Gerlach did not answer: the justice and injustice of the attack equally silenced him. He realised, with irony, that he was chiefly astonished that the pastor had shown insight, and only slightly by his impudence.
Kalb stirred, his head falling sideways, and muttered some phrase. Before Gerlach could stop him, Dücker had bent down and tapped him on the cheek. The stroke seemed a light one, but it left two long marks on Kalb’s sallow skin. He opened his eyes on Dücker’s stooping figure. He kept still. A smile such as a child might unknowingly call up, to ward off a stranger, propitiating and uncertain: he said,
“It’s warm. A fine day.”
“Pray don’t move,” Dücker said, with reproof.
Kalb sat up hurriedly, confused: his hands, trying to do everything at once, adjust his glasses, call his jacket to order, faithlessly betrayed him by their clumsiness. The pastor watched him for a moment, with a little patience, then explained, using the simplest words, as to a child or an old woman, who he was and why he had come. Kalb stood up to listen. As soon as Dücker paused he said warmly,
“How good of you to come and see me. I’m delighted — happy — very happy. You’re very kind.”
Dücker coughed, and lifted one hand — a gesture meant to restore the distance between them. He spoke kindly and severely:
“Can you forgive your executioners?”
“Oh, yes, easily,” Kalb said, smiling.
Frowning a little, Dücker said,
“I’m glad — but you know, there’s something more. You mustn’t — and this is a grave thing — you mustn’t rely on a feeling of innocence to save you in God’s eyes.”
Kalb was shocked into flinging his arms out.
“But... do you believe that I killed, and stole things?”
“You may,” the other said sternly, “be innocent of this crime — but not innocent.” He looked with a shrewd irony at Gerlach. “None of us is innocent. We have all sinned.”
Kalb had listened to him with eyes sparkling behind their glasses. He was, Gerlach saw, surprised out of his gentle wits — too surprised to remember that Dücker was kind and that he wanted him, as he wanted everyone, to approve of him.
“But, my dear good friend,” he cried, “to say that we are all sinners means nothing when you think of the millions of helpless people who have been dying of torture and hunger these last six years. Nothing at all. Why, it means nothing even in an ordinary family where one child is being ill-treated, or a weak creature sacrificed to the others. Every moment, for one guilty person, a thousand weak and innocent people are being destroyed. That is only what life is like.”
He softened, and said more gently, gaily,
“But why am I telling you what you know — better than I do? Only... if eternity — you know what I mean — if an eternity of joy is going to comfort me for knowing the truth about life, it must destroy my memory. And if you destroy that, who am I?”
He laughed at his own cleverness. Gerlach watched Dücker make a severe effort to shake off his feeling of discomfort and anger. It was, he saw, the moment to get rid of the pastor, and he said politely,
“Kind of you to come.”
“Yes, very kind, most kind,” Kalb said eagerly. He held his hand out. “Goodbye, sir. Thank you, thank you.”
“I’ll pray for you,” Dücker said. To Gerlach he said sternly, “And for you, Dr Gerlach. It’s after all possible that God is only waiting for someone, no less unsuitable than myself, to ask that you may be forgiven your — your pride.”
The instant they were alone, Kalb turned to Gerlach and said smilingly,
“May I talk?”
“Of course.”
“Since there is a God, how is it that the innocent suffer unjustly? All those poor people. . . Unless they have been born into another life, it’s unbearable.”
“Another life? Yes — there is another life.”
“Do you —” Kalb hesitated — “believe that with your heart? With your mind — yes. But. . .”
Gerlach was silent. Since he had never been able to assure his heart that Emil was living, his eyes open, feeling the sun on hands able to fold themselves round another hand, re-born in another system of life — with perhaps its own death — there was nothing except a lie that he could tell this grotesque creature. If a lie would comfort him. . . No, why should he offend himself, for Kalb?
