Kaputt (10 page)

Laughing, they all shouted,
"Ja, ja, natürlich."

"Hitler is a superior man. Don't you think he is a superior man?" As I hesitated, he looked fixedly at me, and added with a kindly smile: "I should like to have your opinion of Hitler."

"He is almost a man," I replied.

"What?"

"Almost a man. I mean, not quite a real man."

"Ach, so,"
said Frank. "You mean that he is an
Übermensch, nicht wahr?.
—Superman, don't you? Yes, Hitler is not quite a real man,- he is an
Übermensch."

From his end of the table, one of the guests broke in: "Herr Malaparte has written in one of his books that Hitler is a woman."

It was Himmler's man, the chief of the Gestapo of the government of Poland. His voice was cool, sweet, sad—a faraway voice. I raised my eyes, but I lacked the courage to look at him. That cool, sweet, sad voice of his, that faraway voice, had set my heart trembling slightly.

"Just so," I added after a moment of silence, "Hitler is a woman."

"A woman?" exclaimed Frank gazing at me, his eyes filled with confusion and worry.

Everyone remained silent, looking at me.

"If he is not quite a real man," I said, "why should he not be a woman? What harm would there be? Women are deserving of all our respect, love and admiration. You say that Hitler is the father of the German people,
nicht wahr
? Why couldn't he be its mother?"

"Its mother!" exclaimed Frank,
"die Mutter!"

"Its mother," I said. "It is the mother who conceives children in her womb, begets them in pain, feeds them with her blood and her milk. Hitler is the mother of the new German people; he has conceived it in his womb, has given birth to it in pain and fed it with his blood and his—"

"Hitler is the father, not the mother of the German people," said Frank sternly.

"Anyway, the German people are his child," I said, "there's no doubt about that."

"Yes," said Frank, "there's no doubt about that. All the peoples of New Europe, to begin with the Poles, ought to feel proud to have in Hitler, a just and stern father. But do you know what the Poles think of us? That we are barbarians!"

"And do you feel hurt?" I asked smiling.

"We are a master people, not barbarians; a
Herrenvolk."

"Oh, don't say that!"

"Why not?" Frank inquired with amazement.

"Because masters and barbarians are the same thing."

"I beg to differ," said Frank. "We are a
Herrenvolk,
not barbarians. Do you by any chance feel as though you were among barbarians tonight?"

"No," I replied, "I feel as though I were among masters," and I added smiling, "I must admit that when I entered the Wawel tonight I felt as if I had entered a court of the Italian Renaissance."

The face of the German King of Poland lighted up with a smile of triumph. He glanced around, casting a look of proud satisfaction on each of his guests. He was happy, and I had known beforehand that my words would make him happy. Scheffer had laughingly warned me in Berlin before I left for Poland: "Try not to be ironical with Frank. The worthy man does not understand irony. And, if you really cannot help yourself, don't forget to tell him that he is a prince of the Italian Renaissance. He'll overlook any sin of witticism." I had remembered Scheffer's advice just at the right time.

Before me sat Frank, on his high stiff-backed chair in the old Polish royal palace of the Wawel in Cracow, as if he were sitting on the throne of the Jagellos and the Sobieskis. He appeared to be fully persuaded that the great Polish traditions of royalty and chivalry were being revived in him. There was a light of innocent pride on his face, with its pale, swollen cheeks and the hooked nose suggesting a will both vainglorious and uncertain. His black glossy hair was brushed back revealing a high ivory-white forehead. There was something at once childish and senile in him: in his full pouting lips of an angry child, in his prominent eyes with their thick, heavy eyelids that seemed to be too large for his eyes, and in his habit of keeping his eyelids lowered—thus cutting two deep, straight furrows across his temples.

A slight film of sweat covered his face, and by the light of the large Dutch lamps and the silver candlesticks that ranged along the table and were reflected in the Bohemian glass and Saxon china, his face shone as if it were wrapped in a cellophane mask.

"My one ambition," said Frank thrusting himself back against his chair by propping his hands against the edge of the table, "is to elevate the Polish people to the honor of European civilization, and to turn this uncultured people—" He broke off as if a doubt had crossed his mind, and looking hard at me, he added in German:
"Aber... Sie sind ein Freund der Polen, nicht wahr?—
But you are a friend of Poland, aren't you?"

"Oh,
nein!"
I replied.

"How's that?" repeated Frank in Italian. "Aren't you a friend of the Poles?"

"I have never made a secret," I replied, "of my sincere friendship for the Polish people."

Frank gazed at me with a look of deep surprise, and after a brief silence he slowly asked me, "And why, then, did you deny it a minute ago?"

