Out of This World

by Graham Swift

  I haven’t shown it to Joe. I haven’t told him I’ve got it. Because I think if he knew I’d heard from Harry, he’d be, I don’t know – angry? Hurt? Afraid? And if he knew that I wanted – If he knew that, after all, I really wanted – Then I think he’d know too: that I don’t – Haven’t for years. Not any more.

  He’s going to get married. He’s going to get fucking married. To some fucking girl. And he wants me to – He’d like me – He wants me.

  Harry

  Small worlds. Big worlds. The one can eclipse the other. When the moon blots out the sun and makes the world go dark, it isn’t because the moon is bigger than the sun.

  When I went to Nuremberg in 1946 to cover the end of the war trials, on my first foreign assignment as a fledgling news photographer, I was looking, as my employers were looking, as the whole world was looking, for monsters. Goering, Hess, Keitel, von Ribbentrop … Capture in their faces the obscenity of their crimes, capture in their eyes the death of millions, capture in the furrows of their brows the enormity of their guilt. Jodl, Sauckel, Kaltenbrunner …

  But I didn’t find monsters. I found this collection of dull, nondescript, headphoned men, thin and pale from months in prison, with the faces of people in waiting rooms or people co-opted into some tedious, routine task. Only Goering rose – if this is the right phrase – to the occasion, and with a smart line in sarcasm and courtroom repartee, played the part of stage villain. But that too was wrong. As if we should get to love him, be amused by him. As if he should become some celebrity, a story-book figure, and we would say: We forget the others, but that Goering, now he was a character.

  Where was the horror? And where was the sense of the suspended weight of the sword of History, which, if it should have hung over any point on earth in September 1946, should have hung over that courthouse in Nuremberg. Beneath the rows of white-helmeted military police, the lawyers and officials fidgeted in their seats, scratched their chins, looked at watches, stifled yawns. The testimonies, the evidence, the statistics that must have been, when the trial opened, the object of terrible attention, were repeated now, almost a year later, with a kind of laborious matter-of-factness. Yes, we have heard all this before, but shall we go through it once again, try to approach it from a fresh angle?

  I thought: So what is there to capture? And then I realized. It is this ordinariness I must capture. This terrible ordinariness. The fact of this ordinariness. I must show that monsters do not belong to comfortable tales. That the worst things are perpetrated by people no one would pick out from a crowd.

  Rosenberg, being marched from prison to courthouse. He squints, he seems distracted. He looks like a man with a headache, a morning hangover, that’s all. He has nicked himself shaving.

  People cannot comprehend large numbers or great extremes. They cannot comprehend a thousand deaths, or routine atrocity, or the fact that there are situations – they arise and spread so quickly – in which life becomes suddenly so cheap that it is worth next to nothing, less than nothing, and killing is as casual as being killed. These things are pushed to the remote borders of the mind, where perhaps they will be wafted into someone else’s territory. But they can contemplate one death, or one life. Or a handful of deaths or a handful of lives. And they watch, almost with glad relief, when the unthinkable facts of a decade are unloaded on to the figures of twenty-one men who are placed, as it were, on a stage with the entire world as audience, and the whole thing takes on the solemnized aspect of ritual. Nothing is more edifying than a courtroom drama. Nothing is more conscience-cleansing than an exhibition of culprits. Nothing is more cathartic than the conversion of fact into fable.

  Save of course that no fable, no drama can sustain itself indefinitely. By the eighth or ninth month of the Nuremberg War Trial the audience had wearied. They felt free to let their attention wander. But now, in September 1946, drama was returning to what seemed to have descended into mere bureaucracy. Judgement was nigh, the denouement was due.

