The Avignon Quintet (122 page)

It was at this moment that he was informed that he could release his servant for regular soldiering and replace him with a slave-prisoner if he so wished; at first he was regretful, for his batman had been with him quite a time, but his regrets were short-lived once Krov appeared upon the scene, saluting smartly with that captivating smile, at once so knowledgeable and so self-deprecating. He was handsome and slender and he turned his youthful agility in the direction of making himself indispensable. In a world full of surly mastiffs he was something quite new, a ray of sunshine. What was there he could not do? Sometimes Von Esslin enumerated his skills with amazement – and he said that his family background was rich bourgeois; his father had been a doctor. Cook, sweep, maintain, polish, set to rights … Banquo’s old house had never shown to better advantage; gardener, handyman, mason, electrician … every new problem showed Krov’s versatility accompanied by charm and good nature. His German was imperfect and he made delightful mistakes which sometimes turned into puns of great felicity. Von Esslin recounted these to his mess and earned hearty laughter for his new slave. Krov exercised a charm over his master which was positively Mephistophelean. He tended and brushed his clothes with passion and frequently made some small adjustment of dress, brushing off a crumb or cigar ash from Von Esslin’s tunic before letting him depart for the office. The old man was bemused by his good luck – never had an establishment been run so efficiently and with such warm good-feeling. “Ah, Krov,” he would say, “how did you never marry? You would make a very fine husband. Or perhaps a wife, eh? Ha! Ha!”

“I did, I was. I have two children.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know where they are,” said Krov quite seriously but without undue emotion. “Somewhere they must be.” Von Esslin felt a wave of sympathy heavy as lead around his heart. “Well, I must be going, I shall be late,” he said and stumped off. Poland!

Sometimes when he came back for lunch he might find Krov sitting on the front steps of the villa in the sun polishing his boots and shoes; he would spring up and salute with his warm smile of greeting, so obviously glad to see his master back that Von Esslin’s heart was warmed and he became almost human, almost talkative, despite the official warning that there must be no fraternising with slave-labourers. Or else he might find him on top of a ladder arranging the grape trellis on the garden balcony. It was difficult when one received such superlative and willing service not to fall a victim to it, to become a little slack and dependent. You had only to say “Bring me a clean handkerchief, Krov,” and the youth would dart away like a deer to find the article. Sometimes when he lay awake in bed the General’s thoughts turned homewards and sometimes he accorded the Polish servant a sad passing thought. Krov’s country villa had been in roughly the same region – bought against his father’s retirement, he explained. His master grunted, but did not ask him for any more details about Poland before the war. But in a fit of elephantine playfulness intended in some profounder way to show his awkward gratitude, he learnt a few words of Polish from the little phrase book which the servant carried and both pleased and surprised him by saying “Good morning” in that language; but only when they were alone, of course. And when Von Esslin fell ill of a ‘flu Krov nursed him tenderly, even feeding him with a spoon when he had a high fever, as one would a child. The old man was touched and grateful, though he refrained from thanking him openly, for after all he was only doing his duty in the official sense.

It proved a welcome change. Krov afforded him company and interest at a time when he was withdrawing from the coarse jovialities and philistine high spirits of the mess with its new faces.

He tried in unobtrusive ways to lighten the burden of the younger man’s slavery, but it was difficult to go against field instructions which insisted that his slave was “expendable” and should be “used up in hard labour”. He feared that Krov must present himself to the world as rather too well off, too well fed. He felt reckless, however, and even got him some cast-off clothes with boots and a tattered green mess jacket in which he served meals, which he did with professional aplomb. His cooking also was something special. Von Esslin was so charged with intellectual infatuation about the slave that he wrote and described some of his virtues to his mother who replied by saying, “It’s as if you speak of your son.” The observation struck him quite forcibly. One day when he cut his hand opening the car door he found a sympathetic Krov rushing to bandage it up, first dressing it with ether – he knew where everything was. His speed, tact and sympathy made the elder man say to himself, “But he really
seems
like a son to me,” a sentimental idea which was so novel that he all but felt tears start to his eyes. “There!” said Krov at last, satisfied with his skilful bandage. “That will hold firm until tonight when we’ll change it. Would you be in need of any anti-tetanus injection?” The General snorted with scorn. “For that little scratch? No.” Krov said, “Anyway, the trigger finger is all right, so you can still shoot, sir, without any difficulty.”

