by Adam Thorpe
‘The paintings were all evacuated,’ said Herr Hoffer. He felt weak and silly standing there in his socks, in front of this altered man, this demon. (What was a demon, but someone from whom beauty had been removed by the gods?) ‘That’s very bad news about the van Gogh, but I’m not surprised.’
‘I said, it never left the building.’
‘I saw it leave the building myself, for goodness’ sake.’
‘Herr Hoffer, you’re just like all the others.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘A liar.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Where is the van Gogh, Ingrid?’
‘Stop calling me Ingrid!’
Bendel laughed. He was just a soldier, after all. Soldiers got like that. It stopped them from shooting themselves.
‘Anyway,’ Herr Hoffer said, swallowing his annoyance, ‘why do you want to know?’
‘Because I want to look at it, of course.’
There was a pause. Herr Hoffer’s mind had gone white, as if drained of blood. The gallery’s bare walls were blinding him like sunlit snow on the peaks. Sabine had always wanted to go to St Moritz, to wind up and up in the little train. Life was so expensive!
‘Please,’ said Bendel, leaning back on the green leather and staring up. ‘Let me look at it.’
‘I’d like to sit down.’
‘Sit down, then. Your arse is on the top of your legs.’
There was a chair on either side of the door, where the attendants had once sat in the good old days, dozing off while huge moustaches and horn lorgnettes and long, lavish skirts wandered about, the skirts and the moustaches gradually getting thinner and shorter over time until there were none and there was no one at all. Herr Hoffer sat in the chair to the right of the door. The chair wobbled slightly. That was something he would have to see to, after the end. He noted the chair and its position in the gallery. God is in the details, his teacher used to say. You can’t have a wobbly chair in a respectable museum. There would be so many jobs for carpenters and joiners, as after the Swedes. He gave a long sigh.
‘I hope a shell doesn’t fall on us while we’re discussing all this,’ he said. ‘Poor old Herr Wolmer. I imagine he waved around that silly gun of his. I told him it would get him into trouble.’
Bendel was staring at the parquet floor. The cigarette drooped in his mouth.
‘You know,’ continued Herr Hoffer, ‘that there are, in fact, some of your Waffen-SS boys just outside? Artillery?’
Bendel looked up.
‘Listen, let’s get this shit over with.’
Another pause.
‘The van Gogh might have been taken to Linz,’ suggested Herr Hoffer, too feebly. ‘For the Führer’s culture centre.’
‘It never left this building,’ Bendel repeated.
‘You don’t know that,’ said Herr Hoffer.
‘Sabine told me.’
Herr Hoffer snorted, but the snort turned into a gulp and he had to cough.
‘Frau Hoffer? She doesn’t know a thing.’
‘She knows lots of things,’ said Bendel, with a crooked smile.
‘Please . . .’
‘What?’
‘Look, she doesn’t know that.’
Bendel chortled in his throat. It was all quite deliberate. He’s trying to bait me, thought Herr Hoffer. I would like to kill this man.
‘About the van Gogh, I mean. She’s not interested in my work.’
‘Herr Hoffer, I checked your inventory, in Berlin. I looked it up in the files. On pink paper, it was. Some arsehole had ticked it off on the day of the evacuation. He didn’t even notice that the van Gogh wasn’t on it. That’s why we’ve lost the war. Because no one fucking gives a toss.’
Herr Hoffer closed his eyes. Bendel still had a pleasant voice, in terms of its timbre, but it was turned to the wrong purpose. So it was ugly.
In the end, the main aim was to stay alive.
‘Right then. Just as I stated, in fact, it’s with the other works. Not all the collection is in the salt-mine. Some of it is here, in the vaults.’
His heart was pounding in his ears, but he felt quite in control. Bendel was a lot younger and he’d lied about seeing Sabine; he’d only seen the inventory. Thank God.
‘The vaults?’
‘Yes.’
‘But what about the rats?’
‘We wiped them out,’ said Herr Hoffer.
‘When?’
‘Recently.’
‘And the damp?’
