The Black Laurel

by Storm Jameson

  Arnold hid his exasperation. What do they expect me to do? he thought coldly. Apologise? He saw that his coolness disappointed Gerlach, and this brought him back to a sense that he was with strangers, people he could only half understand. He said drily,

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Not your fault,” Gerlach said. “This, by the way, used to be her own room.”

  Now he had been told, he saw the traces everywhere of an innocently pretty room: dangling at the side of one window the rags of a chintz curtain; the bed she was sitting on had a coverlet which had been pale green and yellow, very suitable for a schoolgirl: it was torn and stained. . . Looking round, he realised that two of the others slept in this room, at the other end.

  There was a second door in the room. Gerlach opened it. He caught a glimpse of beds, a stove rather like a primus, and windows with dangling shutters. The room was almost in darkness. The indistinct figure of a woman bent over the stove. Gerlach spoke to her in his pleasant voice.

  “Make us some coffee, Maria.”

  He shut the door. In silence, because he did not know what to talk about, Arnold handed out cigarettes. Only Kurt put his away in a pocket, with a polite smile. Trotha laid the garment he was mending across his thighs and leaned back with an air of contentment, almost bliss.

  “I’ve had an offer of marriage.”

  “My dear Helmuth — really? Who?”

  “My employer’s niece,” Trotha said gaily. “She’s the daughter of a farmer. It’s purely a business offer. We should live on the farm, I should be looked after and fed — and our eldest son would have the title.”

  Gerlach looked at him with a gentle smile.

  “Well? Why not?”

  Trotha did not answer. He lifted his hands for a second, palm upwards, in a light gesture, as if showing them the tailor’s niece in all her simple absurdity. Gerlach turned to Arnold, again as if he were a difficult guest who must be drawn tactfully into conversation.

  “What do you think? The whole thing is nonsense, of course. Why should the poor woman imagine that any name will be worth more than any other to her son? Nowadays everything, every act, is measured in power units. Is there any other way of pricing things? Of course there isn’t. I’m a Catholic, but I can see for myself that spiritual power goes exactly as far as it has a real backing. Did it save the neck of a single German Jesuit in the last years? Look at France? Was any country more civilised, intelligent, lovable? Yet in 1940 it collapsed like a puff-ball. And next to the French, the English are the most civilised — infinitely, infinitely, more civilised than Americans or Russians. It won’t save you, let me tell you, now you’ve become paupers, from being crushed between the two of them. My uncle is a good man — if you like, a saint. Will that keep him warm this winter? And look at me. In spite of my broken neck, and with my one good hand, I’m worth something. But where can I go, who would make himself responsible for using me? And don’t delude yourself — in a few years thousands and tens of thousands of young men in your country will be just as helpless.”

  He laughed with real gaiety.

  “Don’t think I mind. I’m delighted to have my eyes open. Our fathers were as blind as kittens, God bless them.”

  “You may be right,” Arnold said coolly. “But where does it get you?”

  He was baffled, as always when faced by a talkative intellectual. His own mind seemed to have a protective layer of something dense and resistant, below which he had to search about slowly for what he believed. And that took time. But it was also a sensitive layer, like a photographic plate, and took impressions with amazing ease: at the moment, he had the sense, confused and heavy, of a void. It was not in himself. He expects, he sees, nothing, he thought suddenly.

  He felt inquisitive and ashamed of his curiosity.

  Gerlach looked at him with friendly irony.

  “What do you expect of life?”

  Everything. Something — the unknown.

  “Oh, nothing.”

  “Nonsense,” Gerlach laughed, “you’re defending yourself.”

  Kurt Bœsig spoke for the first time, quietly. Unlike the other two, he had a squat sturdy body; his head was enormous. The black patch over his eye did not distort his face nor break its strict look of composure and reserve.

  “He wants to know what you think,” Gerlach translated. “When the war starts with Russia will your people recruit us Germans as mercenaries?” He added smiling, “It’s quite important for us.”

