A Necessary Action (15 page)

So far as he was concerned, the war had ended in 1944 when he personally had capitulated to the Americans in Normandy after his unit had been surrounded and wiped out in small groups. It was a clear morning and very early as he had crouched down and run along a narrow path between high hedges. As he ran he held his pistol loose in his hand so that in a flash he could either use it or throw it away, whichever the
situation demanded. Round a sharp bend, he had run into an American soldier, so he had stretched out his pistol on the flat of his hand and said: ‘Souvenir.’

The astonished American took the gun and with that Hugo Spohler managed to achieve his sole aim at that particular moment, to become a prisoner-of-war.

As he had been a member of the SS, he was sent to the United States and not sent back from there until the authorities were quite convinced that he was a reasonably insignificant figure.

Before that bright clear morning between the high hedges, Hugo had managed to experience the war fairly thoroughly. He went to France after the great offensive in 1940 and was posted to Bayonne. It was a pleasant posting and he had enjoyed it very much, but a year later he had overslept with a seventeen-year-old French shop girl and missed a parade. The following week he was sent to the Russian front. He spent fourteen months on one of the southern sectors of the front, in thirty degrees below zero in the winter and the same above zero in the summer. In the autumn of 1942 he got a grenade splinter in his right upper arm and was transported back to an Italian field hospital. The wound was a serious one, was badly treated, the Italian surgeon’s eyes were red and sore, and he had had blood on his white jacket from operating for ten hours at a stretch.

He felt Hugo Spohler’s arm for a while and shook his head. Then he took a piece of blue chalk out of his pocket and drew a line round the arm, just below the shoulder. Hugo tried to argue with him, but they had no common language and the Italian also appeared to be very tired.

When the doctor had gone, Hugo Spohler managed to get off the stretcher and walk out of the tent. Out on the road, he stopped a Service Corps vehicle, which took him to a German first-aid post farther away from the front. Two weeks later he was taken on a hospital train going west. He still had his arm but it hurt him so badly that he screamed with pain when the morphine he had been given lost its effect.

After three months he was more or less recovered but not yet fit for service. He was put on special service and sent to France again, to the north coast, where the sun was not quite so
seductive as in Bayonne. In addition to this, the spiritual climate had grown considerably harsher, but that he did not bother about.

Hugo Spohler knew the art of forgetting what he considered not worth remembering.

During the war he had not been able to avoid killing a number of people, perhaps six or seven, but he never talked about it and neither did he think about it.

He remembered the French shop girl’s navel and eyelashes very well, but he did not remember that one morning, with the warmth from their bed still with him, he had executed three workmen who—probably mistakenly—had been suspected of sabotage.

He could describe a young Ukrainian woman partisan in detail, the one he and two others had raped in a stable (she had preposterously large nipples and black hair on her legs, and strangely enough had been a virgin) but he had no memory of the scenes of horror at the first-aid post or the Italian surgeon with his bit of blue chalk.

From his happy years he could remember the tunes and parades and the Fuehrer, whom he had seen several times at quite close quarters, but he had long forgotten a red-haired sergeant who had forced him to throw himself down in a deep muddy pool on the barrack square forty times, one after another.

When Hugo Spohler talked about the war it might have all been a fantastic escapade, full of absurd complications.

He conquered the past with forgetfulness and the present with optimism, romancing away from sorrows and difficulties. People liked him. He was warm and positive and he was always looking straight ahead.

His attitude to Willi Mohr was not very complicated.

He refused to believe that a person who had never experienced anything could be marked by his experiences.

As he had no understanding whatsoever for any form of depression or dispiritedness, he confused Willi Mohr’s sullen coldness with the true integrity and perfectionism he had always admired.

Hugo Spohler filled the empty space round Willi Mohr with
talk. He had never forgotten Bayonne, and in the middle of the camp’s grey muddy sordidness, he gave himself up to vague sundrenched visions of the South. The South had become his Shangri-La, the happy land of naive escapism.

