by Adam Thorpe
It was at that wretched donors’ reception they’d had to throw, just before the war, for the Friends of the Reichsführer-SS. At the instigation – no, the insistence – of Herr Lohse, manager of the thermometer factory and local chairman of the Friends.
Oh, how I hate receptions and parties, thought Herr Hoffer. But they’d had to thank them somehow. However much he loathed these people, they were the business and social elite of Lohenfelde. They would do very well out of a war, and there was an excitement in the air. Without them, the museum would not have been able to, etc. And there was Bendel, in full uniform, looking upon the whole thing with a faintly superior air.
Yes, it was just here that he’d seen Bendel and Sabine together, by the cold marble Dawn. That was when he first suspected something was up. A killer whale nibbling at a supple porpoise. That was how he’d pictured it, afterwards, tossing in his bed next to her.
‘What’s up, Heinrich?’
‘I can’t sleep.’
‘Why?’
‘Worrying.’
‘Stop worrying.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Whatever it is, you can’t do anything about it now. Please let me sleep. I’ve drunk too much. I’ve worn myself out, chatting up all your guests.’
‘Yes, my sweet. That’s what I thought.’
He could see why she was drawn to Bendel. He was different. He differed, for instance, from the very tall and bony senior SS officer whom Bendel had dragged along to the reception.
‘Herr Hoffer, may I introduce our guest of honour, SS-Brigadeführer Eichler from Berlin. A personal friend of Herr Minister Goebbels and a close acquaintance of Herr Minister Bormann. He is staying in Lohenfelde for a fortnight.’
‘Charmed, I’m sure, Herr Brigadeführer. Though everyone here is a guest of honour, of course.’
‘I would like a guided tour,’ Eichler said.
‘Naturally.’
Why had he obliged? Because there was no choice. Sabine and several others had joined them. Sabine had never once heard her husband’s lectures. Herr Hoffer waxed lyrical through the galleries in strictly chronological order. The nearer the denuded twentieth-century collection approached, still housed in the spacious Long Gallery with its glassed roof, the more his nervousness grew. The bare areas of wall had been kept as a subtle reproach: even Bendel had spotted that, and had remarked on it some time before. Although it was now two years since the purge, it still smarted in Herr Hoffer’s consciousness, especially since being forced by the city authorities to exhibit some examples of Munich kitsch by the likes of Gradl and Peiner. These dreadful works he had spaced out to look maximally uncomfortable between the four naked marble warriors from the Klimsch workshop.
Now his voice was starting to sound like a girl’s as his throat constricted. He kept having to wipe his spectacles and clear his throat.
‘Have you got a cold, Herr Hoffer?’ Bendel asked.
‘No no, I’m quite alright, thank you.’
The superior officer had said hardly a word, but appeared to be appreciating Herr Hoffer’s skeletal version of his Tuesday lectures. When the SS-Brigadeführer did speak, he had an accent: Norwegian, perhaps. He certainly looked Norwegian. Or Danish. When they stopped before the Cranach drawing, the SS-Brigadeführer had the strange notion that Lucas Cranach was Jewish. Both Bendel and Herr Hoffer denied it, although the others were not sure. In fact, Herr Hoffer went so far as to say, almost automatically (out of nerves): ‘Do you think it would still be here, if he was Jewish?’
The others had laughed. He then had a suicidal urge to ask the SS-Brigadeführer if he liked the perfectly Nordic painter Edvard Munch, and the effort of not asking brought out beads of sweat on the Acting Acting Director’s brow.
In the eighteenth-century gallery, of course, it was the nudes that the Brigadeführer most appreciated. He said very little, and his expression did not change, but from the way his small, pale eyes were running over the respective canvases, he was fully appreciative of the superb plastic qualities of the painted flesh. They entered the nineteenth-century gallery in silence, as if in church. The reception’s murmuring below, the whistling in the SS-Brigadeführer’s nose . . . Sabine had suddenly giggled at the back and Bendel, next to her, had the air of one who had just told a joke. Neither had been listening. He felt like giving each of them a poor mark.
‘This fellow,’ said the Brigadeführer, pointing to the Hans Richard von Volkmann, ‘died in 1927.’
‘His spirit belongs to the nineteenth century,’ Herr Hoffer explained.
‘Why?’
‘A question of sentiment and style.’
‘You mean he is a good painter?’ exclaimed the Brigadeführer.
