by Adam Thorpe
‘Probably,’ said Frau Schenkel, who hadn’t been listening.
‘Even the famous Destruction might have been exaggerated,’ Werner went on (as he usually did). ‘The great Lohenfelde Fair, for instance, was held in 1631. It wasn’t cancelled. Only three months after the laying to waste. We have – or rather, had – the original documents. Fascinating, isn’t it? One day I will write a popular history of Lohenfelde based on the dry truth. If they leave me my archives. The problem is, no one wants the dry truth, which is full of holes. They lock it up in boxes and call it dull.’
‘History,’ said Herr Hoffer, ‘thrives on colour.’
‘That’s to hide the holes,’ said Werner. ‘No one likes a threadbare rag.’
‘They didn’t exaggerate the cold in Russia,’ Frau Schenkel remarked, quietly. ‘None of them had the right socks.’
‘Let Truth, when hostile times exile, To Fable for her refuge fly,’ Herr Hoffer intoned, with his finger in the air.
‘Keep Schiller out of it, if you please,’ said Werner.
Herr Hoffer smiled, feeling he had won.
‘The Peace of Westphalia,’ announced Hilde Winkel, rather indistinctly on account of her lip. ‘The destruction of the Peace of Westphalia was the Führer’s chief war aim.’
‘That’s good to know,’ murmured Werner. ‘I had been wondering.’
Nobody said anything.
Werner had suddenly withdrawn into himself, like an ascetic. His philosophy of life had an ascetic’s simplicity: facts before beauty.
He had watched his precious archives being taken out of the building by clumsy SS functionaries and driven off in diesel-fuming trucks as another man might watch his daughter being ravished. Werner’s specialism was Luther, and most particularly the original Luther manuscript in the possession of the museum since its foundation: Vom Bekenntnis Christi, dating from 1527. He would study the manuscript as if it was a treasure map, working hours into the night and producing solemn exegeses for obscure journals in old-fashioned German. Werner had never married, but he was married to the museum library. There were great books attached to the desks with chains, and this had always been an image for Herr Hoffer of Werner Oberst’s attachment to his job; since last year’s removal of everything but a core of reference books, Werner had crumpled into himself, his cheeks sinking and his eyes retreating into their bruised sockets. Even his bad arm (from a bullet in the last war, he claimed) seemed shorter and more twisted. He reminded Herr Hoffer of a bulb left in a cellar, drying up almost to a fossil and yet somehow retaining life. He was only fifty-three.
Now they were all dried bulbs in the cellar, Herr Hoffer thought.
Characteristically, Werner had worried about damp in the salt-mine, but it was in fact too deep to be damp. Herr Hoffer had first visited the mine with a member of the SS-controlled Amtsgruppe Kulturbauten a month before the removal, and ascertained this straight away. The Kulturbauten official said that salt-mines were excellent depositories, as the salt absorbed any excess moisture; he showed Herr Hoffer very ancient salt layers in which ground water had not circulated. The great caverns were very dry, perfect for the needs of preservation. The official, while showing a knowledge of salt-mines, was quite ignorant of anything to do with art, being an architect specialising in the upkeep of stone castles – quite why he’d been sent was a mystery. In fact, Herr Hoffer decided the man was touched; he babbled on about a feudal Reich, with his restored castles overlooking thatched villages and towns as in the nursery tales of childhood, silver-armoured knights galloping about with death’s-heads on their helmets, and ancient cultic ceremonies – which even the Führer had dismissed as superstitious rot.
Herr Hoffer was glad that Werner, with his dry wit and absolute precision of thought, had not been there to get them into trouble.
‘How is your hand, Herr Hoffer?’ asked Frau Schenkel, leaning forward and tickling Caspar Friedrich between the ears.
‘Mere flesh, mere flesh, Frau Schenkel,’ he replied.
His hand hurt, in fact. He was not very good with wounds: after the first raid, at the sight of the terrible injuries sustained by his fellow citizens, he’d had a good vomit behind a heap of rubble from which an infant’s hand stuck out, white with dust. He had thought it was a porcelain doll’s.
