The piano they’d put in the house for him came from Paris. It was old and some notes were a little tinny but on the whole the sound was soft and warm. He made his drink with hot water from a vacuum flask, stirring it slowly as he thought about his nephew, to whom he’d bequeathed most of his worldly goods, and about the humble library in a small university at the foot of a little visited range of hills where he’d spent some happy months, which was about to become an important seat of learning for legal history and the development of legal theory through the priceless bequest of the Mertens library. A lot of other things went through his mind too, for example that with a little more knowledge and skill he could have rigged up the stove to give off carbon monoxide, removing any need for action on his part. Next time, he smiled. Then he opened the piano score for the Brahms quartet and began to play. The music echoed softly in the quiet house and out through its rustic windows, and a passer-by occasionally looked up or stopped for a moment before the damp, icy weather drove them on.
Mertens’ fingers flew over the keys, a blissful smile lit his face and he moved his head, his whole body, in time to the rhythms of the overture. His heart filled with inexpressible joy. The man who had brought these sounds into being, before they were inked on the page, was a stout, long-haired cigar smoker with a beard and a snub nose, but an angel had clearly possessed him – for this to have sounded within him, his soul must have been lovelier than Rembrandt’s or Grünewald’s most splendid creations. It was indescribable, other-worldly, the highest joy, a revelation scribbled down for 16 strings of gut stretched on a hollow wooden frame – a dance of blessed spirits performed by 10 fingers that soon would hang rigid and numb. But for now they played. All the sweetness of a spring breeze rippling over a meadow of flowers was there in those notes, as well as the dark, putrid source from which the flowers, like the soul, sprang. This music was the world all over again, but better, flawless, free from the terrible savage urges of our animal nature, which smother everything that is light and pure. How good it felt to bring it to an end, to leave and go through the unknown portal into the unknown land on the wings of the only joy that had never let him down. He drank from his glass, to which he’d added a sweet liqueur, and began the second movement. The deep solemnity of farewell… his fingers slid lightly over the keys, his ear caught every note, his mouth was set and grave. The earth curved away from him; all the people and trees rose up from a mountaintop, but he didn’t see them. Swaddled in the swirling atmosphere, he saw himself on the edge of space, which began above his head and stretched unbroken to the planets. A musician sensed such things. Writers, too, had a sense for what was behind their backs, above their heads and beneath their feet. Had he ever heard as clearly as today? And then the master, in the midst of his wonderful art, bowed before the genius of a young Austrian named Franz Schubert, quoting one of his songs entitled ‘Numbness’: ‘I search the snow in vain/For the trace of her steps…’ Which trace of which steps did a man seek when, the numbness finally over, he softly opened that last of all doors and set upon a new path, leading to new meadows and new towns built of spiritual materials by unknown residents, of gratitude, service and kindness, of valiant solitude, genial companionship and the joy of giving – everything that was great and noble in the human soul and that might just as well, or even better, exist within a Negro savage as within the emperor Napoleon or the philosopher Nietzsche? It felt good to be tired, tired of life and death, tired of being and not being, tired of what lay above and what lay below, tired of colour and the absence of colour… The opening of the minuet required a certain effort from the player, but then a threshold was crossed and the dance of the ghost-lit sylphs was consummated. It didn’t matter if the player’s fingers obeyed him in the allegro. The meaning was clear before the notes were struck, before the opening and progression. But it seemed only natural that Maestro Brahms, pot-bellied with a cigar butt in the corner of his mouth, should come to the aid of his pupil and passionate admirer C.G. Mertens, take a seat at the piano in his black frock coat and apply his soft hands to playing his own music as it was meant to be played, while Mertens rested for a moment. Was it any different from Socrates sitting and drinking with his friends? A solemn sweetness surrounded Mertens’ heart. The spirits of the strings danced a silver, moonlit minuet, caressed by a night breeze, on a hilltop, scented by seaside pines. Foothills and coves swayed before him… ‘and their heads began to sink onto the upholstery/a young man came – I can remember…’ He walked, grave and lovely, from behind the gathered bedroom curtain supported by two slender, flute-playing women, and Maestro Brahms looked at him questioningly and said in Latin: ‘You have loved justice and hated iniquity and so…’ What does he mean? thought Mertens in alarm. I’m not dying in exile! No one could fall asleep more blissfully than I am doing in this armchair.
