Kaputt

by Curzio Malaparte

  While Colonel Slörn was calling a veterinary colonel at the cavalry barracks, the group was joined by the Minister of Romania, Noti Constantinidu with one of the secretaries of the Legation, Titu Michailescu,- the Minister of Croatia, Ferdinand Bosnjakovi with a secretary to the Legation, Marijan Andrasevic and the Minister of Germany, Wipert von Blücher.

  "Ah, those Blüchers!" said de Foxá softly. "They are always on time." Then turning to the German Minister, he said, "Good evening" and raised his arm in the Hitler salute that is also the salute of the Spanish Falange.

  "What is this? You, too, are lifting your paw?" asked the Secretary to the Vichy French Legation, Pierre d'Huart in a low voice.

  "Don't you think it is better to raise one hand, than to have to raise both?" de Foxá asked him with a smile.

  Pierre d'Huart gracefully acknowledged the thrust and replied, "I'm not surprised. Once upon a time men worked with their hands, and greeted one another with their hats,- now, they greet with their hands, and work with their hats—on travaille du chapeau," he said in French.

  De Foxá laughed and replied: "Well said, d'Huart! I bow before your wit." Then he turned to me and asked me in a low voice: "What the devil does travailler du chapeau mean?"

  "It means that you have a bee in your bonnet," I replied.

  "One can never finish learning the French language," said de Foxá.

  Stretched out on the snow between the two sentries, surrounded by a little group of diplomats that had been augmented by several soldiers, two rather drunken girls, some sailors from the port and two policemen with their rifles behind their shoulders, the wounded elk was moaning gently, snorting from time to time and turning its huge head to lick its broken thigh. A blood stain slowly widened on the snow. Just as the elk turned its head, a branch of its huge antlers caught in a fold of President Ristu Ryti's fur coat. Such is an elk's strength, that his sudden movement upset the President of the republic who certainly would have fallen flat on the snow if the German Minister, von Blücher, had not steadied him with his hand. "Ha! ha! ha!" laughed the foreign diplomats in a chorus, as if that innocent gesture of the German Minister had a symbolic political meaning.

  "Perkele!" exclaimed one of the girls, seeing the President of the republic stagger. Perkele means "devil" in Finnish, but it is a word that is as shocking in Finland, as "bloody" was in England in Queen Victoria's day. Everybody laughed at the girl, while some of those who were nearest rushed to disengage the fur coat from the antlers of the elk. At that very moment, Minister Rafael Hakkarainen, Chief of the Protocol in the Foreign Office, appeared out of breath just in time to hear the forbidden word perkele on the lips of the merry girl. Minister Hakkarainen shuddered deep in the marrow of his bones within the warm nest of his priceless, marten fur coat.

  It was an oddly attractive scene—the snow-covered square, the livid and ghostly houses, the steamers gripped in the crust of ice and that group of people in rich furs and tall fur caps, gathered around a wounded elk stretched out between two sentries in front of the gate of a palace. It was a scene that would have charmed one of those Swedish or French painters who, like Schjölderbrand and Viscount de Beaumont at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, pushed on into the hyperborean regions with their pencils and drawings. The veterinary colonel and the military nurses who had meanwhile turned up in an ambulance, fussed around the elk, which followed their movements with its mild, moist eyes. After many tries, in which everyone—the President of the republic, the foreign ministers, and the two gay girls—lent a hand, the elk was placed on a litter, and the litter borne on the shoulders and was hoisted into the ambulance that moved off slowly and disappeared at the end of the Esplanade in a white dazzle of snow.

  The foreign diplomats lingered a few moments jesting with one another, lighting cigarettes, and stamping their feet on the ice. The cold was devastating.

  "Good night, gentlemen, and many thanks," said the President of the republic raising his fur cap and bowing.

  "Good night, Mr. President," replied the foreign diplomats removing their fur caps and bowing respectfully.

  The little throng broke up exchanging loud farewells. The cars drove away with a faint humming of motors toward Brunnsparken, while the soldiers, the girls, the sailors and the policemen scattered about the square, laughing and shouting at one another. Westmann, de Foxá and I walked back toward the Swedish Legation. Now and then we turned to look at the two motionless sentries guarding the gate of the President of the republic, in front of the bloodstain that was slowly disappearing in the windswept sleet.

