The Rules of Perspective

by Adam Thorpe

  ‘It was most unattractive.’

  ‘Sorry to offend. I was thinking of those lamb chops.’

  ‘Pork chops,’ murmured Hilde. ‘If only she had enjoyed them, before she caught that chill in the rubble.’

  ‘If only,’ said Herr Hoffer, ‘I had gone by way of the park to see the blossom this morning. It is a clear, bright day out there, beyond the smoke.’

  ‘You’re not suggesting a calamitous outcome in regard to our own sweet selves, are you, Heinrich?’

  ‘No, Werner, but I wouldn’t have minded seeing the blossom, all the same.’

  Hilde started crying again, very quietly.

  Frau Schenkel said, ‘My hips hurt. I’m not up to sitting on the floor.’

  ‘That’s age,’ said Werner, gruffly.

  ‘I know it’s age,’ said Frau Schenkel. ‘It takes me longer and longer to get up in the morning.’

  ‘You think it’s a long way off,’ said Werner, ‘and then suddenly you’re in it.’

  ‘My philosophy,’ said Frau Schenkel, ‘is that you never know what’s around the next corner. You just never know.’

  ‘Even though one gets plenty of warning,’ smiled Herr Hoffer.

  ‘You’re not old,’ said Frau Schenkel.

  ‘Neither are you,’ he replied, gallantly.

  He glanced at Werner, who had always been old. Werner said nothing.

  ‘Thank you, Herr Hoffer,’ said Frau Schenkel, ‘but it isn’t all appearances, I’m afraid.’

  Herr Hoffer was too tired and nervous to continue a conversation he had had in the office many times before. He crossed his legs at the ankles and folded his arms. He calculated that Frau Schenkel must, in fact, be nearing sixty. She had been in her mid-forties when he first met her, with a decent figure. Although she’d always resembled a hungry cormorant, even then. In fact, she’d reminded him of Botticelli’s cruel young Medici in the Kaiser Friedrich collection – a painting which had struck him with great force on his earliest visits to Berlin, as a young man. The first portrait to show an interior psychological truth, he had read; at an age when interior psychological truth seems to belong only to oneself, he had been so excited by it! Ah, so near and so long ago, he had reflected. And now he might say the same of his own youth!

  The cloudy candlelight was exaggerating his secretary’s features. Her long nose with its wavering shadow came almost to the level of her upper lip, and she had a habit of raising her right eyebrow, so that really she did look quite cruel and self-satisfied at times, as did the Medici youth.

  Sometimes he had dreamt of a young, smiling secretary with nice teeth. Instead of Frau Schenkel. He had even, sometimes, half wished she would have some health problem and retire early. Vanish from his life.

  If people knew one’s inner thoughts, society would become intolerable.

  Hilde Winkel blew her nose and wiped her eyes, apologising. No one even bothered to comment. People were not made by God to sit underground in the darkness, hungry and cold, while other people tried to destroy their homes with high explosive. These sudden bursts of despair were, in fact, a sign that you had recognised the situation for what it was. Most of the rest of the time you concentrated on details, such as the most comfortable sitting position on concrete or whether the darns in your socks were showing. Herr Hoffer recalled spending an entire session in the air-raid cellar at home wondering why coffee was ruined when it was boiled in the pan, and yet could not be made properly unless the water poured over the ground beans was at absolute boiling point. The fact that he’d not had any real coffee in the house for two years did not enter into the discussion, which was conducted entirely in his own head accompanied by the appropriate sensations of smell and taste and so on. Sabine commented afterwards that she believed he had been having sexual fantasies, which he vigorously denied. The noise of the raid had gone on and on above them, rather like a stream of overloaded lorries racing and banging over potholes, and yet he had continued with this inner debate about coffee. At other times in the shelters he had been stiff with fear, though the raids were either non-existent or much further off: this is why he preferred sitting in his flat wadded by cushions.

  Hilde gave a shuddering, tear-filled sigh and Herr Hoffer placed his hand again on her back, in that fatherly way. How slim her back felt under the nobbly bit of the undergarment!

  Bendel had put his hand on Sabine’s back, of course. But with quite different motives.

