Earthly Powers (78 page)

       "Stop," the interrogator said. The drill grumbled down the scale and ceased its ghastly melody. The girl wept and whimpered. "Now speak," he said to Carlo. "It is you who have the devil in you. It is you who are the real instrument of this girl's pain."

       "Listen," Carlo said. "I say again that I have nothing to say. To say that you will be wasting your time when you resume your torture would not altogether be true. You are bound to be committed to brutality as an end in itself, though you may rationalise it as a technique of interrogation or an expression of the frustration of an occupying power that cannot fail to meet opposition from the children of light. Brutality for its own sake is the mark of the devil. This poor child's screams will be the screams of tortured nerves. Her soul, however, is intact. I say again that she is better off than you are."

       "Take the forceps," the interrogator said. "Pull a tooth out. One of the incisors."

       "Poor men," Carlo moaned. "Poor, poor men.O God, work on them. Drive out the evil." He saw the forceps grip the milkwhite tooth of the girl whose rich raven hair was already matted with the sweat of suffering. "You will have to bear it, Annaniaria," he said. "I cannot tell them what they wish to know. Be courageous as Christ was." He could hear the scrape of the tooth in its socket as the forceps twisted it for the girl had fainted and there was now mercifully no noise of agony. The tooth was yanked out in a spurt of blood and cast to the stone paving where it tinily, dully clicked, rolled once, then lay still. To the man with forceps, Carlo said, "What's your name, my son?" The man looked at the interrogator, who minimally shrugged.

       The man said, "Lenbach."

       "No no, what does your mother call you?"

       "Hans."

       Carlo Campanati raised his eyes to the damp discoloured ceiling and prayed: 'O God, look down on your servant Hans with pity. He's a good man led astray by the wickedness of the enemy. He hates what he does. He sees that this innocent child might be his own daughter. He cannot see how the suffering he inflicts can help the cause of his country. Have mercy on him, O God, cleanse his soul and bring him back to the fraternity of humankind."

       The interrogator said, "Get a bucket of cold water. Wake this girl up." Hans Lenbach said: "Es ist genug."

       The interrogator could not believe his ears. He said, "What was that? What did you say then?"

       "I've had enough of it. I don't see what this has to do with fighting a war." And he dropped the bloody forceps onto the butcher's block. His fellow-operator stared at him, his jaw dropped. "Like the priest here says, this poor girl here's done nothing wrong. I've had enough of it."

       "Do you understand what you're saying, Lenbach?"

       "Yes. Enough, I understand enough. Do you understand it? I don't think you do. Get somebody else to do the job." And he lumbered out. As the door opened Carlo could see a helmeted soldier in a long grey greatcoat carrying a rifle stamping on the stones of the corridor, steaming out breath like smoke. The door slammed shut. The interrogator did not call for Lenbach's arrest. Instead he looked murderously at Carlo.

       He said, "You realise what we can do to you?"

       "Oh yes," Carlo said. "Torture me, kill me, nail me to the cathedral door like Luther's ninety-two theses. Get on with it. The devil can't win. Luther knew that, schismatic though he was. But you arme Leute have forgotten Luther as you've forgotten Goethe and Schiller and Johann Sebastian Bach and the rest of the real Germans. God, man, what have you left? What in God's name are you fighting for?" This, I believe, if spoken at all, must have been spoken in good vigorous German. The girl came to from her swoon, looked about with the wide eyes of bewilderment, then fear, then spat blood and screamed. Carlo got up and went over to comfort her, unstrapping her from the chair, burlily elbowing aside the thug who had bound her.

       "Stimmt," the interrogator said. "We say genug until afternoon. We'll give you, Monsignore, time to think and remember."

       "Miuagessen now," Carlo said. "A special meal for the Herrenvolk, today being the Feast of the Nativity of a notorious and subversive Jew. You have to admit that Adolf is a pretty poor substitute for Jesus. God help you, God in his infinite mercy restore you to the community of the living." He hugged the shivering whimpering girl in his arms.

       "You see," the interrogator said to her, "what your holy bishop has done to you. You can blame Jesus Christ and his holy bishop for the pain you've had and the pain you're still going to have. By the time we've done with you you'll be as toothless as your grandmother."

