Earthly Powers (79 page)

       "I honestly," Carlo told him honestly, "don't know what to do with you." Liebeneiner sneered faintly but triumphantly. "But," Carlo said, "there's some truth in the view that only when a man is in severe danger or excruciating pain can his brain be jerked out of the torpor of an unquestioning conviction. Have you yourself, my son, ever participated in the administration of torture?"

       "I have ordered it, I have watched it."

       "And also massacre, or liquidation, or mass elimination, or whatever you people call it?"

       "It was a duty."

       "You felt no shock of horror, no sympathy, no remorse?"

       "It was a duty."

       "Well, God help me, I must do my duty too." Liebeneiner did not now sneer.

       He said, "I knew you would come to it. You preach mercy and kindness and tolerance and the other Jewish-Christian properties, but you find that you have to use cruelty in the end. It is in the history of your Church, with the Spanish Inquisition and the Saint Bartholomew Massacre and millions of martyrs burned in the name of your Christus." He spoke in German. So now did Carlo, who said: "Well, you should approve. It is the Nazi way."

       "It is in order when conducted against enemies of the Reich. It is not in order when used by inferior races against the master race."

       "Are you saying," Carlo said, "that I belong to a race inferior to yours? I speak an older Indo-European tongue or an Aryan tongue as you would have it. I have more claim in terms of history to belong to a superior civilization than do you. I am of the people of Virgil and Horace and Lucretius. Of Dante Alighieri and Leonardo and Michelangelo and—need I go on?"

       "Your civilization has been corrupted by Christianity."

       "My civilization is a product of Christianity. You Nazis have nothing except barks and yelps and marching songs. What you had as members of the Holy Roman Empire you have stupidly expunged. But there's not much point in appealing to your reason. It's your soul I'm after."

       To get at Liebeneiner's soul Carlo Campanati called in a couple of partisans, one of whom, Giuseppe Chinol, had worked in an abattoir, and the other, Enrico Tramontana, had made coffins. They were burly men but not naturally given to cruelty.

       Carlo said to Liebeneiner, "All this should be fairly simple. Your arm will be twisted to near breaking point behind your back. When the pain becomes intolerable I ask you to revile, curse, reject your Nazi faith and the monsters who represent it. Then the pain will stop. I will know and you will know that you will not mean what you say, scream rather. It will just be a device for stopping pain. But it will be something to hear the words of repudiation. For you as well as for me. It will be the first time you will have spoken them."

       "I will not speak them. You're a fool."

       "Oh, you'll speak them."

       And he did. Vomiting his breakfast into the latrine pail, sweating from pain and humiliation, Liebeneiner seemed to groan some ancient German prayer for forgiveness. Carlo listened kindly and with interest. "You're praying," he said. "To whom? Adolf Hitler? One of Wagner's deities? I do not know of any Teutonic tree god with the name Scheiss. But I should not be surprised if there is one."

       The Nazis had had little experience of martyrdom. On the fourth day of his reclamation treatment, with Giuseppe Chinol ready for the harmless but agonising twisting of his arm, Liebeneiner said surely the torture was unnecessary: he was quite ready to vilify his own faith and race and masters without torture. It was the formulae of apostasy that the bishop wanted after all, not the pain. It was not in his Christian office to want pain. Carlo shook his head sadly. He said, "If the pain is administered regularly, as it will be for as long as I think necessary, you will more and more find that you need to identify with some figure, real or mythical, who suffered even greater pain than your own. Such identification has always been necessary in the long history of religious persecution. It both exalts the suffering and eases it. Unfortunately you Nazis have no real mythology of persecution. Horst Wessel? Nothing. Thugs punched in the jaw in Nazi-Communist street fights? Hitler in jail? No. A Nazi in pain is in a situation for which his faith has not prepared him. You see your difficulty. Bene, Giuseppe. Adesso comincia la tortura."

       Liebeneiner screamed. "I hate Hitler, the Nazi creed is inhuman, the Germans are not the master race, for Christ's sake stop it."

       Giuseppe Chinol desisted. "What did you say then?" Carlo asked.

       "Bastard. Filthy barbarous swine. Filthy fucking barbarous decadent bastard."

       "Words," Carlo said, "you must have heard from the beaten-up opponents of your own regime. You see how it's possible to learn even from people you despise. I note that in your transport you called out the name Christus."

       "It was just a noise. It had noÉ I have to vomit."

