by Adam Thorpe
The library, holding antiquarian volumes up to 1850 and intended only for scholars, was like a granary without so much as a husk of corn: at least the shelves were there. At least it smelt of beeswax and leather. The galleries, however, with their bare whiteness, were like brains without a thought. He could still feel the concentrated silence of intellectual effort in the empty library, like a firm-set jaw.
The Führer scowled down at him, though. His huge photographic portrait hung above Werner’s desk on the podium, scowling down on the long, empty tables where Herr Hoffer felt like the last scholar in the world. No one had thought of saving that picture! He could not work out Werner Oberst, whether he was on one side or the other. Anyway, there were no longer any sides, just those that surrounded them like high prison walls.
The shells had paused. His bowels constricted, in anticipation of a sudden loud bang. The pauses were worse than the noises.
He used the toilets off the library, as he would always do in the past. The official staff toilet off the office had very thin walls, you could hear Frau Schenkel’s typewriter as if she was in there with you. For the use of library members only. The small, private space was a relief, even before he had emptied his bowels, his piles more irritating than painful today. It was such a relief to be alone, to let oneself go. Did Hitler shit? He couldn’t imagine it.
And the graffiti was scholarly, in Latin or Greek or English or French.
Quas dederis solas semper habebis opes.
Martial.
J’en ai trop prolongé la coupable durée.
Racine.
Something by Talleyrand, blacked out.
There was no paper. He checked the colour of his turds (black) and pulled the chain. There was no water, not even from the taps. His face in the mirror above the handbasin surprised him; his thinning hair was all over the place. He had run out of cream and Sabine cut with blunt scissors. He took off his spectacles and pressed his face with his fingers – smoothing out the violet-tinted eye bags, the lines around his nose, the folds at the corners of his mouth. The tiny wounds made by the glass were a stipple of dark spots; they stung when he moved his skin about. Lack of food made him both more youthful and more like an elderly man. He replaced his spectacles and kept very still for a moment, as if posing.
Portrait of a Gentleman, 1945
Oil on panel, 25.6 x 30.4
Private collection.
The light fell on one side of his face, dividing it along its contours like the coloured relief in an atlas. The artist had rendered the skin in thick impasto – no, with the careful, methodical brush of an old Flemish master. Ladies and gentlemen, see how the inner life is suggested by the physical verisimilitude of the painted flesh, the highlight on the glistening eyeball!
He smiled, and his living portrait startled him. He must paint, when the war was over! He must devote himself to painting, even if he was appointed Director! Pencil, chalk and watercolour: his favourite combination. Oh, if only he had taken up the true bohemian life in his youth, peeling potatoes for his supper in the corner of a Berlin attic, washing now and again in a tin basin, drying his shirt on the roof!
He felt safe in the little washroom. The bombardment had eased. And then a sudden chill took hold of him. Werner would tell the Americans about the Teniers. Venus would rise from her bath, dripping and naked, holding Werner Oberst’s hand. Werner, whose record had been spotless in all regards, would tell them all about the Acting Acting Director’s collusion with the Regional Party Leader, that fat buffoon Fest.
Would they care? They might. Plenty of men released from the camps or returning from exile to replace the Acting Acting Director. The Jews, for instance. The Americans would be very keen on helping the Jews, making up for the abuse. The mere fact that he had remained in his post, thanks to his agility, would count against him. Deep down they would be jealous of his agility, his pluck, and so seek to destroy him with lies about collusion and betrayal. All he had cared about was the museum and its contents, as an officer must care about his ship and its passengers and its cargo and its crew. But how much would that count for in the face of all those self-righteous exiles and camp inmates and vengeful Jews – those who had either fled to save their skin or been careless enough to tread on the Party’s toes?
His expression in the mirror was pitiful, ravaged. A smell of sewage was seeping up, thicker than his own smell: pipes had probably burst. He watched his lips shape the words, as if in a film: All I have wanted in life is beauty. Is there not a moral force in beauty? Kant thought so, for one.
