The Man Who Went Down With His Ship (30 page)

The man spoke so casually, so flippantly even, that Peter more than ever felt he was dreaming.

‘Don’t they protest?’ he heard himself whispering. ‘Before they’re … loaded?’

‘Some do. But the guards don’t take very kindly to protestors, so – on the whole they go quietly. Also, that fence there hides what’s going on from the main body of the camp. So they don’t know exactly what’s going to happen when they’re put into the cages. Though obviously they have a pretty good idea. It’s amazing, isn’t it? When you see all those people, and think just a few months, or maybe a couple of years ago, they were housewives, bank-clerks, lawyers, school-teachers, nurses, miners, shop-assistants, factory-workers – even artists! And now, reduced to …’ He looked at his watch. ‘But enough of all that! It’s lunch-time!’

They were driven in a jeep to L’s house, which stood about a mile outside the perimeter fence, and was built on the side of a
low hill; from its windows, it was impossible to see anything of the camp itself, but the smell was as pervasive as ever.

As they approached the front door, and Peter gazed down the hill across a wood stretching almost as far as the eye could see – the trees were changing colour in the autumn, and all was gold, and russet, and red – L said: ‘I’ve taken a small flat in town. I take the children there to change, before they go to school. Or my wife does. Otherwise I’m afraid their friends might complain of the odour clinging to them.’

‘Don’t they say anything to their friends?’ Peter said, still whispering.

‘No. I’ve told them that I work in a top-secret establishment, so they can’t know anything more, and, as far as they’re concerned, it’s true.’

‘Even so,’ Peter continued to whisper, ‘they must know.’

‘Must they?’ L said. ‘Did you? Or any of your fellow citizens?’

‘No. But – yes, of course we knew. But not – not that it was like that.’ He gestured towards the unseen camp.

‘Bullshit,’ L muttered. ‘What did you think? That it was a rest home? Of course you knew, if you thought about it. Just as the children must have a pretty good idea, even if they’re too young for their ideas to be clear. But – they prefer not to think about it, too. As their friends prefer not to think about it, and their teachers prefer not to think about it. It’s easier if you tell yourself that this place is top-secret, and that, therefore – Marie!’ L bellowed. ‘We have a guest!’

As L and Peter went into the hall of the house, a woman emerged from a room on the far side. She was blonde, and quite pretty in a washed-out way; but she looked tired, scared and unhappy. Her eyes were puffy.

‘Hello,’ she said, in a voice as lacklustre as her complexion.

‘This is Peter. An old friend of mine.’

‘Hello,’ Marie repeated, her tone unchanged.

‘Do you think we can give him some lunch?’

‘Yes. I expect so.’ The woman paused, and went on, a little
petulant now: ‘It would have helped if I had known in advance.’

‘I didn’t know myself in advance! I just saw Peter walking down the street and I called him over, and – Peter’s a distinguished writer, you know. And painter.’

Marie stared. ‘Oh,’ she said. Then, wearily: ‘It’ll be ready in five minutes if you want to go and wash your hands.’

‘Marie’s very particular about hands being clean,’ L said, with one of his grins. ‘I think she thinks soap is the solution to all the world’s problems.’

Marie gazed at her husband, then went back through the door from which she had emerged.

Peter couldn’t help glancing at L; L, as ever, knew what he was thinking.

‘Why did I marry her? Because she was pretty. Because she was submissive. Because – she was lost.’ The man hesitated, and went on, striking for the first time since he had hailed Peter, a slightly false note. ‘I have an affinity with the lost.’ He caught that note himself, and pulled a face. ‘At least,’ he said, with a smile, ‘I like to think I have.’

When the men went into the dining room they found the children already seated at the table. The two boys and one girl rose, instantly, to greet their father’s guest.

Peter’s first impression was that L was almost as severe and pitiless a father as he was a commandant. Hans, Brigitte and Peter seemed too perfect to be true. Their fair hair was neatly brushed and combed. Their clothes were spotless and without a crease. Their beautiful faces had not a blemish or an irregularity. They looked, all three of them, as their mother must have looked when she was young. It was only if one looked into their extraordinary blue eyes that one caught a glimpse of their father in them – a glimpse of spirit, of wildness. And if one then looked back at their father, one saw that though he appeared to be scanning them for any hint of a flaw – that he would no doubt pounce upon and use as an excuse to mete out punishment – in fact his severity was for
the most part a mask to disguise how intensely proud he was of his offspring. Proud and amazed, that such saplings should have grown from so unpromising a soil.

