Kaputt Read Free Page B

glances absorbed and innocent. The couples embracing on the benches in Humle Garden, under trees already damp with the night, seemed to me ideal replicas of the embracing couple in Josephson's "Festive Scene." The sky above the roofs, the houses along the sea, sailing boats and steamers moored in the Storm and along the Strandvägen were as blue as Marieberg and Rörstrand porcelain, blue as the sea around the islands, as the Mälaren near Drottningholm, as the woods round Saltsjöbaden, as the clouds above the highest housetops of the Valhallavägen; that blue that is discernible in the white of the North, in the snow of the North, in the rivers, the lakes, and the forests of the North; the blue that is in the stuccoes of Swedish ecclesiastical architecture, in the coarse, white-painted Louis XV furniture found in the houses of Norrland and Lapland peasants; that blue about which Anders Öesterling talked to me in his warm voice as we walked between the white wooden columns with golden Doric fluting in the auditorium of the Swedish Academy in the Gamle Stade; the milky blue of the Stockholm sky at dawn, when the ghosts who have wandered all night through the streets (the North is the land of ghosts—trees, houses and animals are ghosts of trees, houses and animals) glide back along the pavements like blue shadows; and I had watched them from my window at the Grand Hotel or from the windows of Strindberg's house, the red brick house at Number Ten Karlaplan where Maioli, First Secretary of the Italian Legation, and the Chilean singer Rosita Serrano now live on different floors. (Rosita Serrano's ten dachshunds rushed up and down the stairs barking, Rosita's famous voice rose husky and sweet above the notes of the guitar, and I saw the same blue ghosts wandering through the square that Strindberg met on the stairs returning home at dawn, or caught sitting in his hall, stretching on his bed, leaning from his window, pale against the pale sky making signs to invisible passers-by.) Through the gurgling of the fountain in the middle of the Karlaplan the leaves of the trees could be heard rustling in the breeze that blew over the morning sea.
    We were sitting in the little neoclassical temple at the end of the park, where the rock drops steeply to the sea, and I watched the white Doric columns etched against the background of the blue autumnal landscape. By degrees, something bitter was arising in me, something like a sad anger; bitter words came to my lips, and my effort to choke them back was useless. Thus I began almost unwittingly, to talk about Russian prisoners in the Smolensk camp who fed on the corpses of their mates under the impassive gaze of German officers and soldiers. I felt horror and shame at my own words. I would have liked to apologize to Prince Eugene for that cruelty of mine; and Prince Eugene kept silent, wrapped in his gray cloak, his head bent down over his chest. Suddenly he lifted his face, his lips moved as if in speech, but he kept silent, and I read a pained reproach in his eyes.
    I would have liked to read the same cold cruelty in his eyes and on his brow that had hardened the countenance of Obergruppenführer Dietrich when I told him about the Russian prisoners in the Smolensk camp who fed on the corpses of their comrades. Dietrich had burst out laughing. I had met Obergruppenführer Dietrich, the commander of Hitler's bodyguard, in the villa of the Italian Embassy on the shores of the Wannsee near Berlin: I had felt strangely attracted by his pale face, his unbelievably cold eyes, his huge ears and his small fish-mouth. Dietrich burst out laughing: "Haben sie ihnen geschmecktt —Did they enjoy eating them?" he laughed opening wide his small pink-roofed fish-mouth, showing his crowded sharp fishlike teeth. I would have liked to see Prince Eugene's face harden with the same cruel expression that disfigured Dietrich and to hear him also ask me in his tired mellow voice, "Did they enjoy eating them?" But