The Only Poet (31 page)

She dressed with care, choosing her warmest clothes. Then she went out into the lifting darkness and took the way down to the fishing village. As she was hurrying through the square which marked where the village and the new suburb met, her eye was caught by a patch of white on the wall of a house, which had not been there the night before. Shuddering in the morning cold, she stood in front of it and waited till the light should be clear enough for her to read it. Some passers-by joined her. When the patch could be seen for what it was, some moved away, others raised a defiant cheer. She read it with excitement that brought her heels off the ground, that set her bobbing up and down like a dancer waiting for her solo to begin.

It was a manifesto, signed by Egon and Nils, telling how the people in the city looked upon the killing of the ten young men the day before. It said that they considered the Germans common burglars for invading their country; it said they knew the German story that they had come only to forestall the English was a stupid lie; it said that they regarded the murder of the ten young men on the previous day not as an impressive display of power, but as the kind of idiot brutality that burglars might show to householders whom they had bound and gagged.

It said that the people of the city did not respect the Germans because they had conquered them; a feat that an organized band of gorillas could have achieved. They despised the Germans as undermen who had interrupted the normal course of life towards greater goodwill and understanding because they were unable to take part in it. The people in the city, the manifesto said, had many faults; they were often shamefully petty and mean. But they had tried to make their city a glory to the earth.

Generation by generation they had had more and more recourse to the kindnesses of science, they had listened more attentively to art, they had felt greater charity towards children and the unfortunate, they had been juster masters of themselves and more willing servants of their fellows and had asked more urgently what purpose their lives should fulfil. And they had availed themselves gratefully of such happiness as had existed since the beginning of the world.

Now the Germans were trying to cancel this achievement, they were trying to blot out the city and make it as if people had never come out of the forest centuries ago and built huts on the sea-shore and carved boats out of tree trunks. They had blotted out freedom, they had blotted out virtue, they had made time meaningless. But those who wanted to be meaningless were likely to be successful; what was nonsense was soon forgotten. An idiot's babble was not remembered. The Germans would perish.

Elisaveta wished David were standing beside her reading it. He would have appreciated it. It was written in a style that was peculiar to this city. A man born there who read this while far away, without signatures, would have said to himself, ‘This was written by one of the townsfolk.' But it would have been understood anywhere in the world. It reminded those who might have forgotten what life was like before the Germans came, and what it had been like afterwards.

It reminded those who might have forgotten what the difference is between good and evil. It set down in black and white what the city had been, and what the Germans were.

‘How I would have liked to speak that from the stage!' thought Elisaveta, and she turned away and hurried off, as to a rehearsal. She went to Egon's house; not from the quay but by the back door, for fear that Egon would try to turn her away, and be distressed by her resistance. It was the day when the family washing was done, so she helped Johanna collect the linens. A great deal had been used the day before.

Then there came a thunder on the door, and Johanna went to open it. She came back, saying, ‘They have come!'

Elisaveta kissed her and thanked her for all she had done for her in the years she had come to the house, and then went out of the kitchen.

In the living-room Egon and Nils were standing face to face with a group of soldiers, one of whom was reading something aloud to them. When she came in, a soldier said, ‘Yes, this is the woman who is always with them. We have orders to arrest her also.' Nothing could have been more convenient. She had feared she would have to strike one of them before they would take her.

She and Egon and Nils looked at each other and laughed, full of the joy that had visited them every now and then during the last few days. But at the same time they swayed on their feet, sick and dizzy with fear. For now began the pain and torture.

They were in prison for some weeks, and were frequently taken before a kind of judge and questioned about a conspiracy which did not exist. As their answers were necessarily unsatisfactory, they were always beaten after these inquiries. During this time they did not see each other, but one night at the end of three weeks they were all brought into the hall of the prison and were then taken to the railway station and put on a train that went through the darkness in an easterly direction. It was pleasant to be together again, but the guards would not let them talk much.

Elisaveta was at first ashamed of letting Egon and Nils see her as she was. Her hair had become lank and greasy, her face powder had been taken from her, and of course she was not properly clean. But they did not seem to mind, and they were dirty and unshaven.

