A Necessary Action

by Per Wahlöö

  He felt Hugo Spohler’s arm for a while and shook his head. Then he took a piece of blue chalk out of his pocket and drew a line round the arm, just below the shoulder. Hugo tried to argue with him, but they had no common language and the Italian also appeared to be very tired.

  When the doctor had gone, Hugo Spohler managed to get off the stretcher and walk out of the tent. Out on the road, he stopped a Service Corps vehicle, which took him to a German first-aid post farther away from the front. Two weeks later he was taken on a hospital train going west. He still had his arm but it hurt him so badly that he screamed with pain when the morphine he had been given lost its effect.

  After three months he was more or less recovered but not yet fit for service. He was put on special service and sent to France again, to the north coast, where the sun was not quite so seductive as in Bayonne. In addition to this, the spiritual climate had grown considerably harsher, but that he did not bother about.

  Hugo Spohler knew the art of forgetting what he considered not worth remembering.

  During the war he had not been able to avoid killing a number of people, perhaps six or seven, but he never talked about it and neither did he think about it.

  He remembered the French shop girl’s navel and eyelashes very well, but he did not remember that one morning, with the warmth from their bed still with him, he had executed three workmen who—probably mistakenly—had been suspected of sabotage.

  He could describe a young Ukrainian woman partisan in detail, the one he and two others had raped in a stable (she had preposterously large nipples and black hair on her legs, and strangely enough had been a virgin) but he had no memory of the scenes of horror at the first-aid post or the Italian surgeon with his bit of blue chalk.

  From his happy years he could remember the tunes and parades and the Fuehrer, whom he had seen several times at quite close quarters, but he had long forgotten a red-haired sergeant who had forced him to throw himself down in a deep muddy pool on the barrack square forty times, one after another.

  When Hugo Spohler talked about the war it might have all been a fantastic escapade, full of absurd complications.

  He conquered the past with forgetfulness and the present with optimism, romancing away from sorrows and difficulties. People liked him. He was warm and positive and he was always looking straight ahead.

  His attitude to Willi Mohr was not very complicated.

  He refused to believe that a person who had never experienced anything could be marked by his experiences.

  As he had no understanding whatsoever for any form of depression or dispiritedness, he confused Willi Mohr’s sullen coldness with the true integrity and perfectionism he had always admired.

  Hugo Spohler filled the empty space round Willi Mohr with talk. He had never forgotten Bayonne, and in the middle of the camp’s grey muddy sordidness, he gave himself up to vague sundrenched visions of the South. The South had become his Shangri-La, the happy land of naive escapism.

  Hour after hour Willi Mohr lay with his chin propped in his hand, listening. Gradually he realized that even his own passive resistance lacked strength, that he was on the way to being convinced.

  Hugo Spohler was the first to get away from the camp. A week later he met a girl from Berlin and made her pregnant. Then he borrowed two hundred marks from her, got himself a passport and hitched south. He landed up in the puerto by chance and managed to stay there for a while.

  After four weeks he came home again, broke but happy. He was intoxicated by the experience and had painted four very bad paintings with borrowed paints. A little later he got himself a place and married the girl from Berlin. She was the only survivor of a well-to-do official’s family and had no assets apart from a good physique, a respectable upbringing and a job in a betting-office.

  Hugo Spohler had thus organized his own life and could again devote himself to Willi Mohr. He got him out of the repatriation camp, much as one fetches a forgotten trunk, and placed him in an attic room in a tumbledown, bomb-damaged old block in Zugasse, on the west bank of the Rhine.

  Next to Willi Mohr’s room was a large, open attic with a hole in the roof, the floor covered with broken tiles and charred bits of wood. They cleared away the rubbish and covered the ceiling with hardboard and corrugated iron. Then they had a studio and Hugo Spohler painted several pictures in it. He was totally lacking in talent, but not afraid of using bright colours, and he himself considered that his paintings were pretty good. He also succeeded in selling some of them for fifteen marks each and was greatly encouraged.

