Pictures at an Exhibition Read online

  PART THREE

  AUGUST 27, 1944

  Salle des Martyrs, Jeu de Paume Museum, circa 1940-1944

  Chapter Seven

  THE SILENCE OF THE CITY AT HALF-PAST FIVE IN the morning felt supernatural. The sky was gray and low, as if someone had stirred ash into milk. From the passenger's window, I watched petals, confetti, ticker tape, a woman's glove, and a handkerchief spin past, lifted and twirled by an invisible presence that still celebrated yesterday's rout of the Boches from Paris. We drove a wood-burning car resurrected from a bygone era and bought from a butcher. The tires of the gazogène thudded softly as they rolled over upturned cobblestones, broken bottles, and bullet shells. They had lost much of their air in the fifteen-hour drive from Le Puy From behind where my father and I sat in the truck's cab, the old butcher's meat hooks rocked against each other and the engine gave off a drowsy smell. The auto made a wide arc onto rue de La Boétie, and Father pumped its brakes. The rhythmic crunching and clanking noises slowed, and I heard the celebratory pop of rifles to the southeast, in the direction of the place de la Concorde. Then all was quiet again, save for the knocking from the meat hooks and the crackle and drop of a piece of wood burning in half and breaking into the fire.

  Up and down rue de La Boétie, our neighbors’ windows were darkened by blackout paper, and at first glance I thought our home was no different. With a grinding of gears, the vehicle came to a halt.

  Another piece of wood broke and settled in the combustion box. We were home at last, and neither of us moved. I had not seen my street in four years and three months.

  Father thumped the steering wheel with his hands. When he turned to me in the murky light, his eyes looked bruised. “Shall we?” he asked.

  The familiar flooded my senses: the bronze post, the depression in the curb from trucks driving up to the gallery door, the tile facade of the bakery, and the gold address integers—2 and 1. By the time my years numbered the same, we were living in Nice at the Palais de la Méditerranée, which my mother referred to as “the dog pound.” Other hotels held ten or fifteen people to a room. We were three when we should have been a hundred.

  I inventoried impressions I had not known I might ever lose. This was the sidewalk where I had caught Rose's hand, her coat open though the day was brisk, and said, Mother insists we leave, and she said, Your father gave me the key to the vault. As if he already knew that she would refuse to come with us.

  I told myself, that day in August 1944, that it was unreasonable to expect Rose to be at the gallery, standing on the sidewalk, awaiting us, her beauty shimmering like the heat on the road. Yet if she had been there, I would not have been surprised, as if the force of wishing could have made it so.

  I took two strides away from the car and pressed my face to the gallery window. The blackness inside was granular and quivering. I could make out the white marble mantelpiece, gray in the dawn.

  “What do you see?” Father asked. He stood next to the car, rubbing his hands above the brazier.

  “The mantel,” I said.

  “What, the shades aren't down?”

  In five broad steps, he was over the curb and at the gate. His ring of keys jingled and the metal-barred door to the foyer opened, leading to a second door. Rust blossomed over its lock, as if it had been in a flood and the waters had withdrawn. Father stepped aside, and with a shove from my shoulder, it gave.

  We took in the smell of burned things. There had been a fire.

  The carpet had been seared away in large swaths. Holes were gouged in the walls where the fire had spread. The skylight had shattered, scattering glass. The spandrels clung like metal spiderwebs. Father jerked forward and the floor stuttered beneath our steps.

  We entered the second room of the gallery. The fire seemed not to have stretched here, though the room was coated with a light ash. We passed into Father's office, with the vault beneath the false floor, where we had hidden the last ninety-seven paintings in the hours before we fled Paris for the South. We had hauled sacks of lime, each as big as a boxer's punching bag, into the corners of the storage room to protect the paintings from the damp for the months we expected to be away. Another 250 paintings—awaiting Father's next exhibitions or sale at a later year—were already in the depository of the Chase Bank.

