The Black Laurel Page 12

  During this time Leist slept badly. He grudged the time wasted. Partly to soothe himself, partly from the instinct of an historian, he began to make a list of the buildings he saw destroyed: the Royal Castle, its collapsed ribs leaning over a heap of dust — the end of the ridiculous Polish arrogance; the Cathedral, the churches of the Old City — when these were blown up, was obliterated under their ruins, with their monuments of the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth centuries, a clerical obscurantism he despised. Time it went.

  He caught himself out feeling shocked — as if some obscure thought of his own had collapsed — because it turned out to be so easy to wipe out not monuments only but the structures of the mind. It made nonsense of men’s greatest effort.

  This void opened under his own feet.

  To avoid it, he worked harder, with a selfless energy. He even ceased caring whether he got the credit for his labours, so frantic was he to secure everything while there was time.

  It began to be cold. The cold from the arctic, from icebound ports, crept towards Warsaw. In December snow fell on the charred ruins.

  One day on his way from the Museum to the hotel he made a detour to walk past the Ossolinski palace; rather, past the debris of this baroque palace — it had been blown up a week earlier. Near it the air was still pallid with the dust of a building brought down the day before. He noticed fragments of the colonnade sheltering the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Its two central columns were upright.

  Frey was in charge of the demolition squad at work now. He looked feverish and yellow. He was suffering terribly from dysentery and could scarcely stand. When he saw Leist he asked him to wait a few minutes and drive back with him to the hotel. Leist waited. He watched the final destruction of colonnade and tomb. Looking round him, he was struck by the sight of a quite worthless modern building standing erect in the formless rubbish of palaces and old houses. He asked Frey why it had been spared.

  Frey looked at him, with a hostile irony.

  “For a reason you would approve. Because it was not worth the trouble of blowing up.”

  Very sensible. Since we can’t remove the seventeenth-century with its carved panels and ceilings painted by the great artists, it has to be destroyed, but by all means leave these peasants and savages a house suitable to them.

  “The Lazienki palace was burned yesterday,” Frey said drily. “You asked me about it.”

  Ceilings painted by Bacciarelli, the bronzes, the decorated walls. He allowed them a moment’s thought, then dropped them.

  “I’m by nature a conserver,” he said calmly, “and I’m not sentimental. I don’t go about saluting monuments, and afterwards blowing them up. At the same time I feel no impulse to lament the disappearance of any so-called civilisation which hasn’t the force to keep itself alive. These people have outlived their meaning — whatever it was.”

  Frey did not answer.

  They drove back to the hotel. He felt the trembling of Frey’s body and noted his efforts to control his hands, the hands, strong and knotted, of the peasants of their village. When they reached the Polonia he got out first, turning his back on Frey. A soldier standing on the pavement was holding a small plaster figure he must have picked up in the rubble of some palace. He was idly snapping off its limbs, one by one, like a boy pulling the legs off an insect. Leist was seized by rage. It sprang in him from so deep that it might equally well have been anguish. He kept his hands off the man with great difficulty, but he let himself go so violently about the wilful destruction of a valuable object that the man stood in a stupor of fear. Leist became conscious that Frey was waiting at his elbow: he was smiling broadly. He stopped abruptly, and went into the hotel. Inside, he turned on Frey.

  “Why are you laughing?”

  “What was the matter with you? Was it really something priceless?”

  The figure had no value at all. His rage had died in him, and he did not understand what had happened. But he spoke coldly.

  “You’ve become such a butcher you don’t know a valuable thing when you see it. . .”

  In the New Year the cold became so bitter that life shrank to an insect-like scuttling among the ruins. A wind, not strong, but colder than steel, guillotined the breath as it came from your throat. The pain it started in the nerves of the chest was unbearable. Even in bed, with blankets heaped on him, Leist shivered.

  The Russian artillery was much closer. At night the sky over the horizon was shaken like a heliotrope-coloured rag. Troops falling back passed heavily through the streets or crowded the barracks.

  Leist gave up trying to pack things into cases. He picked out the finest of the too many paintings still in the Museum and had them piled on to lorries as they were, and driven off: he hoped that when they reached Silesia someone would cherish and repair them.

  He was warned to leave at once. That morning he sent off one last lorry. There was still, stacked in the rooms, a quantity of canvases. He ordered his S. S. to spread them about and trample them. The thought of leaving anything, whether for Russians or Poles, was intolerable.

  He left the men enjoying themselves noisily like children, and went back to the Polonia. He found that Frey, in whose car he had been going, had gone. After minutes of indecision, he took a motor-cycle someone had brought into the lobby, and set off.