I replied politely smiling: "I said 'no' for almost the same reason that a Russian workman in the Ukraine said 'no' to a German officer:

"During the summer of 1941 I was in Pestchanka, a village in the Ukraine, and one morning I went to visit a large
kolkhoz
close by the village,- the
kolkhoz
Voroshilov. The Russians had left Pestchanka just two days before. It was the largest and richest
kolkhoz
I had ever seen. Everything was left in perfect order but the cattle sheds and stables were empty,- there was not a grain of wheat in the granges, not a blade of hay in the lofts. A horse was limping around the farmyard; it was old, blind and lame. At the end of the yard, under a long shed, were ranged hundreds upon hundreds of agricultural machines, mostly of Soviet manufacture, but many were Hungarian and some were Italian, German, Swedish and American. The retreating Russians had not set fire to the
kolkhoz,
to the ripe crops, or to the forests of sunflowers,- nor had they destroyed the agricultural machines. They took tractors, horses and cattle with them, wheat and sunflower seeds. They had not touched the farm machinery, not even threshing machines; they left them undamaged; they merely took the tractors away. A workman in blue jeans was oiling a large threshing machine leaning over the wheels and gears. I stood in the middle of the courtyard and watched the man working. He oiled his machine and kept on with his job as if the war were far off, as if the war had not even touched the village of Pestchanka. After a few days of rain, the sun was shining; the air was mellow,- a pale blue sky flecked with feathery white clouds was reflected in the muddy pools.

"After a while, a German SS officer entered the
kolkhoz
followed by several of his men. He stopped in the middle of the yard with legs wide apart, and looked around. Now and again he turned to talk to his men and some of the gold teeth in his pink mouth glistened. He suddenly noticed the workman oiling the machine and called to him.

"'Du, komm hier!
—You, come here!'

"The workman approached limping. He was lame, too; they had left him behind with the horse. He held a large wrench in his right hand and a brass oil can in his left. In passing close to the blind horse he said something softly and the horse rubbed its nuzzle on the man's shoulder and took a few limping steps after him. Then the workman stopped in front of the officer and took his cap off. His hair was black and crinkly, his face thin and gray, his eyes were dull. He was unmistakably a Jew.

"'Du bist Jude, nicht wahr?
—You are Jewish, aren't you?' asked the officer.

"'Nein, ich bin kein Jude
—No, I'm not Jewish,' replied the workman, shaking his head.

"'Erto? Ti nie every? Ti evrey!
—What? You are not Jewish!' repeated the officer in Russian.

'"Da, ja evrey
—Yes, I am a Jew,' replied the workman in Russian.

"The officer looked at him a long time in silence; then he asked slowly: 'And why did you deny it a moment ago?'

"'Because you asked me in German,' answered the workman.

"'Shoot him!' said the officer."

A fat, jolly laugh came from Frank's wide-open mouth. All the guests laughed noisily, leaning back in their chairs.

When his burst of hilarity had quieted down, Frank said, "That officer gave a very honest reply, and he might have answered much worse,
nicht wahr
? But he had no sense of humor. If he had had any, he might have turned the matter into a joke.
J'aime les hommes spirituels
—I like clever people," he added in French with a polite bow,
"et vous avez beaucoup d'esprit
—and you are very clever. Wit, intelligence, art and culture take first place in the German
Burg
of Cracow. I want to bring an Italian Renaissance court to life in the Wawel; I want to turn the Wawel into an island of civilization and courtesy amid a sea of Slavic barbarism. Do you know that I have even managed to form a Polish philharmonic society in Cracow? All the players are Poles, of course. Furtwängler and Karajan will come to Cracow next spring to conduct a series of concerts."

"Ah, Chopin!" he exclaimed, raising his eyes upward and running his fingers along the tablecloth as if it were a keyboard. "Ah, Chopin! White-winged angel! What does it matter that he is a Polish angel? There is room also for Polish angels in the heaven of music. And yet the Poles do not care for Chopin."

"They do not care for Chopin?" I asked, surprised.

"The other day," continued Frank in a sad voice, "during a concert dedicated to Chopin, the Cracow audience failed to applaud. There was not a single handclap, no surge of love for that white angel of music. I gazed upon that immense audience, silent and motionless, and I tried to discover the reason for that frozen silence. I gazed upon thousands and thousands of glistening eyes, those white brows still warmed by the passing caress of Chopin's wing; I gazed upon lips that were still bloodless from the sad, sweet kiss of the white angel, and I tried to find for myself some reason for the dumb, stony and ghostly immobility of that vast audience. Ah! I shall win these people over by the arts, poetry and music! I shall become the Polish Orpheus. Ha, ha, ha, the Polish Orpheus!" He burst into strange laughter; his eyes shut and his head was thrown against the back of the chair. He had grown pale, his breathing became labored, his forehead glistened with little drops of sweat.

