by Adam Thorpe
Jim Webb had a grenade in his hand. The front door was open.
Parry covered Webb as he crept up to the two steps and waved his helmet on the end of his rifle. Nothing.
Then Parry scuttled up behind as Jim Webb looked into the house.
Nothing.
The dead that was Morrison lay there without moving, that was all. The inner door was closed. There were stairs.
Parry glanced back at the shutters, too busy now for fear, too concentrated in the moment. Any movement there and the BAR the other side of the road would rip the flaky wood apart. He covered Webb as the veteran padded in and stood for a moment by the inner door, listening.
Nothing.
Hell fuck, now it was his turn.
He had a grenade in his hand. His mind became pure body, as always in such situations. Webb waited until Parry’s body had crossed in front of the door, then kicked the door open as Parry drew the pin out and pitched the grenade in and got their ears to whistle.
Once the smoke had cleared, they could see there was no one – just broken mirrors and some spent cartridge cases on a wide bed. It was a bedroom, not a sitting room.
They debated what to do in whispers, pretty sure there was no one in the house. There were other rooms, but the guy would not have hung around after hitting Morrison. He was holed up somewhere else, waiting, like just any sniper. A fucking cocksucking SS son-of-an-asshole-bitch, smoking a good pipe.
All this was said in whispers, like they didn’t want to wake their kid sister up. Their heartbeats were louder than their whispers, however. The mounted Spandau could be pointing at any of the doors from the dark inside of any of the rooms, it didn’t even have to wait for the door to be opened, you’d just get a whiff of pipe tobacco and then kiss Heaven. Nevertheless, they would have to do their house-clearance drill, or maybe call up a tank to blast the place to fuck at point-blank range and get their picture in all the illustrated papers.
You wanna bet?
What was that fucking black tape on his rifle for, anyway?
Webb signalled to the others to approach with caution, though they were pretty sure the guy had gone. And so had the girl. Morrison had not gone from the hallway. He had not gone anywhere. Not even an inch. His blood had gone dark and dead. The others looked at him, they hardly touched him. The film-star mouth was pulled back and very straight and showing the teeth, its curvy nature being to do with the life behind it, making it that way. Two of the men were kids even younger-looking than Cowley, with acne on their cheeks and humid upper lips, their helmets seeming a lot too big. Their eyes darted about with anxiety. The back of Morrison’s neck was still corrugated up against the collar and showing its gingery stubble, but now it was something else. It was very white, for a start.
The squad, led by Parry, kicked open door after door in the damaged house and went up the stairs covering one another, but even in the attic there was nobody; they were jittery after the death of Morrison and did an unnecessary amount of firing into empty rooms where long mirrors gave them the impression of human movement until the mirrors burst into a thousand stars.
One of the young boys looked out of a back window. He shouted to them like he’d discovered Tahiti.
They looked down and they saw the body down below, lying star-shaped in a flower-bed. It was an old guy, with the Spandau under him: he’d thrown himself out of a top window holding the Spandau. They were surprised to see how old he was, lying there in his silk pyjamas and his bloodied white hair. Maybe it wasn’t him: maybe this was the owner, thrown out by the mad SS cunt who’d chucked out the machine-gun and was now disguised as a priest or a three-star US general, and nobody would notice the difference anyway.
They went down into the garden and Parry felt the pockets. There was a warty pipe and some tobacco and a folder of matches. The tobacco smelt very fine indeed.
‘He’s the one,’ he said.
Amazingly, when the young kid gave the body a kick, Parry got angry. You didn’t kick old guys, especially dead ones.
Now that they were pretty sure that the empty cartridge-cases and the body were all that remained of the sniper, they felt better about things. But they were very angry.
Morrison’s death was the result of malice. It was unfair. These snipers, these last-ditch crazies – they were malicious, they weren’t playing fair. They were licked and they wouldn’t stop. This is what the men kept saying, as they dealt with Morrison.
