The Man Who Went Down With His Ship (31 page)

‘It was the truth, of course, to my way of thinking. But paradoxically, the more you told the truth, or the more baldly you told it and it did become the only figure in the carpet, the more contrived, schematic, somehow
less
truthful that figure became. Until I couldn’t help feeling – this has just become theory for
him. This is just some automatic response he is trotting out, that he no longer really believes in. It became as superficial, frivolous … fluttery, in its way, as your paintings had become. Oh, I realise you had to protect yourself, had to go on earning a living. And I have to say, the more schematic, arid you became, the more my fellow animals in the zoo were taken in by you, and
didn’t
see what, by now, was the only thing left to see. They praised your breadth the narrower you became; they admired your palette when you had ceased to use all colours but grey, they took you to be wry and ironical and if not on their side at least indifferent, when I saw that over and over you were condemning them, damning them. If, there again, damning them constantly with the same words, in the same automatic fashion, until even your curses became meaningless. You retired to this place not so much because you wanted to keep a low profile, Peter, or even hide from me, as because – you wanted to get away from the world. You wanted to cease being what you were born to be. And you thought if you kept on trotting out the same line, you could keep your conscience clear. “You see, I was always denouncing the beasts, even if the beasts were too stupid to notice.” But if you get away from the world, if you let everything become theory …

‘Everything becomes dust, Peter. The jungle becomes the Sahara. And frankly – you might just as well be dead.’

L stopped his pacing at last and stood staring at Peter. His eyes narrowed.

‘You have disappointed me, Peter. In the final analysis … You were climbing, climbing the mountain, but then, when you got to within reach of the summit, you stopped. You didn’t turn back. But you didn’t go on. Whereas had you dared to go those last few metres … yes, you would have seen what you had come from. The dark valley, let’s call it. But you would also have seen, on the other side – I don’t know what, Peter. Maybe that’s why I am disappointed in you. I feel you have given me only half the story. The half I already knew. Whereas if you had reached the top … Oh, maybe the view on the other side would have been identical.
But at least it would have been the complete picture. Instead of just … I feel sometimes, Peter, that you have given me only the Beast. The Beast I know so well because I am he. What you never gave me – what you teased me with, but never entirely offered, was … Beauty. As I say, maybe it’s wishful thinking. Maybe there is no such thing. Maybe there
is
only the corrupt court, and you so-called artists can only be jesters, licking the arses of the powerful and telling them their shit tastes sweet. But, whether it is your fault or my own, whether you are to blame or essentially I am disappointed in myself – in my own inability to haul myself out of the slime, the filth, the horror, that instead I revel in – you have, ultimately, failed me, Peter.

‘I told you many years ago I should be your demon, and should come back to haunt you.

‘So I have. And as soon as I got this job, and I found myself near you, I determined that before everything went up in flames and the new age of decency was ushered in, I would do what I had long ago threatened to do. To punish you – I suppose is what it amounts to – for not saving me …

‘I was just trying to work out how to do it, when, amongst all the … rubbish sent here for disposal, I spotted someone who reminded me so much of you that when I first saw him I did a double take. I thought it
was
you. Same build, same colouring, same self-effacing manner, same … I hauled him in and asked him what he had done before he was arrested. In his clear, yet slightly soft voice, he told me he had been – wonder of wonders! – a writer and a painter … It really was you, I thought. A lightweight writer and painter, the poor fellow went on, plaintively. A writer and a painter who had never meant to give offence to anyone. Who had never meant to criticise the regime, let alone “‘tell the truth”. He had just wanted to amuse … Yet, irony of ironies, one of our most noted and respected critics read his last book, and thought that the light, yes fluttery figure in the centre of that little rug was indeed a damning indictment of the powers that be. He had a word with a highly placed
party official … it was discovered, horror of horrors, that our home-grown Dostoevsky was a homosexual – actually, I suspect the critic was too, and that’s the real reason why … but that’s another story. In any case, he was arrested, “tried”, and sent here.

‘Poor thing. If it wasn’t so funny, I think I should cry.

‘On your feet, Peter,’ L said, summoning the writer to the parapet by which he was standing. He pointed down into the vast compound round which the prisoners were shuffling. ‘You see that figure in the blue shirt – that’s rather like yours, come to think of it.’

Peter nodded, and felt himself grow cold.

‘And the blue jacket and the beige trousers … that are rather like yours, come to think of it.’

Colder still, Peter nodded again.

‘And the brown shoes … I had him specially dressed like that so you would be able to pick him out. That is he. Your frivolous alter-ego. The person whom you might have become had it not been for me. And the person who is now down there where, if my dear colleagues did but know it, you should be.’

L went over to the rifle propped up against the railings, picked it up, pulled back the bolt, and handed it to Peter.

