Discourse with Shadows

By Jean Eileen Malcolm

Discourse with Shadows, first published in 1958, is a stark, yet compassionate look at the lives of four Nazi concentration camp survivors and of a friend who returns to Frankfurt from England to locate a missing relative and her son Johann. Driven by their long-repressed anger, the group carries out the murder of a Nazi woman who often attended the tortures at the concentration camp; dire consequences follow which threaten the group of friends.

From the dustjacket: The scene is Frankfurt at the late war’s end: living there are four survivors of a Nazi concentration camp—and Franz Grünwald, who has spent the years since 1935 in England and has now returned to his former home town in search of a relative. We shall only add that the author displays here—in a first novel—such a power of sympathetic imagination as seems to us quite extraordinary. This is an extremely moving book; and while terror and wickedness are never far away, and no attempt is made to see things other than as they are, the total effect given is not only of compassion but also of beauty.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Burtyrki Books
• Release date: Jan 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781839742170

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© Burtyrki Books 2020, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

Discourse with Shadows

JEAN MALCOLM

Discourse with Shadows was originally published in 1958 by Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, New York. All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

• • •

To Asta

• • •

Grief is the word that separate letters make,

By reading them with care, you rightly say,

A scholars accurate heart must bend and break...

You read each letter but have failed to catch

How discourse underneath their shadow-play

Persists beyond the burning of each match:

Though every word is grief, the scholars say.

THOMAS BLACKBURN, The Unabiding

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

I. Franz 5

II. Franz 12

III. Franz 18

IV. Magda 23

V. Pierrot 32

VI. Magda 37

VII. Franz 40

VIII. Magda 49

IX. Franz 53

X. Pierrot 57

XI. Franz 64

XII. Pierrot 69

XIII. Johann 75

XIV. Pierrot 77

XV. Magda 85

XVI. Franz 90

XVII. Pierrot 96

XVIII. Franz 100

XIX. Pierrot 106

XX. Johann 110

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 112

I. Franz

A journey, I remember Irmgard used to say, starts before departure; so tonight it is Paris and the Gare de l’Est, this morning it was Victoria, but the true beginning?

Doors are slamming at the rear and a man advances along the platform. The eye of his lamp shines on the slats, Paris-Frankfurt, on the side of the train. Lights up for a moment the group around the girl in American uniform, a French group, their clothes a blacker tone in the gloom, their arms and voices shrill.

Better get on: the beam of the lamp is far ahead. There is the whistle and at last the girl moves, too. Is there time for all those kisses?

Just. Now she leans out, still talking, still gesticulating. The train lurches and she withdraws her head, to wave through the glass. With the gathering speed, the group recedes, porters slope against their empty trolleys, a station official, the sandwich wagon—a small boy is running, waving, waving, but he drops behind at last, slower, smaller—a pile of sacks and crates shoots back, and the platform ends in a low cliff, and the sound of wheels changes in the open night.

The girl draws back and lights a cigarette. She has a square, rather brash face, and says Pardon me in a strong American accent as she passes, raising a kohl-black calculating eye. From the corner of mine, I see her sway down the corridor.

Interesting. That’s what Curie had said, my last night in Vienna. You might find it interesting in Germany. As a comparison, I mean. See how they do things in the American Zone.

Curie was one of the few civilians on the Commission it was easy to like. I had worked for him at conferences in Vienna, and once he had borrowed me for an assignment in the Zone. I liked and respected him, but I could not tell him why a job in Germany would be out of the question, so I said, I suppose so, yes. And then, of course, he added wistfully, they pay well, and I had laughed and said, Yes, they do, don’t they? He nodded. Fantastic. Well, think about it...How is your Friedl, by the way?

Very well, I said. Friedl’s very well indeed. She gave me the address—I touched the piece of paper—in case I was interested.

Don’t lose it, Frank. You might be on to a good thing. A year or two there and you could save up quite a packet. Something to start on once you’ve made up your mind, got your sense of direction. Must have that, these days, you know. A sense of direction. Can’t just drift.

I nodded: at least I had a sense, strong and sure, of where I would not be going. Not to Germany. Not to Frankfurt.

The lights are thinning now; the outer suburbs of Paris. A couple walk towards me from the rear of the train, an American captain and a woman in civilian clothes. I move back to let them pass, and the woman looks at me. I hear her voice as they go on up the train: Well, if that’s not a Kraut, I’ll eat my hat. You just can’t go anywhere now without seeing them...

The reflection in the night window tells me, smiling, she is right. Where’s Frank Greenwood of Belsize Park? Gone, and here is Franz Grünwald again. Without the battledress, I have returned, not to the eighteen-year-old who put it on, but to someone who might have been.

The lights are all gone now. I pull the door to, and sit down. At least I have the carriage to myself. Just another lucky Kraut. Like Friedl, but I don’t want to think of her. Not now. Glancing up, I am glad to see the French girl back again, an unlit cigarette in her mouth. She slides the door open and leans against the jamb. Say, do you have a light? That atrocious parody of an accent; but her legs are good and the eyes are blank as currants. I light her cigarette and say, Won’t you join me?

Feeling lonesome? Taking the cigarette out of her mouth, she is easier to understand.

That’s about it.

She closes the door and sits down. Going to Frankfurt?

Yes.

I light a cigarette for myself and look at her. Opaque and expressionless, the eyes are like mirrors, reflecting only what looks in.

Where you from? Boston?

I shake my head and, remembering she is French, I tell her I am British and have been working in Vienna.

Vienna? Vienna to Frankfurt via Paris? You always take the long way round?

It seems unnecessary to say I have been in London—unnecessary, in fact, to say anything much. I smile and move across beside her. No, not always.

