The Rules of Perspective

by Adam Thorpe

  His chicken heart resumed control. There was nowhere in the mess to lay the painting down. He went further into the vaults, probing with his light around the corner. The place showed up where he’d shat and covered it after and then the old wood statue showed up that Morriboy had shot the head clean off of and then the dead in the blue cardigan showed up and then a clear space nearby. Rats had been at the dead’s face again, and the other cheek was torn away to the back teeth. It was not a nice place to be, but he had no choice. The dead was not grinning and showing his back teeth, he’d just lost some of his face to that goddamn rat as hungry as hell.

  Those guys like Bosch and Goya, they must have been nuts.

  Life itself is a nightmare a lot of the time, you don’t have to add to it pictorially. Nobody’s going to put stuff like that on their walls, they need snowy mountains and shepherds and golden valleys.

  He took off his jacket and laid it down on the stone floor and then took out his little Mountain knife and eased the nails so the picture came out of its gilded frame. This was not difficult. He kicked away the frame that was now kindling.

  Hell, none of it was difficult. The back of the painting was rough as a hessian sack, with a little numbered ticket stuck on it maybe a hundred years ago, like the painting was a piece of merchandise. The stretcher was just four ordinary lengths of wood, like it would be now, so you could not believe that something so beautiful was on the other side.

  The canvas was fixed to the outer sides by about a hundred ancient thumbtacks.

  Setting the light with difficulty on the uneven slabs, he proceeded to cut the canvas. He held the picture vertical with a steady hand but the slab under it wobbled, as if it wasn’t cemented down, so he had to move to the slab next door. He worked slowly, and his hands were now shaking. This was not the first time. His hands had shook awfully bad the first time he had aimed at a man in a bombed-out French town called Faulquemont, back in late November, through thin sleet. The man was a German soldier wearing a huge tarpaulin with holes for the arms and he had jerked and folded like a deckchair.

  Maybe it wasn’t his own bullet, because there were others firing.

  He remembered that name. Faulquemont.

  The man was dead by the time they reached the wrecked shop from where he’d been shooting at them and yelling. They stepped over him and moved on. He’d looked just like a dead should look, with his mouth open and blood on his nose, but more individual than Parry would’ve liked. He was small, rat-faced, with pouches of exhaustion under his eyes and greying stubble, maybe in his forties. He didn’t look like a German soldier. He’d made the tarpaulin coat to keep himself dry, or maybe it was a kind of gas-cape. Now it lay on him like his death shroud, flapped up over his head so Parry’d had to lift the corner back with the snout of his rifle to take a look. He wished he hadn’t, because the first man you kill will always hang around.

  The knife made slow headway in the canvas; he was cutting against the thin, weak wood of the stretcher. His hands were still shaking, but less so. He didn’t like being down in the vaults any more, with rats and deads and mess.

  But this was salvage.

  The stink of burning still hung heavy in the air; the stink of burnt varnish and burnt oil paint and burnt canvas and burnt gilt and burnt people in their clothes. The flashlight made a tiny thrumming sound, for some reason: otherwise there was only the scrape and squeak of the knife as it made its way through the thick threads of the canvas. It would have been so much easier to have slashed through the canvas flush to the edge, letting the knife have all its play, but he didn’t want to damage the painting itself; so he took it an inch or two back, which was harder.

  Maybe the fumes given off by the burning paint and is linseed and varnish had suffocated them first. It was a chemical reaction.

  If he pressed too hard, the stretcher started splintering or the canvas got kind of pushed into the wood and messed up. Oak, it felt like. Or maybe it was pear wood, like they had always used for palettes. You could never be sure. A great deal changed, though not pear for palettes. The strange thing was, he used a butcher’s tray.

  His army-issue knife was not the ideal instrument: he’d have done better with a surgical instrument. He should have raided the medical truck – there was a complete operating kit in there. They could saw off and suture all day and night, and sometimes they did. The knife slipped and nicked his thumb. A bead of blood welled and he had to suck it for a few moments, his shadow leaping behind him as he moved his arms.

