Mason in Piccadilly in London. Casertano looked at me and winked, "Would you like a nice oyster stew?"

  "Are they Dalmatian oysters?" I asked the Poglavnik.

  Ante Pavelic removed the lid from the basket and revealed the mussels, that slimy and jelly-like mass, and he said smiling, with that tired good-natured smile of his, "It is a present from my loyal ustashis. Forty pounds of human eyes."

  XIII. Of Their Sweet Deaths

  LOUISE stared at me, while a disgusted, pained look spread over her face.

  "I feel ashamed of myself," she murmured with a deeply dejected smile. "We should all feel ashamed of ourselves."

  "Why should I feel ashamed? " said Ilse. "I am not ashamed of myself. I feel as pure, innocent and virginal as the Mother of God. War has not touched me. It has no power over me. I carry a child in me. I am holy. My child. My child. Did it ever strike you that my child might be the Infant Jesus?"

  "There's no need for another Infant Jesus," I said. "Any one of us might save the world. Any woman might beget another Saviour; any one of us might climb his Calvary and whistling and singing, let himself be nailed to the Cross. It's not very difficult to be a Christ today."

  "It depends only on us, whether we feel as pure and innocent as the Holy Mother," said Ilse. "The war cannot defile me. It cannot defile the child in my womb."

  "It isn't war that defiles us," said Louise. "It is we who defile every thought and every feeling within us. We are unclean. We defile our children in our wombs."

  "To hell with war!" said Ilse.

  "Oh, Ilse!" said Louise in a reproachful tone.

  "Don't be so Potsdam, Louise. To hell with war!"

  "Let me tell you the story of Tatiana Colonna's children," I said. "It is another Christian story."

  "I'm afraid of your Christian stories," said Louise.

  Listen to this story of Tatiana Colonna's children:—During the summer of 1940, when Mussolini declared war on Great Britain, the officials of the Royal Italian Legation at Cairo left Egypt and returned to Italy. The Secretary of the Royal Italian Legation at Cairo, Prince Guido Colonna, left Tatiana and her two children in Naples in his mother's house, and went on to Rome where he stayed for some time at the Foreign Office awaiting a new assignment. One night, in the early autumn, Tatiana was awakened by an alarm. A group of British bombers, flying inward from the sea, swooped low above the roofs of the city. It was the first bombing of Naples. There were many casualties and much serious damage, and the damage would have been still greater if the city were not protected by the blood of St. Gennaro, the only anti-aircraft defense which the unfortunate Neapolitans could trust. Both Tatiana's children were terrified. The youngest one fell ill and for weeks suffered with fever and delirium. As soon as the little one was better, Tatiana left to join her husband who, meanwhile, had been appointed Secretary at Stockholm.

  Winter was nearly over when Tatiana reached Stockholm; swarms of sparrows were announcing the coming of spring. One morning, while her children slept, a sparrow flew into their room through an open window. The children awoke screaming with fear. "Mummy, Mummy, help!" Tatiana rushed to them. The children, pale with terror, shook with a frantic trembling; they shouted that a British plane had come through the window and was flying about the room.

  The poor little twittering sparrow flitted from one piece of furniture to another, frightened by the screams of the children and by Tatiana's movements. It would have flown out of the window, but it was confused by the mirror on the wardrobe, against which it had knocked its beak two or three times already. At last it found the window and escaped.

  The children were ill and lay in bed pale and exhausted, afraid lest a British plane should again fly through the open window. Neither doctors nor drugs could free them from that inordinate fear. Spring had faded, the pale glow of summer was already burning in the clear Stockholm sky. From the tops of the Karlaplan trees rose the twitter of the sparrows, and the two children, flat in their beds, their heads nestled under their sheets, trembled with fear, listening to the innocent twitter of the birds.

