CONTENTS
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Frank Westerman
Title Page
Stud book
Prologue
I
The ‘Ts’ in Lipizzaner
Blutauffrischung (New Blood for Old)
The Stork’s Foot
K.u.k.-leute
The Black ‘Mendelizes’ to the Surface
The Obedience Test
II
The Return of the Tarpan
Heim ins Reich (Back to the Reich)
Plant 4711
Summoned to Military Servicing
The Breeding Station
Operation Cowboy
III
Bratstvo i Jedinstvo (Brotherhood and Unity)
Animal Farm
The Cold War Cavalry
The Human Zoo
Conversano Batosta
Acknowledgements
Copyright
ARARAT
ENGINEERS OF THE SOUL
Man and Beast in an Age of Human Warfare
Translated from the Dutch
by Sam Garrett
FOR MY SISTERS, my brother and I, the war proceeded peacefully. Not a summer’s day went by without my going for a ride along the river. Father ran a depot for stallions in southern Poland. He was in charge of more than one hundred pedigree horses, the most noble horses in all the Reich. Each spring they would be stationed around various stud farms to cover the mares; by July they were back at our depot. Among them were slender English thoroughbreds, two Lipizzaners from the Spanish Riding School at Vienna, five Berbers confiscated in France, a handful of Arabs, both pure-blooded and cross-breeds, and also Noriker workhorses and obedient Huzuls, on which I had learned to ride at the age of five.
We lived at Schloss Ochab, a white mansion that served as the officers’ quarters. Stallion depot Draschendorf was on the far bank of the Vistula, where the Polish saddlers lived, and the guards and stableboys – the youngest of whom slept in the hayloft above the stalls. Auschwitz was thirty-five kilometres upstream. We children didn’t know what a Konzentrationslager was. The word itself was too difficult, so we called it the Konzertlager.
Just before Christmas we would select a fat pig for slaughter. ‘Churchill, prepare to meet your maker,’ my father said as he cut the animal’s throat. I stood there hopping in excitement, even though I had no idea who Churchill was. The butcher made rolled meat and sausages out of it, which lasted us for months. On Christmas Eve my mother would sing hymns from the Evangelical songbook, accompanying herself on the piano. Father played the cello; he took lessons from a cellist he had brought in specially from Vienna, a woman of whom we were in great awe, because she was the only one who dared answer back to Father.
To his subordinates, but also to us, he was hard and strict. He never beat us with a belt, but he did box our ears. Every so often he would have the single stablemen line up and drop their trousers; the vet would then come along to check them for venereal disease.
In the summer of 1944, Father had a siren placed on the roof of Schloss Ochab and established sentry duty at night, so that we could sleep soundly. I began dreaming about der Iwan: that he was coming to get us, or the horses. We knew that the Russians were approaching rapidly, that they had already pushed back our soldiers far beyond the Dnieper. But at the Vistula, or so we were assured, they would be brought to a halt. Our house was on the safe side of the river, but the depot itself lay on the eastern bank. The horses were at all costs to be kept out of the hands of the Red Army.
Father began carrying out emergency evacuation drills. Without warning, he would trigger the siren, and everyone had to rush and saddle up half the horses and hitch the others to the carts and carriages from the coach house. Oats and hay, ropes, tackle, the tools belonging to the blacksmith and the vet – everything had to be loaded up and tied down, and within three hours there would be a column of men and horses waiting on the road. Once, during such a drill, when we had an important visitor at the depot, Father gave the order to march. He didn’t send them across the bridge, but straight into the Vistula. Everyone had to wade across the river and climb a hill on the other side.
‘In case the enemy knocks out the bridges,’ he explained to us that evening.
On 7 August 1944, the first swarm of Russian fighters appeared in the sky. I ran outside and stood beneath a beech tree, where I could watch them coming over. The air shuddered with the roar of their engines. There were so many that it began growing dark in the middle of the day. Among the hundreds of planes passing overhead, one opened its bay doors. A bomb slid out and hurtled to the ground behind our home, close to the private stables housing the coach horses and Hildach, Father’s own horse. I braced myself for the explosion, but it didn’t come. When we went to investigate, we found a 500-litre fuel tank. It had been filled with kerosene, but that had leaked and stood in puddles everywhere. ‘A firebomb’, Father said. ‘Meant for us.’
I was nine years old. From that moment on, I knew the war would one day reach us.
My sister Beate, two years my elder, and I were taught to fire a pistol. ‘Beate! Come now, act like the daughter of a soldier!’ my father would say whenever she found something scary, or difficult. We didn’t know that Father had been on at his superiors for weeks to be allowed to withdraw the stallions to behind the Oder. But no permission was given; retreat could be seen as a sign of weakness. No one was to know that the Reich was on the brink of collapse, so life went on as usual. During the first week of January 1945, everything was made ready for the new foaling season. On 16 January we celebrated Heidi’s seventh birthday: she had invited a friend and everyone was cheerful. The next morning, one of my father’s superiors phoned. ‘Evacuate immediately!’ was the order. The Russians had crossed the Vistula that night and were now regrouping before pushing on.