“Yes.” Von Esslin smiled.

The weather had been so variable that one did not any longer know what to make of it; snow was followed by rain and warm winds, then frost, then sunshine again. The mean temperatures rose and fell like the waves of the sea. Now, during his convalescence, they had entered a sunny passage which was almost like summer; he could spend the afternoons out of doors, among the vines at the edge of the copse, reading or writing letters while Krov scurried about his tasks in the house, all the while humming or singing under his breath songs in his own unfamiliar tongue – songs which pleased the old man as much as the fine tenor of the singer. But of course he could say nothing to compliment him. The evenings too had become more supportable since Krov had shown him how to play solitaire. How strange life was! He often wondered nevertheless how Krov could maintain such a continuous amiability – for a man with his country over-run, his family dispersed and lost, his people sold into slavery, it was astonishing. There must be times when he felt the tug of sadness when he thought about these things? It was better not to let his thoughts take this direction, however, for it was the sort of situation which would never be redressed under the New Order.

Krov had placed an old fashioned rocking-chair which he had found in an attic at the end of the garden and it was here that the General sat in the evening to read or write; if the weather was at all chilly Krov put an old military cloak round his shoulders with great solicitude. It was from this habit that the shooting developed, for during the handing in of the guns as dictated by the Army a number of rather fine ones naturally figured among the general run of cheap farmers’ twelves and sixteens. These were naturally regarded as “on loan” to the occupier, and when there was a shoot they were distributed to all senior officers. In this way Von Esslin “inherited” two fine hammerless twelves which he used once or twice for duck on the Camargue. But now, from his rocking chair, he found that on days of mistral his little hillock where the house stood was in the direct line for the evening flight of turtle doves and partridge. The turtle doves could hardly make headway against the wind and certainly not gain height; pressed down earthwards by its violence they flew in little gasps, little bursts, digging their way into the wind, and at each stroke falling back towards the earth once more with a lost momentum. They presented a very easy target even for such a moderate shot as Von Esslin, and on flight evenings he usually disposed of a dozen for dinner with rapidity and ease.

Krov went out of his way to encourage such activity, for he knew how to pluck and dress the birds which fell to his master’s guns; sometimes when the flights were big and he had nothing to do he might take on the role of loader, thus increasing the speed of Von Esslin’s firepower. On the evening of the accident the wind had come up but the day had proved so very exceptional that one felt one was in the month of August; only the clipped and raked vineyards belied the thought, for as yet the first green pilot leaves had not appeared on the black crucifixes. But birds there were in plenty, and the General popped away at them while his slave loaded the smoking guns for him. A certain wilful confusion hangs over the incident which now took place – some believing it an accident due to the General’s thoughtlessness. What actually happened was as follows. Beside the chair of the General was an extremely damp mud parapet which was still soaked with the heavy rain of the preceding days. Inadvertently – he was to claim that the action was inadvertent, though nobody believed him – Krov in exchanging guns lightly stuck the barrels in the muddy bank, thus stopping the ends with heavy pellets of soil. He wiped the end of the gun before handing it to Von Esslin and busied himself with the second weapon. Now came the accident. The old man had got into the habit of discharging both barrels of his sparrow-shot together, aiming just in front of the dover-flights so that the birds dived into the sprayed pattern of lead. But this time when the hammers struck the gun blew back, the barrels exploded and the stock flew off; he received the blowback of the charge full in the face. Enough to kill one outright, as they said later when dressing his complicated criss-cross wounds.

