Marie gazed at her husband, then went back through the door from which she had emerged.
Peter couldn’t help glancing at L; L, as ever, knew what he was thinking.
‘Why did I marry her? Because she was pretty. Because she was submissive. Because – she was lost.’ The man hesitated, and went on, striking for the first time since he had hailed Peter, a slightly false note. ‘I have an affinity with the lost.’ He caught that note himself, and pulled a face. ‘At least,’ he said, with a smile, ‘I like to think I have.’
When the men went into the dining room they found the children already seated at the table. The two boys and one girl rose, instantly, to greet their father’s guest.
Peter’s first impression was that L was almost as severe and pitiless a father as he was a commandant. Hans, Brigitte and Peter seemed too perfect to be true. Their fair hair was neatly brushed and combed. Their clothes were spotless and without a crease. Their beautiful faces had not a blemish or an irregularity. They looked, all three of them, as their mother must have looked when she was young. It was only if one looked into their extraordinary blue eyes that one caught a glimpse of their father in them – a glimpse of spirit, of wildness. And if one then looked back at their father, one saw that though he appeared to be scanning them for any hint of a flaw – that he would no doubt pounce upon and use as an excuse to mete out punishment – in fact his severity was for the most part a mask to disguise how intensely proud he was of his offspring. Proud and amazed, that such saplings should have grown from so unpromising a soil.
Indeed, Peter thought, having observed him further, the man could scarcely conceal his love …
The meal was stiff and formal. L’s wife, who sounded as if she had learned ‘polite conversation’ from a manual, asked Peter a number of questions.
‘What made you move to this area, Mr. Strauss?’
‘Oh, the hills, the river – the quiet, I suppose,’ Peter replied.
‘I bet you didn’t know what they were planning to build when you bought your flat!’ L said with a laugh. ‘I bet you hoped you would be moving some place where your conscience would be as out of sight as you were!’
‘What kind of books do you write? I’m afraid I don’t have much time for reading.’
‘Oh, you know, all sorts. Novels. Short stories. And I’ve written a couple of plays …’
‘My husband said you were also a painter?’
‘Yes. Though just at the moment I’m rather – I mean I’ve been doing landscapes, and flower-paintings, that I can sell.’
‘I like landscapes and flower-paintings.’
‘Flutter flutter,’ L growled, ominously. ‘Flutter flutter.’
Then, intimidated by her husband, or having exhausted her supply of questions, Marie fell silent; and it was up to Peter to try to lighten the mood. He did so by talking to the children; asking them what their favourite subjects were at school, if they liked exploring the woods.
The answers he was given were – of course – immaculate. Polite complete sentences, even from the youngest; each one accompanied by a ‘sir’. Yet, conscious of L’s gaze on him, every time he addressed the angelic-looking creatures, Peter sounded to his own ear as fatuous as Marie; and felt that for all their faultless manners, the children were regarding him with contempt.
Oh, they had their father in them all right; and even if their parents had kept everything hidden from them, those sapphire-blue eyes had already seen too much.
As soon as they had finished eating L, who had been growing steadily more impatient, got to his feet. ‘Let’s go,’ he muttered to Peter. ‘I’ve got to get back to work. I’m sorry the food wasn’t better. Cooking is not one of Marie’s talents.’
‘No, no,’ Peter mumbled, flushing slightly. ‘It was delicious, thank you,’ he went on to his hostess, though in fact L was right.
‘And I’m sorry the talk wasn’t as brilliant as that to which you are accustomed.’
‘No, no,’ Peter again felt obliged to protest.
‘No doubt in another few years the children will be able to contribute something. At the moment, they’re a little small. Hans! Brigitte! Peter! Say goodbye to Mr Strauss.’
‘Goodbye, Mr Strauss,’ the children chorused, their unwavering stares sinister. They sounded as if they were bidding Mr Strauss farewell for ever.
‘And now,’ L said, opening the door of the dining room, ‘I suggest we adjourn to my office.’
