The Black Laurel Read online

  It was a clear, a marvellously clear day. He was flying at fifteen hundred feet; he looked down at the shell of Hanover, empty in its ring of suburbs. Somewhere here, he thought swiftly, the line of his flight crossed the vertical line of terror, pain, traced by Andrew’s mind on the night of May 3rd. Traced then, now, always. His thought leaped aside. He glanced down again. Empty roads. Between Hanover and Magdeburg he saw only two vehicles. No trains. Junctions of any size were a tangle of smashed lines. Bridges sagged like torn wires into the rivers. The rotten teeth of the bombed towns. For the first time he saw what had happened. The hangmen had done their work thoroughly, the body of Europe, flayed while still living, was stretched below him in the sunlight, the nerves exposed and torn, the fractured bones, the nails rotted, decomposing flesh, a death terrible, sordid, poisoned. He had an instant of dismay. Yet — why regret it more than anyone regrets the Middle Ages? The composite death — made up of a million obscure deaths — stretched out down there had been those ages’ future: somewhere to right or left of the strong wings grown through the nerves of his own hands into his body the future was making itself hands and a voice. With a rapidly suppressed excitement, he thought: I shall live in it.

  He had almost forgotten Gary’s presence. Within sight of Berlin he remembered it, and in the same instant he began to attend with his whole mind to the aeroplane and the contour below him of the airport. Gatow. A car had been waiting for Gary, with a sergeant-driver at the wheel. He drove away in it, telling Arnold to do what he liked with the rest of his day. “You can get yourself into Berlin — and if you have any trouble finding your way to the house in Wannsee, see Colonel Brett, you know where he is, he’ll send you out. Dine where you like — I shan’t be at home until later. What time is it?”

  “Twenty past three. Russian time.”

  “Is that right? Are you sure?”

  I don’t make mistakes, he thought, vexed.

  “Yes, sir.”

  An hour later, when he had cleared everything, he saw among the officers on the Station a man he knew, talked to him, and got a lift into Berlin.

  In broad daylight, the city of a nightmare. Façades, broken off half way, at a line of defaced sculpture. Sprawling pyramids of dust, of shattered brick; the skeletons of buildings leaning over ossuaries of splintered stone and dust. A single column erect in acres of reddish dust. Carcases of tanks, burned-out cars. The torn-out megalithic bones, corroded by fire, of a railway-station. Perspectives, beyond those he could see, only of ruins.

  It was impossible to believe that they were freshly made: they had every air — except one — of ruins which have been decaying peacefully through centuries: stroking a façade thrust up between two cataracts of dust, the August sun softened it to a pinkish-grey. Charming. Yet, with their look of age they had no dignity: death had brutalised them and perpetuated a rictus, of senility, of animal fear.

  Arnold picked his way through them with a detached curiosity. The idea that he was responsible for some unknown fraction of these ruins was only silly — he could not feel any link between this sunlit stony desert and nights when the darkness, lit by searing explosions, was a powerful coiled spring, within and outside him. The desert was the less real. Deliberately, he relaxed fingers he had clenched over a memory of one night.

  He walked through a stench he recognised, though he had not smelled it before. Whole streets, he thought, must have died here in a moment, from intestinal rupture, and there were hundreds, thousands perhaps, of bodies rotting under the dust. To get away from it he looked for the Tiergarten. A passage from one lunacy to another. To a landscape of craters, skeletal trees: erect and undamaged, a pair of concrete towers. Surely he had seen this landscape before? Of course — many times. It appeared in nearly every painting his mother bought between the two wars, buying the works of new painters not because she liked them but because she thought they would rise in value. Vultures, he thought, they smelled this before it happened.

  Abruptly, as happened to him nowadays, he was deathly tired; he could not drag himself another yard and sat down on the shapeless fragment of a statue, to wait. He had only to wait and his energy would come back. He waited.

  After a few minutes, when he could have moved, he still sat. Edward was in London and he had nothing to do. He was sleepy.

