by Adam Thorpe
She used her hand, then. She tried to pull him off against her belly, using her left hand, her eyes shining with tears as she watched. Hell, he had to stop her. It hurt. He buttoned himself back into his pants and she tugged herself back into order in the way women do. And the blur hardened back to the straight line.
She lay next to him on the blanket, her arm across his chest. She was staring upwards and jerking a little as if she’d been sobbing instead of laughing. They couldn’t speak because she was a Heini and he was an American, and yet there were no secrets between them now. He knew the secret of her, the hidden heat behind the cool skin of her forearms. He turned to look at her in the sudden, orange glow that was a fire somewhere nearby taking up the slack from a shelled block, lighting the night sky as brightly as the refinery chimneys did back home.
She was not so ugly, though. She had a nice nose and firm, almost lipless mouth. Her eyes were shining orange beneath the lit-up sky. Then the flame must have died because the sky went cold and dark again, and with it her thinking face all but disappeared. She’d looked, like she was thinking out some things that maybe he would rather not know.
The cliff of the ruined gable end way beyond her face was pale, almost white, and against it her profile was a dark cut-out. You would start with the profile and then the sky and last of all the gable end. Unless it was watercolour, whose radiance was the paper and not the paint. If it was watercolour, you would paint the profile last. He wanted the smell of linseed oil and turpentine and a piece of cheese near the palette. He’d applied to be a war artist but they did not want a commercial artist who did dishes of macaroni and a girl smoking Kensitas in front of a waterfall. Her face was very dark against the gable end but really the gable end was not that pale, it was only the contrast that made it so. He knew like a secret that your shadows had to be very deep or the light would not look light and the half-tints in between would not be singing and people would not say how fine and real it looked because you could see the wet on her lip and in her eye there is this tiny window. Hell, he had to make lips kissable for some of those magazines and the bosoms still had to be reasonable and warm with their soft highlights, he was not painting freaks. This is what he told them, when he got angry. He had an idea, now.
He got up and made her stand and together they picked their way carefully over some big lumps of marble to the pale wall of the gable end. He took a piece of burnt wood and scraped black figures on the wall. The moon was up, it was a clear April night and their eyes were adjusting: he didn’t need Morrison’s goddamned flashlight.
He scraped a man, a stick figure, with big round glasses. Then a woman in a dress and loose hair. Then a question mark. It all came easily to his hand which was black now with the burnt wood.
He knew he must sketch each day living scenes of war but, hell, he had not yet filled one lousy pad. Sketch his comrades filling up a jerrycan and civilians with Saratoga trunks and the puffed-up deads and the burnt ribs of TCs and then look sullen for the magazines.
She nodded and took the burnt wood and wrote: Heinrich, mein Mann, and Sabine under the woman. Then, as an afterthought: Herr und Frau Hoffer.
She was doing swell, he told her. He would like to bet on it that they could hold a conversation about the weather and clothes and the history of philosophy with this goddamn piece of burnt wood. She didn’t understand.
Then she crossed out the Herr und and really cried, and he held her. She was a widow. It was confirmed, it was official. The papers were stamped and the doors were open.
They were on their own in the rubble of the museum and no one could see them. She had never wanted to hurt anyone and he had never wanted to hurt anyone. He cradled her a little against his mackinaw.
Then he drew much smaller figures in childish style and followed that with a couple of question marks. She took the burnt wood and drew two stick girls with a trembling hand. Then she rested her forehead against the wall with her fingers in her mouth and her eyes closed. It was as if she were praying.
She stayed like that and Parry didn’t know what to do.
Dear sweet Jesus, he thought, she had better not have lost her kids, on top of being a widow. There is no official name for a woman who has lost her kids. It is beyond any names. Hell it is, and more.
It made him feel as if he was seasick, this possibility. But looking at the ruins around them, it was pretty possible and even likely and now he would have to deal with this.
And then he saw this mad clown grinning at them through a hole blasted in the gable end. Hell. It gave him a shock like a bullet.