As if talking to himself, Kalb said,
“We must be certain: it must be belief or unbelief, God or no God, no eternity, no other life after this. And if there is no other life, then the man who has the least possible kindness in his nature will make himself our God — as soon as he has the power. Even if it’s power he can’t use without blotting out, in one moment of wickedness, the world.”
An irrational anger possessed Gerlach.
“You have the destructive mind — all or nothing — of a Jew,” he said, covering his anger with a smile.
“But I am a Christian,” Kalb said mildly.
Controlling himself and his impatience to be gone, Gerlach said,
“The world will not be destroyed. Even if no one exists who believes with his heart in another life. . . so long as enough men believe that there is a justice above the greed. . . above the benevolence... of men.”
Kalb was watching him attentively.
“You are without hope,” he said in a timid voice.
“You know nothing of my hopes —”
He stopped, aware suddenly that he had spoken with an intolerable arrogance. Before he found the words to soften it, Kalb began again his dialogue with himself.
“No, no, the best human justice is terribly flawed. Why? Only because it’s not love — and nothing less will keep a judge or a great man conscious all the time that he’s talking to another man. My head —” he knocked it lightly — “will be cut off as if I were a thing, not as if I were a man.”
Gerlach felt in his own body the sickness of the gulf waiting at the other edge of the second it takes the blade to fall; a shudder starting in an obscure depth of his spirit broke it open. A very brief time back, Kalb had been crying because he was alone and in disgrace; already, like a willing child, his grasshopper little body had learned a difficult dignity in the face of its annihilation. He felt respect — and to his horror, not a trace of liking.
“Don’t hope very much,” he said, “but don’t —” he hesitated, and said in an almost harsh voice — “you can feel sure I shall try.”
Kalb stretched out a thin dirty hand and touched his.
“Of course. Thank you,” he said gaily.
Gerlach was not able to stop himself drawing back his hand with sharp distaste. He saw that Kalb had noticed. He forced himself to say kindly,
“I shall come to see you tomorrow.”
Kalb smiled, without speaking.
The warder, an elderly man, looking ill and surly, had been leaning against the wall of the corridor. He looked resentfully at Gerlach, muttered something below his breath, and locked the door.
He went directly to Renn. With Renn in his room was a young Englishman, tall, a narrow head, long narrow hands like Emil’s: as soon as he had heard his name Gerlach forgot it — there are too many names in the world, and one tall young Englishman is very like another. To Renn he said coldly and briefly that the trial had gone as badly as he expected.
“Yes, I expected it,” said Renn.
“If I had been able to persuade Mr Gary that he knew Kalb — or to look at him. . .”
He took care that his voice did not give away the anger he felt when he recalled that he had been certain he had only to speak to Gary to rouse his interest in Kalb. What had happened was intolerably offensive. Gary had laughed and answered, with indulgence, “I know nothing about the fellow — that’s all nonsense. But I’ll do anything you ask me to — if you ask. Even perjure myself. That’s what you want, my dear Lucius, I think, isn’t it?”
The young Englishman made a confused gesture. He was standing behind Renn
’s chair, and he said something — so indistinctly, swallowing his words, that Gerlach did not hear it.
“What did you say?”
In a louder mumble, glaring,
“I ought to have spoken to him. I’m sorry.”
Gerlach glanced at Renn. Without explaining what the young man’s link was with Gary, he said gently,
“Before you came in, Dr Gerlach, I was describing the stages through which the records of the trial reach the G-in-G, for confirmation, or —” he glanced swiftly at the young man — “he may alter the sentence. I don’t think Kalb has a chance. But if — if — he has, it lurks at one point. The reviewing authority, the D. G. Legal Division, might recommend a mitigation of the death sentence: there’s no reason why he should — there have been too many cases of violent robbery; why spare Kalb — a Jew, an ex-refugee, and possibly an ex-agent?”
