by Adam Thorpe
Papa, Mama, Leo, Lily, little Henny, Grandmama. I am alive, you are alive, so we are all still alive, thank goodness! Or is it that we are all dead? I have nothing to say. What is there to say? Nothing is nothing is nothing. The huge beam disappears into the shadows and I can’t see the end. I wish I had one of my old dolls. Emilie, for instance.
26
Parry tried to get used to the blackness. The blackness felt safer. This was what God started with on the first day. In the beginning was the blackness and then the Word.
He reached into his left pocket and fished a cigarette from the tin and then lit another before the first was halfway through, keeping the glow hidden in his hand.
He unwrapped a candy from its cellophane and the noise filled the vaults. It turned out to be fudge. It tasted of the Ardennes. His new trousers felt strange against his thighs.
He was sure that if he switched on the flashlight someone would notice above ground: when a town lost its electricity or gas, any flicker attracted attention. If someone found him down here, they’d wonder what he was doing staying with a crowd of deads and they would smell something suspicious.
He tried not to think too much about the deads, or rats as hungry as hell.
The Pied Piper of Hamelin.
As a kid, years ago, he’d think too much about the boy with the calliper who was too lame to keep up and who watched the earth swallow his friends where the Pied Piper had led them in like rats. He didn’t realise then that everyone who read that story identified with the lame boy, because the others had gone away for ever and no one likes to think of themselves as going away for ever, disappearing for ever. It was nothing to do with Freud, it was just that no one can think of themselves as not existing, as being in a kind of blackness for eternity, like this blackness – except that here there were sounds. Here there were sounds.
He heard a tiny, grating noise from around the corner where the guy in the blue cardigan lay. Scritch scratch. Teeth against bone. Something malevolent and intelligent gnawing away. That was unpleasant.
Against the black canvas surrounding him, his eyes started painting pictures. That was bad. The pictures were not good. They were rushing things of war, of dead faces and bad moments of fear, of bodies falling and bodies showing how messy and wet and evil-smelling they are inside. Even children’s. Of smashed equipment and fire and dead horses. A lot of dead horses. Men laughing by broken trees while the ice did not break and the rivers were like the river in Dante he’d had to draw for the art-class exercise back home in red and black wash and use the paper, Neal, let it show through for highlights and dramatic contrast. The secret of art is economy, Neal. Minimum effort for maximum effect. Morrison, who’d been with him right from England for fuck’s sake, laughing like he was there right in front of him now. That SS guy outside Dorsten who didn’t want to be helped, lying there bleeding from his stumps in the pillbox, his sleeves in rags, who didn’t want to be helped and screamed at them in Heini lingo to fuck off, it sounded like, while Morrison laughed because the guy looked like a glove puppet.
He didn’t feel all that well. The blackness was bad. He was in sad shape. He was fagged out.
Morrison?
You’re fagged out, Morriboy?
Yup, I’m in sad shape. I’m in sad shape, Neal. Do you have a cigarette?
Today the one with the big moustache brought a mirror, but I am not to keep it. It is the lovely lake of Konigssee, in which I look at myself and drown.
27
‘The Teniers,’ Herr Hoffer said, finding his voice after swallowing, ‘is in the salt-mine.’
‘No, it had already left the museum.’
Frau Schenkel tutted. ‘Herr Oberst, is this the time or place?’
Tiny bits of masonry pattered down. The candle’s flame was sucked into the melting wax and then enlarged, turning Werner Oberst’s half-moon spectacles into two headlamps taped for a blackout. They seemed to be driving straight for Herr Hoffer, mesmerised in the road like a rabbit. There was a distant boom.
‘Yesterday morning,’ said Werner, ‘I had an appointment with Herr Kreisleiter Fest, in his gymnasium of an office. I was attempting to recover the unique town plan of 1701 that the district Party office had borrowed from the archives, if you remember, two years ago.’
‘Did you get it back?’
‘That, Heinrich, is beside the present point. Everything was in chaos, with Fest sitting in the middle like a pumpkin. They were packing everything into boxes, everything except the telephone. Funny, they all knew before we did. I was wearing my wound badge. Fest asked me what kind of wound it was. As if I was shirking.’
