The 40s: The Story of a Decade (44 page)

The floor show seemed to me absolutely marvellous. I had forgotten how good such things could be, had hardly realized they were still going on. There were a girl who did an Oriental tumbling dance; a girl who sang in Greek and English; a couple who did a folk dance from one of the islands, fresh and animated and gone in a flash; and the great feature: a famous woman dancer who was also a romantic legend. I learned about
her from Eleni and her mother. The Germans had had her on the carpet, the elder but far-from-old lady explained to me, for her well-known association with the English. But she had stood up to them with perfect sang-froid:
“Que j’ai eu un amant anglais—même deux, trois, quatre,”
she was supposed to have replied,
“qu’est-ce que ça fait?”
She had had German lovers, too, Eleni thought; she had run through all the nationalities and always remained herself—and Eleni added with admiration:
“Elle ment avec une facilité inouïe.”
I saw that the myth of this performer, the great dancer who is also a great courtesan, had come to mean a good deal in Athens, which had been so much without the luxuries and so much at the mercy of the war. She was the devotee of art and love who had endured through all the hardship and conflict, and she was almost a sacred figure.

And she
was
extremely good: very beautiful, quick, sure, and dashing, and able to get into everything she did a personality of enchanting insolence. Before one knew it, she would have leapt on a chair, and would be bending down and kissing one of the diners, and then would hit him over the head with her tambourine. I had avoided such black-market places: one night at one of the too well-supplied restaurants in Rome, where we had been dining at outdoor tables, a small mob had gathered behind us and begun reaching in for the food, and we had seen them dispelled with brutality—an old woman knocked down in the street—by the strong-arm men from the restaurant. But I succumbed to the brilliance of this night club, and, since I had been there without my long-distance glasses and we had been sitting in a corner a long way to the rear of the show, I decided to go again and see it better. I got up another party the next night with a man I knew in U.N.R.R.A. and two of the U.N.R.R.A. girls, and this time we had an excellent table in the middle and on the edge of the floor. The girls, who had been there often, said we were right in the spot to be kissed. This time some of the acts, seen distinctly, turned out rather disappointing; but the fascinating dancer was wonderful. Her first appearance was a ballroom number, which had its climax in a piece of business—an ecstatic start and smile as her partner, kneeling, kissed her midriff—that, for daring, style, naturalness, and timing, took your breath away. When she came out for the second time, she seemed to be some sort of priestess or idol—possibly Javanese; and, exhilarated as I was by the excellent white wine—well cooled and non-resinated—I was preparing to fall under her spell when she abruptly disappeared from the stage. The music went on playing, but she did not
come back. “Did you see what happened then?” the U.N.R.R.A. man asked the girls. “Yes: the thing that held her dress behind broke.” “Somebody’s catching hell back there!” he said.

It was two evenings before I left Athens, and this image was to remain in my mind as my last memory of the world of the Greek bourgeoisie.

OCTOBER 26, 1946 (ON THE NUREMBERG TRIALS)

I
t was the last two days of the Nuremberg trial that I went abroad to see. Those men who had wanted to kill me and my kind and who had nearly had their wish were to be told whether I and my kind were to kill them and why. Quite an occasion. But for most of the time my mind was distracted from it by bright, sharp, smaller things. Consider the marvels of air travel. It was necessary, and really necessary, that a large number of important persons, including the heads of the armed and civil services, should go to Nuremberg and hear the reading of the judgment, because in no other conceivable way could they gather what the trial had been about. Long, long ago, the minds of all busy people who did not happen to be lawyers had lost touch with the proceedings. The daily reports inevitably concentrated on the sensational moments when the defendants sassed authority back. To follow the faint obtusions of the legal issues in the press took the type of mind that reads its daily portion and never misses, and, indeed, even a tougher type of mind than that, since this duty had to be discharged without the fear of hell as inspiration. That kind of integrity carries one irresistibly to the top of the grocery store, and almost no further. The high positions fall to people with pliant minds, who drop every habit if it is not agreeable or immediately serviceable. These were all at sea about Nuremberg, and it was a pity, for English public opinion had gone silly about it. There had surged up a wave of masochist malaise, akin to the Keynesian scorn for Versailles after the last war, which spread and split over any attempt to cope with the situation of victory. There was need for the influential to talk some sense on the subject. It was unfortunate that these responsible persons,
as well as the newspaper correspondents, had to travel to Nuremberg by air. This amounted to a retrogression to the very early days of railway transport; planes carry so few passengers, and so many pilots have been demobilized. Nuremberg is between three and four hours’ flight from London, but to attend a sitting of the court that began on Monday, September 30th, I had to leave on the previous Tuesday.

