Nuns and Soldiers (39 page)

‘Now I come to think of it, in the old days you never said you were in love, you said you were involved.’

‘Oh never mind about the old days, my darling, we were children, we were fools.’

‘You think I’m still a fool. You’ve been cloistered a long time.’

‘Let’s stop this.’

‘You said it wasn’t just because it was too soon - and it is too soon and I’m amazed at myself - but because it was who it was. But what have you got against Tim? You don’t know him, you don’t know anything about him. If it’s because you saw him stealing food he told me and it was because he was hungry and poor and I suppose that’s not a crime -’

‘No, no, that was just embarrassing. I haven’t anything against him. Or well - only -’

‘Only what?’

‘He isn’t up to you, darling, he’s a small man, you’re so much more than he is. You could choose a far better person. He seems to me flimsy and not sort of solid enough to be really trustworthy. And he’s lazy and too anxious to please - I’m sorry, I may be quite wrong. But you asked me for my impression and that’s it.’

‘I didn’t ask you for your impression, actually. I asked what you had against him. It seems that what you have against him is that you dislike him.’

‘I don’t dislike him, I just don’t see the point of him. But don’t let’s talk like this, Gertrude. It’s my fault. This sounds like an argument but it isn’t. We’re both taking up simple crude positions and uttering simple crude statements. This is not the way you and I usually talk to each other. This isn’t communication. I admit I’m upset, you are quite right, and there may be an element of what you called “jealousy” in it. But I’m mainly upset because I think you’re running straight into an act of folly which you will regret. It being “so soon” isn’t very important except in a sort of pietistic way. Time is a pretty unreal business after all. Why shouldn’t you love again now you’re alone? But it’s obvious that now isn’t a good moment to make a great decision, when your life and your mind are still so confused. This might have been a good reason for not starting an affair, but maybe the affair doesn’t matter too much either. In a way it’s just a symptom of the shock and muddle you’re in. I’m just advising you not to let words like “marriage” get into your head at all at present. Don’t promise anything to anyone. You’re not in a position to commit your future self. Say firmly that you can’t see the future, because you
can’t.
I don’t know how seriously you meant this about marrying, but if it was serious that’s what I think. And quite a separate point, I don’t see him as right for you. He’s not good enough. I may be wrong about his character. Maybe he wouldn’t let you down. But I’m sure he’d bore you.’

Gertrude, who had sat down on the other side of the room, was silent. Then she said with a little sad laugh, ‘Well, if
you
think that, the
others
will think it with knobs on!’

‘Who cares what the others think?’

‘Oh I don’t care. Yes, I do care. It just makes me feel so alone in this business. And you are making me feel more alone.’

Anne said, ‘I’m sorry. It wasn’t to make you feel more alone that I came back to you.’

Anne was thinking, I must leave here, I must move out. If she’s having a love affair she’ll want the flat! I should have thought of that and said nothing! Yet how could I? Oh why did the Count have to show me that hateful letter! And oh my God, I must go and telephone him, he’ll be waiting and I’ll bring him such terrible news. Perhaps he could bear not to win her, but to lose her
like this
, how can he bear it?

Gertrude was thinking, why does Anne have to say these dreadful clear definite things? Why does she always judge? She’s right that this is not the way to talk. Why does she talk then? And I’m sure she’ll go now, she’ll go away so as to ‘leave me to it’ and she’ll grow cold and disappear. I shall lose her. I don’t understand anything any more. I don’t understand her or myself or Tim. And it was all so clear. I ought not to have brought Tim here, I should have seen it was dangerous to him, but he wanted to come and it seemed right. I shouldn’t have let him make love to me in that horrible studio. It was a flimsy place, flimsy like Anne said Tim was, it was like lying out on a scaffolding with the wind blowing. In fact Tim and Gertrude had been unable to leave the studio without lying down together, but it had been an unhappy perfunctory love-making, Tim fretting and worrying in case somebody came.

As tears gathered in Gertrude’s eyes and as she looked away across the room towards the door, a ghost of a feeling visited her, a shadow sensation out of the past, a little mislaid mental cluster which still hung somewhere there amid the furniture in its accustomed place; she thought, surely it will be all right, I shall tell Guy about it, he will help me, he will know what to do.

 

 

The Count was sitting beside his radio set which he had just switched off. It was late at night. He had listened to a symphony concert, a talk on archaeology, Kaleidoscope, the news, a political discussion, a poetry reading, the book at bedtime, the Financial World Tonight, more news, some prayers with jazz music, the weather forecast for the ships. Now all was silent. Fulham and Chelsea were quiet, except for the occasional distant lonely sound of a car or a rumbling lorry. The music and voices which had kept the Count company throughout the evening were still. They had been soft voices, at the end barely audible, for he feared to disturb his neighbours and had been upset for a long time when once, years ago, a man had banged on his door to tell him to switch off. Tonight indeed he had scarcely listened to what was passing. His simple lonely pleasure in those friendly sounds was quite gone.

