He wasn’t a bad man, your father. He wasn’t wicked. He didn’t mean it, he really didn’t. Careless, rash, negligent, weak – he may have been all those, yes: but wicked, never, never by intent anyway. Default’s a different k of f, another wormcan. He’d never have done a thing like that had he not … He’d never have done it of his own accord, he’d never have thought of it. That wasn’t his way. It wasn’t even his way to go along for the ride. If only he hadn’t been so lax. If only he hadn’t been so loaded with guilt. If only he hadn’t sought redemption in abetment of a greater ill – two wrongs don’t, they never do, they certainly didn’t with him. Wherever you got your appetites from, it wasn’t from him – that’s not just you, Eddie, I’m talking to, son, but the other ones too. It wasn’t by him that the gene labelled ‘-cide’ was issued; that slipped in from somewhere else. Sure, he was all that you children had in common – not that he knew, not that he allowed himself to know. None the less that gene (the symbol on the label is a skull) was not Guy’s, no matter how it might seem, no matter how chance boasts.
I promise, he was gentle as a wounded paw. He rammed the jack into the redcap’s jaw; the fellow gurgled like he was learning to speak – he was, contrarily, that second, beginning to forget how to speak. The fellow fell with a plash that drowned the gurgle. The yard was rutted, puddled; he was on his knees in mud and moonlight. Guy bent over him, panicked; he wasn’t a pretty sight but then he never had been. He made another noise, something like a faulty pipe, precisely like a faulty windpipe. Just then Alban came round the tailboard of the truck with the last crates in his arms. Guy tried to move the man, his victim, and out popped a dental plate bearing a peculiarly narrow incisor, a perfect replica of the original whose narrowness was likely due to inherited syph – gleet in the pudding, not in the sauce. (No wonder he wasn’t a pretty sight.)
Alban Meyer-Decker said: ‘Tant pis pour lui.’ He hefted the crate into the lorry. Then he said: ‘Et tant pis pour toi, hein?’ He picked up the redcap’s rifle and put it in the cab: ‘On sait jamais.’
The fresh tyre spun as Guy reversed the vehicle and sprayed clay over the disarmed soldier who was fixed in a state of eternal genuflection. He wasn’t, he wasn’t fixed. They got him to the court martial to which he gave evidence – a nod here, a shake there: all that was fixed were his tongue and his brain and his memory of the frightened man with a jack in his hand (this was the memory with which his memory stopped).
Did he remember the night of Monday the third of December 1945? It was within the scope of the finite store he was bound to carry round so long as he lived, just within its scope. He was the prosecution’s only witness. Had his injury been less severe he’d have made a better job of it. Guy Vallender’s punishment was in inverse proportion to the gravity of the damage he’d done. Had the wretched aphasiac not persistently confused the accused’s given name (at the mention of which his eyes dilated in recognition) with the make of lorry (ditto) that the accused was alleged to have been driving he would have made a better showing, would have seen to Major Vallender well and proper. But Guy’s defence (a literally barrack-room lawyer whose qualified success in this and other cases persuaded him, on discharge, to read for the bar – he’s now a retired silk with opinions and a gong) sensed, with alacrity, our single witness’s inability to distinguish the two referents of the one signifier. So Guy, the lorry, the kind with a bust of a head-dressed Sioux atop its radiator, looked frightened.
‘And how, pray,’ – featherweight mockery – ‘does a lorry indicate that it is frightened? Do its headlights betray fear like eyes? Do the metal bands of its radiator miraculously contort as an appalled mouth might? And, if so, do they equally miraculously bend themselves back to the impeccably longitudinal before the Guy is identified as the man in question?’
The witness didn’t cry – he should have. That might have alerted the presiding officer, a brigadier exhausted by him-beergeist and the three Estonian dancers on his staff (interpreters), to the conduct of the case. No, this poor fellow, this Private Bright (yes, a misnomial handle) grunted obligingly and gaped at the so far unlooted painting of a swollen peacock that hung above the accused: why, he wondered, has it the head of a chicken and not that of a Red Indian? He must have wondered that.
