The Oblique Place

Book 14: MacLehose Press Editions

by Caterina Pascual Söderbaum

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

"Caterina Pascual Söderbaum has left a major European literary work of art as her legacy" STEVE SEM-SANDBERG, author of Emperor of LiesThe Oblique Place is a captivating journey of the imagination, a prize-winning novel that probes the ruinous legacies of Fascist Europe in the twentieth century.The discovery of photographs in an album ­- of her Spanish grandfather who joined Hitler's Wehrmacht and her father in the uniform of Franco's army- leads Caterina Pascual Söderbaum to explore her family's links to some of the most abhorrent passages of twentieth-century history. Her mother turns out to be related to Kristina Söderbaum, a celebrated Swedish film star of the Third Reich, adored by Goebbels.She travels with husband and child to the shores of the idyllic Attersee in Austria, where the officers of the extermination camps spent their holidays. The journey continues from Schloss Hartheim, where the staff of the Nazi euthanasia programme forgot, with the help of alcohol and sex, the horrors that took place there, to the Villa Saint-Jean, where malnourished children from France's internment camps were sent to recover. This imaginative rediscovery of her own family's disturbing history is fused with vividly captured episodes from other lives and times, and the threads of evil that she lays bare are described in language so beautiful, so subtle and painterly, that her odyssey is at once shattering and mesmerising.Translated from the Swedish by Frank Perry

Release date: September 20, 2018

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 448

Sample

The door of the glazed veranda is ajar, behind the transom windows, pinned down by the invisible steady rain, the garden is breathing beneath the particular kind of stillness that comes with the passage of water through air, and beside the tall dark hedge the cloudy surface of the pond is quivering under the needles of rain like a secret pulse; the blackbird that kept singing through the dawn from the old yew tree outside your balcony can still be heard, the song brings with it the smell of soil and wet grass and lays itself like a warm compress over the ice-cold odour of cellars and mould from your dream, in the deserted conservatory where the three of you are sitting on your own (a large camellia with shiny dark-green leaves and bright red perianths in the middle of the room, a black piano by the half-open door of the French windows) breakfast has been laid but it is as if the morning were not quite able to penetrate the mist green tones of the light and the entire room were tilting towards the night, the hum of the rain hanging in the air like a lingering nocturnal trace, as though not only the gleaming piano and the abandoned bar were missing the night-time comings and goings while still harbouring vestiges of the people and the music that continue to sap the bluish-green mist from the garden floating like a breath above the empty table and the rumpled tablecloth on which you spilled coffee, above the china coffee pot and the broken eggshells beside the plate, above the rag doll lying on its stomach, above the half-finished chocolate, above the gold-painted numerals carved into the large wooden block with a metal key on the end of a grubby cord, but the entire four-storey building you have spent the night in as well. The landlady who put out the coffee and bread disappeared inside the hotel long ago, beyond the kitchen regions where she could be heard clattering for a while, she may have had things to do in a laundry whose whereabouts you do not know, one flight down perhaps, an extension of the spiral staircase that brought you down to the ground floor and through a long wide corridor to this glazed veranda with an open door that a cold draught is coming through. The coffee is cold now as well and is beginning to taste bitter, the rain-drenched air turns your little daughter’s hair frizzy, the curls falling dully over her shoulders, and to smooth out the straggling strands of hair that stick out you slowly run your hand in drawn-out strokes over her scalp and neck, the caresses release a sweet powdery scent of soap in your mind, a velvety mixture of vanilla and amber, of saltwater and sun-warmed skin that trickles like balm inside your ribs. In the chair opposite, he, your husband, lifts his coffee cup to his mouth and lets his gaze fall inside as if to confine it there, to allow it to rest on the bottom of the round interior which it does for a few long seconds, until he puts the cup down and it collides against the saucer with a clink, then he looks up and straight at you instead, settling the entire weight of his dark-brown gaze on your eyes – which are of a muddy greyish-green colour, with a vein of gold that clashes with the green closest to the pupil – and you know that he is planning on keeping it there, that he is not going to drop his eyes, not yet, although you drop yours almost immediately and the moment you have done so you also realise that there will be reproach in his gaze now that he has sniffed out your nightmare that is lying between you unspoken, unspoken but like a wall and that that dream, which he can sense like running water through the movements of your eyes, is making him feel disappointed, angry, making him feel alone, lost, in the wrong place, as though you were suffering from an illness that was self-inflicted and you were refusing to do anything about it. Beyond his head, which you are looking at against the light, the tall dark-green hedge that rises in the background behind the windows screens the garden from everything except the thin strip of grey sky gleaming above its edge, you watch his face from the corner of your eye, it is hanging there at the periphery of your vision as large as a moon; though it is the brilliant actinic light of your dream that comes flooding in now, as if reflected off whitewashed houses with roof terraces in much more southerly latitudes (for a while you thought it was a kindly light, a memory of a different journey you had been on together), then you could see the crocheted lengths of white cotton yarn that were hung so absurdly along the walls of that room, beneath and not above the oblong window (like a crack) beyond which shone a blue sky (named heaven in the dream) that made you screw up your eyes, it was those crocheted expanses of stars and chain stitch pinned beneath the window sill on the inside of the room that signalled danger, accentuated almost immediately by the figure that had let you into that harshly sunlit room (a whisper in the dream called him “the Rabbi”) and you remember turning away from that breach towards heaven to see an iron door ajar and then you remember as well that it was from that dark gap behind your back that the freezing smell of cellars and mould and something choking like exhaust fumes came pouring out during the night, beneath the notes of the blackbird’s song, and tainted everything.