Mother packed the suitcases and summoned Beate, Heidi and me to say that we were allowed to take our school notebooks and one toy each. Sitting at the table, she prepared a huge pile of sandwiches. Heidi and I had to leave first, accompanied by a lance corporal. Our coachman was already waiting on the sleigh to ferry us to the station. It was still dark outside, the only light came from a slight glimmer on the snow. I had the feeling the landscape was waving us farewell. We had to wait on the platform for forty-five minutes, and along the way we had to change trains five times. Then we arrived at our refuge across the Oder, no longer in Poland, but in Czechoslovakia.
In the middle of the following night, our chauffeur arrived in the staff car with Mother and Beate and the two little ones. Father would come later, by horse and wagon. His soldiers and servants made the journey in five days, at twenty degrees below zero. Those on horseback were leading a stallion by the reins as well. At intervals, the riders had to walk for an hour in order not to freeze.
Our new place of safety was on the estate of a baroness, who had enough stables for all the animals. I felt more secure there, also because the Oder is deeper than the Vistula. But during the first week of February my mother fell ill; she had stabbing pains in her abdomen. Father took her in the staff car to the hospital at Olmütz, where she was admitted right away. He went to visit her every other day, and always took one of the children with him. Heidi, the first to go, told us that evening how Mother had been lying in the hospital bed, white as a sheet, her cheeks sunken. On 15 February it was my turn. When we arrived, Frau Hartwig, who had been taking care of Mother, was waiting for us at the gate. Father climbed out and talked to her, I could hear the tremor in his voice. I knew right away there was something wrong with Mama. It was terribly cold in the car, and I just sat there and waited. Suddenly Father turned around. ‘Friedel, Mutti ist tot!’ he said.
We entered the hospital, walked down high-ceilinged corridors, climbed the stairs. When I saw Mama’s dress lying there, I couldn’t bear it any more. Frau Hartwig and the nurses tried to comfort me, but nothing helped. Until Father put on his major’s voice. Crying did not befit a soldier. We had been taught from an early age to hold back our tears.
Mother was cremated the next day at the cemetery in Olmütz, and we put her ashes in a copper urn. It was a shame we couldn’t sing her favourite song, ‘Befiehl du deine Wege’, because the organist didn’t have the music. When the service was over, Father took Beate and me aside and said that we, as the oldest children, must be exceedingly brave from now on. There were more difficult times to come, he said. We didn’t dare to ask: ‘What kind of difficult times?’ But we both had the feeling that Father was sharing with us some important thing from the world of adults, and for that reason alone we felt very grown-up.
Immediately after my birthday, my tenth, Father left us. He had received orders to take as many horses as possible by rail in the direction of Dresden. There he would try to move them across the Elbe, and as soon as he succeeded he would come back and fetch us, along with the remaining fifteen stallions. Meanwhile, under the leadership of Sgt Wiszik, we were to form the rearguard of the Draschendorf depot. Father left on the Saturday before Easter. We never saw him again. Our farewell was extremely hurried, because railway carriages had suddenly been requisitioned.
Throughout April, we waited for him to come back. Every day we heard new rumours about the Russians. Far to the north of us, the vanguard of the Red Army was rolling towards Berlin, but the front behind that was spreading in our direction. And still no sign of Father. In late April, Sgt Wiszik took things into his own hands and planned our evacuation. In addition to two German corporals, our group also consisted of seven Polish stablemen. And then there were the fifteen horses, including Poseur, an English thoroughbred; Nero, a Holsteiner warmblood; Ibn Saud and Dakkar, two Arab half-breds, and the two Lipizzaner stallions from the imperial stables in Vienna: Conversano Olga and Conversano Gratiosa – two silvery-white gentlemen of sixteen and twenty-two respectively. To make things simpler we referred to them only by their maternal names, Olga and Gratiosa, which of course sounded funny for two stallions. Just before we fled they were re-shod by the village blacksmith.
Grandmother, who had been with us since Mother’s cremation, sat with the youngest children in the tilt cart. She never went anywhere in those days without her carpet bag; it contained Mother’s ashes. Father’s chauffeur was to drive ahead with the car flying the banner of the Draschendorf depot, but at the last moment it refused to start and had to be towed. I sat on a flatbed wagon drawn by our Lipizzaners, next to a soldier named Sylvester. We did everything precisely as Father had told us to, but we had no mounted scouts in front of us or at the back. Standing there waiting to move, the entire caravan was about sixty metres long. We wanted to get going, but the local Wehrmacht commander had not yet given us permission. It was 30 April: we didn’t know that Hitler had committed suicide that day. The commander didn’t either, in fact.
It wasn’t until 6 May that he let us go. We were planning to head west, along a route known as the Sudetenstrasse, which gave Prague a wide berth. Our destination was the big Lipizzaner stud at Hostau in the Bohemian Forest, close to the German border. But we got stuck almost right away: the road was too steep, it was raining, the wagons turned out to be overloaded. We may have covered twenty kilometres that first day, but no more. Luckily, we were able to spend the night in a flax mill, where we made our beds on piles of cloth. As soon as I closed my eyes, I saw red-faced Russians everywhere.
