The Rules of Perspective

by Adam Thorpe

  You weren’t supposed to fraternise with the enemy. Also, he had a wife-to-be back home in Clarksburg, West Virginia.

  You’d have thought they’d have taken off their high heels, looking for somewhere to put them. A lot of people are executed in bare feet. Standing in the goddamn snow. Or not necessarily.

  He loved Maureen, yes he did. She was tough, compact, with brown eyes that were too close together but that made her interesting, she was not just your average buttoned-down prettiness, all neat in the pocket. It made her easier to recall. It made it easier to see her face in his sleep, where she was always seated at a piano. Maureen, to his knowledge, had never touched a piano in her life. Maybe when he got back he’d get her to touch piano.

  The German girls chased them, in some places.

  Didn’t they literally run down the fucking road after us, in some places? Yes please. Didn’t they? Too few Heini apes around, all shot up or away and dying or plain running scared and these girls were starved and some of them were very sweet and lovely, they’d do it for nothing, nothing but something you couldn’t grasp but which might be named comfort. Human comfort.

  Others would call it sex starvation. And more things.

  The men always gave something afterwards – K-ration crackers or dehydrated pears or a can of Spam. He’d not yet done it. All the lectures and talks had maybe got to him: it was as though every goddamn girl this side of the Atlantic had syphilis, the way the medics talked. Instead, he’d throw his lemonade powder to the kids, or his supper prunes to the grandmothers, or offer his sugar and canned milk to the women with babes in their arms. Partly, it was his uncleanness, his stinking state of uncleanness. As soon as there was water again in the town, there’d be baths. He wanted a hot soapy bath and clean underwear and some kind of miracle bombers to clean out his stomach. And a feather bed in which he could sleep after his bath for forty-eight delicious hours.

  Then a hot meal of something nice that wouldn’t throw a grenade back in his bowels. And some clean spring water that didn’t need boiling and didn’t taste of chlorine.

  He was so tired it was almost pleasant. If the world revolution happened right now, he would curl over and sleep.

  His rifle was goddamn heavy, even. He didn’t think he could carry an erection. He needed all the blood for his brain, to swirl around in there and keep him just this side of awake.

  The others were probably doing it now, however. Right now, probably.

  Morrison, for instance, with the woman looking for Heinrich someone. It probably was Heinrich Himmler and nobody knew it. Parry smiled. He wouldn’t mind just being pulled off some time, over some girl’s thin belly, if it came to it. Disease and dirt everywhere. Never mind what the killjoy medics said.

  There was this thin breakthrough to survival, his own personal surviving of the war, and he was going to make right for that opening by staying steady. And Maureen would touch piano.

  He shifted on the mountain of rubble, looking at his watch. Twenty-three minutes. Time inched past. Your mind kept talking. He pulled out the two labels from his breast pocket: Waldesraus and mit Kanal. Put them both behind glass. One of the older guys, a PFC from Charlie Company, waved up at him, passing below, giving him a friendly shout. He stupidly stuffed the labels back as if they were valuable loot.

  ‘OK?’

  Uh-huh, he was OK.

  So who cares about fucking rank?

  Stripes are so much chicken shit, targets for snipers. His own had left a faded patch on his shoulder that might not even fool someone, one day.

  Parry fingered the cognac, not wanting to shicker some there, in such a prominent position.

  Yes, it was good being up here, he was thinking, on this mountain, leaning on somebody’s broken desk. As if it had always been broken. As if everything had always been broken. He was supposed to be supervising the chow-line tomorrow morning, with Captain Cochrane, just after roll-call. Between then and reporting back to the CP in about twenty minutes was fluid and off-duty. He felt the exhilaration of the truant. Remembered it from all those years back. The number of those years being ten, because he was awfully young.

  Unless some SS son-of-a-bitching bastard decided to exercise his right to defend his wonderfully picturesque and lying country.

  He needed to figure what exactly to do with the snowy mountains and golden valley by Mr Christian Vollerdt. The nice item of salvage. He’d deal with it while everyone else was drunk and sleeping. Chaos is camouflage.