Now he looked like a clown, one of those sinister cabaret clowns with white faces and black lips. Kant had lent the face no extra dignity whatsoever. It twitched in surprise, suddenly: the little window in the washroom, glazed and ribbed, showed the shadow of something large moving in a strange way beyond it.
He hesitated, then opened the window with difficulty and saw the edge of a large cloth fluttering and billowing in the wind. It was the big red swastika banner, draped the length of the museum’s back brick wall facing Count-von-Moltke Strasse. The banner had come loose. The cloth struck his face as he tried to take hold of it, stinging his eye. There was no one on the long street, its dingy buildings – some of them warehouses – not at all damaged. Everyone must be underground, he thought.
He closed the window again and wiped his wet eye. The banner should be taken down, or the Americans might see it as a provocation. But who would volunteer to remove it before the Americans arrived? The very idea contracted his stomach. A burst of mortar shells, quite near, announced the renewal of the bombardment. It was as if the whole business had an independent brain, like an ogre having its meal.
He left the toilets and crossed the Thoma flower mosaic to the great flight of stairs. He might as well do his duty and check the upper floors again. It stopped him brooding. He passed the superb, white-glazed Allach milkmaid in the oystershell niche halfway up the stairs: it was a gift from Reichsführer-SS Himmler himself, via SS-Obersturmbannführer Professor Diebitsch, the fine-porcelain manager in Dachau. It was expected, in return, that the museum should exhibit one of Diebitsch’s quaint pastoral paintings – which it did. Herr Hoffer had left the milkmaid there during the evacuation, moving it quite close to the edge: each vibration moved it closer. And closer.
The sweet little milkmaid would fall and shatter. Then she would be free.
He moved it again, placing it right on the lip of the niche. A sudden fit of giddiness overtook him. He made it to the top of the stairs and a cushioned bench next to the marble Dawn. He was short of breath and felt his pulse. It was irregular. This was not a heart attack, it was an anxiety attack. He calmed himself down with some yogic breathing exercises Sabine had learnt at the gym. It would be terrible to die next to Dawn. This particular rubbish was by a young and clever disciple of Klimsch, Thomas Rotmann. The breasts were absurdly pert over the narrow waist, and shone like door-handles from being touched. It was the only erotic Party nude he knew, and for this reason he particularly disliked it.
He placed his fingers on its shoulder. It was cold, of course.
Ah, Sabine my dearest darling. You are never cold.
Mama, Papa: have you forgotten me? Please don’t forget me. I am ill. You haven’t said goodnight to me yet. Someone is coming, like a bad dream. Maybe he will show me his tongue again and it will blossom into a flower, or sharpen to a point and sting me. The lake is very deep when I look in the mirror. That is why I am not to keep it.
30
The dame was warm.
She was in shock, and of course she didn’t know she was in shock. That’s the whole thing about shock. You can even be a corporal in the army of the United States and not know you’re in shock.
Parry had got her up to the surface. Now he tried to sit her down on a big wooden beam that was almost horizontal but she just repeated her name – Frau Hoffer, Frau Hoffer – and kept on clinging to him. In the end he sat himself down and let her cling to him.
/> He’d got the map pack on him, too, with the rolled-up canvas inside. It was against his chest now, pressed to him like an extra muscular heart. He shifted it to his side so it wouldn’t be mussed up and thought how he needed to wrap the canvas in something, given the pack’s flap couldn’t be buttoned shut. Brown paper. Newspaper. Newspaper was what he needed.
He remembered there was some newspaper scattered next to that SS dead in the street nearby, as if the pages had been blown away from his face. But she wouldn’t let him go! Parry was not a boy, and he’d have had no trouble throwing her off, but he couldn’t do it. He tried to unstick her from his chest but she just grabbed his mackinaw’s lapels and hung on, sobbing.
He was used to this, he thought, and almost laughed.
