Reprisals
Francis King
The Pork Butcher David Hughes (Constable £5.95)
There are places that, even after the passage of 40 years or more, are still permeated with the stench of all that was
most disgusting in the last war. The best known is Hiroshima, with its Atomic-bomb Exposition Centre, its Industry Promotion Centre — the gutted ruin of the only solid building to have survived in the centre of the city — and, most grisly of all, the shadow of an unknown victim burned into a stone step outside the Sumitomo Bank.
The least known may well be the little Greek village of Distomon, not far from Delphi, where, in 1943, as an act of savage reprisal, the Germans dragged one male member of each family into the square, to be publicly shot. Midway between the two is the French town of Oradour in Limousin, the scene of an even more appalling war- time atrocity, since every one of its in- habitants, men, women and children, was executed by the Germans on a single sum- mer day in 1944.
It is Oradour, given the fictitious name of Lascaud-sur-Marn, that is the scene of David Hughes's terse, pungent novel The Pork Butcher. In an article, recently published in the Times, Mr Hughes has described how, driving down through France, he and his wife came almost by ac- cident on this place, deliberately preserved, as 'a quiescent act of revenge', exactly as the Germans left it after they had shot the men and gassed the women and children: its buildings still charred ruins, its streets still littered with smashed bicycles and prams. Mr Hughes confesses that, as he looked about him, the spectacle 'put me off the French almost as much as the Germans'. But surely those who attempt to avenge an atrocity by commemorating it cannot be placed on the same level as those who com- mitted it — however 'mediaeval' (Mr Hughes's word), un-Christian or sterile such vengeance may seem to us?
Mr Hughes imagines a German, Ernst Kestner, who, as a young conscript, took part in butchering humans as though they were pigs and who, throughout the ensuing years as a successful, outwardly contented pork butcher in Lubeck, has been haunted by a secret too terrible to breathe to anyone. At last, his wife dead and he himself stricken with terminal cancer, he shuts up his house and his shop, loads his car with food packed in dry ice, and makes for Paris, where his only child, a daughter yoked in a loveless marriage to a French an- tiquaire, has been living for years. With this daughter he sets off southward, in an at- tempt to divest himself of the terrible secret
that has for so long been clinging to him like a shirt of fire. The couple arrive at the town and, like Mr Hughes and his wife, wander about its gruesome memorials. Then Kestner demands to see the Mayor of the town, an ambitious and canny politician whom many see as a future President cif France, in order that he can make a confes- sion and face whatever justice is then meted out to him.
When Kestner first arrived in Lascaud- sur-Marn as a raw conscript, he carried on a dangerously clandestine love-affair with a French girl, married to a Resistance fighter. How this girl is linked to the Mayor, whom Kestner eventually confronts and who of- fers to him, in an ambiguous act of kind- ness, the hospitality of his home, it would be unfair to reveal — as it would be unfair to reveal the extraordinarily symmetrical, yet never improbable, way in which the book ends.
The character of Kestner, with his dread- ful jocularity, his boorishness and his obsessive desire to come to terms with the past, is finely realised. One even feels sym- pathy for him as a callow soldier, swept along on an irresistible tide towards an act of shocking violence.
The most remarkable, because the most surprising and yet truest, passage of the novel comes when Kestner describes to his daughter his feelings at the moment when he realised that, ordered to open fire by the officer in command, he had shot the girl with whom he had just been planning, crazily, somehow to run away from the army, her home-town and so from the war, in the absurd hope of living, as in a fairy- tale, happily ever after. ... At that mo- ment the only feeling which the event arous- ed in me was one of relief. Intense relief ... I wouldn't have to desert from the army. No longer would I have to shiver and shake with fear at the thought of Bernard sudden- ly coming upon us in bed . .. My world had returned to normal.' It is by such psychological acuity that a first-rate novelist can at once be distinguished from a second-rate one. A second-rate novelist would have had Kestner define his feelings far more conventionally and predictably, in words something like these: 'At that mo- ment I realised that I had lost the one woman I had ever loved ... My world was shattered ... And what made it doubly ter- rible was that I had killed her myself.'
Hardly less skilful is the characterisation of Kestner's sharp-tongued, bossy daughter and of the intelligent, cynical, shrewd Mayor, a survivor of the local holocaust, to whom Kestner surrenders.
To call someone a writer's writer is as dubious a compliment as to tell a woman that she has 'interesting' looks or a chef that his food is 'unusual'. But it is writers who are most likely to appreciate the extent of Mr Hughes's psychological perception and technical skill, since both are so unob- trusive. The event of the mass-killing is of tragic proportions; but the novel, physically so light in the hand, has the imaginative scope to accommodate it.
Previous page