Parry was confused about this notion of fairness; on the road from Kaiserslauten, approaching a small town with some cloth mills outside it and white flags of surrender flying from the windows, they had killed a woman. That is to say, a woman – young, about twenty-five, twenty-six – had come out of a farm adjoining the road and Parry’s vehicle had shot at her and she had fallen. She lay there on the verge looking very surprised in death and the convoy had not stopped. No way could a convoy of some eighty tanks and jeeps and half-tracks and TCVs stop because Parry’s gunner had shot up a farm girl. The convoy would only stop if it was attacked or to clear out some petty resistance or if there was a roadblock – and there they certainly were, to quote the great God Georgie, going like shit through a tin horn.
It was clear to Parry that the girl had come out of the farm to watch them pass by, it was simple curiosity, but the gunner had shot her out of her apron and she had lain there very dead and very surprised, her eyes wide open, her scarf crooked on her head, and Jimmy Jones the gunner swearing at her softly as if it was all her fault. Jimmy Jones was younger than her, probably. He was jumpy after the previous day, when a German tank had driven out of some trees and killed three men in the convoy and then vanished again. Parry was saying nothing. If people popped up without warning then they were bound to be risking their goddamn necks. Corps commander or farm girl.
Now, looking at Morrison dead as cold cement in a big dark stain, his eyes just visible under the dark lashes, he thought of the farm girl. He felt responsible for both deaths, in some way he couldn’t figure.
He sat on his heels and waited for the stretcher while the other men smoked on the street, guns cocked and eyes nervous, addressing passing civilians in a half-joky, half-jeering way. His throat was too sore to smoke. His breeches and sock weren’t too wet any more and the smell wasn’t just his.
Morrison being dead meant that no one else knew. About it.
Morrison had kept saying, ‘Yup, you and I, we’re gonna go halves on that old painting, being buddies.’ They were checking out the rest of the vaults and Morrison said this at least five times, in so many words.
Every time he said it, Parry felt sore at him and didn’t answer.
‘Yup, we’re gonna go two buddy halves on that old picture, man,’ said Morrison. At least five times. Maybe six. You couldn’t be clearer.
Now the guy was a dead. He couldn’t make a claim. The only claim he could make was on the feelings of his family back home in rural Wisconsin. And no one in the world would ever say ‘Yup’ just the way Morrison said it, with that chicken-peck of his head. Not ever again. It had irritated Parry, every time, the way the guy kept chicken-pecking and saying ‘Yup’ like he’d known all along and whatever.
Now it seemed like a great and inexplicable absence.
When the medic had turned over the Corporal’s body, Parry saw how the neck had been torn open by the bullets and how the pulled-back mouth was all frothed up at the corner. It looked like a bullet had nicked the cheek, too. Those bullets were goddamn sharp. And so fast you heard them sing before you heard the report. Kind of a whipping sound.
Parry had never seen death happen so closely or clearly before, not right in front of him like that.
Many men had died on the advance up to here, but it was always when he wasn’t looking. Even that kid Burgin getting his head removed by their own bazooka. Each one happened out of the corner of his eye or in some time that ran parallel to his, about ten seconds ahead, he was always missing it or else it was too far to matter, it was just
someone folding at the neck and knee and ankle and sprawling in the distance. Here, this time, it was in an envelope in his skull, to be opened any time he breathed.
The wallpaper still showed the five-year-old’s hill but it had been there the whole school year and looked like it needed taking down. Also, it had dribbled so much it was more like a hill with roots, complicated bristly roots searching down and down, the vermilion turned an Indian red already. My guardian angel is gone, he thought. The hill is an angel’s wing, in fact, frayed by the winds of death you have to go through to go anywhere.
The K candies were still in Morrison’s curled hand, still in their cellophane. Parry took the dead wrist – bone-cold but slippery, its small black hairs slicked down with sweat – and tipped the hard candies out into his own hand and rolled them in his palm, thinking how simple were the needs of men and women, and how there is no taste nor sweetness at all for a dead.
