“Why the devil should he?”
“Why not? He once acted as an expert for Gary. If he’s telling the truth. I’m almost certain he is.”
Arnold said nothing for a moment. At last, indistinctly,
“Was he a spy?”
“I don’t think so. We knew most of the contacts. I believe that young Gerlach, it’s his story, is amusing himself — but I can’t shake him.”
A little sullenly, Arnold said,
“What is it you want me to do?”
“What did you think of Kalb?”
“He wouldn’t crush a fly,” Arnold answered warmly; “it’s the daftest thing imaginable. Pure rot. Even a policeman — forgive me, Davy, I don’t mean you — ought to know better.”
Renn looked at him.
“Repeat that to Gary. He’s already been asked if he remembers Kalb, and says he never heard of him.”
He saw Arnold’s reluctance, morbid more than youthful, to risk being laughed at: he added gently,
“It’s quite possibly a matter of life and death.”
“All right, all right,” Arnold said curtly.
At the end of the Kurfürstendamm, Renn stopped the car, and sent it away. “My effort to entertain you —” he was amused by his hypocrisy — “having flopped, I still owe you something.” He stood Arnold a vodka; it was a distant and raw branch of the family, but it lifted the boy to a jaunty good-humour: afterwards, walking to Renn’s flat, he halted half way along a ruined street and said amiably,
“I suppose you know all about the Free Cripples?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Ah, then I can show you something. Friends of mine. There are three of them. Four, counting the girl. Let’s go up, shall we?”
Renn followed him up the fragmentary staircase. At one point, Arnold turned to grin derisively. “Do you mind this? I see you don’t. A pity. It frightens me to death.” They crossed a landing and he knocked on a door with split panels.
“Come in.”
A slight young man swung round on his heels when they entered. Gerlach’s nephew. The room was in a disorder that impressed Renn as unpleasant, like the worse than disorder in those paintings where natural objects are being put to unseemly or perverse uses: his feeling of revulsion was absurd and overwhelming — so overwhelming that he stood stiffly in the doorway. There was a sour smell. Two of the three windows had been boarded over clumsily; the October sunlight crept through the third as by an oversight, and vanished.
A woman was standing in the semi-darkness at the other end of the room. She exclaimed and stepped back swiftly through a door behind her, into a second room. She shut the door at once.
Near where she had been, a bed: a girl lying on it. On the shabby cover of the bed were scattered various garments, creased scraps of silk or lace, a powder puff in dejection, boxes of creams and rouge, a doll, furs, a roll of toilet paper and, held upright by the girl, a grotesque monkey, dribbling bran through its worn places. A young man stooped over the bed, and she pressed the monkey’s face to the spoon he filled and held out to her from a cup resting on the sheet. Patiently, he went through the gestures of feeding her in turn with the animal. He moved his head slightly. Renn saw the eyelid drawn over the empty socket of his left eye; the patch he should be wearing over it hung on its cord over his ear. He took no more notice of them.
Rudolf Gerlach came forward, smiling. In a quick friendly voice,
“I’m extremely glad to see you.”
“We’ll go,” Arnold said uncomfortably. “I didn’t know Miss Lenbach was ill.”
“Why should you? She’s quite safe, not infectious. She has a pulse like a crazy piston, she’s too tired to move, and the doctor says she’s his nth case of shot nerves. I think he’s a fool... If you can bear it here, I wish you’d stay. Ida doesn’t mind. We need a change, you know.”
He looked with a young charming deference at Renn.
“Do stay, sir. I’m sorry we have nothing to offer you.” He smiled. “I haven’t been doing too well lately: I was cheated by a swine of a Bavarian lawyer — the truth is I’m not nearly so clever as I think I am. Bœsig here is out of work —- a female ingratiated herself with the proprietor and snipped his job. Trotha will bring something back with him. At least we hope so. . . Sorry it’s so dark — we’re preparing our winter quarters.”
