by Adam Thorpe
Herr Hoffer –
‘Not now, Gustav.’
He sat up, stiffly, and realised he was quite unhurt apart from a gash on his head and the earlier cut on the hand. He was also alone.
Well, I am being protected, he thought. I am hidden and I am safe. The unbefitting place of darkness where no one can touch me.
He got to his feet, carefully. He had a headache and felt a little sick, but the wound under the thin hair was no longer bleeding. Daylight came in through the interlocking curves and latticework of broken struts and joists, falling clearly on the piles of masonry from the gashed tower. He could see the tower through the hole in the roof, and the gash was considerable. Judging from his watch, he had been out cold for only a few minutes. Just a nap! The damage to the roof was impressive, though not extensive. It was like a piece of moth-eaten and frayed cloth, punctured clean through or showing the joists like thick threads. He could smell nothing like smoke, only the usual bitter trace of explosives and the felty tickle of dust.
He wiped his spectacles. One lens, he noted with surprise, had cracked. When he put them back on, the crack blurred his vision in the lower part: he had thought it was dirt. He was also surprised, looking down, to see that he had lost a shoe. He went back and, of course, could not find it anywhere in the mess of broken tiles, lumps of masonry, scattered boards. He found another shoe, small and frayed and slipper-like, as if his own had shrunk. Odds and ends. The soup tureen was intact. The rusty cross was bent double. A barrel had become its hoops.
Turning, he kicked something with his foot. It was a book.
He picked it up. A notebook, filled with spidery scrawls in pencil. His glasses were fogged again with dust, it was dim, the hand was poor, so he could make out very little of it. But it was most likely Gustav’s. He had always assumed Gustav was hardly capable of even writing his own name, but then he might have been assuming wrong.
The notebook was the type that Werner used, with a red card cover and a pencil tucked into its spiral binding. In fact, he saw as he peered that it had Property of the Library, Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, Lohenfelde, stamped on the scuffed cover. Who else but Gustav? He might have dropped it years ago, on one of his wanderings.
‘Herr Hoffer –’
Gustav, not –
‘Herr Hoffer, they have gracelessly used our wall without permission to place a very large and very ugly image upon it.’
‘An image, Herr Glatz?’
His own voice, from far away.
‘A full-face portrait of the little corporal with the eye bags, Herr Hoffer.’
‘How rude of them. If only we could tear it down.’
‘We can.’
‘Have they gone?’
‘Yes, Herr Hoffer.’
‘Soon hurry we soft through the door, Hurrah for our wonderful dance.’
‘Hölty.’
‘Yes, Herr Glatz. Yes.’
And Gustav Glatz had hurried softly out. Herr Hoffer had not thought twice about it, he was busy at his desk at the time, he’d had no inkling of disaster.
He pocketed the red notebook and squeezed his eyes. These voices always came upon one at the wrong time.
He left the attics, limping down the steps and wondering if it might not be better to go shoeless on both feet. For some reason, his lone shoe squeaked. He was sure it had not squeaked before. He felt so much more vulnerable without a shoe. Achilles with his heel. They got you in the end, every time. Even Baldur the beautiful, bringing light and joy to Asgard. But that was Loki, that was calculated evil. Craft and guile and venom. Loki was responsible. There is always someone to be blamed. Even the gods are vulnerable. Thor and Hrungnir and the death of Sigurd and the ‘Norns who bore the name of Vala’ and the long and bloody journey of Tyr’s sword fashioned by the dwarf sons of Ivald. Harshness and ruggedness. Fire and ice and the glitter of ice. The lonely marsh wastes of Nolde country. The Myths of the Norsemen in his father’s study, with the naked Idun draped by the pool, the page grubby with his thumbs. Idun and her golden apples. Conferring immortal youth and loveliness. Another one betrayed by Loki. Why did these things come back to you at the oddest times?
He had Gustav’s notebook in his pocket. If it was Gustav’s.
My God, supposing Gustav had been up there? He might be hurt! The notebook might have been blown from his hand!