  He didn’t want blood on the painting.

  He tried, at one point, prising the canvas free from the rusted thumbtacks with the point of his knife, but the canvas tore and he abandoned the idea. The shadow of his arm kept obscuring things – but he made progress. He did make progress. He sawed away delicately with the serrated underlip of the blade. He looked up and caught the dead young man’s grinning face, thrown into something worse by the harsh light.

  A dead cannot hurt you.

  He wondered who had shot the guy, and through the chest, taking the blue weave into the ribs and then the heart or lungs; he couldn’t have gotten down here himself, not with a wound like that. Two wounds. Neat holes. And the only blood was around his body. He must have been shot dead here, or at least in the vaults. By whom? Hell, who cares? There are so many deads, probably millions, that it doesn’t matter more than nothing.

  Parry knew what he was doing was wrong, but it was such a small wrong in the huger evil . . . yet he had a bad feeling about it. The kind of sexual excitement was gone. He kept teasing himself – whispering the words – about his moral conscience. The world was going to be a very tough place for a while, even far away in America; the war was nowhere near over in the Far East, and the Russkies weren’t just going to lie down and be tickled in Europe. Some of the men were talking about the next war, the big war between Communism and Capitalism. All hell was going to break loose, and a man had to be well set up for that. He had to be very well set up or sink without a trace. Parry did not want to sink without a trace.

  He cut through the remaining fibres of the canvas and lifted the goddamn canvas away. It kept its shape. The only weight was the paint. A couple of the wedges were stuck to the back and he had to peel them off.

  The varnished painting shone in the flashlight’s beam. But the work looked frail, even a little undressed. When the light fell on it in a certain way, hiding the image in glare, it looked like the surface of the sea as he’d seen it from the troop ship, high up, when the sea was calm but marked by tiny lines and pockmarks: that was age, he thought. In the end, it was only a material, like iron or rubber. He’d never before been so aware of this.

  Everything is material, he thought.

  It was a beautiful painting; he was getting used to it without its frame, with only the thin strip of bare canvas all around, still folded back a little. Carefully, he flattened out this margin where the paint gave out like the edge of a scabbed wound.

  This painting reminded him, as he stood there some twenty feet below the ruined town, of a deep dark wishing well near his uncle’s place in Vermont. He would look down into the well as a child, exulting at the circle of light far below, in which his head was visible as a kind of notch. He’d see another realm down there, in which a lot of good things might come true. I am on vacation and I am going fishing.

  The antique painting gave him that kind of feeling, looking at it in the beam of the flashlight. It was his painting. He was part of its history. He could not imagine this painting surviving him and he sank down into its landscape in blessèd relief.

  Papa, Mama, Leo, Lily, little Henny, Grandmama, you are alive, I am alive – so we are all still alive, thank goodness! Yet I am not here. I am a trick of light. I am not even a ghost. I am not even in your dream [‘Traum’]. I am marking the days on a beam. The beam is longer than my life.

  21

  Herr Hoffer suddenly imagined himself in the hold of a large aeroplane, fleeing war-torn Europe.
The vaults were the right shape, long and with a curved ceiling (he ignored the fact that they turned the corner and continued for the same length, of course), and everything was vibrating and rumbling as it did in an aeroplane. The vibrating stopped as the rumbling stopped, but the plane flew on. Where to, with its precious cargo? Into the past, where everything was better. There was a brief period when, really, the Führer had seemed to fulfil all Herr Hoffer’s student dreams of the artist-hero that might have been himself, emerging from the dark mysteries of the trees as Hermann himself did before the aghast Romans – invincible Hermann himself, whose towering, copper-sheeted statue Herr Hoffer had wondered at, as a boy on a school outing to the Teutoburg Forest back in 1911. He chuckled silently to himself, remembering how he and his chums had climbed up the spiral stairs inside the statue’s base to the viewing platform still far below Hermann’s feet, and gazed over the trees towards Romanish France, towards the Arch-Fiend of France, and had shaken their small fists. It was the time of the Moroccan crisis, when feelings were high against France and many people were talking of war. There was no war, not yet, but to Herr Hoffer’s mind everything went wrong from that moment – not his own trivial visit to the monument, of course, but the French invasion of Morocco. How huge and defiant was the statue rearing above him, the muscled legs sheathed like boilers, the bolts like a warrior’s stitched scars on the bare arm with its upraised sword, the blade actually hidden in the low misty clouds that hung over the forest, as a real god’s might have been! How proud of being German he had felt, and how impossible to imagine himself as anything else!