  We descended into the vault on steps that sprang out automatically when the floor slid back, with a mechanism like a cuckoo clock. There were no paintings, only exploded sacks of lime, sodden and gummy, and a cigarette stub on the stairs. Father rested with his hand against the wall. We stayed there only a moment—there was nothing to look at or for. I helped him up the stairs, out of the vault, my hand at his elbow. We were stricken and silent. There were no barriers between this moment (Father, moaning softly) and another one that I could not quite grasp, in which I also wandered around that second gallery room and wept and there was the smell of something burned, and the paintings on the walls were covered with black, and an identical great loneliness reached up a paw and knocked me aside so that I felt askew and utterly at a loss.

  Father and I gathered papers from the floor. Communist propaganda, pamphlets with mangled spelling, copies of a Fascist newspaper that had been, it appeared, published in our house before the liberation, denunciation letters from neighbors I knew. In one, a veteran from the Great War demanded the government issue him a new pair of shoes since his cobbler had, much to the veteran's irritation, disappeared. We were archaeologists in our own tomb.

  I looked toward my father and watched him grow pale. I thought, My father has begun to die.

  Yet when I reached to take his hand, he snatched it back as if I had bitten him.

  “This is no time for the sentimental,” Father said, and instantly I felt ashamed. “Someone's here.”

  “I feel it, too.”

  “Not that. There is a noise in the hallway.”

  The voices belonged to two figures, one in a stockinged cap sewn with a red star. He opened his palm to show us his brass knuckles and then swiped his fist through the air. The other had a pistol and said, “Don't make me use this.” We ran.

  Outside, Father stumbled over the doorstep, hurtled forward, and fell to the ground. His hands went to his mouth. For a moment, I thought he was uninjured. Then he parted his lips and blood burbled forth with specks of broken teeth in its stream.

  At the hospital, while Father waited to be fitted with a bridge for his gums that would make all his food taste like tin, we listened as a nurse admitted a man who had shot himself while celebrating in the streets. Our victory had already become stupid.

  Chapter Eight

  IT WAS THEN THAT WE LEARNED. FATHER SAW TWO skeletal men at the Hôpital de la Charité. The Soviets liberated a camp named Majdanek, which sounded like a bone stuck in my throat. We staggered into and out of a newsreel in which we saw the horror of the Jews in the extermination centers of the East. There was open weeping in the theater, and also a few who called out “prop aganda,” “lies,” and “unbelievable.” Then, posted on a wall near the Métro, printed on broadsheets of newspaper, were pictures of bulldozers pushing heaps of bodies. Soon these photographs were replaced by pictures of everyday German citizens led through the camps, in fur coats, with their handkerchiefs pressed to their mouths. Father went to the Red Cross agency with a list of friends we had not heard from, but they turned us back, saying it was too soon.

  Father grew weak and listless. Distracted by this unfamiliar version of my once—gleaming father, thinking only of him, I went on a walk and was struck by a blowsy old man piloting a bicycle too small for his fat. A crowd knotted around, asking if I was injured. I said I was fine, that I had just had a bit of a shock. I wandered down the street, feeling shattered, trying not to stumble, repeating, “A bit of a shock, a bit of a shock,” like a children's nursery song.

  One, two, three days passed. I felt half mad with my desire to search for Father's paintings, but some plan of his always held us back, as if he were afraid of what we would find
, and then another newsreel would be released and we would again be delayed.

  On the first day that the Bureau des étrangers announced it would hear cases—we qualified, unbelievably, as foreigners—I stood in line three hours before it opened and my father joined me four hours later.

  “Stop scowling, please,” Father said. “You shouldn't scowl around these people.”

  Rose haunted me ever more strongly. Perhaps, finding the news from the reels incomprehensible, my mind sought a familiar sorrow. I ran into the street once, sure that I could feel her presence. And yet she, too, was invisible.

