Gold in the Furnace Read online

  We passed through a station. More leaflets flew out of the window, written by me, thrown by me—“written and thrown by the Gods through me,” I felt. We rushed through another station. I repeated the gesture.

  I was alone in the corridor save for a young man standing there—a handsome blond with a frank, trustful face. I had sworn to myself not to touch food or drink of any sort and not to sleep as long as I was in Germany—a manner of self-imposed penance for not having come before, and a symbolical expression of solidarity with the starving and the homeless among my Führer’s people.

  I continued to distribute my leaflets. Save for two papers concealed, one in a packet of sugar, and the other in a small tin of butter, I had now only loose messages left. Each time we stopped, I expected the police to come, the train to be searched, and me found out and arrested. I knew I was doing something risky and had not for one moment hoped to get away with it. When, on the morning before, I had seen the Baltic Sea gleam in the sunshine, and watched the seagulls come and go in the bright sky, I had felt convinced that these were my last hours of liberty. I was prepared for the worst. But nothing happened.

  The young blond I have mentioned did not seem to be watching me or even to have noticed what I was doing. Yet, I thought I had better try to find out who he was and what views he held . . . “in case.” I went up to him, and we started talking. He was a Dane, he told me. I had met in Iceland, over a year before, a couple of Danes who were convinced Nazis. But I knew, of course, that a very great number were not. I asked this one the testing question which, generally, no European whose country was recently under National Socialist rule can answer without revealing his tendencies: “How did you fare with the Germans, during the war? Badly?” He smiled and replied: “Better than since they left.” I thought for a minute that he had guessed his answer would please me. But no. That could not have been. It was not written on my face that I am a National Socialist. And also, I was then dressed in the Indian style, in a “sari,” as I always had been, for years, before I came to live in occupied Germany. And few people knew what a response Hitler’s message had found in the hearts of some of the “southernmost Aryans.” The young man was probably sincere. And I felt I could talk a little freely to him. I told him how the sight of the ruins shattered me to the depth, and how I was in sympathy with Germany in her martyrdom.

  “Yes,” he said, “I see you throw cigarettes and food to these people.”

  “And better than that,” I suddenly replied, as though something had prompted me to betray myself—or as though I were sure the young Northerner would not betray me.

  “What do you mean by ‘better than that’? What is better than food for the starving?” said he.

  “Hope,” I replied, “the certitude of a future. But don’t ask me for further explanations.”

  “I shall not. I think I understand you now,” he said. “And you have all my sympathy,” he added in a voice that seemed sincere. “But may I ask you only one question: you are not yourself a German, are you?”

  “I am not.”

  “Then, what is your nationality?”

  “Indo-European,” I replied. And I felt my face brighten. In a flash, I imagined on the map of the world the immense stretch of land from Norway to India on which, from time immemorial, the different nations of my race created cultures. And as the young Dane seemed puzzled, I explained: “Yes,” said I, “I have no other nationality. Half Greek and half English, brought up in France, and wedded to a Brahmin from far-away Bengal, what country can I claim as mine? None. But I can claim a race—a race that stands above conventional boundaries. Fifteen years ago, to someone who asked me whether I gave my allegiance to Greece or to India, I answered: “To neither—or to both along with many other lands. I feel myself an Aryan, first and last. And I am proud to be one.”

  I did not add: “And I love this land, Germany, as the hallowed cradle of National Socialism; the country that staked its all so that the whole of the Aryan race might stand together, in its regained ancestral pride; Hitler’s country.” But the young man understood; “I know,” he told me; “and I repeat: you have all my sympathy. I shall not betray you.”

  I was now sure he would not. He talked a little longer to me and then withdrew into his compartment. I soon was alone, awake in the sleeping train rushing on at full speed in the night through Germany. We halted at Bremen and at other stations. But, in order to avoid getting found out, I threw out my leaflets, as much as possible, at small stations through which we passed without stopping, whenever I saw people on the platforms. Every time the train stopped, I thought I might have been detected; I expected to be asked to get down and follow some man in uniform to the nearest police station. But nothing happened. Of all those who had picked up my message dropped from the windows of the Nord Express, none had yet been willing to betray me.

