by Adam Thorpe
Werner looked even paler than usual. ‘I’ve killed a man before,’ he added, as if someone had denied it. ‘In a British trench. I saw his eyes.’
‘Well, anyone can see you’ve had practice,’ said Frau Schenkel.
She lit a cigarette and offered some around. Herr Hoffer opened his mouth and she put one in and lit it for him. The bombardment seemed to have stopped. Perhaps it was all over. Frau Schenkel’s upper right cheek was quivering. Even in the poor light, it was visible.
‘Well, I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I hope I never see that again.’
The hand holding her cigarette had to be held by the other hand to stop it shaking.
‘Heinrich, are you compos mentis?’
He was in a mould, like one of those bodies in Pompeii.
‘Yes, Werner.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Yes, Werner.’
‘You don’t look it.’
‘Sorry. Can’t get up. Fall down.’
‘You’re holding that painting all the time.’
‘Psychological.’
‘Listen, Heinrich. Are you sure you saw nobody up in the attics?’
Herr Hoffer nodded. He breathed in slowly, making a huge effort. The mould cracked and he rose from the dead. ‘If Gustav – was – sure he’s – unhurt. No cries.’
‘He might have been killed,’ said Frau Schenkel.
Herr Hoffer coughed on the sour cigarette that hung from his mouth.
‘That was not my writing in the notebook,’ said Werner, into his hands.
‘I didn’t think it was,’ said Frau Schenkel.
‘I don’t know whose it is,’ Werner added, rather too quickly.
He said nothing more. He still had his head in his hands. It was quite a relief, knowing that Werner was only himself, after all.
‘Gustav’s, Herr Oberst? Perhaps the poor soul can write, after all. Let me have a look.’
Frau Schenkel leaned forward, trembling hand outstretched.
Werner shook his head.
‘I don’t have it on me,’ he murmured. ‘Not now. Maybe it’s incriminating. Hm? I’ll go and check up in the attics. Just as soon as my head stops spinning.’
‘Werner,’ said Herr Hoffer, his voice flooding back again, ‘I would not have left the scene if I thought anyone was hurt.’
‘No?’
‘Of course not. Are you alright, Fräulein Winkel?’ he asked, as if to prove his point.
She nodded, the blood on her swollen lip glinting a stippled highlight. Herr Hoffer stared at her over the Burck’s frame. He was coming into the station and she was waiting for him there, desperate, in need of comfort.
‘Apologies to you, Heinrich.’
‘That’s alright, Werner. I’m sure it can be restored. It’s only a hole.’
‘I mean, for killing your friend.’
‘My friend? Bendel? He wasn’t my friend!’
‘Ah,’ said Werner, raising his finger, ‘I hear the cock crow thrice.’
‘I must object to that. He was never my friend. I humoured him, that is all. Herr Streicher perceived him as a threat. Clearly, he was.’
‘And all this time,’ said Werner, ‘I thought he was your friend, Heinrich.’
Herr Hoffer blinked at his colleague. He was staggered at the lengths to which Werner would go just to torment him. Perhaps it was a sublimated sexual problem. There used to be sexology clinics for such problems. Air, light and sun. And seawater, possibly. Ah, the sea. Helgoland. Werner had put the pistol back in his coat, at least. He seemed almost unperturbed at having done away with someone. Or perhaps he was still in shock. After the war, Werner Oberst would have to be forced into early retirement. It would be seen to. He, Herr Director Hoffer, would see to it. And he would take his daughters to Helgoland and build them the biggest sandcastle they had ever seen, with a moat full of seawater.
‘Funny – one minute alive, the next dead,’ Frau Schenkel remarked. ‘It’s always like that. Here today, gone tomorrow.’
At that moment Caspar Friedrich reappeared and mewed at the door. Werner let him out.
‘Take care,’ he said. ‘Folk have abnormal cravings out there.’
‘At least he didn’t relieve himself in here,’ said Frau Schenkel. ‘I couldn’t have stood that smell.’