In the morning they got out at a railway junction on a plain and they were made to sit all day and to lie all night in a small room with stone floors where the railwaymen filled their lamps. The air stank with oil and it was very cold. They had to sleep on pallets laid on the stone floor. But now they were over the frontier and the railwaymen spoke a foreign language, so that they felt as if they were a stage nearer the end of their journey, which would be the extremity of foreignness.

In the night Egon said to Elisaveta, ‘Did you think our manifesto was all right? People who read it would remember how things were, wouldn't they?'

‘You did not think it was too long, did you?' asked Nils.

It was just like a first night in the old days. Before the guard could tell her to shut up, she said, ‘No, not a word too long. I said to myself as I read it, “I would do anything to speak that from a stage.'”

The next day, towards noon, they heard a train puffin and shortly afterwards they were taken out on to the platform. The train was made up of cattle trucks. They had been looted from France, for they had
8 chevaux, 40 hommes
painted on them. But when the guards led them up to a truck and slid back the doors, they saw more than forty human beings inside. There were men, women, and children, all strange in appearance. Their skins were yellow and greasy, their black hair was screwed up into tight verminous curls, in their eyes black irises swam in oily yellow whites, and they stank.

As the door opened they cried out in terrible squawking voices, ‘Let us empty the bucket, let us empty the bucket!' and they pointed to a bucket in the corner, standing in an overflow of excrement. One of them by a clumsy touch upset the bucket and it streamed to the open door where Egon and Nils and Elisaveta were standing. They shrank back, but the guards pressed them in, jeering at them, ‘You chose to be with the Jews, you shall go with them to Poland and you shall see what fine friends they have.'

They had to pass over the spilt excrement to enter the truck.

The door slammed behind them and they looked about at the filthy and lousy people, smiling insincerely and thinking ‘Perhaps Hitler was right about the Jews after all.' But an elderly man, his face red with insect bites where his beard met the smooth skin, put out a hot and slimy hand and pulled at Elisaveta's skirt and said, ‘I cannot see you, lady and gentlemen, because the brutes have broken my glasses, but this I know, you do not smell. And it makes me remember that once I did not smell, that in those days I despised people who smelled. Do not despise us, lady and gentlemen, for till we got on this train, we did not smell. I was a lawyer, most of the people here were superior workmen, and we used to be clean and have clean homes. But we have been three weeks coming across Germany in this train. So do not despise us. It will not be just, if you despise us.'

‘No,' said Elisaveta, ‘we are artistic people and so not much in the way of despising people. And in any case, I am the wife of a Jew.'

‘For God's sake,' said Nils, ‘do not think we despise you. We respect you and we need your help. For the joy that sustains me against the Germans comes and goes. And now it has gone from me.'

‘Let us tell each other who we were,' said Egon, ‘and who we shall be again.'

For a time the Jews found relief in recalling their names, and where they had lived, and in what comfort, and which of their kin had been unusual in talent. But soon they fell silent, for they were cold and hungry and tired and sick, very sick. There was one man who seemed to be near death; he sat with his eyes closed and never spoke.

When night came, they found there was no room to lie down straight, but Egon and Nils and Elisaveta were able to huddle into a heap. Their bodies ached, and presently the tears began to stream down Elisaveta's face.

‘What is it, little one?' asked Egon.

‘What is it, darling?' asked Nils.

She blubbered like a child, ‘Things are crawling over me.'

The two men burst out laughing and hugged her, saying, ‘Poor little Elisaveta,' and it seemed no shame to her.

In the middle of the night she awoke and smelled the stench of the degraded animals around her who had been people, and shuddered with horror because that was what the Nazis would make of her also.

But Nils felt her shudders and drew her close to him, and she saw that his face was shining.

‘That joy,' he whispered, ‘it goes away, but it comes back.'