  Willi Mohr had a view over the river from his window. It was autumn and wet and foggy, with tugboats, with their tall sloping chimneys, going by like ships in the mist, towing long barges behind them. One day he borrowed Hugo’s paints and sat down at the window and painted a picture. He took a long time over it, dabbing carefully with the brush, now and again sticking out his lip and peering out into the pouring grey rain.

  The result filled Hugo Spohler with astonishment and enthusiasm, but Willi Mohr was more dispassionate. He knew of old that he ought to be able to make fog look like fog and a tugboat like a tugboat.

  Hugo got seventy-five marks for the picture, but he could not persuade Willi to paint any more like it. Neither of them had a definite job, but now and again they took temporary employment in the docks or on some building site. Willi Mohr mostly lay on his rickety old camp bed, smoking cigarette ends in a pipe as he stared at the ceiling. Sometimes he wondered vaguely what on earth he was doing there.

  When Hugo’s wife was eight months pregnant, she had to stop working and so he was faced with a wholly new problem. For the first time in his thirty-year-old life he was forced to take financial responsibility for both himself and someone else. He was in no way a soldier any longer. The war was definitely over. He felt that it had been going on for a very long time, beginning some time in the thirties when he was only a small boy and to a certain extent continuing through the years, even after that morning between the hedges in Normandy.

  Soon after the New Year, Willi Mohr and Hugo Spohler applied for work as decorators at an English department store, which was there largely to serve the forces of occupation. Although Willi was undoubtedly the one with the qualifications, it was Hugo who got the job. He managed to get a week’s wages in advance and they celebrated by drinking beer and a couple of schnapps at a beer-hall by the cathedral. Afterwards they went to a brothel. Willi Mohr liked the brothel because it was pleasant and clean and functional and wholly impersonal. It was in a new yellow-brick two-storey block, and the prostitutes lived in identical rooms along a long corridor, with numbers on the doors, exactly like a real hospital. The rooms were practical and kept clean, with coverlets and curtains in pastel shades, and the employees were dressed in garments which more or less matched the décor. The women who worked there had been chosen with some care so that the enterprise would be in a position to cater for different tastes in such matters as corpulence, stature and colour of hair. Willi Mohr had no particular bents, but he used to avoid those who were blue-eyed, though he did not know why.

  Hugo Spohler said that the brothel was colour-conditioned and he expressed some disapproval of it, but Willi Mohr thought it was a considerable improvement on those he had been to in Gotenhafen.

  After their visit to the brothel, they bought a litre of wine and sat on the bed in Willi Mohr’s room and drank it. Outside it was raining steadily and dismally, and the tugboats hooted in the poor visibility. The German miracle growled and rattled along the streets by the river.

  As in the repatriation camp the year before, Hugo did his best to talk away the cold and rawness from the air. After his expedition to the south he had not only his imagination to call on, but he also had access to certain facts. So his arguments became even more convincing.

  Willi Mohr sat leaning against the wall and listened. He had drawn one foot up on to the edge of the bed and was balancing his wine glass on his knee.

  ‘You h
ave to express yourself and that’s the most important thing,’ said Hugo. ‘Express yourself in colour or words or tunes. Why is it so difficult to express yourself here? Well, because there’s nothing here one wants to express. And not only that, but also because here there’s such a hell of a lot that stops us and ties us down. You’d be a great painter, if only you could work in the right surroundings and the right atmosphere. Perhaps I would too. Willi, listen to me for once …’

  ‘I always listen to you, said Willi Mohr seriously.

  ‘Wouldn’t you like to try then?’

  Willi Mohr sipped his wine, which was cheap and sour. Then he looked towards the window and nodded.

  ‘O.K.,’ he said. ‘We’ll try.’