It was like those times in France and then in Belgium. They arrived in Normandy in late summer and in every village the back of the troop truck would be waist-high in girls and flowers, the truck’s floor a pungent mush of fruit. They’d roll with the girls in fruit like Roman emperors as the truck rolled on through some town or village and then they’d drink themselves stupid, wrapped in the tricolour, faces smudged with lipstick, and they’d reckon in those first few days that war was OK, very OK, despite those burnt hedges and tanks and crap that hadn’t been moved after D-Day plus sixty and that told them what the action was really about and that they kind of imagined now would be manageable.
And after his first daytime patrol a month later, when they’d broken every goddamn rule in the book and yet survived a burst of mortar and the first live non-captive German they’d seen so far (he was stood in the middle of the lane, before he ran like hell), every man had come over with the shakes and then they’d thrown up one after the other like dogs.
Good for Nothin’ Joes.
He managed to spread the folded blanket over the beam in the rubble with one hand and leant back onto it with the Hausfrau clinging to him. He wriggled his back against the loose stuff until it wasn’t too uncomfortable.
He hoped no one would come up to them in the darkness.
This was not sex, this was grief. He respected her grief. He stroked her hair. It was part of the job. She was not beautiful, in fact.
All he could see was the torn gable end of the museum looming above them, darker against the night sky, with that cross-hatch of skylight hanging on nothing and a little pale spot where the miracle Virgin stood. They were inside the museum, not outside, only there was no inside now, it was all outside. Voices, singing, but nothing too close. They were out of sight of the streets, the animal tracks.
‘We could play some pinochle,’ he murmured. ‘Morriboy always won at pinochle.’
The woman’s face was wet through, but he shone the flashlight on it to try to light up some sense in her goddamn brain. He couldn’t understand what she was gabbling; even a native would’ve found it hard, he reckoned, under the sighs and the gasps and the sobs.
But he’d got the painting. And that was the main thing. I have got the painting, he thought. And that is about all of it, I guess.
It was just next to him, the map pack still hooked around his shoulder. The woman sat up a bit. She told him her name yet again, Frau Hoffer, putting her hand on her chest and then crumpling again into sobs.
He told her his name was Parry, Corporal Parry, but she wasn’t listening.
Why had he told her his rank? Neither had told the other their Christian names. Neither could say anything much more that would be understood: he didn’t want to say schlafen, schlafen? to a fresh and grieving widow, and he wasn’t about to fish for his German phrase book in the map pack and ask her where the nearest pillbox was or to tell her to drop her weapon or reassure her that he came in peace.
All he could remember was Ich verstehe Sie, ‘I understand you’, because that was on the cover of the phrase book, and Berlin ist eine Reise wert because that was on the side of a toy bus he’d been given as a kid by his world-travelling Uncle Robert.
‘Berlin is worth a visit, OK?’ he murmured. ‘Berlin ist eine Reise wert.’
She looked at him in a different way, then. Hell, she started gabbling in German with her hand over his breast pocket where veterans told you to put your eating irons and cigarette-case and spare ammo clips in case a bullet needed stopping. His pocket only had a couple of fucking picture labels in it. Maybe he wanted to get dead.
He shook his head and shrugged. He couldn’t even say how sorry he was, but then her husband in the round spectacles might have been a very bad Nazi you’d want to kick the living shit out of all day.
‘If you think I speak German then take it easy, that’s it,’ he said.
She gave up the German. Her face was dirty and dust-streaked in the flashlight’s beam and her hair was a mess. He ran the light over her as she lay against him. She was done up in a dress patterned with hundreds of yellow and orange flowers like a meadow, the effect was almost three-dimensional; over that there was a kind of thin blue open cotton blouse or sweater – Parry wasn’t too strong on women’s clothing. There were bits of masonry stuck in the cotton of the blouse, and the elbows were white with dust. The dress was torn a little and her bare calves were scratched – he could see the dark streaks of blood. Her shoes were in bad shape. The dress was unbuttoned at the neck and he could see the tops of her round breasts. Her mouth was too thin and her face was mussed up like she had just risen but that was not her fault. He was soothing her, now. Stroking her hair and no longer feeling so embarrassed. Her body was soft and warm against his. She could be thirty-five, maybe forty. There was a woman in her forties in the apartment below his in downtown Clarksburg and she bathed daily and the smell of her strawberry bath crystals would waft up through the trapped air of the back yard and he would stand at his open window and be sexually aroused, breathing in the thick strawberry air.
