The Black Laurel

by Storm Jameson

  Coming back to himself was like waking from sleep. He felt a little giddy, and turned to go home. As he stepped into the narrow hall — so dark, so full of centuries of smells that it was stifling — a young man on his way out asked him for a light for his cigarette. He had halted directly under the unshaded electric bulb: he was young, with a face as clear and delicate as an ivory; dark eyes, long dark lashes shadowing the purity of his cheeks when he looked down at Kalb. Almost before he spoke, in precise slow English, Kalb had recognised a fellow-countryman.

  “Ah,” he murmured, “here you are.” And then, under his breath — because of his rule never to speak German — he even thought in English; only when he slept his own words welled up, and he caressed a room, a cup, trees, friends, in the sounds they kept for him in their underworld — “Fröhliche Weihnachten.”

  The boy scrutinised him for a moment, with curiosity, then said coolly,

  “My name is Sieber, Karl Sieber.”

  “Kalb, Heinrich,” Kalb said merrily. He was smiling with excitement and happiness. “Do you know, you are the first German, all the four years I have lived in the hotel, to come and stay —”

  “But I’m not staying here,” Sieber interrupted. A young woman, Kalb’s neighbour on the top floor, came down the stairs. She was going out. As she passed them, her glance invited the young man, and she allowed her fur to fall back, to show a lace blouse and the points of her breasts. His eyes followed her for a moment. “And — excuse me — it seems a curious place,” he said, with the gravity of a schoolboy.

  Kalb had never considered the place. It was cheap, in every street there were cheap restaurants, and in none of them, nor in the shops, did you meet an inquisitive glance. Among so many foreigners, French, Italians, Greeks, he had not even felt that he was an exile, a refugee in a country not his. Now for an instant he felt ashamed of living in a hotel full of dubious people. Recovering himself, he said jauntily,

  “It’s very friendly.”

  “You come from Berlin.”

  “How did you know?”

  “Your accent. . . oh, no offence, I only mean you talk like a Prussian.”

  “Me! A Prussian! ” Kalb went off into a fit of laughter. There was a long narrow glass on the wall, mildewed and fly-blown: he pirouetted in front of it, and his image in its blackened depths was of a grasshopper in a dark shabby coat. “A pure Berlin Jew,” he cried.

  A smile touched the boy’s finely-drawn lips. Politely, with a young deference, he asked,

  “Can you tell me of a cheap restaurant, very cheap, but where I shan’t be poisoned?”

  “Yes, of course. Try —” He broke off. He had thought of the slices of liver sausage and the rolls that were to see him over Christmas. “You wouldn’t care — I mean, would you — to have supper with me? The poorest meal — I assure you, but —”

  The young man did not answer. I was indiscreet, Kalb thought, mortified. He was going to apologise.

  “It’s very kind of you,” Sieber said calmly. “I should like to.”

  Delighted, Kalb led him upstairs. The room was cold now as well as musty. Recklessly he put tomorrow’s sixpence in the meter and lit the fire. He ran about, chattering as he spread the table with plates, the sausage, the rolls, and sliced gherkins on to a saucer.

  “Do make yourself comfortable. The armchair is not bad, it only creaks —” he shook the cushion — “please sit, please do sit.” With an agitated hand he measured coffee into the pan and set it on the gas-ring. “I shall strain it, you know, don’t worry. . . How long have you been in London? But don’t tell me if you’d rather not!”

  “Six days.”

  “Only six days!” he cried, astonished. “But how lucky you were to get here. It’s so difficult now. But once you’re here, the English are kindness itself — kind, generous, fair. I have English friends. Sometimes they help me — and with such delicacy. You would think I was doing them a favour, I, by accepting a nearly new overcoat — or shoes. And soon I shall have a job — yes, really — with Durtain’s, you know it, the famous art firm. Oh, I’m very lucky.”

  Sieber looked at him briefly.

  “I knew a musician employed in Berlin broadcasting. Walther Kalb.”

