Unforgiving Years

by Victor Serge

  Grandparents save. Parents save. “In saving lies the strength of nations,” says the Great Economist. The Fraüleins Hahn-Simmelholz save. An elite division is goose-stepping by; the Fraüleins Hahn-Simmelholz, throwing thrift to the winds for the sake of patriotism, ply the boys of the division with sandwiches and pretty gifts; the next day, there are a few pfennigs added to the price of the perfumes the factory girls buy before going to bed with their boyfriends, home on convalescent leave … This young soldier was in fact decorated for destroying a boutique identical to the one run by the Misses Hahnkowski-Simmelkowski — in Warsaw. And down comes a bomblet straight from the United States: adieu savings, thrifty sisters, declared inventory, hidden inventory! From out of his tall silk hat, the professorial magician pulls a hilarious monster with a death’s-head and seven flaccid limbs and introduces him to the audience: Herr Geopolitik! Wild clapping from the audience, which continues to save …

  Franz, still chuckling to himself, started to applaud, but you need two hands for that. He smote his cane against the ground with contained fury. Men are insane, Franz! Their destructiveness will not be sated while anything exists, since the magician-professor is probably still teaching his course, people are still alive in the cellars, I am still here to watch the show. The horizon was quieter now, the fighting had moved elsewhere. Not yet the end, goddammit!

  He clearly saw a big human bat drop silently between two walls, as though fallen from the stars. A quadruped that was part bear, part pig, part jackal, and part outlaw slunk close to the ground, paused to test the air with its snout, wiggled its rump grotesquely, and disappeared … “Ha ha! Geopolitik, my friend, geopolitics! I know where you’re headed: toward a bullet in the ass. I’d give something to know where you crawled out of: Bosnia, the Volga, Normandy, Zeeland, or Neukölln, like me? Fugitive, looter, deserter, parachutist, Black Front, dead white all over, d-d-death penalty, my good friend. Same goes for me if I don’t report you. If I do report you, your pals will take care of me instead. If we happen to bump into each other ten minutes from now, it could go either way …” Franz did not quite know what he was doing. But then what’s the use of knowing that?

  Before following the animal shadow, he let himself be distracted listening again to Altstadt breathe. Pieces of cornice broke off and skittered down with a noise like tiny landslides. A door was banging emptily. A tinkle of shattered glass, a cock crowed. Somewhere a tank column was rumbling along on metal treads. Two muffled whistle blasts chased each other from one constellation to another and were gobbled up by a fat fish of cloud. A child started crying, where? Franz pressed his eye to a crack in a wall and saw a white-haired woman stretched out, reading a book bound in black, the New Testament presumably. What light was she using to read by, the witch? He put his lips against the slit in the brickwork and lowed, spectrally: “The good Lord protect us!” He looked again. The old lady was beaming and nodding, their eyes met but she could not have seen him, she must have thought the voice had been sent from heaven above, the end was nigh! Franz considered following up with a ripe rosary of imprecations, before deciding it was too much trouble.

  The manhole through which his four-legged quarry had just vanished made him hesitate. The ladder was twisted, and he would never be able to crutch his way down without being heard. But the warren below probably connected with the old brasserie cellars; some, considered inaccessible, were probably inhabited. Franz found the way in. He moved along as nimbly as a spider. He dragged himself over the sharp stones of a tunnel, making only surreptitious use of his torch. The tongue of light licked at a seething of white maggots in a viscous, purplish slick. He was glad not to have stuck his hand in it, even with his canvas glove on. Just what you’d see if your personal idea of fun was crawling beneath a graveyard. As he was about to turn back, thinking he was lost, the murmuring of voices reached him. He had only to raise his head in order to see. The cellar was open to the sky: a jagged hole in the vault let in the unreal glow of the cloudy heavens. There were human shapes down there, talking low, each in turn, holding council; a poised female voice said something in a language he couldn’t identify — Czech, Russian, Serbian, Polish? He was watching from above, through an oblong hole the size of his hand. If he’d had his revolver on him, it would have been easy to knock down those four opaque forms and collect the four rewards, not to mention a Civil Defense Merit Badge, yes sir. He trained two fingers on the sitting, thinking ducks, one by one, click-clack, your worries would be over my dears. The game amused him. And it was a good job he’d left that gun behind, because the temptation would have been strong: the ingrained habit of killing, the urge to do the right thing, the spirit of fraternity! The incentive of the reward: human motivation is nothing if not complex. Down below, the woman struck a match over a sheet of paper. Franz had a glimpse of slender fingers, an oval face, chestnut-ash hair above the brow. The match went out, but the vision of that stern countenance, youthful yet aging, had imprinted itself so well upon the cripple’s retina that he seemed still to see it in the darkness. Gleefully he prepared his throat for his spectral voice, waited for a silence, and pronounced: “Lady, gentlemen …”