  * * *

  The train halted at Duisburg, and although it must have been about 3:30 a.m., there were plenty of people on the platform. To throw out a handful of leaflets was out of the question. The train was stopping. I would have been seen and arrested at once, without any profit to anybody. But I had an idea: I stuffed the pockets of one of my coats with leaflets, folded the coat in four carefully, and, as soon as the train began to move once more, threw the bundle out of the window. Someone, I thought would be glad to wear it the following winter. (It was a good coat, given to me in Iceland.) In the meantime, whoever picked it up would find in the pockets enough Nazi propaganda for himself and all his friends.

  The train moved on . . . but stopped again. Had I been discovered, this time? I experienced that same uneasy feeling of danger which I had known so often since my narrow escape at the frontier station. Then, I noticed two men in railway uniforms get into the train by one of the doors that opened into the corridor where I was standing. One of them was carrying my coat. The uneasy feeling left me all of a sudden, as by miracle, and was replaced by absolute calm. I now was sure I was going to be caught. I watched the two men walk toward me, as the train started once more.

  They greeted me and asked me whether I spoke German.

  “A little,” said I.

  “You come from India?” asked again the same man, noticing the white cotton “sari” in which I was draped.

  “Yes.”

  “And you threw that coat out of the window?”

  “Yes. It is my coat. I hoped someone among the people would pick it up.”

  “But there are papers in the pockets of that coat—very dangerous papers. Did you know of them?”

  “Yes,” said I, calmly, I would nearly say casually—my fear had completely vanished—“I wrote them myself.”

  “So you know what you are doing, then?”

  “Certainly.”

  “In that case, why do you do it?”

  “Because, for the last twenty years, I have loved and admired Adolf Hitler and the German people.”

  I was happy—oh, so happy!—thus to express my faith in the superman whom the world has misunderstood, and hated, and rejected. I was not sorry to lose my freedom for the pleasure of bearing witness to his glory, now, in 1948.

  “You can go and report me, if you like,” I added, almost triumphantly, looking straight into the faces of the two bewildered men.

  But neither of them showed the slightest desire to report me. On the contrary, the one who had spoken to me, now gazed at me for a second or two, visibly moved. He then held out his hand to me and said, “We thank you, in the name of all Germany.” The other man shook hands with me too. I repeated to them the words I had written in my leaflets: “We shall rise and conquer once more!” And, lifting my right arm, I saluted them as one would have in the glorious years: “Heil Hitler!” They dared not repeat the now forbidden words. But they returned the gesture. The man holding my coat gave it back to me: “Throw it out in some small station in which the train does not stop,” he whispered. “It is no use taking unnecessary risks.” I followed his advice. The coat—and the p
apers it contained—must have been found at daybreak, lying on the lonely platform of some station of which I do not know the name, between Duisburg and Düsseldorf. The two men had long got down from the train.

  The name of Düsseldorf reminded me of the early days of the National Socialist struggle, of the days when the French occupied the Ruhr after the First World War. It also reminded me of one of the Führer’s speeches there, on the 15th of June, 1926, and I recalled a sentence from that speech: “God, in His mercy, has made us a marvellous gift: the hatred of our enemies whom we hate in return with all our hearts.” “Yes,” I thought, “whoever cannot thus hate, is also incapable of loving ardently.” I loved. And I also hated. And for the thousandth time, I realised all that I had lost for never having seen the Führer with my own eyes. Oh, why had I come so late, to behold nothing but ruins? I did not know that, in less than a year’s time, I should have the honour of being tried before a Control Commission Court in that same town—Düsseldorf—for having indulged in “Nazi propaganda.”

