by Adam Thorpe
Maybe.
He shrugged. I figure, he thought, that if she collapses with her grief, then the kerosene lamp will fall and smash and we’ll be cooked to a couple of deads no one will take into account with all the other deads around in this world conflict.
This was why he would just have to get up and make it over to her, before she let go of the lamp like a goddamn phosphorus blanket bombing. He made a great effort and stood up. He was stumbling over to her and she saw him and screamed and he thought she was going to drop the goddamn lamp.
Then he came up close and she just stared at him with big eyes, one hand over her mouth.
Said nothing. Dirty, bruised face.
He took the lamp from her and fished around in his pockets and found the last candy he’d been given by Morrison. No, Morrison was already dead and he’d never again win at pinochle. It wasn’t the fudge, it was the hard, clear candy with a flavour of strawberry, almost. But not quite.
She took the candy and unwrapped it and put it in her mouth, shaking, her body shaking all over, and then she did an unexpected thing as Parry stood there with the lamp, feeling weak and ill.
She placed her hands on his chest – on the dirty tunic, to be precise – and laid her head between the hands so it touched where it buttoned up and he felt it as weight, though not much. She had a mess of fair hair, which he stroked. It was like she was listening to the beat of his heart, except that she was moaning softly. Her hair smelt not of spring but of autumn. It was a little rank and smoky, but he didn’t mind that. It was a juicy kind of rankness, like those rotted windfalls in the Normandy orchards, and the hair was thick and soft against his mouth. He let the hair soften his face, rubbing it with his mouth and nose and chin and eyes. It was so nice, so soft.
He even took some inside his mouth and chewed it for a moment.
As kids they’d believed that, if you ate a girl’s hair, she would certainly have a crush on you. This clever kid called Larry Spinks had given him some nice blonde hair and he’d almost choked swallowing it and then he was told by Larry and the others, who were laughing, that the hair had been cut from Sophie McConnell’s corpse – she’d been run over by a car and killed the previous week and now she would come and crave him in the dark of his bedroom with her glowing eyes and her face all messed up from the car.
He couldn’t sleep without a light for two years. This is probably, why he’d been numb to girls until Maureen had come along and rescued him with her sweet kindness.
All living heads have warmth.
Something flashed nearby, but it was only the spectacles on the dead’s nose, catching the light. The dead wasn’t moving, however. It was the lamp swinging in his own hand.
He put the lamp down carefully on the floor of the vaults. Then he held the woman as if without her he might fall over. He held her tight enough so as his own chest didn’t start shaking, because there was so much he had to let go.
If you’d kiss me goodnight at night, in your usual way, that would be better. One day kisses will mean something else to me. Thirty-six buttons. I kiss each of them in turn. One by one by [one]
29
Herr Hoffer knew why Werner was so cross, why he’d harboured the knowledge with such delicious hate, waiting for the right moment.
My God, it was that auction in Munich, near the beginning of the war. Werner Oberst had come very close, in that auction, to acquiring a handsome second edition of the Theatrum Pictorium; one theory held that the Teniers Venus of 1653 was a copy of an unknown Italian master in the collection of the Archduke William. Certainly one of the 244 engravings in that famous book was identical to the (reversed) Teniers. Poor Gustav Glatz had written a paper on it in 1931, translated for the Gazette des Beaux Arts in Paris; for which triumph he had received a sum equivalent to a meal for two in the shabbiest restaurant in Lohenfelde (without beer). Or so he claimed.
Werner had been outbid by Friedrich Wolffhardt, in charge of developing the Führer’s library in Linz. Wolffhardt purchased the entire collection that day, just like that – mostly first editions from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Werner was furious, given the possible connection with their own Teniers and the fact that the book, as part of the vast confiscated private library of Nathan Gutheimer, would have gone for a relatively low price. He had decided that if that devil Wolffhardt ever tried to plunder, for Linz, their own excellent book and manuscript collection, he – Werner Oberst, Chief Archivist and Keeper of Books – would defend the library with his old trench pistol and make the ultimate sacrifice. He had told the Acting Director of this, as well as his deputy, pointing out that he had been an excellent shot in the last war. Bullets seemed to go where he wanted them to, he claimed, as long as he didn’t think about it too hard. Neither man had objected, but nor had they approved.