Then there was this: had or had not the witness attended the firework display organised and designed by the accused at Bramsche four weeks to the night before the robbery at Ruhl Optik? He had. And he’d seen Guy put his torch, the theatre torch, to the luminescent wheels named for the fired martyr Catherine. He knew him from there, he’d seen him with that torch in his hand – it looked like a jack? Yes (nod). Not guilty. Not on this charge. Guy Vallender was none the less stripped of his rank, was dishonourably discharged from His Majesty’s Service after offering no defence to the crushers’ further charges of dishonestly handling 800 cigarettes and fraternising with eight (actually, eighteen) frowlines – that was all they could sew him for. They stitched him for what everyone did, for what they did – this was not a guiltfree land, everyone was at it. If Bright had been a Kraut, Jerry, Bosch, Hun, Swine your lives would have been different, sons. Your lives would not have been how they were at all. Wherever you are you blame the state, this one there or that. And blame the partiality of justice: he wasn’t to know it wasn’t a German brain he was damaging. Had it been, the crushers would have ignored it.
Do you remember – do you, Bright (are you receiving me in Pompey, Bright?) – do you remember the fifth of November 1945? You don’t do you? Veg! It was as if the lights of the city were reflected in the sky. There were cheers and whoops, and when you lay back across the sidecar combination the world turned upside down and you were looking from an aeroplane at the lights of a city thousands of feet below you, and you gasped. Your white breath streaked across your eyes in a racing cloud effect. The cold stabbed your nostrils. The heads silhouetted against the artificial furnace are pollarded by caps and berets. A face that a moment back was green is violet now. The man I saw becomes a bird. A stone horse, ruinous and riderless, is as white as the day it first reared above this park; then it’s carmine then it’s orange then it’s gone, back into the night. Poor orphaned putti, wanting legs and noses and crowns, humpty beneath the smashed allegories that once clutched them. The blokes don’t even bother to nick them: out there were real children, pokable ones, little suckers, visited by their fathers’ sins, prone in atonement, plating to pay their nation’s debt, and all at two for twenty Seniors: there were other children, too, who had worse things happen to them.
Do you remember, Bright, the man without the hat? The one in mufti? He stumbles down the steps from the terrace of this harshly rusticated, requisitioned house (c. 1810 and, 135 years later, a well-stocked mess) and stumbles about the pitted lawns. He pushes through the crowd. He’s the only one whose gaze is not enskied. He stands on tiptoe, stretchnecked and peering, so long as his toes will support him; when he lands on his whole feet his head oscillates quicker. This is Alban Meyer-Decker, the smokkeler, the bof1 just arrived from Aachen where he’s been on business (bulk passports, meat, metal polish).
M’sieu Albeau wishes to renew the acquaintance of Major Guy; he had a proposition, his head is bursting with propositions, he breathes business opportunities: he was pleased to see his friend’s name in the Allied Forces newspaper he glanced at in the station café at Aachen while he waited for the Brussels train, but the bond of one boozing jag was not enough to cause him to cross the tracks and head two hundred miles north (with changes and delays at Cologne, Oberhausen, Wesel and Munster) on a day when the sky was coloured with dental amalgam and when the claims of Cato, who is now starting to swell in fecund rotundity, were strong – he longed for her. No, what fostered his change of plan was the start of the second paragraph: ‘Major R. G. Vallender, pre-war a professional pyro-technician – that’s firework-maker to you lot! – and now Town Major of Bramsche, ten miles north of Osnabruck …’ It was Guy’s gubernatorial grip on that town which made Alban Meyer-Decker change his plans, just on the off chance; in this game you never know. There, he’s found him, beyond the rope barrier, there in the polychrome inferno where rainbows are made after dark. Guy Vallender’s arms are extended either side of him, each hand holding wooden-handled tongs in which are clamped flaming tapers; night and myopia (poor Bright suffered that too) could indeed transform these tools into jacks, though not half so well as a buggered brain could. Guy Vallender’s arms are extended as if awaiting deposition.
Bramsche! On the Mittellandkanal, eight miles north of Osnabruck (not ten, the Allied Forces paper had it wrong). Bramsche! Its predominantly flat surrounds, flat yet relieved to the south-east by the wooded outline of the Wiehengebirge Hills, to the south-west by the wooded outlines of the Teutoburger Wald. Bramsche! Its quay, its little harbour, its fleet of maintenance dredgers, its aqueduct over the river Hase (some fishing). Bramsche! At the junction of the north German and Westphalian plains (pig farming, horse breeding, peatbogs, genocide). Bramsche! Its optical instruments factory is celebrated wherever people gather together to wear glasses, take photographs, bimp with binoculars, discover the interesting world that microscopy reveals.
