Kaputt (38 page)

The column halted in the village and the soldiers were already scattering through the lanes between the orchards in search of water for their horses when the officer trotted up hurriedly. He was strangely pale and shouted,
"Weg, weg, Leute!
—Off, off, boys!" and, in rushing by, he touched with his whip the soldiers who had already plumped down on the steps of the houses.
"Weg, weg, Leute!"
he shouted. Then a rumor spread among the soldiers,
Fleck-typhus
—spot typhus—and the ghastly word crept along the column, down to the last gun that had stopped outside the village. All the men went back to their places, and the column moved on.
"Ja! Ja!"
The whips hissed through the gray air, and the artillerymen, in passing, cast frightened glances through the open windows into the houses where the corpses, bleak, colorless, livid and ghostly, were stretched out with wide-open eyes on the straw. The officer sat quietly on his horse in the center of the village square, close to Stalin's statue that lay tumbled into the mire. He watched the column moving past him and, now and again, he lifted his hand to his forehead and very slowly, with a gentle, tired movement, stroked his left eye.

Sunset was still far away, but the first evening shadows were gathering in the foliage of the woods that by degrees were growing darker, thicker, and of a deeper and duller blue. The officer's horse was restless, it pawed the muddy ground and threatened to rear or to gallop after the column that was already moving out of the village. The officer held the horse down to a walk, trailing the last gun carriage. He kept in the rear of the column and when he reached the last houses, he stood up in his stirrups and looked back. The road and the square were deserted, the houses were gloomy and empty. And yet there was that whisper, that crackling which the wind made running its rough tongue over the walls of mud and straw, that whisper and that crackling as if barefoot children and famished mice were following the column at a distance.

The officer raised his hand to his forehead and with a bored, sad gesture touched his eye. Suddenly a shot rang out from the village and a bullet hissed by his ear.

"Halt!" shouted the officer. The column stopped and a machine gun belonging to the rear battery began firing at the houses in the village. Other shots had followed the first one, and gradually the firing of the partisans became livelier, more insistent and angry. Two artillerymen were hit. The officer spurred his horse and galloped along the column shouting orders. Groups of soldiers, firing on the run, moved off through the fields to surround the village. "Man the guns!" shouted the officer. "Destroy everything!" The partisans continued firing. Another artilleryman was hit. Then the officer flew into a terrible rage,- he galloped through the fields urging the men on and placing the guns so they would bear on the village from all sides. A few houses caught fire. A hail of incendiary shells rained on the village, bursting open the walls, piercing the roofs, rending the trees, raising clouds of smoke. Fearlessly the partisans kept up their fire, but very soon the violent artillery fire turned the village into a pyre. And there, from amid the smoke and flames, a group of partisans, their arms raised high, ran out. Some were old, the majority young, and among them was a woman. The officer leaned over the saddle and looked them over one by one. Sweat was dripping from his brow and streaming down his face. "Shoot them!" he said in a harsh voice, and pressed his eye with his hand. His voice was bored, perhaps even the gesture with which he pressed his eye expressed boredom.

"Feuer!"
shouted the Feldwebel. After the rattle of the tommy guns was over, the officer turned and looked at the fallen. He made a sign with his riding whip.
"Jawohl,"
said the Feldwebel firing his pistol into the pile of corpses. Then he raised his hand, the gunners harnessed the horses to the guns and the column formed and started off down the road.

The officer, bending over the horse's mane, his hands resting on the pommel of the saddle, followed the column keeping about fifty paces back of the last gun. The hoofbeats, dulled by the mud of the plain, already sounded distant, when suddenly a rifle bullet hissed by his ear. "Halt!" he shouted. The column stopped; the rear battery again opened fire on the village. All the battery's machine guns rattled away at the blazing houses. But slowly and regularly a few rifle shots pierced the cloud of smoke. "Four, five, six..." counted the officer aloud. "It's only one rifle shooting, only one man." Suddenly a shadow with raised arms ran out through the cloud of smoke.