This was long before the Chief Archivist was recruited into the Volkssturm, last autumn, from which point he felt that his position was compromised. Luckily for everyone, Wolffhardt’s greedy prowling through the Reich had never passed through Lohenfelde. Werner fancied sometimes he knew the reason, which was absurd. They were lucky, that was all. The Reich was vast.
At any rate, Herr Hoffer now understood why the Teniers painting meant so much to Werner Oberst: why it sparked such anger in the general waste. Otherwise it didn’t really make sense, this reaction of Werner’s; at least half their collection had been ‘confiscated’, and the Jean-Marc Nattier had been simply plucked off the wall by the last SS-Sturmbannführer – hardly a ‘borrowing’! David Teniers the Younger’s voluptuous Venus was just another brick in the awful edifice. It was only a painting! It was not a human life! He wasn’t guilty of murder!
Anyway, back in the heady days in Heidelberg, certain of his fellow students thought painting pictures was no longer even possible in a world with such awful social problems and after such a terrible war. If paintings were to be painted, they must be painted on the sides of buildings or jugs, not left to the art dealers and the rich Jewish collectors. Herr Hoffer had scoffed then, but he might agree with them now. He would rather art vanished completely for a hundred years than bear the likes of Party daubers like Ziegler or Troost or Gradl at its helm. He wanted to say all this, but of course he could not. No wonder Werner despised him.
He felt sorry for Werner – he did not despise the man in return. Werner had no wife, no family; only his books and fossils and war wound. And now the books were gone, down in the salt-mine where Werner could not stroke them. He, Herr Hoffer, had a wife, a loving and attractive wife, and two adorable children.
His stomach suddenly turned. Why was he not with them? What did all these masterpieces matter (though he was the first to admit that many of them were minor works) compared to Sabine, Erika and Elisabeth?
The thought that they might already be dead flashed through his mind like an obscenity.
It was simply not possible.
I will grant you, dear Lord, all these paintings, if you spare my wife and darling girls.
Another deal. Another negotiation. He had been negotiating for years. He had saved at least thirty modern works, although he had let the Schmidt-Rottluff and the Kandinsky and the Hausmann photomontage slip through his fingers: his favourites. Not the Vincent, however. Not the Vincent van Gogh. He was the only one who knew where it was. Even Herr Streicher did not know where it was. Even Werner Oberst did not know – who therefore did not know everything, after all.
But Herr Hoffer knew, because he had put it there.
He had SS-Sturmführer Bendel to thank for that. If SS-Sturmführer Bendel had not shown an almost morbid interest in the painting, Herr Hoffer would not have acted as he did. It was his chief victory. It was the one painting most at risk, and he had saved it. The museum’s jewel. In the unbefitting place of darkness. Without light, there is no glory.
Umbra. Pure umbra.
So why had he bothered with three coats of size?
Machine-guns, now. A mortar or field-gun, bur
ping every so often. The cretinous Kreisleiter was fighting back, or perhaps it was the Waffen-SS on their own. It was all lost, but they would carry on until Lohenfelde was levelled and the Americans were very angry, shooting at everything in sight.
Captain Clark Gable, my name is Hoffer, Heinrich Hoffer. Please don’t believe what you hear from certain quarters. I did what I thought was best. Most of us, especially myself, prayed for your arrival every day. If only to get some sleep.
