The Black Laurel Read online

  She drew her arm away and answered by an abrupt hostile,

  “No.”

  She went out of the room. Smiling, to cover his annoyance, Edward asked,

  “Have you seen her before? A mother of heroes — what? And what hair, but what a temper!”

  “I believe she lives in the house,” Arnold said carelessly. “Some of them do.”

  He had no intention of telling his friend that he had already noticed the girl — her name was Barbe — nor that she attracted him. From childhood he had known that it was safer to say nothing about any strong feeling. You risked being laughed at or watched — both intolerable.

  “Do you know her name?”

  “No.”

  He had asked beforehand for liqueurs — it pleased him to be able to give such a meal. He was nerving himself to ring for them when the girl came in again, carrying the bottles of kirsch and Benedictine and the glasses. He looked at her with a brief amiable smile.

  “How’s the wrist?” he asked coolly.

  When she smiled, her cheeks dimpled — it was ridiculous and charming, and her mouth, very wide and firm, parted a little over remarkably white teeth.

  “It hurts a bit — well, rather much. But it’s nothing. You can look, I’ve bandaged it.” She held out a thin arm, brown to the shoulder, where it disappeared in her cotton dress.

  “I see.”

  She smiled at him again and went out quickly and awkwardly.

  “Either you know her better than you say or it’s love at first sight,” Edward mocked him.

  “It’s neither.”

  “I’m not sure that I like these gleaming Germanic savages. I don’t know any other people who could live in a black airless cellar, over an open sewer — like a woman the old man and I saw the other day — and keep themselves and their children spotlessly clean. It’s pathetic and overdone. They have filthy habits, yet they die if they can’t wash. Your girl, I’m sure, is hungry and as neat as a needle.”

  “I’m sorry for them,” Arnold said.

  He had no better words to carry the sense he had, when he was walking through the ruined centre of Berlin, of an anguish older than the ruins, as common in the world as the roots of trees, as buried. What these Germans, few or many of them, had done, their cruelties, did not set them apart; like all other peoples, they drew their life from the sub-soil of anguish, and from a never-allowed happiness. He was secretly sure, because he knew it about himself, that what each of them had wanted was to be let alone, not interfered with. Then — to bring this on themselves and on the others — how they must have been imposed on. . .

  “Sorry? Well, yes — a great many will die of hunger and hunger diseases this winter and next. They asked for it! All the same I wouldn’t starve them; I’d train the men as mercenaries and engineers and use them about the world — they’d be happier; scattered like that they’d be delivered from their demons. And I’d marry the women into other countries. They must make excellent mothers. Your healthy young Sieglinde ought to have a dozen children!”

  Arnold did not answer. Turning his chair, he stared outside at a sunlight so powerful that it held everything there motionless, trees, lake, the blazing scarlet geraniums below the terrace, the bright grass. A light pleasurable excitement stirred in him. It was the heat, or the wines he had been drinking. He wished he need never move, and in the same instant he felt a crazy impulse to jump into the lake.

  “Would you like to swim?”

  “No, I must get back,” Edward said.

  “Oh.” He was lightly vexed. “I thought you said you had the afternoon free.”

  “I had, but — well, to tell you the truth, if I go back now I shall run into a man I very much want to see.” He laughed. “I want him to see me. If he can, Lowerby will keep me with him until he retires, I’m too useful. Thank you very much, but I want to move rather more quickly than that. I quite like the old man, he’s treated me very well. But he’s no use to me.”

  I don’t see what can stop you from getting on, Arnold thought, affectionately. He frowned.

  “I see. Yes. Does it mean — if you get a move — does that mean you’ll leave Berlin?”

  “Not yet. Not before you do,” Edward smiled. “I hope not. I don’t trust you out of my sight. You have every chance to make something out of your life now, and I want to see you start.”

  You think so, do you? Well, you may be right. . . He felt again a confused joyous excitement. His life lay open in all directions, anything could happen — and whatever happened, he could handle it. He felt madly confident. It’s mine, he thought, foolishly, lightly. In the same moment he knew that he would never satisfy Edward. . . I want too much, and I don’t even know what. . . He spoke coolly.