He was placing chairs, using his artificial hand as a lever: he whisked out of sight used crockery, garments, a bed-pan. His fine smile excused the absurdity and obvious collapse of their lives.
Renn felt a half-mocking pity. He sat down. Since he had blundered into it, the humane thing to do would be to play in the young German’s comedy. There was, too, the possibility, remote, of picking up a useful thread-end. Always the careful policeman, he thought drily.
Propping himself against the wall, Gerlach went on, in a light, almost ironical voice,
“You know, sir, things are getting absurd. What are you going to do about it? And when?”
“Why us?”
Modestly,
“Well, sir, you took it on.”
The other young man interrupted without turning his head, intent on the movement of his hand from the cup to the girl’s parted lips. He had a low voice.
“We all know that the English have no idea what to do with us. Without meaning to in the least, they’ll let us rot. Except for us, who are living now, it’s not a bad thing. People can begin again from a desert.”
He dropped the spoon back in the cup, moved it from the bed to the floor, and said gently,
“Now I’m going to rub your spine and see if we can shift the pains. Turn over.”
With his one hand (his left sleeve was empty), he moved her round, and pulled at her thin nightgown. Her arms, white and almost fleshless, and her knife-like little shoulder-blades, came out. Her neck was the frail neck of a little girl. He began to rub gently.
“Kurt is a cynic,” said Gerlach pleasantly.
“Absolutely untrue. I have a grudge against the Nazis — they did me out of learning anything with their nonsense — and now our new masters. . . no, don’t move, I’m not hurting you.”
The girl spoke for the first time, a light voice, muffled by the pillow.
“All right, but I hurt. Everywhere.”
Renn glanced at Arnold. He was sunk in a comfortable chair, and seemed to be half asleep. Probably he did not understand more than a word here and there of the German, and he was making no effort to look interested. He has no manners, Renn thought, irritated. At this moment Arnold turned his head slightly, and mumbled,
“One of these days, I should think this winter, this room will go. I noticed a new very wide crack by the stairs.”
“I know,” Gerlach answered. “It’s absurd to stay here, and absurd to move. Besides, where could we move?” He laughed. “It’s a bitch of a life, but we like living together. And another thing — do you know what would be sillier? It would be really inexcusably silly to expect life not to be absurd. Think of all the pains we take to live, bearing up under this and that — half the time frightened out of our skins — for some remote reason — or no reason at all. And in the end we’re only told off to die. Now and then, you know, I think! I can see that for us Germans being defeated hasn’t changed a thing — there’s no less, and no more sense in the world than there was —”
He made one of the convulsive little movements with which he tried to ease his neck.
“In a way it’s amusing to be completely irresponsible, as we are now. Free for absolutely anything.”
Bœsig had lifted the girl up in his one arm, propping her against the pillows, and was trying to adjust his eye-patch. It kept slipping from his fingers.
“Come here,” Gerlach said.
He held it on the socket, fitting the cord round his friend’s enormous head bent towards him.
“Thanks. . . I should shoot myself if I believed you.”
“Shoot yourself, then,” Gerlach smiled.
Bœsig turned to Renn. Looking at him with curiosity, Renn felt a slight shock: there was so much attentiveness in his remaining eye that the effect was like finding yourself under the scrutiny, say, of a powerful caged beast. In his low voice, the young German said,
“We don’t know anything here, but it’s rather certain, isn’t it, sir, that the scientists have gone too far this time — I mean, by putting this atomic power into the hands of politicians and, you know, chiefs of staff?”
“Yes, almost certain,” Renn said.
Bœsig fingered his patch.
“Then — it’s really the end? Except for some peasants, and of course savages, and Asiatics who are still living like Abraham.” He looked quickly at Gerlach, with a curiously provocative smile. “You see how unbelievably wise the Catholic church was to try to hold scientists back. Thanks entirely to them, the power to bring the world to an end has been placed in the hands of men who won’t hesitate to use it. Why should they? Even ignorant people no longer fear God — and it’s too late to educate them in any other form of restraint. Even if you ever could. . . the risks. . . Men insist on believing something: far better give them a dogma — that it’s invariably wrong to kill innocent people (let’s say), or that God is love, or will punish the cruel man — rather than leave them at the mercy of their instincts.”
