Pictures at an Exhibition Page 9

  As I walked into the shop, my eyes adjusted to the smoke-dimmed haze. I ducked to avoid a low-hanging chandelier. A figure in a black coat with a hairless head hunched over a desk, studying a paper he held close to his face. I planned to stride toward the man at the front of the store—I was a newly sharpened knife, after all. Instead, the long sleeves and swinging hem of my jacket, sized in the years before the war, threatened towers of teacups with every step.

  The shopkeeper lowered his paper. He had a glass eye. The marble fixed on me, while the other jerked up and down. He took in my person—the fray at my sleeve, the wrinkles in my pants, the muddy specks on my shoes.

  “You look familiar,” the Cyclops said, in a voice like a radio actor.

  “I have a familiar-looking face,” I said. Perhaps my father had been in this store after all? I had his eyes, I supposed, and the nose, long and round at its end.

  “You were here once before.”

  “Yes.” The eye slid toward the door as a couple paused in the store window. The woman wore a cape with long white gloves. After a moment, her escort pulled her along by the crook of her arm.

  “Now that the old guard is gone, you've all grown so young,” he said. I tried to tell where his eye was focused. “Would you like to see my acquisitions since your last visit?”

  “Very much so.”

  “I'm a family man,” he said. “I wouldn't keep this kind of a collection. But how else is one to stay in business?” He opened a drawer marked ARCHITECTURAL DRAWINGS and took out a box covered in leather.

  I was shown one pornographic photograph after another. They were all of children, little boys and girls. The legs and hair-covered hands of grown men hulked in the background, or to the side of the frame. The lips of the girls shone with lipstick. I winced inside as each page sliced to the bottom of the pile and another sliced to the top.

  “You don't like them,” he said. “I can tell. The collection is picked over, I admit it. I'll have new ones by next Thursday. You can leave just a small payment and I'll lay aside the very best. I have an eye for a gentleman's favorites.”

  I saw that there were drawings underneath the photos. “I've considered starting a collection,” I said. “Nudes from the middle or so of the last century.” He set down the box. “I can't pay much. But every man deserves his own treasure trove of beauty.”

  He gazed at me with great feeling. “It is true, young man; they can take many things away but never that.” I studied his face. There were nicks from where he had cut himself shaving, short scratches as if a cat had leaped at his cheek and tried to cling to it. I looked down.

  And there she was, an early Manet, fluttering on the top of the pile of sketches from another scaly box labeled NUDES, XIXèME. My Cyclops could not know, otherwise his hands would have trembled as mine did, now wadded and clammy in the pockets of my coat. Olympia was not yet the proud whore trying to pose as a grand woman. Here she looked half-witted, with a blond pompadour and a ribbon tied comically around her neck, as if she were a Christmas gift.

  I thought of my father and Matisse.

  I first showed interest in several lesser prints.

  “A real Degas, monsieur,” the Cyclops assured me of another picture. “A pastel, a café concert. Any man would be proud to start his collection with such a masterpiece.”

  I asked for a magnifying glass to admire the counterfeit Degas's faulty monotype. “Isn't this a beauty, monsieur. Yet surely it's too rich for me.” I inquired about two more cheap imitations and, gathering my grease-stained gloves, said, “Let me see that top sketch again. The nude with the red bow—that looks hastily done.” I hoped my voice did not quiver. They say those with poor vision have keen hearing.

  “I've had trouble pricing this one,” the Cyclops said.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “A young man brought it to me after he'd bought the lot from someone in the government who was transferred to the colonies. You know how that went, those last few months.” He named a price, I hesitated, he lowered it, I frowned, he lowered it, and I bought a Manet for what Bertrand said he paid for a girl at Chez Suzy in Pigalle. I handed the man his bills, and I stepped out into the street—how could it still be daylight?—my face was wet and my Manet was in a wax envelope. It cannot rain, I thought.