  Outside the courtroom, in the autumn sunshine, the rubble of Nuremberg was still being cleared. Two years before in the calm of an Air Force Intelligence establishment I had gazed on frozen, monochrome images of Nuremberg being destroyed from the air. The city that was progressively laid waste right up until the early months of ’45 was the old medieval capital of Franconia, a city of churches, towers, merchants and craftsmen – clock-makers, gold-beaters, silversmiths. Since 1946 this intricate product of the centuries has been rebuilt. It is not real, of course. It is a modern reconstruction, but it has been painstakingly done – so I am told – as if to re-conjure a world before certain irreversible historical events had happened. Now, Nuremberg is one of the chief tourist towns of Germany. People go for these picturesque reconstructions, mixed with genuine remnants of the old, for the fairy-tale spires and gables. The one-time site of Nazi rallies and the scene of the War Trials are of secondary interest.

  After the executions were carried out in the prison gymnasium in the early morning of October 16th, I took photos of the crowd which had gathered in the first light of day outside the prison walls. It consisted of members of the Allied occupying forces and administration, but among them were a few, less assertive, German faces. They were gathered to experience a momentous communal thrill which they felt, plainly, was theirs by right and which would be intensified, as if by some physical charge, by their proximity to its source. They were waiting for some sign, some revelation, a display of corpses, perhaps, at which they might cheer and raise their fists; and their faces wore a look of murderous exultation. These too were the faces of ordinary people.

  Eleven were condemned and seven received prison sentences. Of the condemned, only Goering, whose defence had been – is this the right word? – so spirited, played a final trick on his audience by swallowing concealed poison. It is said that there was horse-trading amongst the Allied nations as to who should die. It is also said that the executioner deliberately bungled the hangings, so that some, at least, of those who died, died slowly and horribly. Was this a crime against humanity?

  I don’t recall now where they had flown that night. Conceivably, it was Nuremberg. In any case I hadn’t flown with them (and I was glad of that). But I was taking shots of the planes as they returned at dawn. For one of the Lancs things had gone badly – or not so badly, depending on how you look at it, since the plane got back, as others didn’t, and all save two of the crew were unharmed. They were transferring the pilot from the cockpit to the ambulance, and I should have been stopped, perhaps, from coming so close. But (I would discover this later over and over again) people don’t stop you. They don’t, as a rule, make a grab for your camera, or for you. They are too busy, too caught up. You are just another mad part of the scene. It’s afterwards that they say: Did you see?! That bastard with the camera!

  The pilot was supported in a cradle formed by the joined arms of two ambulance crew who were walking him from the plane. His arms were round their necks and he was held in a sort of jammed foetal position, as if his knees couldn’t be prized from his abdomen. His lips were curled back and his teeth clamped together, so he looked like some terrible parody of a man straining to void his bowels. He had flown back from Germany and landed his aircraft with a cannon shell up his arse, and his face was green with the pain.

  I took three, four pictures, which the Air Ministry promptly impounded, these not being the sort of pictures they had in mind (even if they were, according to my brief, ‘authentic visual records of the air war’). But several years later they released them, and one of them is included in Aftermaths, in the first section called ‘Bombers 1945’ (it is captioned simply ‘Lancaster pilot’ with the name of the base and the date), and became regarded as one of my ‘famous’ early shots.

  That pilot was awarded, posthumously, the D.F.C. for his act of heroism in bringing back his plane and crew. When you look at the photo you do not think, I think, of heroism. You think of pain and absurdity. But your mind focuses on that agonized young a
irman in an act of compassionate concentration that it would be sacrilegious to call sentimental. You think of personal things. You wonder who he was. You imagine his home somewhere, his parents, his girl. You think of him as an unsuspecting schoolboy. You do not think – it would seem almost blasphemous to do so – of the many hundreds of men, women and children who were killed or maimed as a result of the raid in which this young pilot took part. You do not think of the bombs stored in the bomb-bay of the now emptied and shot-up plane in the background. Nor would you think (assuming you were told the nature of the pilot’s fatal wound) of the cannon shell, that particular cannon shell, amongst so many cannon shells. How it must have been turned out, one of millions, in some mid-European works. How it must have passed through the hands of a munitions worker, a girl in a mob-cap, imagine. Whether she had relatives who had been killed in air raids. Whether she could have conceivably guessed the final resting place of that shell. Whether she ever thought of where those shells it was her business to send on their way might end up. Surely she did, but then there were so many shells: to think of them all, impossible; to think of one, pointless. But you stare fixedly at this suffering figure, picked out from the random carnage of war, destined not only for a posthumous medal but also – But then something rebels against your concentration, something undermines the very purity of your pity. Also to be the object of photographic contemplation.