A sudden loud bang made Frau Schenkel’s cigarette fall from her lips. It was as if somebody had dropped a huge cupboard. A trickle of mortar dust started above them, forming a cone on the floor and clouding the air, prickling their eyes with lime.
The cone of mortar dust was growing, like the sand in an hourglass.
‘I’m sorry to tell you that Herr Wolmer has almost certainly passed on,’ said Herr Hoffer. ‘Fallen in the line of duty. He got in the way of Bendel.’
There was a general murmur of astonishment.
‘Oh dear,’ said Frau Schenkel. ‘Poor old Herr. Wolmer. He did have his good points.’
‘I wish to apologise,’ Herr Hoffer stated, ‘for failing in my line of duty.’
He was still holding the Paul Burck painting upright in front of him, resting the bottom edge on his knees, hiding his shame. He gazed into the painting’s airless, sylvan depths where the muddy track climbed and vanished. What a discovery that was, the rules of perspective! Or were they laws? No, Alberti took the laws and made rules out of them. The rule comes after the law. Three dimensions out of two dimensions, all because of rules that came out of laws that came out of where? The eye? Nature? God?
They were all looking at him.
‘But at least,’ he went on, ‘we did not lose our one van Gogh, for which I must thank Herr Oberst. There’s nothing that can’t be mended. And we are all still alive. Except for poor Herr Wolmer.’
‘Do you have to hold that damn thing in front of you?’
‘Yes, Werner.’
The vaults shook again, slightly. Oddly, the mortar dust stopped falling. The silver birches were preferable to Werner’s triumphant look. It was hard to believe that at one point Werner had been a new boy, wet behind the ears. One had to keep reminding oneself of this, but to no avail. Werner had been around since the Creation. Herr Hoffer was gazing upon the silver birches with their dabs of titanium white where the sun fell upon their trunks, but neither silver birches nor titanium white were uppermost in his mind. He was back in the entrance hall in 1934, at the welcoming drinks for the new librarian. There was a loud woman in a strange hat who believed that the salvation of the world would be in leaving infants with pots of finger-paints, to make handprints all over the walls, to splash each other with colour! Werner was nodding with that dry little smile on his face, then he had turned to Herr Hoffer and said, quietly, ‘I know all about you now, Herr Hoffer.’
‘Do you?’
‘You told someone to go out and tear down a poster of our great Führer.’
Herr Hoffer blushed, but the loud woman had wandered off.
‘I did what?’
‘Well done,’ Werner said, quietly. ‘Between these four walls.’
‘Yes, I suggested it. Just before the election, last year. I’m not exactly a Party man –’
‘And he got beaten up for it.’
‘Who?’
‘The one you told to go out and tear down the poster of our great Führer.’
‘I didn’t tell him. I suggested it, almost as a joke. Hardly that. It was, in fact, a bit of a misunderstanding –’
‘I see,’ Werner had said, looking at him strangely. ‘I see, now. The whole thing has been simply a bit of a misunderstanding. But of course.’
Within the first few minutes of their acquaintance, the man was tormenting him! The forest path wound up through the silver birches, unattainable, into the gloom and the verdant darkness. That, too, was a torment.
Frau Schenkel turned to Werner. ‘What was all that rubbish he was speaking about Jews and hair and socks?’
Werner shrugged. ‘Why, Frau Schenkel, are you worried?’
‘I am a bit,’ sh
e said, eyes shining with tears. ‘I don’t like to think of my poor Dieter and my dearest little Siggi with socks like that on their feet.’
56
When they tried to open the goddamn door, it jammed on the ceiling.
So they’d have to chip away at that part of the ceiling and then raise the broken main beam before they could even open the door.
‘Gentle up,’ Parry kept saying.
In fact, the beam turned out to be a steel joist. The block of flats was built fairly recently and its inner structure was metal. The joist hadn’t broken, it had been dislodged from its support on the shelter side. Great cracks in the walls showed how the whole building had jerked and resettled, the joist slipping from its position despite the cement packed around it and then getting arrested in its descent only by the door.
‘You can’t ever tell,’ said Parry.
And the guy Anton, who was shiny with sweat and very tired because he was out of shape, did not understand what that meant.
