Unexploded

by Alison Macleod

  Geoffrey removed his hat and bent low, grateful for both his size and the distraction of his newspaper. The day’s sawdust was still fresh but the musty sweetness of a century of spilled ale, tobacco smoke and woodsmoke clung like tar to the walls. The blackout curtains were two-thirds lowered, even at this time of day, and overhead, the ceiling bulged like a tumour.

  He made his way to the bar, knocking his head against a beam and swearing softly. His eyes were slow to adjust. The drinkers remained silent, apparently uninterested in either him or the reason for his intrusion. The air was thick and tacky, as if suspicion and casual ran-cour mingled with the dust. The publican and his stomach leaned corpulently over the bar, resenting the irritation of a new customer with a good fedora and a leather case. In a low voice Geoffrey ordered a stout, lit a cigarette, nodded to the winkle-eaters, and made a show of glancing at the headlines. Only as his bottle hit the bar did he reach for his wallet.

  His face must have betrayed him.

  Beside him, a man with small, rabbit eyes laughed into his beer. ‘She must have been very dear, sir!’

  A roar went up. The joker’s hand rested lightly against the bar. A razor blade was taped to his finger, snug as a wedding ring.

  A joke, Geoffrey told himself. A lucky guess. They were always going to have their fun.

  ‘May I interest you in a loan, sir?’ It was the oldest man, the one with the lumpen parcel. ‘I dessay you must be feeling spent this fine afternoon.’ He raised a winkle to him, caught the soft dead thing on the end of his pin, and tongued the end of it in a grotesque pantomime. Another boom of laughter rang out, and Geoffrey took in the hard, glittering eyes and the brilliant white rose in the man’s buttonhole. Only now did it occur to him. The house for ‘Gentlemen Lodgers’ was just half a mile away. For what other purpose did men like himself appear in this part of town?

  ‘I should be fine, thank you,’ he said to the widow’s peak. Then he flashed the publican an unsteady smile while, behind the cover of the bar, his fingers scrabbled furiously in the depth of his pockets.

  Three shillings delivered him.

  A raucous cheer went up.

  Thank God he’d left her when he had.

  It was as if, Evelyn thought, she had stepped into some deep pocket in the lining of the day.

  She propped the door open with the picture of the King, and in the vague light, could just make out shelves to either side and, to the right, what might have been a coat rail. She could find no light switch, and the storeroom only grew darker as she edged her way up its length, the smell of mothballs and dust catching at the back of her throat. She stifled a cough and narrowly avoided something large on the floor – a gramophone, could it be? – only to crash into a metal filing cabinet. Was the Head of Patrol still outside?

  She edged her way down the length of the room. A slim chain knocked cold against her cheek and she cried out, like a child walking into a cobweb. Quiet, she told herself in her mother’s sternest voice. Quiet. Then she reached up, yanked, and the room flooded with light.

  At one of the only two tables, he sipped his stout and lit a cigarette. Four hours to kill. He had loose change enough for one more bottle. Both it and his paper would have to last. He smoothed out the front page and, at the window next to his table, he eased up the blackout curtain by inches.

  ‘We Shall Come! Says Hitler’.

  He sighed and turned the page.

  On the weekend, the German bombers over London mostly flew at a very great height and dropped their bombs at scattered points with no apparent plan. It can only be assumed that the object is to terrorize the civil population, and those targeted are best able to judge for themselves how completely these attempts fail. The destitute awaiting money after raids remain very cheerful.

  Somehow, he doubted it.

  At her feet, towers of cigarettes: Du Maurier, Three Bells, Player’s. Viceroy. Pall Mall. Woodbines. German brands. Russian words. Contraband. An Aladdin’s cave of it.

  On page 3, ‘Parliamentary Debate’.

  In the House of Lords, the Lord Bishop of Chichester petitioned for the release of internees in the nation’s labour camps. ‘Do you know, my Lords, that Jews and non-Aryan Christians who have been brutally imprisoned in camps in Germany or expelled, individuals who are not regarded as Germans at all or as human beings by Hitler and who cannot possibly be a danger to England, form the great majority of the internees?’

