The Rules of Perspective

by Adam Thorpe

  ‘That’s horrible,’ said Herr Hoffer. ‘If I’d known . . .’

  ‘And did you hear what he had to say about Vincent? Our marvellous Vincent? He’s pea-brained, isn’t he? Not like me!’

  He was a good mimic. They heard the door opening and turned. It was Frau Schenkel, swaying slightly, her hair loosening at the ears.

  ‘The SS-Brigadeführer is waiting for you in the hall, gentlemen,’ she said. She all but curtsied. She, too, had drunk too much. ‘I think this is a great success,’ she said, finding the door again. ‘My husband says you ought to have one every week on his day off.’

  ‘So don’t fret,’ said Bendel, giving Herr Hoffer a wink and a slap on the shoulder. ‘You did bloody well, old man. You were wonderfully, brilliantly tedious. Our sacred relic will not be leaving its cathedral. At least, only over my dead body.’

  ‘I thought you liked unevolved cultures,’ said Herr Hoffer, a little upset. ‘Purity and all that. Like that doctor in Uncle Vanya.’

  ‘Unevolved peasants are not pure,’ said Bendel, almost snappily. ‘How can they be? I mean, agriculture itself was the start of the disease, for God’s sake! And Chekhov is Russian. We don’t like the Russians.’

  ‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau, then.’

  ‘That bastard’s French. Even worse. We hate the French.’

  A little later in the evening, when Herr Hoffer had stumbled on Bendel and Sabine right at this spot, in front of Dawn, looking suspiciously intimate, he had been incapable of a single word. It was such a shock.

  ‘I am just telling your lovely wife about Hiram Powers,’ said Bendel, swaying slightly in his sleek back plumage, his death’s-head kepi slightly askew. ‘Greek Slave. It makes this little hussy look frigid.’

  ‘You don’t mean me, I hope,’ Sabine giggled.

  ‘I do not think I do,’ said Bendel, laying his hand on her shoulder and staring at her.

  ‘When the heir to the Austrian throne was shot,’ he added, with his hand resting on her bare shoulder, ‘my father was with my mother in Murzsteg. It was their honeymoon. They were making love.’

  ‘During the day?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know the details. It was their first time together. I don’t know any more details.’

  ‘Just as well,’ giggled Sabine, her cheeks red as cherries.

  ‘My mother became pregnant, of course. And little Klaus was born.’

  ‘How romantic,’ sighed Sabine.

  ‘That very day,’ Bendel added, his gloved thumb stroking her neck.

  There was no hair visible under his kepi, even though it was askew. Only the nicks of his razor high above the ears. Herr Hoffer felt like throttling the smooth neck. But everyone was drunk. Nobody knows what they are doing when they are drunk.

  And then, anyway, it was war.

  The lake is very deep. Someone is pulling on the rope. My head is growing again like a bud. But then I know you are all still alive, thank goodness. I read the signs: if the spider crosses my hand onto the beam, you are alive, every one of you. One day I will be standing in a field of flowers and you’ll all run towards me and into my arms. You will have to take turns to be hugged, though. ‘Ah, for your moist wings, O West, how sorely do I envy you!’ If only I knew the whole of Goethe!

  32

  It would be so hard to paint their surroundings, he thought: you could do it as an abstract, all in tones of grey with red showing through. You could make pigment out of ashes and paint this and make quite a shout about it, keeping sullen in the way you had to look for the magazines. You could make a lot of pictures with these ashes.

  ‘How’d you like your face in Picture Post?’ he murmured to the dame.

  How many paintings would the ashes of a man or a woman make? A child would make less. Maybe not even a small painting. Maybe they liquefied to a smear.

  He wished his ass didn’t gall so much and that the blanket was not so full of fleas. He swivelled his eyes downwards and held her tight, now, his chin in her hair. The whole length of her was so heavy and warm. This was what you forgot in your isolation and terror: the beauty of the human weight. Fireman’s lift. You didn’t know it until.

  In how many life classes back in Clarksburg – Tuesday evenings in the Old School Hall – had he tried to get down on paper that weight, that humanness, and ended up with nothing but a charcoal smudge.