The muted rain shower is prolonging the night, your child (she is only partially open to what is outside herself) is moving her hands slowly, as if she were within another dream, or a memory perhaps, you have to protect her, keep her outside it even though the rain is forming a skein of airborne water. A horn blares from the station at the bottom of the hill and over the loudspeaker a voice is announcing a train whose destination you cannot make out. The steady rain is now falling more heavily behind the glass panes, and from the tall yew glistening in the downpour where the blackbird was perched large heavy drops are falling onto the pond, rain bubbles are becoming visible in the water; then the train rolls into the little station on the other side of the veil of rain, the coaches that make up the train so close that you can hear the thumping of the wheels against the stone grooves, the whistle of the train burns its way into your ear canals and is followed almost immediately by the screeching of the brakes, the shrill sounds whirling inside the tunnels of your ears as piercingly as if they were trying to turn themselves into light, to be transformed into the razor beam of a searchlight ransacking your brain.

“¡Mira, una merla!” he says having got up from the table and taken the child with him, the two of them are standing inside the half-open door looking out at the garden, he is on his knees beside her so that their heads, which you can see from behind, are at the same height, his hand extended and the finger pointing towards the blackbird pecking its way around the thick trunk of the yew, he tells her that there aren’t any blackbirds at home on the farm and even though it is so black, it sings very beautifully, almost more beautifully than any other bird, although your daughter does not seem impressed by the coal-coloured bird, not even by the yellow beak a worm is dangling from, she is probably thinking about the hoopoes that live year round on your plot of land and whose orange heads and startling black and white wings she sees almost daily bobbing this way and that over the lawn and under the fruit trees. You are thinking that the onomatopoeic Catalan name puput (poo-poot, poo-poot) manages to convey both the colours and song of the hoopoe through its syllables (like sunlight shining through the petals of a flower) and that merla, too, has a singing sonority that blackbird (a dry dull blackness rather than trills and cheeps) lacks, the Spanish mirlo has the notes of a song in it as well, although something (the “m”?) also lends the word a sheen of black velvet (the black velvet between the stars of a winter night).

