The other looked at him, full of a troubled goodwill.
“Oh, that’s all right, it doesn’t mean that, it’s just an order.”
Lucius had come to the door. He rested his hand lightly on Rudi’s shoulder and felt the young man stiffen himself against the touch.
“I am Dr Gerlach.”
“Righty-oh, here you are, sir. From Mr Gary.”
As Lucius closed the door, Rechberg said drily,
“He’s ashamed of being a conqueror.”
A shrewdly mocking smile transformed Leist’s face for a second into the peasant he pretended to be.
“There’s nothing very ruthless about the English. I feel certain they can be shamed into being reasonable, even lenient.”
Lucius felt his distaste hardening into definite hostility.
“Perhaps this time they won’t sympathise so readily with our famous decency and simplicity.”
“You have English friends,” Leist said.
Without answering, Lucius laid the letter on the table, unopened. His nephew stared at it for a moment, deliberately, then turned to Leist. He was, Lucius saw, in one of his moods of cynically reckless disbelief in everything except his own courage; there were moments when he doubted that; then nothing held him together except the gestures, the contempt of death, he had learned as a paratrooper.
“You were saying?” he said quietly. “If you can give me anything to do that is worth doing, the more dangerous the better, I’m yours. Or I’m anyone’s who isn’t a coward.”
Lucius spoke without haste.
“Why drag the young into committing suicide with you?” he asked Leist.
“Suicide?”
“Be honest,” Lucius said wearily: “what you hope for is a war of east against west, in which we shall be on the side of the east. Yet you’re not a fool, you know deeply that another war will be the end.”
A grief which seemed part of himself as his memory itself was a part invaded him. But what he saw when he thought of the end was no vision of cities become ossuaries and wastes of stone, mounds bleached by the rain, earthworks indistinguishable from the oldest known, pallid fields; it was not even any memory of the Gerlach house, with its fountain and avenues of limes and beeches. They’ll trample over my herbs, he thought.
Leist was speaking in a dully scornful voice.
“Why make such a fuss about the end of the civilisation you happen to be interested in? The state of mind of a tradesman. The next war may be the end — but why worry? I don’t. What I want to see is a German civilisation; if it can’t be managed, if it’s impossible, then let’s heap everything on our grave, to mark it. A German triumph or nothing, complete final ruin, everything burned.”
He was watching, stealthily, the effect of his measured violence on the young man. With his fresh-coloured hairless cheeks, his look of simplicity, the breadth and flatness of his large body, his air of a policeman and a genial bookie contrasting oddly with his formal clothes, he seemed a comedian, harmless and absurd. Lucius was not taken in: he felt the man’s deep seriousness and the intelligence at work in his peasant skull; he was not bloodthirsty, even his violence was cerebral, he would make a civil service job of murder. Perhaps, older than the peasants he sprang from, he was the latest undertow of a myth in which cruelty and heroism, loyalty and a just as firm treachery, were helplessly mixed.
Rudi laughed, frankly and gaily.
“There’s nothing wrong with me, I’m as fit as an eel, though no medical board would pass me. Order me to do what you like. I’ve exactly nothing to look forward to, but there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be an amusing nothing, is there?”
A noise, curiously disagreeable and unnerving, cut him short.
“What is it?” Rechberg asked in a stupefied voice.
“The wall of some house or other has collapsed,” Lucius said. “Usually they collapse without warning, and people are killed. They’ll be even less safe in winter when rain and the frosts get to work on them.”
Jerked by a current of air from the fall, the door swung open sharply: at the other side of the empty stony waste, a fragment of wall shaped like a femur lay against the deeply blue sky.
“For heaven’s sake leave it open, let’s have some air,” Rechberg said irritably.
A silence. Lucius waited. Abruptly, with the agility of a dancer, Leist crossed the room and stood in front of him, so close that he noticed the texture of the other’s skin, veined and glistening like the stem of a fleshy plant.
“Well? Will you help us?”
“I’m not a conspirator.”
