by Adam Thorpe
9
The walls kept trembling very slightly, but the noise of the shells or bombs exploding remained faint and far away. They might not have been far away, of course. Underground, everything felt far away. Shots were always louder than you remembered. Herr Hoffer very much wanted to be above ground, despite the shelling and the possibility of shots. Inspired by the Mendelssohn song, he was picturing himself walking in the meadows or the woods with his two darling little girls and his dearest Sabine. He should have stayed at home. But the idea of the museum being hit and the Acting Acting Director crouched shivering in his apartment cellar, his staff coping on their own, leaderless . . . !
Such things go down in history, in local history – and what other history matters as much to a man?
He could not stand the gloom any longer. After Werner had broken the record, nobody had spoken and it was really very gloomy, both literally and inwardly.
‘I’m going to fetch candles,’ he said. ‘Herr Wolmer will have one or two, if there are none in the cupboard. And I will bring some First Aid.’
Despite their protestations, he went, closing the door firmly behind him. He was not made to sit underground. He was a lover of light.
There were no candles in the cupboard he had built at the top of the stairs: string, a few precious matches, a roll of oilcloth, some magazines – but no candles.
He hurried through the galleries on the first floor like a hunted man, stepping carefully over the broken glass in the pre-Renaissance room, the spots of blood already dry on the floor and walls. Several of the high windows in the further galleries had also been shattered; he smelt the spring air tinged with smoke, as if a heavenly stovepipe was in operation, and saw how smeared the sky was.
The huge rooms had never seemed so empty, so friendless. The paintings were his friends, when it came to it. He could visualise their every face, still, after a year or more of separation. He had come to love even those works he had wrinkled his nose at in the early days – the stagey historical erotica by the likes of Holmberg or Steinbruck, for instance: why else had he placed even those in the vaults, along with Beck, Moscher, Flinck, Salomon van Ruysdael and Johannes Hals and all the other wonders – Poussin, Corot, Cézanne? Van Gogh? Ah, but the van Gogh was a secret. His little secret!
He did not like to think of his friends huddled deep underground, in the lightless silence, as if suspended between life and death. They would turn in his sleep like the pages of a book, every work clear in his memory. Almost a quarter of the collection! Concealed without permission!
He had, of course, descended into the vaults via the broom cupboard in the Prints Room at least once a week – and into the salt-mine at least once a month, to view the rest. His poor dear friends had the same enfeebled look as real prisoners. The stagnant dryness in the salt-mine, its primitive electric lighting; the anxiety he felt in the vaults, the fear of discovery: these made it harder to marvel and adore.
Herr Wolmer was in his glorified cubicle off the main lobby, gripping his spiked helmet between his knees and polishing its leather shell with a boot-brush. He shared his space with a sink, a broom-cupboard, and a crooked stove on which a small copper pot steamed gently, heated by the burning of wood filched from the rubble of bombed-out houses. Herr Hoffer admired Herr Wolmer’s ability to remain impervious to disaster, although his taciturn manner – the expression that rang only tiny changes on what would, in other men, be a scowl – had very often depressed him in the mornings.
‘We need candles,’ Herr Hoffer said. ‘And First Aid. Fräulein Winkel and Herr Oberst were struck by glass.’ He lifted his cloth-bound hand, the coils of blue cigarette smoke writhing around it. ‘And so was I. Nothing serious.’
Herr Wolmer looked up at him through bushy eyebrows, twitched his thick Kaiser moustache, laid boot-brush and helmet on the table and rose to unlock the cupboard. The clock on the wall ticked loudly over the rumbles and coughs of the bombing and shelling. The janitor produced the box on which a large red cross had been painted. Herr Hoffer, wishing the fellow would say something, searched for the little key on his key ring. At that moment the room slid to one side and back again, leaving Herr Hoffer doubled up over the table. The side of the table had struck his stomach, winding him. Herr Wolmer had kept his balance; he had slept through a bombardment many a time, thirty years back, in his dugout.
They had both heard the hiss of the glass, like the sea withdrawing after the crash of a breaker. And then silence.