  He’d get married and have six kids on the basis of Mr Vollerdt. And a tank of a Norge refrigerator.

  Dusk was settling in, bringing new shadows, casting whole streets into darkness. He scratched his brow, tipping his helmet back and exercising his fingers where the sweaty lining had given him a rash.

  And a Gatsby pool.

  Hitching his rifle on his back again, he climbed cautiously down the shifting, uncertain slope that had been the museum’s tower, the cognac slopping and gurgling in his backpack. He could twist his ankle and be out of the war for a time. Go ahead. Only it is virtually impossible to twist your ankle deliberately, someone said. Anyway, he wasn’t a yellow coward. The yellow cowards had to be killed off like rats, that’s what the great god Georgie Patton had said.

  By the way, sir, he was right.

  Parry passed the desk with its folded newspaper and the dead lying underneath and saw how the dead had some kind of a spike on its charred head. Then he was under a length of the museum’s wall that had survived up to the roof-guttering. It had empty windows like a theatre set and a twist of iron balustrade and flowery wallpaper and radiators hanging on. Then it rose to the exposed gable end with the little white Virgin in her oystershell niche, like a miracle or someone thinking how she had to jump. That’s fine, there were a lot of these miracles in a bombed-out town. A bottle of liquor left whole in a wrecked desk, for instance. Radiators were not miracles: you could have most of a wall blasted into grid-work and the radiators left intact behind like gritted teeth. People had leaned on them. Wet to the skin. Or maybe just a little cold in peacetime.

  Looking up, he saw how the roof here must have been glassed; the framework was still there, like inked hatching, ready to fall.

  Au revoir, he thought. I’m not such a sucker as to look up and watch you fall.

  I see them all: Papa, Mama, Leo, Lily, little Henny, Grandmama; all my cousins and aunts and uncles. I have just enough buttons – thirty-six – to include them all. Mama is my top button, that keeps me warm around my throat. I could have looked back at the pear tree and seen her in the door and waved.

  11

  Frau Schenkel lit the candle with one of the precious matches and immediately their position felt better. The flame cast a golden light, for instance, on Hilde Winkel’s face, with its soft downy skin and full lips on which the blood gleamed like a careful highlight. The swollen upper lip filled Herr Hoffer’s heart with tenderness, although it made him think of a duck. Hilde’s thesis was on realism in modern sculpture, the kind of Party sculpture he detested for its heroic bombast and falsity. The swelling was certainly realistic.

  ‘I’m sure it won’t scar, Fräulein Winkel,’ he said, a little breathless from his excursion. ‘Lips heal very quickly.’

  It was a flattering light that the candle made: it made Werner the archivist resemble his younger self, for really he had not changed very much, having so little flesh on him, his cheeks being incapable of sagging. It was even quite temperate down here, and the little golden flame made them forget the discomfort of the hard stone floor, with only an old cushion to soften it.

  ‘I think,’ said Herr Hoffer, ‘we are just beginning to get on top of the situation.’

  ‘That,’ said Werner, ‘is precisely what my sick mother said, two hours before she died.’

  Herr Hoffer ignored him. He did feel hopeful, suddenly. He had, anyway, adapted to wartime: it had been a long process of insinuation. Even rubble and bodies no longer shocked him. Only shots. Peace wou
ld feel strange, like a forgotten smell of biscuits or the inside of an old dresser to which no one had the key.

  Frau Schenkel took off her long coat, rolled up her sleeves and dressed the wounds – she had started out as a nurse in the last war. She was really remarkable. Her son and husband had frozen to death from the feet up. They had died three weeks apart on the Eastern Front and yet she had shown the most remarkable fortitude, coming into work as if nothing had happened. The only difference was that her hair was scraped right back, showing all of her neck and a formidable brow. And the skin was raw either side of every fingernail, which otherwise remained impeccably filed, and varnished with something that smelt of pear drops.

