The Rules of Perspective

by Adam Thorpe

  ‘Right away,’ he kept saying, when someone asked him something. It was never important, what they asked him in German which was so far from English it was incredible. That they lived on the same planet was incredible. You could kiss and you could hug in all the languages of the planet.

  Within fifteen minutes the beams and saws were coming down the stairs. Parry had sketched the plan properly in the red notebook because his Service Writing Tablet had got wet a few days back and he’d used it for goddamn hygienic purposes and now they needed a clear drawing and so he had been right to take the red notebook. They were impressed by his drawing. He put some cartoon figures in and held the drawing up so that the trapped Heinies could see it through the crack in the door. The glistening single eyes were saying a whole lot of stuff that sounded panicked and bad. There was no light for these people, it must be very close and uncomfortable, they were like trapped miners. The crack was too slight even to pass a flashlight through and no one had found any candles. He didn’t even have a Hershey bar but then that might provoke them into tearing each other apart.

  Anyway, lighting a candle was a bad idea, he thought he could smell gas from all the broken gas pipes; it amazed him that these places still had gas and electricity right up to when they were blasted. Now they would not have anything like that for months. He could certainly smell the calls of nature because every goddamn intact building anywhere was a spaghetti of sewage, it’s just that you didn’t think about it until you got it broken. Every bombed and shelled town smelt like that and it was disagreeable and moistened your brain disagreeably until you forgot about it under the bitterness and everything else.

  Then, as they were measuring the beams, a guy came up who spoke English. He looked terrible, like he’d been fighting or hiding out for years. They all looked terrible, except the real fat guys, the real big Nazis who had voices like bassoons and a goat’s kind of cunning and would ship themselves off to Clarksburg no doubt and run the churches and the pawn shops very soon and then the whole goddamn country. If goats were cunning. This guy smelt of pigs.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘They are trapped?’

  ‘Looks like it. You speak English?’

  ‘Yes, I do. And French. I was studying the poems of Baudelaire and Verlaine before the war. My name is Anton Zucker.’

  He was youngish, maybe in his late twenties, early thirties. He looked smart through his dirt and exhaustion. Parry had been told to suspect guys like that, to ask them for their papers, but now wasn’t the time.

  ‘There are many trapped people here,’ said the young man.

  ‘No, sir. It just looks that way.’

  ‘I am helping you?’

  ‘Good of you to show up. Hold this, Anton.’

  ‘I must be helping. I hated the Nazis. They were shit.’

  ‘You’d better have hated them. But I guess you’re all saying that. Pity you didn’t hate them earlier.’

  ‘I was in a hiding-hole for three years under a pigsty. I am a Communist with sensible information about the Nazis.’

  ‘I’m glad it’s sensible because nothing else is. Jesus. A pigsty. Now we’re all done for. The world Red revolution had better not start here. Hold that beam and quit talking, Anton. Tell me what Waldesraus means, before you quit talking.’

  ‘You mean Waldesrauschen?’

  ‘Could be, yup. Here.’

  He produced the wooden picture-label from his breast pocket. Anton studied it.

  ‘A whispering or a – a rustle of the woods,’ he said.

  ‘Really? That’s nice. I like that. A rustling of the woods.’

  They were calling out from behind the door: ‘Amerikaner, Amerikaner!’

  ‘The Americans are here,’ he called back to them, ‘and, hey, there’s a nice breeze through the trees.’

  51

  He would not allow his gut knowledge to interfere and put them all in danger. A public cuckold is worse than a private cuckold.

  ‘What about all those chateaux in France?’

  ‘Sorry, Herr Hoffer?’

  ‘You said you’re not a thief, but what about all those French chateaux, or all those palaces in Poland –?’

  ‘Irrelevant. Higher orders. Like the Americans and the British roasting Germans for breakfast with their bombs. Ah, the Cleopatra with the tits like apples. ‘What a joke.’

  ‘It started with us bombing London,’ Werner pointed out.

  ‘That was by mistake. They didn’t know it was London. Anyway, no one cares who started it,’ said Bendel. ‘You might as well blame Cain.’

  ‘That’s true enough,’ said Frau Schenkel, wiping her eyes.