Everyone had laughed.
The little flotilla settled in front of the Lovis Corinth.
‘Another good painter?’
‘You can almost smell the orange peel,’ said Frau Lohse, who was wearing an enormous hat.
Herr Hoffer remembered this moment as one of those awkward ones in his life.
‘Now, Corinth is very interesting,’ he said. ‘He is also in the twentieth-century gallery next door.’
‘Oh, did he suddenly become a bad painter?’
‘He had a stroke, in 1911.’
Everyone laughed, which was painful. Herr Hoffer much preferred the smudged and fürious later work to the academic naturalism that preceded Corinth’s stroke. The Degenerate Committee had removed the two later paintings for their exhibition, so that Germans could shriek and point their fingers at them.
‘They have been temporarily removed from view,’ he added.
‘I should think so.’
SS-Brigadeführer Eichler was quite a wag, it turned out. Or maybe the others were tipsy on the museum’s account. Bendel was being very gentlemanly towards Sabine, proffering his arm. She took it. The SS-Brigadeführer admired the Wilhelm Leibl and the exquisite Courbet, was intrigued by August Holmberg’s large Troubadour (a theatrical showpiece set in a medieval dining hall with drunken, erotic fumblings around the table), and nodded at the Volkmann landscape, which made the rolling hills of the Eifel look like the American West.
‘I feel I’m there,’ he said, ‘breathing the lovely Eifel air. That’s real skill.’
Everyone agreed. The numbers had grown, Herr Hoffer realised. At least five SS officers, apart from Bendel and Eichler. There was a sweet smell of booze and cigarettes. He felt a little tipsy himself.
Then they came to the van Gogh. SS-Brigadeführer Eichler stood in front of the collection’s jewel and said, tapping the frame, ‘Tell me about this, please.’
His black-gloved fingers began to stroke the acorn-shaped silver tassel that hung from his sword-hilt. A lot of the ‘blackjacks’ did that. Even Herr Hoffer reckoned that he himself would look good in black, with a long sword and those tall black boots buckled at the front. No wonder young chaps joined the SS in droves. He glanced back at Bendel, who might want to wax lyrical himself, given his obsession with the painting. But Bendel was once more sharing some sort of private joke with Sabine, his black peaked cap bobbing about over her flaxen hair.
‘Well?’
‘It’s by Vincent van Gogh.’
‘So?’
The group was not sure, now, whether to laugh or not. Herr Hoffer, with admirable presence of mind, told of Vincent van Gogh’s lone struggle with his art, his saintly poverty, and the genius that drove him out into the hot fields to paint. He left out the artist’s madness and suicide. The group stirred appreciatively. The Brigadeführer nodded perfunctorily and leant forward.
‘Where is the artist? It says here The Artist near Auvers-sur-Oise.’
Bendel had come forward. He made faces at Herr Hoffer behind the officer’s back.
‘That is an interesting question,’ said Herr Hoffer.
‘The title’s a lie,’ broke in Bendel.
‘A lie?’
There was a murmuring in the bunched audience.
‘Let
me explain,’ said Herr Hoffer. ‘Although these rough dabs of colour in the swirling wheat seem to show a man in front of an easel, no one is sure of the provenance of the title. It was fixed to the frame by the time the museum bought it in 1923.’
‘Why did you not change the title?’
‘Well, while the little fellow here has been interpreted by certain scholars as a peasant in a large sunhat, holding a rake, other specialists have disagreed. Our own researches discovered traces of wheat-husks and seeds and even flies in the hard surface of the oil. This means that the painting was achieved “in the field”, as was Vincent’s habit. Thus it is very likely he painted what he saw directly in front of him.’
‘He can’t be seeing himself directly in front of him.’
‘No, exactly.’
‘And what’s he doing with a rake, this fellow, if the corn’s not cut?’
‘I don’t think we should –’
‘Unless the fellow was added afterwards,’ said Eichler, jabbing a finger at Herr Hoffer, as if trying to catch him out. ‘Back in his house. Before he shot himself!’
Everyone in the group had their eyes on the Acting Acting Director, who was feeling hot and a little faint.
‘Impossible, Herr Brigadeführer,’ said Bendel, stepping to the front. The eyes swivelled. ‘Apart from the fact that the artist followed Leonardo rather than Rubens and painted from dark to light, a study of the brushwork shows that these strokes here are slightly below the much paler dabs of corn. The ultramarine of the peasant’s shirt being actually carried into this cream sweep of paint –’
‘How clumsy,’ Eichler interrupted. ‘He should have let it dry. Excellence cannot be hurried.’