  Enclose space, the tutor had said.

  Yeah, the guy was nuts on Kandinsky, on reducing everything to dynamics and lines of force like you were drawing a ladder and a basket instead of a naked human being. What about the weight, mister? What about the smell of her smoky hair? Who the fuck needs Kandinsky?

  It was good not knowing her language; sometimes talk got like a dime novel, it took you someplace you didn’t want to be, very shallow and far away.

  Berlin ist eine Reise wert.

  Right at this moment, in the ruins, he was happy holding in comforting intimacy a human being he did not know and could not talk to. There was something prehistoric about it. Something intense and fiery and prehistoric, as if he was rocking her deep in the cave with the sabretooths prowling in the snow outside.

  And he’d eaten her hair. Chewed it a little. Now she was his, not Heinrich’s.

  Not poor old dead Heinrich’s at all.

  There is always something to live for, if you choose to. That does not mean one always has the choice. Why do we live? To remember. Is that all? And what if we die? What happens to our memories then? I asked the thin one about this when he came up, but he had no answer [behind?] his spectacles.

  33

  Even this awful nude, with its polished nipples, had become so familiar to him that he felt some warmth for it.

  The familiarity of the museum was something he treasured; he would walk around it before going home, in the good old days, after everyone else had left. It was like a country, the museum, with its obscure regions and wild parts, the light falling differently, the great distances covered. Now and again he would pause before a picture as if seeing it for the first time.

  Now there was nothing!

  Except Party rubbish like Dawn, with its stupid, sex-satisfied smile – everything reduced to this hard, pure nub. He felt like hurling it down the stairs, turning into a muscle-bound superman and hurling it all the way down so that it shattered.

  Instead, he ran his hand along the line of its marble shoulder, thinking of Hilde Winkel’s shoulder touching his, of his hand on her thin and living back. How cold and lifeless was the sculpture’s naked back, in comparison! Supposing this rubbish was all that survived of modern art, for the millennia to come?

  Where are the paintings of classical Greece? Smashed, worn away. And all her bronzes? Melted down – to pay damned armies!

  A dull thud outside made no impression on the reclining nude, even though bits fell from the ceiling. One piece rested in her navel, another lay on her open lips like a finger. He looked up: the fancy plasterwork of shells and grapes was badly cracked. The building was suffering from the pounding of the ground. His anxiety increased, but a great inertia filled him. He couldn’t be bothered to move, despite the danger. Was this despair? The shiny marble breasts were stimulating him. The Führer felt that only Botticelli understood breasts, apparently, so Rotmann had miscalculated. All Herr Hoffer desired was a woman’s comforting arms, to lie between a woman’s firm, warm legs and lose himself there. Sabine had lost the taste for that, since the air raids had started. She used to want it so much, but now she was too anxious and too tired. Her nervous fits took it out of her. She was so fearful for the children. And so was he! But he couldn’t move from the bench. Maybe he was having a breakdown. Or the beginnings of a migraine. Please, dear God, not now.

  He laughed, suddenly, as if he was going insane.

  It certainly isn’t Bendel’s fault! Bendel is probably dead!

  The very last time he’d seen Bendel properly was in the winter of ’42 – well over two years ago! He had been posted elsewhere, he had said
. Where? A secret.

  Herr Hoffer didn’t like thinking of that very last time. He had come back from work early with a light migraine one day and there he was – Herr Bendel himself, sipping tea with Sabine, like an English gentleman.

  Sabine’s hair was unpinned, loose. Bendel’s jet-black tie had been hastily knotted. One spur was unbuckled, the strap dangling off the ankle. The tea was cold – Herr Hoffer had accepted a cup and it was stone-cold.

  ‘Oh, is it? We must have been so busy chatting, Heinrich my darling. Poor Klaus – Herr Bendel, I mean – is leaving us. He won’t say where. He’s back just for today, to clear up his desk at the office.’

  It was, to a migrainous mind, unbearably suspicious. Bendel rose and had to hunt for his cap, which was behind the sofa, and its little death’s-head badge snarled at Herr Hoffer as they shook hands and said the polite necessities and then Herr Hoffer had gone off straight to bed, lying there with a black sock over each eye and a bowl between his hands. What else could he have done? Challenged the fellow to a duel?