  Kalb dropped the coffee-strainer. “You knew my friend Walther?”

  The shock made his heart beat violently.

  “My friend — not a relative.” He managed a poor little smile. “So many Jews, so few names.”

  He could not go on. There they still were, hardly below the surface; his friends, the warm over-furnished rooms, Walther’s plump wife laughing and patting herself, the quartets, all the modest treacherous — they had betrayed him! — gaieties of the past. He wanted to question the young man. It struck him — with his simplicity he was no fool — that really he knew nothing about Sieber. He had begun, “Where is —”

  He stopped, awkwardly.

  Sieber looked him in the eyes.

  “Don’t be afraid of me — though I’m not a Jew, and that wasn’t why I had to leave Germany. I’m a socialist.”

  He spoke in a curt voice, with an unyouthful severity. For a moment Kalb felt ashamed of his happy safe life. He asked timidly,

  “What happened to Walther?”

  “I don’t know,” Sieber said in a dry voice, “I wasn’t able to ask.”

  Kalb was silent. The disturbance brought into his life by this charming friendly young man sank deeper in him and seemed to join and darken a shadow already there. He felt one of those strokes of fear — causeless for all we see of their cause — which paralyse us in sleep. He shook it off.

  “Come, you must eat,” he said guiltily.

  He pressed food on Sieber, who took all he offered. And really it was not much. What had seemed ample for two or three meals disappeared down the young man’s throat terribly quickly. His effort to be a good host restored Kalb. He was comforted, and chattered about himself, London, other refugees. The young man said little. He listened, with a courteous pleasant intentness. Now and then he made a remark in a soft voice. . .

  With a shock, Kalb came back to his Berlin room. It was airless, in spite of the many broken panes. The smell of dust, as pervasive as the smells in a butcher’s shop, drifted into it from the night. He forgot his mistake about Sieber. I’ve been seeing ghosts, he thought — and how not? His little body ached from their pressure on it. A dark stream flowed behind his eyes: voices floated in it and broke when they reached him, like bubbles — his mother’s, Walther’s, anonymous voices from the black market and the cellars of dead houses. He tried to make himself deaf. Suddenly he thought: No, no!

  “No,” he said, “come. I’ll shelter you all.”

  He opened his skinny arms widely.

  Chapter Eight

  An awning sheltered the terrace on to which opened the dining-room, drawing-rooms, and library, of Gary’s house on the Wannsee. Beyond it, the sun struck directly from a cloudless sky on the stretched surface of the lake and sprang back in fragments of metal. Trees, lawn, flower-beds, glittered with them. In all these rooms, and in the bedrooms, the windows folded back and the front of the house ceased to exist except as a spectral drawing in steel. Electric fans, out of sight and completely soundless, kept the rooms cool. There were very few separate pieces of furniture, all the inner walls concealed a cupboard, a wardrobe, or bookcases — in the larger drawing-room one wall, of thick glass, was the front of an aquarium, empty now of its sun-fish. The few pieces allowed had each been designed and executed by an artist; they were in the finest modern taste, the badness of which penetrates so deeply to the bone that it is metaphysical.

  Gary’s three guests at luncheon were General Lowerby, his friend Humphrey Brett, and an American called Scorel, a civilian. He was in Germany on a charitable mission. A good man, humane, competent, his nose — its tip exactly in the centre of the other blunt neat features, rallying them — was on the scent of as much misery and wickedness as would crush a weak vessel. He was not weak. The admi
rable wines he had been drinking, the iced melon, the trout, the chicken, braised in butter, he had eaten, and the brandy he was drinking with his coffee, did not make him voluble: he was naturally more voluble than a mill-wheel.

  Lifting his nose out of his glass,

  “I always tell them at home, in Washington, I say: You can’t ignore Europe, you may want to, but you can’t, it’s there, just like any other poor sick old body it needs the doctor, it needs kindness, it needs everything you can spare it — above all, it needs a mountain of faith and a mountain of firmness — I’m not going to be tricked —”

  His unusually thick wedding-ring knocked against the table — of clouded glass. Goodness, efficiency, public spirit, streamed from him, with the energy, Gary thought, amused, of tracer-bullets. He liked Scorel. I must have my gargoyles.