  He chuckled silently again, before noticing Hilde Winkel’s glance beside him. He smiled at her gamely and settled back, wishing he had a cushion. He crossed his legs at the ankles and folded his arms.

  Werner put the other Mendelssohn on the gramophone, winding it up with a grunt. It was Goethe’s loving woman, writing to her absent love, only now she was singing it. Why was she estranged from her own people? Was her husband away in the wars and she far from her family, or was she in exile? A single kiss, yes, was all her delight, and the singer put everything into the yearning. Letters were strange things, both distant and very close. Herr Hoffer could quite clearly see her with a plume in hand, writing as her soul sang, yearning.

  There was a scratch on Stille, as if Herr Streicher had done it deliberately; the word caught on itself three times before Werner jogged the player. Music was just as vulnerable, in the end. He had a great desire to remove his shoes, but the others would see his darned socks, even in the weak light. Frau Hoffer had darned these socks several times. Also, they might have to evacuate the place very suddenly. That was an odd thing about bombs – they blew people’s shoes off. A lot of the dead would be scattered about in their socks, with their shoes nearby. Before the war, he had never seen a dead person, not counting his grandfather in the coffin in 1908 – who hadn’t been real. After a raid, the bodies were quickly covered in blankets and the grisly bits and pieces recovered by special volunteers with sacks, followed by men with brushes and buckets, so that often he might cycle to work with very little to show for the raid but the odd blasted building. Strange, how burnt people were purple, not black. Another peculiar thing was the way in which the blankets never quite covered the bodies, there was frequently a hand or a foot protruding. It was disturbing – it often looked as if they were reaching out, about to remove the blanket and stand upright again, blinking, to walk back into their lost lives.

  People standing in front of their ruined homes would sob, and it was like gales of laughter, from a distance. On the other hand, Gustav Glatz would laugh, and it sounded like sobbing. Gustav would wander into the museum at odd moments and laugh and show the staff his lacerated tongue, mumbling and snorting. His front teeth had been knocked out and many of the others loosened, so he’d had a false set made which were slightly too big. He would remove his false teeth, wincing, and open his mouth and show his tongue – which seemed, yes, to have scars across it. The staff would look suitably shocked, but since he wandered in at least once a month, their looks became less convincing. His right eye remained black; it was not a normal black eye, apparently, it was something worse. Poor Gustav: he had been such a promising scholar, their expert on the Baroque. One felt sorry for him, wandering about like that, a real wreck after the SA thugs set on him, but after a while one dreaded his visits. There was no single painting or sculpture that could convey poor Gustav Glatz’s suffering, or the horror of a mother’s grief, let alone the horror of being boiled alive like a prawn – as had happened in shelters when the boiler burst. Even Grunewald would not be up to it. And now he was scared. The museum had a very large boiler. There had been gas and electricity right up to today, apart from the odd interruption after a raid. He could not imagine the horror of being boiled alive, of clambering as high as one could, holding one’s children above one’s head as the steaming waters blistered one’s ankles and then one’s knees.

  He shuddered and the others glanced at him.

  ‘I’m quite alright,’ he wanted to say, but swallowed instead and closed his eyes. Then he yawned: a huge yawn he could not stifle. He heard the others follow him. That was the thing about yawns. They were catching, as being scared was catching.

  A painting could not convey being scared, either.

  ‘These silences are excruciating.’ That was Werner Oberst. Who had not yawned, it seems. ‘Anyone would think we were ghosts.’

  ‘Sleepy ghosts,’ said Hilde Winkel, holding a finger to her bad lip.

