by Adam Thorpe
mit Kanal
He put the label in his breast pocket. His mackinaw tunic, its pouches and belts and straps, felt to him like a lunatic’s straitjacket, and was too thick for the first warm days of spring. When he got home he would put the label in a frame, under glass, and call it The Pity of War.
The label of the label.
The four deads were seated against the wall in their last position like the plaster deads of Pompeii: he couldn’t think of them as human, despite the spectacles. They were more like rough casts, ready for smoothing off. The light was poor, but he knew their darkness was a dark purple or mauve. One had its arm around the other beside it: the happiness of the heart had burned as things do burn that are inflammable.
He sat on his heels, not wanting to join the world above, where he was never alone, where orders were given or received and somehow you were in the eye of everything. A big beam had saved this part of the vaults from the collapse of the building above, and daylight filtered through in rays picked out by the cloudy air. He wasn’t even sure if it was safe to be down here. Somebody shouted for him, one of the new kids, but he ignored it. He was extremely tired. He was being a bad patrol leader, he knew that, but he was at the bottom of a curve of tiredness. Anyway, this patrol was a waste of time. So many orders were a waste of time.
He pushed back his helmet and squeezed his eyes that were full of smoke. They’d waited outside in the plain rolling fields while the artillery worked and the town burned: the tanks waited on the giant concrete highway in a long column, with the infantry behind, watching the black smoke rise beyond the gentle slope, and where the shells were hitting there were tints of red flushing into the smoke.
Hell, they couldn’t even see the roofs of the town, only a church spire was tall enough to show over the crest of the slope, but they knew what it would be like when they got to take a walk in there.
They had done all these minor and major places, places with bridges and market squares and their very own major and minor streets, piling in the artillery when Heini wouldn’t give over, then shooting them up some until all the streets were major and entering and walking through the streets like it was a Sunday except that now and again a sniper picked off a man when you were least ready for any of that.
They had crossed the Rhine like the goddamn Romans – over two weeks ago, at Wesel. Wesel was left with only its radiators intact. And a stink of damp soot. And rubble you couldn’t touch like you couldn’t touch a searchlight just extinguished. Strange, how rubble always looked the same wherever. The Germans who gave themselves up had panda eyes and were mostly too old or too young, but it made the men mad when some out there among them wanted to play rough, despite the game being over.
He kicked at the debris, at the burnt frames and scorched canvases, and turned to climb out. Colour down there caught his eye, like a patch of clear sky in storm cloud along a flooded rut.
He rooted carefully in the mess and pulled out a small painting.
Sure. He knew more about paintings than he knew about science or monkeys or riding goddamn horses.
Or poetry, although he had written poetry for a year when he was sad and fifteen or maybe sixteen.
This painting had three-and-a-half sides left of a gilded frame that was very loose, the work no longer sat snug in the outer frame and it nearly dropped back to the floor so he had to hold the canvas from behind. He blew off flakes of something like burnt paper and took the painting to the light filtering down between the shattered beams and the picture kind of rose up to it like a shoal of coloured fish.
It was landscape. He wanted to sob a little.
Trees and pools and rocks.
This is a helluva painting. He wanted to go screaming about it. This is first of all old and second worth more than I can know and it is nice as a girl is nice when you aren’t being too specific.
His heart was beating a great deal, and up in his throat.
He squeezed his eyes that had grit in them always and looked again. The flames had closed their teeth on one side of the frame and loosened the nails that had kept the picture in place but had got no further. Maybe if he looked too hard at it he would see blisters but right now he didn’t see blisters or even pimples, although he knew that paint and heat did things chemically together that were surprising. He would’ve taken out his flashlight but it needed new goddamn batteries. There were snowy mountains and a golden village way back. Now he was happy after a long time.
