Kaputt (36 page)

Louise had rested the two bicycles against a lamp post and was waiting for us with her hand on a handlebar. "How are you?" she inquired in that peculiar Potsdam French, self-conscious and shy. She looked up at me, smiling, her head cocked slightly on one shoulder. She asked me if I had a pin. Was I without a pin, too? "You cannot find a single pin in all of Germany," she said laughing. There was a little tear in her skirt, and she seemed to be very concerned about it. She wore a small green felt Tirolean hat pulled down over the nape of her neck and a tobacco-colored tweed skirt; a leather jerkin of mannish cut encased her bosom, revealing the shortness of her waist and the softness of her hips. Her socks were very short and her legs bare. She was pleased to see me again. Why couldn't I go back with them to Litzensee? She could certainly find a bicycle for me, and I would spend the night at the castle. I could not do it; I was to start next morning for Riga and Helsinki. Couldn't I postpone my departure? Litzensee was very beautiful, it was not really a castle, but an old country house surrounded by gorgeous woods; whole families of deer and fallow-deer lived in the Litzensee forests; nature was very lovely and very young there.

We walked toward the center of town,- I was walking beside Louise who was leaning on her bicycle. The rain had stopped; it was a warm, clear, moonless night. I felt as if I were walking by the side of a girl through the suburbs of my hometown,- as if I had gone back to my boyhood in Prato,- in the evening when the girls left the factories, I would wait for Bianca on the sidewalk of the Fabbricone, beyond the Serraglio Gate, and walk home with her, leaning on my bicycle. The street was muddy and Louise seemed as heedless of the mud as the working girls had been. She stepped into puddles just like the factory girls in my hometown, just like Bianca. The first stars, pale and remote, peeped through the misty sky. On the branches of the trees the birds made sweet and merry music, and the voice of the river swayed at the end of the street like a curtain in the wind. We stopped on the bridge and leaned over to look at the water. A boat with two soldiers was gliding under the arches, sweeping down the stream. Louise, leaning on the marble parapet, watched the stream flowing gently between the grassy banks. She leaned over the parapet, raising herself on tiptoe just as Bianca used to do on the Mercatale Bridge to watch the stream of the Bisenzio gliding along the tall red wall that encircles the town. I used to buy a bag of lupine or pumpkin seeds and Bianca amused herself by spitting the shells into the river.

"If we were in Italy," I said, "I would buy a pennyworth of marrons or lupine seeds for you. But you cannot get a single marron in Germany. Do you like lupines, Louise, and salted pumpkin seeds?"

"When I was in Florence I bought a bag of marrons every day on the corner of Tornabuoni Street. But it all seems like a fairy story now."

"Why don't you come and spend your honeymoon in Italy, Louise?"

"Oh, you have already heard that I am getting married? Who told you?"

"Agatha Ratibor told me the other day. Come to Capri, to my house, Louise. I shall be far away in Finland, and the house will be yours. At Capri the moon is truly as sweet as honey."

"I cannot. My passport has been withdrawn. We cannot leave Germany. We live at Litzensee as if we were in exile."

Life was not particularly easy for the princes of the Imperial house. They were not allowed to move outside a radius of a few miles of their home. Louise laughed. They had to have a special permit to go to Berlin.

The trees were mirrored in the river, the air was sweet, illuminated by a faint veil of silvery mist. We had walked a long way from the bridge, when a young officer stopped and saluted. He was a tall blond young man, with an open smiling face.

"Oh, Hans!" said Louise blushing.

He was Hans Reinhold. He stood at attention in front of Louise, his arms stiffly at his sides, and he smiled at Louise. And little by little, as if drawn by a magic power transcending his will, his face turned toward a platoon of soldiers who marched in step, beating their heels hard on the pavement. They were his soldiers; they had been relieved from guard duty and were going back to the barracks.

"Why don't you come with us, Hans?" Louise asked softly.

"I have not finished playing at soldiers. I'm on duty tonight," said Hans. His glance was now gliding past Louise's face, following the soldiers who moved away beating their heels hard on the asphalt of the street.

"So long, Hans," said Louise.

"So long, Louise," said Hans. He raised his hand to his cap, saluted Louise in the stiff Potsdam manner and then turned to Ilse and me. He said, "So long, Ilse," and after a slight bow to me, overtook his platoon at a run and disappeared at the end of the avenue.