‘Yes,' whispered Egon, ‘one cannot be anything but proud of being here.' They listened to the roll of the carriage wheels and the snoring of the people around them, and ecstasy flowered in them. ‘We will not always be happy like this,' Nils warned her. ‘One must keep on remembering that. It goes away, though it comes back.'

During the morning, towards noon, there were a grinding noise and an upheaval. Everybody shrieked. When there was stillness again they found they were piled up on the wall of the truck which was opposite the door. The truck had been tilted on its side. Some of the metal stanchions had freed themselves and were sticking out dangerously. Some of the people at the bottom of the pile were quite still. Egon had injured his left arm and shoulder. There was blood trickling down Nils's brow. Elisaveta's body had been bruised. After a little, guards came and opened the door, which was now above them, and helped them to get out. They found themselves on a vast, unbroken plain, covered with light snow. Many people were screaming. The guards told them to go over and sit on an embankment that marked an irrigation ditch, about two hundred yards from the railway track.

‘Come on,' cried Elisaveta to Egon and Nils, when she found herself on the ground, happy as she had been all her life when she found herself starting to do a new thing. But they answered only faintly, and she perceived that their injuries were not like hers. She found herself crying, as she still did when she woke from a bad dream: ‘David, David!'

She turned to the guards and told them that her friends were ill, but remembered, before their faces told her so, that they were pitiless. There was nothing to do but guide Egon and Nils to the embankment. But long before they got there she saw that Egon could not go any farther.

‘Can we carry him together?' she said to Nils. But Nils did not hear her. He looked at her with the blue, blue eyes of a fisherman from the isles, and she saw that he too had nearly gone from her. ‘Go on to the embankment,' she said to him. ‘Sit down with the others and I will come to you.'

Egon had sunk on his knees. She laid him flat on his back, hoping that he was only faint. ‘What is wrong with you, my little child?' she asked. As she spoke, she noticed that his eyes were immense and pellucid as a child's.

He said, ‘Under my arm.'

She could not look for a second, for a spurt of light had caught her eye and she had to see what was happening to the train. It had been derailed and flame was passing from the engine, where it had already died, and there was a ghost of smoke haunting a pile of twisted metal along the whole long line of trucks. The telegraph pole had been brought down and the broken wires were like twisted fingers pointing to the sky. Then her mind returned to Egon. She put her hand under his armpit and found that blood was pouring down inside his waistcoat. One of the metal stanchions had struck him and cut a vein.

A guard was passing, clubbing some Jews before him. She cried out: ‘Among these Jews, there may be a doctor. Find him. This man is dying. He is a great man.' The guard looked at her with empty eyes, that made nonsense of the fact that there are Jews who are clever and not animals to the extent of being doctors, that Egon was a great man. Again she cried, not from habit, but out of a desire that a miracle would happen, ‘David, David!' But in this place there was no one to bear Elisaveta's part but Elisaveta. She put her hand under her dress and tore her chemise away from its shoulder straps, rolled it into a pad and put it against his wound, set her knee to it and pressed.

‘Elisaveta,' said Egon, ‘I regret nothing. I have served the ideals of love and justice and truth.'

‘My little one,' said Elisaveta, ‘my sweet one.' The pad against her knee was wet. Egon's face was becoming white, blue white.

‘I have done what is right,' he said faintly.

‘And more than that,' said Elisaveta. But she knew as she spoke that he was about to die.

‘What is right,' he repeated more faintly still.

‘My baby, my little baby,' said Elisaveta; and before she had ended, he was dead.

She stood up and looked about her. The train was now wholly consumed by fire; the guards were beating towards the embankment such of the Jews as were old or so infirm as not to have already accomplished the passage. On the white snow all human beings were like small, black flies. She scanned the horizon and saw no farmstead save one that might be six or seven miles away. The Jews would not be able to walk so far; she herself doubted if, after her less exhausting imprisonment, she still had the strength to do it. She remembered that this was a country of vast estates. It might well be, now that the electric wires had gone, that it would be many hours before help reached them. The cold was so extreme that it ran in a network of fire through her body. Most probably she, and everybody she saw before her, would before very long be dead of exposure.