Werner lifted up his right arm, the one that was always rather awkward in its movement. ‘It splintered at the elbow from a single bullet on the Somme,’ he said. ‘The nerves were smashed. It gives me pain every day. If I am sometimes short-tempered, it is the pain.’
‘Ah,’ said Frau Schenkel, ‘so that’s all right then.’
‘The buffoon was called out to greet some woman in a fur. At any rate, through all the comings and goings of men with boxes, I noticed something extraordinary through a door at one end. Pink flesh.’
‘Nothing surprises me,’ Frau Schenkel sighed. ‘You never know what’s round the next corner.’
‘I went closer,’ continued Werner, ‘and peeped in. It was the Kreisleiter’s private drawing room, not yet packed up. The pink flesh belonged to the torso of a painted Venus. You’ll have guessed by whom. She was hanging above the fireplace. I was very surprised: I had thought Venus Bathing was here, in the vaults. At that moment the buffoon came back into the room. I was a little vexed, I have to admit. “Ah, yes, a wonderful painting,” he said, leading me into the private drawing room. “Look at the arse on her! That’s genius, that is. They knew how to paint skirt, in those days.”’
Frau Schenkel giggled. ‘You’ve got him very well, Herr Oberst!’
Never, in twenty years, thought Herr Hoffer, has she complimented him before. I am in trouble.
‘“But this wonderful painting, my dear Oberst,”’ Werner went on, pitching the Hannoverian accent even thicker, ‘“like all your wonderful paintings, is the property of the Reich! As you bloody well know. Anyway, I did not even expropriate the bird. She was a gift.” “A gift, Kreisleiter Fest?” “And stop pissing blood about it, Oberst – the bird’s to fly to safety this very afternoon! In the boot of my personal car, under my personal bloody protection!”’
Werner was almost pop-eyed. He had become, despite his dry thinness, Kreisleiter Fest.
‘Very good,’ said Frau Schenkel, nodding and smiling.
Hilde was frowning, however.
‘And what was our Kreisleiter Fest before the war?’ Werner growled, himself again. ‘A greengrocer in a white coat. In Ebstorf.’
‘My brother-in-law was stationmaster at Ebstorf,’ said Frau Schenkel. ‘Trains run in the family.’
‘Why don’t we put on a record?’ murmured Herr Hoffer. ‘Offenbach. Orphée aux enfers.’
‘Kreisleiter Fest collaborates closely with the Gestapo,’ Hilde Winkel said. ‘You have to tread carefully with Kreisleiter Fest.’
‘My sister, mind you, hated trains,’ said Frau Schenkel. ‘She was standing on the platform, age five, when she was suddenly covered in steam and smoke.’
‘Heinrich,’ cried Werner Oberst, in his thin, rather high voice, ‘why did you have to do it?’
The bombardment paused. They could almost imagine the gunners stilled like themselves in astonishment, poised over the ordnance. Herr Hoffer closed his eyes for a moment. In all his life, he had never got away with anything. God somehow saw to it.
‘Do what?’ asked Frau Schenkel.
‘You tell, Heinrich, you tell,’ said Werner Oberst, in what might almost have passed for a sad voice in any other circumstance and from any other mouth.
‘He said he would kill me,’ murmured Herr Hoffer.
‘Correction. Send you to the Russian Front.’
Herr Hoffer swallowed back nausea.
‘I did not want to be absent,’ he continued, without opening his eyes. ‘I had responsibilities.’
‘Responsibilities?’
‘We’re talking about January last year, before the evacuation order was given.’
‘So?’
‘Let me finish.’ He tried walking through the wild-flower meadow with his mother, but all he could see was Bendel walking with Sabine. Hand in hand. He took a long, profound breath which didn’t seem to get very far in his lungs. ‘It was an icy day, actually. You recall how awful the winter was last year. I was summoned to see Fest and I was, naturally, a little nervous. He’s not, I think we agree, the most polished of individuals. Anyway, he came straight to the point. The Bolsheviks were about to win back Leningrad, he said, and they were very short of mature, intelligent men out there. I replied immediately that it was vital I remained in Lohenfelde. Fest said, “Vital for whom, Herr Hoffer?” That was when I made my error. I said of course it was vital for the Kaiser Wilhelm. “Ah,” he said, “but not at all vital for the Reich, Herr Hoffer.’”
