by Adam Thorpe
‘They’ll treat you alright,’ muttered Werner, without opening his eyes.
No one said anything, because no one really knew one way or the other.
Why do they look after me? If they are caught, they will be shot. When I hear one come up the ladder with my food and water, I am never sure it is one of them. Only when I hear the three knocks followed by a silence followed by a fourth do I know it is one of them. Sometimes they don’t come for days. Then I believe I am dead, and that being alive is a dream. Except that, when you are dead, you do not think all the time of sugar and coffee.
18
The stretcher guys took away Morrison and the fighting patrol did their house-clearing drill up the whole wide street and then Parry gave his report. It was not hard, lying. The others stayed in the billet, drinking and smoking and playing cards. They’d lost their taste for girls, now. They weren’t about to blame the patrol leader, they were too callow, but Parry did not want to be around. He had a new E-Z-Flow double-edged razor and a fresh fat tube of Barbasol and he took his time, pressing his chin and his cheeks with his fingers and then shaving some more just for the hell of it. He had a fresh towel wrapped round his middle after his bucket shower and he wouldn’t have minded a girl’s hand down there just then, he didn’t need to be in bed. Her skin would also smell of pine from the soap and her thick hair, too. He was issued a clean pair of German underpants and socks and an absent buddy’s green trousers from the stores. Its pocket flaps were frayed. They smelt of laundry. He didn’t know the buddy. The pockets were empty.
‘This man is something else now,’ he said – almost a question.
‘Yeah, he’s maybe undergoing treatment in Honolulu,’ said Riddel. ‘Try not to muss them. He may want them back.’
Then Parry spooned down a little hot chow and he swigged some soda and then he hunted around for a battery for his flashlight. He had a problem finding a battery, however – or one that worked. Almost everyone who might have helped him was drunk. He felt good, though. He didn’t need to be drunk to feel good and his face was smooth and glowed and the back of his hand smelt of pine. He had not had a new pair of britches in seven months.
So he went over to where Morrison’s body had been taken and took the flashlight out of the bootstrap. No one had yet taken Morrison’s boots off. Deads weren’t a priority. Morrison was lying in a room with about ten other guys under what looked like old curtains and there was his dog tag to show which one he was because they were a row of covered strangers, but Parry was only interested in the boot with the flashlight tucked in. The light worked.
The strange thing is they were all strangers to themselves, now.
He thanked Morrison and made the sign of the cross over his chest in case the chaplain wasn’t around, then a wave of sorrow came over him and he let the tears drip onto his hands. Soldiers spent so much time sobbing, he thought, that there wasn’t too much time left to fight.
He blew his nose and hurried away without lifting the old curtain’s shroud and taking a last look at his guardian angel’s face, knowing it wouldn’t be the same and that the new dead one would replace the old live one in his memory.
He slowed down, calming himself, feeling hollowed out but not too sad now. He had kept his rifle on him: the town was secured to the last-but-one laundry basket, as Sergeant Riddel put it, but in that basket is a Waffen-SS Colonel with a Spandau and in the very last basket is a bomb.
Also, he had his plan.
It was dark by now. There was a light mist of dust and smoke that thickened into floating ripples here and there, like fog in a vampire movie. It made things easier on the eye. Chickens were bubbling over camp fires that were blurred and beautiful in the mist. Artillery shells were still falling, but no one knew where from and no one cared. Wires hissed and sparked and now and again something small exploded, as if waiting for the right moment. Small fires burned away at the tops of ruined apartment houses, like beacons to immortality on Grecian temples. He had done a picture of a Grecian temple and its blazing beacon to immortality for Texaco and the colours got printed all wrong and it looked sullen. There were sweet whiffs of brandy and beer through the dust and smoke and stink of rubber; his tongue had gotten furred with this unclean air. Bigger fires still glowed, especially from the wrecked thermometer factory.
