The Rules of Perspective

by Adam Thorpe

  ‘And all I want to do,’ this inexpressible girl murmured, ‘is get back to Erfurt and bury my dog.’

  Bendel looked up from his watch. ‘Your dog?’

  ‘Our little terrier, Foxtrott. He was killed when the bomb destroyed our house. We had left him there when we went out to my cousin’s farm to get away from the bombing. Then we were told we couldn’t go back, I don’t know why. We never went back. He was nearly eight.’

  ‘That’s quite old for a terrier, Hilde,’ Herr Hoffer pointed out.

  ‘Doesn’t make any difference.’

  He asked when it was.

  ‘Three years ago,’ Hilde replied.

  ‘Blame the Americans and the British,’ said Bendel.

  ‘Foxtrott,’ muttered Frau Schenkel. ‘Takes all sorts, I suppose.’

  Hilde closed her eyes and rested her head against the wall, her fingers in Caspar Friedrich’s fur. Bendel’s finger was tightening against the trigger. He glanced at Herr Hoffer, like a boy seeking permission. The eyes were dull and red-veined, like an alcoholic’s. He had probably killed quite a few people in his brief military career, thought Herr Hoffer. Civilians, even. It would have become natural to him. Herr Hoffer could almost feel the trigger spring condensing inside his head.

  ‘Bendel,’ said Herr Hoffer, ‘at least count aloud. It helps me concentrate.’

  ‘Alright. Thirty, twenty-nine, twenty-eight . . .’

  Herr Hoffer was pleasantly surprised that the numbers were still so high. He had to concentrate. A submachine-gun was pointing at Hilde Winkel’s head, wielded by someone desperate, unstable, and in the Waffen-SS. Bendel was counting down to zero, presumably. Zero was the bottomless shaft in the deadly mine. Hilde had her hands over her ears, Frau Schenkel had hers over her eyes, while Werner’s were clasped as if in prayer in front of his chin. The three wise monkeys, thought Herr Hoffer, clutching the Paul Burck as if he could wander off into the silver birch woods by sheer effort of will. Waldesrauschen. But it was a very still painting, very still. Not a breath of wind. He could write to Burck and ask him why he had given it that title, back in 1913. He decided he would tell Bendel where the van Gogh was to be found when the count got down to fifteen. He was quite certain that Bendel would steal it, and he didn’t want Bendel to steal it. Maybe something would happen before they got to fifteen. Hilde was staring at him. She was clasping her knees, now, and staring at him not below the eyes but straight in them. The gun was at her head, almost touching her hair, like a finger pushing away a curl. Nobody was saying anything. He couldn’t bear the thought of the Vincent disappearing for ever over the horizon. So many treasures had floated away over the horizon and disappeared. He heard the number thirteen, which surprised him. Twelve. Eleven. It was a contest between the sharpness of a bullet and fear, that awful solid bluntness of fear. He felt as poor Gustav must feel, overcome by somnolence, tottering upright. Bendel got down to eight – he was counting very deliberately and slowly – before Herr Hoffer spoke up. He was trying to keep his head fixed, to give himself more authority, but he had uncontrollable little spasms in his neck muscles.

  ‘Look, if I don’t tell you, you’ll shoot Fräulein Winkel, and then what?’

  ‘I’ll shoot someone else. Not you. If I shoot you, then I won’t know where the painting has been hidden. And I think you might well want to die rather than tell me.’

  ‘Thank you for the compliment.’

  ‘Whatever,’ said Bendel, ‘no man could watch a lovely German girl being shot if there was a way to prevent it. Seven. Six. I’ll also shoot up the paintings, just for you.’

  ‘No normal man could shoot a German girl in the first place,’ said Herr Hoffer, his heart leaping as if horrified by his tongue.

  Bendel laughed.

  ‘My dear Herr Hoffer, as Spinoza once put it: God acts merely according to his own laws, and is compelled by no one.’

  ‘You are not God,’ said Herr Hoffer, without enough conviction.

  ‘Fancy an SS-Sturmführer quoting a Jew,’ murmured Werner.

  Hilde was trembling and staring straight at Herr Hoffer: the lint had dropped off her lip. Its swollenness made her look like a village simpleton.

  ‘Read Descartes on deception,’ said Bendel, playfully. His dirty-nailed finger was genuinely pressing the trigger. ‘Six. Five. Four –’

  ‘Alright, old fellow. I haven’t time to read Descartes. It’s actually not even in the building.’

