Earthly Powers (66 page)
"What's in here?" I took it.
"Disposition of things," she said vaguely. "Domenico will be disappointed, no money for him, a, bit in trust for the twins, very little. The Davidsbundler gets the bulk of the estate, Dr. Nussbaum in Chiasso has everything organised. As for the other things, that's facts. One or two photographs, personal stories. If you still feel sick don't look yet. Don't open up till you get back. Back where?"
"Paris. But not for long. I thought of taking chambers in Albany. What is all this?"
"Whatever it is, publish. I'm egoistic enough to want to be remembered. Other names—there aren't any other names but there are a few helpers, quite a few. They have to go on living. I think you can be trusted."
"Concetta! How can you say that?" The hurt was sharp.
"It's a question of your trade. You deal too much with unreality. Don't make a novel out of all this."
"Novels can be more real than—"
"These are bad bad times. This is the worst century that history has ever known. And we're only a third of the way through it. There have to be martyrs and witnesses."
"They're the same thing, you know."
"You see what I mean," she said kindly. "A certain tendency to frivolity. I know that martyr means witness. You're too used to dealing with words." She suddenly writhed and I saw for the first time the evil of pain: that face, comely still despite age and disease, had ceased to be comely. "I have to use your—It may take quite a little—Jesus—" Shocked, I helped her toward the Abort. It was clear that she was past muscular control.
CHAPTER 48
If I may anticipate, I did what had to be done with Concetta's material in 1937, in London, having taken over from Aldous and Maria Huxley Apartment E2 in Albany, Piccadilly, they, with their son Matthew and Gerald Heard, sailing into American exile on the Normandie on April 7 in that year. I had finished with Paris, which was animated by political broils and smelt of various kinds of corruption. Concetta's big buff envelope contained photographs of men and women recently emerged from places of torture and interrogation on Hedemannstrasse and Papenstrasse and other houses of correction, some facts about Buchenwald near Weimar, a concentration camp set up as early as 1934, and other well-attested evidence of atrocities mostly committed by the Schutzstaffel or 55 as it was affectionately called by its members. In comparison with what was to be discovered later, Concetta's revelations of Nazi diabolism were fairly mild but, as Carlo was to point out to me, evil must never be measured quantitatively: to shove the face of a rabbi into his own shit and let him suffocate was evil enough. The millions we were to hear about later, Jews and Slays and gipsies and Aryan defectors, still form a body of ghosts too vast to impinge in palpable horror on the imagination, and one of the photographs Concetta had obtained remained and remains for me a sufficient testimony to German Faustianism, or soul-selling for secular power. The face is that of a woman schoolteacher, a pure Teuton from Bitterfeld, who had taught some traditional humanist doctrine now heterodox and, betrayed by members of the Hitlerjugend in her class, been subjected to a brief course of rehabilitation. The face was virtually mouthless. A black toothless pulp under a broken nose would no longer be able to recite Goethe; an eye was missing and an ear had been cut off. This was merely what had been a face. For the body the photograph was not able to speak.
Concetta knew that the Nazi persecution of the Jews was only one aspect of the infamous philosophy of the satanic regime, but she had the foresight to envision it as the most spectacular of their achievements. The Crystal Night or night of the smashing, which inaugurated post factum the official mass pogrom, did not take place until November 9, 1938 (two days after Herschel Grynszpan killed an official of the German Embassy in Paris), and the threefold disposal of the Jews—(a) seize their property (b) exploit them as slaves (3) kill, despoil, processhad not yet been presented as a formula, nor had it begun to conflict with the wasteful Final Solution of which Heinrich Himmler (God forgive me; wait for the next chapter) was already dreaming. Concetta, as an Aryan, to use their sickening pseudoscientific cant, and as a Christian, already was well enough qualified to identify herself with millions who were in purely ideological conflict with the regime, a conflict very speedily resolved, but she elected to be considered Jewish and worked for the Jews as an adoptive sister or mother.