Hour after hour Willi Mohr lay with his chin propped in his hand, listening. Gradually he realized that even his own passive resistance lacked strength, that he was on the way to being convinced.

Hugo Spohler was the first to get away from the camp. A week later he met a girl from Berlin and made her pregnant. Then he borrowed two hundred marks from her, got himself a passport and hitched south. He landed up in the puerto by chance and managed to stay there for a while.

After four weeks he came home again, broke but happy. He was intoxicated by the experience and had painted four very bad paintings with borrowed paints. A little later he got himself a place and married the girl from Berlin. She was the only survivor of a well-to-do official’s family and had no assets apart from a good physique, a respectable upbringing and a job in a betting-office.

Hugo Spohler had thus organized his own life and could again devote himself to Willi Mohr. He got him out of the repatriation camp, much as one fetches a forgotten trunk, and placed him in an attic room in a tumbledown, bomb-damaged old block in Zugasse, on the west bank of the Rhine.

Next to Willi Mohr’s room was a large, open attic with a hole in the roof, the floor covered with broken tiles and charred bits of wood. They cleared away the rubbish and covered the ceiling with hardboard and corrugated iron. Then they had a studio and Hugo Spohler painted several pictures in it. He was totally lacking in talent, but not afraid of using bright colours, and he himself considered that his paintings were pretty good. He also succeeded in selling some of them for fifteen marks each and was greatly encouraged.

Willi Mohr had a view over the river from his window. It was autumn and wet and foggy, with tugboats, with their tall sloping chimneys, going by like ships in the mist, towing long barges behind them. One day he borrowed Hugo’s paints and sat down at the window and painted a picture. He took a long time over it,
dabbing carefully with the brush, now and again sticking out his lip and peering out into the pouring grey rain.

The result filled Hugo Spohler with astonishment and enthusiasm, but Willi Mohr was more dispassionate. He knew of old that he ought to be able to make fog look like fog and a tugboat like a tugboat.

Hugo got seventy-five marks for the picture, but he could not persuade Willi to paint any more like it. Neither of them had a definite job, but now and again they took temporary employment in the docks or on some building site. Willi Mohr mostly lay on his rickety old camp bed, smoking cigarette ends in a pipe as he stared at the ceiling. Sometimes he wondered vaguely what on earth he was doing there.

When Hugo’s wife was eight months pregnant, she had to stop working and so he was faced with a wholly new problem. For the first time in his thirty-year-old life he was forced to take financial responsibility for both himself and someone else. He was in no way a soldier any longer. The war was definitely over. He felt that it had been going on for a very long time, beginning some time in the thirties when he was only a small boy and to a certain extent continuing through the years, even after that morning between the hedges in Normandy.

Soon after the New Year, Willi Mohr and Hugo Spohler applied for work as decorators at an English department store, which was there largely to serve the forces of occupation. Although Willi was undoubtedly the one with the qualifications, it was Hugo who got the job. He managed to get a week’s wages in advance and they celebrated by drinking beer and a couple of schnapps at a beer-hall by the cathedral. Afterwards they went to a brothel. Willi Mohr liked the brothel because it was pleasant and clean and functional and wholly impersonal. It was in a new yellow-brick two-storey block, and the prostitutes lived in identical rooms along a long corridor, with numbers on the doors, exactly like a real hospital. The rooms were practical and kept clean, with coverlets and curtains in pastel shades, and the employees were dressed in garments which more or less matched the décor. The women who worked there had been chosen with some care so that the enterprise would be in a position to cater for different tastes in such matters as corpulence, stature and
colour of hair. Willi Mohr had no particular bents, but he used to avoid those who were blue-eyed, though he did not know why.

Hugo Spohler said that the brothel was colour-conditioned and he expressed some disapproval of it, but Willi Mohr thought it was a considerable improvement on those he had been to in Gotenhafen.

After their visit to the brothel, they bought a litre of wine and sat on the bed in Willi Mohr’s room and drank it. Outside it was raining steadily and dismally, and the tugboats hooted in the poor visibility. The German miracle growled and rattled along the streets by the river.