‘Mind it doesn’t get infected,’ Frau Schenkel said.
Werner put a record on the gramophone and wound it up: Mendelssohn’s ‘Auf Flügeln des Gesanges’ filled the vaults with its unearthly beauty.
‘Ah, Mendelssohn,’ sighed Herr Hoffer.
It was a most suitable song for their position, the poet transporting his beloved to a paradisal garden beside the Ganges, where gazelles were skipping and violets whispering and looking upward to the stars. Even through the hiss and clicks of the old record, the song made Herr Hoffer’s spirit sway and soar as he closed his eyes. They would play records almost every time they had to take shelter in the vaults: not only did it distract them, it filled the embarrassing silences. The poor light and the anxiety made it hard to read, and neither Werner nor Frau Schenkel liked to play cards – the only point they agreed on.
The song faded into the violent knocking that spelt the end of the record. Werner slipped it back into its brown paper and there was a general sigh of appreciation, a pride in German artistic achievement that was, they all knew, supreme in the world.
‘Both Jewish,’ said Werner, suddenly.
It was such an odd comment, like a raspberry instead of applause. And Werner was smiling one of his thin, sardonic smiles.
‘Only his grandfather,’ Herr Hoffer pointed out.
‘And Heine?’
‘That was Herr Streicher for you,’ said Frau Schenkel. ‘He did like his music, no matter where it came from.’
‘What a pity we didn’t bring the chess,’ said Herr Hoffer.
‘I always beat you,’ said Werner. ‘You got upset last time. That’s why I didn’t bring it.’
‘He was an internationalist,’ said Hilde Winkel.
‘Who?’
‘Mendelssohn. Down with national music! That’s what he said, once,’ Hilde explained, looking intense, her head on one side. ‘He was a true Jew, in fact. He was no good after about the age of seventeen. There was no inner conflict. That Jewish impurity in his blood, it sapped his romantic part, you see. His striving part. He never reached the heroic heights.’
‘Ah,’ said Werner, ‘I’m so glad you reminded me, Fräulein Winkel. I was just thinking of playing the other side.’
And then, incredibly, he took out the record and snapped it in two over his knee.
Supposing time does not exist at all, or only as a surface made of ice on which we can slip from here to there, so that I might slide backwards one day and all this will be a possibility in the future, but not a certainty? And supposing the ice was so thin that we could fall through it? Where would we be, then? . . . The thin one came up again and comforted me and I cried. I should have looked back from the pear tree, I said.
8
Parry placed the antique painting by Mr Christian Vollerdt in a slit in the stone wall, where maybe they had a rush-light once. Its height just fitted, so he pushed it until it was hidden in darkness. Swell, he thought to himself. He kicked at the heap of burnt paintings, but they weren’t paintings any more. It was really too bad.
He noticed suddenly that the dead with the Himmler spectacles had one lying on his chest. In fact, the dead’s arms were crossed over it, which was why it had not been noticed before, and the dead’s knees were drawn up and the bottom edge of the frame was resting on his pelvis and the top came to his throat. The canvas was black but that was only the back, the front might have been shielded by the dead’s chest and belly and groin.
Parry started pulling at the picture from the top, his hands next to the dead’s face. This face was not the way it looked when it started. Because the arms were crossed over the burnt picture and the hands clenched on the frame each side, and not wanting t
he charred frame to break and not wanting to touch the dead, either, he had made it into a struggle that must finish one way or the other. He had to ease the burnt picture forward but the arms were holding, they were like iron. That is like a man with only one arm, he thought; you reckon he’s weak but he turns out to be stronger than when he had two.
Then he yanked hard and the arms shelled off largely to the bone and the picture came clear. He almost fell over. He was breathing hard. The knuckles of the hands were the colour of new-sawn beech; they hung there in their stiffness and all they needed was someone to put their flesh back and they would serve just fine. There was a scorched watch on the wrist, its cogs visible. Maybe it had been a beautiful piece.
‘Thank you,’ he said to the dead, smiling. ‘My, you look hungrier than ever. I’m sorry about that.’
