Unexploded (27 page)

It was never destined to be the easiest of meetings but Geoffrey seated himself in the Bishop’s reception room and accepted, from the man himself, a cup of Indian tea and a slice of lemon. George Bell wore shabby leather carpet slippers and splashed the tea liberally as he poured. But his recall was sharp. ‘Gottlieb, yes. I first heard the name from a German church colleague who’d been barracked with him at Sachsenhausen; a colleague we got out in ’38 with the help of our German counterparts.’

Through the Georgian windows, past garden beds bare with November, Geoffrey looked across to the ancient cathedral cloisters, where a group of churchmen hurried in their cassocks. He shifted on the narrow sofa, readying himself to make the case, but the Bishop hadn’t finished.

‘Coincidentally, and not long after Otto Gottlieb was mentioned to me, I received an anonymous letter with a newspaper cutting, an old review of his first exhibition in Berlin.

‘The letter was written in a woman’s hand. Elderly, I should think. Her English was quite good. She had, I believe, once been an actress or a singer, I can’t recall which, and she had travelled widely abroad. Before the war, she had, she said, read a piece of mine in
The Times
in which I noted my interest in modern art in general and new German art in particular. I am, you see’ – waving a hand at the hotchpotch of the room – ‘something of a collector, and that detail lingered in her mind, apparently because she thought it odd for a bishop to be keen on modern art. In her letter, she provided a character reference of sorts for Gottlieb and begged me to intervene at Sachsenhausen.’

Geoffrey sat back with his cup and saucer and feigned neutrality. ‘He’s a lucky man.’

Bell paused to study him. ‘Of course, if there is any case that
can
be made by the Church for a man there, any man, it is incumbent
upon me or one of my colleagues to make it. In this instance, it took the better part of a year and delicate diplomacy, but in the end, I was able to plead his artistic reputation to the Home Department – although, in fact, I’d never heard of Otto Gottlieb until I received the woman’s letter with that one review. When the cause is right, Mr Beaumont, I am only too willing to deceive with the best of them.’

Geoffrey smiled obligingly, glanced at the Bishop’s walls and privately wondered that his housekeeper, not to mention the Church, tolerated his so-called art collection.

‘I had expected he’d stop in London, once he was past the tribunal, but he said he was keen on Brighton; he wanted the sea light. Brighton, as you know, is part of my diocese. I managed to find him some work painting sets for one of the theatres. Nothing steady but it seemed enough. He found digs, and that was the last I heard, although later, sadly, I was able to imagine the rest.’ He sighed. ‘Speaking of which, Mr Beaumont, I’d hoped to visit your camp, but as you may recall, you replied to my letter only to say that visits were not advisable.’

His gaze was stony over the rim of his cup.

Geoffrey straightened and returned his cup and saucer, like an offering, to the table. ‘I apologize, Your Grace. Until only recently, I was bound by regulations and a shortage of manpower. Naturally you are welcome at the Camp at any time, and if useful employment for Gottlieb may be found, I am only too happy to give my consent. As you’ll know better than I, artists may now, finally, be considered for release, though we still must argue every case on utilitarian grounds. I’ve come today in the hope that you might have work of some variety here in the Chichester area for Mr Gottlieb, as you were his sponsor.’ He smiled wryly. ‘Unfortunately, when Mr Gottlieb
was asked to produce a list of the practical skills he could contribute to the war effort, he insisted he had none; that he is able only to paint. I’m afraid his official records cast some doubt upon even that.’

‘Excellent,’ declared the Bishop, ignoring the intended barb. ‘I have a church in need of a mural painter, and people at war need churches. The mural will be in the modern style. A fresco. I am sure we can agree it will be eminently useful. Is there anything else, Mr Beaumont?’

Geoffrey flexed his hand. ‘Forgive me, but I feel I should remind you that Gottlieb is not only an enemy alien. He is also Category A and a Jew. Your parishioners might not –’

‘I hope he is good with heights. I shall arrange the scaffolding and meet him there tomorrow for a preliminary look.’ George Bell rose from his chair, and Geoffrey understood what it was to be one of his own clients at the Bank, courteously but summarily dismissed. The Bishop extended his hand. ‘At midday, shall we say? St Wilf ’s in Elm Grove. It’s not far from your camp, as I recall.’

He smiled and shook Bell’s hand. ‘Not far at all. Just a mile or so away.’

At the back of the Lewes Road and just minutes from Park Crescent.

