Earthly Powers (65 page)

       "What the hell are we talking about?" Had I been slipped an MF? Was this Sekt of an unprecedented fortitude? A whitecoated servitor served me more. I took. Mme. Durand, who spoke little English, giggled. "Are we here to celebrate the death of the Mediterranean?"

       "Our Italian friends over there," the Philadelphian said, "would not think so. Is it not rather to glorify a new spirit, a freshly made Europe, Alberich thrust underground and Siegfried phallically rampant?" He was certainly drunk.

       "What the hell have you to do with Europe?"

       "Tomorrow," he said, "the world." Mme. Durand giggled.

       I said, "Gaumont Gauleiterin." And then, "On bien Pathé pathologue."

       "Dingue, din gue," she tinkerbelled. To a white table men in chef's toques brought great steaming dishes. "Goulache," she slavered, going over there.

       And not only goulash but a kind of rich soldier's stew with bobbing sausages, pork cutlets with mushrooms and radishes, beef in a sauce of spiced mugwort, wobbling pink pyramids of saffron custard, a cream cake in the shape of a fylfot, a Tower of Babel chocolate confection reeking like a barbershop of rum, berries of the German forests, cheese the hue of lemons or of leprosy, and, like a warning of heroic times in store, wedges of tough black bread. I ate nothing but drank thirstily of the ample Sekt, while the two hundred or so others spooned in hard, some of them sweating. A godling in mufti who I did not doubt was of the special SS intake in whom not even a filled tooth was acceptable said to me, accurately, "You do not eat."

       "No, I do not eat. But I drink." And I drank, promptly to be refilled.

       "Danke sehr."

       "I too drink."

       "That is good. To drink is very good. Of blood have you yet drunken?"

       "It is English of a strange kind you speak. Of blood, no. It is the Jews that eat blood dry. It is in their religious cakes mixed." He seemed to be serious.

       I spoke German to him, saying, "They say that under the microscope you can see the difference between the configurations of Jewish blood and Gentile blood."

       "Aryan blood, yes."

       "The term Aryan has a purely philological significance. It can be applied only to languages. There is in fact no difference whatsoever between Jewish blood and other blood. This I know. This you are forbidden to know."

       "You are wrong."

       "When I say that you are forbidden to know?"

       "What you say of the blood. Be quiet now. The Reichsminister is to speak." Goebbels, who had not been present during the feasting, now made an applauded entrance. He was no man to improvise a word or two of greeting; he had typewritten sheets of which copies had undoubtedly already been given to the press. He welcomed us in his Rhineland accent with its not yet expunged peasant tones. He called us friends in a double sense: of the art of the cinema, of the new Germany. Nay in a triple sense: of the art of the cinema of the new Germany. But some inner grace bade his deep-set simian eyes register an instant's doubt of the logical propriety of that conclusion. He then spoke of the cinema as the popular voice of the state, reaching audiences as yet uneducated in the understanding of the traditional arts. He seemed to consider that the guests of the Reichsfilmkammer had to pay for their guesthood by extolling in their own lands the excellence of the products of the German cinema that they were to see. Nay, more, in persuading cinema distributors in those lands to show those products, themselves a means of cleansing the world film market through their purity and excellence of the regrettable decadent ordures excreted by international Jewry. For the Third Reich spoke for sanity everywhere. The National Socialist philosophy had purified and made strong a Germany long corrupted by international ordure excretors; Germany by her example would yet save the world.

       I had felt sick before and had been saved by Sekt. Now I was beginning to feel sick of the Sekt. I would, I knew, shortly have to vomit. The Reichsminister seemed to have three or four closely typed pages still to get through. I started gently to move toward one of the open windows. The aims of the artistic policy enunciated by the National Chamber of Film might, said Goebbels, be expressed under seven headings. Oh Christ. First, the articulation of the sense of racial pride, which might, without reprehensible arrogance, be construed as! t just sense of racial superiority. Just, I thought, moving toward the breath of the autumn dark, like the Jews, just like the...—This signified, Goebbels went on, not narrow German chauvinism but a pride in being of the great original Aryan race, once master of the heartland and to be so again. The Aryan destiny was enshrined in the immemorial Aryan myths, preserved without doubt in their purest form in the ancient tongue of the heartland. Second. But at this point I had made the open window. With relief the Sekt that seethed within me bore itself mouthward on waves of reverse peristalsis. Below me a great flag with a swastika flapped gently in the night breeze of autumn. It did not now lift my heart; it was not my heart that was lifting. I gave it, with gargoyling mouth, a litre or so of undigested Sekt. And then some strings of spittle. It was not, perhaps, as good as pissing on the flag, but, in retrospect, it takes on a mild quality of emblematic defiance. When I got back to listening to Goebbels he was onto point seven, which did not seem very different from point one.