‘It wasn’t so damp down there, after all.’
‘Is this the truth?’
‘Yes.’
‘When did you store the paintings in the vaults?’
‘Just before the wholesale evacuation in late March,’ Herr Hoffer lied. ‘Last year. I forget the exact date. A year ago already! Very foggy. You weren’t even there.’
‘I was in Berlin.’
‘I guessed that,’ Herr Hoffer nodded. ‘All those nightclubs, dances, concerts –’
‘I don’t like cities. I like trees, forests, wild woods. The Spreewald was full of tents and guns and barbed wire. We always fuck everything up. That’s capitalism for you. And all our other political knick-knacks. Bolshevism, Fascism, monarchic feudalism, you name it. None of them gets to the root.’
He pulled hard on his cigarette and blew the smoke out through his nose.
‘Fuck me, the vaults,’ he said. ‘I hope you did wipe out the rats. They breed very quickly, you know. They’ll have a chew at anything.’
‘We used poison,’ said Herr Hoffer.
‘Gas is better,’ said Bendel. ‘You could have pumped the vaults full of gas. Quicker. It’s worked a treat with the Jews.’
Herr Hoffer chuckled. ‘You’d better not make jokes like that when the Jews come back,’ he said.
Bendel looked at him, frowning. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Jokes like that,’ Herr Hoffer repeated, out of a sudden burning flush of terror.
‘What jokes?’
‘Like that. About the gas.’
Bendel stared at him with eyes as bloodshot as a drunk’s. ‘It won’t wash with the Americans, you know,’ he said.
‘What won’t?’
‘Pretending not to know.’
‘Not to know?’
‘Herr Hoffer, you’re a fucking lousy liar.’
Herr Hoffer shook his head, bewildered. Then he stood up, spreading his arms. Baldur was the god of peace. He threw his sunlight all about him.
‘You know what, Herr Sturmführer? Or can I call you Klaus, after all these years? And you can call me Heinrich. Klaus, I’ve just had a vision of us two standing here in 1950, admiring the paintings. Chatting about them as we used to do. All this’ll be a bad dream, by then, Klaus. I’ll buy you a real coffee, with cream on top.’ (He used the informal du, without asking permission.) ‘And a cake. Promise. Now, if you don’t mind, I must be continuing my tour of inspection.’
The submachine-gun came up and was pointing at him, suddenly. The gun’s thinness was the worst thing about it, somehow. And the fact that it had no wooden parts. Bendel’s eyes were very dark and bloodshot and hollow, behind the smoke from the cigarette in his mouth. He held the gun almost casually, still seated, with the leather strap sliding down by itself off his shoulder, very slowly.
‘Sit down,’ said Bendel.
The gun remained pointing at Herr Hoffer, who sat down again with a bump.
‘I was always reassuring Herr Acting Director Streicher, dear fellow, that your interest in the van Gogh was purely that of an art-lover. Now I see how naive I was. I’m disappointed.’
He was breathless and his wretched spectacles had misted up again, rendering everything impressionistic. Bendel himself was merely a blurred shadow against white. Then the blurred shadow rose. Herr Hoffer moved his head slightly to find a clearer part of the lens, on the edge of the frame – a narrow strip of clarity through which he could see Bendel holding the gun in a serious way by his
lower chest, ready to fire.
‘If you shoot me,’ said Herr Hoffer, in a voice like a little boy’s, ‘you’ll never find the van Gogh.’
‘It’s in the vaults. You said.’
‘But it’s hidden somewhere you’ll never find.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes.’
He had the vivid sensation that his life was hanging by that single word. Yes. That all other words were stretched out far too lengthily in space and time.
‘You’ve hidden it?’
‘Yes,’ said Herr Hoffer.
‘In the vaults?’
‘Yes. But you won’t find it without me. In fact, you won’t even find the vaults. And even if you did, you’d be stuck.’
‘You mean,’ said Bendel, ‘they’re locked and you’ve got the key?’
‘No, I mean that I have concealed the painting in a place in the vaults that only I know of because I was the one who hid it. The painting.’
