The Rules of Perspective

by Adam Thorpe

  He stroked her hair and felt embarrassed thinking about his Apache forebears, how primitive and wild they were with their bloodcurdling whoops and half-naked bodies. It was a shame that he had picked up so much of it in his face, in his eyes and skin colour. People kept taking him for a full-blood. A few years back, there was a pretty girl in tennis whites who said he looked like a photo she had of Jim Thorpe hitting a home run for Boston in 1919, which was nice. He should have taken her to the nearest good fun. Yet he felt almost bad when he considered what his compatriots had done to those people, among whom were his own forebears. He was stroking her hair and the hip bone was pressing on his surprise.

  She was very still, now, and he let himself stay there, brooding, drawing his own comfort from her human warmth.

  His grandmother’s father had died at the hands of white men, for instance. Blown clean dead off his horse during a raid by horse thieves when his grandmama was only three years old. This great-grandfather of his was in the Indian wars and had fought with Geronimo and then was shot dead by a goddamn teenage horse thief in 1863. Gee, the same year as the battle of Gettysburg. His great-grandmama having died of cholera the year before. His grandmama was adopted by a missionary family so fresh from Scotland she could not understand what they were saying and she was a Primitive Methodist and she did the chores. There was something shameful in it all, and he didn’t know what had been left out or how much of it was even true. For how come she couldn’t understand what they were saying when she was with them from so young? There was stuff that didn’t shake down. There always was, except in a dime novel.

  He hardly remembered his old Indian grandmama, except that her hands were too bony and strong and she smelt of stale milk when her chins unfolded. In school once, when the teacher told them to write about their forebears, he’d written how his great-grandfather had died at the battle of Gettysburg in 1863 and he’d received a better grade than most times.

  The woman shifted slightly in his arms and Parry laid his cheek against her temple and closed his eyes. He would comfort her. He would not do anything else. Then he would leave her in order to deal with the painting; she was not his responsibility. He wished he were in a feather bed without this goddamn filthy uniform galling his ass and the torn blanket making him scratch and the remains of the town museum rolling his vertebrae. He wished he were naked next to this woman, in a deep feather bed.

  Not even his trousers were his own. The edges of the pockets were frayed and in one of them he had found a mess of dried-up lint. When a man was wounded, the medics ripped the cloth like they were opening a present.

  He wondered why anyone bothered to play the War record on the nickel-in-the-slot machine over and over. He started to kiss the woman on the face until they found each other’s mouths very well and warm and whole.

  Happiness is a mountain range, snowy and in the distance. It is behind me, but all I have to do is turn in the deep valley and it will appear in front of me. But I can’t turn. Something pushes me on and I can’t turn.

  37

  He came to on the floor, squeezed between the chair and the door, Caspar Friedrich’s cushion on his legs.

  He didn’t know where he was for a moment. He felt his stomach. It was intact. He was entirely intact, in fact. He wasn’t sure whether he had blacked out, or simply dived. His forehead hurt, but it was not cut. He peered over the chair. Herr Wolmer was looking through the window, rifle in one hand.

  ‘They’re out there,’ he said.

  Herr Hoffer felt elation more than fear. He sprang to the window, ignoring his nausea. There were soldiers pushing a big manure cart towards the stone base of the smashed burgher’s statue. They were not Americans. They were his own countrymen, in field-grey uniforms. Artillery.

  On the manure cart was a gun with a very long barrel, sitting crookedly. He screwed up his eyes behind his dirty spectacles, just making out a black patch on the collars of the jackets, a thin black line on the cuff: Waffen-SS, they must be. One of them had his arm in a sling, another was limping. Two of them had lost their helmets. Another was standing at a distance from the others, but nearer to the museum, aiming his rifle down the street. It was this man who had fired, not Herr Wolmer. The fellow fired again, then looked. Perhaps the Americans were very close, close enough to be fired at. Or perhaps he was firing at nothing. The others were having difficulties guiding the manure cart, or perhaps the gun was too heavy for it. They needed a horse, or a pony. The long barrel was facing the museum, now.

