The Rules of Perspective

by Adam Thorpe

  Because Parry was before anything a deeply moral man, reared by devout Baptists, and did not want to be troubled for the rest of his life by an unearned gain.

  49

  They were stood halfway down the stone stairs leading to the vaults. Herr Hoffer felt he was about to dive into a pool of infinite depth.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘The vaults are there, through that metal door.’

  ‘Go on, then.’

  ‘My dear man, I can’t allow myself to break my professional code –’

  ‘Oh, shut up.’

  Bendel actually poked Herr Hoffer’s back with the gun, so that the tip of the barrel seemed to roll one of his vertebrae like a miniature billiard ball caught by a cue. It was very painful and somehow ugly. Herr Hoffer realised that Bendel had turned brutish. He had been so very elegant, almost debonair, as a young SS officer shoving papers about on a desk. Now he had turned into a thug.

  This whole business is happening to someone else, thought Herr Hoffer. Even my stinging vertebra belongs to someone else’s spine.

  He wished Herr Wolmer’s vengeful ghost would come back to life and finish the man with a single pot shot, but that sort of thing only happened in films and books. The stairs were cold and damp through his socks, like the way to a castle dungeon. Those were certainly his socks down there on his feet. To his embarrassment, their grey toes were darned with black thread. Maybe the vaults had indeed been dungeons, where men were hung in chains or rotted on straw for decades, turning lunatic. He had never considered that to be likely, until now.

  They reached the bottom and he rapped on the metal door. The door was opened.

  ‘We have a visitor, Werner. SS-Sturmführer Bendel. Remember?’

  Werner nodded. Then they were inside and the door was closed behind them.

  Herr Hoffer’s eyes adjusted slowly to the candlelight. Werner had retreated into shadow, dry and suspicious, next to Hilde Winkel. That’s my place, thought Herr Hoffer. Hilde, and Frau Schenkel opposite her, were frowning – Frau Schenkel with a cigarette hanging from her thin lips: it made her look common. She might have been a factory worker. The smoke was thick, in fact: its floating layers in the dim, yellow light swirled and twitched at their sudden arrival.

  ‘Good morning,’ said Bendel, letting the gun point upwards. ‘So there are the paintings.’

  No one replied. Bendel stayed by the door, almost shyly. He hadn’t expected people.

  Herr Hoffer said, ‘I think you know SS-Sturmführer Bendel, everybody. Fraulein Winkel, I’m sorry, you don’t of course know SS-Sturmführer Bendel. One of our most loyal customers. My joke, the term customers. He wants to look at the paintings. A private view!’

  He was sounding silly, rubbing his hands.

  ‘The tower was hit,’ he went on, folding his arms and looking directorial, ‘while I was inspecting the attics.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ Frau Schenkel groaned.

  ‘We thought we heard something,’ said Hilde Winkel, whose upper lip was being discreetly hidden by her hand.

  ‘The damage is not serious. Just the roof knocked about a bit. I was hit on the head.’

  ‘So it looks like,’ said Frau Schenkel, as if in reproval.

  ‘The attics, Heinrich?’

  ‘Yes. I am perfectly alright, Werner, thank you.’

  Werner actually stood up again.

  ‘Did you . . . ?’

  ‘Yes, I did lose consciousness but –’

  ‘Did you – there wasn’t anyone else up there, then?’

  ‘I went up on my own. Herr Wolmer stayed on duty below. Funnily enough,’ he added, ‘I had a notion that poor Gustav might be skulking up there. He’s certainly been up there recently.’

  He produced the red notebook. He remembered with a shock that Herr Wolmer was dead.

  ‘Is that poor old Gustav’s?’

  ‘I believe so, Frau Schenkel.’

  ‘Poor boy.’

  Werner leant forward from his hips, like a mechanical toy.

  ‘That’s my department’s property,’ he said – and grabbed the notebook from Herr Hoffer’s hand.

  Werner didn’t look at it; he just slipped it under his coat.

  ‘Rude to snatch, dear fellow,’ smiled Herr Hoffer, wagging a finger. The man was so odd. Still, after the end of all this they would all be starting again, from scratch, and no one would be odd any more.

  Oh, it smelt really unpleasant, down here. Someone had let off, very badly. Probably Frau Schenkel.