‘You’re going to show me.’
‘As long as you put it back. Afterwards.’
Herr Hoffer grinned like an idiot. He had got through. He knew he was unlikely to be shot, now. Nevertheless, he was amazed at his own lack of fear. It was almost unnatural. He could even joke about things. If his voice refused to be a grown man’s, that was not his fault. It was a physical reaction beyond his psychological control.
He could even imagine the bullets going clean through him without leaving a mark. Like the missiles flung at Baldur by the gods in Asgard; everyone laughing to see them bounce off the god of sunlight.
‘I’m glad you didn’t stay at home this morning, Herr Hoffer,’ said Bendel. ‘With your lovely children and your very agreeable wife.’
‘Thank you. Look, could . . .’
‘What?’
‘Never mind. What happens if I refuse to help you?’
Bendel ran a hand over his face, looking very white all of a sudden. ‘What’s more,’ he said, ignoring the question, ‘we’ve not got very long.’
‘I thought we were friends. I thought there was something called trust.’
‘So did I,’ said Bendel. ‘That’s why I’m so disappointed in you, Herr Hoffer. I only want to look at it, for Christ’s sake,’ he added, after a pause.
46
The woman stopped in front of a big apartment building that had been seriously damaged, like almost everything else on the street. It looked like the whole street on both sides had shut its eyes and got wrapped up about a hundred years back and the science of time had done the rest. There were a few civilians, mostly women and their kids and the kids’ grandparents, going someplace down the street, slowly, like they had a burning ambition that was so mysterious it failed to show in their eyes, though they had it and that was all they had. It was good and dark, except that fires were still burning here and there, out of windows and doors, casting a light on the faces that made everyone seem old and carved.
Parry had never seen anything sadder in his life – since yesterday, anyway. Sadness was something you experienced in the here and now, like pain. Each sadness seemed deeper than the one before. When it touched bottom, you were dead.
He guessed the kids were in there. Frau Hoffnung or Hoffmann’s kids. He pushed back his helmet and scratched his sweat rash. She was holding his arm, now, pointing and jabbering in Heini.
Yeah, they are in there.
The trouble is, the place is wrecked.
A ton of bricks had poured out the main door. It had spilt down the hall stairs and right out the main door, as if the building were vomiting its own insides. He knew enough German to know that meine Kinder meant ‘my kids’. He even knew that Mahler had written an anthem for dead kids and called it something like Kindertod, maybe.
Things were coming together.
He liked Mahler, just as he liked swing and jazz. He was a guy of broad tastes. He wanted to live a long time so that he could weave all those tastes into something meaningful called A Life. He didn’t want to scramble into a dangerous building to search for a crazy Heini woman’s dead kids. He had his fortune rolled up against his chest, the war was almost over, he’d make it through and go back and have A Life that might even be interesting and happy and prosperous, away from all this Old World sadness. He’d tell his grandchildren how he’d fought evil and helped Good to rise again, shaking its old self a little and saying, ‘Hey, that was very close, but I’m in good shape, guys.’ He’d like to paint, paint properly. He’d like to be more than a dull commercial agent, a goddamn illustrator whose only thrill was a week’s fishing in the timbered back country in August. Whose world was one of household appliances and goddamn Milk-Bone for the dog. And Maureen ironing his sweatshirts.
But the woman was tugging at his arm, imploring him, tears running off her cheeks and chin and nose as water does in a rainstorm.
‘Hold it,’ he said. ‘Hold it, now. C’mon. Hold it.’
He started humming ‘It’s a Lovely Day Tomorrow’ and dug out his flashlight and probed the beam through the door.
He didn’t know why he was doing this, why he was climbing over the rubble spill and into the building, with the woman close behind, actually holding onto his belt so he had to remove her hand. He didn’t understand any of it and part of him was saying no.
There is beauty in everything, he thought.
There is beauty in what I am doing, and his heart filled with delight and even the danger seemed the very flower of beauty, even the darkness of the wrecked building that his light probed, the beam cutting through the hanging smoke like a searchlight through fog over a grey sea.