It was sticking out its tongue and grinning and it was all white.
The big man with the Kaiser moustaches came up again tonight with the mirror and gave me some bread and water and took away my pan. For the first time he talked to me. He was saved by a Jewish comrade in the trenches. I am to be his deranged niece. I am not to write down any names in this book or they will all die. My own name is gone.
39
He stepped into the attic with great caution, remembering the time he had knocked his head on a beam. He tried not to think about rats. The thought of poor Gustav was almost comforting.
He called Gustav’s name, softly.
Silence. The muttering and sighing was the war. Amazing, how you got used to things.
His eyes adjusted to the gloom of the first great attic as he caught his breath. The architect had used whole trees for beams, still scabbed with bark. It smelt of mice up here; he didn’t mind mice. Rats did not smell like mice. Light filtered in through the odd glass tile in thin beams made almost solid by the dust he stirred as he moved. Dim, ancient cathedrals, these attics were.
He moved through them like a demure monk. They had reduced the bombardment to strange mutterings and murmurs – like prayer, he thought, or the grief of the Nibelungs as they recounted their bitterest sorrows to Gudrun in the green depths between the boughs.
Life, he thought, is too broad a river. He would love to visit Iceland and Peru and Egypt.
There was nothing untoward in the first attic. He was startled by a mouse scurrying away, but mice were welcome. Mice (or rats) only leave a sinking ship, and the attics with their trusses reminded him of the inverted holds of ships, of great galleons. Mice were like their greatest enemy, Caspar Friedrich. They would have sensed the earthquake coming and poured out of the building.
The Americans were no doubt already pouring into Lohenfelde. They would not be pinned down for long.
He should be at home, with his family. And their three suitcases, in case.
But the Americans were reasonable. It was the Bolsheviks who were savages. The Asian hordes.
What on earth was he doing up here, so close to the sky? His duty, that’s what. He felt warmer, thinking that.
He should remove all Party signs from the building. The banner would provoke the Americans. He’d heard (from a refugee who’d seen it) that they shot at doors to dispossess people of their homes. He’d also heard, from the radio and from Party sympathisers, that they stole and raped and slaughtered and bombed and burned whole villages and towns. But that was Party rubbish.
He had to remove the swastika banner, at least. It was out of sight of the SS men, and only faced Count-von-Moltke-Strasse – that empty street at the back. It was the result of a semi-literate letter from the local Ortsgruppenleiter (a retired baker, and a drunk), but Herr Hoffer had draped the banner on the quietest side. The flag had not quite found its way to the top of the tower. The Ortsgruppenleiter had been dismissed for embezzlement soon after.
You see, Captain Clark Gable, we have had to use our wits to avoid committing suicide. You would not believe the mediocrity of the Party leaders. But they held the whip hand all the time. For twelve years, they held it – a mere squeak in the long symphony of our people, but a very long time when you are in it. It was a risk even to take my children to the doctor’s. Why, Captain Gable? Because a great number of doctors were Party men, I’m ashamed to say.
You can’t control everything your children say. Yes, I removed that dreadful banner at great personal risk. And my family’s risk. We must not forget that they liked to punish one’s family, too. Thank you. I would like to try some chewing gum. That is very kind.
He left the first attic and entered the next. The attics, although huge and dry, had nothing stored in them apart from odds and ends: dismantled frames, a broken deckchair, someone’s paint-splashed overalls hung long ago from a nail, a pair of old clogs, a rusty cross from the bombed cemetery, some big empty barrels lying on their side, a chipped soup tureen. Kurt Schwitters would make a sculpture out of all that. Another version of Merz!
No, it was pointless junk. Or emergency firewood. Even most of the third-floor rooms had nothing stored in them. The museum had been conceived for a much larger city, or perhaps in those days they had lavish hopes that the passage of time would fill it – that an expanding imperial glory would accumulate riches like a barn accumulates the harvest. The passage of time had, in fact, emptied the building.