  ‘What are they doing, Herr Wolmer?’

  ‘Setting up a position. Anti-tank, it looks like. They’re an artillery crew, SS boys, but they’ve lost their chassis. Or maybe it broke down like they all do. Looks like a big 12.8 off a King Tiger, don’t you reckon, Herr Hoffer?’

  Herr Hoffer admitted that anti-tank guns all looked the same to him.

  ‘Very powerful, if it’s a 12.8,’ Herr Wolmer went on. ‘I think it is a 12.8. They’re defending their position, Herr Hoffer. It’s a good strategic position. Covers a wide angle down both streets. That’s solid stone, that base is. Perfect cover. We’re not going to go down without a fight, now.’

  There were no more than ten or twelve of them. After some shouting and struggling, they got the gun to face away from the museum, to Herr Hoffer’s relief. It surprised him that they weren’t using the museum for cover. The tower, for instance, would make a perfect sniper’s nest. But then it might fall down and that would be the end. The cart abruptly gave way at the front and the end of the barrel hit the ground with a clang that Herr Hoffer felt through his feet. The cart’s front wheels were splayed flat. One of the men seemed to be knocked over and lay unmoving while the others shouted and screamed at one another, ignoring him.

  He remained flat out while his comrades, by lifting together, pulled the gun off the broken cart and rested the barrel on the flat lip of the base where the white marble changed to some grey stone, perhaps granite. The lip was just the right height – in normal times, people would sit there for a breather. It had been a favourite place for drunks, years before, lifting their faces to the sun or singing.

  It all looked very desperate. Bodies still lay about from the shell that had blown the statue off and broken the Kluge window, their elbows raised as if warding something off, their faces puffy and dark, with peculiar patches on them that Herr Hoffer avoided looking at, as he avoided the nearby lumps of what might have been butcher’s tripe. The gun pointed over the crater, up the long street towards the centre of town.

  Herr Wolmer was excited. His nose was wet, glistening into his moustache. He gave a big sniff and let the lace curtain fall.

  ‘Still thinking of putting a white flag out, then?’

  Herr Hoffer shook his head.

  The janitor adjusted his spiked helmet, its leather scarred but shining with boot-polish.

  ‘I could go and ask them what the latest combat news is, Herr Hoffer.’

  ‘Be careful.’

  ‘They’re not shelling us here, not for the moment.’

  ‘I was thinking of the SS boys, not the shells.’

  ‘They wouldn’t hurt me, Herr Hoffer. I’m a fellow soldier.’

  Herr Hoffer kept watch over the main door, locking it after the janitor had left. Through the hallway’s large, barred window he watched as Herr Wolmer, in his wobbly helmet and with his trenchcoat flapping, cradling his rifle, limped towards the SS boys, now settled around the anti-tank gun. Herr Hoffer half expected them to shoot Herr Wolmer, but instead they seemed to laugh. The janitor clapped his heels together and gave them the Hitler salute but this made things worse; they returned it rather wildly, still laughing. Perhaps they were drunk, like those drunks of another time who would lift their faces to the sun and sing.

  After a few minutes Herr Wolmer came back.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Young tykes. No respect.’

  ‘They know they’re going to die.’

  ‘So did we, in the trenches. But we nev
er lost respect for our elders. It’s a bad sign.’

  They were back in the little room. Herr Wolmer stood by the window.

  ‘A bad sign,’ he said again. ‘It means the Führer’s lost his grip. No decency or respect, now. For twelve years we’ve had decency and respect. Now it’s all gone.’

  ‘My father would say that family life had already disintegrated by 1918. Which was why the Party had to sort things out. I will inspect the attics.’

  ‘Anyway, one of the young tykes did have the politeness to tell me as how five or six units from their division are consolidating their positions in town and how the enemy are pinned down on Kreiburg Hill.’

  ‘And the American advance down the motorway?’

  ‘Held up by ambushes. Huge enemy casualties from the ambushes. Ordinary SS and Luftwaffe personnel, mostly, but well-armed. Waiting in camouflaged foxholes until the convoy’s mostly passed and then hitting them in the backsides. That’s where we should be, you and me, hitting them in the backsides with everything what we’ve got.’