  ‘Where is it, then? Three. Two –’

  ‘Ask Herr Streicher,’ said Herr Hoffer, sweat beading on his nose. All he wanted was to see his darling little girls –

  ‘Herr Streicher?’

  ‘He dealt with it. He’s still at home, I believe. Fritz-Todt-Strasse. He says that if the Americans destroy his museum, he will kill them with his bare hands.’

  ‘I thought he was ill,’ whispered Frau Schenkel, unhelpfully.

  ‘He is,’ said Herr Hoffer.

  ‘I did see Herr Streicher,’ said Bendel, to everyone’s surprise. ‘I went to his house first of all. I thought he might tell me, being ill. I lied to him. I said I was ordered to protect the painting by the Reichsführer-SS himself, as it was not in the salt-mine depot. He was very cool. He just puffed on his pipe and told me to see you, as the man officially in charge.’

  ‘That’s Herr Streicher all over,’ murmured Herr Hoffer.

  ‘He didn’t look very ill, just tired. He was being tended by a very pretty maid called Gretchen. He has a bed set up in his sitting room and he was lying there in his nightshirt with an MG 34 on a bipod between his legs. It frightened the life out of me when I was shown in. An MG 34 is a fuck sight better than bare hands. The maid called Gretchen watches the museum through powerful binoculars. For the sake of the Third Army I hope it is not hit.’

  ‘It has been hit,’ said Herr Hoffer.

  ‘Winged, but not downed,’ said Bendel. ‘You’re lying to me, Herr Hoffer.’

  ‘Hilde Winkel is innocent,’ he declared. ‘You can’t go killing an innocent.’

  Bendel laughed in that old, high-pitched way of his.

  ‘Deception, Herr Hoffer. Just because you’re not pulling the trigger, you think you’re not responsible. You are wholly responsible. You have the choice. Anyway, none of us is innocent. That’s the biggest fucking deception of all.’

  ‘I appeal to your common humanity, dear fellow.’

  ‘Bad luck. I’ve been to Poland,’ said Bendel.

  Nobody said anything.

  ‘Yes, I was in Poland,’ he continued. ‘Upper Silesia, to be precise. You take the train out of Cracow and in about forty minutes you’re somewhere nobody ought to go ever in their whole fucking lives, even if they’re specifically invited –’

  Bendel seemed to be trembling. That was not good, given his finger was on the trigger.

  ‘We are not in Poland,’ said Herr Hoffer.

  ‘Everywhere’s Poland.’

  ‘Look, dear fellow –’

  There was a sudden brief burst of machine-gun fire. It was incredibly loud. Herr Hoffer had squeezed his eyes shut – no, the noise had squeezed them shut for him – and he opened them again in the ringing quiet. Bendel had swung his gun round and shot at the paintings on the trestles. He had given them a licking. But they would be mended. It wasn’t Hilde. The holes and rips would be mended. Herr Hoffer didn’t know how many bullets had been expended on them but they would only have made holes, small rips. Everything could be mended, restored, varnished, saved. He wanted to cry and bit his lip instead. Hilde was whimpering, but she was intact. Caspar Friedrich had vanished. Herr Hoffer’s mouth was wide open. All he could see beyond the candle was a splintered frame. His ears felt like broken teeth.

  ‘Fuck all that humanity shit,’ Bendel shouted into the singing echo, sounding like a Bavarian worker, or even a Communist, except that he was almost crying. ‘It’s a bourgeois fraud, Herr Hoffer, a pathetic little capitalist costume. A party frock. I was in Poland for three months. The fo
rmer Polish territories. I didn’t say anything, of course, but I felt physically ill every day, especially because I have a soft spot for toddlers. I love the way they toddle about, even in that place no one ought to go in their whole fucking lives that I can’t fucking describe they toddled about on their little legs. Then I had my revelation. All this, I thought, is the beginning of the – the nature cure, I called it. A cleaning out of the Augean stables. Bound to stink, at first. The mucking out. The nature cure. My model is the shark. That’s my fucking model. I’ve read somewhere that the shark, in its present form, is an extremely ancient animal. Pity is always for the self, in the end. If only we realised that everything is ultimately for the self, we might begin to grow into something as clean and beautiful as the shark.’

  He was really close to breaking down; his voice was strident, it was pitched too high and almost all on one note.

  ‘What utter pigswill you SS shits talk,’ Werner growled.

  Bendel stepped over to him and Werner raised his arms.

  Herr Hoffer shut his eyes.