He turned in horror and perplexity, his features runnelled in trickles of blood, powder-markings and mud, as if to invoke the help of Krov; then in a flash he saw that his servant must have been expecting the accident for he had prudently stepped behind the old olive tree, and had his hands half-raised to his ears, as if anticipating an explosion. Von Esslin roared like a bull and stood up shaking all over with shock and pain; but in the roar also was another note, a note of pain and sadness and affliction at the betrayal of his affections by the Polish slave. He stood trembling, looking at him, with his smashed-looking face, and then slowly sank to his knees, grabbing the chair and overturning it as he fell face downwards in the grass.

Unfortunately there was a witness to the scene in the form of the A.D.C. to the General; this young staff officer had been looking for him in order to deliver a service message of some urgency; the house being empty he went out into the garden, and just as he located his chief he saw the whole thing take place; he also saw the incriminating move of the servant as he hid behind the tree. There was no doubt that Krov knew it was going to happen, and was therefore responsible. Consternation seized the young soldier as he saw the General fall, heard him roar with pain and anger. The sparrow shot whizzed in the bushes. The whole thing was so sudden that he stood stock-still before having the presence of mind to race to the General’s aid, at the same time blowing his whistle to alert the duty picket, which now came thumping and panting out on to the balcony with a clatter of useless rifles. Krov was already beside his master, down on one knee, when the officer arrived, so that together they managed to take up the still writhing form and carry it towards the balcony; here someone with presence of mind had produced a stretcher, and the General, who was still swearing and groaning, was piled on to it. The heavy duty wagon had a capacious end with fold-down seats, and this obviated calling an ambulance. The thing was to get him to the general hospital in the Citadel as quickly as possible. They hoisted the wounded man in. Then the officer drew his Luger. To Krov he said, “You are coming with me.”

Krov did not show any particular emotion, but he asked if he might go to the lavatory. The officer said he might, but with the door open and with himself posted outside, his weapon at the ready. They drove in silence to the Fortress where he turned out the guard and asked the officer of the watch to convene a provisional court martial for that afternoon. Then he announced what had happened to the duty officers and confided to the operational telex the news that the Senior Commander had had a serious accident and that a bulletin about it might be expected from the medical staff that same evening. Nor was this long delayed, for they washed the blood and powder and mud from the face of Von Esslin and pronounced with relief that all the wounds were superficial but that the explosion had only compromised his sight. He was almost completely blind and likely to remain so, if not forever, at least for the foreseeable future. A command was out of the question in such a case, and it would not be long before a replacement arrived to take over. It was of course catastrophic in one sense for the
amour-propre
of an active man to be plunged in the dark like this, with the prospect of hospitalisation and retirement to look forward to as a future. Apart from the shock and the pain, the stitches in his cheek and chin, he was beset by a fearful sense of despondency and utter helplessness. An oculist came and tried various kinds of light upon the eye, but was noncommittal about the future. The eyes must be given time to settle down, he said, for they too were in a shocked state from the accident.

Accident? That evening a drum head court martial heard the evidence of the A.D.C. concerning the guilt of the Polish servant in grim silence; it was not thought necessary to ask the wounded man whether he would concur to this statement or not – the thing was so conclusive. Krov was sentenced to death by firing squad the following morning. It was not the only execution, for a couple of
franc-tireurs
were also going to be executed. The General sat in a chair by the window. His face had been repaired and dressed. He sat there patiently under the full weight of his near sightlessness – how unfamiliar it was! Yet he recognised the voice of the A.D.C, who came to tell him about the verdict on Krov, hoping no doubt to please him by this summary revenge. But the old man said nothing. Finally the A.D.C. took his leave, closing the door softly behind him. When the nurse came in to the room she found her charge still sitting by the window, but his chin had sunk on his breast and he was breathing rather more rapidly than usual, which indicated nervous stress; it was most necessary to make some bright conversation to infuse a bit of optimism into the General. She was right. He was soon chatting away in his kindly fashion, thanking her warmly for all that they were doing for him. When the question of his convalescence came up the oculist invited him to the eye clinic in Nîmes where his progress could be checked. It was only a question of clearing up – and there was no Krov to undertake such an operation. Finally a couple of clumsy orderlies assembled his few possessions and helped him into the duty car. In this way he cleared the decks for his successor.