  ‘An act of heroism’ suggests always, if only at first, something glamorous and emblematic: a handsome face turned to some dangerous prospect. We say of certain things that they are not only done but must be seen to be done. We say this, for example, of Justice. When that dead pilot was awarded the D.F.C., you could say that heroism was seen to be done. This is not to suggest there was no actual heroism, but the actual heroism may have been of a quite different kind from that which went recognized. After all (but again this seems almost blasphemous), what choice did he have? Was it as though he willed his life to culminate in an act, and that particular act, of heroism? And, at the terrible moment, what else could he do, with a parcel of hot metal up his rectum and a dead flight engineer and a damaged aircraft? Appeal to some hidden power and say: Wake me out of this dream?

  When I took that photograph I thought to myself, if not in so many words: Let this have no aesthetic content, let this be only like it is, in the middle of things. Since I knew already that photos taken in even the most chaotic circumstances can acquire, lifted from the mad flow of events, a perverse formality and poise. I thought this as I took the picture. I did not think of the pilot. Was this an act of inhumanity?

  The two orderlies are staggering slightly. It is like some joke version of the exhausted athlete being carried in triumph. One second please, face the camera please (but his eyes were shut to the world), to record your moment of glory. I half hid behind the swung-open ambulance door, then stepped out and clicked.

  My first picture of a dying man.

  Until I went to Nuremberg in ’46 I had not seen, at ground level, any of the damage done to Germany. I was not, though I might easily have been, amongst those photographers specifically despatched to record the progress of Liberation and the evidence of defeat. Nor was I amongst those first on the scene, who would never forget being present, when the camps at Buchenwald, Belsen and elsewhere were opened. But a future, now late colleague of mine, Bill Cochrane, was. Our careers evolved along similar lines, since Bill at the time was a War Office photographer, just as I was accredited to the Air Ministry. Some of Bill’s photographs were used in the Allies’ propaganda campaign of post-war ‘enlightenment’ and de-Nazification, others found their way into the mass of documentation submitted to the Nuremberg prosecutors.

  Seeing is believing and certain things must be seen to have been done. Without the camera the world might start to disbelieve. At the newly liberated camps local civilians were made to file past the emaciated corpses in order to witness facts of which, despite their proximity, they had no greater knowledge than the newly arrived Allies. There is a photo of Bill’s showing this procedure taking place. A man is looking at something near his feet, with an expression of confusion on his face. You cannot tell if the confusion is the result of what he is looking at or the knowledge that he is being photographed.

  Which is worse: to have to look at piles of corpses? Or to photograph people looking at piles of corpses? Would Bill have taken this photo if he were not ordered to do so? Was it an act of inhumanity?

  Bill Cochrane was killed in the Congo in ’63, trying to take pictures of an ambush when he had already been hit in the leg. His death itself became a minor news item, there was a half-column report, a brief obituary, and I was asked to attend a memorial service at St Bride’s. Posthumous honours came his way. Should journalists receive medals and citations? For courage and sacrifice in the service of truth? Is it truth they are after, or are they just trying to be heroes?