Then Frau Brigitte Frank,
die deutsche Königin von Polen,
raised her eyes and turned her face toward the door. At this sign the door opened and there appeared on an immense silver tray a savage, hoary wild boar, fiercely lying in ambush on a scented bed of blueberry greens.

It was a boar which Keith, the Chief of Protocol of the Government of Poland had shot with his own gun in the Lublin forests. The angry beast lay in ambush on its bed of greens as on a bed of brambles in the thicket, ready to hurl itself against rash huntsmen and their fierce packs. Twisted white tusks protruded out of piglike jaws; on its shiny fat-soaked back, on its skin, cracked and crackling from the heat of the open fire, there stood out hard black bristles. And there arose in my heart a mysterious feeling of sympathy for that noble Polish boar, that four-legged partisan of the Lublin woods. Deep down in its dark eye sockets there shone something silvery and hidden, as if it were a glance consumed by a great deep fire. It was the same silvery and reddish light that I had seen shining in the eyes of peasants, woodsmen and workmen in the fields along the Vistula, in the woods of the Tatra mountains toward Zakopane, in the factories of Radom and Czestochowa, in the salt pits of Wieliczka.

"Achtung!
—Attention!" said Frank, and raising his arm he sank a large knife into the boar's back.

Whether because of the leaping flames in the large fireplace, or because of the luscious food, or because of the precious French and Hungarian wines, I felt I was blushing. I was sitting at the table of the German King of Poland, in the great hall of the Wawel, in the ancient, noble, rich, learned, royal city of Cracow, in the midst of the small court of that simple-minded, cruel and vain German copy of an Italian
Signore
of the Renaissance; and I felt myself blushing with melancholy shame. From the very beginning of dinner, Frank had talked about Plato, Marsilius Ficinus, about the Oricellari Gardens (Frank had studied in the Roman University, and speaks Italian perfectly with a slight romantic strain that he inherited from Goethe and Gregorovius. He has spent days and days in the galleries of Florence, Venice, Siena; he knows Perugia, Lucca, Ferrara and Mantua. He loves Schumann, Chopin and Brahms, and plays the piano divinely.) He had talked about Donatello, Politian and Sandro Botticelli, and he half closed his eyes, as if charmed by the music of his own words.

He smiled at Frau Brigitte Frank as gracefully as Celso smiles at Amorrorisca in the work of Agnolo Firenzuola. While talking, he gazed as lovingly on Frau Wächter and Frau Gassner, as Borso d'Esté gazed on the bare shoulders and pink foreheads of the young Ferrarese women at Schifanoia. He turned to the Governor of Cracow, the young and refined Wächter—the Viennese Wächter, one of the butchers of Dolfuss—as amiably and seriously as the Magnificent Lorenzo turned to the young Politian amid the merry company in his villa of Ambra. And Keith, Wolsegger, Emil Gassner and Stahl replied to his courteous remarks with the dignified courtesy that Baldassarre Castiglione recommends to polished courtiers in polished courts. Only Himmler's man, at the end of the table, sat silent and listened. Possibly he listened to the heavy tread in the neighboring rooms, where their noble lord was not awaited by hawkers with a hooded hawk on the leather-covered hand, but by the stern SS guards armed with machine guns.

I felt myself blushing as I had after motoring through the lonely snow-covered plains between Cracow and Warsaw, between Lodz and Radom, between Lwow and Lublin—through dimmed towns and squalid villages with inhabitants who were lean and pale, with faces marked by hunger, anxiety, slavery and despair, and whose light dull eyes possessed that innocent look that is the look of the Polish people in distress—where of an evening I entered the
Deutsches Haus
in some misty town where I was to spend the night and was met by raucous voices, gross laughter and the warm odor of food and drinks. I felt transported as if by magic into some expressionist German court conceived by Grosz. Around the richly-stocked tables there turned up again the napes, the paunches, the mouths, the ears that Grosz draws, and those cold staring German eyes, like fish eyes. And now a sad feeling of shame caused me to blush. While I looked in turn at each one of the guests seated at the table of the German King of Poland in the great hall of the Wawel, I remembered the lean, pale throng treading through the roads of Warsaw, Cracow, Czestochowa, Lodz—those faces sweating with hunger and anxiety, people wandering along streets covered with muddy snow—those unhappy houses, and proud palaces, out of which day by day stealthily were smuggled carpets, silver, glass and china—all the ancient tokens of wealth, vanity and glory.