As in the repatriation camp the year before, Hugo did his best to talk away the cold and rawness from the air. After his expedition to the south he had not only his imagination to call on, but he also had access to certain facts. So his arguments became even more convincing.

Willi Mohr sat leaning against the wall and listened. He had drawn one foot up on to the edge of the bed and was balancing his wine glass on his knee.

‘You have to express yourself and that’s the most important thing,’ said Hugo. ‘Express yourself in colour or words or tunes. Why is it so difficult to express yourself here? Well, because there’s nothing here one wants to express. And not only that, but also because here there’s such a hell of a lot that stops us and ties us down. You’d be a great painter, if only you could work in the right surroundings and the right atmosphere. Perhaps I would too. Willi, listen to me for once …’

‘I always listen to you, said Willi Mohr seriously.

‘Wouldn’t you like to try then?’

Willi Mohr sipped his wine, which was cheap and sour. Then he looked towards the window and nodded.

‘O.K.,’ he said. ‘We’ll try.’

They made the decision that evening, a decision which was of determining significance to Willi Mohr, but in fact made not the slightest difference to Hugo Spohler.

They were to work hard for eighteen months and save every pfennig. Then they would go to Spain and live there for a year and paint. Eventually, and if the money lasted, Hugo would take his family there too.

‘But,’ he said, ‘on the other hand I don’t think Maria would get very much out of it. Next year she can go out to work again and perhaps it’s better if she supports herself and the kid.’

When Hugo had gone, Willi Mohr undressed and crept down into his bed. He was slightly drunk and the sheets felt damp and cold. But deep down in his mind, a minute speck of expectancy had come to life, and he wondered whether he would ever be able to experience even a small fraction of the exhilaration which Hugo seemed to be able to produce from his imagination.

Three days later he got himself a job and left the attic in Zugasse for ever.

During the following year, they did not meet once. Willi sent one or two postcards with laconic messages on them, but he never received one in return, perhaps owing to the fact that he never had a permanent address.

When the summer came Hugo Spohler had saved three hundred marks. He hitched to Spain and bathed for three weeks. When he came home again, he had made a lot of new acquaintances and had the Caudillo’s portrait on one single Spanish duro, which no one would change for him.

Next summer Willi Mohr went back to Cologne. He was much the same as ever, if possible even thinner, more sullen and more blue-eyed. He had saved three-thousand-five-hundred marks and was going to go to Spain to paint.

Hugo Spohler had changed a good deal. Although he still had no money, he seemed plump and well. He had moved to another house and had a son of fourteen months and his wife was pregnant again. He moved in circles which enthused about Buddhism and Zen-Buddhism and he was convinced that he could cure his ulcers by will power. He spent his evenings working out involved betting systems, which were going to bring him in a fortune. He had stopped painting, but was still convinced that he ought to move to a warmer country. Sometime.

Willi Mohr felt slightly cheated, but smiled a sardonic smile and persuaded himself that this was in reality exactly what he had expected.

Hugo Spohler was, as usual, master of the situation. He took two weeks’ holiday and borrowed two hundred marks of Willi’s capital.

‘We’ll hitch down and then I’ll show you the best place of all,’ he said. ‘I’ll introduce you to people, good people, and then I’ll come down and fetch you in a year or so.’

He laughed and slapped Willi Mohr on the back.

‘You’ll have to experience this year for us both,’ he said.

They had good luck with lifts, but had to walk the last bit over the border in the Pyrenees.

About a hundred yards directly above the last tunnel on the French side, an iron chain was stretched across the road and a civil guard in green uniform and black shiny cap came out of a little tin shack in the mountainside. He had a carbine over his shoulder and glanced at their visas before he let them through.

‘The real passport control is a couple of kilometres down the road,’ he said, as he raised the chain.

They came to the puerto in the middle of the summer and Hugo Spohler could only stay a week. The day he left, he bought a thick notebook with a blue mercerized cover and gave it to Willi Mohr.