The Rules of Perspective

by Adam Thorpe

  ‘I suppose we are,’ said Herr Hoffer, his heart beating far too loudly. ‘As one is a tiny vertical extension of Germany.’

  This made Bendel laugh as he bent to his coffee. Sabine laughed, too – breathlessly, like a young girl.

  Herr Hoffer changed the subject.

  ‘Herr Sturmführer Bendel and I had a great argument last week, didn’t we?’

  Bendel frowned.

  ‘He thinks our charming Jacob Beck, Hausandacht, should not be hung next to the Johann Christian Vollerdt, Landschaft mit Ruinen.’

  ‘An indifferent copy of the original, which is in Magdeburg,’ Bendel explained. ‘The Vollerdt, not the Beck.’

  ‘Well, won’t everything have to be stored away in the shelter, if we’re forced into war?’

  ‘Exactly where we had our discussion,’ said Bendel. ‘We were planning the future, my dear Frau Hoffer. Your husband and I look forward, not back. The Kaiser Wilhelm Museum will be a brilliant little jewel in the vast and glittering panoply of the Reich’s cultural life.’

  ‘He believes the landscapes should be separated from the genre paintings, Sabine. It’s not a question of quality. At least we have a visitor who cares, even if we do not always agree with him.’

  ‘Please don’t talk about work, Heinrich. It gets terribly boring if you’re not part of it.’

  She smiled knowingly at Bendel. Who, damn him, smiled knowingly back! And then, if Herr Hoffer remembered correctly, Bendel had placed his hand on her back.

  ‘You know we have just got hold of Prague, Frau Hoffer?’

  This is my kingdom. I have no subjects. The old thin one with spectacles brought me a new pencil and put his arm around my shoulder. Maybe I will use up all their pencils, every pencil in Germany, every pencil in the whole world.

  24

  Parry relieved his full bladder in the furthest, darkest end of the vaults, against the big flat stones. It always took him a long time, it had to be eased out. It would stop and start. Maybe this was nerves. The dead on the floor, with its torn cheeks and wide-open eyes, was frightening him some, he had to be honest. Also, the smell – including what he reckoned was his own call of nature – was very nasty, although he was used by now to smells of all thicknesses, especially underground: gun oil and sweat and damp plaster. Dried meat and pissed-in ration tins and smoky oil lamps and wet potatoes.

  Wet fucking potatoes!

  And Holland, where they were sent to, right on the border before they saw any action, full of drying tobacco leaves in farmhouses with interiors like de Hooch or Vermeer, if only they hadn’t been smashed so bad.

  Yet the light still fell on wood and cloth and glass like it did in de Hooch and Vermeer, making the moment eternal, though the wood was splintered, the cloth ripped, the glass broken. Nowhere else did he find the moment made eternal by the way the light fell as he found it in Holland.

  Maybe it was his art studies that made him see that in Holland and nowhere else, rather than something about Holland. Nobody else saw it that way, because all they read was cartoons and Yank and Stars and Stripes. If they didn’t just look at the pictures. He felt like a professor, sometimes.

  Then they were shoved back west and south as if someone had made a mistake, straight into Belgian snow and blood, while other divisions along with the British carried on into northern Germany. And sometimes he could not figure what country he was in, nor what time he was in. Whether dream time or awake time.

  He wanted to wait an hour or two before venturing out, things’d be calmer. He didn’t want to get caught up in the riot, in the hunt for liquor and eggs and girls and stuff, not with his future rolled up in his map pack. He was due to be back with his unit at dawn. Nobody was sure how long they were staying in this city. They could be rolling out tomorrow, for all he knew. Even the Captain wasn’t sure, talking to the Major on the sound power phone in the grocer’s yard where their CP was. Berlin was going to be hot, when they got to it. He hoped the Russkies wouldn’t turn on them, like Siberian wolves. Were there wolves in Siberia?

  ‘You know what I mean,’ he said to himself in a whisper, as if he was two people (easing his bladder). Which was his right.

  He felt very on his own down here, but he would whisper to himself a lot, it helped him. He wondered if Morrison had managed to talk to that woman who’d called down a name – Hermann, Heinrich? – through the hole in the ceiling, before the boy was chalked. He had an infection from not changing his underwear: his piss was pepper, it hurt and he was grunting like an old man.