  “You are all mad,” Arnold mumbled, “why should there be war?”

  Gerlach repeated his answer in German. Bœsig smiled gravely, and Trotha and the girl laughed outright. Ida said in French,

  “Which side will win? We ought to know that first.”

  “Is it right, better, nobler,” Trotha said in the same language, “to be on the winning side, or to be defeated on the side of civilisation? I don’t think we shall object to the last. . . You won’t, you know, be able to do without us. The very fear we roused in people, our cruelties, if they were only cruelties, will be useful to you when we’re on the same side. Not that I like cruelty.”

  Gerlach interrupted him, always in his tone of a charming friendly young man.

  “We Germans have Faust much as your people have rheumatism and sluggish stomachs. One of us is always tempted to play Mephistopheles to his countrymen. Luther and Bismarck succeeded in the role, Hitler failed. Or perhaps he was anti-Christ. In either case, he was a summit. It will be a long time before he’s either forgotten or surpassed.”

  They feel a pride in being outcasts, Arnold thought, with contempt; in the monstrousness of their crimes, in being super-Cains.

  “Yes,” he said, “you’re a peculiar people.”

  He was conscious of Ida Lenbach’s dark eyes, fixed on him in an unwavering disconcerting stare, half like a child, half mindless.

  “You despise us,” she said.

  “Not at all.”

  Trotha held the jacket up to the light.

  “Why shouldn’t you?” he said calmly. “I wonder if there are any more holes?”

  Kurt got up quickly and came over to him. Pushing aside the black patch, he examined the garment carefully, all over. His eye-socket had drawn together; the lid, a little shrivelled, covered the scar.

  Ida leaned forward to whisper in Arnold’s ear.

  “He feels as if he saw better without it.”

  Kurt handed back the jacket.

  “No, that’s all right now.”

  “Thank goodness.”

  Trotha yawned, reached down for his crutches lying on the floor beside his chair — and dropped them again.

  “No, I’m too tired. Help me.”

  Arnold half rose from his chair. He sat down again at once and watched the other two lift and carry him across the room to the couch. They propped him gently against the cushions. Gerlach fetched a blanket and laid it across him.

  “There you are, my dear.”

  A woman came out of the other room carrying a handsome lacquered tray, with a coffee-pot and cups without saucers. She was a young woman — less young, possibly, than she seemed: her hands holding the tray were wrinkled and swollen. In a curious way she was like the girl — but what in Ida Lenbach seemed the recklessness of a very young girl had turned in her to something graver; as if she had cast herself loose and was drifting, without energy, lost. It occurred to Arnold that she was a little mad.

  She carried the tray first to Gerlach. He took a cup and held it towards Arnold. He apologised, smiling, for his left hand.

  “I can use the one they gave me, it works, I can hold with it. But I don’t care to.”

  He helped himself; she took the tray to Ida, standing beside her with a vague smile. Ida looked at her coldly.

  “Thank you.”

  When she had given their coffee to the other two, she took the last and handleless cup herself and sat down with it. She had not said a word, but she looked round the room from one to the other with a lit
tle air of expectant gaiety, her lips lightly parted as if she were just going to speak.

  What is she? he wondered. Her manner was not that of a servant, yet Trotha and Ida Lenbach clearly looked on her as one. Gerlach had seated himself on the floor at her feet; he laid his head back against her knee.

  “I forgot to present you to Maria.”

  Arnold stood up quickly, with the impulse to exaggerate his politeness. She looked at him without moving. Her voice was very strange — light and dragging. She spoke English.

  “How very fair you are.”

  Gerlach turned himself round, to look at her with indulgence.

  “You talk terrible nonsense, my love.”