  “All right — if you must go.”

  “What about this evening?”

  They arranged where they would meet and Edward went off. Half hoping that Barbe would come to clear the table, Arnold waited. She did not come. He grew bored and went outside. He had left his German grammar lying on a chair in the shade; he sat down with it and in a few minutes was sound asleep.

  This end of the Kurfürstendamm was so nearly normal in appearance as to be unreal. It could be a stage set for a rather shabby performance. Reality tried to enter it on all sides from the wilderness of ruins. The side-street a few yards from the café where he waited for Edward was rubble, only rubble, cataracts of it, choked by dust: the early evening sun, falling on it obliquely, gave stones and dust a curious colour of dryness and absence. At the corner a board nailed to a post carried cards of the sort you can see in small provincial shops: Wanted, a child’s warm coat, aged five: Wanted, shoes for a boy of eight: For sale, two pairs of thick curtains: For sale, for sale, wanted, wanted, wanted. Immediately next door to the café, the ground-floor of a half-ruined house had sprouted a wooden bay with a single pane of glass: through it you saw, resting on a coil of black-out material, one red and white coffee cup; its price, marked on a card, was 400 marks.

  Arnold had seated himself at one of half a dozen tables on the pavement. He could drink a very weak beer, or the slightly nauseating substitute for coffee. He chose the beer. It was brought him by a waiter so polite that he overacted his part in the performance.

  He expected Edward any minute. Minutes passed and Edward did not come, and he began to feel that he was conspicuous sitting here. He was aware of furtive glances. Deliberately, he lounged in his chair, his face so empty that it was morose; he pretended to see no one and to feel no interest in the scene.

  This may, he thought, be the place where you can get a nip of vodka for forty or fifty marks. He was tempted to ask — and too shy.

  “May I sit here?”

  A hand touched the back of the second chair at the table. Without glancing up, Arnold mumbled, “Yes, do.”

  Only then he realised that the request had been made in English — in English that was much too good. He looked up sharply. A young man, his own age — dark, slight, attractive. Arnold had an instant and curious sense of liking and embarrassment. The marred face embarrassed him, one side smoothly clear and delicate, the other spoiled. A fine smile made it younger and charming.

  “Yes, I’m sorry, I’m a German — a Boche. My name is Gerlach. Rudolf Gerlach.”

  In the ease of being able to place the fellow, Arnold spoke warmly.

  “I think I know you. Is Dr Lucius Gerlach your uncle?” The young German’s one eyebrow flew up.

  “You’ve heard of him?”

  “Yes.”

  He reflected for a moment that he had heard more about the Gerlachs than he could say. The son, Gary had said, doesn’t know we hanged his father. This was the son. With a friendly impulse, an impulse of pity, he held his cigarette-case across the table. He saw Gerlach hesitate when he had taken a cigarette. Is he going to put it in his pocket? It was the briefest hesitation. As if the thing were worth no more to him than to Arnold, he asked for a light.

  “What have you heard about my unc
le? Or perhaps something about my father?”

  Arnold did not answer at once. With an absent look, put on on purpose, he looked at the street. At this moment a group of German soldiers was passing — prisoners on their way to a transit camp. They walked, stumbled, not on the pavement, but they kept close to it. All but one or two were crippled in some way. Their uniforms were dirty and ragged; one of them wore a Russian overcoat: their boots were broken. Grey, haggard, unshaven, they dragged themselves past the café tables without lifting their heads to look at other Germans who could sit and drink. And the seated Germans scarcely glanced at them, or glanced without kindness.

  These people, he thought, are meanly ashamed of being defeated.

  He noticed among the soldiers a boy — he could not be more than sixteen; his clumsy uniform hung from him in folds: he was bareheaded. As he walked, he was crying. His face, immature, the face of a child from a village, was blubbered with his tears. His mouth worked dumbly in his struggle not to sob aloud.

  For pity, Arnold looked away. He avoided looking at Gerlach.

