The Road Between Us (20 page)

Anselm feels as if he is in a dream. He has not had a civilized conversation in almost five years, and after the violence he has just perpetrated it seems illusory that he should be having one now. He is no longer aware of the guards, of the dying man, of the thousands
of prisoners behind him, accusing ghosts whose eyes must be boring into his head as they listen. ‘Fine art.’

‘You are an artist?’

‘Yes. I trained at the Slade.’

The Commandant thinks about this. ‘Our Führer is an artist.’

Anselm has to fight an urge to laugh. He feels hysteria bubbling up inside him like a spring of cool water. Looking down, he fixes his gaze on the horse’s hooves.

‘And Reichsmarschall Goering is a keen collector of art,’ the Commandant adds. With this he gives a smart tug on his rein and, with a touch of his spur, rides towards the administration block. The Alsatian follows him with a loping stride, without being called. Only now does Anselm realize that throughout the entire performance the animal has not moved from its position. It has not barked in excitement. Nor even snarled.

The Commandant has reached his destination now. When he dismounts in one easy movement, the horse does not move. A guard runs over, takes hold of its bridle and leads it away. The Commandant enters the block, the dog at his heel, and the other officers march back across the square and follow him inside.

Anselm passes into a trance in which everything is being enacted before him in slow motion, without sound. Perhaps it is another change in the atmosphere causing a pressure on his inner ear. Perhaps he is becoming deaf.

The rhythm of the camp soon returns to normal.
Ausrücken und Einrücken
. Go out and come in. The workers march out of the camp gate now in step, heads lolling, arms rigid, and their gait is hard, boneless and unnatural, like puppets made without joints.

Since he was ‘volunteered’ for the medical experiment, the doctors have ordered that Anselm should perform only light duties, repairing prisoners’ uniforms. He has become deft with a needle and thread and today, as he has every day since the injections began, he soon manages to slip into a self-induced trance: it spares him from thoughts of the upside-down man he has martyred. By the
time the sun is setting in a tumult of angry crimson, he has almost forgotten about his deed altogether.

But the crucified man is there to remind him as he trudges back into the square for the evening roll call. The skin is leathery, the body white, drained of blood like a slaughtered bullock. It is moving with flies, alive with them. Anselm has encountered scenes like this in art books: Goya’s series of prints ‘The Disasters of War’, in which naked, mutilated torsos are mounted on trees. Had the Commandant seen them? Is that where this idea for random butchery came from? Is he a man of culture?

As Anselm considers this, one of the other prisoners walks past him and spits in his face.

Three days later, Anselm is summoned by the Ukrainian to see the Commandant in his office at the end of the administration block. His muscles freeze at this order, not in fear necessarily but in something closer to relief. The long, empty, friendless days are over, it seems. This is his time. He will surely die now, and he feels vaguely honoured that his death will be at the hands of a commandant rather than the vicious little Ukrainian. But when he knocks on the Commandant’s door and hears that dark brown voice say ‘enter’, it is not the barrel of a Luger that greets him but a large sheet of thick white paper attached to a board by two clips. The Commandant is eating a peach noisily. He finishes it, throws the stone in a bin and wipes his hands before signalling for Anselm to take the paper. He then hands him a slim stick of charcoal. Anselm has seen shards like this in the crematorium. Is that where this comes from?

The Commandant removes his cap to reveal blond, swept-back hair, shaved at the sides. ‘Draw me,’ he says.

Only now does Anselm notice the Alsatian at the Commandant’s feet. It is studying him with cold eyes.

Seeing a movement, he realizes his hand is shaking. As he steadies it by pressing the charcoal against the paper, an unfamiliar calm descends upon him. As his hand sweeps back and forth across the picture plane without making a mark, he begins to lose himself. He
knows he should be nervous – that he is drawing for his life – but the thrill of having clean paper to draw upon outweighs his fear. He studies the Commandant for a moment, mentally reducing him to spheroids, ellipses and quadratic surfaces. The only sound is the scratching and slurring of the drawing point against the paper.