‘Shoot him,’ he said. ‘You were always a good shot. Thanks to me. Oh, I dare say you have grown a bit rusty, but if you miss the first time you can always have a second go. Or a third or fourth, if needs be.’

Peter stared.

‘Don’t look at me like that,’ L snapped. ‘I said shoot him. If you do not wish to, you may shoot yourself. And if you do not wish to do that either,’ he drew a pistol from the holster in his belt, ‘I shall shoot you.

‘I hope it won’t come to that. It would be so banal. But I assure you I shall if I have to, Peter, and I think you have known me long enough, and you have seen enough today, to know I mean what I say.

‘Shoot him. Shoot yourself. Or be shot. You have a choice. But whatever it is, be quick about it. I have a meeting in five minutes.
We have to decide how to close this place down. Destroy every piece of evidence that it ever existed, so that when the good times come again – oh, people will say this could never have been. It was just some – sick dream.

‘A couple of months, I reckon it’ll take us. To restore all this to nature.’

Peter stared at the rifle he was holding; he could smell its particular smell. He contemplated shooting L, but knew that before he could even raise the rifle to his shoulder L would have shot him. He contemplated shooting himself, but knew he would never be able to bring himself actually to fire. So, feeling that his world had come to an end – no, that
the
world had come to an end – he shouldered the rifle – and oh, how it all came back to him, as clearly as the memories triggered by the sound of L’s voice – took aim at the figure in the blue shirt, blue jacket and beige trousers, and shot him in the back.

A few of the shuffling figures lurched away from the man as he fell; Peter thought he heard one of them scream. Then they went on shuffling, shuffling.

‘Bravo,’ L said – looking, for the first time that Peter could ever recall, quite stunned himself. ‘It’s not just theory now, is it, Peter? You’ve actually – done it.’

He cleared his throat, aware perhaps that he was shaken, that his face was pale. Then he pulled himself together.

‘I’ll have a car take you back into town.’

*

Peter never saw L again.

Shortly after their meeting, it was reported that the promised dismantling of the camp had begun; and by the time the war ended, just five months later, not a trace of it remained. Every scrap of barbed wire, every brick from the crematoria, every plank and every rail had, apparently, vanished – though for a long while no one liked to go and check. And within weeks, as L had predicted, the townsfolk were either pretending that the place had never existed, or were careful never to mention it.

Still, in certain bars, late at night, when people had drunk a little too much, rumours circulated; and Peter gathered that one building – the commandant’s house – had survived the general destruction. ‘Presumably because it didn’t really form part of the camp itself,’ said a man who claimed to have ‘inside knowledge’. Since, however – the man went on – in that house had been discovered the body of a blonde woman who had been strangled, the bodies of three children who had been shot in the head, and, in an out-house, the charred remains of a middle-aged man, it was likely that that too would be demolished, before very long. So there would be nothing to remind people of what had been.

Peter, as he packed up his belongings and prepared to move back to the city, accepted without question that the woman found was L’s wife, and the children, L’s children. But whether the charred remains were of L himself, he sometimes wondered, and more often than not doubted. He couldn’t help feeling that somewhere in the world, that man still existed; a demon, destined to haunt him for the rest of his days.

Alive or dead, L – or a fictional version of him – was the central character in the first book that Peter wrote after the war. A book in which there was not a single artist figure, nor even the suggestion of one. Rather, it was a novel that charted the rise and fall of a self-confessed monster; a man who was so much larger, and more frightening, than life, that he was taken – by critics and the public at large – to represent the regime that had so recently been swept away, leaving behind it a continent in ruins, and countless numbers of people dead.

It was, it was almost universally agreed, ‘a stupendous achievement’, a ‘terrifying cataclysm of a book, that exposes with merciless accuracy the true face of evil’; and it was awarded so many literary prizes that its author soon grew quite used to being acclaimed as ‘the first great artist to have emerged from the rubble’. ‘Nothing in Strauss’s spare, austere previous works has prepared us for such a shattering, magnificent apotheosis’, one commentator wrote; while the London
Times
headed its review
with the single word: ‘Genius.’

‘Strauss! Peter Strauss!’ was for a while the name on everyone’s lips …

There was just one critic, in a small literary magazine that was published in Buenos Aires, who begged, a little apologetically, to differ from the general view. He signed himself, this dissenter, simply ‘I’: and his complaint was the following.

That for all that Strauss’s depiction of a monster was a masterpiece of sorts, and ‘reminds us why the author has a reputation as a painter as well as a writer’ … and for all that ‘he does not spare us a single wart on the face of the beast … one ends the book with the uncomfortable feeling that despite everything Strauss, like Milton before him, is just a little in love with the Devil he has created.

‘But then perhaps, in a sense, precisely because he has inspired a masterpiece, the Devil has created Strauss. So it could not be otherwise.’

To this anonymous reviewer, Peter wrote a short note, c/o the magazine. ‘You have seen what no one else has.’

He did not receive a reply.