  I can’t speak, as if I don’t have a tongue, but my head sings. Exactly like a tree at dawn, in spring, in the depths of the Spreewald. One of the three speaks to me in nonsense that rhymes, sometimes. I think I understand him. He shows me his tongue. Life is nonsense that sometimes rhymes.

  22

  Parry looked down at the snowy mountains and golden valley for some minutes. His hands had stopped shaking. He’d lowered his whole soul into the world down there, a much better world in its purity and innocence.

  Then he rolled the picture up, slowly and carefully.

  It was incredible, that you could roll up such a thing. It was stiff, but rolled up like cardboard. He didn’t roll it too tight, as that would have cracked the paint; he imagined it shelling off like old skin, the hairline cracks forming into plates and shelling off, the little blisters in the corner bursting. He had the impression, down there in the vaults, rolling up that old picture by Mr Christian Vollerdt, that everything he was doing in his life had some greater purpose, that all his actions would eventually make up into one great construction and it would only then be clear what that construction was, what it represented.

  Back in Vermont they’d had a neighbour who’d construct giant dolls out of bits and pieces he’d pick up in yards and farms, with the help of chicken-wire and plaster and paint, and until the paint went on you couldn’t see what the hell it was meant to be, it was just like a tall pile of garbage. The paint kind of made sense of it all, tied it together, and the giant doll would be added to the other giants in the field behind his house. The guy was not an artist, he was just crazy, but now Parry could see how one’s life could appear to resemble a tall pile of bits and pieces, of garbage, until the last stroke of paint made sense of it all, the last breath.

  He held in his hand a thick tube, like hessian, like sackcloth. The painting might never have been. He wanted to burst into tears, although he had triumphed.

  My pencil is almost finished. [. . . ?] At some point in your life you become separated from your luck. Then everything gets difficult.

  23

  Even Bendel had been foxed.

  The young fellow would pop round to the museum very often, but he was kept sweet by being shown the stored works in the Luftschutzbunker. If anyone mentioned the vaults, Herr Hoffer would claim they were too damp, and full of rats. SS-Sturmführer Bendel would gravitate without fail to the nineteenth-century gallery and stare for a long time at the van Gogh.

  When, in late 1941, it was taken down from its hook to join the other works stored for safety in the Luftschutzbunker, Bendel would ask to see it there.

  Herr Hoffer obliged, but kept a close eye on him. He really wanted the van Gogh to slip straight down into the vaults, but it could not ‘vanish’ while Bendel was around. The Artist near Auvers-sur-Oise held the man entranced.

  ‘Now I understand, Herr Hoffer.’

  ‘What do you understand?’

  ‘That what matters is the vision a man has – above and beyond his fellow creatures.’

  Herr Hoffer, looking at the painting, felt rather proprietorial. The windowless Luftschutzbunker had been installed with a fan, but it still smelt of linseed oil and the toilets next door.

  ‘He anticipated the Expressionists by fifteen years or more,’ was what he had said in his gallery lectures in front of this painting. He no longer said that, nor did he mention van Gogh’s mental breakdown.

  ‘All great artists are blessed with an inner vision that is unique to them, Herr Bendel. It is a gift that they must respect, as an art
ist must respect the surface he draws upon.’

  ‘How strange,’ said SS-Sturmführer Bendel, his boot-heels squeaking as he swivelled Herr Hoffer’s way, ‘that you liken an inner vision to the outside surface of a canvas.’

  ‘Not just canvas,’ Herr Hoffer replied, slightly piqued. ‘It might be the side of a clay pot, a newspaper, anything. Even an old crumbling wall.’

  Bendel gave one of his boyish laughs. It was always a bit too loud.

  ‘You are very literal,’ he said. ‘I am not sure this particular great artist would have approved.’

  ‘To his mind,’ said Herr Hoffer, ‘as to the ancient Chinese mind, the inner and the outer were seamlessly joined. Are we looking at a field of wheat in northern France, or an individual’s soul refracted through so many agitated strokes of the brush?’

  SS-Sturmführer Bendel kept very still for a moment.

  ‘I see something else entirely,’ he said, and walked out.