  ‘To what do we owe the pleasure of your visit, Herr Sturmführer?’ Werner asked, in a slightly quavering voice. He had sat down again, and his question came out of the shadow made by Hilde’s raised knees.

  ‘Herr Hoffer will explain. I’m too knackered.’

  ‘Are you here to protect us?’ asked Frau Schenkel.

  ‘No,’ said Bendel, leaning back against the wall.

  ‘I see,’ said Frau Schenkel, taking a deep pull on her cigarette.

  ‘He would like to view a certain painting,’ said Herr Hoffer.

  ‘Which one?’ asked Werner, with a scowl.

  ‘The van Gogh.’

  ‘The Vincent?’

  ‘Yes, Werner.’

  ‘You mean,’ said Werner, ‘you want to put it in your pocket.’

  ‘A bit big for that,’ smiled Frau Schenkel. ‘It might fit in your haversack, though.’

  ‘I just want to look at it,’ said Bendel.

  ‘That’s what they all say,’ growled Werner.

  He seemed upset by something.

  ‘It’s number 19, dear,’ said Frau Schenkel, waving her cigarette towards the trestles. ‘One of the ones wrapped up in brown paper.’

  No it isn’t, thought Herr Hoffer.

  ‘I thought you told me it was hidden, Herr Hoffer,’ said Bendel.

  Why can’t the Americans just come right now, dear God!

  He shrugged.

  ‘We did hide it,’ said Frau Schenkel. ‘We hid it from the authorities, like all this lot. I do believe in coming straight out with it,’ she added, turning to the others.

  ‘Quite right, Frau Schenkel,’ said Herr Hoffer.

  ‘I mean, you’re hardly going to do anything about it now, are you, Herr Sturmführer? You shouldn’t even be down here, dear. You should be off up there defending the Fatherland.’

  ‘I’ve run out of cigarettes,’ was all Bendel said.

  Frau Schenkel gave him one, but it was Hilde Winkel who lit it for him, still hiding her mouth.

  ‘What’s wrong with your mouth, sweetheart?’

  ‘It got cut. It’s not very pretty,’ she said.

  ‘But the rest of you makes up for it,’ said Bendel, still stooping to her.

  Hilde Winkel gave him a shy little smile, her eyes glittering. Of course, Bendel’s a good-looker in the flattering candlelight, Herr Hoffer thought: clean-jawed, soiled by battle. The kind of thing that would excite Fräulein Winkel, drooling as she did over all that dreadful marble kitsch for her thesis, instead of bandaging real limbs.

  Was that how the fellow had lured Sabine? He was on his way to a thump on the nose.

  Herr Hoffer felt dizzy and sat down with a bump next to Frau Schenkel. The noise of the near miss continued to ring in his ears. Not so much the noise, more the thought of what a close shave it had been. Life was really very strange, yet one got used to anything very quickly. Even now he felt that he had, in one sense, been in this situation for his entire existence.

  Bendel was looking down at them and smoking, as if he had all the time in the world. Because he had a gun and was in uniform, he was very much more powerful than anyone else present. If only war would keep to dewy fields with young men in uniform running about on them and cutting each other with swords, Herr Hoffer reflected. Instead, it was all about dropping bombs into private living rooms. There ought to be proper rules against it, as there were against the use of gas and chemicals.

  No one spoke. Herr Hoffer very much hoped that W
erner had not brought his pistol along; he was bound to fluff it. The bombardment grumbled and coughed. Maybe, in his battle exhaustion, Bendel had forgotten why he was here.

  Then, as if reading Herr Hoffer’s mind, the man looked over at the stacked paintings. They retreated into the gloom: at least a hundred of them. Bendel stepped past the various feet and stood between the paintings on their trestles. He smoked greedily, nervously, like a callow boy, as he ran his eyes over the paintings.

  Herr Hoffer’s heart sank: he had no plan, other than waiting for the next moment. Which was no plan at all. Agility, Heinrich! It was much too embarrassing to admit that he had swapped the canvas for a blank. That he had cheated the others. Even with the best and most honest of intentions. No one had any honest intentions left, these days. After the end, honest intentions could flourish again.