He had eaten nothing. He had drunk a little whisky. Anne had rung him up about three and told him that, yes, Tim and Gertrude were having a love affair. Gertrude said they were in love with each other and planned to get married. They were keeping it secret at the moment. Anne added that she had not told Gertrude about the Count’s visit or the anonymous letter. She had simply asked a question and Gertrude had told her everything. So the Count must not only tell no one, but not reveal to Gertrude that he knew. Anne said Gertrude would be hurt if she thought the Count knew before the moment when Gertrude decided to tell him or to announce it to the world. Anne hoped the Count understood. Anne added that she thought it possible that the whole thing would prove ephemeral and fall through, but it was idle to speculate and she only told him what she knew.

The Count of course did not entertain hope, it was not in his nature. He had imagined he knew what suffering was. He was well acquainted with sorrow, disappointment, loneliness, the remorse of one who has no real conception of his life, the homesickness of one who has no home. He had been used to saying to melancholy, even to grief, come in my friend, let us be quietly together. In this way over a long time the Count had come to think himself invulnerable. He had never been in a concentration camp or a torture chamber; but in the wear and tear of ordinary life he thought that he had tasted bitterness and accepted the diet. He had not achieved or wanted much in life; so how could he, living in between Fulham and Chelsea and travelling to Whitehall every day, be touched by any pain with which he was unfamiliar? He had been wrong. He now saw his melancholy as a bed of soft comfort and his bitterness as wine, and he wished for death.

He thought of the night when his brother had died. This was a story not a memory, since the Count had been a small child at the time. It was just before Christmas. His father who by then had left the Air Force, was absent, probably spending the night, as he often did, at the Polish government headquarters in Bayswater. The mother with the two boys was living in Croydon. There had been an argument between his mother and another Polish woman who was lodging with them. The woman, who was very fond of the Count’s brother Jozef, wanted to take him to the church to see the Christ Child in His stable with the ox and the ass. The Count’s mother was afraid, she wanted her sons close beside her. Jozef had cried, wanting to go to the Christ Child. The father was absent. The mother relented. The church was hit by a bomb, the boy and the lodger were killed. I wish I had died then, he thought, I wish I had gone to the church with Jozef, or instead of him. He thought of himself living on as Jozef. He would have been a strong man.

The Count had lived almost happily with his cloistered love for Gertrude. He had lived by little anticipations and little rewards. She had, he felt, amidst all the others, a special smile, a special voice, for him. How quiet, how happy they had all been together. Thus people can pass a lifetime in silent unspoken trust, and live in peace without possessing their heart’s desire; and those who let themselves be loved can of their bounty extend, even unconsciously, a harmless radiance of affection for the salvation of the solitary. Gertrude’s marriage had made her unattainable and holy, but also
safe
, as if Guy were actually keeping her
for
the Count, the secure eternal closeted object of his secret love. Indeed upon her quietness, her immobility, the peace of his love had rested.

With Guy’s death came the awful restlessness of hope, the cloistered passion released to wander. But the Count had never let himself hope much, and an absolute piety, the time of mourning and bereavement, had made it easy for him to inhibit, at least to delay, certain thoughts. And he had looked at Gertrude with eyes wherein he hoped that she could read his sadness.
Now
he wanted her to need, retrospectively, his love, and slowly, unstartled, to be comforted by it. All this, passing through the shock of Guy’s death, was one with his life as he had lived it since he first met her. Since Anne’s telephone call, only hours away in the past, the destruction had been total. It was as if a flame had licked backward through the continuum of his being, annihilating all its structures. He could have endured not to possess Gertrude if she had remained his friend unmarried. He had indeed fully imagined and envisaged, even taught himself to expect, just this. To lose her to another was a different matter, although he had dutifully, and for the farther future, attempted to school himself to the possibility. But to lose her now and to this man goaded him into a frenzy of grief and misery and rage which made the continuation of ordinary life seem impossible.

An almost cynical remorse was part of his suffering. So, she had gone so fast. If he had dreamed that she wanted a man, wanted declarations of love and passion, would he not have given them to her, and not only on his knees? Could a woman be like that, could
that
woman be? How stupidly, it now seemed to him, he had concealed his love! Yet, with a lover’s double-think had he not often imagined that she must know how much he loved her? How can one think all the time about someone without their somehow knowing? Or had she,
could
she have, mistaken his tact, his gentlemanly honour and decorum, for a cool and rational affection? Some cruder clutching had attracted her attention when she was in the mood for being held. That she should have turned to
Tim Reede.
The Count had always liked Tim, but he measured now how much contempt his liking had contained. A patronizing attitude had somehow constituted and facilitated the liking. There was nothing of the rival about Tim, nothing of the equal. Nothing of the rival, he had thought. And
now
- tormented imagination animated a Gertrude how alienated, how changed, how irrevocably spoilt and lost.