  Herr Hoffer nodded, torn between dismay and patriotic pride.

  ‘Herr Hoffer?’

  ‘Yes, Herr Wolmer?’

  ‘Do you think I look like a constipated lunatic with lop ears?’

  Herr Hoffer left the janitor looking at himself in a tiny mirror embedded in an Alpine photograph of Königssee. Did the attics really have to be inspected? He supposed so. Duty! He wasn’t sure what he would do if he found something smouldering up there, or an unexploded shell lodged between the beams. The water was cut off, and there were no buckets of sand in readiness because all their buckets had been taken to be turned into tanks. He could hardly phone the SHD firefighting fellows and, anyway, even the SHD lot were probably on Kreiburg Hill – or running off with the others. Herr Wolmer had insisted on going himself, but Herr Hoffer wouldn’t hear of it. The Acting Acting Director still had his pride.

  ‘All you need to do about them rats,’ Herr Wolmer had advised, ‘is thump up that ladder like an army. Then they’ll hide, right enough.’

  Herr Hoffer ascended the main stairs not quite able to believe in the whole situation. The things one did. He tried not to think about the rats. He’d go back via the cognac, anyway.

  The anti-tank position was a catastrophe. The Americans would shell it or fire mortars and the museum was only thirty yards or so behind. The SS boys were bound to retreat to the museum. He had feared this as much as anything. The museum as one huge pillbox, never mind Herr Wolmer and his rifle. The end of the war struck him as being like a large cloth being pulled through a tiny slit in a hoop made from taut rice paper: only a magician could do it without tearing the world in two.

  He took the back stairs from the first to the third floor, climbing slowly step by step, feeling very dejected. Much more dejected than fearful. He ought to be happy that the Americans were pinned down, but he wasn’t. It would only make the agony more drawn-out.

  He wished he had a helmet. His head felt very exposed. He was entitled to a helmet, but there were no helmets. He had seen one man with a colander on his head, during a raid last week! It was like a village performance of a mystery play. Or that agit-prop cabaret about war in a Berlin street, all those years ago, with kitchen utensils instead of armour. He had watched it with pleasure and amazement: he recalled a sign saying Katakombe and a girl playing the saxophone and a long poem read by Fritz von Sternberg himself.

  The upper corridors were dank and neglected. A railed loft-ladder led to the first attic. He remembered Herr Wolmer’s advice to thump up it. As he stood at the bottom, recovering his breath from the stairs, he heard someone moving about overhead.

  He wondered if it might be Gustav Glatz. It couldn’t possibly be a rat. Those were feet, not paws.

  It was bound to be Gustav, wasn’t it? Many times over the last twelve years he had discovered poor Gustav wandering about, particularly after closing time. It was hardly surprising. Poor old Gustav – he had been such a brilliant scholar, with a shining career ahead of him. His thesis on bracelet-shading was a model of its kind. Even Bendel thought so.

  What the hell do I care what Bendel thought or didn’t think?

  Herr Hoffer felt giddy and nauseous again. The glorified loft-ladder stretched up like the flank of Everest. If only Gustav had not gone out and torn that election poster down. No – if only the two SA men had not spotted him. The poster was a huge one; Hitler glared down from it like a demon. Gustav tore the poster down the middle – it was only pinned to the museum’s delivery door, it was easily done. The huge face of Hitler torn in two, as if peering out from behind a wall. It might have been a work by Kurt Schwitters, entitled Doppelgänger. But it wasn’t, it was a poster for the election that would legitimise the seedy barber’s appointment as Chancellor. That’s how Gustav put it, wasn’t it? The seedy barber’s appointment as Chancellor. He wasn’t ever a barber, but he looked like one. In fact, he had started life as a painter. A postcard painter. That was hard to imagine. The artist-hero was a very minor watercolourist. A Viennese bohemian who slept in dosshouses and sold his pictures as street vendors sell rubber collars or badly stitched handbags or sour cigarettes.