There is beauty in what I am doing, thought Parry.
47
If only, Herr Hoffer would often think, life could be as straightforward and as beautiful as a piece of fine music. As, for instance, Schumann’s Dichterliebe, Opus 48. That, too, was a song cycle drawn from the poems of Heine. Sabine had given him the records for his birthday years ago, before she learned that Heine was Jewish. Then she wanted to throw them away, more out of fear than zeal. That had caused a great row, which he had won, putting them away in a deep drawer and locking it. Then she read that the Führer was attending a concert in Vienna with Schumann’s song cycle on the programme, and the records joined the others again in the living room.
Or Handel’s oratorios: he had the whole of the Messiah on six records. After the war had begun, Sabine was nervous of his playing it, because the words were in English. She preferred old German dance music and folk songs. She liked jazz to dance to, but it was not approved of. She also liked Johann Strauss, and collected many of his records. Herr Hoffer did not tell her that Strauss also had Jewish blood; he was not a man to indulge in spiteful matrimonial vendettas, even though he disliked Strauss’s music and retired to their bedroom with a book whenever she put a Johann Strauss on the gramophone player. She did likewise when he put on Handel or Schumann. It was a battle of the records, he once said.
Not that Schumann was altogether straightforward. Especially not in his piano pieces. He would like to have discussed Schumann’s piano pieces with Bendel, as in the old days. Like that time Alfred Cortot had played in Lohenfelde’s concert hall, on his wartime German tour with Furtwängler, and Sabine had spotted Bendel in the Privileged Guests’ box. They had talked in the interval.
‘Schumann is the supreme romantic,’ Bendel declared over the glass of champagne, ‘but saved from limpness by his internal struggle.’
Sabine wished to know what this struggle was.
‘He invented a double personality for himself, my dear Frau Hoffer. One was tender, one was savage. One was day, one was night. To hear Schumann is to hear a man confront his own demons.’
Sabine’s eyes had opened wide.
‘Herr Sturmführer, you make everything so interesting.’
‘We are all divided, Frau Hoffer. But most of us are too obedient to our bourgeois selves to notice.’
‘What is your favourite Schumann, dear fellow?’
> ‘The Nachtstücke, Herr Hoffer. I howl at the moon when I hear them.’
They had laughed, and the other SS fellows had turned round to look. Herr Hoffer had felt quite on top of things, that evening.
But that was with the old Bendel. Now Bendel had become his own demon.
It was pitch-black in the cuddy. Herr Hoffer had been locked in the little storage room off the Luftschutzbunker while Bendel relieved himself in the toilets. Apparently, he had something approaching dysentery and had not used a toilet for weeks. The excitement had provoked an attack. It was faintly embarrassing. Bendel, with all Herr Wolmer’s keys on their brass ring, was like a jailor. Herr Hoffer had plotted a roundabout route to the vaults, via various disused rooms. There was no point in trying to break down the cuddy’s door; the toilets were just on the other side of the partition. The darkness smelt of wax polish and of Frau Blumen’s underarms. There was not much room among the invisible presences of boxes and tins, the bottles of bleach, the stifling hints of cleanliness. He felt dirty, in fact. The Romans were very clean. The rainwater collected in the centre of the atrium. Echoing baths.
He hadn’t been lying about the van Gogh. He was the only one in the world who knew where it was, right now.
Bendel unlocked the cuddy. He looked better.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I half expected you’d hop it. Next stop: the vaults!’
He was almost cheery, was Bendel.
The vaults! The vaults! Back to the vaults!
‘When Herr Hoffer had first arrived, all those years ago, the vaults were already a glorified junk room, with a single electric bulb casting weird shadows. One day, while bringing some order to the junk down there, he had happened to step on a loose slab. He tapped it: it sounded hollow. Within an hour he had prised open the slab and was gazing down on a hole like a small grave, carved squarely out of rock, and completely empty. An oubliette, probably; somewhere a hunted man could vanish when the hounds of history were baying.
