A few of the shuffling figures lurched away from the man as he fell; Peter thought he heard one of them scream. Then they went on shuffling, shuffling.
‘Bravo,’ L said – looking, for the first time that Peter could ever recall, quite stunned himself. ‘It’s not just theory now, is it, Peter? You’ve actually – done it.’
He cleared his throat, aware perhaps that he was shaken, that his face was pale. Then he pulled himself together.
‘I’ll have a car take you back into town.’
*
Peter never saw L again.
Shortly after their meeting, it was reported that the promised dismantling of the camp had begun; and by the time the war ended, just five months later, not a trace of it remained. Every scrap of barbed wire, every brick from the crematoria, every plank and every rail had, apparently, vanished – though for a long while no one liked to go and check. And within weeks, as L had predicted, the townsfolk were either pretending that the place had never existed, or were careful never to mention it.
Still, in certain bars, late at night, when people had drunk a little too much, rumours circulated; and Peter gathered that one building – the commandant’s house – had survived the general destruction. ‘Presumably because it didn’t really form part of the camp itself,’ said a man who claimed to have ‘inside knowledge’. Since, however – the man went on – in that house had been discovered the body of a blonde woman who had been strangled, the bodies of three children who had been shot in the head, and, in an out-house, the charred remains of a middle-aged man, it was likely that that too would be demolished, before very long. So there would be nothing to remind people of what had been.
Peter, as he packed up his belongings and prepared to move back to the city, accepted without question that the woman found was L’s wife, and the children, L’s children. But whether the charred remains were of L himself, he sometimes wondered, and more often than not doubted. He couldn’t help feeling that somewhere in the world, that man still existed; a demon, destined to haunt him for the rest of his days.
Alive or dead, L – or a fictional version of him – was the central character in the first book that Peter wrote after the war. A book in which there was not a single artist figure, nor even the suggestion of one. Rather, it was a novel that charted the rise and fall of a self-confessed monster; a man who was so much larger, and more frightening, than life, that he was taken – by critics and the public at large – to represent the regime that had so recently been swept away, leaving behind it a continent in ruins, and countless numbers of people dead.
It was, it was almost universally agreed, ‘a stupendous achievement’, a ‘terrifying cataclysm of a book, that exposes with merciless accuracy the true face of evil’; and it was awarded so many literary prizes that its author soon grew quite used to being acclaimed as ‘the first great artist to have emerged from the rubble’. ‘Nothing in Strauss’s spare, austere previous works has prepared us for such a shattering, magnificent apotheosis’, one commentator wrote; while the London Times headed its review with the single word: ‘Genius.’
‘Strauss! Peter Strauss!’ was for a while the name on everyone’s lips …
There was just one critic, in a small literary magazine that was published in Buenos Aires, who begged, a little apologetically, to differ from the general view. He signed himself, this dissenter, simply ‘I’: and his complaint was the following.
That for all that Strauss’s depiction of a monster was a masterpiece of sorts, and ‘reminds us why the author has a reputation as a painter as well as a writer’ … and for all that ‘he does not spare us a single wart on the face of the beast … one ends the book with the uncomfortable feeling that despite everything Strauss, like Milton before him, is just a little in love with the Devil he has created.
‘But then perhaps, in a sense, precisely because he has inspired a masterpiece, the Devil has created Strauss. So it could not be otherwise.’
To this anonymous reviewer, Peter wrote a short note, c/o the magazine. ‘You have seen what no one else has.’
He did not receive a reply.
Copyright
This ebook edition first published in 2013
by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
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All rights reserved
© Hugh Fleetwood, 1988
The right of Hugh Fleetwood to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–30484–4
The Man Who Went Down With His Ship Page 27