The harder he tried, the closer Gottlieb got.

34

The meeting was an unusual one: a Lord Bishop and a ‘degenerate’ painter. The breath of the two men hovered in the frozen air of the church as if the words they spoke trailed ghosts. Finally, at the foot of the scaffolding, Otto Gottlieb thanked George Bell and said, regretfully, that he would have to decline the commission. He was sure His Grace would find another artist eager to take it on.

Sunlight streamed from the tower, the silence of the nave seemed to beat with each man’s heart, and George Bell experienced a peculiar sense of loss.

Outside, the tyres of the Black Maria that had delivered the painter from the Camp were spinning on a thin sheet of ice. George Bell could only stare, lost for words, as the man dashed out the door, slipped on the ice and stumbled to catch the van before it set off back to a labour camp that had already stolen six months of his life.

That day at Sachsenhausen there had also been ice – on the boot-testing track – and it had seemed to Otto that he were falling for whole, long moments while the watchtower rose higher and higher, the sun spun in the grey sky, and the heavy pack on his back pulled him down. Before he passed out with the pain, he felt his ankle twist and snap.

When he came to, his foot was resting on a pillow at a sickening
angle. He felt his stomach heave. The nurse explained that the bones had been weakened after the many previous sprains; his ankle had multiple fractures, and surgery would be required to realign the joints. He could expect a plate and screws in his foot, and a leg cast for three to four months.

She was the nurse with the pretty doe eyes and the voice like honey. He started to scream.

There were men in the ablutions block, their testicles burned and swollen; others, castrated. Some, from the Jewish barracks mostly, were dying slowly from injections or so-called racial investigations. The cellar below the pathology room was an open secret, a room stuffed with bodies.

It took two SS guards to hold him still long enough for the nurse to administer the needle. He wanted to never wake up.

Yet he surfaced from the anaesthetic to see it was as the nurse had said. They had operated. His leg was suspended in a short cast. More strangely still, as soon as he could sit up, she brought him a watercol-our set and a large sketchbook. She smiled and said they were interested in seeing his work. ‘They?’ She reminded him, with a knowing wink, that they favoured a naturalistic style. He would be permitted to paint the other men in the infirmary providing he attempted no interpretation. He must be accurate and accurate only. Did he understand?
Of course
, he said.
Yes
. What was happening? What trick was this? He opened the paintbox. Burnt Sienna. Cad-mium red. Cerulean blue. He hadn’t seen colour in over a year. He’d thought he would never see it again.

That night he dreamed of the nurse’s breast in his mouth and her hair falling across his face. Someone was amputating his leg from the knee down. It was torture, but necessary because freedom, he understood in the dream, came at a terrible cost. Without the leg in the cast,
he was maimed but untethered and free. Even so, it was hard to turn from her soft doe eyes and her breast with its sweet morphine drip. When he woke, his face was covered in tears and he’d come in his sleep.

A week later the sketchbook and his paintings went missing from his bedside table. He was given crutches and told to report to Room 51 in Barrack RII. He hobbled across the parade square, assuring himself that they wouldn’t dispose of him if they had just taken the trouble to operate.

The room stank of bleach. It was windowless but brightly lit. A steel table served as a desk, and was bare save for a clipboard, a box of sharpened pencils and, unbelievably, a large clear jar of boiled sweets.

Against the far wall stood a filing cabinet and four wooden chairs in a row. The centre of the room was dominated by a short examination table. In the middle of the tiled floor ran a gutter with a drain.

A man in a lab coat and civilian clothes stood by the filing cabinet. Otto watched him open a drawer, close it, and turn, holding his sketchbook to his wide, soft stomach. He introduced himself as Dr Metzger and began to talk, immediately and at speed, of art – of Rembrandt of all people – of that artist’s remarkable powers of observation, of his unflinching eye for detail. Otto blinked. He couldn’t keep up.

‘Do you know
Bathsheba at Her Bath
?’

He shifted on his crutches and tried to look the man in the eye. ‘Indeed. I saw it at the Louvre years ago. It …’ Did he dare say it? ‘It moved me profoundly.’

‘He gets the deformity right. That is the thing. He sees like a scientist. How many artists manage that?’

‘The deformity?’

‘In the left breast. It is perfectly rendered. That is the power of Rembrandt. You may take a seat.’

Otto lowered himself on to one of the wooden chairs and rested his crutches against the wall.

