by Adam Thorpe
They slumped back into silence.
Deranged. How very sinister that word was, for Herr Hoffer. It covered such a multitude of sins.
Once they fill you with shame, you are finished.
Woad – and pot-ash. There was Werner’s little pamphlet that he had never read from one end to the other. Pot-ash was once the main industry. Now it was thermometers. No, now it was staying alive.
‘What are you thinking about, Herr Hoffer?’ Hilde Winkel enquired, looking as usual at a point just below his eyes – a touch of shyness that Herr Hoffer found attractive. The lint on her lip was reddening softly like a flower.
Herr Hoffer folded his arms. ‘I am thinking how difficult we make things for ourselves,’ he said. The slabs of the wall were cold against his back, he would be bound to get a chill and die just when everything was looking up.
‘Men make it difficult,’ said Hilde, surprisingly.
‘Men?’
‘Not women. Men.’
‘The Führer is a man,’ Werner pointed out.
‘He’s an artist. He’s guided by feminine intuition. And everyone’s let him down,’ said Hilde, irrelevantly. ‘Except the German women. They voted for him, and they have stuck by him.’
‘German men haven’t done too badly, either,’ said Werner, enjoying himself.
‘I don’t know what you’re all talking about, yet again,’ said Frau Schenkel.
‘Hilde is suggesting we expel all the men as well as all the Jews and the Gypsies and the Communists,’ Werner said, almost gaily. It was strange to see him like this. The broken parts of the record lay at his feet. It upset Herr Hoffer to see them there, as if the breakage was aimed at him personally.
Frau Schenkel bit her lip and looked down at her hands. A spasm went over her face. She blinked furiously.
‘Frau Schenkel,’ said Werner, ‘I apologise.’
‘Never mind.’
She snapped back into order, like a tablecloth being freed of crumbs. There was another embarrassed silence between them. The bombardment sounded like a tetchy old man talking into his pot of beer.
‘Anyway,’ Werner went on, scratching his bony cheek, ‘the women would step into the men’s shoes very quickly. Just take a look at Frieda, who hands out the towels up at the swimming baths. She has hairy arms. She makes men cower before her, does Frieda – even the great big Party one-hundred-and-fifty-per-centers with huge hams and magnificent biceps.’
‘Can we change the subject, please?’ muttered Hilde.
Nobody had anything to talk about, it appeared. Herr Hoffer was thinking of the wonders of Dresden, and the charming old cherry-wood balconies of Lohenfelde.
‘It is all such a pity,’ he said, quietly. ‘Then afterwards it will all go on as before.’
‘What will?’ asked Frau Schenkel.
Herr Hoffer hesitated.
‘Life,’ he said, vaguely.
‘It won’t,’ said Werner, the candle making a curious shadow of his nose. ‘Life will never be the same again.’
‘Defeatism,’ scoffed Frau Schenkel.
‘I meant,’ Herr Hoffer interjected, stalling the argument, ‘that after all this destruction we will pick ourselves up and carry on.’
‘Is that bad?’ asked Hilde Winkel with difficulty, her lip swelling almost as they watched.
‘I didn’t say it was bad.’
‘Like poor Gustav,’ said Werner.
Herr Hoffer surprised himself by blushing. He said nothing.
‘He picked himself up and carried on,’ smiled Werner Oberst, clearly relishing Herr Hoffer’s discomfort.
‘Really, I don’t think that’s very kind, Werner.’
‘That’s one thing we can be thankful for,’ said Frau Schenkel, pulling a face. ‘Imagine if we had poor Gustav down here with us.’
The thought made Hilde giggle. Even Frau Schenkel began to smile. Herr Hoffer felt a bubble of mirth rise alarmingly in his chest. Yes, the thought of being trapped down here with poor Gustav was almost comical, it was so alarming.
‘Have you ever read Gustav’s thesis on bracelet shading in Raphael?’ asked Werner.
‘Of course I have, Werner. You’ve asked me a hundred times over the years.’
‘Quite brilliant, to my mind. Though I am no expert.’
There was a tension between them, softened only by the wavering candle. The shelling and bombing still muttered, rather than roared.