  Herr Hoffer wanted to find his self-esteem again, but the name ‘Ingrid’ nailed him to his own shame, and his socks were ridiculous. Bendel was an absolute bastard, he thought. He was exactly like someone at school, all those years ago, but also very recent in the mind. Ludwig Rothenberger. Funnily enough, he was a Jew. Very short but very strong. He made little Heinrich’s life a misery. He called little Heinrich ‘Beatrice’, for some unknown reason. Almost as bad as ‘Ingrid’. He’d thought all that nasty stuff long past.

  Bendel pulled out another flat brown paper parcel; Herr Hoffer knew immediately it was the right one. His stomach caved in. He might even have to be sick. He gripped the frame of the Paul Burck like a plank in a rough sea.

  ‘That’s it,’ he said, weakly.

  He needn’t have said anything. He ought to have just clammed up. He hated the lot of them. He could so easily hate them, anyway, if he were to put his mind to it.

  Bendel was holding up the parcel so that the candlelight fell across it.

  ‘19,’ he announced, like a teller in a draw.

  He hesitated for a moment, then started to claw at the brown paper, not even bothering with the string.

  52

  Parry and the others worked as if they didn’t want to hurt anyone ever again. Because if they made a bad move then everybody would get hurt, including the whole world outside. The great world Red revolution would not happen, however, because this guy Anton Z-somebody was in fact the guy who was going to lead the Bolshevists after Stalin was shot and make one big Red Flag of the planet. That was one lonely advantage to this thing going wrong. Otherwise it was awful.

  The clearing of the rubble upstairs had stopped. People were being kept away from the building. The kerosene lamp and Morrison’s flashlight provided all the illumination there was. Outside it was night, it was cold and damp and it was hungry and thirsty.

  ‘Gentle up,’ Parry kept saying.

  He was happy because he was totally responsible, he was fulfilled, he had a very clear objective. Fear was something he knew so well by now that he could keep it in the corner, tamed like a girl with a cup of coffee. He never let go of his map pack, because the snowy mountains and the golden valley were in there. He would’ve liked to have had a look, he would’ve liked to have pressed on the buttons and released the flap to check on that picture, just to see the rolled-up thing that might have been one big rolled-up puttee like the kind the Brits had, only rougher, but it was not, it was goddamn ancient poetry in varnished oils. Mr Vollerdt. Nice item of salvage. Also, he liked pressing on the metal buttons of his uniform, he liked the way the two hair springs in the hole let go of the button when you pressed it out. It was well-made and it was made with care. These buttons had gotten so familiar to him and even loved: they were on his ammo belt and his map pack and his dressings pocket and just about everywhere else on his body. It was one of those feelings that if he died no one would recall, because it was his own boat he was holding and no one else’s. Although the whole of the US army was covered in these buttons. Walking or hunched or asleep, it was covered. The war was won on account of the fact that nothing dropped out of your pockets unless you were the victim of something very bad or at the least serious, which gave you the willies thinking of and so you felt your buttons like you once felt the nose of your te
ddy bear long ago for comfort in the pitch darkness, and you eased them in and out of their holes when you were waiting.

  He shifted the map pack onto his back and it only impeded him when he bent down to help with the sawing. He was doing this for the snowy mountains and the golden valley: that was the heavenly deal.

  ‘Amerikaner! Amerikaner!’

  ‘Right away, folks.’

  But you made goddamn sure they were all clipped tight before moving on.

  53

  Of course, Bendel was angry and disappointed when he saw the canvas, as blank as fresh snow. His anger was the quiet and icy kind, however: like a surgeon’s point of metal hovering over a vital part.

  ‘Herr Hoffer, what are you playing at?’

  ‘Ah, my Chinese picture.’

  ‘Heinrich,’ cried Werner, ‘what have you done?’

  Herr Hoffer pulled a face. He really didn’t care. Ingrid! All he wanted was to live on a remote island with his books and his paints, like Gauguin. Humanity was awful. He held the Paul Burck painting against his chest and peered over it, like a boy at the window of a train

  ‘He’s done a swap,’ said Frau Schenkel.

  They were all looking at him. They were people at a station. He felt as if he was gliding into a station where they had all been expecting him for days.

  ‘The Chinese made blank spaces speak,’ he murmured. ‘In that is the mystery.’

  Werner was now on his knees; he was examining the torn sheets of brown paper.

  ‘Impossible,’ said Werner Oberst. ‘That’s definitely a 19. We wrapped it ourselves. Heinrich? What have you been up to?’