The next day, I had to ride one of the horses. Whenever one of the stablemen would go ahead, he would toss me the rope of the horse he was leading. We sold our only gelding for 600 Reichsmark to a family who had a cart but no horse. The roads were becoming clogged with refugees on foot and columns of prisoners of war who were being relocated. All things German were on the move. Everywhere we went we heard the lowing of cows waiting in vain to be milked. Whenever we passed an abandoned farm the Poles would hop off their horses and look for food, eggs for example, which they slurped down raw. After the midday break that day, which had lasted far too long, they began to mutiny. They demanded to be paid in advance, in zlotys, otherwise they had no intention of working themselves to death for ‘the major’s family’. Those were their very words. Grandmother climbed up on to the wagon and reprimanded them as Father would have. That helped somewhat, because they at least decided not to desert.
But during the night of 8–9 May, which we spent in the open, they got drunk. We were planning to strike camp at first light. I was going to drive the Lipizzaners, and I was ready to go. Suddenly someone screamed: ‘Russians, everywhere!’ There was no point in trying to leave. The faces of women, Mongol women, began appearing all around us. I had never seen female soldiers before, let alone Asiatic ones. They carried their rifles slung across their chests, and wore big cartridge canisters on their belts. Some were lying on their stomachs in the backs of wagons. I thought: German soldiers would sit up straight. Two of them came up to me, smiling – I could see their gold teeth flashing. The next moment they levelled their rifles at me. They waved the barrels to indicate that I must get down off the box. I was sure they were going to take me to Siberia. They weren’t interested at all, however, in a blond-haired, ten-year-old boy. But they were interested in the two Lipizzaners. I had to hand over the reins, and that was that.
WHEN YOU GROW up on the outskirts of town, there are two things you can do. You either go down-town – to the square in front of the cinema, where you smoke roll-ups and gaze up and down the main street that runs another thirty kilometres to another, bigger town.
Or you head out into the fields.
In my neighbourhood, the edge of town was marked quite concretely by the row of flats on Speenkruidstraat, three eleven-storey blocks standing shoulder to shoulder. At the end of the walkway on each floor, a fire escape wound down acrobatically to a ditch and a barbed-wire fence. It was there, at that exact spot, that the first field began. Crossing it you came to a rutted road that ran past sourish mounds of silage all the way to the Deurze Stream.
On warm summer days, we – those of us who had chosen the fields – would float downstream with the current in rubber boats. The spillway at Deurze was as far as we went. During my primary-school days, that was where the world ended. The stream there had a sloping bank that seemed made for sunbathing. But I had neither the patience nor the propensity for lolling about. One afternoon, while the others warmed themselves like lizards, I climbed the fence to scout out what lay beyond.
Walking past a stand of willows and an old bathtub that served as a trough, I came to another slope, steep as a railway embankment and with a row of poplars along its top. There was no way I could see over it, so I climbed up on my belly like a spy, using my knees and elbows. Craning my neck – like a lizard, in fact – I peered out on to a rectangle of white sand, worn with paths both circular and diagonal. Tight, symmetrical figures. The sand stretched all the way to a barn with its double doors closed. Just as I was about to rise to my feet, I heard whinnying.
A door slid open and, illuminated in the resulting darkness, was a white horse, standing hesitantly as though posing for a picture. The animal stepped from the frame with a graceless gait, led by a girl in riding boots with hair down to her buttocks. At twenty, thirty paces from my hiding place, they stopped. Face to face, even lip to lip they stood there, like two youngsters kissing.
Then another stable door opened and from that black square also a white horse appeared, not hesitantly but at a trot, snorting, its tail raised like a captured flag. A balding man with big sideburns was leaning back on the halter, yanking on it like an emergency brake, and together they spun a few times on their axis. Sand flew. I could smell the penetrating odour of horse.
The animal that was waiting began scraping one hoof rhythmically over the ground. ‘Better put that hobble on her anyway,’ I heard the man shout to the girl. She took a strap that hung from her belt like a lasso and slipped it with no little difficulty around one of the horse’s hind legs; the other end she threaded between the forelegs and buckled it around the animal’s neck. I understood that the two greys had not been brought out to trot around the exercise ring. Still, I was not prepared for what came next. The hobbled mare was: she swept her tail to one side and remained frozen in that position, like a statue.
The stallion, trotting proudly to and fro at the end of his slackened rope, shook his head then stopped abruptly. His black eyes remained fixed either on the tops of the poplars or on the high cumulus clouds above them, in any case far over my head. I pressed myself down further against the dyke in order not to be seen, but also in order not to see everything. Beneath its body, the stallion’s telescopic member slid out segment by segment. I wanted to run away but I kept watching, transfixed. The horse’s penis was black, with a flesh-coloured head, longer than I would have thought possible and sinuous and rubbery as an elephant’s trunk. He pounced. The balding man seized the stallion’s crooked organ and tugged at it to help him aim. Then the powerful male was transformed into a pantomime of helplessness, flailing with his front legs but unable to gain purchase on the mare’s flanks. At every thrust his mane fell ridiculously over his eyes. I remember how he tilted his head to the left, then to the right, to set his yellow horsey teeth in the mare’s withers. He bit her, she submitted – and all this took place as soundlessly and jerkily as in a silent movie.