He stepped aside in distaste. There was a disquieting sensation in his wrists, as if he had been warding off the actual pressure of Leist’s body. A hand moved from this body like an animal and squatted on the letter left on the table.
“What does this fellow write to you about?”
He felt as much astonishment as anger. Looking at Leist, he saw that not only did he know he had been impudent, he was embarrassed: the hand covering the letter crept back, and Lucius moved the envelope nearer to himself, touching it with an involuntary distaste: he allowed his face to give it away. A wave of red darkened the flesh of Leist’s neck; for a moment his eyes shifted in fear of what Gerlach might do or say. Lucius did not speak.
His nephew looked at him and said mockingly,
“Does he send you money.”
My poor boy, he thought, with anguish. Leist had recovered his self-possession: in a calm voice he said,
“With your rotten liberalism you’ll corrupt the young men I only ask to risk themselves.”
“Liberals are as ridiculous as any other victims,” Lucius said coolly. “All the same, in Buchenwald I learned to prefer them to the believers in a creed — yours, I think — which led them to betray other men to the S. S.”
Leist made an extraordinary grimace.
“Don’t be silly. A communist is at least willing to kill for his faith; you have none, no faith — in spite of your religion. You’ll die prating about humanity.”
Lucius was seized by an ironical gaiety: it was absurd that four people who had survived a catastrophe had nothing more pressing to do than quarrel, Leist was absurd, an intelligent man who thought he could tempt a Gerlach to conspire, this cell itself, gouged out of ruins, was an absurd place. He smiled — and was surprised to see his cousin look at him with fear.
“My good man,” he said to Leist, “don’t waste your earnestness. I prefer you as an actor.”
Now he will never forgive me, he thought lightly. He watched with amusement his cousin’s pretence that he was lost in some absorbing and remote thought. Why did he bring the fellow to see me? As if coming to himself, Rechberg started and said abruptly,
“There’s an unhealthy smell in this room. All these heaps of rubbish. Why the devil must you live in such a place? Do you need money? I can lend you enough to live comfortably.”
“Why should you? Besides, I shouldn’t pay it back, I have no assets.”
“Do you eat enough, Lucius? You’re horribly thin.”
He could not deprive himself of a moment’s malicious pleasure.
“I’m luckier than most of the Buchenwald skeletons — I was able to walk, and walk out!”
His cousin made a disdainful gesture.
“I dare say, but I’m told they were nearly all foreigners — Poles.”
“My dear uncle wants to become famous as a John the Baptist,” Rudi said drily.
Lucius smiled. Work your bitterness off on me, he thought gently; it’s safe.
“If I know anything, the next Messiah won’t please him,” Leist said. “I never liked the idea of concentration camps. If a man is a danger to the state he should be got rid of, not kept alive, and honest men’s time wasted guarding him.”
The violence of his tone set up a curious tension between them. Even without it, Lucius would have known that he was being threatened. It amused him.
“Very logical,” he smiled. “
But we’re not a logical people.”
“Perhaps not. But one doesn’t need logic to deal with traitors — even with traitors masquerading as idealists. You’d be surprised how many of the names — “he hesitated — “how many of these there are.”
“You’ve been making lists?” Gerlach asked.
“No one here is capable of treachery,” his cousin said anxiously.
Ignoring him, Leist said,
“After all, what are you living on? Who pays you to keep up this farce of being a monk or something?”
If I laugh at him now, Lucius reflected, he’ll lose his temper. It would be interesting to know what Rudi would do. In the same instant he laughed without meaning to. Leist made a violent gesture, lifting his arm, and Rudi started up. Passing his hand across his forehead — he had sweated — Leist forced himself to joke.
“So long as your English friends know how to appreciate your friendship,” he said, grimacing.
Clumsy, thought Lucius. He can’t really be dangerous. He is — but the only person in danger from him is my poor Rudi. What can I do?
Glancing at his watch and then at Rechberg, Leist said with marked deference,
“Forgive me for reminding you, but my friend will be waiting for us.”