This town was associable with Ruhl Optik as Jena was with Zeiss or Torgau with Neurath. It was the only reason Meyer-Decker had ever heard of the place, it was the only reason anyone had ever heard of it. Guy Vallender had never heard of it.
‘Where?’ he had asked when given his posting two days after he had met Meyer-Decker for what he believed would be the one and only.
‘“Where?” I asked – I’d never heard of it … Ah, je n’avais pas … ah …’ Guy shook his head.
Alban Meyer-Decker said: ‘I get you Bud.’
They both laughed at his weirdly inflected GI spiel. This is after the fireworks. This is the bar of the mess. Guy, receiving the congratulations of his fellow officers on the display with a courteous diffidence, greeted Meyer-Decker with a kindred neutrality, not a coolness but a manifest lack of surprise as though he didn’t know what surprise was, hadn’t learnt about it, as though the dandiacal singer turned businessman was as likely a figure to frequent this blue and ormolu room animated by yards of khaki as Tigger Dawkins there (who’d motored over from Herford in his Auto Union with two pigs, requisitioned at gun point and now spit-roasting in the basement kitchen). Dawkins was not the only soldier who regarded Alban Meyer-Decker with distaste – zoot splendour was no splendour in the eyes of aspirant gents who’d style themselves by their rank long after demobilisation; but the fellow’s not a jerry or a commie – he is a white man, and he’s a chum of Vallender: look, they’ve got an awful lot to jaw about. A jawful lot Tigger.
It was Guy Vallender who talked. He talked in the bar, he talked with his mouth full of crackling (something Meyer-Decker had never eaten before), he talked with a glass of Piesporter in his hand, he talked as they drove back to his quarters, they talked there in the dining room of that house in which Guy had billeted himself – ‘sometimes,’ he had written to Douglas ‘I don’t know whether to service the mother or the daughter.’
From such letters we know what he talked about. ‘Hunbelievable. Or, would you adam and eve it? (As most of the Tommies are wont to exclaim every other minute.)’ This, followed by inventories of sights and litanies of smells, was his invariable formula.
He listed, and told Meyer-Decker of: vagrant Germans blinded by vengeful allied troops; British arms sold to Germans in order that they might fight on in the Russian sector (Meyer-Decker seemed particularly interested in this); the victim of a multiple rape emerging in a somnambulatory daze, in shredded clothes, from a forest-green forest of pines near Recke; a stench ‘like the end of the world’ (he didn’t specify the source); the men who had comprised the war machine turned by war into machines with improvised prostheses – a scooter-wheeled fruit box propelled by the hands of a trunk, crutches built from tripods, legs made from chairlegs, amputations bound with chicken wire, an amended mousetrap strapped to a handless wrist, a missing ear bunged with brocade, a metal mug at each shoulder stump to receive alms where arms once had been (none proffered of course), a billy can colostomy bucket; rust; craters; cities like the worst teeth you ever clocked – black and holed and broken; a helmeted skull with a pistol in its mouth; bones, more bones, the reek of burning bones emitting gamboge gases and iodine-brown jelly; the woman in the outdoor café (trellises, wind-up gramophone) who winks and sits down beside Guy Vallender and tells him she has a malformed ribcage which she’ll show him for two cigs; the woman with pus-encrusted eyes who stopped the lift between floors of the Atlantic Hotel in Hamburg, lifted her skirt with that hand, pushed the wedding ring finger of this into her vagina and holds it beneath Guy Vallender’s nose, pouting, pelvically, thrusting, insolently imploring; the razed city that teemed like a termitary, its inhabitants, crouched beneath the weight of the wardrobes on their backs and the chairs strung from their necks and the cardboard cases in the wardrobes, scurrying from one hell to the next, crisscrossing, clambering over the fallen; the men who, even though they have limbs enough to walk, crawl lest they miss a cigarette butt; the escaped slave labourers, Auvergnats and Lombards, who died in a Bielefeld cellar ignorant that their oppressors had surrendered on May 8 – three of them had lived till mid August on a diet of rodents; the German who admitted to having been a member of the National Socialist party; the cocky lorry driver who, when admonished by Guy Vallender for blocking the entrance to the mess at Bramsche in contravention of the two-metre-high instruction to Keep Clear, retorted with a grin that yes, he had seen the sign, but that we Germans don’t like following orders; the resourceful couple in Cloppenburg with an attic room full of human meat and blow flies; the caves near here – Guy Vallender swings his cigarette hand north, checks, thinks, swivels, points south-east towards and beyond the lump of Biedemeier which Meyer-Decker turns to look at – the caves in the Teutoburger Wald have got people living in them, a racial memory of troglodytism has scummed up to the surface and they (a clutch of armed charmers in black uniforms) have retreated there. We’ll starve them out. They did.