  When he roused himself it was beginning to grow dark. With a sharp relief he remembered that he knew someone in Berlin. Had he noted the address in his pocket-book? He looked anxiously. Yes — Linden-Allee, Charlottenburg. On his way out of the park he found himself in a furtive shadowy crowd, which might have been sweated out by the ruins. He had a moment of bewilderment before he realised that he was in a market of some sort: objects passed from hand to hand almost in silence, a silence rasped by guttural syllables and half-finished gestures. A woman leaned against a fragment of wall, her right arm stretched like a rail, to display the sheet folded across it. The hand, grey and corded, of another plucked at the stuff of a petticoat with a curious greed, like a beak. Arnold turned sharply — and knocked over a skinny creature: it was exactly like knocking over a man-sized insect, his arms made the same stick-like gestures.

  “I’m awfully sorry.” Arnold helped him up and began brushing dust off him: he could feel bones under the jacket.

  Beaming, his eyes behind powerful lenses sparkling with goodwill, his victim apologised joyously — and in English.

  “But it doesn’t matter. Don’t trouble yourself, it was my fault.”

  “Sure you’re all right?”

  “Quite, quite, I assure you.”

  Arnold disengaged himself and moved away. He had gone a few steps when the German ran after him.

  “Thanks for your kindness. My name is Kalb. Heinrich Kalb.”

  Arnold smiled at him and hurried on. He had no wish to hear anything. Outside, in the formless ruins, it was darker. A car driven by an Air Force sergeant came slowly towards him, and he stopped it. Now he began to wonder whether David Renn would want to see him. Renn was at least twice his age, and it was three or more years since they met last — people change, he thought uneasily. He admired Renn, and before he knew Gary had thought of him as a great man. Now, even without reflecting, he saw him diminished, less unusual, less, far less intelligent. He remembered the light shock with which, only during the war, he had learned that Renn was a secret agent — had been for years. Even now he was not certain what Renn had been doing. What sort of people did he spy on? Secretly proud of knowing a man who worked in the dense shadows behind our lives of simple tax-payers and citizens, he was also very slightly repelled. And then, too, Renn had a trick of seeming simple and very friendly — intimate. And it was only a trick. Just rest a hand on this intimacy and its cold froze you to the bone.

  “Here you are.”

  In the darkness he had not noticed the passage from (it could be) Ur into modern streets, not very much battered. He got out. Now if I’m lucky, he thought. He stiffened himself to walk into a house where he was not expected and ask there for a man who might look at him with constraint and boredom.

  He was lucky. As he stepped into the hall David Renn was standing at the foot of a staircase: he looked blankly at the young man for a second, then smiled with great sweetness.

  “Arnold! Good — this is splendid. Come and have dinner with me in the mess — I was just going.”

  He doesn’t mean it, Arnold thought, but he was sharply pleased and reassured, and felt grateful to Renn. At the same time, and when they were sitting in the noisy room in a house in the same street, he examined Renn coolly. As always, his look of delicacy — his face seemed the work of a Chinese artist, the fewest possible lines, to give an impression of strength and fineness — was attractive until you saw that it was stained and worn. He was a bad colour. His air of authority did not go well with the feverish movement of his hands. He was older, shabbier, less composed.

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Five hours. What goes on?”

&n
bsp; “Well, what d’you want to know?”

  Arnold hesitated. He disliked seeming ignorant or naive.

  “I noticed some women in boiler suits piling up bricks in a street. Apart from that, and a sort of market, nothing seems to happen.”

  “Do you want to buy a Leica? You can get one for three thousand six hundred cigarettes or — I forget the rate in coffee or tinned meat.”

  “Thanks. I don’t.”