The light was good enough to make out some letters on the scorched label of the frame – a ch and an o and maybe two nns and then Christian Vollerdt (1708–1769), Landschaft mit Ruinen. The name of the artist sounded German. It was unknown to him, but then he knew very little about German art. For the moment, he couldn’t recall the name of a single German artist. OK, Dürer. It was a shame the label didn’t say Dürer. Or Rembrandt or Titian or Michelangelo or Vincent van Gogh.
He held the picture in both hands, ignoring the shouts and laughter from above.
A tiny guy with a wide hat and some fallen columns in the foreground. Sheep, not bushes. It wouldn’t look like this if it was van Gogh, stupid.
He knew what they thought he was doing; they thought he was answering a call of nature. In actual fact, he’d found some black bread in a pillbox outside Offenbach three days back and nothing at all was moving inside him now. Waiting in reserve for the big assault.
There was a scuffle and a cough and a cloud of dust and he turned and saw Morrison, cradling his M1 carbine as if nervous of what he might find down here, his face smeared with smoke out of which the eyes peered too white.
‘I’ll have an iced Campari, Neal. To go.’
‘With lemon or without?’
Morrison was special only on account of Parry being with Morrison and Morrison being with Parry right from the beginning, from autumn in Normandy to be specific, from this side of hell and its sweet mash of soft windfalls and burnt hedgerows and the goddamn Ardennes and thinking of good breakfasts in snow inside mined woods and feeling hungry and cold and getting shot up or ducking shells right up to here. The last two sleepyheads of the original platoon. They weren’t buddies. At least, Corporal Morrison wasn’t a man Parry’d ever choose for a buddy – in fact, the guy got on his nerves, but there was some kind of feeling that the air was safer around Morrison. They were a team. The nearest the enemy had got to either of them was a single piece of shrapnel that burst Morrison’s canteen and nicked Parry’s ear somewhere in the Saarland. They’d started as privates first class and picked up their lowly stripes only because others had lost them – it wasn’t through talent or heroism, it was just through staying alive. For about half a day, on a difficult run into someplace a few days before the Rhine was tucked safely behind them, Parry had commanded a whole rifle platoon when all the officers had been hit. He’d been acting captain for five hours, but they didn’t keep it that way after, so he must have done it pretty badly. He didn’t even know all the senior officers had been hit and that he was technically in charge until right at the end, when it was too late to shine. Neal Parry could never believe he was any kind of rank, anyway, and he seldom had reason to pull it. It was not that kind of war. But he did what he had to do: he was an average soldier, neither good nor lousy. And he’d survived right out in the front for six months. With Morrison.
‘Hey, Neal, seriously, you know why I’m looking good?’
‘You wanna bet?’
Morrison laughed and explained why he was looking good: he’d just heard how they’d be stopping over in this town, maybe for a couple of days, to get dried out and fed and into a bath and then he’d have himself a girl because he’d got so much sex stowed away in him he couldn’t walk any more. They’d been moving too fast and the whole line was getting confused. Outfits were taking the same town from different sides and shooting each other up. That was secret. Parry nodded, only half-listening. Morrison always talked too loud and the vaults made it worse, bouncing it back. Now he was picking his
way over.
‘I’m gonna scrub good,’ said Morrison, ‘and eat and have me a first and then a second girl. ‘What the hell is that?’
‘It’s a painting,’ said Parry.
‘Yup, I can see it’s a painting. I’m gonna scrub good and hit the sack some and eat and drink and then get me a girl to adjust my centre of gravity and then a second at the same time, maybe. Are you stealing that?’
‘It showed up.’
‘I never painted in my life,’ said Morrison. ‘I could never get my circle right in math.’
‘You mean it never closed?’
‘Yup. Even with a compass.’
‘Then it wasn’t a circle. Like a canal is not a river.’
‘Hell, my mom said it was a sign of genius. We could steal that together and go halves. What do we do with these sandbags?’
Morrison was brandishing his gun at the deads.
‘They’re guys, Morriboy.’
‘These two are not guys, although, hell, they could be,’ said Morrison, twisting his head round to look at the two deads who were linked by an arm.