       I slept heavily that night and woke to heartburn about half past eight. I would not, I decided, that day visit the studios of Tobis and Johannisthal and GrŸnewald and Froelich and Neubabelsberg. If they wanted me to pay for my air trip and accommodation I would, a free Mensch. I would go to see Fritz Kalbus at Wehmayr Verlag and draw my royalties and go back to Paris. I rang room service and requested bicarbonate of soda and a cannikin of mocha and some dry toast. While I was belching heartily the front desk called to say that there was a lady downstairs for me. I assumed it was an escort with car sent by Toni Quadflieg, and I passed on my regrets that I was too ill to participate in the day's program. No no, it was a lady downstairs who wished to come upstairs, a friend of mine by the name of Fraulein Auronzo. Auronzo first rang no bell then set a whole belfry clanging. Of course. I might have known. Please send her up.

       Concetta Campanati née Auronzo looked very thin and very old but very vigourous. It was a vigour of the will and not at all of the body, wherein, I could divine, the growth that ate her monopolised all vigour. We kissed each other. Coffee? She would have some, yes. She sat, no longer elegant but dressed as for hard work in mustard tweed and lisle stockings. "I thought," I said, "you might he in Berlin."

       "I've been here only a week. Dresden, Leipzig, Magdeburg. I started off in Munich and then kept moving north. Here, I think, I shall finish."

       "How did you—"

       "The Všlkische Beobachier. Haven't you seen it yet?" She took it, rolled to a baton, from a workmanlike brown satchel. "It says an interview here on arrival. You seem to have been attacking the American Jews. I don't believe it, of course. They twist everything. Here, read."

       I don't I. I...

       "No, I        think I will. I m sick enough already.

       "Sick? But you've seen nothing yet. Nothing at all."

       "What precisely have you been doing? You realise we've all worried. I mean, just going off, no address, very vague. Not that we don't. I mean, courage. Almost Hortense's last word before I left her in New York. She's separated from Domenico, by the way. She'd had enough. Even Carlo didn't talk about the sacred bonds of matrimony. But we won't talk about that. What precisely?"

       She drank some coffee. It was mostly real coffee at that time, with only a whiff of pounded acorns. "They all seem a very long way away. Don't forget to give them all my dearest love. Even stupid Domenico. He's not bad, he's just stupid." And then, "There's no time to give you the whole story. It began in Chiasso with my bank manager, a Jew. A discussion about investments. We got friendly, he's a widower. He said this was no time to talk about safe money, not the way things were. If there was any spare money about, he said, it ought to be used to get Jews out of Germany. Big Jews, writers, scientists. The Nazis confiscate and then kindly let some of them out. But only on condition that they pay special imposts to the state. It's monstrous, a kind of dirty joke. They've already paid up. Now they have to find the money for this tax and the other tax. The taxes have horrible long names, sneering names. That's where the Davidsbiindler comes in."

       "The—" The name was familiar. I caught an image of Domenico playing something on his Paris piano. That was it, Schumann. The March of the David gang against the Philistines. But that had been just art. "Yes, yes, I see. Working from Switzerland?"

       "The trouble is they have to have somewhere to go. And nobody wants them. Not unless they're very very big. Or have families somewhere. Nobody seems to like the Jews. Somebody said that all Hitler's done is to do what other people only talk about doing. I'd like to make the Jews crawl, somebody says, and that's that. But Hitler actually does it. Only it isn't crawling. There are these work camps and worse. Trucks coming to decent respectable Jewish houses in the middle of the night and taking people oft. Nothing in the newspapers. Nobody cares. No justice for the Jews, meaning they're literally outside the law. It's going to get worse. I saw Jewish heads smashed in Dresden. What can we do about the small Jews with no international reputation, the little clerks and the watch repairers?" Her face twisted a moment as with referred pain. But, of course, it was her own. She fumbled in her satchel and brought out a glass cylinder of tablets. "Could I have a little water?"