Freddy ‘French Fry’ claimed that people always felt like having sex, but that animals only did when they were rutting or in heat, and that that was the difference. He started talking about one of the girls who worked at the riding school and had hair like Kate Bush’s, except she spoke German. Freddy said he would bet his Seiko that she could never hit the high notes in ‘Wuthering Heights’.
Jelle and I, both thirteen, had no idea what he was talking about, but we agreed with him as a matter of principle. The three of us were walking along the stream, with Pjotr behind us. ‘She went into a skid on the motorbike . . . Bang – right into a pylon. She was on the back, her boyfriend was driving. He was killed on impact.’ Freddy wore a Palestinian shawl and was at least five years older than us.
Whenever a tractor or combine came rumbling down the brick lane we would pull Pjotr on to the verge and let him graze. The corn was so high you couldn’t see the machines coming until the last moment, though the noise had already enveloped you like a cocoon of vibrating air. ‘Good boy,’ Freddy said. And then, to me: ‘You could fire a cannon next to him and he’d just keep on grazing.’
Jelle, my neighbour who had started riding during the summer holiday, nodded earnestly, as though he suddenly knew all about horses.
That fearlessness didn’t strike me as a healthy trait, though. ‘But that means he’s lost his instinct for danger,’ I ventured.
Freddy came over and stood in front of me. He began explaining that that was precisely what was so great about the way animals had been tamed and bred since time began; a well-trained horse trusted people blindly. ‘Trusts you.’ The next moment, Freddy came up with something that he didn’t seem able to get out of his head: it was time for me to try it, too.
I wasn’t interested in horses. I had only come along with Jelle in order to hang out with Freddy, even though I knew little more about him than that he worked at the french-fry stand behind the Shell station on the industrial estate – and that, the one time I had been to his house, there had been a crumpled hundred-guilder note on the table. Like a scrap of paper lying there, waiting to be thrown away.
I patted Pjotr’s neck, something I hadn’t done or dared to do till then. ‘But then we’d have to go all the way back and get a saddle,’ I said.
That was nonsense. Without a saddle was no problem.
‘But how am I supposed to get up there?’
Jelle folded his hands into a stirrup and tossed his head as if to say ‘upsy-daisy’.
As I grabbed a tuft of mane with one hand and laid the other on the warm horse’s back, I noticed that, from up close, all the hairs were either pitch black or white. From a distance Pjotr had looked vaguely grey and spotty, very different from how he looked now. When I said that, Freddy told us that Pjotr had been born black but would be completely white in a few years. ‘He’s a half-bred Lipizzaner. And Lipizzaner foals are born black. By the time they’re eight or nine, though, they’ve turned white.’
It was the first time I’d heard the name Lipizzaner, a word that didn’t make the sound of z’s, but instead had a ‘ts’ that cracked like a ringmaster’s whip.
I slid my knee over Pjotr’s back and sat up straight, clenching him with my thighs to stop myself slipping off. As soon as I tensed my calves as well, the horse went into motion, still munching on grass and shaking its mane. I was wearing shorts, so I could feel every movement of his shoulder blades. They moved upward – forward, like the connecting rods of a locomotive. Powerful, regular. I sat and moved, without moving myself.
Why did this feel so tremendous? Freddy, Jelle, Pjotr and I walked past fields of potatoes and corn, but the only one who didn’t have to walk was me. I was also the only one who could look out freely across the heads of corn. On horseback the world around you seemed different: the pebbles along the verge and the dry bed of the ditch let themselves be seen from another, more oblique angle. I had to duck to avoid branches I would otherwise not have noticed. When I looked back up, a vista opened that was broader than I’d seen before: I could survey the course of the Deurze Stream to where it passed the spillway and the new wooden bicycle bridge. My outlook had widened and deepened. I had been lifted on to shoulders, like a champion wrestler. No one was taller than two metres ten, but I knew myself to be a head taller than the tallest Montenegrin or the tallest Nubian. I felt elevated. You had footmen, and you had horsemen.
Almost every afternoon after school, Jelle and I could be found at De Tarpan. The paved yard of the riding school was our domain, we were allowed everywhere: in the tack room, on to the roof of the big barn to fasten down a rattling sheet of corrugated iron, amongst the audibly breathing horses in the stables and even into the owner’s house. Although we didn’t sleep there, it sometimes seemed as though for us, stableboys and girls, De Tarpan was home – just as it was for the horses.
I kept my parents at arm’s length, they wouldn’t have understood anyway. Although I never for a moment considered becoming a vegetarian, I stopped eating smoked horse meat. On the ceiling of my bedroom at home I drew a life-sized Arabian stallion in charcoal. Arabians have a concave muzzle, like the spout of an Oriental teapot. And they have one fewer pair of ribs than other horses: seventeen instead of eighteen.
Because I had no fear of horses, I was allowed to help break in the four-year-olds. When it was my turn to supervise the pony class on its outdoor rides, I would choose the steadily whitening Pjotr. Along with Jelle, I also trained the cross-breed gelding that belonged to the director of Goedewaagen’s Royal Earthenware Factory, who had been slung from the saddle when he had caught his foot on an upright in the sliding door. Mr Goedewaagen had tried to scramble up from the sand, but remained on his hands and knees with his back sagging like a dog – and it was in that very same position that the ambulance personnel had carried him away.