The lips curl in a pouting return smile, the eyelids droop. Not bad. Something to help pass a few hours. Like conversation or a good book, but easier to find. Eyes still lowered, she puts out one long-nailed finger and runs it down my hand, lying along the arm-rest between us. I’ve never known any English boys.

I turn my hand over and catch her finger. No?

No, never.

Poor you. Poor little you.

The nail is sharp and purple. I can think of pleasanter things to caress.

Poor little me, she repeats, leaning her head against the seat-back and watching me from under lowered lids.

I release the finger and stand up. Don’t you find the corridor light disturbing? Shall I pull down the blinds?

She looks out at the dim blueness for a moment, then back at me with a shrug. Why not?

It is dawn when she goes back to her own compartment. Louise. Works in Mainz at the American liaison office there, and doesn’t see that that is anything to laugh about either. You can’t have everything, and she had those blank black eyes. They remained blank, too, closing whenever an expression threatened.

Through the window now a road runs alongside, white through the dimness. Watching it, I fall asleep.

We are pulling out of Mainz when I wake, so Louise has gone without even bonjour. I wash and straighten my clothes, then stand looking out of the corridor window at Germany again.

There had been so many other returns, other departures. From one or other came the dark man in an astrakhan-collared coat, the woman with parma violets at her throat, but for all their smiling and waving, each has a blank for face. Through the white, salt-sticky lower rails, a small boy peers at the receding wharf. Or, again, the shriek of a train whistle, lighted windows blinking past, until the boy’s face swam, a strange and intermittent twin, in the window as a night express shot through small anonymous towns on the way to—? Somewhere, nowhere. A flicker of luggage labels, postcard views, hotel rooms, to denote the passing of time. It had passed quickly, too—too quickly—and the man and woman had faded like something else from an old film. Only the Frankfurt years remained, to intrude into the forgetting and then the vacuum, a goad and a magnet. One goes back to nothing to call it home.

Against the pewter of a late-November sky jut the snow-covered shoulders of the Taunus; here and there a blot of pinewood. Winter has set in early this year, and in the foreground lie muddy flats and snow-speckled fields. A grey man and a grey horse plod towards a rusty barn. A cock crows.

Four years of belonging doesn’t make a home; four years is not forever. The scattered houses thicken into a band of suburb, then heighten into factories and warehouses as the train slows and the platform rises and the official and the porters and the trolleys slide back it seems again, but now it is Frankfurt! Frankfurt! Aussteigen!

Down the high steps, along the platform, and through the barrier; then shoulder through the early crowd of Germans and the American troops in the entrance. No need to look for anyone at this home-coming.

But I had thought to recognize the city; I had not expected that first glimpse of the square in front of the station, alien with its Army transport, Army hotels, PXs, uniforms. Leaving my case at the station, I walked slowly about the center, to get my bearings, but cautiously sticking to the American way, trailing it as far as the Compound gates. Two taut paratroopers chewed gum and inspected the cards of civilians going in and out; in the shadow of the IG Farben building they looked more at home than by the broken muddy Bahnhofsplatz. We hadn’t often come this way, I supposed, or the barbed wire and sentry boxes confused me.

A siren wailed, and with headlights cutting the grey morning, a caravan of twenty motor cycles swept through the gates, in front of a large car with a little general in it. When they had passed, the sentry on the right rounded on me and snapped, Get moving, Fritz.

I turned and walked away. Once, by what had been the Opera House, I paused; up that street, and to the right...

But the sentry, or the general, or just the military trappings had disturbed my mood. It was as if I no longer knew the password to take me far enough back. I turned in at the first café. That proved a wrong move, too.

As soon as the waitress brought me my order, she scribbled on her pad and tore off my bill. It lay there, on the tablecloth by the glass of beer; when the swing doors into the kitchens thrashed or when someone came in from the street, the scrap of paper lifted slightly and settled again. There was a large jar of mustard in the middle of the table; I moved it over and put it firmly on the bill.

Behind me the waitress was talking to the woman at the cash desk, describing some soldier who had picked her up the week before. He wasn’t exactly handsome, but he had a good heart and he was a sergeant. The cashier sounded impressed: what would a sergeant earn, now? The waitress didn’t know, but of course it would be more than Joe earned. The tall dark one at the dance? Well, he was just a private. And when the girl said yes but so handsome and he danced so well, the cashier said abruptly: All very well, my girl, but one must be realistic, after all.

That closed any possibility of escape for me. It was Vienna again, the tablecloth was white instead of checked, it was night instead of morning, and Friedl was speaking: Johnnie’s a nice boy, really he is, and one must after all be—be realistic.

He’s an officer, you said?

A major.

That’s very realistic.

Her kitten face had puckered with annoyance. Franz! I don’t like you when you’re like that. And as I remained silent, she went on, After all, what do you expect? You’re leaving tomorrow. What am I to do? Wait for you to send for me?

No. No, I shouldn’t do that.

Well, then. One has to live. And Johnnie’s nice. You’d like him—no, Franz, really you would. He’s not the usual kind of GI—

No, he’s a major. Then, at Friedl’s second grimace and sigh, I smiled. Never mind, Friedl. Let it pass. I’m glad you’re...fixed up.

But you won’t come and meet him?

I looked at her for a moment. No, I said.

She shrugged. If you won’t, you won’t. Anyway, he gave me something for you. For a moment, as she opened her handbag, I thought it was going to be money, but she pulled out a piece of paper and handed it to me. There was an officer’s name on it, and an address in Germany.

Johnnie’s really a kind person. I was telling him about you—

"I wish