The Rules of Perspective

by Adam Thorpe

  ‘Fräulein Winkel is young and pretty,’ said Werner, almost gleefully. ‘The American infantrymen are hardly likely to reserve their attentions to kissing her hand.’

  Hilde Winkel held her throat as if strangling herself.

  ‘Fräulein Winkel, no American soldier will lay a finger on you without dealing with me first,’ said Herr Hoffer.

  Werner snorted.

  ‘While in this building,’ Herr Hoffer went on, encouraged by his own rhetoric, ‘you are under my official protection. As is everyone. Even Herr Oberst,’ he added, determined to keep everything light.

  ‘I am unlikely to be the object of even the most desperate or depraved of sexual attentions,’ said Werner Oberst, ‘but thank you for the thought, Heinrich. I can now relax.’

  ‘Herr Hoffer,’ whispered Hilde Winkel, ‘I am genuinely grateful to you.’

  Herr Hoffer nodded (very pleased), took off his gloves and bade the others sit around the table.

  Now he was here, he had no clear idea what to do.

  Most of the artworks were deep in Shaft IV of the salt-mines at Grimmenburg, thirty-three kilometres north of the town; the American troops would stomp over it unwittingly and when this wretched war was finished with, Herr Hoffer would retrieve everything. He had nightmares, of course, in which the salt-mine was flooded by criminals as he was bicycling towards it, the wave roaring over the 440 square metres of the mine’s floor and sweeping everything before it. He was always somehow above and below at the same time, and he would wake up spluttering and gasping for air, Frau Hoffer having to calm him by stroking his damp forehead with her cool hand.

  ‘I think,’ said Herr Hoffer, after a brief discussion during which they distinctly felt the floor tremble and heard the panes rattle in the windows, ‘we must go down immediately to the vaults. This is not an ordinary raid, as Werner pointed out. They are shelling from quite near. I appreciate you all reporting for work on this day of all days, but if you wish to return home, I will not stop you. Though obviously it would be very dangerous.’

  Werner snorted. ‘What do you think I am, Heinrich? A deserter? I am once again in the armed forces,’ he went on, not altogether seriously, tapping his yellow armband on which the words Deutsche Volkssturm – Wehrmacht were even more unevenly stitched than on Herr Hoffer’s.

  ‘I, too, am in the Wehrmacht,’ said Herr Hoffer, ‘and my duty is clear: to stay with the paintings in the vaults.’

  He was staring at the table; he disliked speaking to more than two people at once. He forced himself to look up and caught Hilde Winkel’s admiring gaze, which was always directed at a point just below the eyes. He blushed. He wondered if she had lost her father at an early age. Perhaps he was still, in fact, young enough. Men stayed young much longer, if they didn’t –

  ‘But you’ve got family, Herr Hoffer,’ said Frau Schenkel.

  ‘So has everyone,’ said Werner Oberst.

  ‘Some more than others,’ said Frau Schenkel, her bottom lip giving a little quiver.

  Herr Hoffer felt terrible, thinking those thoughts about Hilde Winkel with Sabine crouched in a shelter with the girls.

  ‘I know what is expected of me,’ he said, his voice rather too high. ‘If my eyes prevented me from serving on the front in previous years, they do not prevent me from defending my country at home. I would be of little use in a pillbox, and my own dear wife urged me to do my duty here. So here I am – and here will I stay to the bitter end!’

  He had countered his nervousness by a forceful note, going so far as to strike the table lightly with his fist. Sabine had, in fact, urged him to stay put. But that detail, and the fact that he had no intention of killing a single American, was neither here nor there. He had not yet sounded out the others on this business of defence; he could not even be sure that Werner was unarmed – that he hadn’t brought along his famous pistol.

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ said Frau Schenkel. ‘You know I’ve nothing to go home for, now.’

  ‘Me too,’ breathed Hilde Winkel. ‘This is my second home.’

  ‘And me,’ sighed Werner, raising his hand as if at a meeting.

  ‘Not me,’ said Herr Wolmer.

  They looked, astonished, at the janitor in his spiked helmet and Imperial greatcoat.