He was told to go take a look at the thermometer factory. It was almost on his way. The mercury tanks had been torn by a shell and splashes of mercury were skidding in their weird rolling way over the yard, quicksilver reddening in the twilight, poisonous and lovely, welling up against corpses then slipping round them and breaking apart again into quivering, silvery constellations and splashes of tiny beads that met up and merged and grew bigger. It left no stain on the ground, like blood or water or gasoline did; it didn’t seem to touch the ground at all. No one wanted to put a finger in it, or even a toe. They threw bricks at it instead to make it shatter and move.
The girls in town were friendly, he’d heard – they kept saying how they hated the Russians but not the Brits and the Yankees, they especially loved the Yankees. Some were angry that the mayor or whoever had not put out a white flag despite the SS guys; others were proud. They were so hungry, but then so were the soldiers hungry: most of the supply trucks had not kept up with their advance, which was why they were sticking around for a couple of days. This was what he had picked up from Lieutenant Howard, who had ulcers from worrying about things. The only crates in the canteen were breakfast rations – dehydrated T-juice cocktail and wholewheat cereal and canned bacon. The hot chow had been canned bacon floating in some dehydrated bean soup that hadn’t wholly liquefied. There were, however, plenty of cigarettes. If the cigarettes ever ran out then the whole goddamn Third Army would give up.
He lit a Chesterfield and picked his way through rubble and over deads looking immortal for a day. They looked as if they had just started but you had to remember they had also just finished. Dazed old men with suitcases and bundles didn’t even notice him. They were sadder than anybody because the blood on their hands was their own past, it was all they had. Mothers with silent kids were not finding it easy to push their piled-up prams. Men from other companies were celebrating victory over yet another strategic point, their hearts still beating. They were laughing and shouting and whistling in the ruins. Some guys had cut the head off a chicken and were watching the body run up and down like a wind-up toy.
Morrison was missing all this, he thought. He’d never know it again. It was as irrelevant to him now as any goddamn thing was, including the Milky Way.
The picture of the moment of Morrison’s death kept coming up in Parry’s mind, as if he was at the movies only it was dark and then all of a sudden a couple of seconds of the movie were shown, but no more.
He needed to make jokes, and hear them. Good jokes.
The back of the stubbled neck, the spinning round, the gills in the neck, the weird little puppy whimpers. Then darkness. Darkness in his mind.
Parry so wanted to live, but so had Morrison wanted to live. A square-headed patriot from rural Wisconsin with a curvy girl’s mouth who moved his head forward and back like a chicken as he said ‘Yup . . .’
No one else did that: it was unique.
And the family would not yet know.
Morrison Senior was a leather worker, worked hides in a stinking concrete shed. That’s what Morrison had related, several times. And he always won at pinochle.
Parry passed a broken-up shop; there was kitchen stuff, whisks and graters and pans and a whole cooker in the rubble blown out over the road. It amazed him that such shops still functioned at the end of time. A few hollowed-out civilians were picking at the mess, filling their pockets, cutting their fingers on the broken window-glass. Heaps of brick and old beams, smoking. They had really dumped a lot of ordnance here. They had bombed the rubble, probably. He wondered why burnt buildings always smelt so thick and sour. And the stubbornness of radiators.
He walked on towards the wrec
kage of the museum a few big streets to the east, looking innocent. He was an artist. He was the only artist around here, he felt. One day he would certainly quit doing advertising copy and aim for the purity of true artistic inspiration. He saw himself in a big airy studio filled with a crisp northern light, but he still could not picture the kinds of paintings he would create. Did that matter? He never had that kind of problem with advertising copy – with peanuts and chocolate cookies and chewing gum and automobiles. It came to him whole and complete, the image, even when there was very little instruction from on high, from the firm itself or his boss. His lines were always clear and neat, and he was exceptionally good at faces.
Some said he was a little like Grant Wood.