The soldiers grabbed the partisan and pushed him in front of the officer who, bending from his saddle, looked him over carefully. "
Ein Kind!
—A child!" he said softly. The boy was not more than ten years old, thin, squalid; his clothes were in rags, his face black, his hair singed, his hands scorched.
Ein Kind!
The boy looked at the officer calmly and blinked; now and again he raised his hand slowly and blew his nose with his fingers. The officer slipped from the saddle and winding the reins around his wrist, stood facing the boy. He looked tired and bored.
Ein Kind!
He had a son at home, in Berlin, at Witzleben Square, a boy about the same age. Maybe Rudolf was a year older. This boy really looks like a child,
ein Kind!
The officer struck his boot with the riding whip, and the horse pawed the ground with an impatient hoof and rubbed its muzzle against the officer's shoulder. Two steps away the interpreter was waiting at attention with an irritated expression. "He's only a child,
ein Kind!
I did not come to Russia to make war on children." Suddenly the officer bent over the boy and asked him whether any other partisans were left in the village. The officer's voice was so tired, so full of boredom that it almost leaned on the interpreter who angrily repeated the question in Russian.

"Niet,"
replied the boy.

"Why did you fire at my men?"

The boy looked at the officer with a surprised air; the interpreter repeated the question twice.

"You know already. Why do you ask?" replied the boy. His voice was calm and clear. There was no trace of fear, no indifference in his tone. He faced the officer squarely and, before answering, came to attention like a soldier.

"Do you know who the Germans are?" asked the officer in a low voice.

"Aren't you a German yourself,
tovarish
officer?" countered the boy.

The officer made a sign, and the Feldwebel, grasping the boy by the arm, took his gun from his belt.

"Not here, farther away," said the officer turning his back.

The boy moved off, taking quick steps so as to keep up with the Feldwebel. Suddenly the officer turned, raised his riding whip and shouted, "
Ein Moment!"
The Feldwebel turned, looked perplexedly at the officer and came back pushing the boy with his outstretched arm.

"What time is it?" asked the officer. Without waiting for a reply, he began to pace up and down in front of the boy, striking his boots with the riding whip. The horse pulled at the reins and followed, snorting and shaking its head. Finally the officer stopped before the boy, stared at him for a long time in silence, then said in a slow tired voice full of boredom: "Listen, I don't want to hurt you. You are a child, and I am not waging war against children. You have fired at my men, but I am not waging war on children.
Lieber Gott,
I am not the one who invented war." The officer broke off, then went on in a strangely gentle voice: "Listen, I have one glass eye. It is difficult to tell which is the real one. If you can tell me at once, without thinking about it, which of the two is the glass eye, I will let you go free."

"The left eye," replied the boy promptly.

"How did you know?"

"Because it is the one that has something human in it."

Louise was breathing heavily, clutching my arm.

"And the boy? What happened to the boy?" she said in a low voice.

"The officer kissed him on both cheeks, clothed him in gold and silver and, having summoned a royal coach drawn by eight white horses and an escort of a hundred horse guards with shining breast-plates, sent the boy to Berlin where Hitler welcomed him like a king's son amid a cheering crowd and married him to his daughter."

"Yes, I know," said Louise. "That's how it was bound to end."

"I met that officer again later at Soroca on the Dniester—a very serious man, a good father, but a true Prussian, a true
Piffke
as the Viennese say. He talked to me about his family, about his work. He was an electrical engineer. He also spoke about his son Rudolf, a boy ten years old. It was really difficult to tell the glass eye. He told me that the best glass eyes are made in Germany." "Stop it!" said Louise. "Every German has a glass eye," I said.

XII. A Basket of Oysters

W
E
WERE
left alone. The two blind soldiers, led by the nurse, had left. Ilse, who had not spoken until then, smiled and looked at me. "Glass eyes," she said, "are like glass birds. They cannot fly."

"Oh, Ilse, do you still believe that eyes fly? What a baby you are, Ilse!" said Louise.

"Eyes are caged birds," said Ilse. "The eyes of those two soldiers were empty cages."

"Blind people's eyes are dead birds," said Louise.

"Blind people cannot look outward," said Ilse.

"They are looking at themselves in a mirror," said Louise.