  “Europe will disillusion you,” he said, smiling.

  “No” Scorel said. He added less bluntly, “You can’t upset a good Presbyterian — I have no illusions. Not more than a child. You know what makes us, Americans I mean, so formidable? We have the egoism, generosity, candour, cruelty, of a child. We possess irresistible force, the gaucherie of youth, and all the wealth we can use. Precisely. But nobody need be afraid of us — we are going to do right by the world.”

  Brett glanced at him ironically.

  “I’m afraid you will. A nation that lets its chiefs of staff run its foreign policy —” he grimaced at Lowerby — “no offence to you, my dear fellow.”

  Lowerby smiled without malice.

  “Your glass,” Gary said to Scorel. He refilled it. “You know,” he said simply, “if you want help, I — or Lowerby here, will do anything possible.”

  “That certainly is kind.”

  Glancing up from the peach he was stripping — he never drank — Lowerby looked at Scorel, politely; but his politeness was almost menacing.

  “Who owns this house?” He tapped the floor, a mosaic of polished woods. “I never saw anything like it.”

  “A Baron Hugo von Rechberg. Before the war — an associate of mine.”

  Gary reflected. None of them, not one, not even Scorel, is sane enough for me to tell him that Rechberg has money in Sweden and America, in various names, mine among them.

  Brett had drunk enough, and enjoyed it, to spice his always indiscreet tongue.

  “Rechberg? An intelligent scoundrel, a rat. I know something about him. If I had my way I’d shut him up with his friends.”

  “Why is he at large?” demanded Scorel.

  “Ask me! He knew enough to guard himself. We don’t, it’s true, allow him to move out of our Sector — otherwise he’s free.”

  “Humphrey, you’re quite wrong,” Gary said, with affection. “Rechberg is a Catholic, of good family, very cultivated, honourable — he spent the last eight months of the war in prison, sent there by Himmler. Isn’t that good enough for you?”

  He reflected that Rechberg had fallen into disgrace only at the very end — a few weeks after he had begun writing openly to America about his dislike of the regime and his certainty that it would break down.

  “Certainly there are Boches who are, as you say, honourable — but what good does it do them, since they are Boches, they feel like Boches, and their sense — of honour, let’s say, since we’re talking about it, but the same goes for their feeling about death, or God, or justice — think of that fellow we hanged — Gerlach. It’s another species of human being. To understand them, you’d need to be, yes, be a Boche — and then it wouldn’t occur to you to understand—”

  Gary laughed at him.

  “I understand Rechberg very well.”

  “Because you’re both business men,” Scorel said. “People are what they do. Precisely.”

  “We’ll talk about this next time,” Gary said, smiling. “I doubt if you know where your beliefs will lead you, my dear Humphrey. . .” His simplicity and liveliness softened the inflection of dismissal. “You must forgive me, I have an appointment. . .”

  Arnold drove him into Berlin. He suspected — indeed, knew — that the pilot was nervous in a car, worried by the traffic. But he enjoyed his silent company too much not to ignore this. Arnold could be silent for hours. It was not the silence of respect. Did he absent himself — it was an absence — deliberately, or was he only preoccupied by his own thoughts? I only know him as he shows himself to older people, Gary thought, with a light bitterness; he’s still too young.

  This afternoon, he had no wish to speak. He thought about the man he was going to see. After eight years — four of them in a concentration camp — he might be unrecognisable. Like Berlin itself. The broken silhouettes of houses, the mounds, the rankness drawn up by the hot sun, at the end of a long street of ruins a thin spiral of dust rising towards a sky stretched indulgently over the anguish of all men. . . And how to talk to him about the brother he had loved?