  A killer whale in an aquarium tank. He had only seen a few fuzzy pictures of killer whales in some book, but they were white and black and sleek, he knew, with giant mouths full of razor teeth.

  And the world was full of porpoises.

  But really, Bendel was a stimulating young man. Killer whales were intelligent. And attractive. Give Bendel a room full of paintings and, really, he was the most stimulating company possible.

  And Sabine is my darling, Herr Hoffer thought. She is my sun and my moon. He had absolutely no proof of anything but a forty-year-old’s girlish, sentimental fling. It was probably nothing. It had cheered her up. One had to forgive. One must always try to be Christian, even if one fell short of four-square belief.

  He himself had been awful company for her, of course, with all his gloom and worries. He should have worn spurs on his boots. But he only had shoes, to start with.

  Bendel had not been back. Yes, he might very well be dead. The Vincent had passed into the windowless Luftschutzbunker with its odour of toilets and then, in Bendel’s absence, had slipped down into the vaults. The Kaiser-Wilhelm van Gogh was safe at last! Ssssh. Secret. Deep. Very deep.

  Thank God the fellow hadn’t been around for the wholesale evacuation in March ’44! When the Party dross remaining in the galleries was finally carted off to the salt-mine, along with the works stored in the Luftschutzbunker, Bendel would have certainly smelt a rat or two, then, if he’d been around.

  The inventory on the pinkish, octavo paper did its job perfectly, oh yes, that had to be admitted by all and sundry – even by miserable old Werner Oberst. All Herr Hoffer received was a minor ticking-off from the middle-aged Hauptstellenleiter in charge of the evacuation (wearing a dented Russian helmet), for the museum staff’s ‘carelessness and disorganisation’, but otherwise the paintings and smaller sculptures were removed by weary men of the Self-Protection Service who couldn’t care two hoots about art. Most had been up the previous night dragging bodies out of buildings near the industrial sector. It was a good time to be agile, because there were so many distractions! Even Mademoiselle de Guilleroy au Bain was not noticed as missing, let alone the van Gogh. This also meant, however, that the paintings and sculptures were not treated with complete respect. Herr Hoffer had trotted about, getting very puffed, trying to ensure at least a modicum of care in the handling. An Adam Toepffer landscape was slightly scratched by the lorry’s mudguard, a Kaulbach Mädchen had her pretty eyes splashed on by mud, and a brush drawing of an angel playing a lute by Gaudenzio Ferrari, set in a period frame, was deposited for a moment on the bonnet and dripped on by fog condensation running off the vehicle’s roof.

  Herr Hoffer half anticipated an angry letter from the Propagandaministerium, demanding the whereabouts of the van Gogh, but nothing of that sort came.

  SS-Sturmführer Bendel was no longer even in the shadows, was he?

  The shelling and bombing was far off, it seemed, but at any moment that could change. Dawn had a death-grin on her, not a sex-satisfied smile.

  After what seemed like hours asleep, but was in fact an involuntary nap of a few profound and delicious minutes, he forced himself off the bench and moved on into the Long Gallery’s whitenesses, shaking plaster from his hair, still a little giddy.

  He advanced into the vast room and stood in the middle. There was somebody waiting for him at the far end. He couldn’t see anyone, but he felt it. It was Death. Death slithering about waiting for him, as if he was Schubert’s poor ailing maiden. He looked up, heart hammering, and was amazed to see the long, sloping skylights above him still intact, cross-hatching the skeins of smoke like a draughtsman’s enlargement grid. Birds would fly slap-bang into it. This roof of glass.

  At any moment it might shatter and rain down on his eyes. He was quite scared. He had managed to scare himself. Now stop it.

  Really, Bendel was quite a decent chap. A little unstable, that’s all. He had come to several of the Tuesday ‘Hoffer’ lectures, particularly German Romantic Landscape: a Yearning for the Infinite. Herr Hoffer had toyed with the idea of giving his course of talks on Modernist painting (from Post-Impressionism through Expressionism and Abstraction to Dada) against the bare stretches of the walls, once the works had been appropriated, but Herr Streicher thought this suicidal.