  Bendel was holding out the blank canvas like a domestic with a tray. He looked more alarmed than angry, now.

  Herr Hoffer, with the eerie calm of despair, pulled out the pinkish octavo paper.

  ‘Let me check,’ he said.

  For once, he had caught everyone on the wrong foot.

  ‘I can’t understand this,’ he said. ‘It is number 19, isn’t it?’

  He held the sheet of paper up, so they could all see. Against the number 19, the characters sitting rather unevenly on account of the age of Frau Schenkel’s Remington, was typed Van Gogh, Vincent, Der Maler in der Nähe von Auvers-sur-Oise (1890), 28 x 21. It looked extremely convincing. Had he really set all this up himself? It was quite an achievement. They would frame this humble pinkish page, after the end.

  The kneeling Werner whipped the paper from Herr Hoffer’s hand and screwed it into a ball. When it’s smoothed out and framed, thought Herr Hoffer, it will look even more authentic, with the creases.

  ‘You really are a curious fellow, Heinrich,’ said Werner Oberst, between set teeth. He had stood up, now. He towered, only because Herr Hoffer was still sitting.

  ‘I don’t think Herr Hoffer would have swapped it,’ said Hilde.

  ‘Thank you, Fräulein Winkel.’

  Bendel really had no idea what-was going on. His hollow eyes glanced from one to the other. His mouth was open. The blank canvas stayed in his hands like an ivory tray waiting for a tea set.

  The ball of pinkish paper, which was the inventory, bounced off Herr Hoffer’s socks.

  ‘No great loss,’ said Frau Schenkel, with a sniff. ‘I don’t mind saying it, now. He’s messy and I don’t think he does people very well. But that’s just my opinion, take it or leave it. He’s a Dutchman, isn’t he? Surprising. Very neat, usually, the Dutch.’

  ‘He was a mental defective, Frau Schenkel,’ said Hilde, as if it was embarrassing. ‘That’s why he was messy. It was a certain view of art that we now see as being – as having much to do with the age of emperors.’

  Someone was crying. It was Bendel. The fine porcelain tea set had slipped off the tray and smashed.

  ‘I just want to look at it,’ he whined, tears rolling down through the dirt on his cheeks and leaving white stripes. ‘Then I don’t care.’

  The man was disintegrating. How could he ever have been feared?

  ‘Have you taken it for yourself, Heinrich?’

  ‘No, Werner. I object to that. I may be laughable, but I am not a thief. I may be a laughable fool, but I am not a vulgar thief like the Führer and his demi-monde of crooked cronies.’

  Hilde Winkel and Frau Schenkel gasped. Hilde’s fat lip started to bleed again, the drops squeezing out from under the loose lint and plopping onto her lap.

  ‘You’ll be dragged off to the camps for saying that, Herr Hoffer,’ she whispered.

  ‘Or shot in his bathroom,’ Werner said, folding his arms and gazing down like a withered god.

  ‘They only shoot you in the bathroom, do the Gestapo boys, if you’re of a certain rank and importance, Herr Oberst. That’s what my husband would say.’

  ‘True, Frau Schenkel,’ said Werner Oberst, nodding so that his glasses flashed. ‘For Herr Hoffer, it would be the camps.’

  ‘Beg to correct you, Werner,’ said Herr Hoffer, raising a finger over the frame. ‘Herr Pischek’s brother and sister-in-law were shot in their bathroom, actually in the bath, in Stuttgart.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘I don’t regard a grammar school teacher of mathematics as of a higher rank or importance than a director of a city museum and picture gallery.’

  ‘Were they in the bath together?’ asked Hilde, wide-eyed.

  ‘I’m sorry, but I still think it would be the camps for you, Heinrich,’ said Werner, tugging at the knees of his trousers as he sat down again with a little grunt and became mortal again. ‘It’s a matter of an indefinable certain something.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Herr Hoffer,’ said Hilde Winkel, looking at him below the eyes, ‘I think you would definitely be shot in the bathroom. Our neighbour Dr Echterling was, and he had not nearly so much of that indefinable something as you. I call it dignity.’

  ‘Fraülein Winkel, I thank you.’

  ‘What the hell are you all going on about?’ cried Bendel.