“We can go over to the pond later, once it has stopped raining,” he says to the child and then you get up from the table as well. “I’m going up,” you say, “I forgot the tablets,” and start making for the stairs, tentatively, as if you were encountering resistance, and you think about the beginning of this trip, when you were coasting so smoothly along in the car on the way to the airport despite your damaged hand and then you also remember the white butterfly (the white bandage reminds you of the wings of the white butterfly) that appeared from nowhere in the opposite lane while you were driving through Colomers, the neighbouring village where you buy bread, and had not yet had time to pick up speed, the unsuspecting zig-zag motions of the wings that you tracked as the distance increased in the rear-view mirror and you can see quite clearly, lingeringly, in a kind of slow motion, the abrupt collision of the fluttering white spot that had been tracing rosettes as it were in the air with the windscreen of the dark oncoming car. And then you raise your left hand to the banister and a shooting pain in your damaged ring finger (which must have overextended a muscle or a joint – you have forgotten that that hand no longer properly functions and you are not supposed to use it – in order to adapt to the shape of the banister as you grasp it) makes you look down at the hand which is bound to a metal splint and has a large brown iodine stain on the bandage and then the dream you had the first night in Salzburg starts to flicker before your eyes, when you were approaching a large, long and narrow table with a glass syringe in your hand, with bloody scratches across your knuckles, the table was covered in sand and growing out of the sand was a rolling landscape of mountains, forests, and plains, there was even a lake, the landscape was slowly rising, like water gently rocking or the ribcage of someone asleep, the hand holding the syringe, dark clotted blood along your fingers, was twice the size of the mountains and the trees (mainly pines) and you pushed the long needle in at various points, over and over again, the needle sucked up the grains of sand and your magnified hand, always in the foreground, deposited them onto a microscope, the grains were magnified, they caked together and fell apart, they built structures, they looked like cells or like letters, lumps began to form, you dropped them into a test tube and the liquid in the tube turned blue-green, the same colour as the lake, longer than it was wide, that was glittering in the miniature landscape like a comma; you woke up as a black locomotive came out of a tunnel on the periphery of the model landscape. You are moving upwards, the staircase is a broad spiral of low wooden steps that work their way along the spine of the building between bumpy whitewashed walls, there is no view out, neither up nor down, just the spiral motion, so you make for the light falling through a window at the back of the landing; the passage between the first and second landings is along the corridor of the first floor, lit by the window at one end of the corridor is a thick hall carpet that absorbs the sound of your steps, just before the next set of stairs is a large hand-painted linen cupboard and opposite the linen cupboard a wall covered in hunting trophies and black-and-white photographs, and then a large painting of the building in pastel shades, with some people standing in front of it dressed in folk costume, two women in ankle-length hooped skirts and a man in short leather trousers and a feathered hat, from the Thirties or Forties to judge by the hairstyles, the facade from that period is recognisably the same even though the photograph has been taken using an obsolete technique, there is too much cyan in the sky above.

*

In the bathroom where you go to get water you are struck by your reflection, the white bandage around your left hand sends a flash through the glass, a diagonal line that runs right through the figure that is you, the alien hand makes your whole appearance unfamiliar: Who is this person with that damaged finger of yours? Who are you here? The present is a place without colour, like the white spot in a chromatic circle, a superposition; you see the full moon above the Dolomites the night you crossed the border on your way to this place, half-lying on your side with your throbbing hand in your lap, the moon huge and distorted above the mountain tops while you groan and hold your hand as if it were a suckling baby, and the silver ribbon of the asphalt that seemed intent on leading you deeper and deeper into the mountains, where horses are snorting and plunging over the edge and the clatter of rain is the clatter of a machine gun. Without taking your eyes from the mirror you shove two capsules into your mouth, letting them lie on your tongue until the taste gets too bitter, you are thinking about the calf that ripped open and broke your finger on the farm at home the very morning you were supposed to fly to Venice and start the journey here, about the rope the finger got stuck in, about the several hundred kilos of fear that made the calf yank at the rope when it felt the lasso around its neck, and your hand got caught between the rope and the rusty pole in the stall so the upper part of your finger snapped, and you are thinking that the pain, your pain, came such a long time later, not until the evening. Then there is a knock on the door.