In principle, all of the horses were at our disposal, except for the white stallion. He wasn’t the biggest horse in the stable, but he did possess the most ‘aristocracy’. He had an arched neck, a silvery-grey mane with an artistic curl to it and eyes that stood out by virtue of their size and blackness. Whenever a mare in heat walked past he would slam his flanks against the walls of his stall. His muzzle was covered in flecks devoid of pigment, he had an ‘L’ branded on the left side of his jaw and a ‘P’ on his right haunch, topped by an imperial crown. On the door of his stall was a nameplate: CONVERSANO PRIMULA.
Primula, or ‘Prim’ for short, belonged to Piet. In the five years I spent at De Tarpan, I never saw the owner of our riding school sitting astride his Lipizzaner. Piet trained Primula by walking behind him, like a coachman without the coach, his arms stretched out either side of the stallion’s tail. At noontime, when there were no lessons to be given, he would take him out of the stall for this ‘long-reining’. Others climbed on to their horses and spurred them on, but for Piet Bakker this was the exercise to beat all exercises. For it he needed no spurs, or jodhpurs or boots.
I once asked Piet what made Primula different from other horses.’
‘His blood,’ Piet answered.
‘What is it about his blood then?’
‘It’s blue. Bluer than any other horse.’
I had been watching their exercises. Primula could canter so slowly, almost in slow motion, that Piet could keep up with him at a walk. That was how it was supposed to work: during the long-rein exercises, you weren’t supposed to run. Your horse’s power was primarily directed upwards, freeing him of the ground. This was easiest to see during the ‘passage’, when it looked as though Primula was bouncing on a trampoline and, for just the click of a shutter, hanging suspended in the air.
Harness racing was exhausting, hard riding. Horse races, according to Piet, were like the motorcycle TT rally in nearby Assen. But even the more sophisticated forms of riding weren’t sophisticated enough for him. Jumping was track and field. Dressage: gymnastics. What we did at De Tarpan was the art of classical riding. Ballet.
After the midday session, Piet called me over to him on the white sand of the outdoor ring. While Primula chewed on a handful of concentrate, Piet told me that the Lipizzaner breed was the product of centuries of minute adjustments. Since 1580, at the Habsburgs’ imperial stud farm on a ridge above Trieste, form had been given to a horse destined to bear kings and emperors. There the Austro-Hungarian equerries had created a pure and noble breed. Power and grace, loyalty and eagerness to learn – these traits had all, by means of selection and cross-breeding, been brought together in this one animal.
Piet ran his fingers down Primula’s backbone, like a vet, and counted up the distinct vertebrae starting at the base of the tail. Between the thirteenth and the fourteenth he stopped and pressed against the cartilage. ‘Amazing, isn’t it?’
I probably shrugged.
This, Piet said, was one of the Lipizzaner’s inbred traits: starting at the thirteenth vertebra, they possess a built-in flexibility. That makes them more supple than other horses when it comes to performing the levade, in which they rise up on their hind legs – like a controlled form of rearing. It was the pose in which the triumphant general would report to his sovereign, and in which he would later be immortalized on canvas.
Primula took a few steps to one side and began shaking his head. ‘Has the inspection lasted long enough?’ Piet looked at him the way a father looks at his son, and ran his hand down his neck.
‘Do that,’ he said to me.
I thought he wanted to show me that his stallion hadn’t even worked up a lather, but he had.
‘Well? Can you feel it?’
‘What am I supposed to feel?’
‘When you touch a Lipizzaner,’ Piet said, ‘you’re touching history.’
It was for the pure-bred Conversano Primula, and only for him, that we built the grandstands.
The idea and the initiative came from Leny, Piet’s wife, who had answered an ad in the local newspaper for a batch of church pews. She called Freddy over, because he could drive a tractor, and handed him a slip of paper with the address.
Jelle and I were allowed to go along, perched on our respective running boards. The flatbed trailer rattling behind, we drove into town, under the railway viaduct, past the Acmesa dairy and the head offices of the reclamation company where Jelle’s father was the managing director.
I climbed off the tractor at the new traffic lights. Grongingerstraat 74, was that a left or a right at the end of the street? The lady I asked took the piece of paper and studied my face carefully. ‘You’re looking for the synagogue?’
‘No, the church,’ I said. ‘We’re here to pick up the pews.’
The address proved close by, just around the corner to the right. Number 74 was a narrow building with three high, stained-glass windows and an equal number of towers. The shoulders of the man who opened the door were covered in dandruff. He showed us in, crossing a floor of cracked tiles. A veil of dinginess had settled over the rows of pews, the baptismal font, the pulpit. The floor was dotted with little piles of dried pigeon droppings and here and there a shard of glass. This, he told us, was the old synagogue, which had been used after the war as a Dutch Reformed church. But the Reformed congregation had moved only recently to a smaller building, so this colossus could finally be torn down.