  They made the decision that evening, a decision which was of determining significance to Willi Mohr, but in fact made not the slightest difference to Hugo Spohler.

  They were to work hard for eighteen months and save every pfennig. Then they would go to Spain and live there for a year and paint. Eventually, and if the money lasted, Hugo would take his family there too.

  ‘But,’ he said, ‘on the other hand I don’t think Maria would get very much out of it. Next year she can go out to work again and perhaps it’s better if she supports herself and the kid.’

  When Hugo had gone, Willi Mohr undressed and crept down into his bed. He was slightly drunk and the sheets felt damp and cold. But deep down in his mind, a minute speck of expectancy had come to life, and he wondered whether he would ever be able to experience even a small fraction of the exhilaration which Hugo seemed to be able to produce from his imagination.

  Three days later he got himself a job and left the attic in Zugasse for ever.

  During the following year, they did not meet once. Willi sent one or two postcards with laconic messages on them, but he never received one in return, perhaps owing to the fact that he never had a permanent address.

  When the summer came Hugo Spohler had saved three hundred marks. He hitched to Spain and bathed for three weeks. When he came home again, he had made a lot of new acquaintances and had the Caudillo’s portrait on one single Spanish duro, which no one would change for him.

  Next summer Willi Mohr went back to Cologne. He was much the same as ever, if possible even thinner, more sullen and more blue-eyed. He had saved three-thousand-five-hundred marks and was going to go to Spain to paint.

  Hugo Spohler had changed a good deal. Although he still had no money, he seemed plump and well. He had moved to another house and had a son of fourteen months and his wife was pregnant again. He moved in circles which enthused about Buddhism and Zen-Buddhism and he was convinced that he could cure his ulcers by will power. He spent his evenings working out involved betting systems, which were going to bring him in a fortune. He had stopped painting, but was still convinced that he ought to move to a warmer country. Sometime.

  Willi Mohr felt slightly cheated, but smiled a sardonic smile and persuaded himself that this was in reality exactly what he had expected.

  Hugo Spohler was, as usual, master of the situation. He took two weeks’ holiday and borrowed two hundred marks of Willi’s capital.

  ‘We’ll hitch down and then I’ll show you the best place of all,’ he said. ‘I’ll introduce you to people, good people, and then I’ll come down and fetch you in a year or so.’

  He laughed and slapped Willi Mohr on the back.

  ‘You’ll have to experience this year for us both,’ he said.

  They had good luck with lifts, but had to walk the last bit over the border in the Pyrenees.

  About a hundred yards directly above the last tunnel on the French side, an iron chain was stretched across the road and a civil guard in green uniform and black shiny cap came out of a little tin shack in the mountainside. He had a carbine over his shoulder and glanced at their visas before he let them through.

  ‘The real passport control is a couple of kilometres down the road,’ he said, as he raised the chain.

  They came to the puerto in the middle of the summer and Hugo Spohler could only stay a week. The day he left, he bought a thick notebook with a blue mercerized cover and gave it to Willi Mohr.

  ‘I told you you’d have to experience this year for us both,’ he said. ‘I want you to note down your impressions day by day in this book, as if you were writing letters to me. Then when we meet again, we can go through what you’ve written. Don’t forget you must express yourself, in every way.’

  Half an hour later he left the puerto. The first bit he did in Santiago’s fish-van.

  He had just introduced Willi Mohr to Dan Pedersen and his wife. All three of them were standing outside Jacinto’s bar, watching the van.

  Hugo Spohler did not hear from Willi Mohr during the whole of the following year and neither did he think about him very often. Hugo got himself a better job shortly after Christmas and the following summer he did not have an opportunity to travel south.

  2

  When Willi Mohr woke in the morning of the sixteenth of December, he was alone in the house in Barrio Son Jofre. Although he had slept for only four hours, he was wide awake the moment he opened his eyes. The cat had evidently felt cold, as it had crept in under the blanket and lay curled up with its head in his armpit. It was quite quiet in the house, and neither were there any special sounds from outside, only the wind rushing over the mountain ridge far above. The wind had begun to get up after the siesta the day before and no boats had left the puerto, not even the old trawlers.