Her attempt to have herself accepted as a Jew by the very officials who were persecuting Jews was, on the evidence of the diary which formed a major part of the material she entrusted to me, more comic than heroic. In Hanover, by dint of loud German, the flashing of her Italian passport, and intimations of urgent messages from Rome, she had persuaded underlings at the 55 headquarters to admit her to the presence of a certain OberbannfŸhrer Hummel. At first properly polite to one who seemed to represent herself as a senior official of a sister party of villains, Hummel allowed his jaw to drop progressively as he heard what he took to be a kind of madness or, more probably, a dangerous trickery masquerading as madness. For she said that Judaism was not a matter of race, since there were no physiognomic or hematic indices which could distinguish Jews from, say, Germans; Judaism was a matter of faith and she, though born an American Italian Catholic, had decided to adopt the faith of Abraham and Moses. What did he, the OberbannfŸhrer, propose to do about it? Nothing, he said: he had no authority as yet to persecute foreign nationals of the Jewish faith. Ah, she riposted, so it was only German Jews—who had sinned against the light? No no, the Nazi ethnologists accepted that the Jews of the entire mondial Diaspora formed a homogeneous body infinitely dangerous to the cause of Aryan civilization, but Germany recognised the unfortunate limitations of its own purificatory or punitive authority. Limitations, she said, which will not last forever? No no, it was hoped not. So then Germany was to declare war in time on the Jews of other nations, which meant, of course, the entirety of those nations, since it would be unthinkable to segregate, in the more civilised nations, Jews from Gentiles? May I tell my friends in America that Germany is already contemplating war? No no no. (He was a very stupid Oberbannfiihrer.) Good, she said, so I shall report your imperfect anti-Semitism to the appropriate authorities in Berlin. No no no. Very well, persecute me. As a Jew I demand to be persecuted. I shall sit outside in that corridor that smells of SS carbolic and await persecution. I have, of course, already informed the Berlin correspondents of the major American newspapers of my conversion. They will be interested to learn what you propose to do. Concetta was not exactly thrown out but she was persuaded to leave through threats of prosecution for trespass on private, or SS, property.
It was sad to have to report that Concetta did not meet, from the Jews she contacted in eastern Germany, the cooperation she had, in her capacity of willing helper, the right to expect. For many of the Jews mistrusted her posture of conversion, regarding it in some instances as a frivolous blasphemy. Like the Nazi theorists themselves, they considered that the Jews were a race different from other races and, moreover, a very special race, a chosen race on which God, to show his exclusive affection, had willed suffering. In a sense, it sometimes seemed to her, the Nazis and the Jews had been made for each other: no nut without a cracker, no cracker without a nut. A little old lady whose luggage was too innocent to be inspected as she crossed the border at Basle, she had been lucky enough to have her suitcase opened by the Zoll only twice, and on those occasions she had not been carrying arms. She brought altogether something like thirty lightweight Webley-Wilkinsons and Smith and Wessons into Germany from Switzerland, complete with ammunition. Her view was that, when SS rank and file, drunk and euphoric, tried to break into decent Jewish homes on a Saturday night, they should be resisted with the odd bullet and that would soon cool them down. With the elder Jews this advocation of violence was abominable, but some of the younger Jews actually wounded and even killed various of their oppressors (a SturmbannfŸhrer was found shot on a rubbish heap in Finsterwalde), though the retribution was terrible. Concetta's other schemes included the importation of SS uniforms with insignia of high rank (made by a tailor in Zug), to be worn by young courageous Jews representing themselves as visiting brass and ready to deflect arrogantly acts of persecution with alleged changes of policy in Berlin. All this, alas, was mere play and dangerous play too. Totally harmless, pathetically so, were the little pamphlets she had had prepared (one of them written, and very perfunctorily, by the long exiled Hesse) and printed in Geneva—on Hitler's Jewish ancestry with genealogical table, a plea from Himmler's dying Jewish mother to stop this nonsense, a letter to the world from a dying Jewish child. Concetta did most good with money, which rides over even the most perverse ideology. It may be yet money that will save the world. But no man or woman was then able to arrest a process which seemed as much willed by the destroyed as by the destroyers.