       "I know both her grandmothers," Carlo said, "and they can both gnaw bones down to the marrow." He grunted at the thug operator to open up for him, holding the girl to his warmth that the chill of the cellar had failed to impair. Then he turned to the interrogator and grinned. To Annamaria he said, "Say that you forgive him for what he's done and for what he's going to do. Go on, say it, child." And the girl, as well as she could through a torn gum and a swollen lip said, remembering some scripture lesson, I vostri peccati vi saranno perdonati. It would be good to conclude the incident with the thug's bursting into gross Teutonic tears and the Gestapo interrogator throwing in his job. But all we know is that the sweet voice of a child with a butchered mouth spoke forgiveness in a freezing Nazi torture chamber on Christmas Day. This must be considered a triumph.

       Carlo was well aware of the location of Gianfranco de Bosio and the Fedele group.

       A more complicated episode in the wartime career of the Bishop of Moneta involved the SS GruppenfŸhrer whom Reichsfuhrer Himmler had appointed to the task of supervising the transportation to the Reich and the disposition, in terms of slave labour and eventual liquidation, of the Jewish population of Northern Italy. This functionary was named Helmut Liebeneiner, a thin, bloodless, dyspeptic former schoolmaster from Westphalia. He had worked for a time as commandant of the camp at Oranienburg, was credited with the invention of a more vicious form of the Stahlruten than the SA, its first manipulators, had used, and was considered due for promotion. He was a busy man and intended his stay in Moneta to be brief but productive. All available German manpower was to be devoted not only to the rounding up of Jews but the public humiliation, before their own forced emigration to the slave camps of the Reich, of priests, nuns and monks. The stripping bare of a certain monastery load of Franciscans in a freezing piazza (it was early January) would disclose evidence of ritual circumcision. It was not yet certain what should be done with the Bishop of Moneta. He had on several occasions offered himself as victim at times of hangings in retaliation for terrorism, but his offer had not yet been accepted. Soon it might be.

       Allied bombing had severely damaged the railway line between Trento and Moneta, and Gruppenfflhrer Liebeneiner was compelled to travel from one town to the other in an Opel saloon. He did not enjoy motor travel, for his constitution was delicate and he was easily made carsick. Outside Mezzolombardo he was compelled to order his driver to stop a while, so that he might vomit at the side of the road. While he was still retching on a stomach now empty he was seized by partisans of the Fedele group. The driver was stabbed several times and then thrown into a wet ditch, though not before he had been stripped of his uniform. This, as well as the uniform of Gruppenfflhrer Liebeneiner, fitted tolerably a couple of partisans from Bolzano, whose first language was German. An Opel saloon arrived at nightfall in front of the bishop's palace in Moneta. With harsh German cries a bloody man in grey underwear was kicked out of the car and admitted to the palace. He had been expected. The counterfeit Gruppenfuhrer Liebeneiner went to the SS headquarters of the town, showed his papers, said there were no immediate plans for the rounding up of Judenscheiss in Moneta, then was heilhitlered off. Ironically, the counterfeit Gruppenfuhrer and his driver were shattered by grenades of the Diligenza group on the road outside Campolasta. Liebeneiner's papers were found on the otherwise unidentifiable body and Liebeneiner was written off. There were bloody reprisals, but the innocent of Moneta did not suffer.

       The real Liebeneiner was by now lodged in a chamber of the warren of cellars that lay, hacked out of rock, deep beneath the episcopal palazzo. He was not cold. He was dressed in six sets of the bishop's American woollen underwear, many pairs of thick Alpine stockings, fur-lined boots, and a beaver coat with hat to match. He had a mattress and eight blankets. He had a latrine bucket and a washbowl and towels. He had electric light and a select German library restricted to some of the greatest of the authors whom the Nazis had proscribed. The poems of Heine were there, and also the novels of the famous Austrian Jakob Strehler, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1935. Liebeneiner was not permitted gas or electric heating, since he might use it as a weapon against his visitors or against himself, but Carlo brought in an electric fire whenever, which was for a total of about three hours a day, he came to talk to him. Carlo himself usually brought in also Liebeneiner's meals, which were as good as those times of privation allowed—a thick vegetable soup, roast boar or stewed rabbit or hare, the heartening wine of the region, grappa, no coffee since there was no coffee. We have to guess at their conversation, though we do not need to guess at Carlo's intention: he wished to convert a convinced Nazi into a free human being.