  ‘My job is to stay up here,’ he growled. ‘I got through two years in the trenches before my leg-wound. They’re not going to finish me. I’m untouchable.’

  Everyone laughed at this bold display of defiance. It reassured them.

  ‘I don’t think,’ said Frau Schenkel, ‘that the Americans will bomb too much. They know we are lost. Our boys are finished.’

  ‘Frau Schenkel, be careful what you say,’ murmured Werner, hardly moving his thin lips. ‘Defeatism. A capital offence against the Fatherland.’

  One was never sure with Werner Oberst if his dryness was dangerous sarcasm or plain speaking.

  ‘I was not talking of the Eastern Front, where we are definitely winning, Herr Oberst,’ snapped Frau Schenkel, her blue eyes fierce.

  ‘I didn’t say you were,’ Werner replied.

  ‘Good.’

  Even now, thought Herr Hoffer, even in extremity, these two quarrel.

  He went briefly into his office to collect the most important files. The others did likewise next door while Herr Wolmer locked up and fetched the paraffin lamp.

  Herr Hoffer loved his office. He loved his glass-topped desk and the way in which the window behind it seemed to continue on down into the glass – an optical effect he would paint, one day, when he had time. The room smelt pleasantly of paper and wax polish and the sweet, lingering suggestion of pipe smoke from Herr Acting Director Streicher’s days.

  Herr Acting Acting Director Hoffer pulled out of the top drawer of his desk a single sheet of thin-lined pinkish octavo paper. He looked at its four typewritten columns before tucking it into his pocket.

  Cleaning his spectacles on his handkerchief, noting the far-off thumps, crashes and crackles, he felt very weary. He thought he could smell fireworks on the air, then realised, replacing his spectacles, that the mistiness he had taken for dirty lenses was smoke. The telephone sat on the desk as in normal times, its ugly black flex coiling straight up to the ceiling as it always had done. Yet there hadn’t even been a buzz on the line for over a week. Nevertheless, he tried it, pressing the piece to his ear.

  Silence.

  There was something unforgiving in that silence, as if the whole of the Reich had folded up or been buried under snow: it was the silence of the mountains after an avalanche.

  He wondered about taking down with him the bottle of vintage cognac secreted in his desk. It had been given to him by the present SS-Sturmbannführer, who had one of the jewels of the museum’s collection in his office: Jean-Marc Nattier’s Mademoiselle de Guilleroy au Bain. The SS-Sturmbannführer’s predecessor had simply helped himself to it. He was legally entitled to do this: a week before the SS-Sturmbannführer’s black Maybach had scrunched to a halt outside the main door, Herr Acting Director Streicher had been ordered to cross out every item in the museum’s official inventory and cancel the insurance. He had called Herr Hoffer into the office and said, ‘This is a museum without walls.’ Then Herr Streicher had lit his pipe, put Schubert’s Heine songs on the gramophone, picked up his paperknife and started to draw it firmly across his left wrist. Fortunately, the paperknife was blunt. This was Herr Acting Director Streicher’s second nervous collapse.

  Frau Blumen had scrubbed the spots of blood off the leather chair and Herr Hoffer had taken his seat there, behind the Director’s desk – not without a certain satisfaction. It had always been the Director’s desk: since 1904! So it was that, when the SS-Sturmbannführer’s predecessor walked in with three of his men and took the Jean-Marc Nattier without asking, Herr Hoffer was behind the desk and technically in charge. But there was nothing to be done. There wasn’t even a loan contract to sign, because it wasn’t a loan. From now on, all cultural property belonged to th
e Reich. Herr Streicher was quite right: the walls of the museum did not exist. The Reich had broken them down. The walls were now the outermost frontiers of the Reich. The SS-Sturmbannführer’s men trotted in and strode carefully out on either end of the huge Nattier, and not a word was spoken beyond the usual civilities. They carried the painting all the way to the Sturmbannführer’s office, covering it only with tarpaulin, while the Maybach crawled elegantly beside them. It reminded Herr Hoffer of a funeral.

  That was nearly seven years ago, in 1938. The present SS-Sturmbannführer had been stationed in Troyes. He had returned with many cases of the vintage cognac. The cases had been stacked in the Sturmbannführer’s office, opposite the window – whose glass Herr Hoffer now imagined embedding itself in Mademoiselle de Guilleroy’s ample thighs.