  I crossed the street to the Seine side. The black windows looked like missing teeth in the white apartments on Île Saint-Louis, and in the distance the spire of the Palais de Justice pricked the sky.

  My new sketch would not have lingered, unpurchased, on a legitimate market. The last honest owner of this Manet could only have been a connoisseur. Who he was, I would never know.

  Chapter Nine

  I RETURNED TO BOULEVARD SéBASTOPOL. SéBASTOPOL, I thought, another battle from another time. The trees that lined the street were beautiful, heavy with early autumn leaves. I followed the gated remains of the arcades, remnants of the older tangled Paris, and held the Manet close to me. The print could take us from this place.

  I opened the door to our hotel room with a bang and had flung my hat down on the chair before I realized that my father was in bed, fully clothed and with his shoes still tied.

  “Are you sick?” I asked. Father shook his head. “Didn't you go to the government offices today?” My father nodded. “And?” He held his palm out, to indicate nothing.

  “Don't you see, all the paintings are gone. They were taken, systematically or piecemeal, but there are none left.”

  “We're not looking in the right places yet,” I said. I sat on the edge of his sagging bed and, with trembling fingers, withdrew the Manet.

  He sat upright at the sound of the wax paper. “What's this?” he asked, in the old pleased voice.

  I handed him the sketch. “From a shop along the quay. A talisman, sent to us from the past.”

  “Nonsense,” he said. His face was gaunt and frightened.

  “Look at it.”

  Father ran his finger along the margin of the page, which was bent. He hesitated. “The damage to the picture is fresh and very minor,” he began. He spoke as if in a trance, as if I were not in the room at all. “The creases here are not yellowed. This was well cared for until recently.” He drew the room's single chair toward him, cleared it of its clothing, and rested the drawing on the seat. “I see no fading of the paper, so one presumes that it was not kept in a frame, on display, but was guarded as part of a collection. Hence its owner had others, larger, more beautiful oil paintings, for his walls.”

  “It's stolen,” I said.

  He looked at me with disgust. “No, looted.”

  “I don't understand the difference,” I said.

  “This is useless.” Father turned the sketch over to see if there were markings on it. There were none.

  “How much did you pay for it?” he asked. I told him and he drew his breath in. “There's no question. You must give it back.”

  “To whom?”

  “Exactly!” Father shouted. “Don't you see how they made this happen?”

  “No,” I said. My head felt leaden.

  “Our paintings have disappeared, yes, you understand that.”

  “For God's sake.”

  “No proper owner who had so many paintings that he did not even desire to display this would have sold his Manet to whatever fraud you found hawking his wares down by that filthy river.

  “This painting speaks to us, can't you hear it? It explains that the Boches stole paintings and, unaware of their values, sold them to third-rate shams, who also were dumb to their value, so that now you can buy it for next to nothing, still knowing it is four times as much as the picture-vendor paid. It would have come from a private collection, because it would have been protected in a museum, and if it were from an art gallery, the Boches would have had a better sense of the worth of the merchandise they were looting. But they didn't dare touch the national collections, only the private ones.

  “It is not a Manet I have ever cared about,” Father said.
He put the magnificent sketch back in its wax sleeve, rose from the bed, and threw open the window. In came the sound of a colicky child, wailing. In a room across the boulevard stood a pale woman with her breast bare, trying to offer it to her infant. The child turned his face from the nipple, crying inconsolably

  “Our missing artwork falls under the ludicrous jurisdiction of the Bureau des étrangers. We must return the Manet, Max. If not to them, then via the Louvre. You may regret this later, but I will not.”

  “Consider it an investment,” I argued. “For the short term, even. If our other accounts are closed, then we have money in this.”

  “Impossible,” my father said, and lit a cigarette. “The painting is unsellable on the legitimate market. Any fine painting brings its provenance with it. No respectable dealer would buy this Manet from you.”

  He paused and tapped his lip while his cigarette burned and smoked.