‘Never believe any of that,’ said Parry, not thinking what he was saying.
He was too tired. He wanted Morrison to go away. He wanted to be left alone with the painting, with the lost landscape that reminded him of something far back in his childhood.
Mr Christian Vollerdt. Great painter. The greatest. Maybe. You don’t always know.
Morrison slung his gun back on his shoulder and walked around over the debris, raising clouds of ash that caught in the throat. His boot struck the foot of one of the corpses and the foot fell sideways as though it wasn’t attached, but he didn’t notice. His stocky neck had gingery stubble on its folds between the rim of the helmet and the stained tunic collar, like a pig’s bristles. If only on account of the neck, Parry would never have chosen Morrison for, say, a day’s excursion up the creeks, not even half a day.
‘You know what the guys are doing, Neal? They’re screwing this really beautiful girl, only the problem is she ain’t got a head.’
‘What?’
‘Yup.’ The soldier burst out laughing, coming in too quickly. ‘She’s made of marble. She’s a statue.’
And he laughed again, almost crazily, while the four burnt corpses sat there open-mouthed and safe as stone.
Please, God, think of me. There are so many demons in the forest. So many eyes. There is light, and there is shadow. But I am somewhere where there is no light and no [shadow?]. Yet I don’t believe I am dead.
5
The one with the spectacles still balanced on his nose was Herr Hoffer, the museum’s Acting Acting Director.
The sirens had started at six in the morning, and they had continued – which was very unusual – for an hour. He had left his paltry breakfast on the table, seen his wife and two daughters into the apartment’s shelter along with their three emergency suitcases, donned his Volkssturm armband and headed immediately for the museum on his bicycle.
It was approaching half past seven. The foolish people like himself who were still above ground were scuttling everywhere, and he fancied quite erroneously that they were all scuttling in the opposite direction. The shells were dropping haphazardly and not very near. He crossed the main square, his teeth juddering from the cobbles, and passed the heap of rubble that had been his favourite building in Lohenfelde until a heavy raid in January. No one had cleared the rubble. That was the Ortsgruppenleiter’s job, of course, but he was a soak. Perhaps this not touching the rubble was out of respect for the loveliest and oldest house in Lohenfelde, blush-pink between the beams and exquisite in its natural proportions. No date had been carved into it, and the archives had no record of its construction, but it must have been one of the very first buildings put up after the Swedish sack of 1631 and had remained, until a few years ago, a very popular and respectable inn.
Herr Hoffer would muse on such local features as he pedalled past them each workday. It had always tickled him, for instance, to think that one of the first new buildings after the Destruction of Lohenfelde was an inn, which he thought fitting. (He enjoyed his clean white beer – its absence in the last few years had been intolerable.) Then, he supposed, the authorities had set to on constructing the cathedral. No doubt the inn was also a hostel, at that time, with available girls. The population of Lohenfelde had been wiped out in the Destruction of 1631 – 20,000 of them – so the only folk present would have been builders and stonemasons and carpenters: thirsty types.
He would often run through this particular little history, bicycling to work in nornial times, the bells of the clock on the Rathaus chiming harmoniously as he passed at the same hour each morning, increasing his satisfaction with the order of the world – especially when the sun shone down, or when the spring light was mother-of-pearl just after dawn, bringing the hint of a freshness from the gardens and fields that only the great painters could convey. Corot, for instance. Or Claude Lorraine.
An orange flash lit the sky, followed by a crashing noise. It was said that the American troops were close enough to shell the city. Perhaps these were shells from artillery pieces. He had seen no bombers in the clear morning sky, heard no crackling of anti-aircraft batteries. It might all be empty rumour.
He thought of his wife and daughters. He slowed, wondered whether to turn back, wobbled a little, then pulled himself together and pedalled on. He had his duty to perform. As a member of the Volkssturm since October, Herr Hoffer ought to have been in the field and facing the enemy, but since his unit had almost no weapons, no standard uniform, and a grey-haired Kompanieführer last seen pedalling out of town on his grocery bicycle, his duty was clear: to defend the museum and the remnants of its collection from any sort of harm.
