HORST VON EPP CUT the classic conception of the ramrod German baron as he stood framed before the tall window of Chris’s flat, transfixed by the first snowfall of the winter, and the strains of a Chopin record.
Chris came in from the outside, slapping the cold from his bones. He nodded to Horst, denoting he was pleased at the unexpected visit.
“Hope you don’t mind my breaking in and helping myself to the whisky?” Horst said, fixing a scotch for Chris.
“Why should I mind? There’s nothing in this apartment your friends haven’t examined twenty times.”
The Chopin record came to the end. “I like Chopin. All those blockheads play is Wagner. A tribute to Hitler in absentia. Isn’t there something enormously enchanting about the first snow?”
Chris threw open the drapes to the alcove bedroom, tugged off his shoes and wet socks. He fished around under the bed for his slippers.
“O the snow, the beautiful snow,
Filling the sky and the earth below,
Over the housetops, over the street,
Over the heads of the people you meet,
Dancing,
Flirting,
Skimming along,
Beautiful snow, it can do nothing wrong.”
“Ye gods, Chris, that’s horrible.”
“James Whittaker Watson, 1824-90. My recitation for the second-grade graduation. My mother didn’t come to the graduation. I never forgot snow, beautiful snow.”
Horst handed him a tall drink. They clinked glasses.
“Fröhliche Weihnachten—Christmas cheer,” he said. “I’ll be a sad bastard. Christmas. I forgot all about it.” “I toast those poor misled Aryans laying on their wet bellies in snow, beautiful snow on the eastern front for the glory of the Fatherland,” Horst said.
“Amen. Well, how does it feel to get clobbered?”
“We are going to lose at Stalingrad, aren’t we, Chris?”
“It’s going to be a catastrophe, Baron. Your Chief of Staff should have read Napoleon’s memoirs and taken a lesson of what mother winter does to trespassers.”
“I had it about a week ago. The sudden realization Germany is going to lose the war. It is making a mess out of all the Christmas parties. Everyone is so damned glum. Stalingrad, El Alamein, the landings in North Africa. But you know what really confounds me is those Americans. Guadalcanal. Now there’s a romantic name. Everyone underestimates Americans. Why?”
“The mistaking of gentleness as weakness is like underestimating a Russian winter.”
“Next year,” Horst said, “Berlin is going to be bombed. What a pity. Oh dear, how they are going to pay us back. Well, Christmas cheer.”
Horst set down his drink and again became enchanted with the falling snow. “Chris,” he said, looking outside, “a report has just been published by the Polish government in exile in London. A hasty White Paper detailing alleged extermination camps operating in Poland. Heard about it?”
“Something or other.”
“Tell me,” Horst said, “how did you smuggle it out of Poland?”
Chris made only a nominal attempt to cover his deed. “What makes you think it was me?”
“My male vanity. When a beautiful piece of tail, Victoria Landowski from Lemberg, turns out not to be a piece of tail and not even Victoria Landowski, my masculinity was offended.”
“Find the woman. They are behind all sinister plots.”
“The trouble was, I couldn’t find the woman. My friend Christopher de Monti had become deliciously decadent, a quivering alcoholic mass of sponge. Then Victoria Landowski enters and Christopher undergoes a magic transformation. He returns to being—what do you call it?—a clean-cut All-American boy. I began to add this sudden spiritual resurrection. It was not difficult to figure the rest of it.”
“By God, Horst, you’re downright clairvoyant. Well, does Gestapo Chief Sauer put his dogs on me, feed me a quart of castor oil, or use testicle crushers to make me talk?”
“Oh, cut that nonsense out. Those dreary people at the Gestapo won’t figure this thing out for months. How did you get the reports out? Italian diplomats?”
“Something like that,” Chris answered.
“See! I told Hitler personally not to trust the Italians. Those people are far too romantic to really carry out a first-class war of annihilation. As soon as we come to the acid tests, they abandon us.”
Chris laughed. “I’m only an Italian by passport. Come to think of it, I’m really not much of anything. But I do know the Italian people. They were sold a bill of goods that they were a reincarnation of the noble Romans, twenty centuries removed. So why in hell shouldn’t they believe it? All they really wanted was to be somebody again.”
“On German coattails.”
“The bride awoke to find her maidenhead broken, but the Teutonic god she married had turned into an ugly black gorilla. Sort of a beauty and the beast in reverse. Horst, the Italian people have no stomach for what you are doing in Poland. It was no chore at all getting five men to carry out five separate copies of the extermination-camp report.”
“Archetype German villain that I am,” Horst said, “I cannot comprehend why those who are utterly crushed insist on dying gestures of defiance. Martyrs are dreadful. I watched you sink to degeneration. What was that voice that called you out of Satan’s arms? What did it say to you?”
“It told me ... I must become worthy enough to receive the spit of a man who was once my friend.”
“Morality.” Horst shook his head. “Just before the war I saw that big hammy American baritone—what was his name?—Tibbett. Lawrence Tibbett. He sang in Paris. After a song about mother’s southern-fried cake he bellowed some more dreadful poetry. Somehow, the damned verse keeps going through my mind these days.
“Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be ... “
“ ‘For my unconquerable soul,’ ” Chris said. “To William Ernest Henley, 1849-1903.
“Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
“This immediately brings to mind the question of why all poets have three names and why wasn’t my mother at the fifth-grade commencement ceremonies, either?”
“It will never replace Schiller or Heine—that is, before Heine became a Jew. I know, you cannot put man’s soul in a ghetto or gas his spirit at Treblinka. It looks fine in the hands of poets but puzzling when it really happens. Why did you do it, Chris? A few sermons by minor bishops, a few editorials by minor newspapers, a few pasty statements by minor politicians, a few protest suicides by minor idealists. What did you hope to gain? Ach. Now I have to spend the whole winter writing counterpropaganda.”
“I’m sorry it’s making you lose so much sleep, Horst. I thought perhaps the report itself might annoy you.”
“Don’t give me that snide journalist’s sneer. I know—how could we do this? The fine, cultured German people, after which I rattle off the names of musicians, poets, doctors, and list all our gifts to mankind. How could we do this? It will take the great philosophical and psychiatric brains a hundred years to find a standard of morals to explain this behavior.”
“I’ll simplify it,” Chris said. “You’re a pack of beasts.”
“Oh no, Chris, we are not even to be classed with beasts. Man is the only animal on this planet which destroys its own species. But how in the devil did I get involved in this? I’m no more guilty than you are. Less, perhaps. I’m trapped. But you, dear Chris, are all the moralists in the world who have condoned genocide by the conspiracy of silence.”
“The conspiracy of silence,” Chris mumbled. “Yes, I buy that.”
“Hell, my own skin isn’t important. After the war all this business will be unearthed and mankind will register a proper shock and horror. Then they will say, ‘Let us all forget about the past. Let bygones be bygones.’ And all over Germany you’ll get a chorus of ‘Amen.’ What will the song be? There was nobody here in Germany but us anti-Nazis. Extermination camps? We knew nothing about them. Hitler? Always did think he was crazy. What could we do? Orders were orders. And the world will say, ‘Look at all the good Germans.’ They will string up a few Nazis as showpieces, and all the good German folk will slink back to their cobblers’ benches and sulk and wait for the next Führer.” Horst broke into a sudden sweat and lost his composure. He downed a shot of whisky quickly.