*

The bandage is piled in the sink, before you pour iodine on the cut you wiggle the nail that was detached at the root, when you press on the tip of the nail a hidden spot jumps under the skin of the third joint, the outer phalanx, just above the last joint of the ring finger, up and down like a swing; you spray iodine over the stitched-back nail and reapply the metal splint, he helps you wind the bandage several times around the splint that keeps the finger straight, but when that has been done it turns out to press too hard and the bandage has to be reapplied. The child is standing in the doorway looking at you, you wonder if this is an image that will stay with her, Pappa bandaging Mamma’s bad hand in a strange building, a place in her memory whose contours will in all likelihood be erased; your daughter’s brown eyes are often unfathomable, in photographs they sometimes possess a distinct expression of grief, but now they are bright with anticipation and under her arm she has the book you bought yesterday after the visit to the Imperial Villa (with its six hundred mountain-goat horns along the walls on the main staircase and the portrait of his wife (Sisi) in his dressing room, she is wearing a white lace dressing gown and her long tresses have been let down, across her shoulders like a broad cloak that falls all the way to her knees, in the middle of her chest two strands of her hair are tied together at the same height as her heart; the portrait was positioned on an easel in front of the desk at which Franz Josef signed the declaration of war against Serbia in the summer of 1914), your child is standing there and the lovely fall of her curls is twisting along both sides of her throat and you smile and say, yes, you’re going to be reading the book about the Empress with the long, long hair in the car together while Mamma drives to the new hotel you’re going to stay in tonight, it’s next to a lake with very clear blue-green water you can swim in.

A certain distance was evidently required for the building to become visible, you have driven past the place several times, followed the waterline all the way to the neighbouring village of Steinbach without managing to see a single building even vaguely reminiscent of the three-storey villa in the photograph you are holding, the glittering lake has been rocking alongside you the whole time just a few metres from the winding country road, the sun is high in the sky and the colour of the water is an opaque bluish green, a colour also called turquoise, cyan and aqua, water that is, redundant therefore or a tautology, water in water, these various attempts to capture a colour composed of two other colours, blue and green, and you are thinking that Gustav Klimt painted the ruffled surface of the Attersee in a great many different versions, with the light slanting at a low angle more often than not, every summer he would row out early in the morning to paint in the middle of the lake in his flat-bottomed boat, the point of view from water to land, the square canvases made up of 98 per cent water and just a narrow strip of sky or land at the very top, and it may be because you have been distracted by thinking about Gustav Klimt’s watery landscapes as you look for the house along the lakeshore on the outskirts of Weissenbach that you fail to see it, by the idea that unlike in Vienna what Klimt painted here summer after summer was the natural world, never any portraits of women, neither naked nor overloaded with clothes, but water for the most part which is after all just a way of trying to capture the light itself, and while you are driving along the narrow road squeezed between the lake and the burgeoning green vegetation at its edge that Klimt too would have driven along many times, you remember the autochrome plate in which he is standing beside the same lake in his ankle-length painting tunic (“Gustav Klimt sur les rives de l’Attersee, vers 1910, Plaque autochrome Lumière de Friedrich Walker, collection particulière”), something about that indigo-coloured tunic must have etched its way in, something gloomy about the colour, like an omen, sporting that faun-like beard of his, the painter is standing there looking towards a point outside the picture with a severe expression, not turned towards the water but towards the land, to the edge where the faded grass is growing inwards towards a deciduous forest, as if he could see something he objected to, his fists clenched beneath those long puffed sleeves. At Weyregg, at the midpoint of the lake, you turned round and drove past Steinbach for the second time, the cyan-coloured water always on your right this time, at the turn-off to Weissenbach, which is now in front of you rather than behind you, the road bends and the lake suddenly stretches across the entire windscreen and that is when it happens, when you see the building that had been obscured, when you choke back a cry or whisper so fiercely it makes your vocal chords burn and you throw yourself forward so your sunglasses touch the windscreen. Beyond the bobbing expanse of aqua-coloured water, right in front of you, some way up the wooded mountains the white building you have travelled all this way to visit is looming, that distinctive projecting turret is unmistakable: Haus Schoberstein, Villa Schoberstein according to some sources. You have found it; part way up the immense cliff (Höllengebirge – the Mountains of Hell? – on the map) the building’s moon-face is taunting you, the narrow shadow you can make out has to be the large veranda visible in the image, like a smile. A stab of fear, the swell of the lake just a little more pronounced, as if it were the house that had discovered you.