He tried to work out what the wrecked picture had been, in the dim light, knowing he would never work it out but only that it must have been special, held onto right up to the end like that, like a bag of gold. The frame at the bottom had been tucked into the dead’s pelvis so it was only scorched and the label was almost legible. The canvas under the arms crossed over made a kind of X, while the rest flaked off into soot. The canvas X had blistered into black, however: there were patterns in the black – shinier black on black – but that was all. And this black reminded him of kicking the floor of the pine forest back home. He had seen one time in the pine forest back home when he was a boy how black and moist it was under the coating of needles and he had understood, all of a sudden, that this moist blackness gave sustenance to the trees and that it was the same as the mushroom compost on Joe Saville’s mushroom farm. That this fine black soil was the falling of pine needles over years and years and that everything grew out of its own death.
He was amazed now by how vivid the memory was – of a certain day in the pine woods when he was staying with his grown-up sister in the mountains, the sadness still in him from his mother’s going away like that, without warning, and then his father not coping too well, getting drunker and drunker back home; and the walk under the pines alone, the kicking of the soft floor, this realisation (in the sweet, rich smell of what he now knew was called humus) that everything grew out of its own death and how that’s what Jesus was doing with the Resurrection. And how he pulled out his Mountain knife under the pines and with this knife he etched, he dug and he etched with much labour a big black cross on the forest floor. Which was no doubt why, in turn (he thought), the remains of the picture took him over to that time some fifteen years back in the mountain pines.
Nothing happened, however, in the outer world as a result of that cross. His father drank more and more and then he died.
There were shouts from above, happy, drunken shouts: some German, some English, some Russian. That wouldn’t be the Russkie army, though; it’d be the Russkie prisoners-of-war. Most men were off-duty and getting themselves some fun for a day.
The first town they liberated, back in France, had given Parry the greatest experience of his life. He threw bars of chocolate to the kids, he was buried under girls and flowers in the back of the troop carrier. The German towns were the same, strangely enough, but by then he’d got sick of it – in a matter of days, especially since the run had got easier, he’d got awfully sick of it. There were too many deads of all types and sizes, too many hurt and frightened and grieving people, too much of plenty of nothing but noise and thrown-up stuff and blown houses and this and that operation that crawled off the paper and messed itself.
He took the black picture into the shaft of light so he could read the label better. The gilt had bubbled but he could make out letters, parts of words: au and Bur and Waldesraus and a date that could have been anything. He tore off the label and placed it in his breast pocket, along with the label that said mit Kanal. He chucked the remains of the picture on the floor of the vaults, creating a cloud of ash.
Then he shot a glance at the bespectacled dead, because he thought it had moved.
Morrison was calling down, cupping his mouth with one hand; the woman was not Frau Himmler but something like Haffer. He reckoned the woman was looking for her husband or brother or boyfriend in the ruins; now she was wandering around in a bad way. Maybe one of the dead guys down there was him, maybe the guy with the Himmler goggles, even. What’s husband in German? He’d lost his phrase book. He wanted Parry to get his Heini phrase book out of his satchel and look up Husband. Was it something like Man?
Parry heard all this with half an ear, wondering why Morrison was so concerned about the woman. Everyone was in a bad way, every motherfucker here was in a bad way, and in the whole goddamn world they were in a bad way.
He couldn’t recall, just at the moment, what ‘husband’ was in German. He was more interested in what Waldesraus meant in English – if Waldesraus was even a complete word. He had no idea why he was so interested in the label, maybe it took his mind off ruins and deads and burp guns and his chafed ass. He reached into his satchel and found the phrase book but it had gotten wet from rain and snow and a lot of the pages were stuck together. Husband was somewhere in the stuck pages. Wald, however, meant a wood or a forest. Maybe Waldesraus had something to do with a forest. The guy with the spectacles had been holding a picture of a forest. That would figure. The dead’s mouth was open and lipless and it was imploring him not to whatever. Or maybe it was just a large yawn because that’s when the heat had hit them.