After ten minutes he is finished. He holds it at arm’s length, feeling slightly out of breath. It is a good likeness. He turns it around so the sitter can see himself.

As the Commandant purses his lips, cocks his head to one side and contemplates the sketch, there is a silence so thick Anselm can hear it humming in his ears. He now regrets not making his drawing more flattering, the eyes wider apart, the face less elongated. But it seems to meet with approval.

‘Not bad …’ The Commandant takes it from him and places it on the desk. ‘I want some drawings of life in the camp,’ he says. ‘Roll call. Prisoners marching to work, lining up for food, sleeping. Some studies. Try and be as accurate as you can. Don’t idealize. I shall notify the guards that you are not to be disturbed. Take the board with you. And take those.’

Anselm notices for the first time that there are more white sheets in a roll tied with string, as well as more sticks of charcoal, also neatly tied. With this the Commandant wafts his hand to indicate the prisoner is dismissed.

Anselm had known better than to ask questions, but as he shuffles out of the office, with the board and the sheaves of paper in one hand and the sticks of charcoal in the other, his head is crowding with them. How many studies does the Commandant want? By when does he want them completed? What are they for? He blocks out the thoughts. Thinking gets you killed. He determines to start immediately and keep going until he runs out of paper. He counts the sheets. There are ten. He should be systematic. The Commandant has requested a drawing of the roll call: the next one is not until the evening; that gives him the afternoon to produce a landscape of the camp from a high viewpoint, as well as some individual studies of prisoners. But it is lunchtime. He will
start with the food queue. It will mean missing out on his own food but since he became part of the experiment, nutrition is no longer the urgent priority it has been. He no longer fears he might die of starvation between meals.

There is a raised terrace outside the kitchen. This will give him a vantage point. And there is a chair here. He looks around self-consciously then sits on it with caution, as if it might be an electric chair. Positioning his board on his lap, he holds the piece of charcoal over it, poised.

‘What the hell is going on here?’

Anselm recognizes the sharp voice as belonging to the Valkyrie, the most feared of the
Aufseherinnen
, or female guards. In the same movement he stands up, removes his cap and speaks in a tumble of words. ‘The Commandant has asked me to draw some pictures.’ He holds out the board as proof and waits for the inevitable lash of her whip. When it does not come, he risks a look. The Valkyrie, a narrow-hipped woman with pockmarked skin, seems unsure what to do next. The clean white paper and the board are an incongruous sight, evidence that this prisoner must be telling the truth.

‘Stay here.’ She disappears into the administration block and returns a couple of minutes later. ‘Then get on with it!’ she shouts.

Anselm begins sketching as the prisoners form a line. There is the usual minor jostling for position but the queue is orderly, each man staring blankly ahead, his thoughts only on the food. The idea for this composition comes to him now. He will sketch the first prisoner in detail and the faces of those behind him will become progressively less detailed, until, as their heights diminish with perspective, they merge and disappear into a vanishing point.

Feeling braver now, he turns to the Valkyrie and says: ‘I need to do a sketch from the top of the camp, looking down.’

‘Follow me,’ she says.

At the top of the camp the Valkyrie signals to the guard in the watchtower that the prisoner has her permission to be here and then looks around before she lights a cigarette. Anselm begins sketching his landscape, conveying a sense of the symmetry of the
camp, the line punctuated by watchtowers. He has realized for the first time that it is arranged in the shape of a noose. This is deliberate, he presumes. The SS never does anything by accident.

But something is missing from the composition. He contemplates the Valkyrie now sitting with her back to him about ten yards away, a little down the slope, slightly to his left. He sketches her as a hunched figure, small under her SS-Gefolge cape. Her forage cap is covering a neat coil of braided brown hair held by pins. As she concentrates on smoking, she draws in her shoulders. She is wearing high boots that reach to the hem of her grey field uniform. Every now and then she turns and watches him sternly, and Anselm feels as if he cannot move out of the target of her glare.

