The Czech priest, speaking in a rough German to his neighbour, said,
“No, no, you are right, it’s not always decent not to tell lies. In my village, clandestine leaflets were given out; the men involved were all fathers of families. So I confessed. They examined me, and I said I had done it. It was a lie. I am a priest, I am bound to speak the truth, but the truth is too precious to give Germans; I was forced to lie. They said: Very well, you won’t speak; take off your coat. And they took their whips. I thought: Well, I’m an old man, I can’t survive. I crossed myself, closed my eyes, and began to pray as I do before the High Altar. After a minute they said: You can put your coat on: take him away. Afterwards the guard told me: They were so impressed that you prayed for them when they were only going to beat you to death that they couldn’t touch you...”
He smiled meditatively, with irony.
“But I wasn’t praying for them! I was praying for my soul. I had nothing against them, but I was praying for my soul, I wasn’t praying for them.”
In a low voice, his neighbour asked,
“And then?”
“Oh, and then Terezin. I survived.”
Renn’s head ached violently from the bad air. The thick shadow closing in on the gleam of the candle was alive with the voices climbing out of the stricken earth of countries beyond the Elbe, and in the darkness of Terezin and the other vast common graves; below even these depths, a voice made its way slowly up, seeking a purer darkness, from the cruelties, the griefs, the silence of human life since its creation. Whispering because these others were whispering, he asked the Mother Superior who the young woman was seated next the priest.
“They arrive from everywhere,” she said in her normal quiet voice. “Eugenia is a Polish woman: with Father Josef she is looking for children who have been lost. Either taken, or homeless after their parents were shot, or driven out.”
The flame of the candle made a brief pallid leap. His glance followed it into the blackness waiting closely above their heads; he saw the two halves of a broken cobweb: they hung perfectly still, there was not enough movement in the air to stir even such frail threads. He had a moment of giddiness: the tangle of snapped threads stretched beyond the walls, across Europe — women from murdered villages searching for the child last seen stumbling off in front of a German guard, wives who had given up expecting a letter from the husband in a foreign army, or a return from one of the camps: the hell of memory which in 1945 is Europe.
An arm stretched into the weak circle of light seeking a piece of bread: Renn saw a face all bird-of-prey nose and repulsively gross lips; the hand was the animal hand he had seen earlier. The young Polish woman placed the bread in it.
“Why did you come back?” she asked softly, almost with affection. “I thought you had gone home? To Kielce? You told me —”
A silence. The beaked face and animal paw drew back out of sight. Unexpectedly, a harsh whimpering voice scrabbled among the roots to find its way up.
“A man had taken over my shop and the room under it — I always slept there. None of us would come back. They knew. I, I came. At night, and I knocked. I knocked again and again during the night. At last he put his hand out with a knife in it. Then I understood. I came back here. Where can I go now?”
Another voice, a woman’s, curiously flawed. Renn could not see her at all.
“Naturally, if they thought you were dead...”
No more than in a plain at night could you see the end of the darkness in which these shadows clattered a spoon or made the sucking noises of drinking soup or talked. It stretched to an invisible horizon. Renn imagined a man looking back into it from some new distant daylight, probing the dust of buildings, trying to piece together fragments of Lear and a few lines of Donne: he will not have to wonder, as we now, why so little is left of the civilisations of the past; the forces hidden in the bomb will be known to him. . . One of Eugenia’s hands rested on the table, in the light, the finely-jointed thumb, two fingers of unusual delicacy, the others broken off at the root. She saw that he had noticed it, and drew it back without haste or awkwardness.
“Did they do it?”
“Yes,” she said in her calm voice. “I was in Ravensbrück. For five years.”
He felt a dully violent anger.
“There can’t be any forgiveness.”
“Oh, yes. There must be. So much cruelty can only be forgiven. You can’t punish it, there was too much.”
Mr Scorel lifted a peremptory hand.