The Count suddenly leapt up from his quiet radio set and ran out into the kitchen. He took down from the wall Tim’s picture entitled
Three Blackbirds in a Treacle Well
. He stared at it. It was a horrible picture. He was about to smash it into the rubbish bin when some unseen hand prevented this exhibition of blind rage. His heart was beating violently. He went into his bedroom and opening a deep drawer thrust the picture away into the bottom of it. As he did so his hand came into contact with a soft roll of stuff which he recognized as being the Polish flag which was one of the few mementos he had carried away from his childhood home. Ready to weep, he prepared himself for bed. He would not sleep. Tonight was the first night of his absolute loneliness, the first night upon the dark road which led now straight on to death.

 

 

The Count did sleep, however, and had a nightmare which it seemed to him (only he was not sure) that he had had many times before. He dreamt that he was a Jew in the Warsaw Ghetto. It is wartime and the Germans are occupying Warsaw. The ghetto is closed. Every day more Jews arrive, from other parts of the city, from other parts of the country. Every day the area of the ghetto grows smaller and smaller. The Jews fight like overcrowded rats for diminishing space, for diminishing food. Affliction does not make men brothers. Yet gradually too, after the first shock, there is comfort, comfort of order, comfort of survival. The Jews are together now without Gentiles, together in their own place. Inside the ghetto they are enclosed and safe, they can look after each other in peace. Their Jewishness is purified, justified. There is music, theatre, literature, a way of life. If only they can be left alone how well they will manage, how quiet and orderly they will be, each one knowing in his heart that he will survive. After all, there is enough food. There is work to do, work it is true for the Germans, but is not this work itself a guarantee of survival? The Count has found himself a corner in a room. Others are kind to him and he has his place. He has learnt what to do. If only people will be kind and orderly everyone will survive. What miracles of patience and endurance the Jewish people can achieve. Through such endurance they have survived and will survive. Against so much provocation, so great a tolerance and fortitude. Never hit back. Avoid the occasion of offence. Be invisible. Be silent. Wait. The Count feels safe. No one threatens him, no one sees him. The ghetto is at peace. Has it not its own Jewish authorities? Safety lies in order, in coming back to the corner in the room and living in amity and helping the sick and the weak. So few Germans can control so many Jews because the Jews are sensible and wise. They are a rational people who have seen much trouble. Be still my people, it is your destiny to suffer quietly. Sometimes Jews go away. There is a farmland at Treblinka where they go to work. The life is good there, there is more food. Someone has seen a postcard sent by someone’s friend. There are rumours from Wilno but no one will believe them. Someone has said the Germans will kill all the Jews, but no one believes this. It would be madness to believe such a tale. The Jews are quiet, the Jews are useful, the Germans are a civilized people. Someone has told a story about gas chambers, about death by gas, but this is an invention, it is science fiction. Is it true that no one has returned from Treblinka. But people have seen letters, the food is good there, the work is not too hard. The Count feels fear in his heart. He banishes hatred as if it were a fatal disease. He banishes anger and the desire for revenge because he knows that these things mean death, and he wants so much to live, that he should survive it all and tell it later as a story. He does not want to die in the ghetto. He does not want to hear of any heroic legend. He does not want to be told what happened at Masada. But now he has seen young men with guns in their hands and insane red flames of rage darting from their eyes. Mad criminal young men who will be the death of us all. Oh let this pass. They are shooting in the ghetto. He has seen a dead German lying in the roadway, a
dead German.
The Count tries to hide, only where is there to hide? Now everywhere there is a sound of gunfire. Which way to go? A man in uniform appears, holding a gun and carrying a Polish flag. He waves to the Count and seizes him by the hand and shouts to him to follow. It is Jozef who did not die after all. Shells are bursting and in their light the Count sees Jozef’s face, so beautiful, so like his father’s face. Over a pile of rubble Jozef disappears into a cloud of smoke. A shell bursts. The Count does not follow, he runs away. But there is nowhere to hide. The sewers are full of gas. The ghetto is in flames. People are screaming and crying and jumping from windows. In some place high up two flags are flying together, the red and white Polish flag, the blue and white Jewish flag. Beside them there is a machine gun, the only one in the ghetto. The machine gun speaks. The ghetto burns. The Count runs. The machine gun is silent. A voice is speaking in Hebrew. ‘Behold, happy is the man whom God correcteth: therefore despise not thou the chastening of the Almighty.’ But it is too late for such wisdom, and there is nobody left to hear it. The gunfire ends, the flames subside. There is silence. The ghetto does not exist any more. They have taken the Count and put him onto the train for Treblinka. Warsaw is
judenrein.