  This infection could creep up and enter his bladder and his kidneys or even his liver and then he’d be dead, probably, because the medics were too busy to sort out some guy with a minor infection. Probably why he kept feeling as though he had a fever.

  He thought of the thermometer factory and its gallons of mercury spilling out, leaving no trace on the ground. It’d be good if you could go through life like mercury, touching but not touching, not staining anything or being stained.

  His little wad of toilet paper was a joke. He used it to pat his glans dry so that it wouldn’t sting so much and then he buttoned himself up again and left that part of the vaults until the dead guy was hidden by the corner and the others were still on the far side of the burnt stuff.

  He had placed the rolled-up canvas in his map pack; it just fitted, but he had to leave the pack’s flap unclipped after throwing out some dirty maps and the French phrase book and the Pocket Guide to Paris and Cities of Northern France. He wouldn’t be needing them now. One day he hoped to go to Paris and climb the Eiffel Tower and see the beautiful slim dames of the Folies Bergère and maybe have a girl with full lips as his life-model.

  He’d wait an hour or two.

  He slung the pack over his shoulder and cleared a space and spread the torn blanket where the vaults turned and he sat on the blanket, wondering whether to extinguish Morrison’s pocket lamp. He did so, and the blackness was very bad.

  Democracy on the march.

  In blackness.

  I am ill. Therefore I exist. Therefore I am visible and that is dangerous.

  25

  There was a sudden ugly, splintering sound, followed by a louder ringing in his ears. No vibration of the walls. The others seemed unaffected. People prided themselves on their phlegm, it was a way of surviving. He was glad they could not see each other very well in the candlelight; it made the lack of conversation easier. They were all so tired. No one had slept properly in two years. Not one night. It became an effort simply to drag oneself from moment to moment. He must stop thinking about that damn Bendel. The fellow had not reappeared in years: he might even be dead.

  Hilde Winkel next to him had stopped crying and was wiping her eyes on her handkerchief. Herr Hoffer removed his hand, smiling shyly, the palm hot and damp from her back.

  The vaults rocked very slightly. They might almost be in a tram, in facing seats. A deep percussive note washed through them. It was a curious sensation: sound become tactile. It worried all of them, by the look of the eyebrows.

  Frau Schenkel opposite broke the silence.

  ‘I think you’re in the wrong place, Herr Hoffer.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about it. You should not have abandoned your family.’

  ‘Abandoned?’

  ‘This isn’t just a normal raid, is it? It’s the end of it all. Whatever that means. Anyway, what I want to know is: why are you here, instead of with your wife and children? It’s not natural, if you know what I mean. Isn’t it one of their birthdays soon?’

  They were all three staring at him. He was frowning, greatly bewildered.

  ‘My duty. As Acting Acting Director, Frau Schenkel.’

  My God, it was Erika’s birthday next week! Eight years old! She wanted to learn the harp!

  ‘There is nothing in the building, Heinrich,’ said Werner, as if they had all three discussed this beforehand. He was just like a crazed waiter, with that blood-spotted
handkerchief draped on his shoulder. ‘It is an empty shell. A ghost. Even Herr Lohse is not in his thermometer factory.’

  ‘Then why are you three here?’

  ‘We have no family,’ said Werner.

  ‘I do,’ said Hilde.

  ‘I mean, no family in Lohenfelde.’

  Herr Hoffer looked across at the paintings ranged into the darkness on their crude trestles. The candlelight gleamed on the gilded wood of the older works. A harp would be quite impracticable in their apartment, and very expensive. But he would buy little Erika a harp. One day she would be a great harpist, thanks to their perseverance.

  ‘Yes,’ said Frau Schenkel, before he could speak, ‘but those paintings are not really here, are they?’

  ‘Yes, they are,’ said Herr Hoffer.

  ‘They are not listed,’ said Werner, for once siding with Frau Schenkel. It was as if he had been waiting for this opening for years.

  ‘Oh, somewhere they are,’ said Herr Hoffer vaguely, feeling cornered without due warning.

  ‘In your head,’ said Werner.

  ‘Well, I am actually in charge, here, Werner.’

  ‘Supposing I had secreted the books as you have secreted the paintings?’

  ‘You would have placed them in the vaults for safety, that’s all.’