I am now getting out of breath, he realised. I have killed men and I got out of breath, too.
They could just stay here all night, it was comforting even though his back was getting chilled. He needed a cigarette but his throat was sore and the tin was in his thigh pocket her side, along with the lighter. He didn’t want to disturb her. The darkness of the ruins was shifting into many tones of grey: his eyes were adjusting like they’d adjust to see the stars out at Uncle Robert’s place when they’d step out of the porch light and the stars would grow until they were crowded and Uncle Robert would say: ‘Hell, you can tell this was Indian country.’
Here it was like being in a wild place full of towering crags and mesas. The desert in New Mexico, maybe. Alamogordo. Mountainair.
She was breathing against him.
I have fought my way into this town. I have occupied the consequences.
He liked these darknesses where there was no electricity. Now and again there were lights from a vehicle that did empty things with the shadowy crags and then darkness fell again. A glow kept pulsing farther off, between two of the crags, from what he reckoned was a cooking fire, and he thought of the boys sitting round it and chewing on their chicken and felt hungry for the first time in days. He was not well, but he felt hungry.
You know, this could be not too bad.
Holding the grieving woman made him steadier, he’d gotten shaky down there in the blackness of the vaults and then another human being had come like a saving angel and now he realised the importance of just holding someone. It helped she was a woman. And not in any way as dead as a log or waterlogged or rotten like a log could be. He’d admit that. She was full of grief and she needed comforting. The enemy was one side of the line and then you crossed the line and they were no longer your enemy. There should not be lines.
Hell, they’d been warned about this, back in England. There would certainly be a million sex-starved widows and you’d better watch out, syphilis is endemic out there, in the barbarian lands. Wotcher, cock. Cor blimey. I’ll say!
They must have been told that too many times.
It hadn’t been exactly like that, so far. They were bur
ied under girls and fruit and flowers. Then the real action had hit them with sharp bullet teeth and the girls had gotten thinner and more serious. They weren’t even widows. They were doing it mostly for food or cigarettes or soda.
This was his first widow, the first real widow – she couldn’t have been a widow for more than two days at the most, in fact. She was a fresh widow, newly plucked. She’d stopped shaking and sobbing now and she’d turned real still against his chest.
There is only her breathing, the firm rise and slow fall of her breasts.
I wish I had a mirror all the time, like Emma Bovary. Like Emma Bovary, I do not exist. I have never existed. Therefore there are no traces of my existence. I must keep it that way. If I think myself into invisibility, I will become invisible. It is all a matter of will.
31
It would take one shell through that fancy plasterwork ceiling above the Kaiser-Wilhelm Dawn and he would be finished.
He felt so tired and now Werner had upset him, humiliated him. If it wasn’t for Sabine and the girls, he wouldn’t care too much if a shell did come through that fancy ceiling. He couldn’t move a limb.
And Werner had broken that marvellous Mendelssohn. What a sad, irritating fellow he was. To think that he’d only joined the staff in 1934! To think that he was once a new boy, wet behind the ears!
I am senior to him, Herr Hoffer considered, in terms of length of service: by three years. One forgets that.
No, he would care. He would definitely rather live and try to do good in the world. When his grandmother had died after sixty-one years of marriage, his grandfather had said, ‘Well, it was good while it lasted.’ That’s the spirit, thought Herr Hoffer – sitting above ground as he was.
The unbefitting place of darkness.
This was precisely where he had spotted Bendel nibbling Sabine’s ear. Or maybe just whispering into it.