  By the second day of the journey he had become, except that he suffered, an automaton, part of the nervous hammering of motors and caterpillar wheels, a frenzied vibration running against his clenched muscles, and broken off in jerks by the bombs. Even at the times when he left his machine and ran to the nearest shadow of cover, he moved like a man obeying something other than his will. Flying under the iron absence of a sky, the Russian machines bombed the road, the convoy, the bridges. It was a country of flat planes, with few trees. At night its outlines folding one over the other, and filled by the noises of an invisible army stretching right across the Polish darkness, went back to the pre-human time they had indeed never left. The returning daylight made it scarcely more human. Here and there in the fields, a cluster of stone chimneys thrust from the snow marked the place of wooden villages burned down during the occupation as a punishment. When they had time for it, the soldiers killed: he passed lately slaughtered peasants, and more and more dead Germans: some of the soldiers had died of cold; their faces, haggard, almost fleshless, had an extraordinary look of absence; bodies in which the life had frozen or run dry were primitive statues, elongated distorted signs for a human being, rather than men who had lived. Or they had died in a mediæval battle, so remote were they, so nearly nothing. The only recent deaths were those of the burned-out tanks and cars.

  He refused to think of it as a rout. It was the moment, he told himself, when the spent force of a wave falls into the hollow of the next.

  On his third day he sheltered under the wall of a cottage during a raid. A bomb exploded near him, and another. He felt the panic of his body as if it were not his own, his head had drawn into his shoulders, the drops of sweat froze in its sockets. After the attack, there was a moment’s silence. Still pressed into the ground, he heard a child crying.

  The sound, weak, and strangely sharp, like a bird’s cries, was inside the cottage. He got to his feet. Without thinking much about it — perhaps he only wanted to hide for a minute from the sky and its equivocal blankness — he turned, instead of going back to his machine, towards the door of the cottage.

  There seemed only one room, darkened by the closed shutters. Germans had already been here. The room was in disorder, and the bodies of a man and a woman lay across an overturned bench; they were dead, their throats had been cut. Near them, bleeding from a smaller wound in the neck, was the child. A very little girl. Leist bent himself to look at her. She came from any mediæval painting: the dazzling purity of her face, the grey eyes under long arched brows, the straight nose, the fine lightly curved mouth. She could not move, but her face quivered under the blow she expected.

  He should have left at once. He felt
compassion, yes, when he was dressing the wound, and a sort of anger that so nearly perfect a thing had been damaged. He meant to leave when he had bandaged her, but these few minutes when his muscles unclenched themselves had made him feel done. Loosening his belt, he stretched himself on the floor.

  When he woke, the child was still where he had placed her, on a heap of sacks in a corner. He went to her. She did not move, did not make any sound. Her eyes had the inward-looking grief of a very young child. He touched her. She was colder even than his finger.

  For the first time he reflected that she would die very soon unless she were nursed. He noticed the ragged collar of her little dress fluttering as she breathed, like a feather in a draught. She must be nearly gone. Laying his great-coat over her, he went to the stove and found it full of half-charred wood. When he had got that going he searched the room and the shed opening off it for food. He could find only grain, half a sack of coarse dark meal. From it, with water, he made a sort of gruel and dropped it carefully in the child’s mouth. She made no attempt to swallow, and he thought: I’m wasting my time with her. With a convulsive movement she took a spoonful, and another. A start of joy went through him. After a moment she closed her eyes. He touched her again, gently. Already she was warmer.

  While she slept he tidied the room; dragged outside at the back the bodies of the two peasants — surely her father and mother? — and cleaned up as well as he could, shuddering when his fingers touched the fouled bench. The room, and the loft over it — where there was a bed with quilts — were so poor, there was so little decency or comfort, that he felt surprise and contempt. These Polish peasants, he thought, live like animals.

  The child sighed. He went over to her at once. She was still asleep, and he stood a long time watching her. Such useless beauty, only born to be spoiled, a life good for nothing except to be used until it was used up.

  Why am I trying to save her?

  During the night and the next day, and most of the second night, the road outside the cottage trembled with a diminishing flood of men and lorries. He strained his ears to catch other sounds. There were air raids, but nothing fell near the cottage.

  That morning he woke very early; in the instant of opening his eyes, he realised the change. It was quiet. He got up and drew back the shutter of the small window. Except for an overturned car, the road was empty. Silence. A silence as deep as if there were no war.

  An hour, two hours later, he heard the Russians: he heard them for some time before he could see anything. When the first tanks and cars came in sight he went out to the side of the road with a flag of surrender torn from a red skirt he found in the loft. He stood there holding it, and no one took the least notice of him. Then a car stopped at a short distance; an officer and three soldiers tumbled out and pushed it off the road into the field. Leaving his men at work, the officer strolled towards Leist.

  He had time, as the Russian came nearer, to look at him. With his scrap of red stuff he had only obeyed the cunning of the peasant born between East and West, between the knights of the Teutonic order and Polish barons, between the Reformation and the Catholic Church — yet in some obscure way it was a decision; he felt its pressure at the back of his neck, in the exact place where, he had been told, a Russian places the mouth of his revolver to shoot a prisoner.

  The Russian officer was young, not tall, slender: he had a dark face, pointed and narrow, and black eyes, so black, so full of a lively restless light, that they seemed to live their own life in his face. He walked as brusquely and gracefully as an animal.