Guy Vallender told Alban Meyer-Decker all about all of this and more besides. Alban Meyer-Decker boasted to Guy Vallender that Cato, sa p’tite Trina, la belle Catherine was pregnant. In the club, up the spout, got one on her, puddinged. Who was the cook?
‘Elle est pleine comme une vache.’ He stood and extended his tummy. His hand described an arc beyond his tummy. He was hoping for a boy who’d excel at chanson and cycle racing, a real Belgian. Guy said a real Belgian would be a boy who’d excel at eating mayonnaise with chips, asked when the baby was due.
‘C’est en mars, en mars, c’est en mars que je serai père, père encore une fois, bibi.’
Three from one year, six of the other; the sixth month is June.
‘Wan’ more?’ asked Guy Vallender wishing he could count on his fingers but his fingers were wrapped round a bottle of schnapps flavoured with sloes, and one fist of fingers (the free one) makes a mute abacus. Alban replied in the affirmative to these questions Guy asked: are you pleased; are you sure you’re pleased; and (more tentatively put) is she pleased? Alban was so pleased that he wept, he wept and shook his head and gasped at the prospect of his bliss. Guy watched him warily. He watched to determine whether this was a lachrymose act – he must have wondered at some point what Meyer-Decker was doing here, so far from home, so far from Catherine.
But: ‘Je suis si fier … One ’ell of a proud guy you lookin’ at.’ And: ‘I wish you ’ad met her – Catherine. Tu te souviens de sa photo? Eh? Quelle nana hein? Sewerm broad buddy yah. Moi, papa, uh?’
Well, you, no, not actually, no. It wasn’t just that Guy retained a muscular memory of the way, last June, she’d drawn him in her by uterine suction; there was, too, her amazonian scorn at Alban’s incapacity – Trop paf pour bourrer, ‘trop bourré pour baiser.’ Alban’s pride at putative paternity was a gloat, it was a misplaced gloat, he was claiming a goal he hadn’t scored: he didn’t know he hadn’t scored. The unwitting cuckold is no cuckold: he’s still the strutting cock, up to here in bliss, loin-bragging, generatively potent. He doesn’t know that his bull about his balls is balls. Shorn of brawn, and he doesn’t know it. This is an awful thing not to know. Guy Vallender was a softie, not the man to let on. The hierarchy of hurt was his to resolve. It was an awful thing for Alban not to know, but that knowledge was as unborn as the babe so long as Guy kept mum (which the mum would – the mum needed keeping, the mum’d keep mum). Keeping mum was awful for Guy. He wore a gag so long as he breathed. We know how long that was. Schtum, mum, dummy – there’s a happy triptych of irresonance, of palatal no-go, of the tongue floundering like a beached dolphin (p. 434). Oh, Guy Vallender held back all right. His stoic reticence was founded in circumstantial necessity – that’s what stoicism is: the avoidance of bother when bother’s the other choice.
No wonder he weighed in with compensation, with full-set repentance. He owned up to not owning up by agreeing to it, by going along with this bad, rash scam. Which astonished Alban Meyer-Decker; he could hardly believe Guy’s willingness to go along with it. It was only his greed that prevented him being wary of Guy’s willingness, his greed vanquished his suspicion. He had entertained little hope when he had changed trains, he had arrived expecting rebuff (the Albion mix of hauteur and mocking incredulity), he had expected to get nowhere, to have to use cunning to get anywhere, to have to offer the Englishman the bulk of the cut. He had even feared arrest. That’s why it was 2 am before he even broached the matter. Yet, by 4.12 am (neoclassical clock on the mantelpiece) when Major Guy went to wake the daughter of the house – it was her turn this week – to get her to fix a bed for me it was in the bag, the plan was cast. He couldn’t believe how easy it all was. He wondered at that: it made me think.