The door had moved, too. No one had tried to open it. It had been forced a few inches out by the vacuum created by the blast, otherwise the joist would’ve fallen all the way and maybe the five or six floors of the building would have plunged down with it. Who was to know?
‘Will you take hold of that,’ said Parry, looking at it and shaking his head.
And Anton did not understand this, either.
The joist was resting right on the edge of the door, a quarter of an inch from the edge and from falling. It was like a crazy circus act. Like a long full shelf held up only by a book you wanted to read.
All these theories of pressure and force were going around in Parry’s head as he wondered at the size of the exposed steel joist. Then he realised that the door was making noises. It was groaning. Maybe it was straining at the hinges, ready to buckle and fall under the weight of the great joist and whatever tonnage was above it. The laths in the cracked concrete above the plaster were of metal, one of those metal grids that he’d seen back home on building sites, leaning against fences, and that now you saw everywhere poking out of the rubble or draped over walls like shredded rags or even cobwebs. He hadn’t been an expert in demolition before the war. Now he was an expert.
For the rest of his life he’d be able to paint ruins, he thought, very unromantic ruins with garbage and metal and bricks and lumps of masonry in just any old position and any old country: ruins of every nation. Import and export. Chaos.
Now he was fumbling with the chaos, right at the heart of it, trying to turn the dial ever so carefully towards order and salvation. And the goddamn door kept making these noises over the desperate sounds beyond it. This was the Flood trickling around their boots. This was the quarter inch between life and death, order and chaos, salvation and the end that is maybe despair. And he didn’t know what to do, now. He didn’t know what the fuck else to do because whatever he did would be wrong.
‘You bitch,’ he said, just as Frau Hoffmann or Hoffnung appeared with a toy rabbit, but he didn’t mean her.
It was a very filthy toy rabbit, and it flopped in her hand like it had given up. The others were standing around the pit-props looking lost, waiting for Parry to have a good idea, listening to the groaning that was both the metal of the door and the people beyond it. Even young Anton, who did seem to have a real smartness about him and would lead the world Red revolution, was just listening to the groaning.
Then she went up to the shelter door and no one stopped her. She held the toy rabbit in all its floppiness up to the crack and called for Erika. She was calling her and saying something, maybe that she had the kid’s toy rabbit, Parry didn’t know. The US army’s German phrase book did not cover all eventualities.
But he reckoned that’s what she was calling out. This certainly wasn’t the Big Picture, he thought. What I need is a chance to look and think and she is distracting me with this toy thing.
And then the door moved in a strange way.
It moved soundlessly at first, just leaning back a little maybe a quarter of an inch. And then this shrieking sound that was metal on metal engulfed Parry as he was turning his body away and trying to hide his head.
57
Herr Hoffer held the Paul Burck against his chest and realised that he should never have left his wife and children that morning.
His first duty was to his loved ones. As it was, he had been of no use to anybody in the museum. Frau Schenkel had been right all along. He hadn’t even been of much use to Hilde Winkel, who was still shivering. He wished he had the courage to put his arm around Fraulein Winkel and comfort her. It would comfort him too, to do this. He was sure she wouldn’t mind his wet trousers. Who could mind such trivial failures now? One’s first duty was to others.
He decided that, after the war – in other words, in the weeks to follow – he would take much more care of such things. Other people, starting with one’s loved ones. He imagined life would be very hard, in the months and possibly years to follow. Forget Helgoland. One had to be realistic. There might not even be any white beer, or lemons. Only rhubarb. But he would take his daughters to the park. It was unlikely the park would have been destroyed, and new trees would be planted to replace those smashed in the last bombing raid. He took his daughters to the park most Sundays, and they would run about and play on the grass. Especially Erika, who never stopped running. (This, Sabine joked, was because they had gone to the Berlin Olympics in the same week as her conception.) He had taken them last Sunday, for instance. Oddly, they always followed the same route through the park, skirting the big ornamental pond with its sluggish goldfish and weaving between the large glossy bushes in the shrubbery, before stopping at the swings. He must take a new route, from now on. He would even start at the other gate, so as not to fall back into the old rut. They could begin with the swings and end with the ornamental pond, sailing their little boats. He would make his two dear girls even finer boats, painted red and blue and yellow, with glossy black funnels. Sabine sometimes accompanied them to the park, but more often than not she used the time to sit by herself on their nice green sofa and read old magazines or darn socks while listening to the wireless. Sometimes she waxed and polished the furniture. Whenever a bombing raid made the pictures go crooked, she would always right them, giving them a wipe as she did so. That’s what had got them through, he realised. When the dust fell like a mist, Sabine was always there to wipe it away.