  What he most feared was that, on discovering he’d been cheated, Bendel would have a fit and shoot everybody, as he’d most probably shot Herr Wolmer. Right now the gun was dangling from his neck in front of his chest. It was the most horrible object, to Herr Hoffer; he had never really noticed before just how ugly the standard-issue submachine-gun was: its grip was that of a pistol, but then the pistol had grown a monstrous tumour of metal. What one always forgot was the weight and the sharpness of a single bullet. Which travelled so fast you heard the gun go off only after you were hit. No, you didn’t hear anything whatsoever and ever again, amen, in all likelihood. Thus death came to you out of a silence. It was the bullet that finished you, not the gun. To be precise, like Werner would be. Pernickety.

  Or it didn’t quite finish you, that was the worst. To be hit in the stomach, for instance, and not die.

  It was so quiet that he could hear somebody’s watch ticking. It was the quiet of all underground places, the muffled soundlessness of a cavern. It had been the same in the salt-mine at Grimmenburg, when the SS man had stopped talking about knights and castles and switched off the light prior to moving out of the vast chiselled-out room of Shaft IV. It was a lightless silence, Herr Hoffer remembered: the dry nothingness of death. The blackness had seemed to press against his eyeballs. And his eardrums.

  ‘Are these in any order, Herr Hoffer?’

  ‘No. We stacked them in a hurry,’ he lied.

  ‘Like for like,’ said Bendel.

  He immediately began to hunt through the paintings, the cigarette smoking away between his lips. For a time there was no sound but the bump of frames, Caspar Friedrich’s purring and the odd tiny snarl from the Acting Acting Director’s stomach. It looked as if Bendel was leafing through a giant, gilded card index. He wasn’t being very careful.

  ‘All these old mates,’ he said. ‘Ah, the Poussin.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind looking at poor Gustav’s journal,’ said Frau Schenkel.

  ‘No,’ said Werner. ‘It’s private. How much damage was there, up in the attics, Heinrich?’

  ‘I would say,’ said Herr Hoffer, ‘that part of the roof was a bit moth-eaten, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘Shut up,’ said Bendel, his cigarette bouncing in his lips.

  They were shocked, but they shut up. The bumping of the frames as Bendel hunted through was somehow horrible. Bits of gilt moulding fell like crumbs. Every time he came across a work wrapped in brown paper, whatever the dimensions, he lifted it up brusquely to examine the number.

  I will pretend to be totally bewildered, thought Herr Hoffer. But no one will believe me. There was a faint smell of sewage, rather than farts.

  ‘Here it is,’ said Bendel. ‘19. Or is that 119? Too big, anyway.’

  ‘That’s our Paul Burck. The Rustling of the Woods. Though personally I can’t hear any –’

  Bendel advanced towards the candle and started to tear the parcel open.

  ‘You can’t take that,’ said Frau Schenkel. ‘I wrapped it myself.’

  ‘He’s not taking anything,’ Herr Hoffer reassured her. ‘He’s only having a look. I can understand that –’

  ‘Shut up,’ said Bendel.

  He pulled the Paul Burck from its wrappings.

  ‘Crap,’ he said, and thrust it into Herr Hoffer’s arms.

  ‘No it’s not,’ said Frau Schenkel.

  She started to cry softly. Bendel ignored her. Herr Hoffer held the painting like a wall, behind which he could crouch.

  ‘It’s very nice seeing all these old friends,’ said Bendel, continuing to hunt through the paintings on the trestles. ‘A pity I can’t linger over each one, as I used to.’

  He came across more brown paper and ripped it open, though it was much too small for the van Gogh.

  ‘Look, the exquisite Corot, his lovely blue-grey alders. Or are they poplars? Reminds me of your excellent lecture on Corot and water and the dreams of Gérard de Nerval, Herr Hoffer. I hope the painting is here and you’re not lying. I can’t afford to waste time, you know. If I wasn’t serious about this I’d walk out with the Corot and a few others and have done. But I’m not a thief. Never have been. So I’m putting it back.’

  ‘You did say you were only going to take a look,’ said Herr Hoffer, plaintively.

  He peered over the Paul Burck. His toes were curling in his socks. The black darn looked ridiculous.

  ‘I said, I’m serious. I’m not a thief, Ingrid.’