  He drew hard on his cigarette. He had the Lord Bishop of Chichester to thank, he thought bitterly, for the fact of Otto Gottlieb. According to the tribunal notes, the Bishop had arranged for him to be released from a German camp just days before war was declared. Now Bell was denouncing Britain’s labour camps too, and the scandal was growing.

  *

  She could hardly take it all in. Suits. Some beautifully made. An entire rail. Shirts of every size. Three dinner jackets. In the pocket of one, an engraved silver flask. On the shelves overhead: vodka, gin, whisky, Caribbean rum. Neat rows.

  He checked his wristwatch and surveyed the situation at the bar. No change there.

  Churchill tells the House of Commons: ‘Our people are united and resolved, as they have never been before. Death and ruin have become small things compared with the shame of defeat or failure in duty.’

  Yet below …

  Reports from public shelters in poor crowded districts suggest that harsh lighting, inadequate clothing, cold concrete floors, and the noise of crying children fray people’s nerves. Public disorder and arrests grow more frequent.

  On the lower shelves: a box of wristwatches. Here at the Camp, time no longer moved. A chessboard. Notebooks. Cigarette cases. Letters, tied with string. Framed photos – each face, an innocent unaware of this place in which they’d landed.

  And books. Dostoevsky. Dorothy L. Sayers. Flaubert. Kafka. Best Jewish Jokes. The Waverley novels. A monograph: ‘Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity’. Agatha Christie. The Confessions of Saint Augustine.

  He sipped his beer and tried to stretch out his legs without drawing attention.

  In Folkestone last night, German bombers swooped out of the sun and people saw the bombs leaving the racks as the raiders dived to within a few hundred feet of the roof tops. Fatalities were few. Three laun-dresses are reported dead.

  He thought of Tillie. How was she these days? he wondered fleetingly.

  She’d come full circle, it seemed. At her feet again: the gramophone. Phonographs, too, piled on the shelf above with sheet music, an accordion and a mouth organ. In the corner, a cello case leaned like a woman against the wall. Three violin cases were propped alongside.

  At the cabinet, she riffled through the files. Fender. Finke. Gabbler. Gas. Glick. Golden. And there: Gottlieb.

  She opened his passport. Its front page was stamped with the word ‘Entartete’. Meaning? She found his Identity Card; glanced at the record of his tribunal – ‘Sachsenhausen’, ‘counterfeit’, ‘Category A’, ‘Intern No. 6031’. She lifted out a single sheet: ‘Record of Contraband and Confiscations’. The list was long and careful. She knew the hand.

  oil paints

  watercolour paintbox

  stolen butter knife

  oyster shell (paint palette)

  pencil

  quill pen

  three brushes

  lumps of chalk, removed from grounds

  charcoal, stolen from Camp laundry

  strips of wallpaper – stolen from former lodging house, found in lining of jacket

  Images 1 to 3 on wallpaper: sea through wire; sheep through wire; Gypsy boys through wire

  Images 4 to 7 on card: internee body in watercolours.

  She rummaged among the boxes and shelves till she found it: a brown-paper parcel at the back of a high shelf.

  She ripped the string with her teeth. The pictures were fragile in her hands: small paintings on the card backing of a soap-flakes box. Sea, yes. Sheep. Children, yes. Barbed wire, everywhere.

  Then,
as she’d dreaded: Mr Pirazzini, haggard and yellow with death, his eyes open in surprise. Two images.

  On the edge of the blanket near his shoulder, the artist had captured the stamp of his four regulation digits. But there was something else, something less defined. His face, though emptied by death, had been softened. The watercolours had rendered him transparent, translucent, as if he were already dissolving between worlds. It was a release, she thought. Freedom. That’s what Otto Gottlieb had tried to give him.

  He must have got hold of his paintbox on the night of Mr Pirazzi-ni’s death. He must have bribed someone to bring it to the infirmary or traded some risky IOU for it. One could work quickly in water-colour. She knew that much from her own primitive efforts as a girl. One trusted as much to chance as intent.

  Otto Gottlieb’s shoulder had been bandaged, the bullet only just extracted, and a nerve in his arm damaged, yet he had managed this much before he was discovered.