Rechberg stood up. He held Lucius by both arms, to look at him.
“You really are only skin and bone,” he said affectionately. “You make me anxious. If you won’t let me lend, or give you money, I shall have to think of something else. Mechtilde and I still manage to get butter; I shall send you some every week. Do you like goose eggs? Yes, of course. Do you remember roasting them in the ashes, in the fires we used to make outside, at Gerdnau?”
“Don’t trouble,” Lucius said gently.
You would give a great deal to know whether I know what you did — that is, didn’t do for me. He felt a warm pity. . . You cared more for Gerdnau than most men care for their children. What a mistake to give life to trees, lakes, a house — so that you can never free yourself from them but must carry them with you in your nerves, in your veins. . . It struck him that his cousin was anxious as well as unhappy. Why anxious?
He stood in the doorway and watched them going off together. Leist walked easily among the stones and broken rubbish of this place, and Rechberg followed him, hesitating, placing his stick carefully and dragging towards it his lame foot before taking the next cautious step. They reached what had been the street and disappeared behind the angle of a wall. Rechberg’s lame footsteps sounded when he could no longer hear the others.
Going back into the room, he saw that Rudi was anxious to make peace with him: he smiled and said quickly,
“Thank heaven they’ve gone.”
His scar and the missing eyebrow gave something pitiable to the boy’s diffident smile.
“I say, I’m sorry I behaved badly; do forgive me.”
Gerlach felt a thrill of joy.
“Nonsense. Are you staying to supper? I’ve been lucky. A young man I used to teach is working on a farm, the one who brought me the seeds for my herbs: this morning he brought me two eggs. Not goose. I’ll make an omelette for us — go and get me a few chives, will you?”
*
This was the first time Rechberg had been in Leist’s lodging. He examined it with a more indiscreet curiosity than he gave the man who had been waiting for them. It was extraordinarily neat, almost morbidly — you would have said a room in a barracks or prison, kept clean under penalties. Yet Leist, he knew, had no servant and looked after himself. There was a bed — the blanket on it so tightly folded that it was hardly creased, although his friend had been lying on it. He jumped to his feet as they came in.
“I’m sorry we’re a few minutes late,” Leist said.
The Russian showed his white teeth in a smile.
“I amused myself. Polish vodka is better than curs. Did you bring it with you? No, of course not, I should have taken it from you.”
He pointed a finger from the door of a cupboard swinging open to the bottle he had found and set on the floor beside the bed: lifting it, he poured recklessly into a glass. While he drank, Rechberg tried to watch him without being noticed. In his Catholic heart he felt that the Russians were devils; but as a financier, what alarmed him about them was much more their indelicacy and inexperience. He had agreed to see this Russian, when Leist pressed it — chiefly to please Leist, and also from what he felt was a morbid wish to see a Russian police official (surely an official more than a soldier?) at close quarters. Looking at the Russian’s smooth strong throat strained back, he shuddered. Men like this, asiatics with the energy and suppleness of cats, were living in Gerdnau, sitting in its low-ceilinged rooms, lying on its ponderous old beds, his mother’s bed in the room not lived in since she died, his own room, which had been his father’s and grandfather’s, spoiling his books, the gun-room, the stables. He felt an overwhelming despair.
What would I not do to save it from them?
What had he not done? It was Gerdnau he was protecting when he had his first meeting with a Nazi chief: he had talked, as he talked now, about Germany, and meaning, with his heart, every word. Is it a disgrace if a man’s own fields and trees are the image of a country? Never. And yet — the point of guilt in his decent passion tore open his hand every time he touched it. . . After all, what had he done except join, for an honourable purpose, the stronger side? Honourable — even though he had made use of it to enrich himself and Gerdnau. And now, when he was making ready to join Gary, what else was he doing? He saw the lake at Gerdnau on an autumn evening, the grey smooth water, mist creeping over it from the trees, and the ripples opening like a fan behind the little boat. In the next struggle Germany must be on the winning side. Only, this time, he must be sure.
He was sure.