  Her husband was a train-driver and froze at the controls, which seemed odd to Herr Hoffer. He had been at a loss what to say, after the second death (Siggi, the twenty-year-old son’s), on the third day of 1943. He had cleared his throat and started to address a consoling speech but she had lifted her hand to silence him. She had remained very still like that, behind her typewriter, with her hand up, staring in front of her like a statue – a marble statue, for her face was very pale – and Herr Hoffer had not dared to move a muscle or utter one more word. All he thought was: this woman is now alone. It was as if her aloneness was flowing into her, steeling her, throwing off all exterior invasions.

  He thought she might explode, turn hysterical, collapse into a sobbing fit.

  Instead, she very slowly lowered her hand, blinked a few times, turned her head towards him and said: ‘I dreamt last night of trees, Herr Hoffer. That was enough. I won’t describe it, but it was enough. Please, let us carry on as normal.’

  And so he had, giving her some papers to file. Really, he was very relieved. He was vaguely frightened of Frau Schenkel. If somehow he were to lose his wife and daughters – if a bomb fell directly onto their apartment, for instance, driving right down into the shelter – he knew he would be in a pitiful state, and scarcely responsible for his actions. But Frau Schenkel had dreamt of trees and now she was in her forest solitude.

  Later, perhaps even in the same week, he had found her looking at a painting in the Long Gallery.

  This vast clear space, with its glassed roof, had housed the contemporary collection, now dwindled to the harmless, the conventional, the trite. Frau Schenkel very rarely looked at paintings, although she knew the contents of the catalogue as well as he did. She was staring at the Paul Burck painting of the birch forest, with its muddy, sunken road winding into the shrouded distance through the complete stillness of the trees. It was a painting that had gained from the absence of the great Expressionist works around it, and for that reason Herr Hoffer tried to dislike it. Its only mystery was why it was called Waldesrauschen, since the painting gave no hint of a breeze rustling the leaves.

  There again, all paintings were trapped in silence, like a noisy fly in amber.

  ‘They grow on eternally,’ she said, when she heard him trying to tiptoe back out, the parquet creaking. ‘They are so steadfast, are trees.’

  She was standing with one foot slightly forward, as if her movement had been arrested suddenly, in extended hesitation – though it was clear she had been staring at the Paul Burck for quite a while. Her position reminded Herr Hoffer of all his favourite sculptures, including those he knew only from photographs. Donatello’s David, whose bronze he so very much wanted to touch. The same strange tension, between stillness and movement. The colossal marbles of the new Germany had no movement, no hesitancy. No past, and no future. Everything will always be like this. This is why he thought of them as dumb brutes, albeit with swollen veins on their feet and in the crooks of their arms. But he kept this to himself.

  And what had he said that time, from the door, while the parquet creaked of its own volition and a fly buzzed against the roof-glass in the huge room?

  ‘I think, Frau Schenkel, that one feels protected in a forest.’

  His voice had echoed. His spectacles had misted up. He had seen again, as if it had happened weeks before and not years, the black-sleeved, red-banded arms taking the paintings off the hooks one by one at a nod from the experts of the Degenerate Confiscation Committee in their grey suits, and remembered what Frau Schenkel had said, watching them: ‘Between you and me, Herr Hoffer, I was never very keen on those peculiar ones.’

  But that was several years back, in the previous decade, when he still took the tram to work and Herr Streicher was still technically behind the Director’s desk and now (meaning two years ago, standing in the Long Gallery) it was war and Herr Streicher had taken to his bed and Frau Schenkel had lost her son and husband and he bicycled twenty minutes each way, thinking inspired thoughts about art.

  One minute you are one thing, and the next you are another.

  They could hardly hear the bombing, now the door was closed. It was a special door, constructed following the Ministry’s guidelines in 1938.

  Herr Hoffer looked up at the low curve of the vault’s roof. It really did look invincible. What was it Schiller said about Phidias’s Zeus, the crouched Zeus of Olympia? That if he’d stood, the roof of the temple would have shattered? There was strength in curves and the god was subservient to the makings of man. Yes. The vaults had belonged to the tough old castle. The castle that had reared its rather squat towers on the site for centuries, until the Swedes razed it in 1631, so that you could stand on the rubble and see the sky. As if there had never been any towers at all.