Gerlach looked at him with an aggressive irony.
“Why don’t you go in for a priest? Father Kurt Bœsig.”
Renn had the sense that he was watching a duel. It was friendly, even intimate, but something else was there as well.
Bœsig smiled.
“It isn’t a choice any longer between —” he hesitated — “between materialism and mysticism. No use calling materialism names; it’s in charge, in Japan it had a record success — naturally, it will try to beat that. The point is — out country having been humiliated to death — truly — and besides, we’re imperfectly civilised and not bored, we shall grow from our roots again. The last shall be first. Men like Rudi’s uncle will save a few seeds from oblivion. And something — perhaps in England, too,” — he said politely to Renn — “will turn out to be alive in the first light.”
“He sees these things with his missing eye,” Ida mocked.
Turning his eyes to Renn, Gerlach said derisively,
“You wouldn’t believe he once crept up to a Russian and strangled him with his hands.”
“I dream about it,” Bœsig said calmly.
“That comes of. . .” Gerlach hesitated, and went on with an ironical tenderness. “You should try praying.”
The girl whimpered suddenly.
“What’s going to happen to me? Can’t any of you do anything?” She laughed a little, and said in another voice, “When I was young, if I got toothache I used to dance until it stopped.”
Renn looked at this girl who said: When I was young. Her temples were wet; he could see the pattern across them of veins and wisps of dark hair. The sides of her fine nostrils had fallen in, and except where she had painted her face it was livid. He had a sharp unexpected sense of the youth of these ruined Germans, and of their excluding intimacy within it. His age, more than his nationality, shut him out. A little enviously, he saw that Arnold, sprawling in his chair, had no such feeling of being excluded: it was not because he had no manners that he let himself look bored to death, but because the others were his age and he felt no obligation to keep up a social face with them.
None the less, it was Arnold who heard the slight sound made by the girl falling sideways across the bed. He jumped up, and mumbled something to Gerlach. He and Bœsig went to her. She was trying weakly to help herself. Holding out her sticks of arms for them to pull her into place, she said quietly,
“Do you two think I’ve had it?”
“Not a hope,” murmured Bœsig.
Gerlach said in a soothing voice,
“Nonsense. You’ll sleep with dozens more pretty soldiers.”
Arnold glanced at Renn, and they went quietly away. As they closed the door, Bœsig was saying, “We’ll throne you now, puppy, then you can sleep.”
A little later, when Ida was dozing, Gerlach went into the kitchen. Maria was sitting there, as usual doing nothing. Her eyes had what he thought of impatiently as her gone look.
“Why did you bolt when they came in?” he asked sharply.
She looked at him without speaking, with the vacant obstinacy of a child whose whole body is a refusal to answer. He took hold of her wrist in his nervous fingers and twisted it until she cried out.
“Well, don’t be a mule. Tell me.”
“That older man,” she said, nursing her wrist, “I forget his name — has it in for me. I’m afraid of him.”
“What nonsense are you making up now, Maria?”
She looked at him with such indifference that he realised she was not, as she quite often was, day-dreaming aloud, ridiculous or pitiful stories (she did it, he thought, to make herself a little interesting). He said curtly,
“There’s nothing to be afraid of. He’s not in the least likely to come here again.”
Chapter Twenty-four
Two days later Renn had a message from Kalitin, asking him to come and see him. He went. Kalitin greeted him with a sharp smile, and at once, looking inquisitively into his face, told him that, after all, Rechberg had been discovered hiding in the Russian sector. He had been there for five weeks.
“Extraordinary,” Renn said, “that you didn’t know it on Thursday.”
Kalitin laughed.
“Yes, extraordinary. You know how it is, though. Someone in another department was talking to him. I can tell you why, if you like.”