BOOK SEVEN
The great cold
CHAPTER ONE
Pelican
THE EARTH WAS a stone disc under a sky of ice.
Winter had bitten across the whole continent and now held people and objects in its pitiless grip. In Potsdam, for example, where Frau Bertin’s parents were able to heat two rooms in their villa, the thermometer had registered 34 degrees below zero one night. But that was little help to their son-in-law. In France, particularly in the Meuse hills, the cold was less extreme: 17 degrees below, but it was still plenty. Since the beginning of January, the company’s gods and demigods had all returned from leave and been rather depressed by the reception they’d received from various quarters and by the changes that had taken place. Having already been dismantled and reinstated once, the depot was now dismantled again, this time for good. It was relocated to Mureaux Ferme wood, a dense, undamaged woodland behind a hill, which meant a new railway line was required to connect this sheltered spot to Romagne station. By the time that would have been done, the French airmen would long since have spotted, photographed and reported the clearings in the wood with predictable consequences, so that the whole facility would have to be moved again – chop, chop – this time to the gorges near the village of Etraye, but that was still some way off; work first began on the standard-gauge railway.
Under Sergeant Schwerdtlein’s reliable direction, a construction squad of heavy labourers was transferred from Romagne to work opposite the Mureaux Ferme men. He lived in a stone house and didn’t see the company on weekdays or on Sundays. At daybreak, in a heavy frost, the ASC men loaded one lorry with the heavy 6m full-size rails, another with oak sleepers and a third with loose chippings, before climbing on top of the cargo to travel to their place of work. The lorries were then unloaded – the heavy rails dug into the men’s collarbones – the ground levelled, the sleepers laid and the rails set in place. The screwing in place of the ‘joints’ with fishplates and nuts was the job of the Württemberg sappers, Landsturm men who had come from Damvillers, and they performed this duty with sober exasperation. For the greater part of the day, they all helped the Russians, who were preparing the track. The Russians? Absolutely. Russian prisoners, over 70 men in all, had been attached to the ASC men, and no one knew where they were billeted. Gaunt men in earthen coloured coats, patient and quick on the uptake, they were guarded by men from the Prussian Landsturm, if possible ones with a smattering of a Slavic language. And did we already say that Private Bertin was part of the Schwerdtlein working party too? As it was not a congenial working party, it’s hardly worth mentioning. However, there he was, more patient than ever, apathetic even, no longer hoping for an Iron Cross, but with the demeanour of a man who has escaped death twice in a row. He’d spent five days in the Karde working party, which was in charge of a small testing station in the cartridge tent for shells damaged in the bombardment. On the sixth day, he was sent to Romagne in the morning, and at midday one of the shells burst, killing his bed neighbour, Biedenkapp, a farmhand from Upper Hesse and father of three. And only two days later, an aeroplane had dropped its load on Steinbergquell depot, and although it only destroyed the officers’ latrines, the barrage of shell splinters perforated the outer wall of barracks 2 at the narrow end where only Private Bertin ever slept. Such coincidences made a man think and promoted patience, especially as rumour had it that the same aeroplane had visited Montmédy as well and taken out a high-ranking military official – or possibly several. Happy, then, was the man who could sleep safely in Romagne at night and warm himself up working with a pickaxe during the day. The frozen clay was as hard as marble and could only be broken into small fragments the size of mussel shells. In this terrible cold, the men sometimes warmed themselves by a fire, which the weakest of the Russians were allowed to tend. An undamaged copse of deciduous trees stood outlined against the sky. The new railway line’s course was marked by felled trees, blown-up roots and a levelled ridge. By the time the men had removed 10cm of frozen crust and reached the softer clay underneath, the sun would be setting. In the night, the earth froze again to a depth of 10cm, and the next day the game restarted.