Although days have no name for the prisoners in the camp, Anselm knows this is an
Arbeitssonntag
, a working Sunday. The previous evening he had to visit the
Blockfrisör
, the official barber who shaves heads and chins on a Saturday, and the interval between visits is always a week. The other prisoners don’t look at him as he heads up the hill to the top of the camp and sets up his board. Under the Valkyrie’s protection, he is invisible again.

He has been sketching for perhaps fifteen minutes when he notices that a group of new arrivals is being herded into the camp below, about fifty of them, men and women, old and young. All have yellow stars on their striped uniforms and hair cropped close to their skulls. The blisters, pustules and welts on their skin are familiar, but the sight of so many Jews in this camp of mostly French political prisoners is not. Even more unusual is the presence of so many women. All look malnourished and their movements are slow and listless to the point that even the barking of the dogs does not seem to register with them.

Instead of being taken to the barracks, as usually happens when inmates arrive from the station, they are made to stand in the square for about a quarter of an hour before two doctors, recognizable from their white coats and SS peaked caps, emerge from the infirmary and order the prisoners to remove their clothes. They do as instructed without complaint, like sharp-boned robots, and then
they follow instructions to throw the clothes into one big pile in the middle of the square.

One of the doctors counts off fifteen prisoners and leads them out, back towards the village. They follow him, arms raised, still in single file, with three female and two male guards bringing up the rear with their dogs on leashes. As they leave the camp, the men drop their hands to cover their genitals. The women do the same, with some covering their breasts, too. This modesty strikes Anselm as peculiar. Surely they are used to this by now?

He has to get to his feet to see where they are being taken: a white building. With a tiled roof and a metal chimney, it looks like a small hotel. To reach it they have to pass an
estaminet
and the locals drinking in it have brought their chairs and their glasses outside to watch the strange procession. Some of them are laughing and pointing. The prisoners file into the building and, when the last has gone through, the guards follow them in, only to emerge again a minute later and stand outside, leaning against the wall, smoking and talking.

Anselm sketches what he is witnessing. After a while the guards check their watches and go back into the building. A further ten minutes or so pass before they emerge again and march back to the camp and count off fifteen more of the naked, waiting prisoners. As the others did, they cover their genitals as they leave the camp. Anselm realizes now what the scene has brought to mind: Masaccio’s fresco of Adam and Eve being cast out of the garden.

The following day, Anselm is sketching a former kapo, one of the prisoners with the green triangles who administer most of the beatings to the other prisoners. This one has become too sick and weak to carry out his duties and so has been left behind from the daily work details. He looks old and his death is a matter of weeks, perhaps days away. When a kapo is of no more use to the SS he dies.

Anselm does not resent the kapos as much as others do. In this place you do what you have to do to survive for another day. The kapos have chosen their way to survive. He has now chosen his.
And the opportunity to draw is giving him back his sanity. He feels nourished by it. A man again.

The Commandant rides across, followed by his dog, and without dismounting studies the picture of the kapo over Anselm’s shoulder. He looks at the model, an emaciated man, with head dropped and shoulders curved, on whose face and in whose eyes not a trace of a thought can be seen. ‘I wouldn’t even know where to start,’ the Commandant says, drawing out the words. ‘How do you start? Do you start with the form? The composition?’

‘I always start by thinking of the figure as a series of solid volumes which can move in relation to one another,’ Anselm says, holding up a piece of charcoal at arm’s length to form a vertical line down the centre of the subject.

The Commandant cocks his head. ‘It doesn’t look right.’ He taps his chin with his riding crop. ‘Let us see what he looks like on the gallows.’ He signals with a click of his finger for the kapo to mount the scaffold. With a look of confusion, the old man obeys.

‘Now remove your clothes.’

Without lifting his sad, opaque eyes, the kapo obeys again. He looks like a human skeleton.

The Commandant clicks his fingers. ‘Come on, come on. Your head in the noose.’

The kapo steps on to a stool and slips the rope around his neck. It hangs loosely.

Anselm looks at the Commandant.

The Commandant makes an impatient signal for him to start sketching. Then, after watching Anselm at work for five minutes, he tuts. ‘It was better how you had it before.’