The word ‘synagogue’ stuck in my mind. Only twenty-five years later – at the spot where Freddy had turned the tractor around – would the city install a memorial stone with the inscription:
AROUND US HERE ONCE STOOD THE NEIGHBOURHOOD WHERE 550 JEWS LIVED IN 1940. NO MORE THAN 25 OF THESE CITIZENS OF ASSEN RETURNED AFTER THE WAR.
When the memorial stone was unveiled, the Vanderveen department store published a book about the history of the Jews of Assen. It said that some of the furniture we had come for had been sent to Westerbork as early as 1940, to build a stage at the Nazi Durchgangslager (transit camp).
The pews that remained were four metres long. Leaden benches almost too heavy for three men to carry – Freddy at one end, Jelle and I at the other. The dust blew in our faces as soon as we went out the door. We slid the pews on to the trailer and lashed them down with longes. Three rows of four on the bottom, two rows on top.
Back at De Tarpan, Freddy drove straight to the visitors’ area beside the outdoor exercise ring, where we unloaded the pews on to a platform made from old pallets.
When the grandstands were finished, and Piet came to inspect them, the pews had been arranged in four rows of five. He ran his hands over the armrests and felt under the seats as well, where we had already discovered a whole galaxy of chewing gum. Piet did not look happy. He told us to get some putty knives and scrape off the petrified lumps. He was even less pleased with the dismal condition of the wood itself. Using his bare hands, he broke off a chunk from one of the seats. Piet ground the wood to powder and hurried off to his lessons in the indoor ring.
Halfway there he paused, looked over his shoulder and shouted: ‘Tear that rubbish apart. The rotten pieces can go in the wood-stove, the good ones we’ll keep.’
Following Piet at a little distance, we went to fetch crowbars and claw hammers. Our grandstand was a write-off.
The easiest way to go about it, we discovered, was first to knock off the armrests, after which the middle sections simply fell to pieces. All you really had to do then was pry the back away from the seat. We vented our frustration at having done all that work for nothing on the pews themselves, and when Freddy suddenly remembered that his Seiko had a stopwatch, we made a game out of it. Taking turns in two-man teams, we would wait with sledgehammers poised for the third to shout ‘Go!’ Our faces red with exertion, we finally succeeded in tearing apart a synagogue pew in under six minutes.
My last contact with Primula had been in a movie. In an almost deserted cinema in 1991, five of his sons and daughters paraded by on the screen. First Pjotr, then Lublice, Tarras, Latka and Sarpa – all half-breds who had already passed the age of selection and were therefore Lipizzaner white. Along with the pure-bred Lipizzaner mare Nobila, they were playing in a film based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
The scene I was waiting for came about three-quarters of the way through. In all their whiteness, Primula’s offspring came strolling down the long corridor of a palace. They appeared casually and without fanfare from doorways left and right – like members of an audience who accidentally wander on stage from the artists’ entrance. As a group they formed the background to a love scene that took place amid an orgy of colours and shapes, to which the director – Peter Greenaway – seemed to hold the patent. Like a painter of light, he projected colourful, crowded tableaux vivants, one on top of the other, with as the single, fixed point actor John Gielgud, eighty-seven and still a force to be reckoned with, who played both Shakespeare and his creation Prospero.
At ease and seemingly without prompting, the horses pushed ahead until they were standing around Prospero’s daughter and the chained Prince Ferdinand. Meanwhile, the two were declaring their love for each other – ‘Admir’d Miranda, indeed the top of admiration’ / ‘I am a fool to weep at what I am glad of’ – but the horses milled about imperturbably, sniffing at Miranda’s dress, pawing at the carpet, until Nobila turned to face the camera and claim the entire screen for herself. Shakespeare/Prospero looked at the viewer and declaimed: ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on / and our little life is rounded with a sleep.’
There were, including myself, six people in the theatre. For a full ninety minutes we sat submersed in a fairy-tale world. We saw winged angels on swings, and greyhounds, the sleekest of all land animals. Shakespeare did not give one the impression that we flabby humans were the pinnacle of creation. He brought in a devil – ‘a born devil, on whose nature nurture can never stick’ – in order to underscore firmly the incorrigibility of the villainous streak in mankind. Against this background, the Lipizzaners radiated calm and innocence, as though they stood far above human machinations. They looked, it seemed to me, more sincere than their masters.
For the first time then, and for the first of many times since, I asked myself what it was that people tried to express through the animals with which they surround themselves. Or, in the case of the horse: what does the animal embody in the eyes of man? The horse, it occurred to me, is a repository of a host of human traits. Those characteristics have been foisted upon him – which is not to say that he is not imbued with them through and through. For starters, the horse was made a slave, obedient and tame. That took some 6,000 years, but the result was something to behold: unlike the zebra, the horse would eat from your hand. He would allow his hooves to be shod and his teeth to be flossed – as was the daily custom with the Arabs owned by King Hassan. In almost every culture, the horse was on a higher level to other grazers, he was their herder. And festooned with straps he used his muscle power to cleave the soil, thereby increasing the earth’s yield; the surplus he dragged to town as though born to do nothing else. Many a civilization was elevated on four hooves, and when those civilizations collided, the speed and agility of their horses often served to determine the outcome.
