Men of Snow

by John R Burns

  ‘He talks about retribution like other people his age talk about pop music or something,’ she had once said.

  --------------------------------------------------------------------------

  David had done as he had promised and not phoned. Now Leon wondered if that had been a good idea because as the day had passed the anxieties had increased until as he was talking to Geraldine Dunlop he could hardly focus on what he was saying. His nerves were out of control.

  When he got out of his car he started going through the same ritual as always, something that was so embedded he did it automatically. He pulled down the garage door, walked across the driveway and stood on the front lawn.

  The rain had stopped, leaving a cold, damp feel to the evening. He forced himself to become aware of his house, of Rachel, of David. He made himself search the house front as carefully as he could. Nothing had ever to be taken for granted. This was a ritual of thanksgiving repeated every evening.

  Rose, who came every day to clean, had prepared a cold meal for him and David that she had left in the fridge and a note stuck on the fridge door reminding him that she was taking three days off to visit her sister who lived in Glasgow.

  In the lounge he put on one of his favourite Haydn quartets and then as always took time to look at the painting above the mantelpiece. All this was an attempt to calm himself down. The painting had been one of the reasons he had put in a bid for the gallery. By chance he had walked in one lunchtime and it had been the first painting he had noticed, a work by an unknown Canadian artist called Ben Sutcliffe.

  ‘I have to thank you sir,’ the artist had said to Leon on a long distance phone call, ‘I’m seventy two years of age and have been painting for most of my life here in Alberta and only now do I sell one of my paintings. You have made me a happy man. Mind you it was my own fault. I used to think having a public was unnecessary. But now I’m older and wiser and believe firmly that art should be seen by as many people as possible. I just think about my paintings up on the walls of your London gallery and it makes me smile.’

  Through the abstract of white and cream colours yellow shafts of sunlight in Leon’s mind crossed the canvas. They were strokes of inspiration flashing from a sun that never rose completely above the horizon. Adam’s voice was in its texture. Life was gilded gold as the rays of pure yellow light cut through broken wood into the eyes of the beholder as the train crossed Siberia. It was a painting of survival. It was his most treasured possession. Sometimes he would have nightmares of the house burning down and with it this most precious piece of art

  Now he was hoping it would calm his nerves.

  He poured himself a whiskey and sat on the sofa and continued looking at Ben Sutcliffe’s work. He could tell it had been born out of the same northern light skimming over a frozen surface. The artist had seen the pure edge of life in those rays of winter sun. In the memory Adam’s face brought all the light together to become its source. Ben Sutcliffe had found creation amidst the emptiness, the white, endless plains.

  ‘Painted it more than twenty years ago,’ he had told Leon, ‘It was one of those I nearly froze to death trying to do. I’m not a painter who takes photographs or anything like that. I paint what I see directly from experience. And it was one that I knew was finished. I often have the problem of knowing when to stop.’

  His voice had been a slow Canadian intonation that had drawn Leon immediately closer. He had so wanted to visit him, to see his studio, to see more of his paintings he said were stacked to the roof of the shed where he worked.

  ‘Some of them I haven’t looked at in a long time. I suppose I feel them like some kind of insurance. So long as I don’t take a whacky fit and try and destroy them they will last longer than me. I hope a lot longer. You’d be welcome to come and visit any time you like. I’ll be here. I haven’t left this place in a long, long time.’

  Haydn, the whiskey, Ben Sutcliffe’s painting, eased him a little, slowed down the pulse of his worries.

  But when he heard the crunch of the taxi wheels on the drive everything was suddenly accelerated. Leon no longer wanted this evening. He needed to be able to change his mind, but knew with his son that was impossible. David had taken over the victim’s mantle and was using it like a weapon.

  He had his own key. His father waited for him to take off his coat before following him into the lounge. Looking at his son’s serious face he understood what was coming but still resisted, still hoped that things might be reversed.

  ‘Do you want a drink?’ he tried.

  ‘To think,’ David said, ‘I’ve spent all those years in the company and that wasn’t the way he was found.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Yes I’m sure. I’ve listened enough to your descriptions to know when we’ve got him. ‘

  ‘Have a drink,’ Leon repeated.

  ‘It was in a Hamburg newspaper announcing his retirement.’

  Suddenly Leon did not want to think about who this was.

  ‘The bastard is still alive and by the sounds of it has done bloody well for himself. Here have a look.’

  He held out a photocopy of the page of the newspaper. Leon felt smothered in reality. All his thoughts, dreams, were changing colour into a grey, dull certainty.

  ‘You always said he would get through the war,’ David added.

  The face was there out of a thousand nightmares, thinner, more lined but with the scars and the tight eyes. Even his hair although grey now was cut in the same way. Brucker was looking at him with a slightly surprised, unsure expression. Whoever had taken the photograph had caught him off guard.

  ‘So?’ David was asking.

  ‘I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘You wanted this.’

  ‘Yes, I wanted this, but it can still come as a shock. Understand David what this man did, and here I am looking at him in his suit and tie, all spruce and sharp as I always remember him except he was in a uniform. Understand please that this is still difficult.’