  “There’s one has had more than he can stand,” Gerlach said in a light voice. “Children ought to be weaned before they’re sent out.”

  Taken aback, Arnold thought: He’s pretending to be inhuman. But he was not sure. He smiled; he wanted to seem friendly.

  “It’s bad luck for them.”

  Gerlach gave him a curious glance.

  “What are you doing here like this? Are you a writer? What are you?”

  He felt the strongest reluctance to explain himself, or give his name. After a moment he spoke grudgingly.

  “My name is Coster, I’m a pilot.” He smiled briefly. “An air chauffeur. How I know your uncle, he happens to be an old friend of my employer — Mr William Gary.”

  Gerlach’s face changed subtly, as though he had drawn back from it.

  “I don’t know which is queerer — for a German to have a close friend who is English, or to have to remember all the time that we’re pariahs, without friends anywhere. Both seem to me rather comic. . . By the way, I’ve seen your Gary. He — I — well, I don’t understand my uncle.”

  He was not amused by the fellow’s having the impudence to dislike Gary. But why notice it? Leaning back in his chair, he said nothing. It vexed him that Edward did not come. He’s chasing his career, he thought drily. He decided to go, and beckoned the waiter, who came running.

  Gerlach looked at him with a smile in which there was as much gentleness as mockery.

  “I suppose you wouldn’t come to my — my flat? I can give you some coffee. Really coffee.”

  Arnold hesitated. He did not want to get further involved. Very much not. And he was ashamed of this distaste — it might only be moral laziness or cowardice.

  He noticed Gerlach’s hand — the right was gloved and lay immobile on his knee; with the other he gripped the edge of his chair so tightly that the nails were bloodless. He was stiffening himself against the refusal he expected. Arnold spoke almost without thought.

  “Thank you very much. I must say I’d like some coffee.”

  “Good. We can walk there.”

  They took a street which had not been cleared, even roughly. On both sides the houses had collapsed across it: by keeping more or less in the middle, they could pick their way through the chaos of scorched and shattered stone, but only very slowly. At the far end one house was still upright. The side walls and the wall at the back stood: the two lower floors had slid forward bodily into the street, leaving the upper half of the house balanced on the remaining walls; the roof had been torn away, exposing the attics; a floor immediately under them seemed intact except for gaping windows. Intact, and precarious, thrust out crazily over nothing. It was a freak.

  “Here we are.”

  “Good God.”

  Gerlach smiled. He led Arnold to the back of the house. A doorway — the door was gone — opened into what may have been a lobby outside a kitchen and was now only a narrow dark space behind the debris of the lower floors: when these collapsed onto the lobby, the thick beams forming its ceiling had sagged and held, so that something vaguely in the shape of a room was left. Against one wall there had been a staircase — it must have been the servants’ staircase, with stone steps. Fragments of these were still there; they jutted from the wall at irregular intervals, broken off like decayed teeth.

  “I’ll lead the way.”

  With his foot on the lowest stair Gerlach changed his mind.

  “You might as well inspect the property.”

  He had taken a torch out of his pocket, and he pointed it downward, at the back wall: Arnold could see the opening to another flight of stone steps leading down, no doubt to the cellars.

  “Come and look.”

  If he imagines he can put the wind up me — or if it’s a psychological experiment — but how like a German. . . He took pains to seem bored, and in silence followed Gerlach down the stairs, narrow, pinched closely between damp walls. It was not a long flight, and the cellar into which they emerged was not quite dark: light came into it from the street at the back of the house, from what had been an area grating before it became merely a gap between street and cellar.

  It must have been in use as an air-raid shelter. There were chairs and a deal table. In one wall a door swung open over blackness, unfathomable, like the blackness of a mine shaft. A few wide shallow steps clung to the edge of the chasm. Did they continue down and down — and how far? He spoke casually.

  “You don’t live here, do you?”

  “No, of course not. It was used during raids. Those steps —” he nodded towards the gaping blackness — “are the beginning of the emergency entrance to an underground hospital.”