Turning to Gerlach, he went on, with a smiling irony,
“I have a friend in the neighbourhood of the D. G. He tells me that in civil life this gentleman is one’ of Gary’s lawyers — in fact the head of his private legal division. Would it be tampering with the sacred course of justice if Gary were to remember Kalb, and to wonder — I say, wonder — whether he mightn’t be telling the truth? Hardly. Justice will have been appeased if Kalb is locked up for a few years. If Kalb, who is now a nobody, could be turned into a human being — with a powerful friend. . . I don’t put it higher than a 90% chance.”
The idea of speaking to William again revolted Gerlach. He hesitated. . . Kalb. . . a being without tortuousness, without irony, without a mask.
“Very well,” he said, “I’ll try to see Mr Gary tomorrow.”
Renn nodded. He glanced with a friendly air at the young man. He was staring absently in front of him: clearing his throat, he mumbled,
“All right, I won’t forget it again.”
Unexpectedly, he jerked himself upright, his eyes started at Renn, and with an angry curtness, he added,
“And you’ll see that you’re mistaken about Gary.”
“I hope so,” said Renn. “But I don’t know how likely he is to be moved by your feeling that Kalb is innocent — or to act on it if he is.”
Gerlach’s curiosity had been roused: he looked at the young man, for the first time. He might be Rudi’s age, twenty-five or twenty-six; but he had spoken with the tense seriousness, the violent need to admire some one person, of a boy — there is a schoolboy in all these Englishmen, he thought. Glancing again at Renn, he excepted him, liking him none the better for it.
“All right,” the boy said hotly. “I’ll bet any mortal thing you like. If Gary agrees to do anything, he’ll do it. And if it’s certain he knows Kalb, and we —” he looked directly at Gerlach, with a sharp smile — “tell him that the poor little gnat is innocent, he’ll agree. Absolutely not a fear.”
Chapter Twenty-six
Coming into his room, he saw, and for some reason was startled, that his nephew had come in in his absence. He was lying asleep on the bed. Gerlach walked gently across the room to look at him. He lay with his long arms stretched out to their widest extent, his head hanging forward on his left shoulder: with a pang, Gerlach recalled the young soldier he had stumbled on in a trench in 1915, dead, in this crucified posture. The image dropped back into the dark at once as Rudi opened his eyes. He got off the bed in one gesture of his slight body.
“Have you come to supper?” asked Gerlach.
“No.”
Lifting his eyebrows — the young man had spoken brutally — he said,
“What then?”
“I came chiefly to tell you that I’m glad you didn’t succeed in getting your filthy little Jew off. I really think I should have strangled him.”
“Don’t be absurd,” Gerlach said gently.
At once, as he was speaking, he saw that he had not been wise. Rudi was in one of his worst moods, perhaps in pain, irritable, on the edge of hysteria. His voice was under control; the muscles of his face not.
“I suppose you’ll try begging your English friends to let him loose again?”
Gerlach was silent. Without despair, but desperately, he tried to feel his way through to the good child, decent, brave, living helplessly behind the wall of nerves and flesh, the mirrors before which Rudi acted, half for himself, half for an audience, in the vacancy formed when his reasons for dying were taken away from him. The difference in age was too great. He had transferred to Rudi the living warmth of his love for Rudi’s father, but he was drily unable to live Rudi’s despair with him, or even to hear it. He had forgotten the dialect. Anything he said to the young man was more likely than not to strike against the instinct to deny and deride — instinct or defence of the adolescent (at twenty-five Rudi was an adult only in courage and brutality).
“Why did you defend the brute?” Rudi asked, in a light voice. “Why? Why?”
Tell him simply the truth.
“I got the impression when he came here, with the letter from Professor Smith, that he was an honest creature. It became stronger after I’d talked to him in prison. Put it that I was unable not to believe that his story of how he came to be in the cellar when the other wretched — and not at all pleasant — fellow was shot, was absolutely truthful. Although there was no evidence to support it, and a great deal against.”