  He opened them again. The barrel of the gun was raised, hovering above Werner’s face. All metal. The cracking noise would be dreadful, like a dog settling into a bone. Herr Hoffer had heard it when poor Gustav was being beaten up, and on several other occasions. He felt that his heart was about to explode, it was beating so fast and fiercely, and his buttocks were tingling as if electrical pads had been applied. He would very much like to avoid Werner’s imminent fate. Then, incredibly, Bendel swivelled and was facing him, Herr Hoffer – the gun-barrel raised ready to come down on his nose.

  ‘You’re really fucking annoying me, Herr Hoffer!’ shouted Bendel. ‘You know that? You’re really getting me upset. In no way have you understood my point of view. That’s because most of the human race are petty-minded, blind cretins, starting with you, you little jumped-up fucker.’

  Frau Schenkel gave a tiny scream.

  ‘Alright,’ Herr Hoffer said, his hands up in front of him, both trembling like an old man’s with palsy; ‘I’ll tell you.’

  ‘So you don’t mind me being shot, but you do mind being beaten up?’ said Hilde Winkel in a hoarse voice, wiping away tears.

  ‘I want to avoid further pain,’ said Herr Hoffer.

  The truth was, he had already wetted his trousers. He’d let himself go, down under, and it had simply poured out, warmly. He had almost soiled his trousers, in fact. He wasn’t quite sure which part of him was capable of speech, but it was a noble and lonely part. The rest of him was cowering in a corner, petrified with terror. The gun was lowered. He couldn’t stand up, because his trousers were wet.

  ‘It’s hidden under a loose slab, around the corner.’

  ‘Get it,’ said Bendel.

  ‘I’m sorry, Bendel, I can’t. If I stand up,’ he lied, ‘I’ll fall over and pass out.’

  ‘Crawl there, then,’ said Bendel, grabbing the Burck painting from him and giving him a shove on the hip with his foot, stepping on Frau Schenkel’s leg in the process.

  Herr Hoffer crawled. He crawled on his hands and knees off around the corner to the back of the vaults. The others followed, herded by Bendel, carrying a candle which threw dreadful shadows in front of Herr Hoffer, as if he was being pursued by a legion of the dead. His thighs were wet and uncomfortable and his arms trembled and his injured hand hurt, but he continued to crawl. He wondered if he smelt of piss, like a tramp – but then everyone smelt, these days.

  He felt around for the loose slab and found it and then, with Werner’s help, he lifted it. The ancient cedarwood Mary Magdalene watched them from the shadows, her lovely arms raised in blessing or in horror. Bendel watched, too, with the gun trained on Hilde. He had a broken match set between his teeth.

  Everyone (even Herr Hoffer, in the circumstances) was astonished to see the sackcloth parcel lying like a shrouded infant inside the oubliette. He took it out reverently: surprising, the lightness of paintings. His hands were literally shaking as he handed it over to Bendel. Van Gogh was a saint and this man was a devil. Both were mad.

  ‘My God,’ said Werner Oberst, brushing his hands; ‘first David Teniers the Younger, now Vincent van Gogh. What price, trust?’

  ‘I didn’t do it for myself, Werner!’

  ‘Shut up,’ said Bendel.

  He tugged hard at the sackcloth, unwinding it impatiently and tossing it onto the floor. Frau Schenkel held the candle up and Bendel looked at the painting, his face gleaming in the candlelight. His expression hardly changed, but a ripple of emotion seemed to pass over it, as it does over someone finding a photograph of a lost loved one. Nobody jumped him. Herr Hoffer wanted to jump him but nothing happened when he ordered his body to leap.

  The Artist near Auvers-sur-Oise.

  Then Bendel wrapped the painting up again in the sackcloth and herded them back, Werner leading and Herr Hoffer forming the rear, still crawling. He kept expecting a metal-tipped boot in the behind, but nothing happened. He slipped into his old place next to Hilde and her lovely smell of sweat; Werner was too slow and had to make do once more with Frau Schenkel. Herr Hoffer’s palms and knees were filthy and the linen of his trousers stuck wetly to his thighs.

  Bendel ordered them to sit with their hands behind their heads, like prisoners of war. All except Frau Schenkel, who had to wrap the painting further in the covers off the cushions. She had to rip the old cloth up with her teeth.

  Then Bendel unbuttoned his bread haversack and took out a shirt and a pale blue cardigan and a pair of fieldworker’s trousers, all rolled up like a tent. He removed his camouflage uniform and donned the baggy trousers and woollen shirt and cardigan, keeping a beady eye on the others in case anyone tried to make so much as a single false move. Herr Hoffer did his best to make sure that he looked as if he was harbouring nothing but the most honest intentions.

  Which he was, of course.