Herr Hoffer stopped on the first-floor landing, looking back up the stairs as if Gustav might be there behind him. The ceiling here was painted with blue dwarves and green trolls: Jacob Kluge again. The gods had fashioned them from the maggots in Ymir’s flesh and they were cleverer than us. He felt sick and frightened; the lewd and rubbery faces grinned down at him, lipless mouths curling under hooked noses, ready to pluck him from life.
If he went back for Gustav, a shell or a bomb was bound to drop.
Look at those trolls. How thirsty for vengeance! Dark, treacherous and cunning, were they not banished underground, these dwarves, to the mines of silver and gold, where they banked their riches in secret crevices? He heard them blaring and cackling above him, just as in a Party film. He stood at the top of the stairs and felt as if he was on the edge of his own inner being. Staring into a chasm as the flame giant Surtr stares – his sword flashing sparks that spiral down to the iced blocks at the bottom of the abyss, hissing and melting the ice with their celestial heat!
He leant back against the wall, his face shiny with sweat, clutching his shoe. He had taken off his shoe. A man in socks is vulnerable. Should he go back for Gustav? Who might not even be there? One night in Berlin, returning alone from a weekend date with Sabine before they were married, a group of SA Brownshirts collared him, thinking he was a Jew. Maybe he looked like a Jew himself, maybe that would save him from the vengeance of the Hebrews and the anger of the Americans. The SA men had pulled his trousers down and seen that he wasn’t a Jew. They laughed, with their hair shaven high above the ears so that he could see the skin there wrinkle when they laughed. They were sure he was a fucking Bolshevik, and one of them had briefly touched his member. He was very scared, but also indignant. He had drunk a little too much, and this encouraged his reckless indignation.
‘And I’m not a homo, either,’ he’d said, buttoning up his trousers. ‘You’ll have to look elsewhere for that.’
Herr Hoffer was gripped from behind and his shirt was torn open, buttons bouncing and clicking over the pavement. Herr Hoffer thought that he was about to have a screwdriver inserted into his chest or his member cut off. Instead, the SA man lifted up the undershirt and took Herr Hoffer’s nipple between thumb and forefinger and squeezed it. He squeezed harder and harder, as if trying to extract some liquid. Herr Hoffer was prevented from wriggling by the others, who had their hard, muscular arms around his neck, all but throttling him. The intense pain made him want to cry out, but he refused to let himself do so. He bit his lip instead. He watched the nipple being squeezed as if it had only something vaguely to do with him, trying to separate the pain into its constituent parts, while the beery breath of the Brownshirts made the night air clammy around him. It went on for a very long time (probably only a minute or two, in reality), and the torturer’s expression was curiously serious and concentrated, as if engaged on a vital task, watching Herr Hoffer for a reaction. Herr Hoffer tried to avoid the man’s eyes, but kept being drawn back to them. They were surrounded by pale, gleaming skin in which Herr Hoffer could see the open pores, and somewhere below was a rounded jaw set to one side with the effort, and blond hairs crowded into the corner of large nostrils. Then the SA man stopped squeezing and grunted. He was obviously drunk. He gobbed onto the pavement as if he’d run the length of the street and back, drew on a comrade’s cigarette and blew the smoke into Herr Hoffer’s face – and the others let the victim go, laughing.
He ran off clutching his trousers, with his undershirt up, letting the cold night air assuage his nipple. Which swelled up and went a Veronese green.
The trolls would never hurt him, even if the
y were to swarm back over the border tomorrow. Why should they?
He had done nothing.
44
Parry followed the woman.
He wasn’t sure why he was following her, except that she’d wanted him to, flapping her hand about, telling him to follow her. It wasn’t that he owed her anything; he had not forced her into the act of sex. In fact, he had comforted her. He had done her a favour. Hadn’t she laughed? He even felt some disgust at what they’d done together, as if she had been responsible. Maybe the world was so sad and broken that there was no other action he could have taken, other than following the woman. That’s how bad he’d got, how tired.