Everyone nodded in approval except for Bendel, who looked pained.
‘What a pity it is not as the title says,’ Eichler went on. ‘Though less egotistical, A Peasant near Auvers-sur-Oise has not quite the same, ah, attraction. That is no doubt why you have not changed it.’
Herr Hoffer swallowed as the others laughed.
‘Probably,’ he said.
‘It wasn’t clumsiness,’ Bendel said, sharply.
Eichler looked at him.
‘What was it, then?’
‘Life,’ said Bendel, staring at the work with bloodshot eyes. ‘The pure force and energy of natural life.’
‘Of course, Herr Sturmführer,’ Eichler snapped. ‘Everyone knows that. But you don’t find these colours in natural life, do you?’
‘Well,’ said Herr Hoffer, hurriedly, ‘we have to remember that there are two words for colour in Dutch, verf and kleur . . .’
His voice sounded strangulated, very tense, but he soldiered on. Bendel made his way back to Sabine, as if she needed him – or vice-versa. Eichler stroked that nut-like silver tassel with his black-gloved finger and thumb as a child might rub the paw of a cuddly toy. The other SS officers yawned, quite openly. Frau Lohse adjusted her enormous hat. Sabine swallowed some of her wine and coughed and Bendel seemed to be rubbing her back. But at least he was safe, there.
There was a silence. Herr Hoffer had run out of information. If nothing else, he had bored everyone silly about van Gogh.
SS-Brigadeführer Eichler nodded, smiled slightly and said, ‘He was pea-brained, wasn’t he?’
‘Pea-brained?’
‘Everyone knows he was pea-brained. He painted like a child because he was pea-brained. He wanted to paint like an adult, but he could not. So he was driven round the bend.’
Then he touched the painting, stroking its uneven surface with the same finger that had rubbed the tassel. Herr Hoffer gulped. The gallery was silent except for the creaks of all those tall black boots against their spurs – the pseudo-cavalry ranged behind and ready to charge. SS-Brigadeführer Eichler was leaning forward and stroking the frozen clots and stipples of paint – the chrome yellows of the corn, the Prussian blue of the sky. Bendel’s mouth was open in horror; Herr Hoffer was very afraid he might try to strike down his superior officer. Light poured in from the windows in sloping columns of dust-motes, burnishing the parquet, glittering off tiny woven eagles and death’s-heads. The finger was now following the depression of a tree’s long shadow – the same inky black, as it happened, as the glove that touched it.
Watching the finger touching the paint was like watching someone scrape at a fresh burn.
‘He put the paint on very thickly,’ said the officer, at last, retiring his finger as if he had inspected it for dust and was now satisfied. ‘Just like a child. If he was not so famous, he would be nothing. And he was famous only because he was driven round the bend – by the knowledge that he was pea-brained.’
He gave a little grunt, as if amazed at his own cleverness. The others smiled and started to move on into the Long Gallery. Sabine squeezed Bendel’s arm and his expression softened. Really, there might have been the most awful incident, if Sabine hadn’t taken Bendel in hand.
It was difficult. Apart from a beautiful Erbsloh nude, Paul Burck’s birch forest and the chilly marble of Klimsch’s naked warriors, the contemporary collection now consisted of nothing but a couple of impressionistic seaside scenes by Ludwig von Hofmann, a chocolate-box landscape by Diebitsch, and Führer favourites like Gradl or the watery Kriegel – along with a local artist, Klaus Nerdinger, who specialised in dogs.
The white, unfilled stretches of wall were witness to Herr Hoffer’s fury and grief. He pulled out his handkerchief and dabbed his perspiring forehead. He must not faint. He must not look at the whiteness, which was shifting and swelling horribly around him, as if he was stumbling through drifts.
The SS-Brigadeführer nodded at the snowy stretches as if in approval, however. He then wondered why the museum had not seen fit to fill them up with, for example, the excellent portraits of ordinary Party members painted by Wolfgang Willrich.
‘Do you know his work? You could have filled up these spaces with Wolfgang Willrich.’
He was striking the bare wall sharply with his black leather gloves.
Yes, with the artist’s intestines, thought Herr Hoffer, who had recovered his nerve with the mention of Willrich.