He would forgive her, right off, even if she howled with grief for Bendel.
Most of his compatriots who were not so fortunate would no doubt be paddling about in damp cellars or under tarpaulin, haggling for food and such things as candles or paraffin or wood. The younger men would join forces with the Americans and the British and drive back the Bolshevik hordes. The bigger Nazis – not the famous ringleaders, who would be put on trial – would probably be flown out to America with their nefarious gains, their criminal fortunes, their priceless works of art, while the lesser Nazis would flourish at home with what they had thieved and put aside. It was always like that. It had been like that since time immemorial.
Money, Herr Hoffer had long realised, was the key to all doors – except, perhaps, happiness. Money would be the new God.
But he, Herr Hoffer, would not worship that new God. He would worship the small, domestic gods and the stranger god of love. Yes, Captain Clark Gable, that is my ideal. Let us call it German. My old German ideal. He would try to be as selfless as he could, to be a decent father and husband, to shield his loved ones from the hardships to come, through sheer cheerfulness and inner warmth. He would read them poetry and play them Schumann. The thought of Lohenfelde Park slightly depressed him, he couldn’t say why. He pictured himself walking with his lovely daughters in the proper countryside, through an unknown birch wood beside a meadow, in a summer breeze, hearing the rustling and sighing of the leaves. It did not matter if he had failed, or if he had been laughable in the eyes of others who had called him a stupid and puzzling name: the important
thing was to pick oneself up again and carry on.
He glanced at his watch. It was very nearly eleven o’clock. Things were much quieter. Werner, Frau Schenkel and Hilde Winkel all had their eyes closed. It was really very peaceful, after the storm.
Yes, he would definitely forgive Sabine for the business with Bendel. She would grieve for the fellow, of course – but he would soothe her with the sheer force of his Christian patience and his Christian love. He would no doubt be very busy with the recovery of the museum’s collection from the salt-mines, especially if he was appointed official Director, but somehow he would always put his loved ones first. He might even teach his little girls to like paintings, with enough patience and care. He would not tell jokes about Jews and socks, if only out of precaution. He would once again buy his bespoke overcoats from old Mordecai Grassgrän, the minute the crafty devil returned from Poland, or perhaps Romania, and re-opened his shop in Fritz-Klingenberg-Strasse (which would have to have been renamed, of course). That way he would avoid the Hebrews’ ire.
He was most uncomfortable in his wet trousers, but he ignored it. The main task in the immediate future was not to be shot by the Americans. They were trigger-happy. Sometimes, on clearing a town, they fired on anything that moved. He had heard about this from the refugees. On the other hand, they were unlikely to shoot someone in socks who had wet himself. He had closed his eyes. He felt he must have dropped off: on opening them again, he was surprised by the extraordinary smell of burnt things, bitter in his nose. There was a man in front of him, a soldier. A shadow in a helmet. A pale and wavering form that seemed to glow from within, pulsing with some unearthly force. The form was moving into the depths of the vaults, like a visitant angel. Sounds made their way to his ears as if travelling over a great distance, distorted and faint and strange. He was in pain, but the pain was not quite his own; it was emanating from his skin, but his skin had been sloughed off somehow. He would have cried out in terror, but all he could manage was a silent cry. The sighing of the wind through the leaves took every last syllable from him, growing into a great rustling and soughing in which the creak of branches sounded and the rush of clouds above the wood roared like blood as he was whisked up into them and dispersed among them like rain.