  His heart was pounding.

  ‘No, I would have expropriated them without official sanction,’ said Werner, crossing his arms and smiling grimly. It was hard work being pompous and sanctimonious, while sitting on the floor with a bloodied handkerchief draped on your shoulder.

  ‘I think, in Herr Streicher’s absence, and with his full permission, I had the appropriate authority to take all the necessary measures, Werner.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is it really true,’ said Frau Schenkel, ‘that no one else but us knows about these paintings here, Herr Hoffer?’

  ‘I sent a copy of the inventory to Berlin and another to our bank,’ Herr Hoffer replied, wrestling to find his authority without succumbing to petulance. The third copy of the inventory – a single sheet of thin-lined, pinkish octavo paper – was burning a hole in his inside pocket. He wished he had brought the cognac now, of course, if only to settle his stomach. ‘What a time to start an interrogation,’ he added, glancing at Hilde for support.

  ‘That inventory did not include these works here,’ said Werner, flatly. ‘Almost a quarter of the entire collection.’

  Herr Hoffer looked at him. ‘No. And you know perfectly well why.’

  ‘It was not a proper or a full inventory,’ Werner went on, like a stenographer’s typewriter.

  ‘Exceptional times demand exceptional measures.’

  ‘I made a full inventory of the library’s contents, volume by volume, and they were all taken away,’ said Werner, rubbing his nose and wincing, because there were little cuts on it made by the glass.

  ‘To the salt-mines,’ said Herr Hoffer, as if that was reassuring.

  ‘Taken away,’ repeated Werner, with a hint of mournfulness.

  ‘That is books,’ said Frau Schenkel.

  ‘So?’

  ‘We’re talking about paintings, Herr Oberst.’

  ‘The books were placed in the salt-mines for their own good, Werner,’ Herr Hoffer insisted, seizing his advantage. ‘I have checked them since, at least once a month, as you are well aware. The conditions are ideal. It is perfectly dry at 460 metres down; the salt absorbs excessive moisture and there is no ground water circulating. There is not a hint of any change to the books, even on the oldest pigskin bindings. I regularly leaf through a sample, and the pages are entirely clean. Here it isn’t so dry, as we know. In fact, it’s even a little damp in certain atmospheric conditions. And the rats –’

  ‘Exactly. These paintings have suffered over the last year. That frame has been nibbled.’

  ‘Nothing compared to the treatment they might have received had they gone off with the others. You saw the way they were bundled into those dirty furniture vans by those sloppy men from the Self-Protection Service.’

  ‘Thank God they were sloppy. If they hadn’t been, they would have checked the inventory properly and suspected something. Imagine that.’

  ‘Those boys weren’t sloppy,’ said Frau Schenkel; ‘they had been up all night pulling out bodies from that orphanage.’

  ‘That doesn’t affect my point,’ said Herr Hoffer. ‘And you know perfectly well, Werner, that any inventory was a farce, since the museum’s contents belong entirely to the Reich. I’m sorry, but I don’t understand why you are suddenly attacking me on this subject.’

  ‘I am not attacking you, Heinrich, I am informing myself. As Chief Archivist and Keeper of Books, with responsibility for the Fossil, Town History and Local Handiworks Collections, I think I have a right to know. I can’t speak on behalf of my missing colleagues, God rest their souls.’

  Herr Hoffer coughed involuntarily. The reference to the eight members of staff, from gallery guards to trainee curators, missing or killed in action was couched as an accusation.

  ‘At no point did you ask me, Werner,’ he said.

  ‘I was waiting to be told.’

  ‘We had several meetings at which the storage details came up. You could have asked then or under Any Other Business.’

  ‘Yes, and you would have started by lying to me,’ said Werner. ‘As you did just now to Frau Schenkel.’

  ‘Lying is too strong,’ Frau Schenkel broke in. ‘Herr Oberst, this is really not the moment –’

  ‘Frau Schenkel, keep quiet.’

  ‘No, why should I?’

  ‘Listen,’ said Herr Hoffer, raising his hands, ‘we act in the most intelligent and reasonable manner with one aim only in mind, like a sacred calling: the safety and protection of the collection for which we are all, in our own ways, responsible. The collection has been much damaged and dispersed over the last seven or eight years for reasons beyond our control. This unofficial storage in the vaults is, in a way, a rearguard action to protect the remaining works at special risk, solely for the future benefit of the people of Lohenfelde, after this nightmare is over.’