  The third was a study of Mr Pirazzini’s hands, folded on his chest, their blue veins swollen, their liver markings more vivid now than the flesh they marked. The fourth, the fourth was simply the stub of his finger, pale, waxy, yet here, in Otto Gottlieb’s vision, not incomplete, not unsightly, but precious.

  She had to look away, bow her head, take a breath. It had taken her until now to believe what Otto Gottlieb had tried to tell her, to reassure her of, that afternoon from the other side of the screen. Mr Pirazzini’s death – his life, rather – had not passed without notice.

  She returned the paintings to their parcel paper and reached blindly for a novel from the storeroom shelf. Agatha Christie.

  She would feign ignorance of the ban; she would go to the barracks door and insist on delivering it herself. Who would argue the point with the Superintendent’s wife?

  ‘Thank you,’ she would humbly say to him.

  27

  Three years before, in a different lifetime, on a spring afternoon in 1937, Otto Gottlieb, in a jacket and tie, his nails scrubbed clean of paint, sat down to tea with his elderly neighbour, the former silent-film actress Klara Klein. In the inner courtyard at Number 142 August-strasse, both turned their faces to the first of the year’s careless, unstinting light. ‘Bliss!’ breathed Klara. ‘What a suntrap!’

  The mildness of early April was a balm after Berlin’s long winter and its privations. From Klara’s little table, through the open windows, they listened to Harman the Pedlar climbing the long, broad, stone staircase, flight after flight, shouting his wares more and more impatiently as he climbed. They were amused by the novelty of their first outdoor tea of the year, by the spectacle they gaily presented to any neighbours who stared from their windows and balconies, for life at 142 Auguststrasse was, they knew, unfailingly communal.

  At the struggling outset of his career, Otto’s parents had tried to persuade him to take a studio in West Berlin, closer to them and the fashionable area in which he’d grown up. His mother had even found him a studio apartment off Potsdamer Platz, with views over the elegant roof garden at Wertheim’s, but he had gently refused. Instead he had chosen the Ostjuden district, or the Barn Quarter, so called because, before the Yiddish from Eastern Europe had made its dark jumble of streets their home, it had been the location of the city’s stables and cow sheds.

  But that afternoon at 142 Auguststrasse, the weekly laundry of the residents made bright bunting across the six storeys of balconies, and both Klara and Otto looked up from the courtyard, taking a wordless pleasure in the sight. Above them, Frau Nagel smiled down and kindly refrained from beating a rug. Herr Wexler opened his book and pretended to read as he eavesdropped. Fräulein Weiss carried her geraniums on to her balcony after their long confinement indoors, and somewhere on the top floor, two women argued audibly about the dishes they would use for Passover. All the while, the sun winked in Klara’s tabletop mosaic of shiny blue and red tiles. She poured. Otto cut the strudel. Had time accommodated their respective births differently, with fewer decades between them, they would have been lovers, so sparkling and deep an affection did they share.

  He must, she said, tell her everything; how it had come about; who would be there; which of his models he had fallen in love with, for she had seen several women coming and going on the stairs. ‘Naturally I am wildly jealous,’ she said, and she smiled mischievously over the teapot.

  After more than a dozen years painting, Otto Gottlieb was to have his first solo exhibition at the end of June in a small, avant-garde gallery in their district, and Klara had bought Ceylon tea and freshly baked apfelstrudel to celebrate. He chatted. She advised, running her hands through the ferns that uncurled in the pots around her table, and when he’d finished his tea, she took his cup, reversed it, turned it three times in his saucer and lifted it up once more.

  She pushed a shining silver lock of hair from her eyes, raised the pince-nez she wore on a green ribbon around her neck, and peered. Ever an actress, she raised her free hand to call for silence from the non-existent crowd and, coincidentally, Harman the Pedlar stopped shouting and even the arguing women went quiet as she studied the dregs of the leaves. At that moment, she looked less like the Romany she was by birth than a steely-eyed biologist examining a culture on a slide.

  She looked up, her eyes glittering over her specs. ‘Well …’ she declared.