Indeed, Peter thought, having observed him further, the man could scarcely conceal his love …

The meal was stiff and formal. L’s wife, who sounded as if she had learned ‘polite conversation’ from a manual, asked Peter a number of questions.

‘What made you move to this area, Mr. Strauss?’

‘Oh, the hills, the river – the quiet, I suppose,’ Peter replied.

‘I bet you didn’t know what they were planning to build when you bought your flat!’ L said with a laugh. ‘I bet you hoped you would be moving some place where your conscience would be as out of sight as you were!’

‘What kind of books do you write? I’m afraid I don’t have much time for reading.’

‘Oh, you know, all sorts. Novels. Short stories. And I’ve written a couple of plays …’

‘My husband said you were also a painter?’

‘Yes. Though just at the moment I’m rather – I mean I’ve been doing landscapes, and flower-paintings, that I can sell.’

‘I like landscapes and flower-paintings.’

‘Flutter flutter,’ L growled, ominously. ‘Flutter flutter.’

Then, intimidated by her husband, or having exhausted her supply of questions, Marie fell silent; and it was up to Peter to try to lighten the mood. He did so by talking to the children; asking them what their favourite subjects were at school, if they liked exploring the woods.

The answers he was given were – of course – immaculate. Polite complete sentences, even from the youngest; each one accompanied by a ‘sir’. Yet, conscious of L’s gaze on him, every time he addressed the angelic-looking creatures, Peter sounded to his own ear as fatuous as Marie; and felt that for all their faultless manners, the children were regarding him with contempt.

Oh, they had their father in them all right; and even if their
parents had kept everything hidden from them, those sapphire-blue eyes had already seen too much.

As soon as they had finished eating L, who had been growing steadily more impatient, got to his feet. ‘Let’s go,’ he muttered to Peter. ‘I’ve got to get back to work. I’m sorry the food wasn’t better. Cooking is not one of Marie’s talents.’

‘No, no,’ Peter mumbled, flushing slightly. ‘It was delicious, thank you,’ he went on to his hostess, though in fact L was right.

‘And I’m sorry the talk wasn’t as brilliant as that to which you are accustomed.’

‘No, no,’ Peter again felt obliged to protest.

‘No doubt in another few years the children will be able to contribute something. At the moment, they’re a little small. Hans! Brigitte! Peter! Say goodbye to Mr Strauss.’

‘Goodbye, Mr Strauss,’ the children chorused, their unwavering stares sinister. They sounded as if they were bidding Mr Strauss farewell for ever.

‘And now,’ L said, opening the door of the dining room, ‘I suggest we adjourn to my office.’

‘Goodbye,’ Peter told the children. ‘Goodbye,’ he muttered to Marie, even as he was being herded out. The woman looked as if she were about to start crying. ‘And – thank you again.’

As they walked towards the jeep that would take them back to the camp, L murmured, reasonably: ‘It can’t be easy being married to me. And having to put up with all this.’ He gestured towards the brow of the hill. ‘That’s why I don’t say more to her. Poor thing. But what can you do? We can’t always choose those whom we love, can we?’

‘No,’ Peter replied. ‘We can’t.’

L’s ‘office’ was a narrow, four-storey house on the edge of the camp. L accompanied Peter to the top floor, and showed him into a study at the back. The room had a view of the river; into which, even as the two men went over to the window and L murmured ‘Look,’ three cages were being towed by the now taut cable, that was attached to a winch on the far side. Each cage contained
what must have been a hundred tightly packed people, half of whom were screaming, reaching out through the bars of the cages, trying to clamber on each other’s shoulders, half of whom stood with heads bowed apparently resigned to their fate. It was a scene so horrifying it reminded Peter of some painting by Bosch; and for the third time that day he thought that he might faint. But L was holding his arm, holding him up; and despite himself he was unable not to keep watching, until all those cages, running smoothly on their rails, had disappeared beneath the surface of the river.

‘We’ve built a system of locks and weirs a little way downstream’, L murmured, ‘so even in summer the water level never falls below … what is required.’