I was bidden by the authorities, the day before, to wait for my papers in a block of offices built on a site which, up to a few years ago, was occupied by the town house of a ducal family. I frequented it in those days, though not to visit the duke and duchess. I used to pass, on another errand, through their halls, where gold and lacquer and crystal reflections swam in the depths, a little sadder than still water, of mirrors some centuries old, and go across a patch of sour grass where lean London cats, masterless and therefore as God made them, mocked and bullied the plump ducal cats, who, as the price of love and regular meals, had suffered a certain misfortune, and finally enter a sort of outhouse, in which an old gentleman sat among an uncontrollable spilth of papers, such a spilth as would have sent one, had it been of water, telephoning right and left for plumbers. The duke was Roman Catholic; this man had been an Anglican clergyman in a village on his estates, and had been converted to the ancient faith; to provide for him, he had been given the task of putting in order the family archives. It was kindly meant, but the poor old gentleman, who was a scholar, was in the state of one who has been turned out in a forest during the autumn and been told that each fallen leaf bears a message and he must piece the leaves together. In panic, he complained to every visitor that in these papers he found chains of evidence running all through modern history to this and that event, and he could not keep them in order or deliver any neat whole to the historians. Now there were no mirrors and no cats, and no old gentleman lost among an excess of significance, but a bright civil servant in a bright office, who brightly handed me some papers. When I saw that they were my Army orders, in triplicate, I knew that I was entering a man’s world, in the pejorative sense. It was decreed that I should fly from an airport half an hour from my home in the country, and I applauded that. Nothing, I said, could be more convenient. I was checked and chilled. I must, it seemed, report at an office in the heart of London, and that at six in the morning. But why? It had to be. I looked into the face of something as immutable as the will of God but not as sensible as that. Well, could I leave my bag in that office overnight? No, I could not. How was I to get
a bag, at an hour when there are no taxis and no buses, to an office nowhere near a subway? They did not know. It is true that I have a husband who can wake at any hour at will, and that we had our automobile in town. But how did authority know that? How did authority know that I am the kind of woman who, finding that neither my club nor any hotel could give me a room, would spend the night on the sofa of my club cardroom? That was not my original intention. People play bridge so late. I had hoped to use the sofa in the ladies’ rest room, but I found someone else was there already. She said she had just got off a train from Milan. Gloomily, I went and waited till hearts and diamonds permitted me to wind a rug around me on the other, narrower sofa. It was hard to sleep there. I looked at the gilt pilasters of the room and remembered that this club had once been the town house of the fifth Marquess of Lansdowne, who had embarrassed the government in the middle of the last war by starting a movement in favor of peace negotiations. He was impelled to this unconventional and unpopular action, some said, because of his grief at the death of a son in battle; others said he had done it because, the bluest of Conservatives, he had seen that a prolonged war would bring down the old order in ruins. I was glad not to be visited by his ghost. Yes, the death of a young man in that abortive war has seemed, in each successive year, more tragic. Yes, the old order is in ruins; a club has trespassed on your family’s house; I have trespassed on that club. But to stop fighting would not have been the answer. And what is the answer? Excuse me! I am going to Nuremberg tomorrow morning! Very early!

A motorbus took the planeload of us out of London night into country dawn, passing, in the ghostly twilight, a corner where, one breezy April afternoon when I was in my twenties, I had helped Joseph Conrad chase his bowler hat across the road. He had seemed to me then an exciting exotic, writing of such unusual things as danger. Now, as the plane rose into the leaden sky, we looked down on a land that was recording, after this worst of summers, a disaster that restored one’s self-respect because it was not made by statesmen or soldiers or any men at all but by nature. In the fields, sheaves that should have stood in harvest time like stocky golden girls and then been gathered in were crouched and drab, like old scrubwomen, and would never know the honor of a barn. Half-finished ricks heeled over on their narrow bases. The pastures looked quite lustreless. Across the North Sea, in Belgium and Holland, the ditches that should have scored fine, silver lines were broad, gross troughs of sullen
water. There would be much less milk this winter, fewer eggs, less meat, perhaps less bread. There would be financial disaster in these little, sodden villages, these farms standing in black smears of mud. Worse than that, there would be mental misery, a sense of guilt. I had seen on my own farm how men who had overworked throughout the war years could not stand up to this wet summer. The bombs that fell in our valley, by reason of its likeness to another, where an important research station was hidden, were realized to be the work of an enemy and taken as fair enough. But even those who did not believe in God believed that this summer was a judgment of God, a sign that they had not found favor with a force which might have been kind, which had decided to withhold, which perhaps knew something wrong in the heart and was therefore just and irrevocable. The wet summer, which showed that God was disagreeable, the lack of shoes, which showed that governments, of whatever color, were inefficient—that is what everybody would be grumbling about in the sulky land below us. Here someone would be putting a hand in the bed of wheat spread in the barn and groaning because it was hot, hot as a hot-water bottle, and so no good for seed; and here someone would be raising his foot across his knee and twisting his neck to see the sole of his boot and groaning because there was another hole and the sock inside was soaking wet. The plane seemed a fortunate molecule, immune from the dowdy sorrows beneath. It was an illusion. Nearly all the passengers except myself and another correspondent were industrialists and technicians on their way to Hamburg on important business. The airport at Hamburg was under water.

· · ·

A man’s world, a man’s world. I was in it, all right. When I got to Berlin, grave young men said impatiently that I must get on the next plane going back to London, because they had no idea how to send me to Nuremberg. I laid my Army orders down on the table, but nobody would look at them. Nobody ever did, then or afterward. When the young men turned the other way, I got into an automobile that had been sent to fetch another correspondent, and the pair of us went to a hotel in the Kurfürstendam which is used as a press camp, and there they knew all about me. Yes, of course I could go to Nuremberg. Either I could go by American plane from the Tempelhof airport, which was doubtful, as there was such a competition for seats, or I could go by train by way of Frankfurt, which would take about eighteen hours.