Louise walked in silence. I could only hear the slight swish of the bicycle tires on the damp asphalt, the hum of motors on a distant road and the tread of feet on the pavement. Ilse was also silent, shaking her small blond head from time to time. Now and again, a human voice broke through that silence, through that continuous harmony of faint sounds that make up the silence of a street in a provincial town in the evening, but it was a human voice attuned to that harmony of sounds, just a human voice, nothing but a pure, solitary human voice.

"Hans is to go to the front next month," said Louise. "We shall just have enough time to marry." Then she added after a momentary hesitation, "This war..." and she was silent again.

"This war frightens you," I said.

"No, that is not it. No, but there is something about this war..."

"What?" I asked.

"Nothing. I meant... oh, it is useless!"

We came to a restaurant not far from the bridge and went inside. The larger room was full of people, so we took a table at the end of a smaller side room where a few soldiers sat silently around a table and two girls, mere children, were having supper with an old lady, perhaps their governess. Their long blond hair was braided down their shoulders, and they had starched white collars turned back on their gray school-girl dresses. Louise seemed embarrassed; she gazed around as if searching for someone and now and again she raised her eyes to me, smiling sadly. Suddenly she said: "I cannot bear it any longer." There was a shade of cold severity in her simple grace, that cold severity so peculiar to Potsdam, to its baroque architecture, its neoclassical pretensions, the white stuccos of its churches, its palaces, its barracks, its colleges, its houses—a severity both courtly and middle class, supported by the thick green dampness of the trees.

With Louise I felt as free and unaffected as with a factory girl. Louise's charm was in her simplicity, the simplicity of a girl of the people, and in her shy sadness that seemed to be the result of a joyless existence, of everlasting daily toil—the gloom of a hard drab life. There was in her no trace of downcast pride or heart-felt renunciation, no trace of false humility, vainglorious shamefulness or sudden resentment in which ordinary people see indications of fallen greatness—only a sad simplicity, unconscious patience, a slightly filmed glow, an ancient and noble innocence, a dark patient power that is at the root of pride. I felt as free and unaffected with her as with one of those factory girls that one sees in the evenings in the U-Bahn coaches or in the misty streets of Berlin suburbs near the factories when they come out in groups and walk downcast and sad, followed at a distance by the dull silent crowd of bare-legged, almost nude and disheveled girls whom the Germans had brought back as prisoners from their white-slave raids in Poland, the Ukraine and Ruthenia.

Louise had delicate hands with pale transparent nails. A network of blue veins flowed from her slender wrists into the lines of her hands. She was resting one of her hands on the tablecloth, as she looked at the sporting prints that decorated the walls of the room—the most famous thoroughbreds of the Vienna
Hochschule
drawn by Vernet and Adam, some prancing, others galloping through landscapes of blue trees and green waters. I gazed at Louise's typical Hohenzollern hand. I could recognize the hands of the Hohenzollerns, famous for their shortness, their provincial refinement, rather plump, with an out-thrust thumb, a tiny little finger with the middle finger scarcely exceeding the other fingers in length. But Louise's hand was red and roughened by scouring powder and covered with a mesh of fine wrinkles, cracked and chafed, like the hands of the Polish and Ukrainian factory women whom I had seen munching bits of brown bread close to the wall of a factory the day I had gone to the Ruhleben suburbs—like the hands of the "white slaves" from the east, of the Russian engineering women workers who in the evenings throng the sidewalks of the industrial quarters of Pankow and Spandau.

"Could you bring me some soap from Italy or Sweden?" asked Louise trying to conceal her hand. "I have to do my own laundry, my stockings and my underwear. A little kitchen soap." And she added after an embarrassed silence, "I would prefer working in a factory. I cannot bear this lower middle-class life any longer."

"Your turn will come soon," I said. "They will send you to work in a factory."

"Oh no, they will have nothing to do with a Hohenzollern. We are pariahs in Germany. They will have nothing to do with us,"
she added with a spark of contempt. "They will have nothing to do with an Imperial Highness."

At that moment two soldiers, their eyes covered by black bandages entered the room. A nurse was with them to help them find their way. They sat at a near-by table, motionless and silent. The nurse turned now and again to look at us. Finally she whispered something softly to the two blind soldiers who turned their faces in our direction.