  In the meantime, the words of the unknown railway employee filled my consciousness: “We thank you, in the name of all Germany.” Was it to hear these words addressed to me that I had come from so far? And was it to deserve the love of my Führer’s faithful ones—now, in the days of trial, when only the faithful ones remained—that I had come so late?

  * * *

  The train rolled on. I was still there in the corridor, standing in the same place. I was neither tired nor sleepy, although this was the third night I was spending awake. The thrill of danger and my devotion to our Führer sustained me. And the memory of those glorious, unexpected words addressed to me by one of the thousands who still love him—and the first German in the country who had spoken to me—filled me with joy and pride. I would soon be out of Germany now. But I longed to come back—although I could not imagine how—to come back, and begin again.

  We reached Cologne—another ruined city. In the bright morning sunshine, this time, I saw once more those same endless rows of burnt and shattered houses, those deserted streets. The sight was perhaps even more heartrending than in the subdued light of evening. The wounds of the martyred town gaped in all their horror, calling for vengeance.

  I saw people pass in the streets below the level of the railway—those same worn and dignified faces I had noticed all over Germany. When we came to a bridge built above a street, I threw out my last leaflets and my last parcel—some sugar (and, naturally, a leaflet) wrapped up in green paper. The train halted on the bridge, and I watched people pick up my message. They had a look at the papers, saw the swastika at the top, and quickly put them in their pockets; such literature was not to be read in public. For a long time the green parcel lay in the middle of the street. Then, a young man on a bicycle stopped and picked it up. He felt the parcel. Lumps of sugar—or perhaps sweets—something fit to eat, anyhow. He put it in the basket fixed to his bicycle and disappeared.

  I imagined him reaching his home—some cellar, or some narrow rooms in a half-destroyed house—and opening it; seeing the old sacred Sign of the Sun, which is also the sign of National Socialism, at the top of the paper; reading the writing. He would show it to his friends. And when his friends would ask him where he had got it, he would say: “From nowhere. It dropped from heaven into the street. The Gods sent it.” Yes, the Gods. And the words of hope would travel from one end of the country to the other.

  The train moved backwards. Had someone at last betrayed me, and was I going to be asked to get down? No. I was not to be arrested till several months later, in this very station of Cologne, but through my own abysmal stupidity, not through the betrayal of any German. The train was only changing lines. As we passed before a ruined house of which the ground floor alone was inhabited, I saw before the door a plate out of which a stray cat was eating something—some black bread soaked in water, probably; all that the poor people could spare for it. And I was deeply moved by that kind attention to dumb animals on the part of starving people, in the midst of a town in ruins.

  The train started to move again, slowly. For a while, I went back to my carriage where I found two of the Indian girls alone. The Jewesses were not there—thank goodness! I stood at the window, gazing at what was left of Cologne. Then, turning to the girl from the warrior caste—the one who had said, the evening before, that she would like to feel that Hitler were alive—I said to her, in Bengali: “Look! Look what they did to beautiful Germany—to my Führer’s Land!” And I burst into tears. Then, I remembered the splendid starry sky I had seen all night from the windows of the corridor. And I remembered the Dark Blue Goddess, the Mother of Destruction, Whose presence I had felt that night. In faraway India, during the war, I had visited her temples and offered her wreaths of blood-red jaba flowers for Hitler’s victory. The implacable Force had not answered my prayer. But I knew that the ways of the Gods are inscrutable. I now turned my face to the sky, as though the Dark Blue One had been there, invisible, but all-pervading—and irresistible—standing above the ruins. “Kali Ma,” I cried, again in Bengali, “Pratishod kara!”—“Mother Kali, avenge!”

  The Hindu girl saw how moved I was, and heard my appeal to heaven. She looked up to me from her corner and said: “Savitri, believe me, I understand you. The way these people treated Germany is disgraceful.”

  * * *

  Aix-la-Chapelle,79 another city in ruins. Our train stopped again. It must have been, by now, nine o’clock in the morning. A woman came to sweep the train, a woman with a kind, sympathetic face. Seeing me alone and willing to talk, she talked to me. She showed me the ruins one could see from the train and told me the whole country was in the same state. “Alles kaputt,” she said.