They went out into the lobby. The coloured glass in the front doors and the double oval of glass above, painted by Jacob Kluge no less, were scattered in glittery shards across the tiles. The windows were unharmed.
‘And I’d always fancied a quiet life,’ Herr Wolmer joked.
‘What a pity,’ said Herr Hoffer, feeling his heart beat in a jittery, uneven manner. ‘They’ve got the Kluge.’
The two men unlocked the main door and peered out.
A fog of smoke and dust, through which they could see that something had changed: the illustrious burgher was no longer on his marble plinth. Black smoke billowed over the roofs beyond the blossoming trees; every other second it seemed to flash orange, like Morse code.
The dust entered Herr Hoffer’s open mouth and made him cough. He’d knocked his injured hand, and the blood was oozing again.
The two men stepped out to inspect the damage. The front wall was peppered with holes, as if sprayed by a machine-gun. They looked up: high in the sky, through the whirls of black smoke and dust, they saw a formation of bombers. Americans. A dull, throbbing roar followed after. A huge flame shot up in the direction of the Rathaus, then another next to it, spewing a mushroom of smoke and debris and trembling the ground under their feet.
Werner was right: the Americans wanted it rubble.
At that moment, a crowd of about thirty or forty people appeared on the avenue, with a horse and cart in its midst full of bundles and boxes and cases. The people – women and children and old codgers, mostly – were haggard and miserable. Some of the old codgers were wearing their Sunday best, now dirty and torn – old-fashioned country costumes, knee-breeches and broad hats and quaint jackets.
Herr Hoffer, from his studies of peasant genre pictures, was quite an expert on regional wear.
‘They are from the Oder region,’ he said.
‘Where’s that?’
‘The Polish border.’
‘The Polish border? That’s a – that’s a long way off, Herr Hoffer.’
‘They are fleeing the Reds, at any rate.’
‘Who wouldn’t?’
One of the refugees spied the two men at the door and shouted. The crowd seemed to swerve as one, like a giant insect moving towards them in the smoke and dust.
They hurried back in and locked the door, bolting it at the top and bottom. The slam of the door seemed to echo for ever through the caverns of empty rooms. For the first time, Herr Hoffer believed the museum might not survive. He shifted the fragments of the glass painting with his foot, waiting for the door to be beaten down. The Kluge glass was so familiar to him! He would glance up at it each day, on leaving the building; it had become pleasantly embedded in his life, as if they were mutually dependent. Apollo the blond, Visigothic warrior; Diana the Rhinemaiden in her transparent shift: anything could happen, now. The mob might surge into the vaults and destroy the paintings.
Herr Wolmer locked the shutters in his little room – but the refugees had vanished.
‘Are we wrong?’ said Herr Hoffer.
‘Wrong?’
‘To be slamming the door in their faces?’
‘Better to be done in by a shell than raped and crucified by the Reds,’ muttered Herr Wolmer. Which didn’t help at all.
‘We must always put the paintings first,’ Herr Hoffer declared, on Herr Wolmer’s behalf.
‘I’ll stick to my post,’ said the janitor, taking out a broom from the cupboard. ‘No one gets in except it’s over my dead body.’
> ‘Unless you know them,’ said Herr Hoffer. ‘Not all the staff have reported yet, and there are our families. The last thing I said to my wife was: if you’re in trouble, come to the museum.’
‘Stick together in trouble, that’s what I say.’
‘I did try to get her to come along with the children, but she preferred to stay at home.’
‘There’s no place like home, Herr Hoffer.’
‘No, but there’s also one’s duty. I’ll do a very quick check over the building, Herr Wolmer. You never know. Bombs are funny things. I do feel worried about you being up here while we’re sheltering below.’
‘You just said it,’ said Herr Wolmer, holding his broom like a sentry with his rifle. ‘It’s called my duty. Your duty’s to the pictures.’