  They never talked politics: they strolled together through a sort of sealed parkland of high art, immune from interference. Occasionally Bendel would mention the Führer, but only with reference to the latter’s taste for such-and-such a painter (generally nineteenth-century). He never mentioned his boss, Reichsführer-SS Himmler, and he rarely appeared in uniform. He told jokes about General Goering that were genuinely funny. For instance, Goering was visiting a steel factory when he suddenly shot up to the ceiling; an electro-magnet had caught his medals. (Apparently, the General found them funny, too, which spoiled Herr Hoffer’s enjoyment while it soothed his nervousness.)

  Once, Herr Hoffer had called him an extreme romantic.

  ‘Do you know what Dostoevsky called the romantic, Herr Hoffer?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘A wise man. In Letters from the Underworld.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Herr Hoffer, who had never read it, ‘an excellent book, but very Russian.’

  Bendel had laughed his loud, high-pitched laugh. It was fashionable, among SS officers, this laugh, probably because of Reinhard Heydrich.

  ‘How right you are, Herr Hoffer. Very Russian indeed.’

  Klaus Bendel was, in short, an agreeable and stimulating young man whose engaging boyishness was only slightly marred by a shrill note that crept in from time to time. This reminded Herr Hoffer of his own youth. The shrill note was usually philosophical, an extreme or sweeping statement that came out of the blue and rendered the careful discussion null and void. The last two thousand years of Western civilisation would be dismissed in a sentence; Bendel was drawn to prehistory, in which he found ‘the truth of beauty allied to nature, something instinctual and true’. Flint tools and arrows of barbed bone or whale ivory were the artefacts he held in special esteem; he was involved in various archaeological digs run by the SS, and this had changed his view of art. Art, he would maintain, was at its most truthful when it was unconscious: when a bone arrow achieved, in its anonymous, unconscious simplicity, the expression of man’s innermost soul. The prehistoric hunters would not have called it art. Art was the product of a lapse, a decline into a sedentary and urban form of life. Paintings were a frivolity, a decadent corruption of the essential, millennial effort of prehistoric or primitive man to unite the utilitarian with the sophisticated aesthetic of art. This made art a subtle companion of nature: the shark and the bone arrow combine aesthetic and practical perfection. Both are beautiful because they are perfect. We are living, Bendel would go on (his eyes shining with excitement), in an age of imperfection. We have lost the instinct, the unselfconsciousness that was our natural birthright. The intellect has taken over; our movements are awkward and ugly. Look at the terrible ugliness of cities! Look at this room, this gallery – how absurd it is, when you think about it instinctually! These are our sacred objects, this our modern church – but isn’t it absurd and unnatural, when you look at it coldly, like a timeless god? Wouldn’t you prefer the terrible mask burning in the fire?

  ‘Personally,’ said Herr Hoffer, once, after one of these fits of enthusiasm, ‘I would prefer a drawing by Raphael to the mask in the fire.’

  ‘Herr Hoffer, you have missed the point entirely. If you don’t mind me saying so, you are being naive.’

  ‘Candid, perhaps. Did you know that Leibniz, that great man of Reason, started out as a member of a secret society, dabbling in magic and alchemy and Rosicrucianism? Apparently there was a lot of that sort of rubbish following the Thirty Years’ War.’

  ‘What are you saying, Herr Hoffer?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  There was a pause. Bendel was in uniform, looking tall and elegant and restrained. He folded his arms abruptly and there were tiny creaks and clinks from the blackness.

  ‘If you’re suggesting I am not an anti-rationalist, then remember what Leibniz said about primitive truths of fact.’

  ‘I don’t remember, Herr Sturmführer.’

  ‘That they are the immediate internal experiences of an immediateness of feeling.’

  ‘Did he. I see. At any rate, if you’re saying all art is the vanity of illusion, then the still-life painters of Holland said it some three hundred years before you.’

  The mistake, of course, was to have invited him home. What an idiot one could be!

  It was at Sabine’s suggestion, now he came to think of it. She was keen to meet this young fellow she had heard so much about. ’39, this was. A wet March.

  ‘Invite him over? But I can’t.’

  ‘Coffee and cakes, Heinrich. Stop pacing up and down.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘He’s SS.’

  ‘So?’