“She’s right. The young lady is right. If you’re going to start punishments you’ll have to bury as many more as are dead already; their children will want to avenge them; there’ll be no end to it. I’m for food, clothing, mercy. Precisely.”
Renn’s head was swimming. A voice came from the darkness on his right. Slowly, dragging the syllables,
“They’ll invent something, you’ll see, to double the harvests. Very likely three harvests!”
“What nonsense!”
“I’m telling you! During the war I read it — in one of the papers.”
“You’re dotty,” the other voice said contemptuously, “they invent a lot of things — bombs, eh? — but they don’t invent harvests.”
A third voice, hurried and eager, babbled,
“I have a lucky ring. Yes, bought in Frankfurt; the man had fifty he had fetched from somewhere, India, I think: he sold them all in an hour. I tell you, twice I was the only one left alive —”
As if, in the darkness smelling of earth, sweat, and fennel, the thirteenth century were divided from them by the breadth of this hand moving stealthily again on the edge off the light, its myths stronger than any brief flicker of human reason. . .
Leaning forward, Renn made out a single feature of the speakers, the wrinkled forehead of one, the fine pouting mouth of the second, a youth; round bright eyes like a bird’s, heartlessly merry.
He had been conscious for some time that the Mother Superior was watching him again. Suddenly she came to a decision.
“The girl we were speaking of — Marie Pieck or Marie Duclos — left her child here. Would you like to see him?”
Startled, he repeated,
“Him?”
“Yes, it is a boy.”
Standing up, she lit a second candle from the one on the table, and walked in front of him to the entrance into another cellar. Mattresses were laid on the floor. She led him to one placed against the wall and lowered the flame so that he could look closely at the sleeping child. An arched forehead and glistening fair hair: a hand doubled under the pale cheek. As if disturbed by the light, the child opened his eyes and looked unseeingly into Renn’s face for a second, then closed them.
“How old is he?”
“Let me see — he was two when he came here. Three. He is three.”
“What is he called?”
Her attempt to pronounce the name in English made it faintly grotesque.
“William.”
In the early dusk the ruins were of any age; they could be of any place — a horse’s skull lying on a heap of dust had been left there since the last air raid, or in the exodus of a nomadic tribe. There was no lighting: on both sides of the street other still more dilapidated roads were empty except for furtive shadowy figures: at this hour Berlin was inhabited by sleep-walkers, lost in their dream of ruins.
He had arranged to give Arnold Coster dinner. The young man was a little on his conscience. When he knew him before the war, Arnold had listened to him expecting some, the least authoritative, judgement. But Renn detested the idea of bearing even a moment’s responsibility for another person, he had no wish to teach, nor (he pretended) any right. . . It had been nothing but laziness. . . The chance to form the boy, a little, had been lost. During the war Arnold had learned a great deal about himself — but not what to do with himself now that society no longer needed him as a murderer.
Whether he knew it or not, and since he dropped out of the hive, exacting, gay, a little
brutal, of the Air Force, he had been waiting for another discipline to make sense of his life. An acceptable purpose. Intelligent enough to want his life to be intelligible, he was as ignorant as any other young man brought up in (God help us all) a cultivated family, sent to the right school, and escaping from it only to learn his job as bomber pilot.
Is he going to accept, as his purpose, Gary?. . .
Renn could not endure Gary. The man had once treated him unjustly, and — why not admit it? — his hate secreted this point of malice. But it was also an impersonal hatred. He had chosen (so long since that it was barely true to talk of a choice) to take the side of the powerless against the powerful whose greed and arrogance deny these even the reality of their lives. He was shocked that a young man — surely decent? — was tempted to choose Gary. There is something truly shocking in the first symptoms in a young creature of brutality and caution.
It was Arnold’s ignorance: of course it was ignorance; the boy simply did not know what he was doing.