  ‘Sometimes I think I’ve wanted this more than you. I was sure this was going to happen, that we were going to nail the bastard.’

  Leon could hear the relief in his son’s voice as well as the excitement, as though the hunter was already closing in. David was well over six feet with a broad chest and thick arms, perfect for all the rugby he had played at university. His black curly hair emphasised his dark skin and brown eyes. His expression was nearly always serious. Life was the constant challenge to David. Leon could see him as he crashed through tackles, running with his legs up high, all power, speed and total concentration. Physically he looked nothing like either his mother or father.

  ‘He’s been a director of a sports company, in Hamburg, for over thirty years. There’s been nothing wrong with his life, nothing at all, another German success story.’

  ‘Germans are good at that.’

  David poured himself a whiskey.

  ‘This was always going to be only up to us,’ he said, ‘We were told repeatedly if the German army was guilty we’d be talking about millions of Bruckers and his kind. Well there were millions.’

  Sometimes Leon hardly recognised his son. Rachel would have been appalled.

  ‘You’ve made him like this,’ she often said, ‘God knows how he’s managing his law degree when all he does it seems is to study the war. He’s never had a proper friend. He never mentions any girl. He’s lost in the past and you damn well have put him there. He wants to be the victim, your own son. He’s listened and listened until he’s angrier than you ever were. He’s only twenty for God’s sake and all he can think is about things that happened over thirty years ago.’

  He could hear her so clearly, his defeated by his past.

  David watched his father’s uncertain expression turned to something more anxious.

  ‘It was me who wanted this father. Your agreement was only secondary.’

  ‘I also want to see this over with.’

  ‘No, I’m not sure if you
do.’

  ‘David, why are you wanting to argue?’

  ‘Because I don’t trust your feelings any more. Don’t tell me that we leave it. You don’t tell me that,’

  Leon felt pressed back by his words.

  ‘I don’t mean that at all. It’s just....just I want time to think this through. It’s still come as a shock.’

  ‘You’ve had nearly forty years. Just because now it’s real, really happening, doesn’t mean anything has to be different. Why should it for God’s sake?’

  ‘You’re shouting.’

  ‘Yes father I’m shouting. I don’t trust your feelings anymore. You know that. We’ve found him, Brucker. I can get his address so we’ll know where he lives. He’s there. We do what we agreed. We confront the bastard. But you don’t have to come. I can do this myself.’

  ‘No David.’

  ‘Why not? You’re still poorly, still weak from all the illnesses you have had. I know that. So let me do it. I’ll go and see Brucker and tell him what he’s done, tell him that it hasn’t been forgotten. I hope the bastard shits himself. ‘

  ‘Brucker would never do that.’

  ‘He might. We have to do something. We have spent so much time and money to create this chance and we have to take it, the quicker the better. He doesn’t deserve anything else. He doesn’t deserve to die in his bed thinking he’s got away with it. He needs to remember. He needs to have it shoved right down his bloody throat.’

  ‘He’ll use your anger.’

  ‘No he won’t. He won’t be given the opportunity. I know what I’m doing father and I’m doing it for you as well as me. Never forget that.’

  ‘But we have to be....to be calm about this, as much as we can be.’

  Again Leon glanced at the newspaper photograph. Not one detail of that face had he forgotten. He had seen Brucker on only two occasions but had remembered everything about him.

  ‘I’ll make the arrangements,’ David said as he poured himself another drink, ‘I suggest we get on with this by the end of the week.

  ‘We’ll take my car.’

  ‘So long as you’re sure you want to come.’

  ‘David, it’s not that. I just don’t want to mess this up. I want to be strong enough, that’s all. I want to manage this more than anything. If this had happened even a few years ago I would not have these concerns, but I have and I have to deal with them.’

  ‘That’s why I should go by myself.’

  ‘No David.’

  ‘And you’re sure?’

  ‘Yes, in my mind yes. Am I determined? Yes. It’s just I want this body of mine to manage as well. That’s all.’

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  That night his bedroom was full of trees. He was not asleep. He was listening to the rain that had started again and the distant sounds of traffic and trees moving their branches around him as he stared up at the ceiling filled with the motion of the high firs balanced against a distant sky. There was the scent of the pine, the soft sound of the rain. He could see intertwining roots that formed part of the roof of an earth shelter. Kas was there for a moment being encircled by the roots that were like white veins squeezing him. His mouth was open but no sound came.

  As Leon turned and lay on his side Brucker’s face was only inches away. The German was looking straight at him with a resigned expression as though nothing mattered any more. The war was over. Everything was finished. Nothing could be reclaimed. The dead were dead. Everything else was pointless. Brucker was telling him to leave it all in the dark past, to leave his mother and father and sister and uncle David and Polyna there, to leave Kas and Radek and big Paul and the rest of the Poles, to leave Adam on the train to Siberia, to let them all be left back in the silence because that was where they were. Nothing could change that.

