Being beastly to the Germans

Francis King

THREE NOVELS by Nina Berberova

Chatto & Windus, £10.99, pp. 215

PIG AND OTHER STORIES by Antony Lambton

Constable, 0 1.95, pp. 166

These two collections, Nina Berber- ova's consisting of three superb stories and Antony Lambton's of five good ones and a dud, provide an interesting contrast.

Despite her many years of teaching Russian literature, Berberova, now 89 years old, is first and foremost a writer. Manifestly, writing is central to her life; it is difficult to conceive of her existing without writing; writing is something to which she was born and to which, through the tribulations of exile first in France and then in the United States, she has always been faithful. However, writing cannot be said to have been central to Lambton's life, any more than painting can be said to have been central to Peter Thorneycroft's or music to Edward Heath's. If British cant had not so abruptly terminated his political career, it is perfectly possible that, memoirs apart, Lambton would never have published a single book. From this contrast it would be right to deduce that Berberova is a totally professional writer; but it would be wrong also to deduce that Lambton is a totally amateur one — far from it.

Written in Paris in the 1930s and 40s, when she was a member of a Russian community which also included Ivan Bunin — one would guess a potent influence — Berberova's three novellas deal poignantly with the self-deceptions, cruelties and yearnings of people who, both physically and spiritually, have nowhere to rest arki nowhere to travel.

The first, The Resurrection of Mozart, evokes with masterly economy the fore- boding of those early days of June 1940 when it became increasingly clear that the French army was totally unfitted to resist the German invaders. As their world be- gins to darken, a group of friends discuss whom they would most wish to bring back from the dead. Napoleon, Bismarck, Queen Victoria, Julius Caesar? The host- ess opts for Mozart — 'We could sit up till dawn, and he could play our piano and we'd talk. And everyone would come to see him and listen to him . . .' Subsequent-

ly, as refugees arrive in the village, a young man — pale, thin, with a long nose and tangled hair — turns up and asks her, in French with a slight foreign accent, if she can give him shelter in her house. She agrees. But such are her other worries that from then on she hardly spares him a thought. Eventually, when she and her husband decide that they too must join the general exodus, she puts the young man out of the house with scarcely a word of explanation or apology. She has been entertaining an angel, Mozart himself, unawares.

Even stronger, because less whimsical, is The Waiter and the Slut. Here a story which many a lesser writer would have spun out to novel length is given an all but unbear- able intensity because of its compression. As a young girl, Tania flees, at the outset of the Revolution, with her bureaucrat father and her unloved older sister, from Siberia to Japan. Married to a man whom she soon ceases to love, she spends some time in Shanghai, before travelling, full of unrealisable hopes, with him to Paris. After his death, she is obliged to live, in increasing desperation, on her wits, her friends and any man whom, on her visits to cafes and restaurants, she is able to attract. Finally she shacks up with a middle-aged waiter, another émigré, whom she picks up at the close of an unsuccessful evening of trawling. Disgust with herself, with him and with her whole way of life eventually leads to the violent deaths of both of them.

Almost as remarkable is the third story, Astashev in Paris, about another Russian

émigré, a young man with an instinct for self-preservation as powerful as Tania's desire for self-destruction. The agent of an insurance company, cruelly adroit at fright- ening potential customers into buying life-

insurance; he shuttles between his divorced

mother's dingy apartment and the luxu- rious residence of his ex-actress step- mother. Essentially heartless, he attracts and seduces a young, ardent girl, and is then unmoved when, in despair and re- morse, she kills herself. Tania is a slut, Astashev is a cad; but both are much more than merely these things. They are infinite- ly complex human beings, constantly sur- prising others, themselves and the reader. All six of Lambton's stories are set in wartime Germany; and all but one — the dud, entitled 'Pig', about a middle-class Englishman married to an ineffectual Ger- man aristocrat in Nazi Germany — are, so a prefatory note tells us, based on fact.

Scarcely credible horrors abound, as they certainly did in Germany at that period; but of the acts of decency which from time to time no less certainly also took place, Lambton displays a seemingly obsessive determination to record nothing.

In 'Skating', the inhabitants of an Am- sterdam lunatic asylum are piled into trucks to be carted off to the gas-chambers. Their nurses, who heroically insist on travelling with them, administering to them as best they can, are then also exterminated, for fear that, if they are allowed to return home, they will talk of what they have witnessed. In 'The Axe- man', an expert woodcutter takes pride in beheading 70 Dutch men, women and children on the orders of his commandant, as a reprisal for one Dutchman's refusal to reveal his associates in an attempt to help several hundred Jewish prisoners to escape. In 'The Party' some SS officers allow the most attractive girls in a concen- tration camp to bath, make up and dress in finery stripped from the dead; then they dine them and sleep with them; finally, the next morning, they have them shot.

What Lambton's Maugham-like prose so effectively brings out is the composed tidiness of an evil which even today baffles as much as it shocks. Dostoevsky's thugs, murderers and rapists are consumed with horror and despair, as well as with blood- lust; they feel that they have made a pact with the devil; frantically they long to wipe their hands clean, yet know that they can never do so. Lambton's characters have no such feelings. There is a job to be done — quickly, efficiently, above all tidily — and they must do it. The job done, they feel a quiet satisfaction: after all, the efficient beheading of 70 people is not all that different from the efficient felling of 70 trees, the efficient gassing of lunatics not all that different from the efficient gassing of rats.

The subject-matter of these Grimm stor- ies may not excuse Nicholas Ridley's re- cent outburst about Germany and the Germans in this journal; but it certainly goes far to explain it.

'She's even stayed in London for the media blitz!'