  They are living together, he thought. Of course. . . He had had enough of them, of them all. In spite of its no windows the room was hot, and disagreeably airless. The strain — it was that, although he had not noticed it until now — of guarding himself against so many alien minds, was making him dull and heavy. He had an unpleasant feeling of tension, as though he were with people who might at any moment snatch all their clothes off. Moreover, he was not entirely comfortable about being here, in a German house. Yet he liked and was sorry for Gerlach and the other two, and he did not want to humiliate them by leaving clumsily: he knew that in a few minutes he would do precisely that, because he resented on them the situation in which he had landed himself.

  “What were you in the war?” Ida asked.

  He was taken aback.

  “I was in the R. A. F.”

  She looked directly in his face, without a trace of hostility, with the defiance and curiosity, both awkward, of a schoolgirl.

  “It was a wonderful sight,” she said calmly: “I mean our raid. We ran out into the park, with thousands of others — thousands: everyone lay flat on the soil, my mother dug in it with her fingers. She wanted to hide! I couldn’t do that. I lay on my back and looked at the red sky. I thought when the aeroplanes came back they would hit the trees — streams of white-hot sparks tore from them. There was a child next me saying: Please don’t, please don’t — my mother rolled over on her to protect her, but the bullets went through both of them.”

  She stopped, and went on in a light voice.

  “You’d really think I was saved for something. Wouldn’t you? But you know, I believe it was a pure accident. All the same, I really enjoyed it. It was an astonishing night.”

  “Nothing like so astonishing as Hamburg,” Trotha said. “Thousands of people caught fire in the same instant and were whirled into the air like torches. A real ascension day.”

  That’s enough, Arnold thought. He did not for a moment believe they were mocking him. Simply, they were — he sought for the word — they were the victims of a dry-rot of the emotions; everything they touched had one taste, a savourless dryness — despair, grief, pleasure, cruelty, all were worth one price, the same; and each fresh experience, coming to them out of a void, dropped back into it.

  He saw Kurt’s hand move to replace the blanket slipping from Trotha’s legs. It moved quickly, with tenderness.

  They trust each other, he thought. It was a discovery — so simple a one that he could not grasp it. He must have time to think. . . With an air of reluctance, he got up to go away. Kurt spoke briefly, in his quiet voice. He had used simple words, but Arnold did not understand him, and Ida translated, mockingly:

  “We are the same as you.”

  Which means precisely nothing, he thought. He smiled at Kurt warmly.

  Taking his torch Gerlach went with him down the broken stairs, pointing the torch backwards so that the circle of light moved from step to step. In the darkness the ruins stepped forward. Gerlach bowed.

  “Good of you to come.”

  Since there was nowhere else he could go he went home. It was late. He undressed and turned the light off, and got into bed. He lay with his eyes open, and after a few minutes he could bear it no longer and got up. A restlessness that was like a fever, or a fit of temper, possessed him. It had sprung on him in the darkness, but from a hiding-place in himself, as though he housed an animal or a lunatic; it raged in him dumbly. He wanted violent action, and to get away. Every day he spent in this fog of decay, hysteria, tension, was time wasted. His time. The faces of the Free Cripples, their room, words, Trotha’s ridiculous German drawings, stuck in him like a fishbone he could not swallow. In an obscure way he knew they would not have disturbed him if in himself something had not — however slightly, however buried — known intimately, known as a fever patient understands fever, what they were talking about.

  He stopped prowling about the room and stood in the open window. The sky was clear, so clear, so brilliant with stars, that it seemed alive as a field is alive. A long swathe of stars was obscured suddenly — the wind racing through the grass. At an immense height a flight of migrating birds. Silence — made up of the sighs of sleepers, of words, cries, the first cry, the last noisy breath: below there, over the whole earth, with its men and infants, persisting indifferently under their brief labours, indifferent to their cruelties, joys, fevers, the web of minute roots you find when you crumble a handful of soil.

  He sighed without knowing it. What was the matter with you? he thought quietly. Plenty of time. You can wait.