  The four shapes scattered into the blackest depths of the vaults. Franz could feel them below him, tense, crouched, unsheathing knives, intently scanning the recesses of the walls, the hole to the sky … Not a flicker of movement. He paced his phrasing, to bring out the humor.

  “Honorable fodder for the gallows and the stake! An unknown well-wisher, who doesn’t actually give a fart about anything, advises you to decamp without delay … The neighborhood is getting dangerous.”

  Feeling better now, graveyard rats? Franz believed he was feeling in his own breast the beating of four terrified hearts calmed by the balm of such an improbable reprieve. Taking a deep breath, he concluded: “Reasons of State. Good night.”

  A man’s deep voice rose from the cavern and said, in good German, “Thank you. Good night. Beat it.”

  A pause ensued, like a rising tide of silence slowly sealing off the underground world. And the woman’s voice added, from farther away, “Brotherhood.”

  Franz lost his temper. In the light of day, this woman would be repelled by him, his crutch, his stick, his rubberized extension, the hook in place of a hand, the sourness etched into his zero-hero kisser. “Which one’s the glass eye?” she’d wonder, and, “Tell me, are your balls synthetic too?” He loathed her. There’s precious little brotherhood to spare for the armless and the legless, except in official speeches … He answered violently, “And a bucket of flaming shit to you too!”

  Laughter melted his anger.

  You see, there’s only one brotherhood these days, and that’s in the pit, the common pit, where the same fraternal lime is shoveled over Slavs and Aryans, Negroes and Jews! They’re all the same when they’ve twitched and defecated their last, all equally stinking, putrid, impotent, pacified, delivered … All the drowned look alike, salt water or fresh, and corpses are the truest brothers, the only ones you can trust: they neither murder nor betray … Just as the devastated cities are sisters, Stalingrad, Warsaw, Coventry, London, Lübeck, and this city too: they could all be mistaken for one another in a photograph. Brotherhood.

  He was still feeling jubilant, carried away by his speeches to himself, when a security patrol hailed him at the corner of an erstwhile street. It was nearly sunrise. The corporal recognized him.

  “Out prowling, Franz?”

  The cripple produced an engraved silver goblet he had just found, undamaged, in a thicket of scrap iron.

  “It was shining like a cat’s eye!”

  “Anything suspicious back there?” “Everything, you name it. A ballet of ghosts. What’s the news?” The corporal edged a step away from his men, mobilized civilians who looked like the defeated insurgents they could never be. “It seems the elite division was crushed to a pulp this morning … The general’s killed himself …” “White of him,” murmured Franz hypocritically. “Does that mean the ci
ty is surrounded?” “Only halfway,” said the corporal, a perfect vessel in which official lies were preserved forever fresh. “An army of shock troops is poised to break through their exposed flank, but not for a few days …” “Only a few days?” marveled Minus-Two, reaching for a smirk of gratification, and rounding it off with a wink. His amputated hand was beginning to throb, it must be the damp. He raised his other hand in a parade-ground salute: “Sieg Heil!”

  Back at home he removed his clothes by himself, in an agony of pain. His amputated limbs felt as though they were bleeding, severed raw, gnawed by the icy cold. “Warm me, Ilse.” At such times the Pomeranian woman would stretch out on top of him so as to clasp both of his stumps, and the prostheses would cut into her; but a saving warmth crept from her body into his. He began to doze off to the vision of a flaring match which threw light onto a hand and thence onto a face strangely framed by rays intermingled with ash-brown locks. Three human shapes, molded in opacity, were worshipping or menacing that hand, that brow … So he made haste, pointing his machine gun at the hand, the brow, the three crouching forms: fire, fire, fire! I killed all. Duty. Franz let out a groan, his head struck the partition, flakes of plaster rained down on his face. Ilse still sprawled hotly on top of him, suffocating him. “Ha, strangle me would you, vermin!” He shook her off in one convulsive jerk. Ilse knew these nightmares, when he joined battle with things unseen and often hit or abused her, without waking. She made herself passive, as if she didn’t exist, and waited for the storm of the blood to spend itself through his clenched body.