  Renn looked at him.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to annoy you. It’s simply that if I know what is happening here I don’t like it. But probably I don’t know. There are some very respectable families living in cellars, over the sewage, and in a few other cellars you can have a quite decent young woman for a bar or two of chocolate. Then there’s a black market — you saw it. And of course women prepare meals, and put their children to bed, and think the thoughts of anxious women, ignorant. . . and all the other — survivors, all the living, over the entire planet, feeling and acting, as if they were not in the prison Pascal talks of, precisely as human beings have always felt — in the twelfth century, in fourth-century Greece, ten thousand years ago in Tibet — and either they don’t know or it doesn’t matter to them that they are living through the last years of a civilisation. Is it — I don’t know — is it the human grandeur? — are we, just now and then, superb or only — distracted and unimportant?”

  He smiled, and touched his upper lip with the sharp point of his tongue.

  “You know I never liked Berlin — that may be why I feel free, as if I were an onlooker — or immortal. It’s only very rarely I feel — grieved —”

  No, he’s lying, he hates it, Arnold thought. Possibly he’s right — even so, I can’t help it.

  “I should like an island,” he said.

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-four.”

  “What are you doing?”

  Arnold told him. With a feeling of defiance he added,

  “You know, he’s a remarkable man — Gary.”

  “Yes, remarkable,” Renn said drily.

  Arnold hid his discomfort.

  “Are you on General Lowerby’s — er — staff?”

  “Not noticeably.”

  “Sorry.” He blushed. “Am I being a fool?”

  “No,” Renn said quickly. “But I am. . . Shall we have another bottle?”

  “That would be pleasant.”

  “The Political Investigation Division has several branches, including the Special Branch. Mine. Full of shady individuals like me. However, if an enthusiastic German shoots you I shan’t be called in unless he’s so unlucky, or suspect, as to be on my books. Or a pal or cousin of one of my goats. A Military Government Court will sentence him and release the knife. Not at once, and not with its own hand. Various pretty soldier men and civilians disguised as soldiers will pass on it before the C-in-C confirms, and justice is done. But you can be sure it will be done.”

  His nerves are shot to pieces, Arnold thought coolly.

  “How long shall you be here, David?”

  “I could go home at once.” He looked aside, and his voice caught up a note of contempt directed, certainly, at himself. “I have a reason for staying. It’s quite a story.”

  If I ask him to tell me, Arnold thought, he’ll invent something. He waited, half in indifference — nothing is very startling — half fascinated and uneasy.

  “Three days before the war — I was in Paris — there was a girl — English — she had been brought there by an old man, a brutal fellow, I was pursuing. . . I handled her so clumsily and stupidly that she bolted. We lost the trace. She was very young — a born victim. Later I found out something — she was picked up that evening by a German hurrying to get out of France; he took her with him. Since then, nothing. She could be anywhere —” he threw his arm out, and pointed down, as if the darkness stretching outside flowed under their feet — “anywhere in this country.”

  “Or dead,” Arnold said.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Why not?”

  Renn hesitated.

  “Because I should be responsible.” He smiled. “So long as I look for her she’s alive, and I have a chance of coming to terms with her. You can’t make terms with the dead, they’re not impressionable.”

  In a brief silence, the distant sound of a motor-horn, and repeated at a greater distance, came into the room. The clatter of voices rose again at once, a confusion of faces, uniformed bodies, laughter, tossing from side to side of this — this improvised waiting-room. Arnold was slightly drunk, and so, relaxed and off guard. Renn would not have told him the story if they were not, for the first time, as much equals as friends. He was eager to make a confidence in return.

  “All this, you know, unhappiness, disorder, in the world, the only man who can deal with it, who is strong enough, is in fact the man I work for. Gary.”

  Renn looked at him without interest, as if it would be foolish to try to explain anything to him.

  “Do you think so?” he said, politely. “Yes, of course. It must — to a young man — be attractive — that mixture of good manners, power, immense power, certainty. One shouldn’t expect anything else.”

  Arnold froze. After a moment, during which he thought only of the need to steady his voice,

  “I must go,” he said. “I have no idea how to get myself to — where is it? — Wannsee.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll arrange it.”