A dog could be vicious (something seen as a typically animal characteristic), but a horse was brave and proud. In every age there lived men who loved their horse better than their wife. The dying wish of a Roman general? To see his horse one final time. And Emperor Caligula, a contemporary of Jesus of Nazareth, dressed his stallion Incitatus in purple and considered having him appointed consul. Since the most distant past, when the horse was first admitted to the circles of aristocracy, he has come to be treated less and less like an animal.
Conversano Primula was registered with a casting agency. For years he had played parts in advertisements for Verkade biscuits and chocolate bars. Sometimes he won bigger roles as well. I had once helped with the preparations for the Dutch feature film Iris. We spent two or three weeks teaching Primula to stand still in the dark as a car approached. In the evening we would tether him behind the sliding front door of the riding hall, Piet would come driving up with his headlights on and we would open the door and say ‘whoa’ and ‘whoa fella’. His instincts as an animal of flight screamed at him to run away, but we finally brought him to the point where he would remain standing until the bumper almost touched him. Alert, but motionless.
After that we taught him to rear up whenever Monique van de Ven, who played the veterinarian Iris, tried to grab his halter.
The student trainee from De Tarpan was the only one of us allowed on the set. When it was over she told us that she had sat under a bush, in a wetsuit, to avoid growing numb in the downpour from the rain machine. Primula had done a magnificent job. In the film he displayed a will of his own – a pure white apparition under the hard, bluish spotlights, his indomitability serving as a warning for the calamity awaiting Iris.
The Lipizzaner was the horse to top all horses. More than any other breed, the Lipizzaner had come closest to the bastions of human power. He had performed at the coronation of shahs, parvenu sovereigns and Third World dictators – but also in Washington, at the inauguration of President Reagan in 1981. What is it about this animal that appeals to such men? Its power, held in check? Its obedience? Or perhaps it is the animal’s white coat and the underlying notion of purity? The human species does not lend itself so readily to moulding and making; despite its knowledge and expertise, and despite the remarkable results humans have achieved with their own pets, it has as yet been unable to improve significantly upon itself. Man had designed the Haflinger, the Orlovdraver, the Clydesdale, the Friesian horse, the Connemara pony. More than four centuries of fine-tuning culminated in the present-day Lipizzaner, making it the oldest ‘cultivated breed’. From generation to generation, the horses were selected for both outer and inner beauty – or at least for what passed as such at the Habsburg court of the moment. Each summer, a number of the best male four-year-olds were brought to Vienna. They had ascended to the pinnacle of the pyramid of civilization and became inhabitants of the palace, where they ate from red marble troughs. It then took ten to twelve years of training to school each individual stallion in all disciplines of the Hohe Schule. In the imperial manège, the fully qualified Lipizzaner would then perform his kinetic art to the strains of Handel, Chopin and Strauss. He danced.
As the credits rolled by, I waited long enough to see the special word of thanks to ‘Piet Bakker and the De Tarpan riding school’, and even after that I remained seated. The lights in the cinema came on, but I was caught up in my flow of thought. Man had created the horse after his ideal image of it, there was nothing religious about that. From the rugged Equus ferus, the wild quadruped of the steppes, he had moulded Equus caballus, an animal with sixty-four chromosomes: two fewer than his feral forefather. Neither God nor Darwin’s slow evolution had had anything to do with it. The result was a new species which, with a little help in the form of stage directions, could perform Shakespeare.
AT THE CENTRE of the ring that was the world of Lipizzaners stood a Viennese hippologist named Hans Brabenetz. He knew their individual paces, their characters. He did not own a computer – the bloodlines of 5,000 horses were stored in his brain. Herr Brabenetz was the living, breathing filing system of the Documentation Centre for Old-Austrian Horse Breeds. With his wife, Suzi, he could be found in the Vienna phone directory, listed as ‘certified horse-breeding professional’.
Pacing back and forth before the windows of my office, I practised three German sentences. Then I punched in the number and explained to ‘Brabenetz!’(the ‘r’ dark and rolling) who I was and why I hoped to speak to him. I also told him that I would be coming to Vienna that weekend – to visit the Spanish Riding School.
‘Hofreitschule,’ he said. ‘The Royal Spanish Riding School.’
‘Hofreitschule,’ I corrected myself.
‘Herr Hartmann, before you go any further . . . Do you mind my asking your age?’
I dithered between repeating my correct name or stating my age. ‘Forty-two,’ I said at last.
‘Ha ha, then I’m twice as old as you. I am eighty-four.’
After congratulating him on his seniority, I started talking about the Lipizzaners. What intrigued me most was the idea of their nobility – a human-bred animal that resided on the top rung of racial enhancement. If anyone could tell me about the background of this ‘imperial horse’, he could.
At his age, Herr Brabenetz said, the world around him no longer proceeded at such a clip. If I would go to the trouble of writing a letter, he would reply within two weeks. ‘But before that, may I ask what it is you want from me?’
I started by describing Conversano Primula and his ancestors, who Piet had told me included famous stallions that had performed in Vienna. He listened for a minute, then asked: ‘Have you ever been a soldier?’
I had to admit I hadn’t.
