Men of Snow (36 page)

‘Paintings need to be seen, even by at least one person. That will do.’

‘Show me the person. Go on then, pick out the one,’ had been David’s silly challenge.

Ever since his mother’s death these challenges had increased. There was hardly now an occasion when the tension between them was not obvious.

‘You can’t leave it father,’ he had repeatedly told him, ‘It’s you for God’s sake, you. Just because you have a life here doesn’t mean that absolves everything else. Why am I telling you this when you understand it as much as anybody, certainly more than me. Why do I have to bully you into it?’

It was their struggle for Leon’s past. David wanted to take it over, to make it more defiant, more lethal.

Thankfully Rachel had avoided as much as she could.

‘I’ve not married your past. I don’t want it. You started on the first day we met as far as I’m concerned. Just because we have a son who seems obsessed with the past. Where did he get that from I wonder?  He’s your surrogate. If he goes on like this we won’t be able to get into his room because of the books he has on the war. You give him the money to buy them. Why? Why do you do that?’

‘It’s his weekly allowance,’ had been his feeble answer.

‘No it isn’t. It’s his guilt. He thinks he shouldn’t have been born or that he should suffer as much as you. It’s a perversion and you’re doing nothing to stop it.’

‘Rachel, he’s eighteen. He’s about to go to university. I can’t tell him what he’s supposed to read for God’s sake.’

‘Yes you can. He’s only going to study law because he thinks that’s what you want him to do. Somehow he has this idea in his mind that you were going to do the same. You never talk to him about what you really wanted to do. But of course the war stopped that.’

‘He asks.’

‘But you don’t have to answer in so much detail. It’s twisting him all over the place. He wants to suffer. Because you suffered he feels he has to do the same.’

‘If he doesn’t hear it from me, where does he get it, from academics or from his own imagination? You tell me which is worse.’

It had been a repeated argument. Rachel had seen the past as a power over their son from which she could not extract him.  Leon thought how much she must have envied his effect on David. He was her child. She wanted her love to be the source of his life when all she understood was that death and suffering appeared to have been taking its place. So much she had needed her family to be one that lived in the present. Books to her were always words from the dead. She had begun to hate them. It had grown so extreme he often wondered if he might not one night return from the gallery to have found her in the back garden in front of a huge fire.

‘He talks about retribution like other people his age talk about pop music or something,’ she had once said.

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David had done as he had promised and not phoned. Now Leon wondered if that had been a good idea because as the day had passed the anxieties had increased until as he was talking to Geraldine Dunlop he could hardly focus on what he was saying. His nerves were out of control.

When he got out of his car he started going through the same ritual as always, something that was so embedded he did it automatically. He pulled down the garage door, walked across the driveway and stood on the front lawn.

The rain had stopped, leaving a cold, damp feel to the evening. He forced himself to become aware of his house, of Rachel, of David. He made himself search the house front as carefully as he could. Nothing had ever to be taken for granted. This was a ritual of thanksgiving repeated every evening.

Rose, who came every day to clean, had prepared a cold meal for him and David that she had left in the fridge and a note stuck on the fridge door reminding him that she was taking three days off to visit her sister who lived in Glasgow.

In the lounge he put on one of his favourite Haydn quartets and then as always took time to look at the painting above the mantelpiece. All this was an attempt to calm himself down. The painting had been one of the reasons he had put in a bid for the gallery. By chance he had walked in one lunchtime and it had been the first painting he had noticed, a work by an unknown Canadian artist called Ben Sutcliffe.

‘I have to thank you sir,’ the artist had said to Leon on a long distance phone call, ‘I’m seventy two years of age and have been painting for most of my life here in Alberta and only now do I sell one of my paintings. You have made me a happy man. Mind you it was my own fault. I used to think having a public was unnecessary. But now I’m older and wiser and believe firmly that art should be seen by as many people as possible. I just think about my paintings up on the walls of your London gallery and it makes me smile.’

Through the abstract of white and cream colours yellow shafts of sunlight in Leon’s mind crossed the canvas. They were strokes of inspiration flashing from a sun that never rose completely above the horizon. Adam’s voice was in its texture. Life was gilded gold as the rays of pure yellow light cut through broken wood into the eyes of the beholder as the train crossed Siberia. It was a painting of survival. It was his most treasured possession. Sometimes he would have nightmares of the house burning down and with it this most precious piece of art

Now he was hoping it would calm his nerves. 

He poured himself a whiskey and sat on the sofa and continued looking at Ben Sutcliffe’s work. He could tell it had been born out of the same northern light skimming over a frozen surface. The artist had seen the pure edge of life in those rays of winter sun. In the memory Adam’s face brought all the light together to become its source. Ben Sutcliffe had found creation amidst the emptiness, the white, endless plains.

‘Painted it more than twenty years ago,’ he had told Leon, ‘It was one of those I nearly froze to death trying to do. I’m not a painter who takes photographs or anything like that. I paint what I see directly from experience. And it was one that I knew was finished. I often have the problem of knowing when to stop.’

His voice had been a slow Canadian intonation that had drawn Leon immediately closer. He had so wanted to visit him, to see his studio, to see more of his paintings he said were stacked to the roof of the shed where he worked.

‘Some of them I haven’t looked at in a long time. I suppose I feel them like some kind of insurance. So long as I don’t take a whacky fit and try and destroy them they will last longer than me. I hope a lot longer.  You’d be welcome to come and visit any time you like. I’ll be here. I haven’t left this place in a long, long time.’