So he followed her through the broken streets, over heaps of rubble, loose brick and plaster, with flaky masonry everywhere underfoot so that at any moment you could screw your ankle or worse and it was like walking over deep sugar and you were a tiny goddamn bug.
Yet he followed her and it was not strange. While he was following her he was thinking. He thought well while he was hurrying along, it was always the same. About the typewriter he was thinking – the Remington that had been in the Dada postcard above his sophomore desk and was now on a windowsill in a ruined museum and although it wasn’t the same one it made no difference, in the picture it was just thrown there into the corner next to this woman’s shoe and this cut-away medical head and this cigar label and so forth and on the windowsill it was just thrown there by the goddamn blast. And chance. And photomontage is where stuff is cut out and stuck any which way. How now the whole world had got like that. A leg on its own, just there. Stairs stuck where they shouldn’t be. How we’ll all be seeing the world and it won’t make any son-of-the-bitch sense. As if you’re crazy drunk. Like the sight of the woman dangling upside-down by her feet in France and she’d been there five days and her face had been smashed up. A collaborator. Who says she was a collaborator? It was the French, not the Germans, who had done that – maybe the Communists, or maybe people who liked to cover their own dirt. And her arms were hanging down either side of her long hair and yet she’d tried to lift her nightdress up back over her thighs when they’d strung her up by her feet because she wasn’t dead then, despite her face. That’s what he had been told by a Brit who had seen the whole goddamn thing five days before. She had wanted her modesty back, mate. Maybe she had hurt a lot of fine people. Betrayal and revenge. Goddamn revenge. She had hit them and they had hit her back as hard. She wasn’t the only collaborator he had seen, dead or just insulted or knocked about or with a shorn head. Then there were the ordinary rotted deads dug up out of that pit someplace in France with their high heels still on. That was the work of the Gestapo, in too much of a goddamn hurry. All that good detail stuck in his mind while the big picture and the names slipped away along with the maps. Those fucking high heels that were the only intact thing, with little ribbony bows on them.
Life can’t hurt me, he thought. If you don’t fool with life too much then it won’t hurt you. He was following the woman down the ruined streets and his brain was firing like a new Ford engine and letting him make interesting connections. He had the snowy mountains and the golden valley in his map pack. He was going with the snowy mountains and the golden valley. The nice item of salvage. The tiny shepherd. Vollerdt. He was crazy drunk on all these things. He didn’t know where the woman was taking him, only that she kept turning back to check he was still there.
He was still there. The strangest thing is that your life is important and then when you run along out into the garden of death goddamn none of it matters to anyone, least of all yourself. Not even in the white backwash of the whole thing.
She was twenty, maybe even thirty yards in front, running and scrambling like a crazy person. He could hear her breath panting in and out, see her shadow lengthening wildly when they passed a fire.
He would follow her, he thought, into the jaws of Hell. And the hell with her, when he thought about it. What did he care? But he kept on following her through the darkness as if he was in awe of not following her all the way to the end.
45
‘Not very well,’ said a voice. ‘I was learning a Chopin étude, Opus ten, Number three. Do you know it? You have to stretch your fingers wide to play the melody and keep them like that all the way through.’
Herr Hoffer surfaced from this memory. He had no idea to whom the voice belonged. He was going down the main stairs to the ground floor and the voice – a female’s, very smart – murmured in his ear. Herr Hoffer wondered if he was going mad, because there was no one on the stairs. It was his tiredness: through the fabric of the mind the memories were breaking. For instance, his first outing with Sabine. They were walking in the park. His arm held her around her waist and he was enjoying the warmth of her, the movement of her form against his ribs. The muscles of her waist moving under his hand. As for rendering the waist in a life drawing . . . ! Absence of form, really, ensnaring one in pointless strokes. Minimum effort, maximum effect. Yes, to understand the waist, one had to hold one’s hand against it and feel it move, supple and vigorous. My darling? It was no longer absence of form, but presence. I love your waist, my darling. He loved all the waists of humanity but most particularly his wife’s waist. His chest was inwardly enfolded with the love he had for his wife’s waist and for all of humanity through it. He kept his eyes on the stairs, still a little feeble and uncertain after the blow on his head. At the bottom of the stairs appeared a pair of scuffed black boots, the metal tips grinning at him like jutting lower teeth. He wondered who had left them there. He moved his head upwards and saw the boots had legs in camouflage trousers growing from them and then a tunic with arms and then a jaw with two SS runes on the collar-patch and he knew the face.