  There had been shouts, and these two figures running up. He hadn’t quite clicked in time.

  If only they had not thrashed poor Gustav quite so badly! Herr Hoffer caught the end of it through the open window of his office, hearing a sound like a dog settling into a bone and noting how one of the SA men wore peasant clogs instead of leather boots. He had a large hole at the back of each sock, exposing dirty ankle bones. Then the thugs had bolted. No, strolled away, laughing. Thirty seconds, and it was done. Certainly not more than a minute.

  Poor Gustav. He was quite unrecognisable. His teeth seemed to be protruding through his lip.

  Bound to be him, thought Herr Hoffer – mounting the attic steps, which creaked horribly. He’ll show me his tongue and say slurred, incomprehensible things with great eagerness. It was all rather tiring, being nice to poor Gustav. He hardly remembered to thump, convinced it wasn’t a giant rat.

  Almost as tiring as being nice to members of the Party.

  Life, when you come down to it, he thought, is an uproar in which you seek your solitary bed.

  I have been asked not to move in the day. I can come out from my hole, but I must not move about. I feel I am an ox-wagon, carrying my own dung. All the signs tell me that you are all waiting for me, somewhere near.

  38

  Parry did not think any more. For a short while, anyway, he just gave up. He let himself be washed through by sex. Whatever logic there had been to the straight line of his actions, sex chewed into it, sure as hell. The straight line became a wave and then blurred into something without craft or suspicion. And he lifted up her dress. She was laughing. Laughing! Why the fuck was she laughing? She was crazy. He was without suspicion, though. They had even been warned. This made him open all the doors even wider. He banished those medical jerks from his sight. There was firelight on the creek and he was floating in the hired canoe. The Studebaker was rocking with its goddamn dog hairs. No Sophie McConnell in his throat, either.

  The front of her dress tore down the hem as he pulled her breasts out from the loose neckline of the undergarment. He did not mind the faint, dishcloth smell of his own saliva as he returned to each nipple and held it in his mouth like an infant. Because that’s what he was: an infant of great thirst and moment. She held his head tight against the breasts, against their great strength and smoothness, and kept on laughing.

  In the back of his mind, right up in the corner, there was a wicked little face with a bubble that was saying: That guy with the spectacles can’t have fucked her too well.

  He, Parry, was doing it so well they were almost exploding.

  They had slipped off the beam and the rubble could hardly take it. You sack a city you sack a city and you get the girls. The town was digging into his ass and his spine through the blanket but he wasn’t complaining, sh
e was riding him like she wanted to crush the rubble to powder under them both. Panting and exerting like animals. Crying out and laughing. Pushing him deep into the rubble and crying out as if they were dying and laughing at the same time. Which they were.

  And who cares about the noise?

  He knew he was loving her just for this time, and not for any other. She was not beautiful until he started the loving. Like he had not loved Morrison until he was a dead and the blood had flowed past and over those goddamn steps and down the path where the paving was jointed good. They used to say that Germans could not keep the thread or join up good, he had read that somewhere, but now they were changed and it suited everybody to call them inhumanly efficient and good at keeping the thread that was of steel or iron. And he was proving that the enemy was not of steel or iron or something you just dropped phosphorus on like it was a Monday and the day for phosphorus dropping and doing the wash. He hadn’t even eaten Morrison’s hair but the stupid guy was splashing him all over with that goddamn blood as the woman groaned and squeezed him up deep inside her belly. Her hair falling like a net curtain over her face and his.

  Hell, he was getting sore. As she was riding him. He was pinioned by her. This is what happens, he thought, when you take some nice girl out in the Studebaker beyond Water Street. They might have brushed off the goddamn dog hairs. And he knew what kind of a dog it was. So large and fat it dented the smooth front lawn just lying there yards from the sidewalk.

  It wasn’t Morrison. It was this goddamn infection, this burning at the tip whenever he pissed. It was never changing his underwear and having the GI common condition. Of the runs. It was museum masonry digging into his back and it was all the fucking war. He came out of her. But she had had a good time.