  Leist was the taller by a head, and much broader, yet when the Russian was standing in front of him, scrutinising him, he felt exposed, almost paralysed. Something like a current of energy menaced him from the brilliant eyes. He croaked,

  “I am a German, I surrender.”

  The Russian spoke a pure fluent German.

  “I can see you’re not a ballet dancer. The devil you do. What have you got here?”

  He raised his arm, knocking the improvised flag out of Leist’s hand. Leist did not move: he had the sense not to give away his fear — his immobility was an instinct, deeper in him than either his fear or his hard courage. Looking at the officer he said quietly,

  “There is a child, a Polish child, in this cottage; she has been hurt, she needs looking after. I’ve kept her alive for three days only in the hope of being able to hand her over to your doctors.”

  “Who else is with you in the cottage?”

  “No one.”

  Something like a look of amusement crossed the Russian’s face. It was the face, after all, of a young man.

  “Walk in front of me into the house.”

  Leist turned his back. Now it comes, he thought. He moved dully. As he walked, he noticed the wood of the door jamb, and a stain spreading on the plaster beside it; he felt cold.

  They were inside the room. Without knowing it, he had bent his head forward. Now he lifted it and watched the Russian walk with his light supple stride to the heap of blankets and lean over it. After a moment he turned.

  “What are you doing here?”

  Leist explained, briefly and coldly, how he came to be here, with the child: he had the sense, as he spoke, that he was believed. It doesn’t mean that I’m safe, he reminded himself.

  “You stayed behind to look after her?”

  “I did.”

  “Why?”

  “You can see for yourself,” Leist said quietly.

  The Russian looked at the child again. Suddenly, she put her little arm out from the quilt and, timidly, with a strange coquetry, touched first the edge of Leist’s coat, then the Russian. Something like a smile altered the perfect mouth.

  The door opened with violence, and she started. It was the soldiers from the car. They were dirty and shabby, smelling powerfully of a stable. They jostled like good-tempered young horses in the doorway: at once their officer dropped his nearly personal manner of the last few minutes, and ordered them to search Leist. They did it with impatient roughness. The coins he had sewn into the waistband escaped: they took his papers — including the list headed in his neat writing: Historical buildings demolished in Warsaw after the Rising — with the dates. The officer was interested in this strange list. Tossing heads or tails, Leist told him exactly what it was.

  The Russian nodded, with indifference.

  “And you? Why were you in Warsaw?”

  He answered every question with the same frankness. Another of his peasant grandfather’s sayings — Tell the truth and shame the devil — jumped into his head: he had begun to feel a little confident, yet whenever, as he walked up and down the little room, the Russian officer passed him, he had the same sense of danger; the fellow was like a whip, or, no, like a young powerful animal, with his own habits and impulses. He had taken off his gloves; he had very small hands, white and quick-moving. They, too, were alive with their own vivid energy.

  He stopped in his restless walk and said sharply,

  “All right, all right, that’s enough. . . I’ll take her with me. I’ll take you along, for the time being — to look after her. We’ll see. Come — move yourself.”

  He had the feeling when he stepped outside the cottage, carrying in both arms the almost weightless body of the child, that he was seeing the landscape for the first time. So it might look on the day of resurrection, its weight of centuries dropping away from a surface as smooth and pure as that of the child’s face, where, now that he looked at it in this light, he saw below every line, below the curve of the lips, in the clearness and depth of the eyes, age gliding into age of the stubborn life of men in this hard country.

  The Russian told him to get into the back of the car. Two of the soldiers got in with him; the other, who was the driver, waited until his officer had jumped into the front before scrambling in beside him.

  A little over four months later — in the middle of May — he was moved from Breslau to a prison camp near Dresden.

  He had b
een there a week when he was summoned to an office of the administration. He was expecting the summons; what he did not expect was to find in the room, with the commandant, the young officer he had not seen since, at the end of that day, the Russian handed over his prisoner. Again he had the sense of standing too near an energy, a force, dangerous if it were let loose, and not likely to answer to any rational (call it that) appeal. The young man’s gleaming black eyes rested on him for a moment with an impersonal interest, almost insulting. Leist looked back at him with an unmoving face, as if they had never seen each other: he saw, a little mortified, that what he had meant as discretion, went unnoticed.

  After a few words which Leist — he had been trying to learn Russian — did not understand, the commandant left the room. There was no change in the other’s manner when they were alone. You could not say he was unfriendly — indeed when he spoke he was friendly and very gay: simply, he behaved as if Leist were of as much and as little importance as the telephone, infinitely less important than the German binoculars he was carrying. He handled these as if they were living, moving them gently from his knee to the table, stroking them, with a lively affection.

  He did not give Leist permission to sit.

  “First,” he said, smiling, “I must tell you about Halima, about the child. She was ill in the hospital, almost dead. Now she’s all right and I’ve adopted her — that is, I’ve made arrangements for her for when she leaves the hospital. You wouldn’t expect me, me, to become a nursemaid! But she’ll be looked after.”