He pedalled on, on through a sudden mist of smoke in which people were impressions of people, shadows in panic. He was afraid suddenly of what he would find when he arrived. A vivid mental picture came to him of the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum in ruins, touched with ivy and rather romantic, with nothing around it but rubble-strewn fields and a lone shepherd. The sky in this picture was swept with rainclouds, interspersed with a pinkish clarity. A wind. Lohenfelde become as the Forum Romanum: a subject for artists. Would there be artists, after the rubble?
He bumped across a sunken tramrail and his bell rang.
The museum stood on the corner of Fritz-Todt-Strasse (formerly Lindenstrasse) and Otto-von-Guericke-Strasse, and occupied several blocks’ worth each side; built in 1904, it showed all the playful extravagances of the period, with a tall round-topped tower, a long roof set mostly to glass, and attached steep-roofed structures whose façades and gable ends were inspired by various German cathedrals. The broad pavement in front, with its stocky memorial to an illustrious burgher standing like a sentinel at the corner, lent the rather muddled building an air of importance.
Herr Hoffer would always alight from his bicycle and walk the last few yards; the pavement’s generous breadth relaxed him. Even today, with shells dropping on the city and the city probably about to fall to the Americans, he alighted and walked his bicycle the last few yards, its tyres bumping on the steps that rose in shallow stone curves to the porch in which Herr Wolmer stood like a memorial statue, watching him arrive.
The janitor was smoking, looking anxious. He, too, was wearing the Volkssturm armband, but his uniform was an old Imperial German greatcoat and a battered helmet with a spike on top, from his days in the trenches. The bombs were not too close: it seemed they were mostly concentrated again on the perimeter. As if to correct this notion, there was a crash from beyond the large villas and trees along the avenue and a black cloud puffed up.
The two men conferred very briefly and went inside, Herr Hoffer coughing in a cloud of the janitor’s cheap, bitter tobacco. Alas, it never seemed to run out!
The staff were gathered in the general office at the base of the tower, beyond which was a glass door leading to Herr Hoffer’s own den. Frau Schenkel and Werner Oberst were
present, as was Hilde Winkel, the pretty young research student who spent hours sketching the museum’s sculptures. The one attendant not dismissed (there had been almost nothing to show in the museum for the last year) had not come. Neither had Frau Blumen, the last of the cleaners, who usually worked each morning from six to eight. It was, Herr Hoffer was fond of saying, a phantom museum.
Frau Schenkel, the museum’s secretary, looked very solemn behind her old-fashioned typewriter, smoking one of her hoarded cigarettes; while Werner Oberst, the blotchy-faced archivist, had turned white about the eyes. He, too, was wearing his Volkssturm armband on his civilian jacket: with Herr Wolmer they were a batalion of three (Herr Hoffer would joke), dedicated to the defence of art.
Herr Hoffer wheeled in his bicycle between the desks, smiling encouragingly.
‘The Americans are shelling us,’ said Werner, quietly. ‘These are not bombs from the sky.’
‘I’ve come to the same conclusion, Werner,’ said Herr Hoffer.
‘They will reduce us to rubble first, and then the tanks and the infantry will enter to mop up.’
‘I’m going back to Berlin,’ said Frau Schenkel, not meaning it, ‘if you carry on like that.’
‘I didn’t know you were a Berliner,’ said Werner Oberst, not meaning it either.
‘Better the Americans than the Russians,’ said Hilde Winkel, fingering the top button of her blouse.
‘Not that it’s us choosing,’ said Frau Schenkel.
‘I think Fräulein Winkel is right, however,’ said Herr Hoffer.
‘Soldiers are soldiers,’ Frau Schenkel sighed, ‘especially when they aren’t German. My dear late husband was given a basket of black mushrooms by grateful villagers outside somewhere in Russia.’