  He went on calmly,

  “Nothing below there now but water and bodies. During the fighting with the Russians our people flooded it and drowned patients, nurses, doctors. Well, I’ve been told we did. There was a fellow, a surgeon, who tried to stop the order being carried out. He came and sat in this cellar for five days afterwards, staring down. I don’t know what good he thought that did. Perhaps he was planning a novel about it. He disappeared. It’s surprising how a man who, so to speak, has been saturated in death, suddenly makes a fuss about it.”

  Yes, surprising. . . Arnold felt an almost unmanageable anger. He could not keep it out of his voice.

  “If it’s true — a revolting story.”

  Gerlach shrugged one shoulder.

  “Do you think so?”

  They went up again into the lobby and he led the way up the steps clinging shakily to the wall. Some of them were missing, others broken off so close to the wall that there was room only for one foot; you had to arrange, the wall being on your left, to set your left foot on it, so that for a moment your right leg dangled in the air. Arnold disliked the climb intensely.

  They reached what had been the second floor and a passage, a short dark passage, leading to a landing.

  Here, they might have been in any normally behaved house. It was impossible that there was nothing below the floor they were standing on except space and a cascade of rubble. Arnold imagined that the floor sloped towards the front of the house — was it imagination? He followed Gerlach to a door. Opening it, Gerlach stood aside for him to walk into a room, long and wide, with three raggedly gaping windows, the frames torn out.

  A medley of furniture — a bed, armchairs, wooden kitchen chairs, pictures on the walls, small tables, a couch. On one wall an immense sheet of brown paper was covered with drawings of women, plump, naked, grotesque. They were rather pitiably lewd.

  A girl was seated, half kneeling, on the bed. And there were two young men. One of them had a black patch over an eye, and an empty sleeve on the same, the left, side. The other had lost both legs at the knee. Gerlach waved a hand at them in turn.

  “Bœsig, Kurt. Helmuth von Trotha.”

  The legless Trotha was sewing at some garment which might be a jacket. He apologised pleasantly for not
moving.

  “I ought to explain,” Gerlach said. “We are a group. I call us the Free Cripples. Free because we are cripples.”

  He smiled with great sweetness.

  “You must have noticed my hand. And my neck is cracked; they repaired it neatly, with steel. We’re lucky. We live here as merrily as Christians together, and share our profits. Our good little Kurt washes up in a café. Trotha mends for a tailor. He’s also our artist, but I don’t care for his efforts. Neither of them has the wits to make money — between them they earn about forty marks a week. I have my own occupations.”

  Smiling, he turned to the girl.

  “Ida, this Englishman is called Coster. Miss Lenbach.”

  She was younger than Arnold had thought, a very young girl. Her hair, dark and sleek, fell to her shoulders: she was tall, thin, with splendid eyes. She said something to him in German. He did not understand it. She laughed at his blank face and repeated in French,

  “I’m not a cripple.”

  “You can see she isn’t,” Gerlach said, lightly and happily: “she dances and the rest of it, with your officers. I don’t know — they may only be Americans. You’re going to drink their coffee. They pay her, you know, with coffee, chocolate, soap and all that. When she needs money I sell something for her on the free market. Selling antiques on commission is one of my occupations; I’ll get you anything you want — within reason.” He lifted his gloved hand. “Within reason. Don’t get it into your head that I make a fortune — I’m sharp, but I’m always being cheated by the really clever scoundrels. And I know it won’t last. One of these days someone will clean the country up, and ruin me.”

  He smiled, with indifference.

  “Ida lives with us. In fact, she’s the only one who has a right to live here — it’s her Pappi’s house. Lenbach — I mean her father — was a professor; he sent Ida to school in Paris. When your attentions to Berlin, my dear Coster, became too much of a good thing, they took her to Dresden — do you know, we all thought it would be spared, because it was only an enchanting city with no industries. And then one night this year, February, I think, your planes fired it from end to end. They bombed the flames afterwards. I believe you killed twenty-five thousand people — includes both Ida’s parents.”