  He knew, because on his first day in Berlin he had had himself driven to the place, only to look at it, where they were. Impossible to take the car closer than this side of a vast area of rubble. Broken columns, a wall or two, the steps of a non-existent house: almost in the centre of the rubble a single house, narrow, small; the two upper floors were wrecked, the lowest seemed intact, except that there was no frame in the window.

  “This is the place,” Gary said. “Wait for me in the car.”

  He picked his way through the rubble. When he reached the house, he saw with astonishment that someone — Lucius? — had dug a patch of ground and planted herbs. The door of the house was half open. He knocked.

  Lucius had not changed. Or rather, he had changed only to become himself. His very long narrow face, the long finely arched nose, the eyes, so deeply set that they looked out from their pits with the absence from the world of a gothic saint (or demon), the stone eaten by the centuries — anything in his face which was not of the Middle Ages had been worn down, and what sprang out was gothic: the patience, the secret smile, the travail, of the centuries of faith. He was thinner than ever. He wore a pale grey suit, shabby and ludicrously elegant.

  “My dear fellow, my dear William,” he said smiling. “The happiest day of my life.”

  “Nonsense,” Gary said.

  “Of course. But I’m happy. Come in.”

  Inside, there was only one room, and a half-room, held together by boards, where — he showed it off at once — he had a primus-stove, a few kitchen tools, and a spade. The living-room was nearly empty — a stretcher he used as a bed, a table, a shelf, three or four chairs — extremely clean; the walls had been whitewashed, even over the laths in places where the plaster had fallen off. It was curious — a cell rather than a decayed room. A hut. It will be intolerable in winter, Gary reflected.

  “Let me hand these over at once.”

  He held out the letter from Emil Gerlach, and the miniature.

  At this moment, a young man appeared who must have been keeping himself deliberately out of sight against a wall of the half-room. Of middle height, slender; clear delicate features — the long Gerlach chin so modified that his face was an amazingly pure oval. But for a scar drawn from forehead to chin, and a missing eyebrow, he would have been beautiful.

  “My nephew Rudolf. Emil’s son.”

  Gary held out his hand. The young man made no move to take it. He bowed slightly, heels together, arms rigid. His right hand, Gary saw now, was gloved.

  “Your father spoke of you to me.”

  “Indeed.”

  The coldness was so marked as to be insulting. Half touched — the wish to insult a victor is at least pitiful,

  “If I had been able to see him for a longer time,” Gary said, “to talk to him, we should certainly have become friends. He was very like his brother — your uncle — I should have known him at once, anywhere.”

  Barely waiting until the sentence was finished, the young man said curtly,

  “No, you would not have been his friend.”

  He turned to leave the hut.

 
“Rudi,” Lucius Gerlach said gently.

  Without a glance at him, the boy went out. Lucius turned to Gary with a faint smile.

  “You must overlook it. He’s in a bad nervous state. What can one expect? We take these boys — when the war started he was barely nineteen — train them to a degree of physical skill and daring which ensures that their entire nervous system as well as their muscles and senses are able, on the given instant, to perform miracles. . . no doubt you had parachute troops in your army —”

  “Of course.”

  “— so brave they will do anything — and when they break, everything is involved, nerves, brain. Emil’s son was badly smashed up in Russia, in ’ 42; he was in hospital two years; he lost a hand, and there are fragments of steel in him the surgeon couldn’t touch.”

  He pointed a long bony finger at himself in the gesture Emil Gerlach had made; it was clearly one of those gestures a family hands down, along with its land and the colour of its eyes.

  “Even for strong nerves defeat is humiliating.”

  “My dear Lucius,” Gary said gently, “the boy is all right.”

  He hesitated, then said,

  “And if he knows how his father died —”

  “He doesn’t,” Lucius said swiftly. “The information came to me. I was able to — edit it. I hope I needn’t tell Rudi the truth, now or ever.”

  His face — he had thrown his head back — was convulsed; the cords of his neck, knotted, his hands, lying on the table, palms upward, immobile, gave away the image he had made of his brother.

  “You know — the difference in our ages, and then — he was much more my child than my brother. I haven’t reconciled myself yet.”