  ‘Ingrid?’ exclaimed Frau Schenkel. Then she and Hilde and even Werner started to snort, as if they found it funny.

  ‘How did you know that?’ Frau Schenkel shouted.

  It was awful: she was really shouting with hilarity and delight.

  ‘You told me, once,’ said Bendel.

  ‘I can’t have done.’

  ‘You did. You were annoyed with him, as usual. You told me. Years ago.’

  ‘Told him what?’ asked Herr Hoffer, out of a sea of flames.

  ‘This isn’t very fair,’ said Hilde.

  ‘Your nickname, Heinrich,’ came from Werner in the shadows. ‘For as long as I can remember.’

  Herr Hoffer felt that this was the worst moment of his life, oddly enough. It was worse than Dresden. It was worse than the Degenerate purge. Ingrid. Yes, although he had no real idea how he was Ingrid, it seemed to fit him like a glove. That was the paradox. He didn’t know how, yet he knew why.

  And in that moment he knew, as well, in his gut if not in his brain, that Sabine had slept with Bendel.

  50

  They were going to throw the biggest party in the history of the world. And the houses of the town would be set upright and everyone would say to everyone else, ‘You’re looking good, boy.’ And that’s how it would be. And they would pass out on beer and Hershey’s Tropical Chocolate would rain from the skies, incidentally. He had fished out his War Department Technical Manual TM30–606 because it was good for all the ills of the world, being a German phrase book, and without that and having to handle this whole thing by himself he would not be good for another day, let alone this one.

  The words for beam and saw did not feature. Are you hungry did, but I have never heard that word before in my whole fucking life did not, though it should have done. This shelter is authorised to receive only ( . . .) people. Now that was as much use as a bug in a hammock. You looked up the number. Now what goddamn use was that? Nobody was bombing their own side unless they were the truly lazy cocksuckers who had bombed them outside St-Quentin.

  He tried something in Heini but he had to show it to them on the page. He mimed beams with his hands. The book was no use and he jammed it back in his pocket and realised he still had the red notebook in there taken from that dead with the ripped face in the museum vaults. Hell, he had so many goddamn pockets he didn’t know what was laid inside them unless they were going to save his life like a cigarette case might do one day or maybe even a field dressing or a clip of ammunition. What wasn’t important was the question. Every goddamn thing was important, brother.

  He used the red notebook and its pencil to show them what was needed. What they needed was beams. They couldn’t open
the door, or the ceiling and maybe the whole building might come down, so they had to replace the door with something else. They had to find something else to keep the ceiling up, like miners did. They had to construct a kind of miner’s shaft or tunnel, a network of pit-props. He was talking quietly and sketching, which was an international language. He was in charge, now. There was a lot of writing in this notebook. The guy must have kept a journal and maybe there were intrigues in there and his courting days in peacetime. Or maybe it was all a soldier’s philosophy, though he’d not been in uniform. A lot of the pages were stained purple-brown, one after the other the same and then diminishing.

  Yup, it was easy being in charge of people when they had nothing, when they were dazed and defeated and generally cut off from any sense of confidence in anything. It was not an achievement.

  He had studied the ceiling a little and reckoned from the bulge in the plaster and the bent pipes that a main beam had in fact broken and slid down and been caught by the metal door; the door was the beam’s only support on one side. Buildings touched by bombs could be like houses of cards: a shout or a jab of the thumb could bring them down. It did not take a genius.

  Moving the door could be the jab of the thumb.

  What he in fact communicated was something much simpler: Do Not Touch Door, Door Dangerous, Need Beams and Saws. Women up in the streets, along with the elderly air-raid guys who’d stayed, were already clearing the rubble, they had saws and stuff and plenty of beams. The widow he’d had sex with, she kept squeezing her hands and calling out her kids’ names by the shelter door – ‘Erika, Elisabeth!’

  She was told to go up to the street, she was hysterical and in the way.

  She went up, pretty well herded there, wailing like a demon. Parry wasn’t sure whether Erika and the other one – Elisabeth – had responded. If they hadn’t, it looked bad. He could hear groaning and moaning in there, like a whole lot of people making love or a first-aid station. Behind the scared voices at the crack in the door there was a lot of that groaning. So there was life, but maybe not one-hundred-per-cent life.