  Herr Hoffer now felt marvellous. Yes, dignity was the thing, and so underrated these days! All someone had to do was grab Bendel’s horrible gun, without losing their dignity. Because in a moment he would point it at someone’s head, Herr Hoffer was sure about that.

  ‘I know what you mean now,’ said Bendel, pointing a finger at him, instead of a gun.

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘You didn’t mean that it was wrapped up in brown paper, when you said it was hidden. You meant that it was put away where no one could find it.’

  ‘Really?’ said Werner. ‘How interesting.’

  The child’s metal arm swung in front of Bendel’s stomach as he spoke, the barrel resting against the scuffed leather of the map satchel. All someone had to do was grab the gun. But it was still slung around Bendel’s neck. It might go off. He might keep hold of it and shoot them all as he had already shot poor old Herr Wolmer. Herr Hoffer couldn’t bear not telling the others about Herr Wolmer. It seemed like a surreal detail. The yellow and cream and blue swirls of The Artist near Auvers-sur-Oise danced about in his head. Vincent was painting, just for him. Vincent was a saint. He died in poverty. The greatest wealth is that which you give to others, as Martial said in the toilets. The hard stone floor bit into his buttocks through the thin cushion.

  ‘Well, Heinrich?’

  ‘He’s right. I swapped the canvas, Werner. I wanted to save it from Party thieves and plunderers.’

  The shelling had started again, unfortunately. The walls quivered very slightly. Mortar pattered on the stiff white canvas at Bendel’s feet like fingers on a drum.

  ‘I’m not a thief,’ said Bendel. ‘All I want to do is look at it. If you don’t tell me, I’ll have to do something you won’t like.’

  He tapped the gun’s stock. The barrel was pointing, perhaps by accident, at Hilde Winkel.

  Herr Hoffer thought about Sabine and his two little girls. How fast they grew up! How fast everything changed! What was it about life that was so determined to move everything on, like a Party official at a mass rally?r />
  ‘Herr Hoffer,’ said Bendel. ‘Don’t be so bloody mean.’

  Now was the time, thought Herr Hoffer, not for silly tricks, but for miracles. He was not brave enough. This place was a ward in a madhouse. He was an inmate, too mad to know it, and there was no war going on at all. The nurses would be rattling the bedpans soon, and he would prattle on to them about Vincent van Gogh and Hilde Winkel’s lip and SS-Sturmführer Bendel and they would nod and smile and give him his sleeping draught. Was it Baudelaire who said that life was a hospital?

  ‘For fuck’s sake . . .’

  ‘Let me think, dear fellow,’ said Herr Hoffer. ‘I’m thinking. Give me a minute or two to think.’

  He looked at his own watch, as if timing himself. Just after ten o’clock. Where had the last hour flown? Then he stared, for some reason, at Bendel’s boots. The folds and tiny creases on the officer’s leather boots were real; he could see how they were charged with dirt and dust, and how painful it was to see the leather scraped raw in places or cut as if with a knife. This is life. Life is only this. A soldier’s tired boots. It wasn’t all the rest: the mental and emotional complications.

  ‘I said I’d protect you from the Americans, Fräulein Winkel,’ said Herr Hoffer, ‘but I didn’t count on the Germans.’

  Werner snorted and shook his head.

  ‘I’ll give you one minute precisely,’ said Bendel, and sniffed. The snout of the gun was a few centimetres from Hilde’s forehead. She frowned, as if she didn’t quite understand.

  ‘Well, I don’t know,’ sighed Frau Schenkel.

  Werner said, no longer shaking his head: ‘Heinrich, don’t be an idiot.’

  Hilde’s eyes stared out, as if unseeing. The cat slept on her lap, its ears flicking in dream. Were animals wise or just plain stupid?

  Bendel’s boots shifted slightly as he studied his watch. The candlelight gave a rather lovely lustre to them, defying their battered nature. They were so real. But Herr Hoffer saw such things in dreams, too, in loving detail, and believed those to be real. He did so want to live, to appreciate such things himself. Maybe even to paint them. A pair of Waffen-SS boots. Even they could be beautiful, once battered and soiled! He raised his eyes and gazed upon the girl with the swollen lip and its patch of bloodied lint. She was the loveliest creature in the world, granted such loveliness by the moment. She had passed beyond the real. She had become other, inexpressible. Herr Hoffer was amazed.