       "Vomit, my son." And while Liebeneiner retched Carlo looked sickly through a deck of large-size glossy photographs. They were part of the record of Nazi infamy in the work and death camps. The Nazis themselves had compiled this record. Their philosophy told them that there was no infamy in it. So perish all the enemies of the beneficent darkness. The bundle of photographs had been left behind in the house on the Via Giuseppe Verdi which had served as headquarters for the SS. It was a spiritual document. It had been put into the hands of the spiritual leader of the community, who now puffed one of the rank last of his stored Tuscan cigars. "I'll leave these with you to look over," Carlo said when pale sweating Liebeneiner sat again on the edge of his cot. "You'll feel something you haven't felt before—a certain kinship with some of these victims. Of course, your sufferings have been nothing in comparison with theirs. The war, by the way, is as good as over. The American Fifth Army is in Milan. The Russians draw near to Berlin. You may not wish to believe me. But if I set you free now you will certainly be torn to pieces by Italian citizens who have liberated themselves from your nauseous yoke. Shall I set you free? Ah, so you believe me. Consider yourself fortunate to be in my charge. I assure you that you shall not leave it until you are a changed man. I will come to see you again this afternoon. Bringing the good Enrico with me. A fine strong boy who would not normally wish to hurt a fly. Ah, the things you people have made us do."

       Or words to that effect. It was only after a full month of beneficent torture that Liebeneiner began to see that his place was with the victims and that a philosophy of brutal overlordship availed him nothing in his sufferings. He had a vision of Adolf Hitler crucified—naked, with a creampuff paunch, quiff and little moustache intact, crying out Eli Eli lama sabacthani? The image was, of course, absurd. Hitler was by definition not one of the crucifiable. Yet he, Liebeneiner, faithful servant of the FŸhrer, had been granted by the FŸhrer no metaphysical or theological defence against agony of the body and humiliation of the soul. The FŸhrer had let him down. By accident Giuseppe Chinol broke his arm. He swooned. The bishop was extravagantly penitent. Dr. Praz was brought in to set the arm and bind it. There was no more torture for a time. Carlo waited patiently for Liebeneiner to experience a liberating dream. He knew that a change of heart was often signalled by a sequence of nightmares culminating in a sleeping vision of hell that turned into a revelation of light. The trouble with Liebeneiner's soul was that it was not much of a soul. It was a soul made for a simplistic philosophy like that of the Nazis. And yet it was a human soul that had issued from the hand of God. God loved his own creation. He loved Liebeneiner. All he asked of Liebeneiner was such reciprocal love (and there was love in his name) as he was capable of giving, gratitude for the gift of moral freedom, a minimal charity to others, humility. Carlo came every morning with Liebeneiner's breakfast—goat's milk, mineral water, bread, jam—and asked him about his dreams. One morning Liebeneiner said that he had dreamed he was dead.

       "Ah. You are, of course, officially dead."

       "I saw my dead body. It was on a great battlefield. I looked down on my own body and thousands of others. I wept."

       "You wept for your own body or for all the bodies?"

       "I don't know. I wept. The bodies were of my comrades dead in battle."

       "You couldn't see that they were your comrades. They were just the bodies of dead men. And yet they were your comrades."

       "There were women too. Naked. Everybody was naked. I could not stop weeping. When I woke up my eyes were wet."

       Carlo looked at him kindly. Liebeneiner had not been permitted to shave since his delivery to the episcopal cellars. Nor had his hair been cut. He had been given regular warm water for washing and did not smell, except for a kind of spiritual stench that Carlo had found emanating from all the Nazis he had met, even when they were meticulously bathed and cologned. Evil and stupidity both had their distinctive odours, but it was sometimes hard to tell one from the other. Liebenejner did not now smell too bad. With his unshorn hair and beard, which were dark brown greying, he could have passed for the Nazi idea of a Jewish intellectual. "You'll be going home soon," Carlo said. "Somehow. MŸnster's a long way away. And there's not much left of Minster. I pray your wife and daughter are still alive. Think what a joy it will be for them to see a husband and father resurrected from the tomb."

       "Is the war over?"

       "Very nearly. Your Hitler wasn't much of a prophet, was he? A thousandyear Reich, indeed. It was a stupid dream. What other dreams have you to tell me?"

       "I dreamed it was Christmas and I was a boy. And there was the Christ child in the manger."

       "Oh, you bloody sentimental Germans. Cruelty and sentimentality and noth ing between the two. It took a bell of a long time to Christianize you, and you still don't see what it's all about.

       Wit blankem Eis und weissem Schnee Weihnachten kommt-juchhe! juchhe!'