‘You haven’t quite got him,’ said Frau Schenkel.
‘If I’d said that straight off, about it being vital for the Reich –’
‘We get the picture,’ murmured Werner. ‘Your error.’
‘The next thing he said was: “Is it to be Leningrad, my dear fellow, or Dachau?” The Dachau business was just ridiculous, of course. Just threats and bullying. Why should I have been sent to Dachau? What had I done?’
Werner grunted. The others looked away.
Herr Hoffer closed his eyes again. It was like trying to tell his restless daughters about paintings and myths. He was not very good at it, he couldn’t do the voices. They liked the museum only because they could run up and down the galleries, making an awful noise and irritating Werner.
‘Well? We are all ears, Heinrich.’
‘I’m sorry. The only pictures in his oversized office were photographs of racing horses and some postcard watercolours of the Hannoverian countryside. And a Siemens calendar. As you know. Apart from the Führer’s portrait, of course.’
No one said anything. The golden stems of the willow. A mandoline. Ah, for your moist wings, O West, how sorely do I envy you!
‘Heinrich?’
‘I said I must be present, as Acting Acting Director, when the contents of the museum were removed into storage in the salt-mines. He came over to my side of the desk and sat on the edge of it, swinging his black boots. They’re the only bit of him that’s polished.’
‘I think we’ve got that point, Heinrich.’
‘I don’t know how the desk took it, in fact. You know how overweight he is. My chair was a long way from the desk, in the middle of the floor. It was very quiet.’
Herr Hoffer opened his eyes, closing them again almost instantly on seeing Werner’s fixed gaze. He pictured the fat district leader staring at him over the shining sweep of parquet, the man’s brown breeches like a clown’s trousers, a hint of sweat drifting over with the expensive cologne. It had made Herr Hoffer feel very small, stranded in the middle of the parquet.
‘And? Heinrich?’
‘I knew what his next words were going to be. Everyone knows our Kreisleiter. He said to me that we could make a deal.’
‘Ah, yes.’
‘I pretended to be bewildered. He got cross. “I think Leningrad rather than Dachau,” he said. “As you look so hot and sweaty, Herr Hoffer!”’
All three of them found this funny; Herr Hoffer gamely squeezed out a smile.
‘Yes, if only one could find him amusing. Having despatched me to the Russian Front, he would have helped himself to the entire collection.’
‘You could have reported him to a higher authority,’ said Werner. ‘For felony. That Orstgruppenleiter in Bavaria, where was it, I can’t remember – anyway, they nailed him. For embezzlement.’
‘And my family?’ said Herr Hoffer, nettled now. ‘That’s Party policy, that is. Think of my family, please, Werner.’
‘So you let him,’ said Werner.
‘If you want to put it like that. Which I’m sure you do.’
‘And that’s putting it kindly, Heinrich.’
‘At least let me finish, Werner! Thank you. Fest visited us the next day. He was plastered, as usual. He insisted on examining those paintings stocked in the Luftschutzbunker. We examined them together. He complained about the smell from the toilets. We came to the Teniers Venus, and then the von Bohn Cleopatra, and he slobbered over them. He made the most vulgar remarks about them. I pleaded with him not to take both, and because he was plastered he put his arm around my shoulder and agreed to take only one. Unfortunately, he chose the Teniers, not the von Bohn.’
‘So he does have taste, after all,’ said Werner. ‘As Max Friedlander once put it: “An artist loves nature, not his art. The art is loved particularly by dilettantes and amateurs.”’
‘I don’t see the relevance of that remark, Werner.’
Werner smiled, thinly. Another of his jokes.
‘I brought the Teniers to him a fortnight later,’ Herr Hoffer continued. ‘Being already in the Luftschutzbunker, it was not hard to dissimulate the removal.’
‘You told us it had been slipped down to the vaults, Heinrich.’
‘It was only for the good of the museum,’ he said, not quite sturdily enough.
‘Oh come on,’ said Werner. ‘It was to save your own skin. Anyway, Fatty Fest gave me a different version. He told me you had been the first to offer the deal.’
Herr Hoffer nodded, looking up at the big square stones in the ceiling and trying not to wince. ‘But it was quite clear what he was after, even if he didn’t state it openly. Agility is the thing,’ he added, and pursed his lips.