And for the soul, well – maybe you don’t need candies when you’re really home.
He pocketed the candies and sat on his heels by the body.
A few minutes later he heard shouts and a girl with plaits in a stained apron was being pulled through the door. Her arms were held by two of the squad – the kids with acne and over-large helmets. She looked very frightened, thin and frightened. He shook his head. It wasn’t the same girl. And if it had been? But it wasn’t. The two soldiers looked at the girl as if she’d let them down.
‘Wait,’ said Parry.
They looked hopeful. Parry was hunting for the candies all over his battledress. Damn. He finally found them in his breast pocket where the old labels were and he gave the candies to the girl. His fingers brushed her live hand and he felt something stop his throat. Maybe his heart. She thrust the candies in her apron pocket and ran out.
If it had been the same bitch, what would he have done? Ripped her living goddamned guts out and used them to grease the treads of a tank, to quote Georgie Patton the General? Or what?
Between dreams and waking, there is one difference: the cold. Asleep, I don’t feel the cold. That is the one difference. The difference between life and non-life. Creation and non-creation. Safety and harm. The cold.
17
Herr Hoffer nodded off for a moment.
(He had been extremely tired for three years, ever since the raids had started. The sirens sounded almost every night and you could not help but lie awake and think: maybe they will bomb us tonight, even though they have not bombed us for months. Until this year the Hoffer family had hardly been down to the shelter, but stayed in their beds right through the air-raid warning. The sirens gave a little cough to begin with, to clear the throat. You imagined a small, balding man in a glass office, with earphones and papers, operating some kind of control panel. You waited, and then it began. The sirens would whine up and hold their note for longer than you would think possible and then whine down again and you would be just dropping off to sleep, very tired, when the sirens would start their hideous, slow climb upwards once more. The only consolation was that this might be happening over Great Britain, too, keeping the enemy awake in their foggy cities. So how could Herr Hoffer be anything other than tired, utterly tired – like the whole population of Lohenfelde, covered for three years in a miasma of tiredness that made everyone sharp and tense with one another, that overcame you suddenly of an afternoon like a thick cloth thrown over the head and body, in which you struggled to keep awake? How many times had Herr Hoffer nodded off at his desk, his elbow on the glass, his face sinking into his hand, his body staying upright in the chair as his soul sank lower and lower into blessed oblivion? His dream of the after-war was to sleep and to eat, if not simultaneously then one after the other – to lie in a feather bed in a pleasant old hotel by the forest and eat all his meals on a tray, to walk in the forest a little and then return to his bed and his great, creamy meals of meat and fish and eggs and refined vegetables, washed down by white beers and fine sweet Rhineland wines, topped by firm cheeses and as many chocolate cakes as he could manage, and then sleep in the fresh, unadulterated quietness for as long as he wished – a whole day and night together, if need be – a whole week! This was Herr Hoffer’s dream. Frau Hoffer had a part in it, too, but not a central one. Her warm nakedness was not as voluptuously desired as food and sleep. There had been a lull in the shelling and bombing – rather a long one into which he woke with a start, conscious of crying out as he leapt from the hotel window by mistake into a deep gorge and now wondered for a second where he was.)
Nobody seemed to have noticed, though he was sure he had at least snorted through his nose. He blew it just in case. He felt awful.
‘Perhaps they have gone away,’ said Frau Schenkel, looking upwards.
‘Perhaps they were never coming,’ said Werner Oberst.
They listened to the silence. But then a fear that it might be broken by something tumultuous, shattering, that it was merely a prelude rather than a relief, began to be felt in the smoky air of the vaults.
‘Who said they were coming in the first place, in fact?’ Herr Hoffer asked, after clearing his throat.
Hilde Winkel said that the SS offices had been evacuated.
‘They were burning papers yesterday,’ she said. ‘I saw the smoke in the garden.’