  “We'll return to Le Puy soon enough.”

  “And stop looking?” I asked.

  “Throw Death off your scent, Max. Give it all away. And when it is taken from you, say it is God's will.” He blinked. “Take this to the Louvre,” he said. “It will be your skeleton key to her shut door.”

  I had hoped, in the long car ride from Le Puy, that this time with Father would allow me to know him better, so as to avoid angering him, so as to burnish his love. I could have one hundred years, I thought now, and still that would not be enough.

  That night, with the Manet in a drawer so neither of us would look at it or begin our argument anew, Father said, “On my honeymoon with your mother in Capri, on our first day there, we took a sail. Floating out at sea, I saw an abandoned life vest. I did not draw your mother's attention to it because it seemed an ill omen. When our boat ride was over, as we walked along the beach, Mother found a pair of eyeglasses, unbeknownst to me. Before dinner, I said I planned to take a stroll. Mother said she would rest. We met at the police station, each with his evidence. The next morning, the schoolmaster's body washed up on the shore.” I thought Father had fallen asleep when he added, “I cannot stand to be in Paris much longer.”

  I took the Manet to the Louvre several days later, along with a letter to Rose, of which I had written a dozen versions. When I asked for Madame née Clément, two guards appeared and again, with an increasing degree of hostility, I was instructed to leave her in peace. A secretary took the wax paper package from me and stood at her desk, waiting for me to depart. Surely my unimposing presence did not unsettle them. Therefore, it was something about Rose, and I did not know what that was, other than that she too had unset-tled me.

  THE MONTH OF OCTOBER PASSED IN A STUPOR, AS IT often does, though the Soviets were marching through Yugoslavia, then Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. Amsterdam was without electricity. The vigorous Americans liberated the Philippines. The German they called the Desert Fox was dead, supposedly by his own hand. And then it was November and the rains began. By December, there were bitter slanting storms, leading to a winter season at which historians and meteorologists would later marvel as the coldest in France since the Prussian siege of 1870-71 forced Parisians to eat the animals in the zoo. (I still remember reading that the first to go were two elephants, Castor and Pollux, known as the “pride of Paris.” The tiger and a pair of lions were spared because a neat kill would have been too dangerous to execute. The primates starved to death because of the belief that to eat them would have been, as I recalled reading, “akin to cannibalism.” Those were different times. Perhaps.) The offensive in the Ardennes began, and rumors were that casualties were high.

  My head still throbbed faintly at night, on the spot where I had fallen against the curb, and when my blood pressure rose, it bothered me then, too, as when I went from gallery to gallery, asking the dealers if they had any Vlaminck or Laurencin sketches for sale, since such modern artwork would betray the invisible fingerprints of wartime acquisitions. Few Frenchmen were buying in those days, so my presence was enough to rouse suspicion, if not alarm, and more than once I was asked to leave. There were times when I was simply overwhelmed by outside news. In January, after the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, I found myself almost shouting in a gallery on rue Bonaparte, and had to stop searching for days.

  Then it was February. Dresden smoldered. I returned to our hotel in midafternoon, though it was already dusk outside, as if the clouds of ash had drifted west and darkened our skies, too. The key to our room hung on its peg like a ripe fruit and, for once, the concierge lifted his nose from his book of puzzles to peer at me with boozy interest. He raised his eyebrows and muttered “Hein?” This alarmed me, and I took the stairs three at a time.

  I arrived on the fourth floor and saw a wedge of light from our room in the darkness of the corridor. I looked through the door before pushing it open. Two men in American uniforms stood facing my father, who sat on a chair in the farthest corner of the room, atop my clothing from the previous day. Father stared at something outside my line of vision. I thought I detected a third presence in the room, which, when I pushed open the door, I understood was not human.

  The two soldiers turned and one slapped his massive hand to the pistol at his side. My father saw me and said, “Thank God.” The soldiers parted and I stepped between them into the center of the room, by the foot of the bed.