He hesitated, terribly uncertain, and after a moment decided:
“I even feel sure that you were mistaken in believing him to be one of our agents in England.”
Rudi was listening with a mocking smile.
“Exactly! You are so perverse, or so corrupted, that you find it easier to believe a Jew.”
“The accident of his being a Jew blinds you. But I assure you — I haven’t even been influenced by the thought of the debt we owe Jews who survived our attentions.”
“It’s not an accident when you unwrap a mean dirty crime and find a Jew in it,” Rudi said calmly. “It’s entirely natural.”
A silence. Gerlach broke it to ask,
“How is Ida?” He knew her only by name: he had not been asked to meet Rudi’s friends.
The change in Rudi was instantaneous — to a young baffled anxiety.
“She’s in hospital, since yesterday. She’s very ill — a lung infection, due to something, I can’t understand what, except that she ought to have been watched and hasn’t been. . . I went with her to the hospital, and came back to find that Maria, the young woman who’s been looking after us — very badly — had walked out on me.”
“Why not stay here?”
Rudi looked at him with a return of his suspicion and mockery.
“I couldn’t stand it.”
Gerlach was silent. With what might have been a touch of remorse, his nephew said,
“It’s useless. When I don’t see you I forget to hate you and your poisonous ideas.”
A realisation — almost a warning — seized Gerlach as with a hand.
“You’re seeing Leist?”
“Yes.”
“You’re working with him?”
“Of course.”
“My poor child...”
Exasperated, Rudi said sharply,
“Keep your filthy pity for your Jews.” He made an effort to control himself. “I don’t mean quite that.”
“Stay here one week,” Gerlach said.
Let him stay with me one week, he thought, and I can save him. We’ve lost too many of these children — unjust to pray only for one, but let me save this one. He’s not, I swear it, corrupted, not incurable: his wounds, the defeat, nothing he can be loyal to with his loyalty — how expect him not to throw himself into the void he feels? (Help me, Emil.) Grace for this one child, my God. For this one.
“No,” Rudi said sullenly.
Gerlach made a last effort. He talked, not of Rudi — of his father, of phrases in Emil’s last letter, which the boy had seen now, of one phrase. . . “I have nothing to leave you except my son: look after him for me”. . . of the folly of Leis
t’s plots at this moment, at any moment. Compelling himself to talk quietly, without emotion, he felt a physical anguish. His temples were throbbing, his tongue and throat dry. At last he could not go on.
In a smooth young voice, Rudi said,
“We’d better not see each other again.”
When he had gone, Gerlach prayed for him. His prayers gave him calm, but no comfort. But why expect comfort for what is incurable? He went outside to look at his herbs, and spent an hour dragging out the strong weeds. He was indoors when another young man came.
Nothing happened to him more often than to open the door to a knock — at this hour especially — and find that his visitor was a young man, or two or three young men, he did not know. Either, like Rudi, they had been severely wounded and discharged before the end of the war, or they were workers. They came to talk only. Some personal problem was making them desperate, or they could not endure the defeat any longer without help. Ironical that they came to him — whose own brother’s child had found no help in him.
No — nothing was unusual — except the visitor himself. He was like many of them in that he was a war cripple; he had lost an eye and an arm. He was unusual in his self-possession. Where most of them came in frothing with their words, his crossed, to become audible, an area of silence. Attentive silence. He had an attractively large head on a short body. Gerlach did not ask him his name — he never asked for names. This time he was tempted to, because he felt a curiously warm liking for the young man.
“Sit down,” he said smiling, “and tell me what I can do for you.”
When he answered, the young man’s deep rather low voice was less steady than it had been.
“I hope you won’t laugh at me. I’ve come to tell you that you’re not safe.” He hesitated, and flushed. “It’s not easy to explain. But it was the same, wasn’t it?, after the last war — there was a group of men, or more than one, which judged people it didn’t approve of, and —” he hesitated again, for longer — “punished them. Sometimes assassinated them.”
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