Those were the only words spoken by either man until, some minutes later, the cages re-appeared. Now all was still inside; the bodies piled in contorted heaps, arms outstretched between the bars.

As he finally allowed Peter to leave the window, and accompanied him out of the study, L said: ‘The rails go right into the crematoria; the cages are up-ended automatically. So no one has to touch anything …’

The front room of the office-building was furnished only with a long table and twenty or so wooden chairs; off it there was a large terrace that over-looked the main body of the camp.

The first thing Peter noticed, as L opened the glass doors to the terrace, was a rifle propped up against the railings.

There was also a single stool, set right in the middle of the broad expanse of tiles.

It was to this stool that L led his prisoner, as Peter suddenly came to think of himself. ‘Sit,’ he barked; and as Peter did so, the man started to pace slowly up and down the terrace, his black boots clicking on the terra cotta.

‘We were talking, earlier, about figures in the carpet,’ L started; then paused, and seemed to start again. ‘I suppose, even when you were thirteen and you seemed undecided whether to become
a serious person or a fluttering, effeminate … butterfly, I detected a vague, as-yet ill-drawn … yes, let’s call it figure in your carpet. That made me both want to fuck you, destroy you, and hope at the same time that I didn’t – that I could make you stronger, make you – yes, choose your serious side. You seemed, as no one else at that school did, and as few people whom I have met since, to see … clearly. And when I looked at those paintings you were doing then, and read your first little stories – they were immature, of course. Careless. Unformed. Even so – I detected in them that same – hint of a vision I could share. There always seemed to be, somewhere within them – the stories, now, I’m talking about – some figure who saw civilisation as both an unceasing struggle for decency, justice, a degree of equality and a certain amount of freedom – plus a seed-bed for extraordinary inventions, amazing discoveries and great works of art – and, at the same time: a catalogue of crimes. Of unspeakable, appalling crimes, that fertilised the seed-bed, and without which those flowers – those trees – could never have grown.

‘Maybe I was reading too much into them; seeing what I wanted to see rather than what was there. And I’m not saying that your vision was the only valid vision. It was just … one that appealed to me. One that I responded to. That was why I decided to take you under my wing. Though it may not have seemed like that to you.

‘And then, after I left school and went into … politics, let’s say, I always kept an eye out for you. I think I saw the first poems you published when you were – seventeen, you must have been.’

Peter nodded.

‘And then the first short story you wrote, and the first novel, and – I felt a tremendous sense of achievement. I felt you were my creation. Pure vanity, of course, you were your own creation. Nonetheless … And always, if your work could be seen as a carpet and there were a thousand different patterns in it, all wonderfully well arranged, I felt that I could detect one underlying pattern, the pattern that bound all those others together.

‘For five, ten years – I was so proud of you I cannot tell you. So
proud of myself, for having first spotted you, even if I had had no real hand in your creation.

‘And then, as the political situation became more … fluid, and the world – our world – started to fall apart – I thought I detected a certain … paling of your imagination. A loss of energy that became more marked as the Party took over, and my own rise became more marked. Though I was always too crazy, even for the lunatics, to make it quite to the top; I disturbed even the profoundly disturbed.’

L gave one of his slightly wistful smiles.

‘It wasn’t that that fundamental pattern that I had always found so attractive had disappeared. Rather the opposite. It was that all the other patterns had disappeared; all the colours, the variety, the vitality. Until, in you last few books, there was nothing left in the carpet apart from that one
ur
-figure. Again and again, however much you changed the story, however much you … changed the clothes, let’s say, the hanger off which you suspended those clothes was the same. There, at the centre of the novel, or the novella, or whatever it was, was some artist-type – whether he was literally an artist or an artist in all but name – who, instinctively liberal in outlook, came to believe that he was living in an essentially corrupt society, and that to have any measure of success in that society – both material success and yes, ‘artistic’ success – he had to embrace the corruption. Or at least, acquiesce in it. He had to become an accomplice to murder, if not an actual murderer himself. He had to lie about what he saw, and at the same time draw strength from it. He had to – what is it you keep saying? “Become a laughing, prancing joker in the court of a depraved monarch.” I think I’ve read that, or words to that effect, in about six of your last seven books.