  Bill and I worked together for a while on the same paper. He used to tell a story about when he was at Nordhausen, the first of the camps he witnessed. He had not known then that he would later become a professional news photographer or whether he wanted to be one. Before the corpses were removed he deliberately went to look at them, because he thought he should do so without the protection, as it were, of his camera. He found himself virtually alone beside a row of bodies – people were staying clear because of the terrible smell – but while he was standing there an American corporal approached from the other end of the row. Bill used to say that the corporal’s uniform looked particularly new and pressed and his face clean and fresh, as if he had just stepped off the troop plane, but I wondered if this was Bill’s embellishment. The G.I. was approaching the corpses with a handkerchief held over his nose and mouth, but he also had a camera round his neck – his own camera, new-looking – and he started to take pictures. He would wrench his hand from his face, raise the camera and repeat, ‘Oh my God, oh my God,’ apparently not noticing Bill. Bill said it was like some parody of the determined sightseer desperate to take snaps for the folks back home. He wondered whether without the camera the corporal could have got so near. Or whether he needed, as if to convince himself, the future proof of what his own eyes were seeing.

  But the point of the story is that in his agitation the American had forgotten to take the lens-cap from his camera. Bill said he could have gone up to him and told him. He could have made that decision. But he didn’t.

  Sophie

  How can I tell, Doctor K? Tell me how to tell it. People say: ‘It was all over in an instant’ or ‘It happened so quickly.’ But it isn’t like that. Something happens to time. Something happens to normality. A hole gets blasted in it. A hole with no bottom to it. So what is over in an instant just goes on happening. It happens in long slow-motion. And then it just keeps on happening. So that afterwards, when I was some place else, here in New York, three thousand miles away, it wasn’t afterwards or some other place, I was still there, on the terrace at Hyfield, standing, frozen, as if I might never move again, with that strange noise in my ears, the noise of absolute silence. Couldn’t even hear Mrs Keane screaming. Apparently she was screaming, her mouth was wide open. Only the voice in my head, like the distant voice down a telephone, which was saying: Something terrible has happened. Is happening. Is happening.

  Because you don’t believe it. You don’t believe that one moment – Then the next – Because you don’t believe it can have happened. So it goes on happening. Till you believe it. How can I tell you what I don’t believe? What do you want me to say? I was there. Heard. Saw. On the spot. How does that help?

  And what am I trying to tell you, anyway? That on an April morning ten years ago, my grandfather was blown up by terrorists, along with his chauffeur and a Daimler. And that if I hadn’t been standing there on the terrace, about to sit down with the cup of coffee Mrs Keane had brought, and thinking, Now I will talk to Harry – if I’d said goodbye to Grandad at the front porch and not on the terrace (‘Goodbye,’ he said, ‘no
, stay here, sit down,’ like a husband who thinks that even a newly pregnant woman shouldn’t move) – then I might – Too.

  Goodbye. A kiss. Another sixty seconds –

  And if Harry hadn’t been up in the rear bedroom, packing his things – And if Mrs Keane hadn’t just stepped from the kitchen, with a fresh tray of coffee –

  But you know all that. Or you can look it up. Do you do your homework, Doctor K? ‘Lucky escape of Harry Beech and his Daughter’: that was how the newspapers put it, mentioning Mrs Keane only as an afterthought. Lucky escape! And then of course the pictures. The ‘gruesome’ pictures. Wreckage ‘littering the once immaculate lawn’. Policemen sifting. And the newsreels and telerecordings. Mr and Mrs Carmichael leaving the hospital. (Can you describe, Mrs Carmichael, can you describe, exactly?) Harry Beech arriving at Hyfield in a police car. He looks like a criminal. ‘This very morning, by grim irony, Mr Beech was about to leave for Northern Ireland.’

  It’s all there. It was all news, public knowledge. What more can I say? Except how it really –

  By grim irony.

  You see, I wanted to talk to him alone. I wanted to sit there with him on the terrace, just like I’d sat with Grandad, and talk. About me and Joe. And America and Hyfield. About homes and families (homes and families!). He had an hour or more before he had to leave for his plane. I think I even said to him, Go and pack your things, then let’s talk. I wanted to say to him, When did we last talk together, really talk, you and I? Yes, yes, I know you are going off, again, to Northern Ireland this time, and that is far more important of course than any piffling bit of news I can give you, like the fact that I am pregnant. But I am going to be a mother. Doesn’t that remind you of being a father?