He was stupid as well as weak, your father. What could be more self-regardingly stupid than to infer ‘moral’ blackmail, to see blackmail where there is none, to submit to that blackmail without challenge? The man was crippled by an incapacity to give offence, by the terminal Englishness whose highest virtues are found in unrocked boats, in what’s beneath the carpet. He could of course not admit this self-deceit and masked it with a further programme that he may have believed in and which his brief believed in or used – which is the same thing in the moral vacuum of the law:
a) That the British policy of ‘spite and dynamite’, of destroying factories (eg Krupps Essen plant, Knesser gearboxes, Halle ball bearings, Voss shipyards, Bloehm shipyards, Nettl at Recklinghausen, Haensel rheostats) was self-defeating, liable to prompt civil unrest and to increase the dependence of the vanquished upon the victor.
b) That Bramsche, unbombed save by a parachute failure from a Wellington who burst all over a roof and seeped into two streets, would be destroyed ‘in spirit’ if its main employer, Ruhl Optik (the streets of whose jugendstil workers suburb were named in honour of German optical scientists – Eppenstein, von Rohr, Voit, Steinheil, Scheel etc.) was blown up rather than reopened.
c) That the ocular policy of National Socialism – to prescribe unground, non-corrective lenses as placebos – had resulted in a collective myopia which was a traffic hazard, and that this policy might be undone by re-activating the Ruhl laboratories and factory.
d) That believing in all this it is hardly likely that Major Vallender would attempt to incapacitate the factory by carrying out an audacious robbery and assaulting a private soldier into the bargain.
Acting on information received, three Military Policemen, led by a Lieutenant Colonel despatched from Hamburg, arrested Guy Vallender before the dawn of Sunday the ninth of December (he was in bed with the mother when the sleepy daughter answered the door). They act – hammering on the door, entering the house bearing rifles, the half colonel coughing with embarrassment – on information received by telephone at the Regional Commission in Osnabruck and at the headquarters of the Military Governor of Celle.
Both had taken anonymous calls in unsure, slangy, heavily accented English during the afternoon of the previous Thursday, three days after the robbery. The truck, whose tyre-prints corresponded with those found beside the Ruhl Optik warehouse, was thus discovered in a wood at Nordhorn near the Dutch border; the steering wheel, gear shift and driver’s doorhandle bore Guy Vallender’s fingerprints though this was of little moment since he often drove this very truck to the site of evictions: ‘It seems good sense to take along a lorry that people can put their possessions on there and then – gets it all done snappier.’ (This impressed the presiding drunk.) Guy Vallender could not understand why Alban Meyer-Decker had not set fire to the truck as they had arranged. He didn’t know this was a truck Guy habitually requisitioned; indeed, Guy had foreborn to tell him so lest he worry about the connection. Guy just couldn’t understand it. The very last thing he said when he got down from the cab near a level crossing outside Bramsche on the Uffoln road (the rails moongleamed to the treeless horizon) was: ‘Make sure it really burns – we don’t want anything left, nothing.’
Alban Meyer-Decker wriggled to accommodate himself on the driver’s seat he had just occupied. ‘Like fireworks, it’ll be,’ he said and winked and drove west with a jolt, with a cargo whose worth was estimated at £40,000, none of which the bastard Englishman was ever going to see, he’d see to that.
No, Guy Vallender had not been stupid, not in that regard he hadn’t. He watched the light of the truck diminish and disappear then walked beside the railway so far as the bridge over the canal. He rattled down the steps to the path alongside it. There was slurred singing on a moored barge. The moon twisted in the water, contorted grinningly. Major Guy Vallender marched at a nippy double, shutting his eyes now and again – but not too long: mind the drink, it’s deep and dangerous – to conjure patterns to impose on the night, fluid scrolls and mutating dreamscapes of a grandeur that only funny money was fit to afford. Easy come, Guy, easy go.