  54

  Within the hour they had set up the basic framework of the props. It was a kind of thick scaffolding, a tunnel of beam and crossbeam. It was amazing how well people could work together, how ingenious were the works of man. There’ll be no more bombing, Parry thought. No more destruction. The guy who spoke English was good to have around, he was young and efficient, his name was Anton – maybe he really had hated the Nazis and somehow escaped the draft. Maybe he really was a Commie or a Yid.

  He needed a slug of whiskey. Too bad he’d broken the cognac. He needed a cigar store and a bar and plenty of time. And on the stoop is sunlight and it is Maytime, not too hot, so the sunlight is just bold enough to warm you and over there are the meadows and the woods and the woods are rustling like skirts and the air is very fresh and there are no lies in anyone.

  Very soon the framework was in place. There were no hammers and no nails so they had to go back to carpentry joints, crude tongue and groove, as in very old pioneer times, though even the pioneers probably had nails unless they had dropped them someplace, say in a bug-filled marsh.

  This was like a marsh. They were paddling about in water, warm water was trickling onto them from the joins in the strained pipes just above them, a few inches from their heads.

  They had to work so gently and carefully, placing the props not an inch short of the ceiling.

  The older men, maybe in their sixties, were wheezing a little. One of them was a carpenter with missing fingers on his big hands, he was very useful. These are the same people, thought Parry, that we were shelling and bombing just over twenty-four hours ago. These were mine enemy. Now we’re working together gently and carefully to undo the destruction. This is how the world’s going to go, from now on. We’re all going to go gently and carefully, undoing the destruction. Delivering creation into the hands of the good and the wise and so the lying will stop thereafter.

  Though maybe you still won’t know what’s sprawled and waiting for you around the corner.

  They had to hold their breath, almost, placing the beams and fitting them together around the door and then slowl
y, ever so slowly, raising the framework by shoehorning it up with wedges, tapping the wedges so very softly until the crossbeams touched the bulge of the ceiling, loosening fragments of plaster, pressing against the hidden laths as gently as a peach against a wicker basket: whereupon they stopped and breathed again, whispering to one other in German, in English – in all the tongues of the world, it might have been, gazing upon their great and simple work with pride.

  ‘It is excellent,’ said the young man called Anton.

  ‘It’s goddamn Biblical,’ murmured Parry. ‘That’s the strange thing. Now comes the Flood, you guys.’

  55

  When Bendel had dressed and was holding his gun again, he told them they could lower their hands.

  ‘Thank you for small mercies,’ said Werner.

  The Paul Burck painting was lying next to Herr Hoffer. He picked it up and rested it on his chest again, covering his shame below.

  ‘So you just wanted to look at it, did you, Bendel?’

  ‘Shut up,’ said Bendel. ‘I’m too fagged out to argue.’

  Herr Hoffer thought of Bendel emptying the chateaux of France and the palaces of Poland, huge painted canvases emerging on pallets and disappearing into lorries like – what was it he had said? – like whole pieces of the landscape, like life itself, disappearing into a furniture lorry. That is what will happen to genius, thought Herr Hoffer; it will all disappear into a furniture lorry and be driven off by louts and crooks. The van Gogh had disappeared further into the cloth off the cushions; Frau Schenkel had knotted the string and Bendel had knotted the thin rope that held up the peasant trousers, now his trousers, soon perhaps to be someone else’s. The human genius was to have invented knots, knots were very ancient, they permitted all sorts of things. Herr Hoffer was reasonably sure that even the most intelligent of the apes in the jungles of Africa had not yet come round to using knots. Nor had he come round to using guns and bombs. Frau Schenkel had handed Bendel the painting, neatly wrapped in the patterned cloth. Everything Frau Schenkel did was neat. It was enviable. Herr Hoffer could not wrap up without making a mess of it. It was always Sabine who wrapped up the girls’ presents at Christmas or on birthdays, until the paper shortages. His lovely girls! An unceasing succession of noises, like lorries backfiring, announced some sort of renewed assault. Bendel could, at any minute, decide to shoot them all. It was his, Herr Hoffer’s, job to make sure he did not. It was all that was left of his dignity, this job. He wondered what Bendel had meant by somewhere near Cracow that no one should ever visit in their whole lives. A mass grave, probably. It was said that all the Polish officers had been shot. That was war, martial law, Clausewitz, the indispensable severities whose ruthless application is the only true humanity (the Wandervogel camp, the cooking-fire, the readings from those dreadful professors, the awful bigger boys against whom he was helpless). He, Herr Hoffer, would visit this place.