Herr Hoffer did not want to think about Gustav Glatz, of course. Though he did remember the time, some fifteen years ago, just before the Party gained power, when the brilliant young fellow had pointed out the astonishing resemblance between Holbein’s portrait of a villainous Englishman called Richard Southwell and the leader of the National Socialists. Gustav even drew a toothbrush moustache on the Holbein reproduction (in the Steglitzer Anzeiger), and the unpleasant, self-satisfied, pug-like face had become the spit.
‘Perhaps,’ Gustav had said, tossing back his thick locks, ‘there is a certain physiognomical type.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Richard Southwell was a murderer, you know, before he was made a sheriff. He helped to execute his childhood friend. The Earl of Surrey, who was a poet.’
Herr Hoffer had chuckled. ‘I thought Herr Hitler is supposed to have the face of a barber.’
‘Or a waiter.’
‘A waiter in a seedy café, with grease on the beer and bruisers on the door.’
‘No,’ Gustav had laughed. ‘A waiter in a barber’s shop who serves you with a cut-throat razor!’
A brilliant mind, sharp and witty. Perhaps he had some Jewish in him. ‘Glatz.’ It was quite possible. But he hadn’t been taken away; given his state, he ought to have been taken away, Jew or no Jew.
Herr Hoffer tried to stop thinking about Gustav Glatz. He was wishing he had brought the cognac from his desk drawer. But they did feel reasonably safe down here. They all knew how old the vaults were, and the stones that made its walls and ceiling were large and solid. It was a little like burying oneself for safety in the distant German past, which could not be touched. Perhaps he should have taken to his heels with his family like so many others, burying themselves in the deep Thuringian woods. But that was going east, towards the Red Army. Magyars. Woad on their faces. Huge and wild-haired.
Somebody above seemed to slam a giant door, and the walls trembled. The ancient cement between the stones trickled slowly again onto their hands.
They were all looking up with their mouths open.
More doors slammed, exactly as if someone was running wild in the museum. Still, no one said anything, as if talking might attract the shells and bombs. Caspar Friedrich had lifted his head from Hilde’s lap and was looking alert, his one ear pricked, not purring. A bad sign, Herr Hoffer thought. Hilde’s lip looked terrible under the patch of lint, but she didn’t seem to be in pain. His own lips started quivering, so he tensed them. He often found his mouth tensed like that. Impossible to draw, mouths. Breasts, easy. Buttocks, child’s play. But mouths . . . Waists, too, for some reason. And light on hair. And getting the feet the right size. And the hands the right shape. All those fingers and their shadows. In fact, the whole body was difficult. There were so many vistas.
Leap onto the subject! Without prior thought! Leap, leap onto the mouth!
It was hard to swallow: fear was having a physiological effect on him, his heart was tangling itself up with his lungs.
The tetchy old fellow started muttering again, over their heads and far away. God, perhaps, in a Heaven of doors.
Herr Hoffer considered that he might have done better with his life. He had left no mark. An artist left a mark, at least. He glanced at Hilde Winkel’s maimed mouth. Glass had kissed it and left its mark. He should have kissed it instead. What was he thinking? She was twenty years younger than him! He felt very old.
Forty-two, for God’s sake.
War made one feel very small and old, in the end. As if one was lost in a blizzard.
As did the Party. The Party was the most stupid part of oneself made enormous. At the beginning, it had made one feel rather extraordinary because it was pleasant to recognise something in it of oneself that one didn’t yet recognise as the most stupid part of oneself. Until then that stupid part of oneself had been hidden under layer after layer of sophistication and education and trepidation and fornication, and one simply thought, ‘Ah yes, this is it, after all.’
Close my eyes, you’ll be mine, serve me summer, serve me wine.
You could die of grief, though. Kirchner, for instance. Kirchner had certainly died of grief. Hundreds of his works had been confiscated and he had died of grief. Well, one would, wouldn’t one? Around the time of the Degenerate Art exhibition.
Naturally.
Really, though, that had been a perverse honour, for Lohenfelde to have been included. In the countrywide tour of Entartete Kunst. A perverse honour! Along with the likes of Halle, Essen, Cologne. Surprising, really. A member of the Kirchner family had actually written to Herr Streicher, telling him quite openly about the tragedy – perhaps his sister. But then, Kirchner was already highly-strung. A morphine addict, actually. Two of the confiscated paintings had belonged to the museum. Probably burnt, by now. The bright colours blistering. They had not come back for the exhibition. Others had, other confiscated pictures had returned, to be laughed at. What was that like? It was like a mirage of water in a desert. Torture.