Frau Schenkel raised her chin and looked down her long nose at Herr Hoffer.
‘Do you mean to tell me, Herr Hoffer, that you bribed the Kreisleiter with a painting from the museum in order to avoid the draft?’
‘That’s putting it too crudely, Frau Schenkel –’
‘Making me an unwitting party to the deed?’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Who typed the false inventory, Herr Hoffer?’
‘Frau Schenkel,’ Werner interjected, ‘nobody cares about that.’
‘I do!’
‘Please,’ came Hilde Winkel’s pleasant young voice, ‘do we have to quarrel at such a time? With the barbarians at the gate?’
‘Ah, this is your adored realism, my dear Fräulein Winkel!’ cried Werner Oberst.
‘Naturalism, not realism. I prefer the term naturalism, Herr Oberst.’
‘Is there a difference? I had always thought the terms interchangeable.’
‘I prefer to keep them distinct. Up to a point, Herr Oberst.’
‘Philosophically speaking, I suppose.’
‘Let me illustrate. The thrust of my thesis. The difference or rather distinction,’ Hilde went on, with the harmless if slightly aggressive intensity of youth, ‘is exemplified between early and late classical Greek sculpture. That is, the manner in which the later period departs from the norm of perfection through imitative naturalism. The influence of both periods on our own contemporary masters such as Breker, Thorak or Albiker is extremely illuminating. It is my conviction, you see, that they are combining both periods in a new, revolutionary manner. I mean, by showing the swollen veins that denote struggle and effort, but without sinking into the decadence of imitative naturalism.’
She was blinking, as if someone was throwing dust in her eyes. It was intellectual excitement.
‘All very disappointing,’ sighed Frau Schenkel.
‘And how do they achieve this?’ Hilde Winkel continued, although no one was listening. ‘By never forgetting the supra-human ideal to which great sculpture must always aspire, in the true Platonic tradition!’
‘We live in disappointing times, Frau Schenk
el,’ said Werner.
‘At least I saved von Bohn’s Kleopatra,’ Herr Hoffer said. ‘I slipped it down here straight after Fest had left, in case he came back for it. I don’t know what I’d have said, mind you.’
‘Yes, at least you did that, Heinrich,’ said Werner, folding his bony hands around one knee and nodding very slowly. ‘At least we have the von Bohn Kleopatra.’
Maybe you are the ones pulling on the rope.
28
‘Heinrich? Heinrich?’
Morrison was talking to him. The voice was high, now, because death did that to you. No phantom had a low voice. You returned to childhood.
The livid movement of flame-light wavered over the vaults. It wasn’t the fluttering that he felt all over his body but something separate, not him. There was an angel, in fact, a woman. It wasn’t Morrison. It wasn’t Hell. Unless it was a demon. A demon of the deep Germanic forests they’d been told about in England, that gave Hitler his satanic power.
Parry struggled against his fever, his colossal exhaustion, as if it was something separate. He separated it as he’d separate his fear. This is how most of the men died: not with a bullet, but with sickness.
A cigarette hung from his lips. Maybe the airlessness had extinguished it, or maybe he’d forgotten to light it.
The woman was holding her lamp near the four deads by the exit hole. He made sure he kept still as she started to wail. She was grieving. One of those deads was called Heinrich. From the look of the way she was stood, bent over a little, it was the guy with the Himmler spectacles still on his nose. The hell with her.
The one who’d been cradling that cross, he thought. The hell with her. That painting burnt to a cross. Like crossed keys or a mark of the plague on those doors back then, whenever, in ol’ London. Nope, he’d not been there. Not back then. It was all rats.
Parry patted the wooden labels in his breast pocket and remembered; he’d try to ask her what Waldesraus meant. It was a word that would heal him, certain words were good medicine, you could chew on them like sweet, wholesome bread with healing herbs inside. This was the quart of Indian blood coming up in him: that Apache grandmother who’d given him his slant lower eyelids and swarthy skin. He was joining up the dots with difficulty, making a great effort. Good. The woman was standing there shaking all over, and the lamp – paraffin lamp, it looked like – was shaking with her. There is no wind down here, he thought. Is there wind, overhead? He couldn’t remember.