‘Goodbye,’ Peter told the children. ‘Goodbye,’ he muttered to Marie, even as he was being herded out. The woman looked as if she were about to start crying. ‘And – thank you again.’
As they walked towards the jeep that would take them back to the camp, L murmured, reasonably: ‘It can’t be easy being married to me. And having to put up with all this.’ He gestured towards the brow of the hill. ‘That’s why I don’t say more to her. Poor thing. But what can you do? We can’t always choose those whom we love, can we?’
‘No,’ Peter replied. ‘We can’t.’
L’s ‘office’ was a narrow, four-storey house on the edge of the camp. L accompanied Peter to the top floor, and showed him into a study at the back. The room had a view of the river; into which, even as the two men went over to the window and L murmured ‘Look,’ three cages were being towed by the now taut cable, that was attached to a winch on the far side. Each cage contained what must have been a hundred tightly packed people, half of whom were screaming, reaching out through the bars of the cages, trying to clamber on each other’s shoulders, half of whom stood with heads bowed apparently resigned to their fate. It was a scene so horrifying it reminded Peter of some painting by Bosch; and for the third time that day he thought that he might faint. But L was holding his arm, holding him up; and despite himself he was unable not to keep watching, until all those cages, running smoothly on their rails, had disappeared beneath the surface of the river.
‘We’ve built a system of locks and weirs a little way downstream’, L murmured, ‘so even in summer the water level never falls below … what is required.’
Those were the only words spoken by either man until, some minutes later, the cages re-appeared. Now all was still inside; the bodies piled in contorted heaps, arms outstretched between the bars.
As he finally allowed Peter to leave the window, and accompanied him out of the study, L said: ‘The rails go right into the crematoria; the cages are up-ended automatically. So no one has to touch anything …’
The front room of the office-building was furnished only with a long table and twenty or so wooden chairs; off it there was a large terrace that over-looked the main body of the camp.
The first thing Peter noticed, as L opened the glass doors to the terrace, was a rifle propped up against the railings.
There was also a single stool, set right in the middle of the broad expanse of tiles.
It was to this stool that L led his prisoner, as Peter suddenly came to think of himself. ‘Sit,’ he barked; and as Peter did so, the man started to pace slowly up and down the terrace, his black boots clicking on the terra cotta.
‘We were talking, earlier, about figures in the carpet,’ L started; then paused, and seemed to start again. ‘I suppose, even when you were thirteen and you seemed undecided whether to become a serious person or a fluttering, effeminate … butterfly, I detected a vague, as-yet ill-drawn … yes, let’s call it figure in your carpet. That made me both want to fuck you, destroy you, and hope at the same time that I didn’t – that I could make you stronger, make you – yes, choose your serious side. You seemed, as no one else at that school did, and as few people whom I have met since, to see … clearly. And when I looked at those paintings you were doing then, and read your first little stories – they were immature, of course. Careless. Unformed. Even so – I detected in them that same – hint of a vision I could share. There always seemed to be, somewhere within them – the stories, now, I’m talking about – some figure who saw civilisation as both an unceas
ing struggle for decency, justice, a degree of equality and a certain amount of freedom – plus a seed-bed for extraordinary inventions, amazing discoveries and great works of art – and, at the same time: a catalogue of crimes. Of unspeakable, appalling crimes, that fertilised the seed-bed, and without which those flowers – those trees – could never have grown.
‘Maybe I was reading too much into them; seeing what I wanted to see rather than what was there. And I’m not saying that your vision was the only valid vision. It was just … one that appealed to me. One that I responded to. That was why I decided to take you under my wing. Though it may not have seemed like that to you.
‘And then, after I left school and went into … politics, let’s say, I always kept an eye out for you. I think I saw the first poems you published when you were – seventeen, you must have been.’
Peter nodded.