No, it was like seeing a fabulous dish turn into one’s own vomit.
Then they were whisked off again, in a dirty furniture van. Having been guffawed at thoroughly. Through the mangle and out again.
The number of visitors to Entartete Kunst (Free Entry!) at the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum rotated to its total in Herr Hoffer’s mind as if in a film: 149,565 . . . 6 . . . 7 . . . 8. 149,568! Five times that of any previous exhibition! What a success! Congratulations, Herr Hoffer! That’s what counts! The numbers through the turnstile! Art for the people!
149,568 of the people, filing with little steps and jostling through the cramped spaces between the false walls of trellis-work and burlap in the Long Gallery and they are talking loudly and they are laughing loudly and he’s bent double with excruciating stomach pains. For three weeks.
He remembered going back home each day and lying on the sofa while Sabine – O dear, loving wife! – stroked his forehead with her cool hand.
‘What is the matter, my darling Hein?’
‘I don’t like people very much.’
‘You smell of people.’
‘Exactly. Ugh. There are too many of them and they are intrinsically vulgar.’
‘You should be glad, my honeybun. The museum’s never been so popular. They’re even talking about it in the baker’s.’
‘I’m sure they are. And in the butcher’s, too. It’s because it’s free entry and they can laugh and jeer at my favourite artists. I feel like resigning.’
‘They say Dachau is very pleasant at this time of year,’ said Sabine in a strangled voice, tears already filling her eyes.
She would pose for him in the nude, he recalled. Like a proper life model. But his watercolours and charcoal sketches were timid; she would always look too thin. Nothing of her lovely roundness came out in his feeble efforts: he was no artist. Even his oils looked forlorn. Yet he panted after art as the deer for the stream. At one point she wondered, giggling, if he might ask other wives to pose for him, and they were both mutually aroused by the idea, though he never put it into practice. He did, however, imagine her as another man’s wife posing for him: his sketches improved, along with their lovemaking – which normally followed these sessions and frequently damaged the sketch beyond repair.
The Degenerate hanging was an execution. The pictures were crooked and he put them back straight and he was told off.
‘Herr Hoffer, you are interfering.’
‘But you can’t hang pictures crookedly!’
‘They are supposed to be crooked. That piece of painted internationalist crap is supposed to be on the floor. Take it down and put it back on the fucking floor so it can get kicked. You’re getting on my wick, Herr Hoffer. Anyone would think you were a cretin. Have you ever been to Dachau?’
‘Yes, frequently. My aunt lives in the town. Very pleasant at this time of year.’
What he really said was: nothing at all. It was amazing how severely a picture suffered by being hung at an angle. Its dignity went. So did Herr Hoffer’s.
Two Beckmanns, the small Raoul Hausmann photomontage featuring Frau Schenkel’s actual Remington typewriter, three Oskar Schlemmers, a small Herzog, the superb early Nolde and the beautiful Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. All present and correct. Welcome back. Now we will hang you as if you have been knocked by an elbow, surround you with insulting graffiti, and laugh our heads off at you. Haa haa. Haaaa haaaa haaaa. From the mayor down to the street cleaners. Haaaa haaaa haaaa. What a lot of bollocks. Deranged, aren’t they? Unpleasant. A child could do better. We’re so glad that our instincts were right, after all. Do you paint, too?
Of course, Herr Acting Director Streicher was off sick again. Another nervous setback. All up to Herr Acting Acting Director Hoffer to avoid placing his other foot – his only remaining foot – in the concentration camp. Hoppity hop.
Herr Hoffer, you are a cretin.
He had a sudden need to talk. This silence was awful. One filled it with accumulated rubble.
He reached across and placed another record on the gramophone, without looking at the title. It was a waltz, Offenbach’s ‘Souvenir d’Aix-les-Bains’. It had them all swaying slightly, even the Chief Archivist and Keeper of Books with responsibility for the Fossil, Town History and Local Handiworks Collections. Who was something of a fossil himself.
‘Always Jews,’ he said, swaying even more.
‘That’s Herr Streicher for you,’ said Frau Schenkel.