  ‘Doom?’ he grinned, and helped himself to a second piece of strudel.

  ‘On the contrary. Many will see your paintings. Indeed’ – she paused for dramatic effect – ‘the leaves say the nation will see your paintings!’

  He laughed into his tie. ‘Then I must paint you, Klara! You must sit for me!’

  She demurred, covering her smile with freckled hands and shaking her head. ‘My dear Otto, come, come. Do you think I could bear for the nation to see me like this, as I am now, a ruin in a house-dress?’

  ‘A ruin! How you tease.’ He craned towards her. ‘And who said anything about a dress?’

  Her hands rose once more, this time in a silent-film display of shock. He reached for them and kissed them.

  Otto Gottlieb’s first triumphant review arrived on the 3rd of July, in the Saturday edition of the Berliner Morgenpost. Klara rejoiced. His parents rejoiced. His neighbours were amused. He was relieved beyond words.

  Its retraction was published the following day. In it, the young reviewer declared his regret for his ‘inexperience and haste’. He had failed to note, he explained to the Morgenpost’s readers, that Otto Gottlieb was not an accredited member of the Culture Chamber, and he apologized both to his readers and to his editors for his ‘lapse of critical and moral judgement’. The views he had expressed in no way constituted those of the Morgenpost.

  Even so, the young critic would not save his job, and in the days to come, he would be required by the Reich Culture Chamber’s Deputy for Visual Culture to account for his ‘unaccountably Jewish-Bolshevist’ taste in art. It would take him three days to persuade the Deputy of his regret for his actions and his renewed determination to reject ‘perversity’. During his time at the Culture Chamber, he was denied his wristwatch, sunlight, sleep, and the use of a lavatory.

  Otto Gottlieb’s paintings, a series of oils depicting life in the Barn Quarter, were confiscated. The small, heretofore unknown gallery was closed. Its owners were bankrupted; its doors kicked in. Later, someone would smear human excrement over its windows.

  His canvases were loaded into a windowless van. They took his Hungarian women in their Shabbat shawls, shpitzels and aprons. They took the buxom dancers of Clärchens Ballhaus, sickened, it would seem, by the women depicted in the extremis of the dance. One assiduous officer produced a Swiss Army knife and scratched at the impasto and its stippled surfaces, as if to expose, in the welter of bodies, planes and perspectives, an especially dangerous form of perversion. Then they turned their attention to the nudes.

  A year before, in the sanctuary of a local church hall, Otto had discovered, quite by accident, actors who had been cast out of the Neues
Theater following its transformation into the German National Theatre. Offering what little he could as a fee, he began a series of female life studies. In his modest studio on the August-strasse, he worked almost obsessively with model after model, fascinated by the physical intelligence of those women; by their ability to communicate small profundities through the fluid line of an arm, in the arching of a back or in the attitude of a pair of hands. In every gesture, a story.

  He began with charcoal on canvas, sketching impulsively before slathering on the pigment, mixing it at times on the canvas itself, trying both to get the life of the flesh and to see through the flesh to the essence of the sitter, to the spirit. He worked unhindered by either faith or doubt in what he was doing. Neither was relevant, he told himself, for he himself was not relevant, or was only inasmuch as he, the maker, needed somehow to become the subject he painted. Boundaries disappeared. He could feel the moment an image took life. ‘Yes,’ he told the young critic, ‘I think that is fair to say. One is always, also, painting oneself. It’s inevitable, though one’s focus is necessarily trained upon the subject. I suppose all of life, whether off the canvas or on it, is made from’ – he’d allowed himself to smile carelessly for the first time that opening night – ‘the intercourse of two things.’

  He hadn’t realized his words would find their way into the Mor-genpost review. He had never dreamed there could be a review in any national paper. He’d had wine. He’d relaxed at last that evening. Now in print, he sounded like one of the so-called louche intellectuals from the days of the Weimar. ‘Regulation’ beauty bored him, he’d been foolish enough to admit. He couldn’t paint it. It depended too much on smoothness, on symmetry, on stillness. What did anyone know of those things in the Barn Quarter, there in the hubbub of its narrow streets?