  The door of his room opened. He turned, but he knew before he saw her that it was Barbe. She was bare-footed, and holding a coat over her pyjamas. She stood in the doorway for a moment. He did not say anything, and she closed the door noiselessly and came directly to him, smiling.

  He felt a pleasant excitement, and his body grew light and rigid. He held her away from him, gripping her by the arms and laughing at her.

  “What do you want?”

  She smiled more widely, throwing her head back, so that the not quite darkness outside fell on her face, across its high cheekbones and childishly rounded forehead.

  “Well, now,” she said, “what do you think?”

  He thought that was what she had said. It went very well with her frank look, a look of simplicity, candour, strength. She looked like a peasant, the village girl of German folk tales, yet she belonged, too, to the madness breeding in ruined cities. He tightened his hold and felt her body along the length of his, warm and hard, and its scarcely-grown breasts.

  When she took off her pyjamas she laid them neatly across a chair before coming to him. He was amused, enchanted — and then lost. Barbe gave him back ardour for ardour, abandon, pleasure; as sensuously simple as a young animal.

  He laid his hand on the very slight hollow between her breasts, and asked,

  “Why did you come?”

  He could just see the movement of her eyelids and that she was looking at him with mischief.

  “I love you.”

  “Nonsense.”

  He caressed her gently. Her body, he half saw, was the same dark ochre colour as her neck and face: it meant that she found time to lie ritually in the sun. She was thin, so thin that her bones — not at all small — stretched tightly a skin as smooth and slippery as a rind.

  “Surely you get enough to eat here? You’re skin and bone.”

  When she laughed her eyes narrowed like the eyes of a cat, and her face became perfectly round.

  “But you see, I save more than half for my parents and sister. I don’t like them; though I’m sorry for my mother I don’t like her when I live with her. But I can’t let them starve.”

  “Why don’t you like them?”

  “They’re fools,” she said, with a frank vehemence.

  I must do something for her, he thought. He felt — with the gaiety, the delicious relief, and the contentment — a sense of responsibility for her, not very serious.

  “Are you hungry now?”

  “Yes,” she said, smiling, “very.”

  He had a packet of chocolate. He brought it and watched her eat it quickly and greedily. When she had finished it she licked her fingers and began to talk to him in a lively voice, using her hands, her shoulders, even her head, for e
mphasis: she had a trick of shaking her head so that a lock of hair swung across her cheek. He was not able to follow long sentences in German, but he understood in a confused way that she was telling him she had had a lover who was a Russian, one of the Russian soldiers; he had blue eyes and yellow hair like her own, he was kind to her, he protected her from all the others who wanted to make love to her, he brought her meat, butter. . . “I liked him very much”. . . All they had been told before it came about the Red Army was lies. . . “Yes, lies, foolishness,” she said scornfully. Only her father, that fool, had talked about humiliation and shame; one night he had cried, my God, how he had cried, and she felt sorry for him and hated him for being such an old fool.

  Arnold interrupted her.

  “What became of him?”

  “Who?”

  “Of your Russian.”

  She shrugged her shoulders.

  “He went away.”

  Turning — she was sitting up in the bed, her knees raised so that the bone pressed against the skin — she touched his face with one finger: she had long hard fingers, like a young man’s.

  “I’ve forgotten him, he wasn’t so beautiful as you are. I must go, my darling. You’re glad I came? And you want me to come another night again? Don’t worry, I shall come without being asked. When you know me better you’ll love me very much. I know it.”

  Without stirring, he watched her slip from the room.

  She looks after herself. . . She was not innocent, neither was she touched by the dry-rot of those others. In her way, she’s superb, he thought coolly. . . he felt less cool, less worldly, than he wanted to be.

  Chapter Ten

  Kalb had walked the length of what had been Unter den Linden. It was no longer a street, the only one in Berlin with a pretension to elegance, it was the half-formed scar over a wound. He stood still and looked at a woman who was gathering single bricks and piling them together with the languid movements of a child tired of playing.