Haydn, the whiskey, Ben Sutcliffe’s painting, eased him a little, slowed down the pulse of his worries.

But when he heard the crunch of the taxi wheels on the drive everything was suddenly accelerated.  Leon no longer wanted this evening. He needed to be able to change his mind, but knew with his son that was impossible. David had taken over the victim’s mantle and was using it like a weapon.

He had his own key. His father waited for him to take off his coat before following him into the lounge. Looking at his son’s serious face he understood what was coming but still resisted, still hoped that things might be reversed.

‘Do you want a drink?’ he tried.

‘To think,’ David said, ‘I’ve spent all those years in the company and that wasn’t the way he was found.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Yes I’m sure. I’ve listened enough to your descriptions to know when we’ve got him. ‘

‘Have a drink,’ Leon repeated.

‘It was in a Hamburg newspaper announcing his retirement.’

Suddenly Leon did not want to think about who this was.

‘The bastard is still alive and by the sounds of it has done bloody well for himself. Here have a look.’

He held out a photocopy of the page of the newspaper. Leon felt smothered in reality. All his thoughts, dreams, were changing colour into a grey, dull certainty.

‘You always said he would get through the war,’ David added.

The face was there out of a thousand nightmares, thinner, more lined but with the scars and the tight eyes. Even his hair although grey now was cut in the same way. Brucker was looking at him with a slightly surprised, unsure expression. Whoever had taken the photograph had caught him off guard.

‘So?’ David was asking.

‘I don’t know what to say.’

‘You wanted this.’

‘Yes, I wanted this, but it can still come as a shock. Understand David what this man did, and here I am looking at him in his suit and tie, all spruce and sharp as I always remember him except he was in a uniform. Understand please that this is still difficult.’

‘Sometimes I think I’ve wanted this more than you. I was sure this was going to happen, that we were going to nail the bastard.’

Leon could hear the relief in his son’s voice as well as the excitement, as though the hunter was already closing in. David was well over six feet with a broad chest and thick arms, perfect for all the rugby he had played at university. His black curly hair emphasised his dark skin and brown eyes. His expression was nearly always serious. Life was the constant challenge to David. Leon could see him as he crashed through tackles, running with his legs up high, all power, speed and total concentration. Physically he looked nothing like either his mother or father.

‘He’s been a director of a sports company, in Hamburg, for over thirty years. There’s been nothing wrong with his life, nothing at all, another German success story.’

‘Germans are good at that.’

David poured himself a whiskey.

‘This was always going to be only up to us,’ he said, ‘We were told repeatedly if the German army was guilty we’d be talking about millions of Bruckers and his kind. Well there were millions.’

Sometimes Leon hardly recognised his son. Rachel would have been appalled.

‘You’ve made him like this,’ she often said, ‘God knows how he’s managing his law degree when all he does it seems is to study the war. He’s never had a proper friend. He never mentions any girl. He’s lost in the past and you damn well have put him there. He wants to be the victim, your own son. He’s listened and listened until he’s angrier than you ever were. He’s only twenty for God’s sake and all he can think is about things that happened over thirty years ago.’

He could hear her so clearly, his defeated by his past.

David watched his father’s uncertain expression turned to something more anxious.

‘It was me who wanted this father. Your agreement was only secondary.’

‘I also want to see this over with.’

‘No, I’m not sure if you do.’

‘David, why are you wanting to argue?’

‘Because I don’t trust your feelings any more. Don’t tell me that we leave it. You don’t tell me that,’

Leon felt pressed back by his words.

‘I don’t mean that at all. It’s just....just I want time to think this through. It’s still come as a shock.’

‘You’ve had nearly forty years. Just because now it’s real, really happening, doesn’t mean anything has to be different. Why should it for God’s sake?’

‘You’re shouting.’

‘Yes father I’m shouting. I don’t trust your feelings anymore. You know that. We’ve found him, Brucker. I can get his address so we’ll know where he lives. He’s there. We do what we agreed. We confront the bastard. But you don’t have to come. I can do this myself.’

‘No David.’

‘Why not? You’re still poorly, still weak from all the illnesses you have had. I know that. So let me do it. I’ll go and see Brucker and tell him what he’s done, tell him that it hasn’t been forgotten. I hope the bastard shits himself. ‘

‘Brucker would never do that.’

‘He might. We have to do something. We have spent so much time and money to create this chance and we have to take it, the quicker the better. He doesn’t deserve anything else. He doesn’t deserve to die in his bed thinking he’s got away with it. He needs to remember. He needs to have it shoved right down his bloody throat.’

‘He’ll use your anger.’

‘No he won’t. He won’t be given the opportunity. I know what I’m doing father and I’m doing it for you as well as me. Never forget that.’

‘But we have to be....to be calm about this, as much as we can be.’

Again Leon glanced at the newspaper photograph. Not one detail of that face had he forgotten. He had seen Brucker on only two occasions but had remembered everything about him.

‘I’ll make the arrangements,’ David said as he poured himself another drink, ‘I suggest we get on with this by the end of the week.

‘We’ll take my car.’

‘So long as you’re sure you want to come.’

‘David, it’s not that. I just don’t want to mess this up. I want to be strong enough, that’s all. I want to manage this more than anything. If this had happened even a few years ago I would not have these concerns, but I have and I have to deal with them.’

‘That’s why I should go by myself.’

‘No David.’

‘And you’re sure?’

‘Yes, in my mind yes. Am I determined? Yes. It’s just I want this body of mine to manage as well. That’s all.’