There were gleams of sweat on his corn gatherers and dusky coffee pickers. It was a blend of social realism and something dream-like and easy, like a childhood memory. If it hadn’t been for the war, he would now be in New York, almost certainly, with one of the top firms. It helped so much to have money. He had no money. He couldn’t seem to hang on to what little he made in his job. All he needed was a good sum as a kind of starting fund. This was why he was heading back to the vaults. It was for art’s sake, he was doing this. He didn’t need to try to look innocent: he felt it. He felt OK, doing what he was about to do, although he also felt self-conscious of being alone and made sure he looked like he was a soldier with a strict military objective, heading someplace.
A lot of streets, even the wider ones, were neck-high in rubble, as if a river of brick had flowed down them and settled up to the middle of the ground-floor windows; no path had yet been cleared by the prisoners, and only a very few people ventured up them.
They were streets of death, he thought: that’s how you walked to the other world, over a sea of loose bricks and lumps of masonry, stumbling, taking a helluva long time.
A lone tank ground its way up and over the debris and passed him in a choking cloud of plaster dust where a group of civilians was stood at the base of a tall ladder. At the top of the ladder was a man attaching a rope around a giant Nazi eagle bolted to the building. He wanted to stay, to watch the Nazi eagle get pulled down so that it would remain as a mental sign for him in the chaos, a sign of the end of evil, but it was getting dark and the guy was having problems knotting the rope and the dust was hanging in the air.
Anyway, the end of evil will only come with the end of the profit by it. No way will it come tomorrow, nor the day after.
Apart from small-arms fire and some sporadic artillery, there were machine-guns going off somewhere, in short bursts. The Brits called them ‘chatterboxes’ and that was the right word, they talked too much and too easily. These sounded like big Browning MMGs, the ones with a 4,000-yard range, maybe clearing some trouble on the outskirts. He hoped there wasn’t too much trouble.
Maybe they had found another guy with a Spandau in some upper window and that noise was a tank spraying Besa fire at him until he danced and screamed and fell forward like a puppet.
He flashed his light in the dark pockets of the rubble as he passed it. There was a blanket hanging off a smashed wall next to a broken bed with a doll beside it, the type whose eyes opened when you stood it up. Sometimes dolls were booby traps so he didn’t touch it and it reminded him of a dead kid he’d seen. He rolled the blanket up and carried it on his shoulder.
He had this idea he’d need something soft to sit on, waiting.
When he saw the exposed gable end and its surviving wall with the typewriter in the window and the hatch of skylight at the top and the tiny Virgin hanging on in there and the hillock of rubble with the desk halfway up, he felt an excitement such as he had never known before.
It was almost a sexual excitement, and he had to force himself to look calm, to wait again like a guard with his gun across his knees until the coast was clear.
It took some time.
There were a lot more people around, now, as if they’d suddenly emerged from hiding and they came towards and past him like a dream of being somewhere abroad and strange: civilians with suitcases like they were tourists or wheeling bicycles loaded with linen or pushing handcarts spilling over with china and deckchairs and mattresses. Nobody acknowledged Parry, which made it even more like a dream. He saw a hand in the rubble, a girl’s hand, and kicked away at the stones and stuff until he saw a white breast and shoulder and realised it was a statue, a marble nude without a head, maybe the one the boys had pretended to screw. But it had found itself under rubble again, as if it had sunk in under its own weight. Maybe it was old and Grecian. It had sharp nipples. Exaggerated. Maureen’s were not like that.
This is not the season for cardigans.
He sat on his heels a little way up the rubble hillock again and wondered where life went to. He somehow thought it was tougher being dispossessed than being bombed out. He couldn’t imagine, back home, having his door kicked down by strangers, the rooms looted, his family told to go. It must have happened in the Civil War, along with massacres. For that matter, he couldn’t imagine Clarksburg being bombed.
Clarksburg had a small museum with some Indian flints and mementoes of the early settlers and a room dedicated to Stonewall Jackson, with his uniform in a glass case and his stuffed war horse. Imagine that museum turned to rubble.
When he was in England a year back, training for the invasion, an RAF guy told him the slang term for hitting museums, schools, hospitals and any other soft civilian stuff.
Sex-appeal bombing.