  “What is it? An alert?” he asked in a childish voice.

  A submachine gun, great strangling pincers, white maggots in the gruesome sludge, tetanus, a vault punctured by the sky; and the sound of the Schulzes snoring in the next room, like in a stable. “Ilse,” he said plaintively …

  “Try to sleep, my man,” she answered roughly. “It’ll be light soon.”

  * * *

  Nurse Erna Laub’s dossier had of course been “carefully reviewed” by the appropriate offices … Her father was an agronomical engineer, Oscar-Julius Laub, a card-carrying National Socialist and vice president of a national association abroad, entrusted with the most delicate assignments, awarded top marks, last heard of in 1941 at a civilian prisoners’ camp in the north Obi, Eastern Siberia (there was no more on Oscar-Julius). Erna was his only child, unmarried, a nurse with a Red Cross diploma from Riga; fluent Russian from infancy, smattering of Spanish for having accompanied her father on a six-month journey to Peru, competent French after several visits to Paris; slight Slavonic accent in German. The data regarding her character could be summarized as follows: highly patriotic, member of the National Women’s Association, diligent, conscientious, of below-average intelligence (underlined). Doesn’t speak up at meetings, but ardent in her applause. Generous with donations. Not especially gregarious, strict morals, no offspring (underlined, a black mark). War record: crossed Lithuanian lines with a group of escapees from Russian prisons, which made a twenty-four-hour stand against the Sokolin gang. Slightly wounded in the shoulder, excellent morale, exerted a positive influence upon companions. Personal acquaintance of Standartenführer F. M. B., former Communist, sterling Party member, killed at … and of Lieutenant Colonel H. W. W., a boyhood friend of her father’s. Political acumen: nil. Physical appearance: forty years of age, appears younger, medium height, well built, sober of dress, extremely proper in demeanor. Chestnut hair, pulled back from the forehead and gathered into a low bun, sprinkled with gray strands; blue-gray eyes, and a set to the lips expressing severity.

  Discreetly accompanied by the confidential papers that drew this rather accurate portrait of her, Nurse (First Class) Erna Laub, usually well provided with money, looked for jobs just behind the front lines — the sort of posting her colleagues did their best to evade with the help of their connections (in violation of a draconian rule) and even of their amorous liaisons. Laub’s only known liaison occurred in Breslau, with a twenty-six-year-old flying ace who was distinguishing himself on the eastern front. After his sorties over the Red Army munitions depots, this handsome Siegfried, an occasional drug-taker, easily obtained a twenty-four-hour leave from his chiefs in order to attend a concert with Erna and end the night in the arms of this yielding statue. He only tore himself away, still ravished by that embrace, to meet a somewhat unaccountable bullet during a nighttime rumpus in the city itself. Suspicion fell on some Polish workers, who were executed without fuss. A few days later, the deceased’s elite squadron was destroyed in its magnificently camouflaged and isolated hangars by Russian bombs of breathtaking precision. Placing fatherland above friendship, Nurse Erna Laub wrote to denounce the careless talk of a certain officer who drank too much, slept with the first women who came along, and talked about his exploits to all and sundry, neglecting, in short, the most elementary precautions. In view of his service record, the culprit was merely demoted and transferred from the air force to a disciplinary infantry unit, where the soldiers lasted an average of forty-five days. Such a courageous show of patriotism on the part of Erna Laub further bolstered the trust in which she was held, and soon after she was appointed head nurse to Army General von G, recovering from a serious fracture to the skull. This task she fulfilled with “matchless devotion,” though the patient died from rampant septicemia four days after beginning his convalescence … It happened at the spa town of Bad Schanden, in Erzgebirge. The view of lofty ranges and white mists framed by the window was so restful, so invigorating, that General von G felt he was coming back to life. The nurses offered him the first cup of some hot, delicious coffee — a gift from the field marshal — while he talked to them innocently about his mountain-climbing youth, his explorations in Anatolia, his fallen sons, and the execution of a pack of Jews at Tarnopol, carried out by those nasty little bandits of the Reprisals Brigade, the worst soldiers in the world! He explained that the Slavs’ very name had derived in ancient times from the Latin slavus, slave — proof of the immemorially servile nature of these tribes from the Asian steppes. Leavening erudition with wit, the general went on to discuss the alternative etymologies peddled by philosophers with more imagination than sense. These would have “Slav” derive from slovo, the Slavonic for verb; or slava, glory, also in Slavonic — for to cap it all, the slaves aspire to the word, they lay claim to glory! Erna Laub implored him several times not to overtax himself by talking; as dusk fell, she injected him with a sedative. “He is saved,” she repeated, “this great man of war! And such a dazzling conversation-alist!” The fever attacked the next morning. The head nurse offered herself for a transfusion, but she was not of the same blood group … The bereaved family sent a miserly one hundred marks to the nursing staff.