  Three coats of size to stiffen the canvas. Amazing, to think that he had bothered!

  As if the whiteness was as necessary as the blackness, the entire lack of light that was his secret.

  Maybe I am the only person in the world, apart from the demons and the mice. What proof is there that, anyway, everything we experience is not invented by us? But the bread they bring is not invented, nor is hunger. Nor is fear.

  12

  A typewriter was sat on one of the empty windows’ sills, perhaps blown there or placed for a joke.

  Take dictation, Miss Hayworth.

  It wasn’t all that damaged, although the paint had mostly blistered off. It was a Remington: he could see enough of the name. Like in that postcard he’d had in his student rooms at college: a photomontage from the twenties, a crazy Dada picture with this Remington typewriter in the corner and a guy in a suit and a row of pipes and a medical-demonstration head and a picture on an easel and a label saying Naturkraft, all thrown together in a photographic collage that must have been revolutionary twenty-odd years ago. He couldn’t even remember the name of the artist, but it was a crazy picture and he’d spent a lot of time gazing at it, thinking of other things like girls or grits or the meaning of life.

  He stood where the inside of the museum had become the outside, like a turned-out sock, and looked through the window, pretending he was a visitor come to admire the artworks. It was hard to find his balance on the rubble. There was so much glass around, so much old iron.

  It did not help much to think of the inside of art museums back home, the way they always felt so civilised and still and untouchable, the air kind of not breathing. Timeless and eternal. Truly true and deep and eternal.

  He tapped on the typewriter’s twisted keys, but the heat had fused them. He considered a painting he could paint of the typewriter in the bombed-out window, with the smoking ruins beyond, entitled Survivor. He was getting so used to rubble and dust and flame and deads, they were almost average to him, and to see a town with flowers in the windows and people in buses and the smell of bread baking nicely would be as strange as luxury. Or revolutionary.

  When he got back home, that is what he would paint: normal streets. And from time to time he’d paint a ruin, he’d paint a twisted typewriter or a little white Virgin in a scorched wall or a newspaper lying on rubble. No one would buy those, it would be for his children and his grandchildren in a time when bombing towns had been replaced by world peace and everybody was shovelling shit in Louisiana, whatever. He couldn’t really picture tho
se pictures, though, because he wanted to ditch his clean, advertising style of painting for something more complicated, more from inside him, and when he looked around him now he saw weird, jagged lines and chaotic shapes, more complicated than a normal street.

  He couldn’t really figure his pictures-to-be, no, yet he felt an excitement, thinking about them as he walked between the rubble with the gun on his back, like the regular soldier he was.

  He stepped over a dead under a blanket with a hand sticking out and a helmet upside-down beside it with the two little cartoon-lightning Ss on the sides and a lot of stuff from the pockets scattered about. He turned around and he kicked the helmet. It spun off and rolled and rocked and kept on rocking smaller and smaller, like it was talking some.

  Every dead is a sad son of a bitch. Even an SS dead.

  The emptied pockets meant their men had been down here – maybe Morrison or the others.

  You’re looking good, boy, sad and dead. We prefer you like that. One day in another time I might have said to you: C’mon, let’s have dinner. Too bad I never did or will because this time is now and is hauling us all along in the cart.

  The secret is not to think too much. I wish I had a gramophone player. Thirty-six buttons. But where am I in the buttons? Papa, Mama, Leo, Lily, little Henny, Grandmama . . . Where am I?

  13

  Somewhere in the city they had made woad.

  That was what the Romans had seen coming at them out of the trees: woad-painted terrorists, unafraid of death. A great and unearthly scream coming at them out of the mist.

  ‘I think,’ said Werner, out of the mist as it were, ‘we are all living in a hospital.’

  Frau Schenkel sighed. ‘A very helpful remark, Herr Oberst.’

  ‘It isn’t mine. It is Baudelaire’s.’

  ‘Hospitals are generally more comfortable,’ Herr Hoffer said, shifting on his cushion.

  ‘Sometimes I think you’re all a bit deranged, the things you say,’ said Frau Schenkel, half-seriously through her cigarette.