He felt the emptiness, underneath the rough planking of the attics, as something solid, like solid blocks of ice. The actual contents, buried now in the salt-mines or the vaults, felt vaporous.
He opened a tiny, low skylight set into the roof – what thought and care that architect showed back in 1904! – and looked out cautiously upon this quarter of Lohenfelde: a jumble of roofs, steeples and gable ends in which smoke was set every so often in a kind of fat black column rising to a brownish haze: nothing more dramatic. There was something of a burnt smell on the cool air, but that was all. A perfect sniper’s nest. A perfect lookout for the artillery.
The bombardment was clearly concentrated elsewhere, in another quarter. He tried not to entertain the idea that it might be his home quarter, where Sabine and Erika and Elisabeth were crouched underground with their three suitcases, but the thought gnawed at him anyway. He shut the skylight as if that might help. The sloped attic ceiling ended in a low stone wall, a little further on, which was where the tower cut up through the roof.
His foot kicked an apple core.
It was fresh. That was odd! Herr Wolmer must have done his own tour this morning, although as far as he knew the janitor had never made it up to the attics, not with his limp.
Gustav, he thought.
Again, he called Gustav’s name. Nothing. Gustav Glatz is not dangerous. Gustav is like a little child.
And if it wasn’t Gustav Glatz?
For an awful moment he thought someone – a Jew, a Communist – might be hiding up here. Even now, at this late stage, that could get them into appalling trouble. The mere thought of it chilled him. That was the problem with refugees who hid themselves: they were selfish, they put everyone else in danger. Not that he could blame them: he had never minded Jews, personally. His finest overcoat had been made bespoke by old Mordecai Grassgrün, for instance, in what was now Fritz-Klingenberg-Strasse – even as the Party was coming to power. That fact would stand him in good stead, as much as his support for Jewish artists in the old and golden days. Not that he’d even thought of them as Jews: they were artists, first.
He hoped Mordecai would make it back here, to bear witness. Although his memory might have suffered. No doubt the conditions were not of the best, in the camps. It would not be St Moritz, in the camps.
It was something that had always worried him, in fact: that the Gestapo would find someone crouched in a museum cupboard, and blame the staff. Then you could kiss goodbye to the paintings. And the staff, probably.
On the other hand, a well-concealed Jew was a useful insurance for when the Reich collapsed and the enemy came. Everyone knew that. The enemy was coming now, he reminded himself, although the real Party hundred-and-fifty-per-centers would be at their most dangerous, at this time, cornered and snarling.
Yes, it was said that quite a few of the big boys in the Party had their personal Jew hidden away, for after the end.
He wasn’t big enough to get away with something like that. He would be carted straight off to Dachau, or worse. And then the paintings would be lost for good.
Herr Hoffer shuddered, throwing the apple core over his shoulder. He was sick of apples, of spreading apple compote on his bread every morning instead of raspberry or honey or orange. Honey! Orange! Lemons!
A shell made a sound like someone hitting an egg with a spoon. Close, again. Annoying, he thought. Go and play elsewhere, please. You might break a window.
Captain Clark Gable, I was very worried at one moment and thought of you as a naughty boy playing with his ball. Thank you, I will indeed have a glass of your famous Coca-Cola. Yes, my girls would be delighted to. Erika and Elisabeth. I believe you find these names in America, too. Hm, it is delicious. Quite out of the ordinary. Do try this excellent old cognac of mine.
These attics were beautiful spaces, they really were! One could create such things in them! He ran his hand along a hewn joist. Oh, how he loved the scent of wood. Wholly natural. The more he concentrated on the materiality of it all, the way the light touched each surface and yielded texture and complexity, the less likely it seemed that it could be effaced. Impossible, in fact.