  Two American parachutists isolated at the top of the Fourth Field Hospital developed a hatred of Erna Laub, marching in and out of their garret several times a day. Privately they called her Old Lace, after the play Arsenic and Old Lace. Torn between hope and fear, they listened to the throb of battle beyond the horizon. The abrupt silence of the guns plunged them into such despondency that Old Lace, noting the rise in their temperatures, fixed them with a gimlet eye straight out of the Last Judgment. She was standing by the door, thin in starchy white, and to them she looked like a Prussian death’s-head. The latch clicked into place behind her. “Our number is up,” said the young man from Arkansas to the young man from Illinois, without specifying whether he meant them personally, the nearby fighting, or global war. “See that poison look on her face?” Old Lace returned to administer some tablets. Bending toward the ear of the young man from Arkansas, she asked, in English, “Speak French?” The parachutist bit back an expletive, and said, “I understand a bit, un peu.” Old Poison Lace was whispering, unbelievably, “Courage, you have won, gagné la bataille. Elite division kaput, comprenez?” “Ja,” stammered the prisoner, he thought he was dreaming, and gaped admiringly at the austere visage that now looked nothing like a death’s-head. The nurse put a finger
to her lips.

  “Not possible,” protested the young man from Illinois, “you must be nuts …” But he’d seen the finger on the lips. “She’s great, amazing, what a woman! What chumps we’ve been!” Their temperatures returned to normal. Meanwhile, in the mess, Captain Gerhard Koppel and Heiderman the medical officer were debating the prisoners’ fate with Erna Laub. “I vote we get rid of them quietly,” said Dr. Heiderman. “There’s a circular that gives us the right … You know that if Altstadt falls, there’s not enough transport for all of our wounded …” Captain Koppel objected that the circular had been overruled by a subsequent order from the divisional chief, in the interests of intelligence. Erna Laub proved to have some political acumen after all: “Besides, precisely if the town falls, such captives will indirectly serve to protect the population …” She backed this up, tactfully, with: “Anyway, you can always decide at the last moment. It’ll only take two minutes.” If there is a last moment, even lasting two minutes, and anyone around to decide anything at all …

  The thought of the last moment passed through their three minds, stirring up unconfessable anxieties and expectations. Koppel admitted that the local situation was getting worse, but that the general situation would improve, despite appearances. You never knew with this model officer whether he believed what he was saying or if he said what must be believed. “Berlin stands fast, and the enemy’s plans will be foiled in time; the outlying bits of territory we are losing are as insignificant as the bomb damage, which is really a golden opportunity to rebuild … Between ourselves, let’s face it, many of our venerable old piles were crying out to be demolished long ago. The justifiable respect in which they were held were a brake on modern urban development … And what we shall erect in their place will be equally historic …” He gave the final tug to his glove with a little laugh. Straight and supple, agreeably blond, he might have been a life-sized cutout, soul included, from a military fashion magazine. Was he as genuinely steeped in high official stupidity as he appeared? Or did he put on his stupidity in the morning after his cold shower, along with his uniform, well brushed by an orderly? Was it part and parcel of his contempt for others, did it afford him a secret pleasure in deriding the cowardly? Koppel continued: “We only need a few weeks more to perfect a new technology of warfare … England will be destroyed when she least expects it. In future the real war will be a war of scientific inventions …”