‘What do you mean?’ asked Hilde.
Herr Hoffer told her, albeit humorously, that Herr Streicher’s record collection had not been cleansed of infection. He held Caspar by the paws and pretended to dance, his knuckles brushing Hilde’s blouse. Hilde Winkel frowned.
‘No, I know, but isn’t this Johann Strauss?’
‘Offenbach,’ said Werner Oberst. ‘Strauss is a Jew, too.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Fifty-odd per cent of him. Maybe less, maybe more. Ask the relevant authorities.’
‘Not available today owing to unforeseen circumstances,’ said Herr Hoffer. ‘A pity this isn’t the “American Eagle Waltz”, eh, Caspar?’
‘But the Führer likes Johann Strauss,’ Hilde insisted.
‘Well, I’m sure he only likes the right half,’ Werner said, straight-faced as ever. ‘He is an artist, after all.’
Herr Hoffer chuckled as Hilde’s frown deepened, her eyes gazing at his chin. The record finished but the waltz had gone to his head.
‘If the sky is yellow and the grass is blue, what does it matter to me and you?’ he sang, as he held the soft paws and danced with Caspar Friedrich. What a good-natured animal he was! The little pads were dry against his fingers.
‘I remember that one,’ said Frau Schenkel. Her eyes were wet with tears.
Werner turned the record over and the music glided on; Herr Hoffer could see all those long-skirted girls and men with huge waxed moustaches swirling about and about in France: polite gaiety and abandon! Yesteryear! Degas, Monet, Renoir! Golden, golden! Ah, my darling Sabine! Ah, Berlin! Ah, life!
The music stopped. Herr Hoffer let go of the cat’s paws and sighed. He caught Werner looking at him, as if in intense dislike. But it couldn’t be, could it?
‘I think,’ said Werner, pulling a book out of his pocket, ‘I will read.’
‘You’ll ruin your eyes,’ said Frau Schenkel.
‘“Apropos of the Falling Sleet”,’ said Werner. ‘What a marvellous title.’
It was Dostoevsky’s Letters from the Underworld. He opened it at the ribb
on marker. Werner was peculiarly drawn to Russian literature, although it was banned.
It was annoying, the way Werner was holding the book up to catch the candlelight, reading with a supercilious smile through his thick half-moon spectacles.
‘What an appropriate book,’ Herr Hoffer remarked.
Though he had never read it.
‘I thought so,’ said Werner. ‘I read it at least once a year. The bit about the shabby German beaver that is still too dear makes me laugh out loud each time. You recall the passage?’
‘Very amusing,’ said Herr Hoffer.
‘And when he thinks his face looks vicious and ugly and stupid and so makes every attempt to make it pure,’ said Werner, smiling. ‘Isn’t that wonderful? And then, of course, he thinks everyone else vicious and ugly and stupid.’
He glanced over the book at Herr Hoffer, in a way that made the latter feel uncomfortable.
Perhaps Werner has always despised me, he thought; out of pure envy.
‘Isn’t that wonderful?’ repeated Werner, through his glittering half-moon glasses. ‘Imagine that.’
‘I like the passage,’ Herr Hoffer lied, ‘about a romanticist being a wise man. As a romantic myself.’
Werner now gave him a withering look.
‘Dostoevsky is, at that point, describing a specifically Russian romanticism, Heinrich.’
‘Yes, but –’
‘More rounded and practical than the “stupid transcendental romanticising” of the Germans, “in which nothing is ever done by anybody”.’
‘I see.’
‘You’re a Russian romantic, then, are you, Heinrich?’
‘Of course you know the book very well, Werner.’
‘I hope he isn’t a Russian anything,’ said Frau Schenkel. ‘Beggar the thought.’
Herr Hoffer closed his eyes for a moment. He saw the cafés and the waltzes and the green Seine.
‘Degas,’ he said, quite irrelevantly, ‘didn’t like Jews.’
My chief activity is to potter [‘aimlessly wander’? – ‘herumschlendern’]. Yesterday about five men came and I only just hid in time. I did not recognise any of the voices. They floated right over me, like big boats. I didn’t say goodbye to Mama or the others properly. I didn’t look back when I ran past the pear tree and through the back gate and out of the garden, out of my life.