       It's time for another lesson. I shall bring my black cat down here and cut its throat with a kitchen knife. It's a wicked cat, always eating birds. You'll enjoy seeing the blood, won't you?"

       "No no no no no."

       "You blasted Germans. Shall I bring a Jew down then? That won't be quite as bad, will it? A Jew with a beard just like yours, and we'll shove his head into your latrine bucket and let him suffocate in good clean Nazi excreta. You'd better get yourself ready for the great outside world, Herr Liebeneiner. I've had enough of you."

       Liebeneiner looked wary. His face had, during his benign incarceration, gradually learned qualities of foxy alertness and suspicion: it had become a prisoner's face, almost a human one. "I will go," he said, "when it is safe to go. Not before."

       "Yes," Carlo said, "of course. You want to snuggle down here in your burrow with your blankets and your three meals a day. Rather like being in the Nazi Party, isn't it? You don't have to face the big dirty world where the winds have blown down the signposts. The world where moral decisions have to be made. Look, I have no specific desire to turn you into a Christian. I merely want to remind you what it's like to be a member of the human race, the only race there is, there's no master race and never was. The devil got into your people, and I'm not using a metaphor. A colossal force of evil thrust in and you were all too damned stupid to recognise it for what it was. Make no mistake about it, your Adolf Hitler was a big man. I say was because it seems certain that he's now dead. A real incarnation of evil, very rare in the world's history. If I could have had him down here as I've had you I'd have had to engage in a strenuous program of exorcism. I might not have won but I'd have had to try. I might have been blasted to hell myself in the process. As for you, there's been nothing really to work on. Not much there, Herr Liebeneiner. You always were a kind of vacuum which the Nazi Party kindly filled up for you. I'd be happier if you had real convictions, not just slogans. But, by God, I should think you've done a lot of harm in your time. Tomorrow morning I want to hear it all from your own mouth. It will be a sort of purgation. Then you can have a haircut but if I were you I'd keep that beard. It doesn't look like a property of the Herren yolk. I'll get you some old clothes from somewhere and some army boots. Then you'll start walking home. You'll have a lot of interesting decisions to make on the way. Whether or not to steal, for instance, and from whom. Whether to help less lucky wanderers than yourself. What lies to tell to the various allied soldiers you'll meet. You'll have a chance to turn into a human being. Later perhaps you could write me a letter, I'll be sincerely interested to hear from you."

       Liebeneiner sulked. "So we were all cheated."

       "God be praised that you're beginning to understand."

       "We won't be cheated next time."

       "O suffering Christ on the cross, there's nothing that can be done with you people. It's not sin, it's sheer damned stupidity.O dear God in heaven."

       "May your God," Liebeneiner said, "consign Adolf Hitler to a deep and eternal hell. God's curse on all of them. And you don't have to twist my arm to make me say that. It's the Jews who've won, isn't it? And the Bolsheviks. The international capitalists and the international Communists and liberals and international decadent freethinkers."

       Carlo now felt that he had spoken too hastily in crying out on Nazi stupidity. "You can say," he said, "that your philosophy of power and intolerance hasn't worked. It's been defeated. Therefore it was wrong. If you Germans want to be the one great race you'll have to think of something else. You've killed off a very great part of the Jewish people. Perhaps you'll have to fill in the vacuum. The Germans will have to turn themselves into the new Jews. Strength through suffering. Kraft durch Leid. I'll see you tomorrow."

       The next day Carlo Campanati heard it all from Liebeneiner's mouth. Confession without absolution. But it was all so statistical, so abstract. No pride in butchery and certainly no remorse. But a measure of self-pity, for pity is built into the human psyche and has to find an object somewhere: the stress of rule, the problems of organisation, the screams and stenches that offended Liebeneiner's delicate sensibility. Finally, the waste. In the middle of the following night Liebeneiner, well-shod, warm-coated, wearing a cast-off suit donated by Carlo's chaplain, without money and without papers of identification, was sent on his way. He gave himself his mother's name, which was Waschneck. Two years later Carlo Campanati received a letter, in English, from Helmut Waschneck. He was teaching in a Gymnasium in Lippstadt in the British Zone. His wife and daughter and himself were well. They attended service regularly in the local Lutheran church. There was a great German for you, Martin Luther. There was another great German, Johann Sebastian Bach. The Germans had a great destiny, and that was to civilise the world. Communism remained the big enemy. It could only be countered by the example of democratic freedom. By God, the world would yet see that its only hope lay in systematic democracy and systematic free moral choice. Germany would show everybody. Deutschland über alles. All that Germany lacked was a leader.