He kept his eyes shut, feeling what the three others now thought of him as a hot, sour breath on his face. He began, not surprisingly, to remember that day in 1910 when he stole a pear from the market-stall and was beaten with a cane by his father. It was a large, round, shiny pear, and very sweet. He was sure it would have been very sweet, but he did not get to taste it. The market-stall owner had spotted him. He could not say why he had stolen it. He was a good boy, and feared God, and went to the bare, white, wax-smelling church at least twice a week with his family. But he had stolen the pear. And his father had thrashed him. His father was not even a violent man. But he was keen to nip evil in the bud; it saved trouble later. That’s how he’d put it. And Heinrich Hoffer had grown up straight, not crooked, and passed smoothly into adulthood as a student beneath the ruined Schloss of Heidelberg, acquiring his scars and glory. But the untasted pear haunted him.
Always there was the feeling in his life – even in Sabine’s succulent embrace – that some ultimate happiness was eluding him, that he had not quite managed to sink his teeth into the ultimate sweetness.
‘Herr Hoffer?’
‘Yes, Fräulein Winkel?’
‘Hilde, please. I believe you acted out of integrity, Herr Hoffer. With Fest.’
‘Thank you, Hilde.’
He heard a snort from Werner. Herr Hoffer kept his eyes closed, as if he was on a train and dozing.
‘The times are very difficult,’ he added.
‘Through no fault of the Führer’s,’ said Hilde, quickly.
He didn’t reply. No one replied. Hilde, for all her naive enthusiasm and shy loveliness, might easily be a Party block spy. The Americans might yet be repulsed. People were dealt with until the very last moment. Summarily. They didn’t even bother to send you off to a camp. Too much trouble. No time. They just blew your brains out or throttled you on the spot, without even removing your shoes or jacket. Right to the last minute. Most especially in the last minute. The play was not over until the curtain fell and bumped on the stage.
He looked at his watch for something to do, peering at it in the candlelight. The hands got confused under the glass. It could have been quarter to eleven or five to nine. For a few seconds he actually forgot where in the twenty-four hours they were situated. The air here was always the same, the temperature unvarying in the blackness: you could live here in the winter and not die of cold, and cool off in the summer. Night and day were identical.
Five to nine in the morning, obviously.
He listened to the watch’s movement for a moment, holding it up to his ear. It comforted him, the tiny grind and click. A birthday present from Sabine, and rather fine. Werner had a fob, of course, and he had to produce it.
‘Two minutes to nine o’clock,’ said Werner. ‘I doubt we’ll hear the bells.’
‘As my dear mother would say, “We’ve got the whole of today to arrive at tomorrow,”’ said Frau Schenkel, who was in fact a notorious stickler for time – and the main reason Herr Hoffer would always try to get the earlier tram in the morning, when there were still trams. Once, when he came into work five minutes late, after baby Erika had coughed all night, Frau Schenkel had looked at him as if she knew some awful moral disintegration had already begun. Even after he had explained, out of his exhaustion, she had given the air of not quite believing him. The key, of course, was not to care what she or anyone else thought.
But he did care, and much too much. Three coats of size to stiffen the canvas! Ridiculous!
They stayed quiet for the bells, in case. Ten lorries loaded with iron rivets passed full-pelt over a trench in Otto-von-Guericke-Strasse. Or so it sounded like. That was followed by a lot of burping and smaller thumps. There was the distinctive bitterness of smoke, which was more disturbing than the noise. It had leaked down here off the street, Herr Hoffer decided, feeling a little breathless. There must be a ventilation hole somewhere.
Damn, he needed to go to the toilet: his bowels were loosening. It was nerves, mainly.
It was unfair of Werner to bring up such matters at this juncture. Extremely unfair. It was sadistic. It came of an embittered nature.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ Herr Hoffer said, adjusting his armband, which had a tendency to end up by his elbow. ‘As a member of the armed forces, I should go on patrol, should I not?’
‘What do you mean?’ came from Frau Schenkel.
‘I mean I should do a tour of inspection above. The museum, not the streets.’
‘You’ve only just come back down,’ said Frau Schenkel.
‘Herr Wolmer might need help,’ he said, too weakly.