  ‘Here,’ the new incumbent had said to Herr Hoffer, handing him the 1921 cognac, ‘please don’t think of me as unappreciative.’

  Herr Hoffer decided not to take the cognac to the vaults.

  Instead (mainly to please Werner), he took the battered gramophone, which closed up into a portable box like a briefcase, and several records in their brown paper sleeves that Herr Streicher had also left behind.

  Herr Hoffer was quite convinced that the building was somehow protected, perhaps supernaturally, simply because the Americans and the British deliberately avoided dropping things on its distinctive tower. There had been five or six serious bombing raids over the past year, and it (and he, obviously) had survived all of them. He was not a deeply religious man, but he did attend church most Sundays in deference to the general tenor of the townsfolk. He found more spiritual conviction, however, in the contemplation of the many sacred works in his care – most especially the wood carvings in the pre-Renaissance gallery. These had all been stored in the salt-mine, apart from one glorious piece: a life-size cedarwood figure of Mary Magdalene in sorrow, from the thirteenth century, that he and Herr Wolmer had carried between them to the vaults.

  It was his own decision to do this, yet again: he had not referred to Herr Streicher. As it was his decision, and his alone, to build a cupboard behind the double door in the Prints Room – the door that led to the stairs down to the vaults. A hidden handle opened another door in the cupboard’s back wall: he and Herr Wolmer had constructed it themselves. Thus the only access to the vaults was skilfully disguised. Not even a surprise search by the Gestapo, looking for hidden Jews, had found it.

  He was hoping that, after the war, he would be rewarded officially with the post of Director and any decision would be his automatically. As it was, he always felt a little nervous and small behind the desk with its plate glass and bronze paperweights, as if he were a pretender. But Herr Acting Director Streicher was ageing, depressed, and ill – unlikely, after his third nervous collapse, ever to shoulder his old responsibilities.

  The Reich had broken him. It had not broken Herr Hoffer.

  Herr Hoffer thought of Herr Streicher as the four of them walked now through the empty galleries on their way to the vaults, Werner slightly ahead as usual, carrying the gramophone records under his arm. There were discoloured rectangles below the empty hooks, as if each work had left its phantom presence. Herr Hoffer suddenly wished very much to return home, to sit in the apartment block’s shelter with Sabine, Erika and Elisabeth and their three suitcases. But he could not return, of course: he had his duty, his position. And anyway, the shelters were smelly, dark, and full of spying Party block leaders. Also, there was the man from the ground floor who sniffed waterily every two minutes. And the screaming baby, called Ulrike. It was sheer torture, to be honest.

  The thuds and crashes seemed to have intensified, sounding not quite so muffled by the thick walls as before. He gripped the paraffin lamp in one hand and the gramophone player in the other and tried to calm his breathing. Above all, he must not start to think that the shells and bombs were aimed at him personally.

  As they were passing through the pre-Renaissance gallery he heard Frau Schenkel mutter ‘Good God!’ next to him. At that precise moment (although it must have been a little before) the glass in the great window to their right quivered and then carried on coming into the room.

  I am so lonely. Fear is my closest playmate, but he is a bad companion. He plays tricks on me. He makes me see him where there was nothing before. His favourite game is hide-and-seek, but he never lets me hide. Why should I always have to seek him out, when I don’t care if he never comes back?

  6

  Corporal Parry did not know what to do with the painting he had salvaged.

  Or rather, he knew what he wanted to do with it but there were two elements that constrained him.

  First, army rules concerning loot (who’re are you kidding?).

  Second, the object was too large to be buttoned down somewhere on his tunic and he wanted to have himself some fun in this town and not be burdened.

  He could hear small-arms fire, bouncing off the ruins of the town, and every now and again some artillery that whistled in such a way that they were definitely 88s. Some jerk was always willing to play it rough. In not much more than an hour, however, his patrol would be back to base and dispersed and having some fun. A long time, an hour. Three seconds was a long time.

  Quite a long time can be any amount. It depended on your mind and how your spine felt and your muscles and your innards.