‘And then the first short story you wrote, and the first novel, and – I felt a tremendous sense of achievement. I felt you were my creation. Pure vanity, of course, you were your own creation. Nonetheless … And always, if your work could be seen as a carpet and there were a thousand different patterns in it, all wonderfully well arranged, I felt that I could detect one underlying pattern, the pattern that bound all those others together.
‘For five, ten years – I was so proud of you I cannot tell you. So proud of myself, for having first spotted you, even if I had had no real hand in your creation.
‘And then, as the political situation became more … fluid, and the world – our world – started to fall apart – I thought I detected a certain … paling of your imagination. A loss of energy that became more marked as the Party took over, and my own rise became more marked. Though I was always too crazy, even for the lunatics, to make it quite to the top; I disturbed even the profoundly disturbed.’
L gave one of his slightly wistful smiles.
‘It wasn’t that that fundamental pattern that I had always found so attractive had disappeared. Rather the opposite. It was that all the other patterns had disappeared; all the colours, the variety, the vitality. Until, in you last few books, there was nothing left in the carpet apart from that one ur-figure. Again and again, however much you changed the story, however much you … changed the clothes, let’s say, the hanger off which you suspended those clothes was the same. There, at the centre of the novel, or the novella, or whatever it was, was some artist-type – whether he was literally an artist or an artist in all but name – who, instinctively liberal in outlook, came to believe that he was living in an essentially corrupt society, and that to have any measure of success in that society – both material success and yes, ‘artistic’ success – he had to embrace the corruption. Or at least, acquiesce in it. He had to become an accomplice to murder, if not an actual murderer himself. He had to lie about what he saw, and at the same time draw strength from it. He had to – what is it you keep saying? “Become a laughing, prancing joker in the court of a depraved monarch.” I think I’ve read that, or words to that effect, in about six of your last seven books.
‘It was the truth, of course, to my way of thinking. But paradoxically, the more you told the truth, or the more baldly you told it and it did become the only figure in the carpet, the more contrived, schematic, somehow less truthful that figure became. Until I couldn’t help feeling – this has just become theory for him. This is just some automatic response he is trotting out, that he no longer really believes in. It became as superficial, frivolous … fluttery, in its way, as your paintings had become. Oh, I realise you had to protect yourself, had to go on earning a living. And I have to say, the more schematic, arid you became, the more my fellow animals in the zoo were taken in by you, and didn’t see what, by now, was the only thing left to see. They praised your breadth the narrower you became; they admired your palette when you had ceased to use all colours but grey, they took you to be wry and ironical and if not on their side at least indifferent, when I saw that over and over you were condemning them, damning them. If, there again, damning them constantly with the same words, in the same automatic fashion, until even your curses became meaningless. You retired to this place not so much because you wanted to keep a low profile, Peter, or even hide from me, as because – you wanted to get away from the world. You wanted to cease being what you were born to be. And you thought if you kept on trotting out the same line, you could keep your conscience clear. “You see, I was always denouncing the beasts, even if the beasts were too stupid to notice.” But if you get away from the world, if you let everything become theory …
‘Everything becomes dust, Peter. The jungle becomes the Sahara. And frankly – you might just as well be dead.’
L stopped his pacing at last and stood staring at Peter. His eyes narrowed.
‘You have disappointed me, Peter. In the final analysis … You were climbing, climbing the mountain, but then, when you got to within reach of the summit, you stopped. You didn’t turn back. But you didn’t go on. Whereas had you dared to go those last few metres … yes, you would have seen what you had come from. The dark valley, let’s call it. But you would also have seen, on the other side – I don’t know what, Peter. Maybe that’s why I am disappointed in you. I feel you have given me only half the story. The half I already knew. Whereas if you had reached the top … Oh, maybe the view on the other side would have been identical. But at least it would have been the complete picture. Instead of just … I feel sometimes, Peter, that you have given me only the Beast. The Beast I know so well because I am he. What you never gave me – what you teased me with, but never entirely offered, was … Beauty. As I say, maybe it’s wishful thinking. Maybe there is no such thing. Maybe there is only the corrupt court, and you so-called artists can only be jesters, licking the arses of the powerful and telling them their shit tastes sweet. But, whether it is your fault or my own, whether you are to blame or essentially I am disappointed in myself – in my own inability to haul myself out of the slime, the filth, the horror, that instead I revel in – you have, ultimately, failed me, Peter.