  He pushed the cat away and looked at his watch lying in its usual place on the floor to the left of his mattress, together with his cigarettes and a box of matches. It was half-past seven.

  Willi Mohr got up, took off his pyjama jacket and went out into the kitchen. He cleaned his teeth and washed his face and torso with cold water. Then he went back into the room and dressed. He shooed the cat away from the warm bedclothes where it had again curled up, opened the door and shook out the blankets and sheets thoroughly. Meanwhile the cat sat on the stone floor blinking sleepily, waiting for his bed-making to be completed so that it could go back to bed again.

  Willi Mohr lit his first cigarette of the day and went upstairs. The sky was covered with an even grey blanket of clouds and although it was not raining the air was heavy and humid. Despite the mist and the low clouds, he could see that the wind was howling through the pines up on the mountain.

  He fetched the gas can and the funnel from the kitchen and poured the remains of the gas into the camioneta’s tank. When he put the things back, he took his straw hat down from the nail in the doorpost and was just about to leave when he stopped in the doorway, went back into the room and got the notebook out of his rucksack. Then he sat down on the bottom stair and leafed through it.

  The last note was more than three months old and very brief.

  4th September, 22.30. Today I fetched wood, bathed and played ping-pong with S. and D. I think I’m beginning to like …

  He had never completed the sentence.

  On the next pages were three or four small sketches of houses and streets and one of a donkey working a pump. There were also some calculations and some figures, but he had forgotten what they were about.

  He leafed on until he came to an empty page, undid the top of his fountain pen, looked at his watch and wrote:

  16th December, 8 a.m. Yesterday I waited all afternoon and evening in the puerto but they did not come back. It was past two in the morning when I got home.

  He put the notebook in his hip pocket and went out to start up the camioneta. It took a while to get it going. The dog had been locked out again and he had not thought of taking her with him, but when she ran so far after the truck, he took pity on her and stopped. As he lifted the animal up on to the seat he could feel her trembling with the strain, her heart thumping violently.

  In the puerto all was silent and calm, as if the inhabitants had not yet woken. The quay shone from the rain and the water was pale and smooth, reflecting the sky in
shades of grey. There were a lot of boats lying in harbour, but he at once saw that the calamary boat was still not there.

  Willi Mohr parked the camioneta on the quay and lifted down the dog. He listened absently to the sea roaring beyond the mountains and walked slowly across the broad open concrete surface. He had already waited for twelve hours the day before, from two in the afternoon until two in the morning. He had not sat in the camioneta all the time, but had moved from café to café, and no one had spoken to him or even noticed his presence.

  He bought a roll and some red jam in the tienda, sat down outside the nearest bar and ordered café con leche. Although the basket chair was under the awning, its arms were sticky and slightly furry with the damp.

  He gave the bitch half the roll and forced himself to eat the rest, although he did not feel at all hungry.

  An hour went by. Willi Mohr remained sitting in the basket chair, staring out across the bay. His eyes were blue and expressionless. There was no sign of life in the harbour.

  Pedro Alemany came down from one of the steep side-streets and walked out on to the quay. He had a dead yellowish cigarette in the corner of his mouth and was wearing espadrilles, a black shirt, black trousers and a beret. He stood for a long while with his hands in his pockets, looking out towards the approaches, small and fat, his feet apart. Then he looked round, caught sight of Willi Mohr outside the café and slowly walked across the concrete space.

  He leisuredly raised a thick, short forefinger to his temple and said something which the other man did not understand. Willi Mohr had no sense of language and knew only a few of the most ordinary words.

  When the fisherman saw that he had not succeeded in making himself understood, he first pointed at Willi, then out towards the sea and then made a questioning gesture.