  One day, Tatiana went into the nursery with a large box full of toys: small spring-propelled airplanes, stuffed birds, picture books with illustrations of birds and planes. The children started sitting up in their beds, playing with the cloth birds and the tin planes. They turned the propellers with their fingers and glanced through the pages of the picture books. Tatiana explained to them the difference between a plane and a bird, told them about the lives of sparrows, black caps and robins, about the deeds of famous airmen. Each day she placed stuffed birds on the furniture and hung small red-and-blue painted planes from the ceiling; she hung little wooden cages with merrily twittering golden canaries on the walls. When the two children were stronger, Tatiana took them every morning to play under the trees of the Skansen; sitting on the grass, they wound the springs, making the propellers of the small tin planes hum and letting them hop about on the grass. Then Tatiana crumbled some bread on a rock and the birds flew down from all sides, twittering and pecking at the crumbs. Finally Tatiana took the children to the Bromma airport to let them see at close hand the large three-engined planes that take off every morning for Finland, Germany and England. Sparrows hopped briskly on the airport grass chattering among themselves, and they were not afraid of the huge aluminum birds that glided along the grass with a tremendous roar before they rose in flight or dropped down from a high and distant sky to land smoothly on the grass. And so Tatiana's children were cured. Now they are no longer frightened by birds; they know that sparrows will not bomb towns—not even British sparrows.

  "How charming!" said Ilse clapping her hands.

  "It's a very beautiful story," said Louise, "almost a fairy tale." She added that the story of Tatiana Colonna's children reminded her of certain drawings by Leonardo da Vinci in which children's and women'
s heads are entwined with birds, skeletons and flying machines.

  "No doubt," she said, "Tatiana Colonna is as pure and gentle as one of Leonardo's women."

  "Oh, yes!" said Ilse. "She is certainly as pure and gentle as a woman painted by Leonardo. No doubt Tatiana is like the birds and children,- she believes in heaven. Could you ever imagine a bird or a child who did not believe in heaven?"

  "There is no more heaven in Europe," said Louise.

  "Tatiana is like the butterflies who invent wonderful fairy tales to whisper to the flowers," I said. "Before Tatiana told her children that birds will not bomb cities, it was certainly true that the birds had bombarded cities."

  "Butterflies enjoy dying," said Ilse.

  "It was a woman, a woman who is now dead, who told me one evening that there are two kinds of women, and two kinds of roses—the immortal ones living forever and those who enjoy dying."

  "Even dead roses are immortal," said Ilse.

  "Shakespeare loved the scent of dead roses," I said. Of their sweet deaths are sweetest odours made— I was dining one evening at the villa of the Italian Embassy on the shore of the Wannsee. The night was clear and the last winter moon shone on the frozen lake. Although the young German ladies seated around the table were extraordinarily good-looking and refined, there was something rotten in their light eyes, in the sheen of their flesh and of their hair. They laughed with a cold indifferent laughter, and gazed at each other's faces with slightly clouded eyes. Their way of laughing and staring lent an unpleasant feeling of loneliness and complicity to their beauty. Sheaves of gorgeous roses, some white, some crimson, some milky pink as a girl's cheek, flowered proudly in the Nymphenburg and Meissen vases standing here and there on the furniture, and in the wide Murano shell cloudy as a morning lagoon that was placed in the center of the table. The roses had arrived by air from Venice that morning; they were still moist with Venetian air; the call of the gondoliers along the lonely canals was still trembling on their wide transparent petals. The light of the silver candlesticks was mirrored in the Saxony ware with the dull reflection of sleeping waters, and faded softly into the deep glow of the glasses scattered around the table, into their frosty glow of an Alpine glacier at dawn, and into the glistening surface of the large glass doors that separated the covered veranda on which we had gathered from the trees of the park and the shores of Wannsee—motionless in the cold moonlight.