He felt euphoric, suddenly, stroking the joist, as if some immortal flame had sprung up, blazing behind his tired eyes. After the war he would open up these attics to artists, yes! – to young, fierce, idealistic and penniless young artists who would germinate great movements up in these attics, just as Die Brücke was germinated in Dresden all those years ago: Kirchner, Bleyl, Schmidt-Rottluff, Nolde . . . open-necked and quoting Zarathustra as they leapt up their attic stairs, full of hope, the trenches not even a rumour in their nightmares. These names were a kind of rosary for Herr Hoffer: he would run them through his mind and finger them mentally. He was sure one day they would be renowned in the world, unstained by what the National Socialists had done to Germanness.
This sudden surge of inspiration made his heart beat quicker, as if Heine’s wings of song were beating within him on that lovely melody of Mendelssohn Bartholdy – the inner sound of the spirit! The excitation and fear of the last few hours and the imminence of the arrival of the Americans – these made him almost dizzy with inspiration as he stood there in the great second attic by the tower and saw the space opened to the world, to all the healthful, modernist currents in the world, its solid bark-encrusted beams from the deepest forests supporting the newest and most exciting ideas in art – ah, how he dreamed! He even saw where he would place the glass, the long skylights. Would it matter if they were facing east? Was that not a symbol of hope? The rising sun casting its dawn light on the youthful artists at work, inventing anew?
And he pictured himself visiting the attics as a very old man, after they had become renowned – the proud benefactor applauded by the fiery youths spotted with paint or glue or varnish, smiling and cheering him in front of their extraordinary works. He placed both hands on the huge, central trunk of beam and placed his head between them, his ear against the bark, and cried out in a kind of ecstasy, his anxiety fled or perhaps transformed into this strange, sudden inspiration.
The Lohenfelde ateliers!
He gave a great sigh and clapped the shoulder of the beam like an old friend and moved on, muttering to himself as he would when alone and excited. The hoop of rice paper did not have to tear. This vision of the attics would see them through. How could it be otherwise, with his famous agility? Had they not survived so far, against all the odds, thanks to his suppleness and agility?
Things might still be marvellous, he thought. They might even draw the vengeful sting of the Jews by soothing words and humility. They themselves – the ordinary German people – might even have to get down on their knees and eat grass as a sign of contrition, to avoid the returning Hebrews’ biblical vengeance. Though it would be worse in Poland, where there were millions of them, teeming like disturbed ants. Yes, he would certainly be willing to crawl and eat grass as a symbolic gesture of contrition, to save his family from the
Hebrew ire! At the very least, he would sport old Mordecai’s bespoke coat.
Then he could get down to the real business of creating anew.
When a loud crash from the bombardment trembled the roof’s very structure and filled the air with dislodged dust, he considered it only as a kind of affront to his own marvellous vision.
I didn’t even say goodbye to you properly. I didn’t even look back when I ran past the pear tree and out of the gate.
40
The face with the stuck-out tongue disappeared but not before it had laughed. It had bobbed and looked like a moon bobs in a break in the cloud when really it is not the moon that does that but the clouds. Here it was the face, because a face is alive and that is its sign of life: that it moves. A dead’s face does not move. The difference between a dead’s face and an alive’s face is infinitesimal but it makes all the running. A sleeping alive’s face twitches after a minute or so of watching and that’s how you can tell when a guy is lying sprawled without even a blanket because he is so tired but it still can give you the willies, seeing him there.
But the white face with the tongue vanished and he kept his hand on his rifle, not knowing why he did not scream. Maybe because fear is repetitious. He thought the creature might have laughed.
And then it is really terrible, the vice versa: when you think an American kid is sleeping and he turns out to be deader than your great-great-great-grandmama whom you will never meet this side of the last goodbye. And you think: his folks don’t know yet. I have got there before them. And I don’t even know the guy. You don’t think you think the same about the Germans until you see one dead who has not tried to kill you and you do think: his folks don’t know yet. Crazy. You think even of his goddamn momma washing the dishes in the sink and not yet knowing. And then when you come across a real momma and the little kids sprawled who are not sleeping either, then your thoughts blow too hard even to stand up so you close up and keep that goddamn wind out of your head and just step over and pass on.