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  Three days later David went down to the bar of their Hamburg hotel leaving Leon by himself in an overheated room that looked out onto one of the city’s main streets.

  Sonya had been pleased when he had told her about his trip with David.

  ‘You need a break Leon. It’ll do you good,’ she had said.

  He thought of her back in the gallery. It was the only part of his world that he really understood. The rest was now a confusion of feelings that he often was too tired to explore.

  They had taken the Dover – Calais ferry and driven through Belgium and Holland into Germany. The autobahns had been clogged with cars and lorries, everybody busy and on the move. Germany it seemed was thriving, even more than he had expected.

  There was a tension in the realisation that Brucker might be only a few miles away. For the first time he was in the land of the enemy, of the perpetrators, and yet all he was worried about was the unbearable heat in the room. Now Leon was sitting in his shirt sleeves by the window watching the evening traffic below and listening to Rachel chastising him.

  ‘You’ve created him to be like this. He has listened to every single thing you’ve told him until it’s as if it’s all his now, his experience, his war, his suffering.’

  He closed his eyes and bent forward slightly, his thick grey hair reflecting light from the too bright neon strip on the ceiling.

  ‘You trapped him,’ Rachel continued, ‘You could have released him a long time ago. But no, you think you’ve tried and yet now you’re scared that he’ll want to take things further than you ever had the courage to do. You’ve made him angry Leon, so angry.’

  He could not control her. She was in his head and he was too tired.

  ‘I’m asking you. Try and stop him. He has no life, no friends, no interests besides this obsession. I don’t know whether you can save him, but promise you’ll at least try. You have to do that Leon.’

  Rachel had been dying and had used some of her final moments to make another attempt.

  ‘Please Leon. You’ve shown him over and over again what you suffered when it should have been you helping him to forget.’

  He could feel the perspiration down his back as he walked over to sit on the edge of the bed, for once unable to block out her words.

  ‘You can’t keep doing this to our son. You’re destroying who he could be.’

  ‘He asks and I’m not going to lie,’ he could hear himself saying.

  ‘And why does he want to know so badly?’

  ‘Because he feels for what happened. He’s a Jew for God’s sake. He understands what the past means. He has a right to know.’

  ‘He has a right to his own life,’ Rachel had said.

  ‘And what’s that life supposed to be based on? It has to come from somewhere. It shares a history. All that can’t be just ignored.’

  ‘He won’t listen to me. He thinks I’m naive, that I don’ understand or don’t really care, just because I spent the war in England’

  ‘And I tell David that’s not true.’

  ‘Well he’s not listening. He’s not listening.’

  ‘No,’ Leon muttered to himself, ‘No he’s not,’ looking up as David tapped on the door before coming into the sweltering room.

  ‘I’ve told them again, at reception,’ he said, ‘she says the heating switches down through the night.’

  ‘Well I hope she’s right.’

  David went over to try and open the window. He was wearing tight jeans and a sweater that made him look even taller.

  ‘Hamburg,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ Leon said back.

  ‘We’re here.’

  ‘Yes.’

  And he’s here.’

  ‘We hope so.’

  For the next hour they went through their plans. David spread out a map of the city working out a route from the hotel to where Brucker lived.

  Instead of joining a law firm David had been employed for the last eight years in a firm of head hunters. One of the reasons had been the hope that his company’s resources would help him find Brucker. In the end
it was a small business that checked any reference in the media to anything a customer might wish that had come across the photograph of Brucker in the Hamburg newspaper. It was then David’s contacts had helped him find the German’s address.

  ‘I still find this hard to believe,’ Leon said as David folded up the map.

  ‘That’s because you doubted this would ever happen.’

  ‘And it’s because of you David. You’ve made this happen.’

  ‘Well we haven’t done anything yet.’

  ‘We will. I believe now that we will. But we just talk to him, nothing else.’

  David got up again.

  ‘You promised that,’ his father added.

  ‘But you agree we talk to him in a place of our choosing.’

  ‘Brucker will refuse. Of course he will.’

  ‘Well we’ll come to that.’

  ‘No violence David.’

  ‘For God’s sake. We don’t know yet if the bastard is where he’s supposed to be. Let’s just take it stage by stage and not get ahead of ourselves.’

  Later as David was leaving to go to his own room Leon said to him, ‘You know that finding Brucker will never be enough, because whatever happens, David we’ll never understand him.’

  His son’s face had stiffened as he replied, ‘I don’t want to understand him. I just want the bastard to know that things haven’t been forgotten. That’s all.’

  In the bathroom as he was preparing to go to bed Leon opened his box of pills. They were an essential part of the daily routine to keep him alive. His body had a complicated pattern of different problems, especially trying to combat high blood pressure as well intestine complaints, constant headaches, a bad back, poor eyesight, high cholesterol, bouts of dizziness followed by days of flu like symptoms. All of it he knew was a consequence of the war. His array of medical problems was his legacy from those years, something that he had to combat every day of his life. Except for Sonya and David he saw more of his doctor than anybody else.