  Through the mire of bureaucracy for which my country is so famous, I pursued my father's paintings. One agency required a form from a second, which necessitated a stamp from the third, which had to be filed by a date that had already passed in order to make an appointment with an officer at the first, who would soon leave his post and be replaced by a younger uniformed man who demanded a whole new set of papers. None of my father's records from before the war could be found. We presumed that most of them had been burned, though that did not explain why his accounting file at Chase Bank, which dated back to 1933, had also disappeared. Neither Matisse nor Picasso kept careful books; they relied on my father and his assiduous assistants. Hence we had no documentation for any painting Father had acquired or, just as importantly, sold, in the seven years before the invasion. The works he had bought through the auction houses would be accounted for, but those were often lesser ones; masterpieces were purchased directly from the master. Since my father had had no written contracts with either Matisse or Picasso, we learned (through a newspaper article) that both had adopted new art dealers in his absence. War stopped neither production nor commerce. Picasso went to Kahnweiler, his dealer from before the Great War, and Matisse, so we heard, betrayed my father with an American.

  If Father was crushed, he hid it behind the soliloquies he delivered, maddeningly, in a raised voice, to the tailors, cobblers, upholsterers, and grocers in line with us at the different refugee agencies: “The act of painting is munificent, and yet the artist himself is rarely generous. When his artwork is lauded and he is enriched, it is because of his genius. When his paintings are ignored and he has to tighten his belt a notch, it is the fault of the art dealer. And yet he can exist without me, whereas I cannot exist without him.” The agency had closed before we reached its door. We walked down to the boulevard Saint-Michel. Father shrugged and ducked into a four o'clock newsreel.

  From there, I passed the Luxembourg Gardens, where, I had read, one of the final battles for the city had taken place. The dirt was churned up as if it had been chewed, and the remains of a German six-pounder gun were buried in a trench that zigzagged the length of the avenue. The bars of the park's gate stuttered alongside me. Before the war, on a rare snowfall, this section of the Luxembourg would have been closed off, so that passersby could admire how snow draped its fountains and grassy hillocks. In springtime, girls chased hoops and boys proudly carried their toy boats, still wet from the fountain, in solemn outstretched arms. Now it was unrecognizable, except for the gate.

  I descended into the train station and rose again at Les Halles, intending to return to our hotel on the boulevard Sébastopol. As I climbed to the top of the Métro stairs, I had a sudden feeling of the vast tunnel behind me and the locomotive whisking away with swaying, stupefied bodies inside. A black van idled at a stoplight. It was the only car on the street, which struck me as uniquely sinister. We had heard that there were mobile vans in which deported Jews were poisoned, a story that we had dismissed at the time as too ghastly to be true. The black car sped forward, its tailpipe streaming fumes, and I had again the sense that I had ascended from the Métro into the wrong city and in a body that could not quite contain me.

  At the hotel, the concierge told stories of girls who had once consorted with the enemy left with shaved heads and an O branded on their brows, a vengeance carried out unchecked because everyone was afraid of being called a collaborator, and, in those days, we heard that many such accused were shot. One late night, I thought I heard Rose's name bounced over the concierge's counter (though I also heard it while listening to water drop from the faucet into the sink, in the jingle of money on the bus turnstile, in the straining of the violins in a Rossini broadcast), but when I asked the speaker to repeat himself, he eyed me strangely and said, “I'd stay away from politics if I were you, young man.”

  AS IF I COULD NOT ACCEPT THE WORLD I HAD EMERGED in, during those first days in Paris, I awoke persistently expecting to find the dark rooms in which we had spent the war: those of Monsieur Bickart's farmhouse in Le Puy, and its odor of the chicken coop, the dray's stamp and whinny, the earthy smell of the green lentils, and the fond way our protector rubbed their stalks between his fingers. The relative simplicity of that time now seemed like a luxury. I worked in the fields alongside Monsieur Bickart. The soil was black and rich from the volcanoes that had spread themselves over Le Puy a millennium before. Above the distant town stood a bronze Virgin, who blazed when the morning sun found her hillside.

  Monsieur Bickart called me Jacques, the name of his nephew who had worked a summer on his uncle's farm in 1931, after the Depression. Jacques's boots, which I wore, were a size too big, and I stuffed their toes with newspaper. If any of the citizens of Le Puy believed I was Jacques, they were either very young or so old they had become young again. My parents were required to remain hidden in the house and, often for long stretches, in the root cellar. We supposed Monsieur Bickart did not want to test his neighbors’ tolerance as, to begin with, he was a Protestant and so already under suspicion.