       His task was more difficult than he would ever have thought possible. It seemed to him that Nazi Germany had succeeded in producing a new type of human being, one that had abdicated the rights and duties of freedom of moral choice, that was capable of putting the abstraction of a political system before the realities of human life, that could obey without question, that was able, under orders, to perpetrate the most ghastly enormities totally without remorse, whose satisfactions were referred or collective, whose creed was mystical and insusceptible of any rational reduction. And yet this man Liebeneiner, who had after all taught the English language and analysed poems by Shelley and speeches by Shakespeare, who loved music and had wept at the death of his dog Bruno, who had a wife and daughter whom he claimed to adore and miss sorely, had to be considered one of God's creatures and capable of Christian redemption. Carlo and he spoke English.

       "You say you love your wife."

       "Yes. I adore her."

       "If it were to be established that she was of what is known as the Jewish race, would you still love and adore her?"

       "Of course not."

       "So a profound complex of human emotions, what even you might be willing to call a spiritual state of being, can be wiped out immediately at the behest of a spurious orthodoxy?"

       "I do not understand all your words. You speak too fast."

       "There is a line of Shakespeare you ought to know. 'Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds.' Do you think this is true?"

       "I love my wife. She is not Jewish. She could never be shown to be Jewish. So I will always love her."

       "What does it mean—to be Jewish?"

       "To belong to a race that considers itself to be chosen by its tribal god to be above other peoples. It is a race with special physical and mental qualities. Its blood is different from Aryan blood. It has declared war on Aryan culture. And so it has to be destroyed."

       "Many ethnologists, free ethnologists, scholars unbound to a particular political orthodoxy, state that racial differences are very superficial. There is no such thing, for instance, as Jewish blood. All blood looks alike under the microscope."

       "This is not so."

       "You have had visual evidence of this?"

       "The ethnology of the Party says it is not so."

       "The Party is always right?"

       "Always."

       And so on. And, regularly, the question from Liebeneiner: what was to be done with him, when was he going to be thrown to the partisans to be torn to pieces shouting "Heil Hitler," why was he not put out of his misery now, what trickery was this of the bishop's?

       "No trickery. I believe humanity is above political ideology. I wish you to join the rest of your human brothers. You have nothing to fear. The war will end soon. Germany will be ruined, but a new Germany will arise. You will be a citizen of a free polity unanimated by false doctrine. But your career as a Nazi functionary is at an end. The Nazis are finished. God, man, is the entire world wrong except for Hitler's Reich? Is it not at least conceivable that a system built on the suppression of free thought and free speech, on racialism and genocide and the worship of power, might be an untenable system? Can you at least accept that possibility?"

       "You speak too fast but I think I understand. Can you accept that your Christian Church may be wrong?"

       "Every day I face that possibility. Every day I pray for faith."

       "I have faith too. And I do not have to pray for it."

       "The faith I represent has endured longer than yours. It is also faith in a spiritual essence, not in a mortal leader."

       "Adolf Hitler is as immortal as you believe your Christus to be. When he dies in the flesh as your Christus died he will be alive in the spirit. If Germany is destroyed by your Christians it will be only as land and fields and cities and people. But Germany as the great truth of the world cannot die. The Aryan truth cannot die."

       And so on and so on. Und so weiter. Meanwhile the replacement of Helmut Liebeneiner had arrived in the region, a certain Gruppenfuhrer Ernst Lamprecht. Lamprecht knew very well how the war was going and was perfunctory in his rounding up of Jews and cenobites. Moneta was gaining a bad name for terrorism. The fascist mayor had been shot by partisans. A bomb had been chucked into the guardroom of a barracks taken over by the remnant of a Wehrmacht battalion, killing a sergeant, two corporals and three enlisted men. An SS firing squad, marching to its appointment with the innocent victims of reprisal in Piazza Clementi, was machine-gunned from a bombed villa. The partisans were taking control. Reinforcements were needed to stiffen the wavering Gothic Line further south. The occupying garrison heard rumours of a total German evacuation of Moneta and district. Lamprecht's polished jackboots were seen to be twinkling as he trotted to his Opel for a journey northwest. He wanted out. So did all the Germans. But one German remained, very safe, warm, well-fed, and obdurate.