  Once again we were sitting in the library before the fire, drinking and smoking in silence.

  At intervals we could hear a dog barking: a sound of sad, almost human purity, that lent a warm, full-blooded feeling to the clear night, and to the cloudless sky bleached by the white glare of the snow. It was the only living and familiar voice in the frozen silence of that ghostly night, and it made my heart race. Now and then we could hear in the wind the squeaking of the ice-bound sea. The birch logs crackled on the fire, the crimson reflection of the flames flitted up the walls, around the gilded backs of the books, and around the marble busts of the Swedish sovereigns ranged on the high, oaken bookshelves: and I thought of those ancient Karelian icons in which Hell is pictured not by living and beneficial flames, but by blocks of ice that imprison the damned. The barking of the dog reached us faintly, perhaps from aboard a sailing ship gripped by ice near the Suomenlinna Island.

  Then I told them about the Ukrainian dogs, the "red dogs" of the Dnieper.

  IX. Red Dogs

  IT HAD been raining for days and days and the sea of Ukrainian mud slowly spread beyond the horizon. It was the high tide of autumn in the Ukraine. The deep black mud was everywhere swelling like dough when yeast begins to work. The heavy smell of mud was borne by the wind from the end of the vast plain and mingled with the odor of uncut grain left to rot in the furrows, and with the sweetish stale odor of sunflowers. One by one the seeds dropped out of the black pupils of the sunflowers, one by one fell the long yellow eyelashes from around the large, round eyes, blank and void like the eyes of the blind.

  The German soldiers returning from the front line, when they reached the village squares, dropped their rifles on the ground in silence. They were coated from head to foot in black mud, their beards were long, their hollow eyes looked like the eyes of the sunflowers, blank and dull. The officers gazed at the soldiers and at the rifles lying on the ground, and kept silent. By then the lightning war, the Blitzkrieg, was over, the Dreizigjährigerblitzkrieg, the thirty-year lightning war, had begun. The winning war was over, the losing war had begun. I saw the white stain of fear growing in the dull eyes of German officers and soldiers. I saw it spreading little by little, gnawing at the pupils, singeing the roots of the eyelashes and making the eyelashes drop one by one, like the long yellow eyelashes of the sunflowers. When Germans become afraid, when that mysterious German fear begins to creep into their bones, they always arouse a special horror and pity. Their appearance is miserable, their cruelty sad, their courage silent and hopeless. That is when the Germans become wicked. I repented being a Christian. I felt ashamed of being a Christian.

  The Russian prisoners, moving from the front to the rear, were no longer the same we had seen during the first months of the Russian war. They were no longer the men of June, July and August, whom the German soldiers escorted on foot toward the rear in a blistering sun, on foot for days and days through the red and black dust of the Ukrainian plains. During the first months of the war, the village women looked out of the doors of the houses, laughing and weeping with joy, and they hastened to bring drink and food to the prisoners. "Oh bednii, oh bednii—Poor fellow!" they shouted. They also brought food and drink for the German guards who sat in the center of the little square, on the benches around the white statues of Lenin and Stalin that lay overturned in the mud, and smoked and talked gaily among themselves with their
tommy guns between their knees. During an hour's halt in a village, the Russian prisoners were almost free, they were permitted to come and go, even to enter houses, or to wash themselves at the fountain. At a whistle from the German corporal they all ran to take their places, the column moved out of the village and, singing, disappeared into the green and yellow sea of the vast plain. Women, old men and children, laughing and weeping, followed the column a long way. After a while, they stopped and stood waving good-by and throwing kisses to the prisoners who went off into the blistering sunshine, turning back from time to time to shout, "Do svidanya, daragaya!—See you soon, my dear!" The German guards, their tommy guns slung behind their shoulders, walked chattering and laughing among themselves between the hedges. The sunflowers peeped over the hedges to see them go by, following them a long way with their black round eyes, until the column disappeared into the dust.