       "Of course." Bringing her a glass, I said, "How is it? I mean, how are you?"

       "The times's coming," she said, having swallowed, "to make an end of it. No, no," she said, seeing my jaw drop, "I'm still a kind of daughter of the Church. I wouldn't," with her old irony, "want to endanger my immortal soul. I'm not," she said, as though rebutting a proposal of my own, "going to die in one of their work camps which are really death camps. There's nothing wrong with dying spectacularly. Christ did it."

       "Nobody," I said, "can touch you for anything. I take it you're armed with an American passport. I mean, you gave your name as Auronzo. Nobody could touch you as an Italian either. Surely the name Campanati means something. What do you mean—die spectac—"

       "Campanati," she said, "is not too popular a name in the new bright lands of oppression. Carlo, I gather, has been what they term indiscreet."

       "Carlo," I said, and nearly said: who now knows all, "has been speaking out, no more. A priest's duty he called it, his own voice not the official one of the Holy See. But the Pope has been speaking out too."

       "The Pope is vague and full of generalities. Carlo has been bringing in blood and bones and talking of casting out the devil."

       "How did you learn about this?"

       "You can see the American papers in the consulates. One of these radio talks was reported in the Washington Post. Have you actually heard him?"

       "He was very good. Guest on this weekly program run by Father Somebody. He didn't have him long. He stole Father Macwhatsisname's thunder. Look," I said, "I don't like this talk about dying."

       "A lot of people are dying. I saw a Jewish girl of ten with her head smashed. That was outside Leipzig. These people are murderers. And they haven't really started yet."

       "It's not only the Jews, is it?"

       "Ah, no. Not only the Jews. Have you heard of the Brown Houses? No, of course not. Hedemannstrasse and Papenstrasse, the Ulap. God, the hypocrisy. Doctor Goebbels telling the International Penal and Prison Congress all about humane rehabilitation—here in Berlin."

       "You seem very well informed, Concetta."

       "I am. And you're going to be very well informed too. And you're going to inform anybody who's prepared to listen. You're the writer in the family."

       I groaned inwardly. "I let poor Raffaele down, didn't I? Scribbling my shopgirl romances instead of attacking the gangsters. But what good could I have done?"

       "People don't want to know. They have to be made to know. Whether they act on what they know is up to them. But they have to know."

       The telephone buzzed. It was a discreet noise here in the Adlon, Venusberg not Valkyrie. Toni Quadflieg, querulous rather. Message about my crankhood received. But I was expected, he said, on the studio tour to be present. I wanted to blast obscenities but I kept calm. Crank, I said, crank crank. You will be well for Hitlerjunge Quex today evening? Crank crank, and I crashed down the handset.

       Concetta said, "Why did you come?"

       "Invited. All paid. Film based on book of mine. Royalties to be collected and spent. Curiosity."

       "Who have you met?"

       "Goebbels. French and American and Viking admirers of the regime. Film People. Mrs Goebbels."

       She nodded. "There'll be a lot of the big ones at this Horst Wessel premiere." She got up painfully and went over to the escritoire where the telephone was. Next to the telephone was a bulky folder with, on the cover, a film projector flashing a swastika onto a screen. The program. Film personalities. Synopses, cast lists. Very thorough and comprehensive. She brought the folder back to her chair; standing seemed to take a lot out of her. "Here it is. Thursday evening Eight o'clock. God, what an obscenity.

       'Die Fahne hoch! Die Reihen dicht geschlossen S. A. marschiert mit mutig Jestem Schritt.'

       A ponce and a cornerboy and his dying word is 'Deutschland!' Ken, don't go to that abomination."

       "I have to see the worst, don't I?"

       "Don't go. Leave this place. But take this stuff with you." She dropped the folder to the carpet, red turkey, and let its glossy unbound contents fan out. The stuff she meant was what she now took from her satchel, a buff quarto envelope, legal and solid, the size of an eighty-thousand-word typescript ready to be mailed. "It's all in here," she said.