"How young they are!" said Louise in a low voice. "They look like mere boys."

"They have been lucky," I said. "The war has not devoured them. The war does not eat corpses—it only eats living soldiers. It gnaws the legs, the arms, the eyes of living soldiers, mostly while they sleep, just as rats do. But men are more civilized; they never eat living men. Heaven knows why, they prefer to eat corpses. Perhaps it is because it must be very hard to eat a living man even though he is asleep. I saw Russian prisoners at Smolensk eating the corpses of their comrades who had died of hunger and cold. The German soldiers stood by looking at them in the most respectful and kindly way. The Germans are full of human feeling, aren't they? But it was no fault of theirs, they had nothing to give the prisoners to eat, and so they stood by looking at them and shaking their heads and saying,
'Arme Leute
—Poor fellows.' The Germans are a sentimental people, the most sentimental and the most civilized people in the world. The German people will not eat corpses,- they eat living men."

"Please, don't be cruel, don't talk about such horrors," said Louise resting her hand on my arm. I felt her shivering, and I was overcome by a rush of angry pity.

"The cold was frightful," I went on, "and I was sick. I felt ashamed of appearing so weak before the Germans. The German officers and men looked at me with contempt, as one looks at a puny woman. And I blushed. I meant to apologize for that moment of weakness but my retching prevented me from apologizing to the Germans."

Louise was silent. I felt her hand trembling on my arm. She had closed her eyes,- she seemed to have stopped breathing. Keeping her eyes closed and trembling, she said, "I sometimes wonder whether my family is partly responsible for all that is happening now. Do you think we Hohenzollerns are partly responsible?"

"Who is not partly responsible? I am no Hohenzollern—and yet I sometimes think that I, too, am partly responsible for what is now taking place in Europe."

"I sometimes wonder whether, being a German woman, I am bound to love the German people. A Hohenzollern should love the German people, don't you think?"

"You don't have to love them. But the Germans are very nice."

"Oh, yes—they are very nice," said Ilse smiling.

"Do you want me to tell you the story of the glass eye?"

"I cannot bear to listen to these harrowing stories," said Louise.

"It is not a harrowing story. It is a German story, a sentimental story."

"Talk softly," said Louise. "The two blind soldiers might hear you. Can you imagine anything in the world gentler than the blind?"

"Perhaps there is something even gentler in the world— namely, men who have glass eyes. But last winter in Poland I saw men who were gentler than the blind, gentler than men with glass eyes. I was in Warsaw, in the Europeiski Café. I was just back from the Smolensk front, and I was terribly weary, a feeling of nausea prevented me from sleeping. I would awake at night with a cruel pain in my stomach; I felt as if I had swallowed an animal and the animal was gnawing at my insides. I felt just as if I had eaten a piece of a live man—and I would lay by the hour gazing into the darkness with wide-open eyes. This night I was in the Europeiski Café. The orchestra was playing old Polish songs and Viennese
Lieder.
Several German soldiers were sitting with two nurses at a near-by table. The café was crowded with the usual people, splendid and miserable, full of the dignity and chivalrous sadness that is ever present at Polish meeting places during these years of slavery and destitution. Worn-looking men and women sat at the tables silently listening to the music or whispering softly among themselves. They wore crumpled clothing, washed-out linen and down-at-the-heel shoes. There was that gentleness in their manner that makes the Polish nation like a misty mirror in which the most common actions are reflected with an old world grace and nobility.

"The ladies were marvelous in their simplicity, full of grandeur and pride that veiled the pallor of hunger in their faces. They smiled wanly, and yet there was no trace of sweetness, resignation or pity. There was nothing humble in the wan smiles on those pain-stricken lips. Their eyes, deep and clear, were stormy; they resembled wounded or caged birds. They resembled those seagulls that fly wearily by, forecasting a storm—white against the black sea sky, mingling their shrieks with the noise of wind and waves. The German soldiers sat at the neighboring table, their eyes staring, their faces motionless. In the center of their staring eyes, I could see their pupils oddly expanding and contracting. I noticed that they did not flicker their eyelids. But they were not blind; some were reading the papers, others watched the musicians, the people coming and going, the waiters fussing around the tables, and, through the misty panes of the large windows, the vast Pilsudski Square deserted in the snow.