*

A few minutes later and you reach Weissenbach, stopping the car on the shore road, opposite the small town’s hotel, a building hard to place in terms of age whose sign proclaims it to be the hotel post, you had stopped here yesterday while trying to find the house, then as now the water was lashing the pier, throwing up metre-high columns and spattering the parked cars, the silver-coloured Renault you hired in Venice a few days ago along with one or two others.

Your child is sleeping on the back seat, it goes without saying that the hunt for the house cannot be undertaken while she is awake, sleep is a protective shell.

*

You have both been sitting in silence in the car for a while, your eyes fixed on the private jetty that caught your attention the first time you were here: it is square-shaped and covered in a lush, well-maintained lawn, an elderly couple were sitting there yesterday on garden chairs side by side reading the papers, you have never seen a jetty like this one before, like a backdrop, part of a working stage set. After a while you reverse out of the car park and turn 180 degrees towards the vertical cliff from which the house takes its name: Schoberstein, and drive up a little hill and turn off to the left just round the corner from the Hotel Post to park in front of the kitchen entrance, behind a green rubbish container standing in the shade. On the right-hand side the ground rises a metre or two above your heads, up there is where the land belonging to Haus Schoberstein begins. A member of staff walks from the kitchen door over to a van and peers in your direction, but then soon goes back inside again.

“There are no bearers of secrets up there any more,” you say, and wish he would try to smile. Slowly, with your good hand, you place the video camera and your new digital one in the shoulder bag. The car park is just as empty, the sun is broiling, you try out the word Herz, here the word for heart is Herz, your heart is beating rapidly. You close the car door carefully behind you so as not to wake her, she is breathing heavily inside the car with the heating on.

*

A half-landing stairway cut out of the rock leads up to the property, after the last turn you are standing on the edge of an English park, the greater part of which is in shadow, the trees are a mixture of pines and firs and right at the back next to the cliff face is an immense copper beech. It is apparent that the building is connected with the hotel in some way, presumably it is used as a conference centre, no single person can be seen in the vicinity at this moment, the lawn has been weeded and is well tended, there is no long grass swaying in the breeze, which reinforces the impression of absolute stillness, a gravel path draws gleaming lines across the ground, the gravel here is white too, although you notice that it does not stick to your soles as the gravel (or was it ash?) in Treblinka is said to have done.

*

The path curves beneath the beech tree, you get out the video camera and press PLAY. Facing the mountain you film the huge copper beech, when you arrive beneath it you look up at the canopy, layer upon layer of branches reaching up towards the sky, there is a wooden bench beside the trunk and it frightens you, as if a voice might emerge from it, that may be why you start talking quietly into the camera, tentative and indistinct to begin with, there is a kind of protection in the silence it feels uncomfortable to abandon. It will be difficult to hear what you are saying afterwards (. . . sixty-six years . . .), particularly at the beginning of the tape, the camera pans shakily towards the house (There . . . the balcony and the veranda . . . the side wall overlooks a fish pond . . .). In focus a circular construction of coarsely polished granite. A long tracking shot zooms in on the fish pond, the water is opaque and mud-coloured. Cut from the fishpond up to the house. A quick panning shot from the basement to the top. Just below the roof there are reflections from the sunlight dancing on the water, the sunbeams form an undulating pattern that simply freezes solid on film, not one of the still pictures captures it.

*

A clear blue sky.

The black motion of a swallow cuts into the image, it flies this way and that above the billowing reflections of the water, in and out under a beam. How old does a swallow get? How many generations of swallows have used the nest under that beam? If evil is an oblique angle, what is time? What kind of geometry does it possess?

It was all drifting on open water.

You turn around, from the veranda the Attersee is a blue strip shredded by white sails. The Rose Wind is blowing across the lake, ruffling the surface. You wonder where the roses are, what kind of roses the wind is sweeping across the lake.