‘I do know him, yes, Brigadeführer.’
Herr Hoffer did not say that he thought Willrich’s portraits to be talentless daubs of pigswill incapable of holding their own in a village show of crippled weekend painters, but murmured something instead about funds. The SS-Brigadeführer pulled a long face and looked at his watch and clicked his heels together and said to the others that he was sorry to announce that he must be leaving, and asked Herr Hoffer for the whereabouts of the toilet. He paused only to glance up at Wamper’s bronze Conquest on the landing, with the hand outstretched like a Roman emperor. The dreadful thing had been especially polished for the occasion by Frau Blumen, and Herr Hoffer could see his face in a massive thigh.
‘Looks like he’s testing for rain,’ said the SS officer. Who was allowed to say things like that. Without smiling.
Herr Hoffer did not rise to the bait. It might have been bait, after all. It asked to be capped with the story of the Jewish comic he’d seen all those years ago in Berlin, holding out his arm in a Hitler salute and saying, ‘That’s how deep we are in the shit.’ But Herr Hoffer merely smiled and let the officer go first down the stairs.
While SS-Brigadeführer Eichler was relieving himself, SS-Sturmführer Bendel congratulated Herr Hoffer on a superb performance. They were in the office, on their own; the reception in the entrance hall was horribly noisy, with business types guffawing and their wives shrieking and the echoes bouncing everywhere. Bendel seemed to be drunk.
‘You have no idea of the extent of that man’s influence, Herr Hoffer. He has the ear of the Chief himself. He’s an old mate of Bormann’s, too, of course. Peasants both. They probably shit in the handbasin, if you’re lucky.’
‘As long as he doesn’t go telling everybody how wonderful it is, here,’ said Herr Hoffer.
‘He certainly enjoyed Dawn.’
‘Oh, he can ta
ke her with him, if he wants.’
‘I hope you appreciated the brilliance of my reference.’
‘To Hiram Powers?’
‘I’ve seen the pussy myself, in Washington. She is every boy’s wet dream.’
‘The link is not proven,’ said Herr Hoffer, disliking Bendel’s coarseness. ‘Rotmann’s is much more a feeble borrowing of Michelangelo’s Dawn in San Lorenzo. Except that Michelangelo’s Dawn is waking up with a sorrowful face, as if daytime reality is worse than sleep. I can’t blame her.’
He was a little tipsy. Bendel’s face darkened.
‘She might be waking from a nightmare,’ he said.
‘Maybe we will, too, one day,’ said Herr Hoffer.
Bendel snorted. ‘I refuse to be beaten,’ he said, waving his gloves about. ‘Both Powers’s and Rotmann’s nudes are in white marble, have the same hairstyle, and there’s a chain around Dawn’s wrist. Rotmann’s, I mean. That’s a reference.’
‘That’s a bracelet.’
‘You don’t even know Powers’s work.’
‘I don’t suppose it’s worth knowing,’ Herr Hoffer said, feebly.
One of his lenses had misted up, but he couldn’t be bothered to clear it. He was exhausted by the strain of his effort, and now by Bendel’s usual eagerness to engage in a fencing match where the scars were cultural. The flex for the telephone, which came straight down from the middle of the ceiling onto the desk, appeared to cut Bendel’s face in two.
‘Anyway, what’s wrong with saying how bloody wonderful the collection is?’ Bendel pursued.
‘I just hope,’ said Herr Hoffer, choosing his words carefully, ‘that I haven’t brought too much attention to certain wonderful elements in our collection. I seem to remember that was your advice. You called it the “secret”, if you recall.’
Bendel laughed one of his loud, high-pitched laughs. He wasn’t even bothering to keep his voice down, not with the racket through the wall. His eyes were bloodshot.
‘That man’s a complete ignoramus,’ he said, his words increasingly slurred. ‘A Ukrainian, I believe, with a German grandfather. His grandmother was probably a whore, screwed by a German. Do you know the Ukrainians? It’s surprising, but they’re basically savages. Like all Slays. They’re almost as bad as the Russians, in that they’ve never evolved. Ninety-nine per cent of them are backward peasants. For him, van Gogh is a complete puzzle. He only knows everybody because he’s rich. But he’s an absolute bloody knuckle-head. And a show-off. He made a whole load of Jews get on their knees and mow an entire lawn with their teeth, which is supremely vulgar. Vulgarity is disgusting.’