  ‘Then put another record on,’ said Frau Schenkel.

  ‘We’re not a dance hall,’ said Werner. ‘There are only five records, anyway. You only brought five down, Heinrich. Maybe you thought defeat would come sooner rather than later.’

  Herr Hoffer blinked and apologised and then Hilde Winkel started crying. She covered her face in her hands and shook next to him. He placed a hand on her back and felt the thinness rippling and a certain unevenness he assumed to be her undergarment.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, blowing her nose. ‘I was thinking about those chops. My sister caught a chill in the rubble and passed away in January.’

  ‘My sister liked to sing,’ Werner murmured, for some reason. ‘She was nine years older than me.’

  ‘I said it would be depressing,’ said Frau Schenkel, with a satisfied nod.

  Herr Hoffer carried on rubbing Hilde Winkel’s back for a few moments, feeling fatherly. He was, after all, the head of this little family. He had been so for four years, since Herr Streicher’s last collapse. He was not only the head, but the saviour. He had saved the remainder of the collection. The Americans would acknowledge him as the saviour.

  The silence grew weighty, though it was better not to talk. The tetchy old man overhead had nodded off, for the moment. No – there was a little stutter, like stones cast in a bucket. Those were shots.

  Even Sabine had never known anything about it. Even that damn Bendel; even he had been foxed.

  Her Hoffer smiled to himself. He had been very agile, really. When the call comes, you are ready. He had already started to secrete a few of the more sensitive paintings by the time the Degenerate Confiscation Committee wreaked its terrible harvest in ’36: Herr Streicher was fully supportive of this precautionary measure against Party looters.

  ‘I insist,’ he had said, knocking out his pipe for emphasis, ‘that the Poussin figure-study be the first guest of the vaults.’

  ‘Not the Bernini marble?’

  ‘We don’t have a Bernini marble.’

  ‘My joke, Herr Director. It is very important at times like these that we keep a sense of humour.’

  Herr Acting Director Streicher had frowned, scratching his wild shock of white hair. It had definitely grown whiter very quickly, in Herr Hoffer’s opinion.

  ‘Nothing,’ Herr Streicher had replied, ‘is more grotesquely amusing than seeing these barber-shop cretins try to run Germany, if you are of a cynical disposition like
myself.’

  So the little Poussin went down that night into the darkness of the vaults. A dozen others followed over the next few years. But this piecemeal, haphazard manoeuvre turned, in Herr Hoffer’s hands, into a sophisticated operation of which he was very proud.

  One answers the call, when one has to.

  The key was having had four years to do it in, since Herr Streicher’s last collapse: reducing the collection not stolen by the Degenerate louts to a skeletal sample and storing the rest quite openly (as it were) in a room on the ground floor. Next to the toilets, yes, and only on the ground floor, but windowless, steel-plated and sandbagged. Their official air-raid shelter, as demanded by the authorities long before the war. Luftschutzbunker, said the stencilled red letters on the door, in case anyone was in any doubt.

  And all these paintings in the vaults? What the hell are they down here for?

  Well, Captain Clark Gable of the USA, that was my master-stroke, for which I was taking a great risk. These were the ones I slipped a little deeper, you see. Over a hundred of them! Personal favourites, or in particular danger from the Nazi cretins. This paper in my pocket is the inventory, but it includes only those works visible in the Luftschutzbunker. And (this is the brilliance of it), it is full of mistakes. It is what I jokingly refer to as my imprecision relation. Heisenberg, you know? Anyway, the most flagrant mistake was the listing of Mademoiselle de Guilleroy au Bain as present in the Luftschutzbunker when she was, of course, in the SS-Sturmbannführer’s office – that building you are now using for storing your chewing gum and chocolate and excellent fruit drink. So the other mistakes were covered by – well, my own apparent idiocy. It foxed everyone.

  Thank you, Captain Gable. But, you know, I believe in the supreme value of art. We must all make our humble sacrifice –

  ‘Heinrich.’

  ‘Yes, Werner?’

  ‘What’s that supercilious smile about?’

  ‘Was I smiling?’