  Bickart possessed an accordion, of which both he and my mother were jealously fond. Each waited impatiently for the other to finish playing. One day, in passing, a neighbor complimented Monsieur Bickart on his astounding progress on the instrument. That evening, the accordion broke, which was nearly a crisis in the household, as our host decided it was best not to fix it. Mother sulked until Monsieur Bickart gave her the lace-making kit that had once belonged to his grandmother. Following a manual printed in the 1860s, Mother taught herself to make guipure, the kind of filet lace for which the Massif Central is known throughout the world.

  We paid Monsieur Bickart for our protection and care, a single enormous sum, the total of which I never learned, that had been withdrawn from my father's safe before we left Paris. Withdrawn from the safe because, by the time we fled, access to our accounts at the Chase Bank was already compromised. It took my father and Auguste days to realize no bank teller would let them do anything other than make a deposit, and so they left empty-handed. Those accounts, though, in the weeks after our return to Paris, in the dingy hotel by the markets of Les Halles, were my one comfort. It was said that the presidents of the Banque de France, Crédit Agricole, and Crédit Lyonnais all kept their money and treasure at the Chase Bank. Surely, these would have been untouchable.

  IDLY, ONE SEPTEMBER AFTERNOON, WHILE TRYING TO engage my father in something other than reading the newspaper, I asked him if, while I looked for the paintings, he should purchase anew the works of his former artists.

  Father replied, “I bought paintings in the twenties and thirties, expecting to sell them in the forties. I can no longer afford what I once owned.”

  I did not know what to say and left the room. As I stalked about outside, my thoughts returned to Rose. She, of all people, seemed to offer a solution. We had been in Paris for eighteen days and I had not yet seen her. The thought struck me as nearly inconceivable. The Louvre remained a locked fortress. I had even been to the lycée she attended as a prize scholarship student before she entered university. I haunted 21, rue de La Boétie, too: the first time, I saw a young man sleeping on the floor with a rifle beside him. When I returned that day, the gate was locked with a chain as thick as my wrist.

  At our hotel I asked the concierge to ring the museum once more for me. As he did, I studied his face with its florid skin and webbing of blood v
essels. His hands shook when he held the telephone, as mine did when he passed me its receiver. I gave my name and asked the switchboard operator to connect me to Rose Clément. She said, “Who?” I repeated Rose's name. I knew then that she was married. The concierge smiled at the crossword in his lap and clucked his tongue, while I waited and blinked at the ceiling.

  The operator returned and requested that I not contact this person again. I sputtered to the dead line. I wondered what my crime had been. The concierge gazed at me unsteadily when I handed him the telephone. His nose was red and resembled a potato. “Hope is the devil wearing a new coat,” he said, after a long pause, and returned to his puzzles.

  I climbed the stairs to our empty rented room and stood by its window. The trucks rumbled by and belched their fumes into the dim space. There was the bell of the knife grinder, with his grindstone attached to his motorcycle by a rickety cart. Housewives, maids, and cooks streamed outside, their hands thick with knife handles, the blades pointing down like mechanical fingers. I too wanted to make my dull self sharp.

  MY MOTHER COULD NOT PLAY AN OUT-OFTUNE PIANO, but I could, so I walked down to the Seine, past plane trees and their bark flecked as if a thousand boys with pocket knives had been at them, to the antiquaires on the quay.

  I looked in several shop windows before I found my vendor. His wares were not prints of great value, but were on quality paper with clear colors and lines. From the stoop, I examined the engravings: a map of Versailles and its emerald gardens and fountains impossibly blue, an eighteenth-century curricle, and a preening cockatoo with a stiff red comb. The shop's owner had displayed his prints in frames of good taste—in fact, the frames were finer than the prints themselves, so as to trick the untrained eye. I felt my father's presence.