  A flickering flame occasionally lighted the faces of the guests,- perhaps the reflection of the rose-colored satin tablecloth through an ancient Burano lace of a faint ivory tint, perhaps it was the reflection of the roses—the secret breath of those sweetly scented roses wafted into the room the atmosphere of a Venetian loggia at the hour when the smell of the lagoon mud mixes with the breath of nocturnal gardens. A few canvases of a minor French school, resembling Watteau, hung on the walls,- their original hues had been heightened by a coat of varnish in the process of a recent unskilled restoration; still-life roses flashed through a dark landscape of statues, black trees, silver amphorae and green fruit. The roses looked like shadows of roses, so that when the eyes rested on the Venetian roses, rising with youthful pride from the Saxony vases and the Murano shell, they encountered the memory of roses long dead—a living and vital recollection of ancient roses.

  The guests, it seemed to me, sat in strange positions: their shoulders pressed stiffly against the backs of the chairs, their busts slightly sagging. They ate looking upward as if they were instinctively backing away from the food. The ladies spoke in unexpectedly soft and gentle voices,- they seemed to me remote voices—unreal and weak. Their blue-ringed eyes had a weary look. Something at the same time careless and conventional was in their refined manners, their elegant dresses, coiffures and make-up. Their refined elegance appeared to be the result of an unconscious effort for which the only moral excuses were wealth, carelessness with money and the privileges of birth and social position. The gift that women possess to such a high degree—of enjoying the present, of the Faustian passing moment—seemed to be dimmed and betrayed in them by a secret fear of time, of fleeting youth, by an inner craving that was unable to overcome the sadness of the hour and of the events. Malicious envy, bitter regret and haughty proud dissatisfaction had mastered every part of their natures and had produced a kind of sensual pride of caste.

  By contrast the men seated at the table had a detached, cheerful, I might say a rested, almost indifferent air. Among them were a few Italians, a Swede and the Brazilian Ambassador; all the others were Germans; all belonged to the diplomatic world; all by constant association with foreigners, and because they had lived away from Germany, appeared to be men of almost another stock than the Germans, almost free, though secretly afraid and lacking confidence because they differed from the other Germans. Unlike the women, the men had a calm appearance, they laughed freely without a shadow of suspicion or of pride, as if at that table in the villa of the Italian Embassy they felt miles away from the grim, dark and cruel Germany of that terrible winter.

  "Eddi a soldier? A real soldier?" laughingly asked Count Dornberg, the Chief of Protocol at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Reich. The gigantic Dornberg, almost seven feet tall, to whom the short pointed beard gave the look of a faun, leaned across the table and rested his large hairy hands on the satin cloth.

  "A real soldier," I replied.

  "Eddi will be very shy when he has to undress before the eyes of his comrades," said Veronica von Klem.

  "Poor Eddi, he is so timid!" said Princess Agatha Ratibor.

  Axel Munthe, in Capri, was the one who had told me a few days previously about Eddi Bismarck—that Eddi had left Capri to spend a few weeks in the small house owned by the Bismarcks in Switzerland, and that unexpectedly he had been called back to Germany by the military authorities. Eddi was now despairing in a Strasbourg barracks and, as Veronica put it, "very uncomfortable." In telling me about Eddi Bismarck's military vicissitudes, Axel Munthe had smiled, showing his sharp pointed teeth. Upright, leaning on a stick, his cloak thrown over thin shoulders, his head shook with laughter,- the entire vast seascape of rocks and olive trees against which he leaned, as though it were a wall, seemed to have been shaken by a dry thunderstorm. We had stood on the top of his Materite tower,- Axel Munthe's mischief spread like a solitary tree under the blue sky of Capri. Not a blade of grass grew around him in his parched and dusty shade. Only the soil all yawning with deep fissures surrounded him, and out of the cracks some lean lizards, green as despair, peeped occasionally.

  The man, the soil, the trees, the lizards looked as if they had been painted by El Greco. Axel Munthe had taken Eddi Bismarck's letter from his pocket and had begun reading it aloud, purposely stumbling over the words and stopping at the end of each sentence to grin through his little gray beard, the color of worm-eaten wood. Now and then he became angry, repeated a word two or three times and pretended he could not pronounce it, with the air of an actor who loves to make fools of his audience.