Is it too late to educate him? Of course not. But why should I take the trouble?. . . Astonished, he discovered that he had lived for fifty years, half a century, without the desire to pass anything of himself on. In less than a minute it had become a need. A passion.
He saw Arnold coming towards him. For the first time since they had met after the war he noticed the change in the young man. It was less a matter of the deep lines round the eyes than of a shadow in the flesh (little enough of it) of his face — as if a pool had become muddied. A trick of the half-light? When Arnold was in front of him he could see no change at all. Apart from the eyes.
They walked together towards the mess. Suddenly Arnold mumbled,
“Do you see that fellow on the other side?”
It was Rechberg.
“Do you know him?” Renn said, surprised.
“I live in his house. An extraordinary place. Dust and rot proof. It doesn’t show marks —- the same family could live in it for a couple of centuries and it’d still be anonymous.”
“Rechberg is a fox. He belongs to an old and very pious family. East Prussian landowners who would have gone bankrupt if they hadn’t married into industry. He was one of the earliest of his class to guess that Hitler was the future — and to help him. Without signing any of the cheques.”
“Why is he at large?”
Renn hesitated. To handle the boy brusquely would be a bad mistake. He was quietly pig-headed.
“William Gary is protecting him,” he said, with indifference.
Arnold was silent for a moment, then said drily,
“Probably he has a reason for doing it.”
“I dare say. Let’s hope it’s a good reason. Men like Rechberg, who knew what they were doing, are infinitely more despicable than the brutes we shall hang.”
Arnold gave him a quick warm smile.
“Don’t take life so hard, David.”
Chapter Fourteen
“Of course. Come in.”
The arrival of his cousin Hugo, with a man he presented as “my friend, Dr Leist”, had disturbed Lucius on his knees, at work on the bed of chives. Brushing the dry earth from his fingers, he showed them into his room. Rudolf Gerlach was there, and it turned out that he already knew Leist: he had met him the day before, with Hugo. . . Yes, but who is the fellow? His rigid body, smooth rosy cheeks, genial smile, reminded Lucius of a general he had known — Blomberg, was it? But he was certainly not a soldier, and something — a discomfort he was quite prepared to forget — prejudiced him against Leist’s friendly affable manner. No one, he thought arrogantly, has any right to suppose that I need so much politeness — not to call it flattery. Folding his hands, he rested them on the table, and listened in stiff silence.
Leist was quoting to him a sentence from one of his books, written as long ago as 1930:
“The democracy we Germans are invited to worship is graceless, materialistic in the meanest sense, unnatural, unworkable: the doctrines of Nazis and Communists, both of them lower middle-class and bureaucratic tyrannies, are the unavoidable and distasteful final end of democracy, the corpse into which it stiffens: I say nothing of other peoples when I say that a German fulfils himself in being ruled, and it is only in a few families that you will find men fit to rule our people. . .”
Leist finished his quotation with his head on one side, in an attitude of merrily expectant candour.
“Is this still your opinion of democracy, Dr Gerlach?”
“Yes,” Lucius said drily.
“How your helplessness now must torture you!”
“Thanks, I’m very happy.”
Leist raised his eyebrows. In a graver less intimate voice,
“You know, Dr Gerlach, or since you don’t know, I must tell you, I’m a countryman by origin, a peasant —”
“Really?”
“You and I, the Catholic scholar and the peasant, are in fact Germany. We are the Germans. If anything can be done, any action taken, against the awful despair and apathy of defeat, we are the people who must do it. No one else.”
He waited. Lucius was silent. Glancing quickly at Rudolf, he saw that the young man was listening to Leist with the severe attention he must have given to the officer briefing him before a raid, his face immobile except for the faint regular movement of a muscle in each cheek. At the other side of the table, Rechberg was staring in front of him, with the sorrowful uneasiness of a clown in his dark eyes. It was perhaps their roundness and vacancy gave him this look, or. . . since at the time he was the trusted colleague of certain powerful men, he could have saved me from Buchenwald if he had wanted to; and out of prudence he refused. Is he wondering whether I know that he was asked to help me? My poor Hugo, as if I cared!