  ‘The Dark Dwarf has just forbidden all independent art criticism,’ he had said. ‘We’ll have to cancel your Tuesday lectures, Herr Hoffer.’

  ‘Not at all, Herr Acting Director. I have thought of a way round it. Modern Art from Vincent van Gogh to Kurt Schwitters is to become The Story of German Art.’

  ‘And the content?’

  ‘A little suppleness required, that’s all.’

  Herr Streicher smiled behind his pipe.

  ‘I like the idea of you being supple, my dear fellow.’

  Herr Hoffer’s gathering plumpness was a joke between them: Herr Streicher was tall and thin.

  ‘For instance,’ Herr Hoffer went on gamely, ‘I have prepared a whole new section on the influence of early German draughtsmen on the standard use of the curved line as a shading technique.’

  ‘That,’ said Herr Streicher, ‘was poor Gustav Glatz’s thesis.’

  ‘To be put to very good use,’ said Herr Hoffer, blushing profoundly.

  Bendel had congratulated him after the lectures. A sharp fellow. Always putting pertinent questions.

  Yes, he was very glad that Bendel wasn’t present when the collection was carted off to the salt-mines. He would certainly have noticed that the Vincent was missing from the inventory. Let alone all the others.

  Ah, one has really done rather well. One really has, all things considered. Death is not here. One is not an ailing maiden.

  He left the Long Gallery, passing the Wamper sculpture on the landing and descending by the back stairs to the Fossil Room. Its glass cases were empty. They had once been full of trilobites and brachiopods and delicate stone ferns from the shale deposits near Kreiburg Hill. It may have been his nerves, again, but he thought he heard someone scuttling off. For real, this time. There were mice, of course, scuttling about in the Fossil Room: hunger was forcing them out of the wainscots and into this frightening bareness of floor and wall. Perhaps they were the souls of the German people – those who had lost their souls and gone into a kind of Party trance: millions of them. Was that not what the Northern folk had once believed, in heathen times? That the soul escaped from the body in the shape of a mouse?

  Thank God he was not a mouse.

  He paused before knocking on the janitor’s door, noting how the bombardment had gone even quieter. Perhaps the cretins had surrendered. What would the American soldiers be like? He pictured them sitting atop tanks, with black Negroid faces, chewing gum. Many were white, of course, no different from those visiting Berlin before the war, but he had difficulty in picturing that type of American atop a tank. He did not for one moment believe the lurid stories of the press, but nevertheless he was
frightened. There would be Jews among them, for a start, wondering where all their fellows had gone. Perhaps the German men would be sent to concentration camps while the women fell into the American soldiers’ arms. He could see Sabine doing that, horribly easily; she was fun-loving, and he did not bring her enough fun. No German did. The war was a personal affront to her, because it stopped her having fun. When a friend organised a folk dance for the Lohenfelde Shop-Girls’ Club last year, it was all Herr Hoffer could do to dissuade Sabine from taking along some jazz records he’d bought years before in Berlin. Only by making her think of the danger to their children did he succeed in dissuading her. This is why she had her fits, when she would scream and beat her fists on his chest. She had one of them right then, breaking the jazz records over his head. He’d had to carry her to bed, which was an effort: thank God she was so thin!

  He realised, gathering his strength by Herr Wolmer’s door and feeling the cool April draught through the shattered Kluge window, that he had forgotten what it was not to be permanently anxious: it was as if, every day, he had to face an appointment with a doctor concerning a verdict on some possibly life-threatening ailment. Each day he experienced the same shortness of breath, the same looseness of the bowels, the same irritable anxiety – pacing up and down for hours and hours, as it were, in that imaginary doctor’s corridor before the dreaded door, which was possibly Death itself, or which would yield either life or death on a simple word. Yet he could not get used to this state of anxiety and exhaustion: it was not natural to him. He dreamed of lampposts, when he slept at all, never of a hooded Death. Mostly he lay awake, and so in the morning he would rise from the bed with hollowed-out eyes, with a sort of circle around his eyes like a film actor’s mascara – just as if he had lain down ten minutes before.