He couldn’t possibly tell them he needed to empty his bowels. Some people used a bedpan in front of everyone else, shielded only by a relative holding up a coat: one of the main horrors of the public shelters, in his opinion.
‘Don’t get too close to glass,’ said Hilde.
‘You’re better off down here,’ Werner growled. ‘You might not want to come back.’
‘You’d be best off with your family, anyway,’ Frau Schenkel muttered, scratching her scrawny neck.
‘Of course I’ll come back, Werner,’ said Herr Hoffer, a touch crossly.
Hilde stretched her arms up and gave a little grunt, having grown stiff; she was an active sportswoman, apparently, exercising the body as well as the intellect. She linked her fingers together and turned her hands palms upwards and stretched, very gymnastically.
Herr Hoffer suddenly caught a sharp scent of sweat, almost fierce in its sharpness. Hilde’s sweat.
He experienced the most extraordinary, animal desire.
It was as if this desire was emanating from the very pores of her body and entering his insides with its animal strength, bypassing his mind. There was nothing even sweet about her sweat; it might almost have been a man’s. But the mere fact that the lovely Hilde could smell so fiercely and frankly was itself stirring. No, that reflection came after; that was his mind catching up. Her face was hidden by her arms, but he could have drunk her smell to the last drop.
She lowered her arms with another grunt and let them rest in her lap, her head tipped right back.
Herr Hoffer stood up with difficulty, deeply uncomfortable and at the same time very glad. There was almost a moral power in that attraction. And he hated the fuggish odour of gymnasiums! He didn’t like the smell of people at all, in fact, and the lack of decent soap – soap that frothed, that didn’t just swim uselessly about on top of the water – meant that people around him had smelt a lot more, in recent years. The revelation of Hilde’s smell made him embrace humanity again.
This was his main, comforting thought on passing through the bare galleries above a few minutes later. The hazy air was bitter and the parquet crunched underfoot like sand, though Herr Wolmer had tried to sweep up, even here. The man was a marvel! The bombardment seemed muffled by the museum’s emptiness, in fact – or maybe they were shelling further off: he pictured the shells falling on Hermann-Goering-Strasse, where his apartment stood.
He felt an enormous relief, getting out of the vaults.
Though he had never really got used to the emptiness of the museum, of all its huge rooms. It seemed to deny his very right to exist, this emptiness. If he opened his mouth now it would be only to scream. To scream is at least a denial of futility. He felt so like screaming.
Instead, he coughed. He really did need the toilet rather urgently.
He hurried on, his steps echoing over the rumblings beyond – on the other side of life. He thought, for a moment,
there was someone else in one of the galleries – or rather, he had the sensation that someone had just left seconds before; but it was undoubtedly the echo of his own steps. In the seventeenth-century gallery, in the corner next to where a lovely Marell flower-study had hung, a large black spider waited, its web already dingy from the dust and smoke. The point, he thought, is not to lose faith. The pictures will hang again from the picture-rails. German culture will be restored. Its essence is depth and spirit: such things cannot be shattered by bombs or soiled by cretins like Fest. The French will understand this, in their calculating, sharp way. Even the British, with their purely mercantile instincts, will understand this in the hour of victory. He was not so sure about the Americans. He somehow saw them as a force, quite shallow, that would flow over and depart, leaving only a litter of gifts. Chewing gum and Coca-Cola and chocolate bars.
He must be mad. The Americans were pummelling his town to bits. That was not very shallow.
He stopped in front of the marble hulk, Defiant, guarding the library: it was the work of Willy Meller, no less. Herr Hoffer privately nicknamed it Trotsky. Here he had found Hilde on several occasions, sketching the fellow’s toes, biceps, absurd tendons. He had to admit, now, that her presence over the last year had added a spring to his step, on the way to work. But at no point had he ever dreamt of trying anything on. He simply admired her, that was all. She had beauty and a youthful, intellectual passion. How she could see anything in this tripe defeated him. The Party had somehow possessed her, like a demon lover.