‘Then it’s going to be difficult. If you have never served in the army, how can I explain these things to you?’
‘I’ve been in wars,’ I said. ‘In the Balkans and the Caucasus.’
‘Ah, ich auch,’ I heard him say. ‘Also in the Balkans, and almost in the Caucasus. We landed in the Crimea, 1942, but never got further than the Kertsh Peninsula . . .’ He paused, then asked: ‘Govorite po russki?’
I replied in Russian.
Brabenetz growled. ‘I used to speak it. You see, I spent two and a half years as a Soviet prisoner of war. We learned Armee-Russisch . . . But you know what, if you call me on Sunday, once you get to Vienna, I’ll let you know whether I can receive you on Monday.’
Vienna, the mere sound of it, awakened in me the mood of Sunday afternoon visits to my great aunts, where boredom mingled in equal parts with cigar smoke. In heavy-framed honeymoon photographs on the sideboard – of Uncle So-and-so in a checkered sports jacket, and the corresponding aunt with her hair up in curls – the city displayed its gaudy side. And when the Vienna Boys’ Choir sang their ethereal carols on TV at Christmas I watched slack-jawed, but that was because, according to my sister, they had been gelded at the age of ten or eleven.
As it turned out, my hotel, close to Vienna’s Arenbergpark, stood in the shadow of two structures that looked like cooling towers, taller than cathedrals. Nothing could be less Viennese than this: windowless, drab, in a park full of skateboarders. The receptionist told me they were Flaktürme: air defence towers, each topped by four elevated crow’s nests for anti-aircraft guns. Flak, from Fl(ieger) a(bwehr) k(anone), meaning ‘anti-aircraft gun’. In 1943–4, six of these colossi had been built in the heart of Vienna, to raise the anti-aircraft guns above the city skyline. No one had ever got around to razing them.
I went into the park and laid my hand against the wall of one of the Flaktürme, you could still feel the seams where the concrete shuttering had been. And there was an entrance: a dark, vertiginous shaft leading to the cash desk of a modern art exhibition. Behind those walls it was as cold as a walk-in cooler. On the way to the top, by way of stairwells and service lifts, one kept passing statues and installations: a wilted rose garden, a miniature aircraft carrier stranded on a hill, a video spelling out the word P E A C E, over and over again. Outside, on the windy walkway, you looked over the Stefansdom and other city landmarks from a sixty-metre-high vantage. I saw the course of the Danube, tightly canalized and far from blue. That made me feel a bit more in place as well.
Vienna had a way of continually throwing me off balance. At Volkstheater station, where I left the underground, I found myself caught up in a demonstration. Waving the Austrian flag, the protestors crowded on to the escalators to street level. They unfurled banners reading NO TO THE EU DICTATORSHIP and chanted ‘Austria stays free!’
Out on the pavement, I managed to give them the slip. Starting at the corner beside the station entrance was a baroque building so huge it would have taken ten minutes to circle on foot. These were the royal stables – not to be confused with the even more exclusive residence of the Lipizzaners – which, during the heyday of the Habsburg Empire, had housed more than 600 horses. In 2001 the complex had been converted into a ‘museum quarter’. Paintings by Schiele, Klimt and Kokoschka had replaced the colourful collection of parade animals, which had once included thirty-two ‘identical’ Kladruber carriage horses, sixteen white and sixteen black (for funerals). In the courtyard stood dozens of purple plastic settees. Settling down into one, you couldn’t help but wonder what had become of Vienna’s iconic mustiness.
En route in the high-speed train through Germany, I had read Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March – to get a feeling for the old Austria that had given birth to the Lipizzaner. Writing between the wars, Roth had brought to life the twilight years of the Danube Monarchy. ‘Vienna was, as they said later, the capital of peacetime.’ That kind of tone. He wrote with fondness of Emperor Franz Josef I, whose patriarchal moustache and sideburns billowed and twined together. ‘The emperor was an old man. The oldest emperor in the world. He saw the sun go down on his empire, but he said nothing. He knew, after all, that he would die before its downfall.’
Roth provided a painstaking description of the ineluctable fall of the once so sluggishly peaceful multi-ethnic state, which had extended from the Alps to beyond the Carpathians. This 600-year-old ‘Holy Roman Empire’ – wedged between the Prussian, Russian and Ottoman empires – had been run by twenty-four Habsburg rulers and was, by the dawn of the twentieth century, a worn and dilapidated house. The cohabitation of Poles, Czechs, Germans, Ruthenians, Hungarians, Slovenians, Croatians, Italians, Romanians, Slovaks and Jews had given rise to irreconcilable differences. The hairline cracks between the races and the classes had widened to become fractures. The writer, a Jew himself, let the reader feel the sweltering anti-Semitism, the burgeoning nationalism and the charged atmosphere at the gatherings of workers who had supposedly met only to perform gymnastics. At the same time he bore witness in unsuspecting Vienna to the splendour of the annual parade on the Day of Sacraments: ‘an army of cherubs singing “God preserve us, God protect”’, a Lipizzaner stallion drawing near ‘with majestic coquettishness’, followed by a strident voice: ‘Hear ye, hear ye! The emperor approaches.’