He told Morrison to do whatever he thought best, but not to let the woman know there were deads down here. Say nein or nicht or take me to Berlin. Another of the guys, one of the young kids who looked like he was in the Boy Scouts, had put his face next to Morrison’s and was beaming down at him. Parry couldn’t stand it, he couldn’t stand being in charge any more. There was no point to flushing snipers or checking out booby traps with civilians breathing down your neck. The order was crazy.
Parry squinted at his watch.
There was an hour to go. Another sixty minutes pretending they were doing their duty.
He saw it sharp and clear, now: that he needed to be on his own. He was an awfully bad patrol leader. His guts had begun mounting the assault.
The kid called down: ‘D’you want us to cover you, sir?’
Which meant: what the fuck are you pissing at down there?
Parry shouted back at him, surprising himself. ‘What’s that sir? Don’t ever call me sir. OK? We told you that, man. Or Corporal. D’you want me picked off and dead? Didn’t we tell you that? I’m Parry. Or better still, I’m Neal. You know that, Carter.’
‘Cowley. Yes, sir. I mean –’
‘You’re a fuckwit, Cowley. I don’t want to be dead on account of a fuckwit. Do I?’
‘No, Parry.’
‘Call me Neal. Yeah, even better, definitely call me Neal.’
‘OK. Neal.’
‘Hey, you’re learning! You’re only half a fuckwit, now.’
‘Sir. Neal. Parry.’
‘I’m an English knight now, am I? Where’s my fucking horse? My kingdom for a fucking horse?’
His shouts were echoing in the vaults. He had once been a soldier in Richard III in junior high but that was another day and now he was a soldier again. His face came over in a sweat. A great Russian sweep was happening inside his bowels.
Morrison’s grin appeared again beside kid Cowley’s, those lips curled like some goddamn film star’s.
‘Everything OK, Neal?’
‘Listen. Patrol temporarily disbanded. Report back to the platoon CP in the grocer’s yard with the others in an hour to get counted off, meanwhile you can do what the fuck you like. No, regroup back here in forty-five minutes. If you’re late, I’ll assume you’re a casualty. That way you might get a posthumous medal and still appreciate it. Forty-five minutes, back here. Just fuck off and have yourself some fun.’
‘Are you serious, Neal?’
‘Yeah, I am. I am figuring hard. Objective accomplished.’ His head was spinning. The Russian
s were advancing towards his knees. ‘A little early, that’s all. What the hell’s a few minutes? It won’t lose us the war. Now scram, Morriboy. Go fuck off for forty-five minutes and just watch out. Watch out for company commanders and the last, crazy sniper of whatever this goddamn place is called.’
‘Hicksville. Hicksville-on-the-something. What fucking river is it, anyway, Neal?’
‘Just don’t let Georgie Patton know, OK?’
The Boy Scout squealed his laughter and Morrison shouted down, parroting General Patton’s drawl so they understood it quite clearly: ‘Yeah, we’re gonna get to murder those lousy Hun cocksuckers by the bushel-fucking-basket!’
‘Morriboy, you know the whole fucking speech.’
‘Yup, and every fucking line, Big Chief.’
Morrison was going over the top, now. This was his tendency.
‘Someday,’ he drawled, the boy next to him whooping his appreciation, ‘I want to see them goddamned Germans rise up on their piss-soaked hindlegs –’
‘Hey, Morrison, quit –’
‘And howl, “Jesus Christ, it’s the goddamned Third Army again and that son-of-a-fucking bitch Patton!”’
The dim space echoed with Morrison’s crazed voice: itch Patton . . . itch Patton . . . Yeah, what a bitch. Parry remembered how quiet it was when the General paused, not a man in the thousands of massed ranks sitting there in the English field stirring a muscle, so you could hear the breeze rustling in the leaves.
‘We are not interested in holding onto anything except the enemy’s balls!’ the fresh meat called down in a pathetic, sophomore’s voice, breaking the memory, trying to join in.
Morrison pushed him over with a shove of his hand.
Parry was already off further down the vaults, unstrapping his canteen belt as fast as he could.
The shadows on the beams move very slowly. It’s like watching the minute hand on a clock. They move, but you don’t see them move more than you see the moon move unless you let yourself [move] with it. The silence moves, too. One day I’ll miss that.