He started sweeping up the coloured shards in the lobby as Herr Hoffer hurried away with the First Aid box, three candles and a spare box of matches. He had once declared, in an obscure arts journal, when Curator of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century galleries, that the Kluge glass was sentimental and even old-fashioned. This had come to the attention of the local press; furious letters, calls for a sacking. Oh, what it was to be young and naive! Now the Kluge was being swept up and there would be no furious letters. Herr Wolmer, for all his faults, was a marvel.
He inspected the upper galleries. The skylights in the Long Gallery were intact; given that the roof was mostly skylight, this was just as well. Birds would knock their heads upon the roof, thinking they could fly straight through. He mounted the stairs up to the little-used third floor, following the janitor’s usual routine, and walked briskly along the corridor. He had many projects for expansion, but at present these rooms were empty. At least a third of the museum building was redundant. After the war, Herr Hoffer planned to devote himself to those projects for expansion – including the establishment of an art school. One must never stand still.
There was a scraping noise above his head, near the ladder-like wooden stairs up to the attics.
He stopped and listened. He was terrified of rats, and this sounded like a very heavy rat. Caspar Friedrich had killed one the other week and he had surprised them all, for the corpse was very large and fierce-looking. The noise stopped abruptly, as such noises always did. Herr Hoffer disliked entering the attics, owing to his rat phobia. He didn’t even like being up here alone, so close to the rat kingdom. The vaults had been cleared of rats by poison, over the years, but not the attics. The attics were too vast to clear, too like huge Swabian barns. He hurried away.
The bombardment thundered distantly, pretending to move off like a storm.
Clutching the candles and the matches at the top of the stairs down to the vaults, he thought of the lines in Vergil where Orpheus enters the high portals of Dis, ‘the jaws of Taenarus’, and felt that he, too, was bringing life to the spirits of the dead.
I am not at all certain I am alive. What is being alive? Occasionally I see birds. The birds are alive, but that is no proof of my own existence: just as words in a book can bring pictures, but the words are not alive, they are an illusion of life. I hear someone just below, but then I might still be a ghost. Or a god in my heaven, all alone.
10
Parry found some cognac in a big mahogany desk above ground. There was a hillock of rubble and the desk was poking out near the top, covered in broken glass, and he’d pulled on its drawers. The cognac was a fine vintage one, he could tell from the label. He considered burrowing down somewhere and getting drunk on his own. They’d be meeting up in twenty-five minutes and then it was back to the CP in the grocer’s yard, packs bulging with liquor, and no one would know that for forty-five minutes the patrol led by Corporal Parry had gone AWOL. It made Parry feel good.
Then they’d split up to hit town, the bombed-out town, but he would go off on his own. He started to feel lonely at the very thought of going off on his own. He didn’t really want to be alone any more; that was too sad, to get drunk on your own. He was superstitious, these days: it was fatal to be greedy and selfish. He would drink to and with his guardian angel, Abel Morrison of Whitehall, Wisconsin, the kind of guy he’d never have known without the war. He would play pinochle with Morrison and lose as usual, his pack of Uncle Sam cards so greased and stained it was hard to read them sometimes.
He scrambled on up to the top of the hillock of rubble, like he was hiking back home, and looked down on the two shell-cratered avenues that met in front of him, criss-crossed by broken trees and debris and corpses, and then out to where blackened, ruined streets traversed the long perspectives. Lying on the hillock of rubble was a thin metal shaft, like a spire. The girl had told him this had been a tower of some kind.
Thirty minutes to go.
He lit a cigarette and felt a thrill of awe at his own state of disobedience. Obedience is a sin: look at the Heinies. But his scattered patrol hung about him in grey shadowy shapes of bad conscience. He had to believe in himself more, in his right to assert his own individuality against the machinery of war. It was a moral gesture. They had flattened this town, then they went around kicking down doors in this flattened town. So he had broken up the ice, the pointlessness of the ice. The men would regroup in thirty minutes and turn back into a patrol but something will have been declared, even created.