  “Jawohl; alles kaputt.” I repeated—all lies in the dust. “But that is not the end. The great days will come back, believe me,” said I, with the accent of sincerity. I had no leaflets left to give her. But I knew their contents by heart. I told her what I had written: “We are the pure gold put to test in the furnace. Let the furnace blaze and roar! Nothing can destroy us. One day, we shall rise and conquer again. Hope and wait.” She looked at me, bewildered, hardly daring to believe that she really heard my words. “Who are you?” she asked me. “An Aryan from the other end of the world,” I answered. “One day, the whole race will look up to the German people as I do today.” And I added in a whisper, as she pressed my hands in hers, “Heil Hitler!”

  She looked at me once more. Her tired face now shone. “Yes,” she said, “he loved us—the poor; the working people; the real German nation. Nobody ever loved us as ‘he’ did. Do you believe ‘he’ is still alive?” she added. I was not yet sure of it. I said: “He can never die.” Some people were coming. We parted.

  The two Jewesses were walking up the corridor with the stage manager. The female who had spoken like a devil from hell on the evening before did not address a word to me—the Gods be praised! But the other one burst out at me in anger. She felt she could say what she pleased to the dresser.

  “Where were you all night?” she asked me.

  “Standing in the corridor.”

  “Why weren’t you in your place in the compartment?”

  “I wanted fresh air. And whose business is it, anyhow, whether I care to sit or stand?”

  “Fresh air, my foot!” she exclaimed. “You were feeding your bloody Germans all night. Don’t we know.”

  “Feeding them, only,” thought I. So they did not know the whole truth after all. “Can’t I feed whom I please with my own money?” I replied. “Again, what business have you to pry into my affairs?”

  But the stage manager stepped into the row. “The Germans!” said he. “You should go and live with them, if you find them so wonderful: live on boiled potatoes in some cellar, like they do, and see how you like it!”

  My eyes flashed, and my heart beat in anticipation of the beautiful life that I so wanted to be mine. Without understanding what he had said, the Jew had expressed my most ardent, my dearest desi
re. “Gods in heaven,” I thought with a longing smile, “help me to come back, and live among my Führer’s people.” But the Jew was not shutting his mouth. My silence, and possibly the happy expression on my face, irritated him.

  “You should be ashamed of yourself,” he continued. “You should think of the British soldiers who lost their lives in this country before you go giving butter and cigarettes to these people.”

  “Mr. Israel B.T.,” I replied, stressing that word Israel that used to precede all Jews’ names officially under the National Socialist régime—“Mr. Israel B.T., I happen to be half-British. And my other half is at least European. You are neither British (save by a misuse of the word) nor European.”

  “A bloody Nazi, that’s what you are!” the Jewess now shouted at me, as loudly as she could, so that all the English-speaking people in the carriage could hear.

  My face beamed. “The highest praise given me in public ever since I left India,” I wanted to say. But I held my peace. We were still in Germany. There was no purpose in further irritating those angry dogs, and calling for unnecessary trouble. I needed my freedom to come back—and begin again.

  The row subsided, as rows always do. I was once more standing at the window alone, my head against the wind. My task was done—for the time being. I looked back to those fifteen intense hours across Germany. I thought of those famishing people, living among ruins. Five hundred of them had got my message. Any of these could easily have taken the paper to the police, and said that it dropped from the Nord Express, and with the reward given him, bought enough black market food to stuff himself for a month. The Nord Express would have been stopped, and searched, and I arrested. But no; of five hundred Germans taken at random along a route of four hundred miles or more, not one had wished to betray the holy sign of the Swastika—not for money, not for food, not for milk for their children. I admired these people, even more than I had in glorious ’40. “My Führer’s people,” I thought, “I’ll come back to you somehow. I wish to share your martyrdom, and fight at your side in these dark days. And wait with you for the second dawn of National Socialism.”