“Hugo, this is the first time you’ve been in my room,” he said gently, “what do you think of it?”
Politely, without interest, Rechberg murmured,
“Charming, it’s charming.”
Leist stood up. As if he had forgotten that he was not in his own house he began to walk heavily and noiselessly from side to side of the room, sending round him an absent glance. For all its remoteness, his gaze reflected the poverty of naked boards and walls. He stopped suddenly where he could look into Gerlach’s face, and spoke with a blunt eager modesty.
“Forgive me, my dear sir, if I’m beginning to bore you. I feel so strongly that there is no time to waste. The country must choose, and the choice is certainly between west and east. You’ll realise that I’ve made my choice. The west means to murder us, to make a slum of us, we must turn to the east without regrets. Since you feel about democracy as you do, I have no qualms in saying that the only serious error the late government made was in trying to unite Europe against Russia — with Russia it can be done. And must be done.”
There was something so unreal in his eagerness — and yet it was not acted, it was sincere — that Lucius had an impulse of curiosity, perhaps only of malice.
“Well?”
Quietly authoritative, with always the same smiling frankness:
“It would only be absurd to talk of a movement. But in fact a few nerves are alive. Have you heard anything of the Free German generals in Moscow?”
His contempt sharpened Gerlach’s voice.
“I’ve heard of them.”
Leist smiled more widely.
“Yes, you’re right. Perfectly. One reason the more why you should join us.”
With a deep shock, Lucius realised that he was being offered something not so different from the offer Gary had made him. Different in end, alike in being a summons — and a temptation. He half closed his eyes.
“What are you hoping for from me?”
“My dear sir, I’m not a fool,” Leist said gravely, “I didn’t come here to ask you for money or to take part in violence.”
His glance rested again on a part of the wall where the plaster had fallen away, exposing laths, and moved from it to the shelf with its half-dozen books.
“Your
reputation as a religious man — not only in this country. Your influence with young men. Your name. You don’t need me to tell you what these would be worth to a movement which has scarcely been born, but is as certainly alive in the womb as I’m alive in front of you.”
Before he could answer, Rudolf spoke for the first time.
“What about me, what’s my job?” he asked coolly.
Gerlach saw that Leist had an answer ready, and he spoke quickly, to stifle it.
“Your job? My dear Rudi, you know it. We’ve been defeated, we’re hated — justly — but no one of our family has ever felt himself unfit to rule, or ever had the slightest taste for a romantic violence. Or for ruling by fraud, like Bismarck — or for nihilism. Apart from these, you can choose.”
“Thanks for directing me,” Rudi said.
His manner could not have been ruder. Lucius felt an anguish as sharp as if his nephew were attached to him by a nerve he was dragging on with all his force. It was nearly intolerable.
In a soft voice, Leist said,
“Dr Gerlach is right. A conspiracy must always be unromantic. In the meantime, while we are waiting for the real unromantic thing, there is plenty of work to do of the sort you were trained for; you can rally the morale of other young men, organise guards to punish the murderous tricks of displaced persons, so-called, watch potential traitors, the men and women who are friendly with the allies —”
He checked himself abruptly. There was a knock on the closed door, followed after a moment by others, becoming louder. On a nod from Gerlach, Rudi opened. A young English officer, with the unfinished face of a schoolboy, burned brick-red: he smiled, warmly and diffidently, and held out a letter.
“Dr Gerlach?”
“I’ll give it to him,” Rudi said curtly.
The scarlet of the young Englishman’s face deepened. Shaking his head he stammered,
“Excuse me, I must give it to Dr Lucius Gerlach himself.”
With an ironical politeness, Rudi said,
“I beg your pardon. I forgot for a moment that you can’t trust just any German.”
The Black Laurel Page 16