The SS-Sturmbannführer himself had left in a big car in a great hurry, followed by his members of staff in any vehicle they could get hold of, including bicycles and a manure cart. One lowly clerk had been spotted pushing a wheelbarrow full of files.
‘There were some soldiers in my neighbour’s shop yesterday,’ said Frau Schenkel. ‘They weren’t in uniform. They told my neighbour’s wife that the Americans were coming up the motorway in a very long convoy of tanks. She asked them why they weren’t trying to stop the enemy and they laughed, I’m afraid to say. They left without paying. They weren’t local.’
There was a little silence after this confession of Frau Schenkel’s – it was very like a confession, the way she told it. It was a distasteful story, somehow.
‘There won’t be any more bombing,’ said Herr Hoffer. ‘We’ll get a good night’s sleep.’
‘There’ll be Negroes,’ said Frau Schenkel, with a shudder.
‘You’ve seen them in films,’ murmured Werner, from deep in his book.
‘Exactly,’ she said.
Herr Hoffer knew that Frau Schenkel’s chief dread was being raped by a Negro. She had read the articles in the papers and believed them. Herr Hoffer had no idea how the Americans would behave when they arrived, but he was fairly certain that even the most uncivilised among them would not bother with Frau Schenkel. Her smell alone – a hint of toilets mingling with damp wool and mothballs – physically repelled him. In better days it had been covered by eau de Cologne or decent soap, but now even types like Frau Schenkel avoided washing too often.
He was feeling uncomfortable after Frau Schenkel’s little story, in fact, but for other reasons. Although their Kompanieführer, a grocer in his late fifties, had fled a few days ago on his delivery bicycle, the Volkssturm unit could still theoretically have been in the field. Even fourteen-year-olds had gone off to die for the Fatherland, over the last few weeks. He did not have the excuse that, say, a factory director might have had, since the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum not only failed to produce vital parts for the war effort, but was also empty. Its rooms had been emptied of the last of their remaining works a year ago.
He looked across at the paintings on their crude trestles, the frames glistening gold in the dim light of the candle. He was not a pessimist. Even through the most difficult moments he had felt fortunate.
As a young student at Heidelberg, in the History of Art faculty with its little round tower and courtyard nestling at the foot of the hill upon which the ancient Schloss loomed like a ruined god, he had dreamt of this life – of having the loveliest masterworks in his charge, of having the power to acquire sublime treasures, old and new, of nursing them as a mother nurses her children, and of being ab
le to talk about them to the masses, to shopkeepers and clerks and factory workers. Of lifting everybody to the sublime, refined level of the History of Art faculty at Heidelberg.
Never had he been more happy than when strolling through the grounds of the ruined Schloss with his fellow students! All brothers, they were, in the onward march of art and progress, untouched themselves by the horror of war: too young, just too young for the trenches, and never to be touched in the new, reasonable, golden future!
Herr Hoffer closed his eyes and remembered. How the river had snaked away far below them, silvery in the moss-green of the woods, lapping at the pink and red of the illustrious old town, exactly as in the paintings of a hundred years before – how that view united them with the burning, romantic young minds of a hundred years before! Speechless they stood on the lawn, looking down over the parapet – the great castle, burnt to a blank-eyed hollow by the army of Louis Quatorze (how they always said his name in French, hating it and loving it!), beseeching them to take up their lives and make them glorious.
It was so very grand and poignant, the castle of Heidelberg.
Half a vast tower lay in the position in which it had fallen to the French cannons, like the collapsed part of a sandcastle made by a bucket, its great fallen bulk covered in grass and ivy. It reflected onto them, onto these callow young men in their modern jackets and coats and hats, the glamour of history. As they sketched it, they felt drawn into the glamour and vastness of history – yet superior to it, too. They would not be caught by it, like their elders – their elder brothers, even, who had wallowed in the trenches. They would never be victims.