"Hitler's eyes," said Ilse, "are full of dead people's eyes. They are full of dead people's eyes. There are hundreds, thousands of them." She seemed like a baby, Ilse. She was a baby full of odd whims and strange fancies. Perhaps because her mother was English it occurred to me that Ilse was a picture of Innocence such as Gainsborough might have painted it. No, I was wrong. Gainsborough painted women as if they were landscapes, with all the candor, the proud sadness and the languishing decorum of the English landscape. There was something in Ilse, something whimsical, a sort of fanciful madness, that is lacking in the English landscape and in Gainsborough's paintings. Ilse was more like the portrait of Innocence as Goya might have painted it. That blond hair, short and curly, that milk spreading over the face amid the roses of dawn, those lively blue eyes with gray specks around the pupils, that graceful habit of tilting her head on her shoulder with mischievous yielding made her look like a portrait of Innocence painted in the Goya style of "The Caprices," against the background of a pink and gray horizon of a deserted Castilian landscape, parched, swept by a high invisible wind, stained here and there with the reflection of blood.

Ilse had been married three years and still looked like a girl. Her husband had left for the front two months before and was lying in a field hospital near Voronezh with a splinter in his shoulder. Ilse had written to him: "I'm going to have a baby.
Heil
Hitler!" Expecting a child was the only way to escape the decree about compulsory work. Ilse did not want to work in a factory, she did not want to be a factory hand. She preferred to have a baby. "The only way of making Hitler a cuckold," said Ilse, "is to expect a baby." Louise blushed and shyly reproached her, "Ilse!" And Ilse said, "Don't be so Potsdam, Louise!"

"Eyes are made of horrible stuff," I said, "of slimy, dead stuff. You cannot hold them in your fingers. They slip through your fingers like snails."

During April 1941, I was traveling from Belgrade to Zagreb. The war against Yugoslavia had been over for several days, the Free State of Croatia was just born,- Ante Pavelic was ruling in Zagreb with his
ustashi
bands. In all the villages large portraits of Ante Pavelic, Poglavnik of Croatia, were pasted on the walls, along with the notices and decrees of the new national Croatian state. The first spring days were here and a transparent silvery mist rose from the Danube and the Drava. The Fruska hills were melted into slight green waves spread with vineyards and wheat fields. The light green of the vineyards and the darker green of the wheat followed one another, alternated and mingled in a play of light and shade below a silken blue sky. We were having the first clear days after weeks of rain, the roads looked like streams of mud. I was forced to stop for the night at Ilok, midway between Novy Sad and Vukovar. In the only inn in the area, supper was served on a large common dining table, around which sat armed peasants, policemen in Serbian uniforms with Croatian badges on their breasts, and refugees who had been ferried across the river between Palank and Ilok.

After supper we left the room and went out to the terrace. The Danube glistened in the moonlight and the lights of the trawlers and barges could be seen appearing and disappearing among the trees. A vast silvery peace sank into the green Fruska hills. It was curfew. Patrols of armed peasants knocked at the doors of Jewish homes for the evening checking, calling out names in monotones. These doors were marked with a red Star of David. The Jews came to the windows and said, "We are here, we are at home." The peasants shouted, "
Dobro! Dobro!"
and banged the butts of their guns on the ground. The large three-colored posters of the
proglas
of the new Zagreb government pierced in vivid red, white and blue splotches the moonlight on the walls of the houses. I was dead tired and toward midnight I stretched out on my bed. I lay on my back watching through the open window the moon climbing gently over the trees and the roofs. A huge portrait of Ante Pavelic, the chief of the new Croatian state, was posted on the house across the street in which the Ilok
ustashis
were housed. The portrait was printed in black on thick paper faintly tinted with green: the Poglavnik stared at me with his large black eyes, deep-sunk below a low, stern and obstinate brow. His mouth was wide, thick lipped, his nose straight and fleshy, his ears huge. I never would have thought that any man's ears could be so vast or so long. They came halfway down his cheeks, ludicrous and monstrous; they surely were drawn in the wrong perspective—a mistake of the artist who had drawn the portrait.