  "Eddi Bismarck a soldier! " shouted Axel Munthe raising his arm and waving the letter as if it were a flag—"Eddi Bismarck a soldier! Forward, march! Für Gott und Vaterland! Ha, ha, ha!"

  "It is right and proper," said the Italian Ambassador, Dino Alfieri, in his silly, gentle voice, "that Germany should appeal to all her best children. It is fine that a Bismarck will fight as a plain soldier in the army of the Reich."

  Everybody laughed and Dornberg, with deep seriousness, said, "Thanks to Eddi, Germany will win the war."

  A few days previously, before leaving Capri to return to Finland, I had gone to the Grande Marina and, strolling through the narrow lanes shut in by high walls stained white with brine, I had passed in front of the Fortino, the villa of Mona Williams in which, during her absence in America, Eddi Bismarck played the jealous housekeeper. It was raining and the Fortino had a sad, sick look.

  "The Count has gone to the war," said the Capri gardener as he saw me go by. The thought of the blond, delicate Eddi peeling po
tatoes in the Strasbourg barracks filled me with mischievous glee. "The Count has gone to the war. Forward, march! Für Gott und Vaterland!" shouted Axel Munthe, shaking with dry laughter as he brandished Eddi's letter with a gesture of spiteful joy.

  "Eddi on the battlefield will certainly be a magnificent soldier, worthy of the name he bears," said Alfieri in his gentle fatuous voice, and everybody laughed.

  "Eddi is a very nice boy, and I am very fond of him," said Anna Marie Bismarck. "Without him this war would be only a war of ruffians." Anna Marie is a Swede; she married Eddi's brother, Prince Otto von Bismarck, Councilor of the German Embassy in Rome.

  "The name he bears is too fine for a battlefield," said Count Dornberg in an ironical tone.

  "I cannot imagine anything more ridiculous than for a Bismarck to be killed in this war," said Anna Marie.

  "Oh, yes, it would be truly ludicrous," said Princess Agatha Ratibor in a playful voice.

  "Wouldn't it?" said Anna Marie, casting a sweet and scornful glance at Agatha.

  Something small, arrogant and evil had entered the conversation that Veronica and Agatha were leading with a dry grace which lacked brilliance. Listening to those handsome young women I thought of the women workers on the outskirts of Berlin. This was just the hour when they walk back to their homes or their Lägers after a long day's work in the war factories of Neuköln, Pankow and Spandau. They don't all belong to the working classes. Many belong to the upper middle class or are the wives of civil servants and officers, but they have been caught in the cogwheels of compulsory work. Many are "slaves" from Poland, the Ukraine, White Russia or Czechoslovakia, and P or Ost is embroidered on their shirtfronts. But one and all, workers, middle-class women and slaves procured from occupied territories respect, help and stand up for one another. They work ten, twelve hours a day under the eyes of SS men armed with tommy guns, each of them within a narrow space between lines chalked on the floor. At nightfall they go out tired, dirty, black with engine grease, their hair rusty with iron shavings, the skin of their hands and faces burned by acids, their eyes circled with livid signs of hardship, fear and anxiety. The same anxiety and fear, though defiled and abashed by an arrogant sensuousness, a shameless pride, a sad moral indifference, I saw again that evening in the young German women seated at the table of the Italian Ambassador. Their dresses had been smuggled from Paris and Rome, from Stockholm and Madrid in the dispatch cases of the diplomatic couriers, as had their perfumes, their powders, their gloves, shoes and lingerie. Not that they were proud of the privilege of their elegance. They were well brought up and took pride in those small things that belonged to them by right and were due them. But their elegance undoubtedly was a considerable part of their patriotic feeling. Of their patriotic feeling. They felt proud of the suffering, the want and the losses of the German people, of all the horrors of the war, that they—owing to an old or recent privilege—held it to be their right to share with the people. And this was their patriotic feeling—a heartless complacency in their own fear, in their own anxiety and in all the hardships of the German people.