  By then the winning war was over, the losing war had begun, the Dreizigjährigerblitzkrieg, and the columns of Russian prisoners became steadily fewer: the German soldiers escorting them no longer walked with their tommy guns slung behind their shoulders, chattering and laughing among themselves, instead they closed in on the flanks of a column, howling in raucous voices and fixing the prisoners with the black, glistening eyes of their tommy guns. The prisoners, pale and lean, dragged their feet through the mud, they were hungry and sleepy. In the villages, women, old men and children looked at them with tearful eyes, murmuring, "Nichevo, nichevo!" They had nothing left, not a bit of bread, not a glass of milk; the Germans had taken everything, stolen everything, nichevo, nichevo. "It doesn't matter, daragaya, it doesn't matter, my dear." "Vsyo ravno—it makes no difference—vsyo ravno," replied the prisoners in the rain. The columns went through the villages without halting, to that hopeless cadence, vsyo ravno, vsyo ravno, vsyo ravno, and sinking into the sea of mud in the vast plain.

  Then began the first "lessons in the open," the first reading exercises in the yards of the kolkhoz—the collective farm. Only once, in a kolkhoz of a village near Nemirovskoye, I chanced to be present at one of those lessons. After that I always refused to assist with these reading exercises. "Warum nicht?—Why not?" the German officers of General von Schobert asked me. "Why don't you want to watch the lessons in the open? It is a very interesting experiment, sehr interessant."

  The prisoners were lined up in the yard of the kolkhoz. Along the walls of the yard and under the large sheds were piled haphazardly, hundreds of agricultural machines—reapers, cultivators, mechanical ploughs, threshing machines. It rained and the prisoners were soaked to their skins. They had been standing there, in silence, leaning against each other,- they were big, fair boys, with close-cropped heads and light eyes in their broad faces. Their hands were flat and thick with squat, arched, calloused thumbs. Almost all were peasants. The workmen, mostly engineers and mechanics from the kolkhoz, could be distinguished among them by their height and their hands; they were taller, leaner and lighter skinned; their hands were bony, with long fingers, and smooth finger-tips glazed from gripping hammers, planes, wrenches, screw-drivers and controls. They could be distinguished by their stern faces and glazed eyes.

  Finally, a German N.C.O., a Feldwebel{11}, came into the yard followed by an interpreter. The Feldwebel was short and fat, the type I playfully called "Fettwebel." Standing with his legs wide apart he faced the prisoners and began talking to them in the good-natured way of a head of a family. He said that a reading test was to be held, and each would have to read aloud a passage from a newspaper. Those who passed the examination well would be drafted as clerks into the offices of the prisoners' camps,- the others, those who failed, would be sent to work on the land or be employed as laborers and dockworkers.

  The interpreter was a Sonderführer,{12} short and thin, not more than thirty years old, his face covered with little red pimples. He had been born in Russia in the Deutschvolk colony of Melitopol and spoke Russian with an odd German accent. The first time I met him, I said jokingly that Melitopol means the city of honey. "Yes," he replied in a harsh voice and with a sullen look, "there is a lot of honey in that district, but I am not concerned with bees; I am a schoolmaster." The Sonderführer translated the brief and good-natured speech of the "Fettwebel" word for word, and he added in a tone of a schoolmaster upbraiding his pupils, that they had to be careful with the pronunciation, and read with attention and ease, because if they failed to pass the examination, they would have reasons to regret it. Later when I recalled his words, I felt a shiver creeping down my spine.

  The prisoners listened in silence, and when the Sonderführer stopped they all began talking among themselves and laughing. Many of them seemed to feel humiliated. They gazed around like whipped dogs and glanced from time to time at their horny peasant hands, but many others laughed contentedly; they felt certain of passing, and of being sent into some office as clerks. "Eh, Pyotr! Eh, Ivanushka!" they shouted to their companions, and slapped each other roughly on the backs with the simple-minded gaiety of the Russian peasant. The workmen among them were silent, turning their stern faces toward the administration building of the kolkhoz, where the German headquarters were. From time to time they looked at the Feldwebel, but they never deigned to glance at the Sonderführer. Their eyes were deep and glazed.

  "Ruhe!—Silence!" suddenly shouted the Feldwebel.