  He mimed pictures being taken off the walls; he was never quite sure that the apartment was not being listened into in some way. Elisabeth (she was seven, then – how fast they grew!) came in hand-in-hand with little Erika and laughed.

  ‘What’re you doing, Papa?’

  ‘I’m – I’m –’

  He couldn’t think.

  Erika pointed at him and piped, ‘Papa’s a muscleman.’

  ‘That’s right. I’m lifting a whole house, my poppet. Oof. Now a lorry. Oof.’

  The two girls shrieked with laughter. Herr Hoffer had once seen a muscleman in a Jewish café-theatre in Vienna, on Praterstrasse. He told them about it, and how the man had bent a thick steel bar. The girls’ mouths were open in awe.

  ‘Papa and I are talking, you two,’ said Sabine. ‘There are almond biscuits in the larder.’

  They scampered out.

  ‘You like him, Heinrich.’

  ‘I’m humouring him,’ he replied, keeping his voice down. ‘I’m keeping the right side. It’s a game. Part of my job.’

  ‘Exactly, my honeybun. Make sure he comes in uniform,’ she added, planting a sloppy kiss.

  And so he came. In uniform. Smelling of herbal cigarettes.

  Sabine’s eyes sparkled. The SS had a lot of cachet in Lohenfelde. And he was very handsome, any fool could see that. He asked Sabine all the right questions and complimented her on her cakes. (Ah, how they had taken those cakes and that coffee for granted, six years ago!) Herr Hoffer’s heart never quite calmed, however, the whole time Bendel was in the apartment: he was more like a raven than a laquered ornament, here. Also, he was sharing the sofa with Sabine, which did not seem quite right.

  ‘Do you meet the Führer on your trips, Herr Bendel?’

  ‘I have spent an entire afternoon in his company, Frau Hoffer.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘In an aeroplane, flying from one end of Germany to the other. The Herr Reichskanzler never spoke a word the whole time.’

  ‘But they say he talks for hours without stopping.’

  Herr Hoffer felt a flush of fear, but Bendel only smiled.

  ‘I’m sure he can. But people tend to contradict what is reported of them, don’t they? Or what one expects. You, for instance, Frau Hoffer, are not what I was expecting.’

  Sabine blushed, perhaps because their should
ers touched at that moment.

  ‘Worse, or better?’

  ‘Oh, much better.’

  ‘You mean, you were going by my husband’s reports?’

  ‘Not at all. It’s just that one has a certain received idea of housewives of a certain age married to bespectacled functionaries.’

  His playful smile disarmed what might have been insulting; Sabine laughed, and Herr Hoffer served him more cake, feeling a flush of pride rather than annoyance.

  ‘Anyway, the Führer just sat there, across the aisle. He didn’t even smile. He didn’t move a muscle. He was awake, or at least his eyes were open. No food, no water. Nobody smoked, of course.’

  ‘You must have been disappointed,’ Sabine said, her eyes widening, chin cupped in her hand. ‘I mean, not by the Führer himself, but by the fact that you didn’t hear his conversation.’

  ‘Not at all, Frau Hoffer. I understood his power.’ Bendel’s neck seemed to stretch above the brown collar, a glint coming into his eyes: Sabine’s wide eyes caught the glint and sparkled in return. ‘I once went to the zoo in Berlin, as a child, Frau Hoffer, and stood for a long time in front of the lion cage. I wasn’t interested in anything else. The lion lay like a cat, with its head on its paws, its eyes slightly open. Apart from the flicking of its ears, for the flies, it never moved. I wanted it to move, because I was stupid and thought that power was in movement.’ He turned his head and glanced at Herr Hoffer before returning to Sabine. ‘Real power is in stillness, Frau Hoffer. Have you ever noticed that I try to keep my head still when talking? It gives one more authority. A man who moves his head about when talking has no authority. I have to learn it, because it doesn’t come naturally. For the Führer, it is completely natural. To tell you the truth, I was terrified on that aeroplane. It was like being inside the cage, not outside. Then one certainly wouldn’t want the lion to move. Although I have to say that the Führer was completely unaware of my existence. He has changed all our lives, but he doesn’t really notice us. We are extensions of himself, and nothing more than that.’