‘I told you many years ago I should be your demon, and should come back to haunt you.
‘So I have. And as soon as I got this job, and I found myself near you, I determined that before everything went up in flames and the new age of decency was ushered in, I would do what I had long ago threatened to do. To punish you – I suppose is what it amounts to – for not saving me …
‘I was just trying to work out how to do it, when, amongst all the … rubbish sent here for disposal, I spotted someone who reminded me so much of you that when I first saw him I did a double take. I thought it was you. Same build, same colouring, same self-effacing manner, same … I hauled him in and asked him what he had done before he was arrested. In his clear, yet slightly soft voice, he told me he had been – wonder of wonders! – a writer and a painter … It really was you, I thought. A lightweight writer and painter, the poor fellow went on, plaintively. A writer and a painter who had never meant to give offence to anyone. Who had never meant to criticise the regime, let alone “‘tell the truth”. He had just wanted to amuse … Yet, irony of ironies, one of our most noted and respected critics read his last book, and thought that the light, yes fluttery figure in the centre of that little rug was indeed a damning indictment of the powers that be. He had a word with a highly placed party official … it was discovered, horror of horrors, that our home-grown Dostoevsky was a homosexual – actually, I suspect the critic was too, and that’s the real reason why … but that’s another story. In any case, he was arrested, “tried”, and sent here.
‘Poor thing. If it wasn’t so funny, I think I should cry.
‘On your feet, Peter,’ L said, summoning the writer to the parapet by which he was standing. He pointed down into the vast compound round which the prisoners were shuffling. ‘You see that figure in the blue shirt – that’s rather like yours, come to think of it.’
Peter nodded, and felt himself grow cold.
‘And the b
lue jacket and the beige trousers … that are rather like yours, come to think of it.’
Colder still, Peter nodded again.
‘And the brown shoes … I had him specially dressed like that so you would be able to pick him out. That is he. Your frivolous alter-ego. The person whom you might have become had it not been for me. And the person who is now down there where, if my dear colleagues did but know it, you should be.’
L went over to the rifle propped up against the railings, picked it up, pulled back the bolt, and handed it to Peter.
‘Shoot him,’ he said. ‘You were always a good shot. Thanks to me. Oh, I dare say you have grown a bit rusty, but if you miss the first time you can always have a second go. Or a third or fourth, if needs be.’
Peter stared.
‘Don’t look at me like that,’ L snapped. ‘I said shoot him. If you do not wish to, you may shoot yourself. And if you do not wish to do that either,’ he drew a pistol from the holster in his belt, ‘I shall shoot you.
‘I hope it won’t come to that. It would be so banal. But I assure you I shall if I have to, Peter, and I think you have known me long enough, and you have seen enough today, to know I mean what I say.
‘Shoot him. Shoot yourself. Or be shot. You have a choice. But whatever it is, be quick about it. I have a meeting in five minutes. We have to decide how to close this place down. Destroy every piece of evidence that it ever existed, so that when the good times come again – oh, people will say this could never have been. It was just some – sick dream.
‘A couple of months, I reckon it’ll take us. To restore all this to nature.’
Peter stared at the rifle he was holding; he could smell its particular smell. He contemplated shooting L, but knew that before he could even raise the rifle to his shoulder L would have shot him. He contemplated shooting himself, but knew he would never be able to bring himself actually to fire. So, feeling that his world had come to an end – no, that the world had come to an end – he shouldered the rifle – and oh, how it all came back to him, as clearly as the memories triggered by the sound of L’s voice – took aim at the figure in the blue shirt, blue jacket and beige trousers, and shot him in the back.
The Man Who Went Down With His Ship Page 26