  Confusedly, he felt that Renn had not wanted to humiliate him. He was not thinking — or thinking of himself. . . He drew this comfort from the nervous tapping of Renn’s fingers on the table, and his absent smile. But he had no wish to risk himself again, and he kept quiet.

  Chapter Seven

  The meagre little German, Heinrich Kalb, stood perfectly still for a moment where he had halted when the young Englishman turned his back on him with so positive a snub. His expression became sad, then pensive. You forget, he scolded himself, you’re no longer in London, and harmless, a harmless foreigner, here you’re a German. Why are you so stupid?. . . Turning, he stared again at the people he had been watching before he was knocked down. He did not want to go back among them, but after a minute he went, dragged by a craving in himself. The woman with the sheet draped over her arm had not moved: looking at her he saw panic rising behind her eyes in a steely flood. He looked away. A grey knotted hand pulled at a petticoat with longing, like a caress. The same gestures broke out of him, out of his skinny body, and the pain they gave him was so acute that he told himself he must go away. He stumbled. How foolish to come back, he thought. His work here, and the efforts he had made — such efforts — to get himself sent to Germany, had been only incredibly silly. . .

  He forced his legs to hurry. He was out of breath. Ashamed, he whispered, “Heinrich, be brave.” He remembered that he had been going to look for his friend, his dear friend. He felt sure of finding him, and trotted along rehearsing little cries of joy and triumph. Now he was in his own quarter, near the Gedächtniskirche — and it was such a grotesque ruin that he laughed. Come, he thought, with so much gone, Walther is certainly safe. It was the next street. He turned the corner.

  Nothing. As far as he could see in the dusk, shapeless ruins. His body knew so well the number of steps from this corner to Walther’s flat that it carried him to the place. A hillock of dust.

  He turned, but he was not quick enough. The room, the table with the salami and the tumblers, Walther’s radiant face, and the music — yes, all the music played in the warm shabby room — rose through the ruins. He wept.

  He hurried away — panting, his heart knocking against his frail ribs. He reached his street. A young man passed him. A moment later he thought: But I know him. It was too good. Turning back, he ran, calling breathlessly, “Mr Sieber, Mr Sieber!” The young man took no notice, but he was sauntering and Kalb caught him easily.

  “Mr Sieber!”

  A blank hostile stare. “My name isn’t Sieber. I d
on’t know you.”

  “Oh, no, I’m sorry, I beg your pardon, do forgive me.”

  He crept away.

  When he was in his room, he tried to forget his second snub. The young man was not Sieber, it was a mistake — and yet. .

  Closing his eyes, he recalled the real Sieber. London, December 24th, 1938. His room at the top of the shabby little hotel in Soho was cramped, dark, and, not to make any bones about it, squalidly dirty. With all their virtues, the English are sluts. No room could be less like his dear modest flat in Charlottenburg when he was a professor of art in the university — until it was realised that a Jew talking about German art is a blasphemer. But he was happy in this sordid room. Incurably gay, he believed — in spite of the Nazis — that men are kind. And the English were kind to him; he loved them with a childlike love and trust.

  The little gas-fire smelled terribly of gas and snored like wind in a forest. Lifting his kettle off the ring he poured water into the tea-pot. There was a faint click in the meter; the flames sank, quivered, died. But he had spent the day’s sixpence, because he had been in all day. He must wear his overcoat. But when he had drunk the tea he decided to go out and warm himself by walking.

  It was already dark. In the narrow streets, light from shop windows lay like a benediction on the passers-by; there were many of these, women loitering from stall to stall with full baskets, lively dirty children, greetings, cries, an orange lying in the gutter like a sun. In all this good-humoured squalor, he felt safe, warm. Suddenly, in a poor shop, he caught sight of a Christmas tree with frosted cotton-wool and stars; all his childhood, his long happy childhood, ran to it and pressed itself to the window. Oh, he thought, my home, my home. A joy like a knife was thrust into him, pointing at his throat; oblivious, he pressed his hands over it, over the hollow of his stomach, in the gesture of a child clasping his dear monkey or his horse.