  ‘What nightmare do you mean?’ asked Hilde Winkel, frowning.

  Herr Hoffer felt all their eyes upon him in the frail, yellow light. His injured hand hurt. His face stung.

  ‘The war,’ was all he said.

  ‘Surely a salt-mine 460 metres deep is preferable to some old town vaults with rats and condensation?’ Werner scoffed.

  ‘I couldn’t be certain that the paintings would reach the salt-mines,’ he said.

  ‘And the books?’

  ‘I did not feel the same danger.’

  ‘The Führer collects books, Heinrich,’ said Werner, taking off his half-moon spectacles and resting the ends of them in the corner of his mouth. They came out and waved a little when he talked. ‘Thousands of them. For Linz. Tens of thousands of them. It was to be the greatest library in the world.’

  ‘And you wouldn’t have felt honoured, Herr Oberst?’ asked Hilde Winkel.

  Herr Hoffer felt the heat was off.

  ‘Honoured?’

  ‘By the inclusion of some of our volumes in the Führer’s great library?’

  ‘A librarian has the care of every volume at heart, Fräulein Winkel,’ said Werner. ‘Ours is not a lending library.’

  The women’s eyes widened. For Herr Hoffer, the idea of the Führer filling in a library ticket was more surreal than shocking.

  ‘The fact is,’ said Werner, the spectacles at his mouth flashing the candlelight like a warning, ‘you started secreting them down here long before the war. That air-raid shelter next to the toilets was a decoy.’

  ‘Yes, certain examples especially at risk were placed down here. Herr Streicher and I started with a few works, but I developed –’

  ‘Degenerates?’ Hilde Winkel interrupted.

  Werner replaced his spectacles and sighed.

  ‘Paul Burck isn�
�t a degenerate,’ said Frau Schenkel. ‘Far from it. You can understand what you’re looking at. You can hear the rustling of the leaves.’

  ‘Is Burck’s painting here?’

  ‘Yes, Fräulein Winkel, mainly for Frau Schenkel’s sake,’ said Herr Hoffer. ‘As well as certain modernist works. Takes all sorts,’ he added, unnecessarily.

  ‘I didn’t know it was just for my sake,’ said Frau Schenkel, looking pleased.

  Hilde opened her damaged mouth to speak.

  ‘And what about the Teniers?’ Werner said, staring at him, his glittering lenses like an awful vision in a mirror.

  ‘The Teniers?’ Herr Hoffer echoed, feeling his face draining of blood.

  ‘That’s with the SS-Sturmbannführer, in his office,’ said Frau Schenkel.

  ‘That’s the Nattier,’ said Werner, keeping his gaze fixed on Herr Hoffer, ‘the Jean-Marc Nattier. Mademoiselle de Guilleroy splashing about in the tub. I’m referring to the Teniers. David Teniers the Younger. Venus Bathing.’

  ‘If you want to split hairs, Herr Oberst –’

  ‘Different scalps, Frau Schenkel,’ smiled Werner. ‘Different style, different period, different nationality. They both show females bathing, that’s all. One in a tub, one in a pool. One’s a goddess, the other’s a French lady of the court showing her legs. The Jean-Marc Nattier was openly borrowed, as it were, by the SS-Sturmbannführer and one day we will get it back. I’m talking about the David Teniers. David Teniers the Younger. His nude.’

  ‘I don’t think I’ll be bothering either way,’ said Frau Schenkel, with a sniff.

  ‘Venus Bathing,’ Werner continued, with a patient sigh. ‘A work dated 1653, from his middle period. As is typical of David Teniers the Younger, the figure has strangely disproportionate arms. He is more used to painting drunk Flemish peasants. Venus is dressed in nothing but jewellery. Purchased for the collection in 1906. You know the one I mean, Heinrich. There is only one in the possession of the museum. Of inestimable value to future generations of art-lovers in Lohenfelde and beyond. What has become of our Teniers, Heinrich?’

  And Herr Hoffer, although he had been mentally rehearsing this scene for several months in the small hours of the night, could not find enough moisture in his throat to utter a single word.