Renn waited.
“He has an estate in East Prussia. You know it, of course you know it. Very well, when our people took it over they found a cache of documents — to do with the trusts he and his interests were allied with, and their finances. Very interesting. An order came through to question him about it.”
“How did you get hold of him?”
“An indiscreet question,” Kalitin said, smiling. “As a matter of fact, we invited him and he came. On his own feet.” He looked ironically at Renn. “You can believe me.”
Renn believed him. Impossible not to catch the difference between this frankness and the official candour of his opening remark. He stood up.
“Where is he?”
“Gone home. By the time you can send there, he’ll be in his house. At least, I think so. Wait.”
He spoke briefly into the telephone. Renn did not understand Russian — they had spoken German. Putting back the receiver, Kalitin said with a polite gesture,
“Sit down. They’re making sure for me. . . We may not meet again... I find your Rechberg — yes, I saw him myself — a bore. Dull — and as dead as the priest in my village, who hanged himself in a temper when I was a boy. My God, how boring. Nothing at the bottom of him, when you scrape round, except his belief in himself as something precious. Classic! It’s since I came here, you know, and since seeing them in the flesh, that I understand how your Rechbergs all over the world betray the common people. They have nothing to offer. Simply that. Because the only thing they believe in is their own sacredness. If a sacred elephant could think, he would think that the world existed because he did. . . Simple, isn’t it? Simpler than anything I was taught.”
Resting his small hands on the desk, he went off into a fit of laughter. His slender body vibrated in it, like a spring.
“So what? So only communists know how to get rid of Rcchberg. And of the little Rechbergs — millions of respectable lice. Pure-minded intellectuals — like you — know that you can’t vote a cancer into removing itself; but only the communists are willing to do the job and pay the price; only they are serious about revolution. . . Like the first Christians,” he said, smiling, “a few men who had the bad taste to be serious about religion...”
The remarkable thing about him, Renn thought, astonished, isn’t his terrible energy. It’s
his freedom. The dusty image of a Russian he had been cherishing cracked and fell over. This official, this policeman, should have been stiff, brutal, without sensibilities — a Soviet version of Calvin’s saints. . . Is he reckless? Or so sure of himself, so born sure, that he can play inside his jungle like an innocent beast?. . . He felt an extreme weariness and an extreme lucidity. Looking at the young Russian, he thought: The future, perhaps, and perhaps no more bloodstained than any. other persecuting religion — and I don’t like it.
With a sudden feeling of intense curiosity, he said,
“In your own way, you betray your common man.”
“I?”
Hesitating — what use was it?,
“You’ve got rid of your Rechbergs —” the brief excitement he felt sprang from an image of Gary — “you’ve cut millions of cells of opposition out of Russia — and every one of those cells had living eyes, a sex, the will and the longing to live. I know it’s useless to talk to you about the purges; and the horror on horror of the deportations — I mean of your own people, not the genecide you’re undertaking in your Baltic conquests. And no use saying anything about the irony of making the common man so free, doing him such justice, that he becomes a poor beast, only kept alive because of his yield — with no right to a choice even in the simplest things. . . Let alone to a conscience. . . It’s useless because you have an answer. It’s for the future! The glorious future, when all the deaths, all the tears, all the tortures, the cruelty, will be forgotten; nobody will think of it — no more than anyone, not even their children, if they lived long enough to have a child, will think about the millions of dead under the earth. . . They’re not even tragic — what tragedy is there in the labours and death of an animal?”
Kalitin’s eyes sparkled.
“I knew we should come to that famous conscience!” he said, smiling. “Yours — your little dove — tells you that the right thing would be to explain to a great many ignorant people. . . we can’t educate everyone at once — and we’ve been at war for thirty years. . . that they’re being sacrificed to create a strong, safe, happy, yes, happy, world. I told you Russia was a world!. . . And since no one, however ignorant, wants to be sacrificed. . . And I, if I had a conscience, ought to let you do it.”
The Black Laurel Page 26