“If only everyone was like you, Unterscharführer Seidel.” The bookkeeper Klara Deneke’s words come back to him on this last morning, who was she comparing him with in her thoughts? Miete? Mentz? Josef Vallaster? He’s from the area after all so he’d be bound to come here when he could and she can’t really have been thinking about Frank and that fair boyish face of his that would surely have charmed Lorent’s former secretary when she sighed like that, besides he’s got a whore in the village and would never bother making the long trip here. In his mind S.S.-Unterscharführer Kurt Seidel runs quickly through his colleagues, which of them has taken the opportunity to stay at the holiday villa? Apart from the married ones, a lot of them stay at the camp while they are on leave, exchanging goods and services with the Polish women who gather at the fence; although what’s it to him, why bother about what some conceited typist thinks of him? He brushes the whole business aside and turns his gaze outward instead, towards a landscape irradiated by the play of light off a vast still lake, once again he notices the way the summer clouds are reflected in the great glass pane that is the Attersee at this time of day, before the wind has picked up, the clouds are snow-white cottony formations and remind him reluctantly of Boelitz’s hair (a dependable young man nonetheless, maybe because they share a background in the police force), in his mind’s eye he can see the glint of Boelitz’s bone-white hair as he stands on the ramp, his eyebrows and lashes are faded as well and give off tiny golden sparkles when the sun shines through them, Boelitz on the platform, sober and correct, his hair gleaming as he issues directions in a reassuring though firm voice, just like the policeman he essentially continues to be, oh well . . . S.S.-Unterscharführer Kurt Seidel takes one last deep drag as he looks at the glassy lake dotted with cumulus clouds that extend all the way over to Unterach on the other shore, the village he sometimes rows over to in a newly painted rowing boat, if only he had time he would have jumped into the little vessel and made his way out to the centre of the lake to float in the enormous inverted sky that is now expanding at his feet, what a sight he saw when he came down to the jetty a while ago: the sky doubled, dropped, to put it bluntly, across the surface of the lake; the mirror effect is opening up the firmament before him, row upon row of shining cumulus clouds are sketching a kind of heavenly valley above the water, the water no longer water but air, the weightlessness of the clouds, snow-covered mountains or gigantic tufts of cotton wool, continues to enthrall him and for a fraction of a second the delusion, the hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach that says a fall from up there would be identical to the incomparable sensation of flying, gets the better of him again. It occurs to him almost immediately afterwards that there is also a practical side to the notion: he can save this beautiful illusion and summon it up if . . . when at death’s door, when he is about to be devoured by what he conceives to be the cellar-like darkness of death, which could happen at any moment, after all, at any moment he could be reassigned and forced to board one of the troop transports that pass through the railway junction at Małkynia rather than get off there; at the thought of the small station where he has seen so many army units and military supplies pass by on their way to the front, a few short kilometres from the river where he goes to swim, the word “Stalingrad” occludes the image of the lake like a solar eclipse and blacks everything out; he throws the butt into the water, the cigarette end floats for a second or two before coming apart and sinking; at any moment, though, a bombing raid could blow them all apart or the partisans could launch an attack, or death could strike the way it struck Max Bielas on the calmest of afternoons, stabbed as he was by a worker-Jew when he least expected it; if death comes creeping so slowly through his body he has time to see the black wave coming he can place the vision of this heavenly valley between himself and the onrushing darkness like a hand-coloured film, reassuring notions of dying form part of a soldier’s equipment after all, like cigarettes, preserved meat and dressings. And endless rounds of drinks in the stone hall named Valhalla are not in his nature, on the contrary, all he feels when occasionally he goes to the mess is revulsion. A splash cracks the surface into concentric circles, the rings reach the water-lily leaves floating in clumps near the jetty where he is sitting, the long ridges and knots of the rough grey-bleached boards scrape the back of his thighs as he reaches for the gold lighter that has become a kind of amulet; he lights a fresh cigarette, spitting out a flake of tobacco. Bug! He loathes the very name, he tries to keep his eyes fixed on the clear greenish-blue water clucking against the jetty beneath him, but it is a brown Polish river he is seeing, the mud churned up by those disorderly, bleating Ukrainians; the jolting and the racket of the squeaking wheelsets is already preying on him, all the stops and the changes of train, the singed smell, the overcrowding and the sweaty feet, the suppressed fear of being strafed which is another form of cold sweat all the time on the nape of his neck, the smouldering fires and the fences clad in pine branches where he is headed that limit your field of vision wherever you look; his reluctance to make the journey is being converted into a sluggishness in his limbs, a hollow sensation in his midriff that leaves him almost breathless; how he wis