  A group of officers was already approaching, led by an old colonel, tall and thin, a little stooped, with gray mustaches clipped short; he walked slightly dragging one of his legs. The colonel glanced absent-mindedly at the prisoners and began speaking rapidly in a monotonous voice, swallowing half of his words, as if he were in a hurry to finish his sentences. At the end of each sentence, he made a long pause, but his eyes remained fixed on the ground. He said that those who would pass the examination and so on, and so on—The Sonderführer translated the colonel's brief speech word for word. Then, on his own account he added that the Moscow government had spent millions on Soviet schools, that he knew this because he had been a schoolmaster among the Deutschvolk of Melitopol before the war, and that all those who failed in the examination were to be set to work as laborers and dockworkers; it was their fault if they had learned nothing in school. The Sonderführer seemed very anxious that all of them should read fluently and with a good pronunciation.

  "How many are there?" the colonel asked the Feldwebel as he scratched his chin with a gloved hand.

  "One hundred and eighteen," replied the Feldwebel.

  The colonel gave a sign to one of the officers who was clutching a bundle of newspapers under his arm and the examination began.

  Five prisoners took a step forward. Each of them stretched out a hand, took a paper that the officer held out to him—they were old issues of Izvestia and Pravda found in the office of the kolkhoz—and began reading aloud. The colonel raised his left arm to look at his wristwatch. He kept his arm breast-high and his eyes fixed on the watch. It was raining and the newspapers were soaked; they drooped in the hands of the five prisoners whose faces were either red or extremely pale and sweating as they stumbled over the words, halted, stammered, blundered the accents and skipped lines. They could all read with difficulty, except one very young man who read with assurance, from time to time raising his eyes from the paper. The Sonderführer listened to the reading with an ironical smile in which I seemed to sense a vengefulness—as interpreter, he was the sole judge. He stared at the readers, shifting his eyes from one to the other with a deliberate and nasty slowness. "Stop!" said the colonel.

  The five prisoners raised their eyes from the papers and waited. At a nod from the judge, the Feldwebel shouted, "Those who have failed will go and stand on the left; those who have been promoted, over there, to the right." The first four failures at a sign from the judge went dejectedly to cluster on the left, and a youthful ripple of laughter ran along the ranks of the prisoners, a gay, mischievous, peasant laughter. The Sonderführer also laughed. "Oh, bednii—Oh poor fellows!" the prisoners called to those w
ho had failed. "You will be sent to work on the roads, Oh bednii, you'll carry stones on your backs," and they laughed. The one who had passed, all alone on the other side, laughed more than the others, chaffing his unlucky comrades. They all laughed except the prisoners who looked like workmen; they stared at the colonel's face and were silent.

  Then came the turn of the next five. They also struggled to read well, without stumbling over the words, without placing the wrong accents, but only two could read fluently; the other three, red with shame or pale with anxiety, clutched the papers tightly in their hands, and from time to time licked their parched lips. "Stop!" said the colonel. The five prisoners raised their faces, wiping the sweat with the papers. "You three, over there, to the left; you two, to the right!" shouted the Feldwebel at a nod from the Sonderführer. The prisoners continued chaffing the ones who had failed saying, "Oh, bednii Ivan!" or "Oh, bednii Pyoti!" and patted their shoulders as if to say, "You will be hauling stones!" They all laughed.

  Again, one of the five prisoners in the third batch read excellently, fluently, pronouncing each syllable, and from time to time he raised his eyes to look at the colonel. The newspaper he was reading was an old issue of Pravda, dated June 24, 1941, and the page read: "The Germans have invaded Russia! Comrade soldiers, the Soviet people will win the war and will crush the invaders!" The words rang out under the rain, and the colonel laughed, the Sonderführer, the Feldwebel, the officers laughed, everybody laughed; and the prisoners also laughed, looking with envy and admiration at their companion who could read like a schoolmaster. "Well done!" said the Sonderführer and his face shone. He seemed proud of the prisoner who could read so well: he was happy and proud as if the prisoner had been his pupil. "You, to the right, over there," said the Feldwebel in a good-natured voice, giving him a kindly push with his hand. The colonel glanced at the Feldwebel, started to say something, but checked himself, and I noticed that he was blushing.