  The unit had found a smashed-up grocery store with a yard and straw and beds a few streets away and established their CP there; he guessed they would be staying here now for a couple of days to allow the line to make sense, if Morrison’s latest dope was correct. They’d been driving so hard they might jump right over the Germans and finish in Minsk, at this rate. Things had to slow up, shake down into some kind of order, like the order General Omar Bradley must be staring at on his neat strategy table, all those little flags moving gently forward like a goddamn flotilla in Chesapeake.

  Morrison and he were checking out the remaining area of the museum vaults, dreaming of finding beer butts. They had found beer butts or even brandy butts in other similar places. The remaining boys in the patrol were doing likewise above ground, under the pretence of rooting out Heini nuts who thought they could turn the war alone with a single Mauser.

  The vaults spread further than they’d thought around the corner. It wasn’t burnt there and it was looking like a schlock shop; Morrison flashed his light over broken frames, church-type benches, plaster things, big old chairs and bolts of green cloth. There were no beer butts, but Morrison did give it in spades to a painted wood statue whose shadow seemed to leap out at them with its hands out, the head blown off by the shots that temporarily deafened Parry and made him think of consequence and ricochet.

  He felt jumpy, now; this was just the kind of place the nuts could be making their last stand inside. The fire had hardly touched the far end, though it smelt nasty, and everything had this greasy film on it. Morrison reckoned anybody down there would have been suffocated by carbon dioxide, saying it in his soft Wisconsin drawl as if reassuring himself. Parry wondered why the four they’d found back there hadn’t tried to make a break for it, gone deeper into the vaults. Maybe the blast of heat was instantaneous, or something. Maybe it was the heat’s gas the medic had told him about which maybe was carbon dioxide and Morrison had surprised him again. The consequence. The ricochet.

  There was nothing left of the museum above but a gable end and part of a wall; he wouldn’t even have known it was an art museum if the girl in the long coat hadn’t told him. She was part of a crowd of about thirty people, staring at the ruins as if they couldn’t believe it.

  He’d thought it was a big church, from the look of the gable end. There was a tiny white statue in an oystershell niche that must have been the Virgin and it had survived like a miracle, too high to bring down.

  Then the girl, who was about eighteen and very thin and wore spectacles and spoke some English, told him it was the town’s art museum, the Kaiser Wilhelm.

  ‘It�
��s not the church? Kirk? Hey, you reckon I read German at Harvard? Ein Kirk, das there?’

  ‘No,’ she said, ignoring his German like he had tried to kiss her with it or something. ‘It is the museum. Art. Kunst. And books. It is the library and the museum of art.’

  Maybe she’d used the present tense because her English was not advanced, or because she hadn’t gotten used to the idea that the museum was a thing of the past, now. The others were nodding and saying, ‘Museum, museum,’ which he had a hunch might be the same word in German. These people must have been the town’s art-lovers, except they were the usual down-at-heel and half-starved and miserable fucking crowd. There were deads with newspapers over their faces, the pages lifting and falling in the breeze as though the mouths were breathing. The footwear of deads, if they had any on, always looked too big. He wasn’t quite sure what had seen him through so far with barely a scratch: he didn’t pray to God too much, and when he did it was more like a badass insurance policy.

  Maybe it was Morrison, maybe Morrison was his guardian angel!

  Morrison could have passed for a stocky kind of tough-boy angel. He had a rosebud mouth that curved at the corners and dark lashes that didn’t go with his gingery head, shaved close all over and very square. His nose was small and flat: Parry wondered if the guy also had Indian in him, like himself, and maybe Irish, and the two hadn’t quite blended properly, like water and oil.

  ‘Well,’ said the guardian angel, ‘there ain’t nothing in here by way of liquor.’

  ‘It’ll show up someplace.’

  ‘Not here. We’ll go halves on that old painting that was always our true objective.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Parry.

  ‘For sure,’ said Morrison.

  He flashed his light in Parry’s face.

  ‘Neal, it’s never hard to say yes to a buddy.’

  As if, Parry thought, they’d both found it.

  Like they found the fifth corpse by both nearly falling over it; it was lying in the corner by the far end of the vaults. It changed the subject, as deads always should do or you’re finished inside.