That was British humour, he guessed, you had to say it in that weird British accent to make it funny. I say, old chap, let’s do some sex-appeal bombing, don’t you know. Bloody good show, what? But the Brits had done as much as the Americans or the Canadians or anybody else on D-Day, and lost fewer men; for all their weird accents and behaviour, they were pretty good at fighting.
A group of Americans passed below him with linked arms, helmets askew, like a dance routine. He did not know them. They were singing ‘Good for Nothin’ Joe’.
The burnt bodies further down, around the dead horse, hadn’t been cleared: he could see them as rocks in the gathering darkness. Stones in a river.
He kept quiet.
He fingered the labels in his breast pocket. Waldesraus. And the other one that said ‘canal’.
Do people who don’t speak English picture the same life? If you know what I mean.
He got up slowly and he slipped down into the vaults.
(He’d waited until there was a gap in the passers-by, so no one saw.)
Something big scuttled away from the bodies down there as he lowered himself in. Maybe the rats were hungry, too. He switched on Morrison’s flashlight and avoided more than glancing at the four cadavers with their purple agonised faces, almost like Negro faces, lined up on either side next to the wreckage of the artworks. Deads don’t have themselves any fun.
He’d been nervous about not finding the snowy mountains and golden valley in the slit that was maybe a niche for a rush-light, but the painting was still there. The four guardian angels had protected it. He smiled to himself as he took the salvage out of the niche. He loved this painting, more and more. Mr Christian Vollerdt. You and I.
He stood the flashlight upright in the niche and studied the painting again. The late-evening light flooded the valley beyond the silver birch trees, beyond the pool and the high rock: amazing, how the painting was the judge of its own light.
There was a dog; he hadn’t noticed the dog before.
The tiny shepherd still leant on his stick and the sheep were bunched up around him. The light’s beam fell on the label and he savoured it again. Something, maybe John, John Christian Vollerdt (1708–1769), Landschaft mit Ruinen. ‘Landscape with Ruin.’ Or maybe ‘Ruins’. He hadn’t worked that out with Morrison around: alone, he felt more intelligent.
Vollerdt must be famous. He wished he knew how to say the name as it really was. His way it rhymed with ‘dirt’. At any rate, it was a beautiful painting. That high rock
wasn’t a rock, it was the side of a ruin, maybe a big church or a castle, with the broken columns in the foreground also a part of some big joint.
Good for nothin’ Joe, huh?
The splendour of the snowy mountains, like the timbered back country of home where the trout flash in the shallows and all that crap he had to illustrate. The peaks are catching the last of the sun beyond the golden valley. Like ice in the bucket at Pompeii or whatever, this thing had somehow survived the conflagration. He felt almost religious about this picture. It was blessed. It had tiny hairline cracks in it, like the joins of a jigsaw. Maybe in one corner there was some blistering. Or maybe it was age.
He was touching the painting softly with his finger and feeling the faint corrugations of the varnished brushstrokes when he heard a noise.
He heard this scuffling noise and he grabbed the light clumsily from the niche and the beam caught a movement in the head of the guy who was not Himmler.
We’re all here for the night, man.
The guy with the round spectacles and the yawn. He was shaking his head.
He was staring at Parry with his blind spectacles and shaking his head.
Keep quiet and hope the demons don’t notice you. I didn’t look back, but I’m still [in] Hell.
19
The bombardment could no longer be confused with Herr Hoffer’s stomach. The walls now shivered against their spines. The candle flame was surrounded by a misty aureole that was not smoke but dust, and the air definitely smelt of a bitterness that even Frau Schenkel’s dirty cigarettes could not be manufacturing.
Herr Hoffer closed his eyes, keeping his mind very still. He was trying not to feel nauseous. He had not had a migraine for six weeks. He would he in his bed with a sock over each eye. Buried in complete darkness, like his secret. It was all he could bear. Light was torture. Poor Sabine would have to whisper comforting words, empty the pail of his vomit and keep the children quiet. The attacks usually came when he relaxed after severe tension, but the last one, in February, was the result of shock.