‘You have a dilemma, Mr Gottlieb. You find yourself in a labour camp and yet you are unfit for work.’

‘This is only my first day on the crutches. I will improve.’

Dr Metzger approached, picked up the crutches, and removed them to the far side of the room, smiling. Then he seated himself on his desk. ‘I am involved in anthropometric research, cranio-facial studies mostly. Deformities. Sometimes, cranio–brain ratio work. Head injuries are a growing area of interest. I require good records, accurate records. You are very lucky, Mr Gottlieb. I can no longer carry on doing the work, not at this rate, and documenting it myself. The fact that I cannot has probably saved your life.’

He looked up. ‘I am very grateful.’

‘I work with children, local Jewish, Roma and Sinti children spe-cifically. Mongoloids when we can get them. Twins of any variety. Sometimes I work with the same children for up to a year, depending. They will change considerably in that time. Your paintings must be in watercolour, for the sake of speed, and they must be anatomically correct. You must be able to work with the measurements and proportions I give you. You must be able to scale up or down as requested.’

‘I can do that. I trained initially as a draughtsman.’

‘You must be able to produce records both before and after.’

He felt something grip the back of his brain.

Dr Metzger reached for a sweet in the jar. ‘Before, after and, in some instances, during the surgical interventions.’

Otto stared at the table, at its straps and stirrups. ‘If I may, Dr Metzger, what is wrong with these children?’

‘You mean, what is wrong when they come to Sachsenhausen?’

Otto nodded.

‘Race aside?’ The sweet bulged at his cheek.

‘Yes.’ He made himself say it. ‘Race aside.’

Dr Metzger glanced at the clipboard, turned back a page, and was distracted briefly by a detail there. Then he looked up and leaned across, proffering the jar of sweets. Evil was mundane, not monstrous. ‘Nothing, Mr Gottlieb. There is nothing wrong with the children when they arrive.’

When the Superintendent first told him of the Bishop’s need of a mural, a fresco, he’d felt life surge within him for the first time since that June morning when he had swum out too far. The space of the church would be his, the Superintendent had explained. It would be closed for services for the duration of the renovation work. He would have to report to the local police station once a week but, otherwise, he would be a free man. He would be paid modestly for the work upon completion. In the meantime, he would need to find other temporary work to keep himself. Did he feel capable?

In that moment, Otto had liked the man.

Entirely modern, the Bishop had said. Nothing sentimental. A single fresco spanning the three walls of the Lady Chapel.

But that morning in the nave, when the Bishop had announced to him the subject of the commission, the words had closed on him like a trap. ‘Suffer the Little Children’.

Just months ago, he’d thought he’d go mad with it, Room 51, the memories. Any decent human being would have killed himself long before he tried.

The Bishop offered to find child models from the parish.

He fled the place.

Later that same November day, summoned to the Camp’s HQ, he found, not the Superintendent and his disapproval, but the Bishop alone at a salt-smeared window, taking in the view. ‘Is it a fear of heights?’ he asked, without turning. ‘The dimensions are for you to say. It is for you to decide how to use that space. If not the Lady Chapel, something less large scale.’

If he knew
, Otto thought,
he wouldn’t let me anywhere near his church
.

‘Perhaps it’s the location? A church? I assumed you were a secular Jew, but if I have offended –’

He shook his head. ‘It really isn’t a matter to concern –’

‘Then it can only be the theme.’ Bell turned. ‘I chose it for the Lady Chapel because St Wilfred’s is a parish with many young families. It is the moment of course when Christ says to the Apostles that the children gathered must be allowed to go to him; that they mustn’t be kept away. No doubt you know the story. But you must name your subject.’

How could he say that there was nothing more he could actually say? He thanked the Bishop again and turned to go.

‘Mr Gottlieb,
please
. I need an artist, and I believe you need not to be smashing limestone over a long winter. I ask you to put whatever reservations you have aside. You owe me absolutely nothing but –’ Here, Bell produced an envelope, a single sheet of notepaper and a yellowed newspaper cutting from his pocket. He laid all three on the desk. ‘But I believe the author of this letter took considerable risks – considerable personal risks – to send it; to ensure, not only that you would live, but that you would paint. The letter was opened,
Mr Gottlieb, and resealed before it left Germany, which is troubling of course.’ He looked him squarely in the eye. ‘I feel we must both persist for
her.
I feel you must accept this commission for her.’