‘I’m on duty,’ was all he could manage.
Bendel had a gun hanging off his shoulder. That nasty-looking type, all metal. One elbow rested on it.
‘You’re hurt, Herr Hoffer.’
‘Am I? I suppose so,’ he said, touching the blood on his scalp. ‘Goodness me, what a surprise, Herr Bendel.’
The man stood on the edge of the flower mosaic by Hans Thoma. His epaulettes were edged with blue; one was hanging by its thread. He was still a Sturmführer. That was fine, then.
‘You’re not sheltering, Herr Hoffer.’
‘Tour of inspection. I was up in the attics.’
‘The attics?’
‘They were hit.’
‘I thought I heard something,’ said Bendel, vaguely.
He’s in the Waffen-SS now, thought Herr Hoffer. He’s a soldier. He looks worn-out and filthy. He has a haversack for his bread and a leather satchel for his maps.
‘It’s a big building,’ Bendel added.
‘It certainly is. Now it’s not the same. Nothing stays the same. It’s got a hole in the roof. I think the tower was hit.’
‘Fire?’
‘Oh, no. Thank God!’
‘They’re using phosphorus.’
‘I checked,’ said Herr Hoffer.
‘Good.’
‘Well, what a surprise, SS-Sturmführer Bendel. Seeing you. I can’t get over it. Look at my glasses. That’s what happens.’
He realised he was waving a shoe about. It was his own shoe.
‘Actually,’ he went on, ‘I thought you were dead.’
‘Not quite. How annoying, having to go around in your socks.’
Bendel smiled at him through a dark layer of filth. He had eyebags that aged him ten years.
‘I need a seat,’ Herr Hoffer said. ‘You look as if you’ve been in the thick.’
‘You could say that, yes.’
‘I definitely need to sit down, if you don’t mind.’
Herr Hoffer, followed by Bendel, padded into the seventeenth-century gallery, where there was a comfortable double bench set like a green island in the middle of the room. Herr Hoffer sat down on its scuffed leather; the other man stayed standing next to it. The room was misty with smoke, shadowing the blank walls. It caught in Herr Hof
fer’s throat.
Three coats of size to stiffen the canvas. Why had he bothered? If only we could tear it down.
‘Well well,’ said SS-Sturmführer Bendel, placing his feet wide.
‘You could say that,’ said Herr Hoffer. ‘The smoke’s from outside, by the way.’
‘I always thought you were unflappable, Herr Hoffer.’
‘Don’t I seem it?’
‘Not really.’
‘Oh,’ said Herr Hoffer, a little disappointed. ‘I thought I was doing rather well. Given everything. This is just the shock.’
‘I all but forgot your name, Herr Hoffer. Just for a moment. But that’s normal. I haven’t slept for weeks.’
The submachine-gun, slung casually off Bendel’s shoulder, was as small and thin as a child’s metal arm.
‘Ingrid,’ Bendel went on, giving a short laugh. ‘Strange, the names that pop up.’
Herr Hoffer closed his eyes for a moment. Shock, or whatever it was, was translating into nausea and giddiness.
‘Heinrich,’ he said.
‘A good easy name,’ said Bendel. ‘Like mine. Klaus.’
‘That’s better,’ said Herr Hoffer. ‘I’ll just lie here for a minute, if you don’t mind.’
‘You should have been sheltering, Herr Hoffer. The town’s getting well and truly plastered. In fact, you should be in the Luftschutzbunker right now.’
Herr Hoffer nodded, lying flat on the bench with his feet off the end. He had run out of words. His throat was so dry it hurt. Bendel does not know about the vaults, he thought, and he must not ever know about the vaults.