“I bought the vodka,” Leist said, “for visitors. And my dear Kalitin, if you’re going to finish it I trust you to provide me with another bottle.”
“You can trust me to finish this one,” Kalitin said gaily. He sat down again on the bed, and rested both feet on a chair he pulled towards him.
With a touch of bitterness, Rechberg thought of the use Germany could make of the vast energy and inexperience of these people. An idea, one of those dangerously adroit turns he made use of to confuse and defeat a rival — less thought than the workings obscurely of an instinctive cunning — budged in his mind. It excited him the more because it was tortuous, not merely bold or simple. . . Why not give Gary reason to suspect that unless he were treated with especial generosity he would use his interests and his prestige abroad in the service of friendship with the Soviets? Ridiculous — but he had caught large animals before in traps no less crazily baited.
In a civil voice he said,
“It was good of you to agree to see me, Major Kalitin.” Kalitin looked at him with a quick charming smile.
“I never do things out of goodness. Why should I? Do you?” He stretched himself in a single feline movement. “What a day! I should like to be at home, eating peaches. I would eat a dozen, my God, how I would eat!”
“Would you mind taking your dusty boots off my chair,” Leist said.
Kalitin took them off — a moment later, he had put them back again.
“Our friend is a regular old maid,” he said, grinning. “But then all Germans are. Do you agree? They’ll make admirable revolutionaries, docile, obedient, no need to break them in, they’ll do it themselves, with all the pleasure in the world in their own righteousness. At least you can say that for savages like us, we’re not righteous.”
But he’s completely sober, Rechberg thought suddenly. He felt a pang of fear.
Kalitin got up and walked out of the room. At once, Leist turned to Rechberg and said coldly,
“I have bad news for you. Really, I can scarcely bring myself to tell you — I meant to tell you on the way here, and I couldn’t do it.”
“Well?”
He knew Leist well enough to feel sure that this hesitation was a
pretence. Why is he doing it? he thought with contempt; Surely he doesn’t imagine he can disturb me? He waited.
“I learned yesterday that a German — a Jew, of course, every refugee is a traitor and the Jews doubly so — is busy identifying the paintings in Hilfrich’s cellars; not only that, he has already picked up something, some no doubt trifling piece of evidence — but one leads to the next — that certain of the paintings were in your house.”
He had spoken with every mark of distress — except that his hands, resting in front of him on the table, were slack and composed. Rechberg was silent. He felt an extreme anguish and humiliation. This was what for a long time he had expected would happen, but he was not prepared for it.
His first thought, the first he noticed, was that Leist had hoped to dominate him by this. He felt a contempt as sharp at his anger. Easily, he forced himself to seem calm.
“Really? I must see to it.”
Kalitin’s return cut short the confused reply Leist began.
Chapter Fifteen
“One of these nights, the whole place will come down.”
A hundred pairs of dancers, brushing against each other in a space wide enough for ten, started a tremor in the floor: apparently intact, the only thing undamaged in a street of ruins, the house must have shifted on its base during the raids, and Arnold felt the uneasiness he felt in traffic — attached to the ground, and for that very reason not safe. He refused to dance; he knew that after she had danced with Edward, Lise would find him clumsy and he preferred that she should believe him unfriendly and bored. They went off again now, choosing a moment when there were not more than three times too many people on the floor: he watched them; both were natural dancers, Edward with indifference and Lise in childishly irrepressible delight: she was smiling, with the trace of mockery her smile had, as though it hid thoughts. Probably, he reflected, she thinks of nothing; it’s a trick. Deliberately, he looked away.
He was surrounded by women in the uniforms of the allies — as though he had been led on to the stage during a patriotic revue; American officers carrying two or three bottles of cognac for every one brought by the members of less opulent forces; a few Germans, young women in light frocks, a dark sunburn taking the place of a uniform, even to the monotony, and elderly men disguised as diplomats, with the used seedy eyelids of money-lenders, a refined brutality in the fixed lines round the mouth.
The Black Laurel Page 17