I put together a little book called A Heroine of Our Time, which stated who Concetta was (I did not blow the secret that Domenico had blurted that night in the Garden of Allah), what she did, and how she died. My publishers on both sides of the Atlantic demurred when the typescript and its accompanying photographs were presented to them. What the hell was I, a popular novelist and playwright, playing at? I had already brought out a heavy book on religion, and now here I was with a piece of hagiography which would please few and anger many. Germany was a friendly nation, none of the allegations presented could be proved, the photographs (which could be trick ones anyway and, anyway, could not be shown to be of the provenance stated) were obscene and unpublishable. It was not, you will remember, till the outbreak of war that the British Government had the guts to publish, through His Majesty's Stationery Office, its white paper on the Nazi treatment of German nationals. By then it was considered too late to bring out my book on Concetta, paper not being available anyway, it all having been commandeered to print death certificates for the entire British nation, soon to be destroyed, except presumably for its bureaucrats, by the Luftwaffe. I had fifty or so copies of A Heroine of Our Time printed at my own expense by a firm in Loughborough. It is now, as you may know, a collector's item.
That theological book, by the way, caused little stir and sold little. It was reviewed equally scathingly by the Tablet and the Church Times and was publicly burned as Godless in the town of Branchville, South Carolina. But non importa, Carlo said: the seed had been sown, nobody in the future would be able to say that the Christian world had not been warned. He made the message of salvation seem strangely ominous.
CHAPTER 49
I got there late, but I got there. A boy called Heini was giving out tracts (title in closeup: Hunger und Not in Sowjetrussland). Cut to a café with a young Communist, walleyed, reading the latest issue of VorwŠrts. Cut to a street: Communists, including walleyed one, have grabbed Heini's tracts and are throwing them into a canal. Cut to another street with Communists clawing down Nazi posters. Now begin chase sequence. Heini is chased by Communists, including walleyed one in the lead. He takes refuge in fairground resounding with calliope music. He looks for hiding place, finds it behind throbbing generator truck. Communists find him and Nazistically kick and beat him to death while trivial music continues in the background. Walleyed one delivers booted coup de grace. Before Heini dies he murmurs the opening line of the "Marsch der Hitler jugend": a heavenly choir takes it up, crescendo. Closing montage of marching Nazis, swastika banners, snarling Hitler, song continuing: Unsre Fahne flattert uns voran In die Zukunft zieh'n wir Mann fur Mann. Wir marschieren fŸr Hitler durch Nacht und durch Rot, Mit der Fahne der Jugend fŸr Freiheit und BrotÉ I got out schnell as ENDE came up and the audience started cheering. Tripe, filthy, tendentious, sickening. Thugs against thugs. I very badly needed a drink. Just round the corner of WindmŸhlenstrasse, on, I seem to remember, Korngoldstrasse, there was a red-lighted cabaret sign: Die Rote Gans. A red neon goose goose-stepped endlessly on wheeled feet. I went down the steps toward stuffiness and Germanic jazz, Weillian, somehow already crammed with Heimweh. A sad elderly waiter showed me to a table and I ordered blond beer and schnapps. The place had not yet begun to fill up. A little man not unlike Goebbels was singing "Wenn die Elisabeth nicht so schšne Beine hŠtt' ..." As I drank a few men in uniform came in, rank-and-file SS in black, perhaps fellow auditors of that damnable film. The management turned on the revolving kaleidoscopic lights and we were all fantasised into a Fritz Lang dream, though coloured. I thought of Concetta and worried. When she had come that morning out of my bathroom, spent, a rind, tottering, she would not let me telephone the hotel doctor, arrange an ambulance, anything. A large tot of cognac and then she would go. I could ring for a taxi. But where was she staying? This surely I had to know. But she would not tell me. Brutally I said, "Someone will have to know sometime where you are. Someone will have to take you away." She still would not tell me: it was as if she had things so arranged that there would, when the time came, be no problem in locating her. I didn't like this. Nor, to be frank, did I wish to be involved. I had already been too much involved with the Campanati family. I had my own life to live, books to write. I looked troubled at the small dance floor. The band was playing "Eine kleine Reise im FrŸhling." Three couples were stiffly fox-trotting. The SS men were calling for WTilli. "Willi, Tilli," they called.
At the end of the fox-trot Willi appeared to applause. It was the little man not unlike Goebbels, now dressed as a nun. He went into a dirty routine in falsetto Berlin dialect, apparently holding off a dirty priest, he/she mincing about its being Blutscfiande or incest since he/she was a sister and he a father. Finally he sang "Auf Wiedersehn": "Und wenn du einsam bist, Einsam und alleine, o sŸsse denk' an mich, Dass ich auch einsam bin und weine."