He shook his head free of too many thoughts and calculations that stopped him seeing. He looked instead, he let the moment open itself to him. There was a very nasty burnt-out smell, chemical and bitter, already faded by familiarity. You couldn’t paint or photograph smells. Only the light and the shade and the colour. Dusk was figuring whether to come in.
It was April.
He had to remember that: for a moment he thought it was November.
You could see a whole lot further in a bombed-out town. It looked like King Kong had torn with his teeth at the buildings, leaving shreds, upright portions as thin as chimneys, pipes coiled like liquorice, radiators clutching the one wall left of a home. Already there were paths established down the streets between the rubble, like the paths animals make in underbrush. The men in their green kit flitted into view here and there, with slower-moving civilians and prisoners. He could tell the prisoners from way off because they were in columns and had their hands behind their heads. Youths and old guys in ill-fitting military jackets, mainly. Dark clumps lying in the debris: deads. What looked like the remains of an anti-tank gun, with a severed arm next to it, just below. He must’ve walked straight past it, not even noticing.
All the sounds felt distant, he could almost orchestrate the shouts and cries and far-off explosions and crackles with his hands. Was that really small-arms fire, over there?
He kept still for a moment and then he unhitched his rifle and cradled it in his lap. Now he’d given himself a role. He could stay up here till nightfall and no one would know, and then he would deal with the painting of the snowy mountains and the golden light in the valley. For the moment it was sitting pretty in a niche in the vaults. Mr Christian Vollerdt. Nice item of salvage. He, however, was exposed. Snipers smile before they bust you.
He relaxed, chucking chunks of plaster between his boots so the chunks rolled down, trying to forget his tender ass on the unyielding masonry. He rolled some Old Gold and lit up from the half-smoked Chesterfield, his tongue already sore. Hitler hated smoking, he reckoned it was bad for you. The man was not sane. How do you fight a war without cigarettes? A woman with a neat figure in a thin dress picked her way along the avenue, through the debris, glancing up at him as she passed. He waved but she ignored him. She had a handbag with maybe an umbrella sticking out of it and high-heeled shoes. That was class, dressing like that at this time, ignoring him. He liked thin women. Women with plump arms did not attract him. There were rotted deads in a big pit in France, brought out with their high heels still on. Gestapo boys did that, he was told. He watched them being brought out. Thirty, maybe forty. He shouldn’t have. There were ribbons on the high heels of the deads.
He shook his he
ad clear and spent a few minutes undressing the thin, neat woman, visualising very clearly her subtle breasts and wishing he had followed her. His lips touched her breasts, one after the other, gently and with reverence. Morrison had a pin-up under his helmet, like a Scout card: a page from Esquire with a Rita Hayworth flirt stroking her long bare legs and saying, ‘Would you mind if I took a little time to think that over?’ He had another in his map-pack: a sweet-and-lovely peeling off her cardigan so you see up to the big round underpart of each breast just short of the nipple. This is not the season for cardigans. Parry didn’t have a pin-up, not one: just Maureen in a swimsuit, which didn’t count. His mind wasn’t a gas-station, for fuck’s sake. The closest he had come to a pin-up was a postcard of Hiram Powers’s Greek Slave, which had fired him up when he was fourteen. Something about the chains over the private parts, the incredible smoothness of the marble, the small and lovely breasts. He’d seen it in Washington a few years ago and felt shy, looking at it in public along with women in big hats and fox furs.
Sure, he liked thin women.
There were so many pear-shaped grumpy women with their hair in a coil above each ear and the same pale cardigan over their apron; they were hard-eyed and came back upright like skittles. Whenever the refugees flooded through a village, stumbling in the mud, shouting and bickering, this tribe of dames surveyed them without compassion – though there were plenty of their own kind, grumpy and dumpy and with a coil above each ear, among the refugees.
Yes, but there are some nice-looking women.
In every place they’d passed through. Except for that brick town where it had rained and rained and the enemy shelling and mortars had shot too many men out of their tanks and their lives. And Jack Burgin’s head went to hell and gone so as he couldn’t comb and grease and comb his wave any more. And who’d got covered in the mess? That was one of their own goddamn bazookas.