  Three paintings tilted against its chipped headboard. Two I recognized and one I did not: the familiar pair were from Father's last Cézanne exhibition before the war. In one, blocks of color—reds, pulsating greens, and browns—gave way to rooftops, mountains, and walls. The second painting was sky and tree branch, with the sky's blue straining, ready to push out in three dimensions between the reedy trees. The third frame held a Cézanne portrait—an earlier work, I guessed—of the artist gazing sidelong at his mirror.

  I looked at my father and then at the Americans. “You must be Max,” the taller of the two said. He addressed me as tu. American informality never ceased to irritate me. His French was assured and quick, but spoken in the heavy accent of those who, I would come to learn, lived in the Midwest. His spectacles reflected the lamplight, as if they were mirrors. Both men had removed the name patches from their uniforms.

  “They found your paintings,” I said to my father.

  “Tell them,” the second soldier said in English, “that if we say how we got them, it'll cost extra.” He was fair-haired with a wrestler's neck.

  Father stood. “Get out,” he told the soldiers.

  I gave my father a furious look. “How much?” I asked him under my breath.

  “Five hundred thousand francs,” the tall soldier said. “And that's a deal.”

  “You said four hundred thousand, right?” the wrestler mumbled. The other shook his head once.

  “We'll get more from someone else,” the tall soldier said. “But we thought it was only polite to offer them to you first.”

  “Let me look at the paintings one last time,” I said, in a voice thick with melancholia. I was deciding which one to destroy. I chose the Cézanne landscape. How many valleys of houses had he painted? A Cézanne face, and his own at that, was a rarity. In the second painting, I loved the way the sky seemed to burst through the sapling trees as if it was a form, an organ, or alive and sentient, and pressing against the canvas.

  With a gesture, I asked to examine the portrait.

  “Sure.” The wrestler replied in English. Even with the two khaki-colored Americans crowding our room, the pictures seemed to breathe space into it, to shift the distances and depths as if all along these had been mutable. On the back of the Cézanne portrait was a family crest, a crown with five arrows gathered behind it, and then a stamp in Fraktur script. I could make out the letters A-B-E-T-Z. Now I knew where it came from; this was Rothschild booty. The palace of the Jews, turned over from one conqueror to another. I had a flash of envy, too. The Rothschild painting was the rarest, the most precious of the three.

  Father leaned over my shoulder and breathed in my ear, “Do
n't you dare.” He had guessed my intentions. I let go of the painting.

  “We don't bargain with thieves,” Father said. “Once you give these back to me, I will be happy to sell them to you for their market price.” The wrestler laughed and gathered up the frames roughly and shoved them into a limp rucksack.

  “Too bad,” said the taller one.

  “You'll regret it,” said the other.

  “In exchange, then, I have something for you.” Father's English was halting. “I have a curse for you to take back to America and give to your wife and daughter and son.”

  “Please.” The taller one laughed, snatching the rucksack from his friend.

  “Hush, Bub,” the wrestler said.

  “Your firstborn will die, maybe before she walks, maybe when you are an old man, but you will live to see the funeral and hold dirt in your hands and—how do you say”—he made a scattering gesture—”over a grave. I give one curse, since, after it, everything decays.”

  The tall man grinned but twisted his wedding ring. The wrestler patted his pocket to check that his wallet was still there, then crossed himself on our threshold.

  “Kikes,” the wrestler said, and they closed the door with a bang.

  I started into the hallway. “Stop,” Father said. My hand was on the doorknob. I turned it. “Please don't,” Father pleaded. Since I was moved by his curse—that the worst fate Father could imagine was the loss of a child as precious as I—I did not go after the American soldiers.

  FATHER SET OUT FOR LE PUY IN EARLY MARCH AND returned to Paris a week later. He told me only that Mother had rented a cottage and begun to give free piano lessons to the neighbors. He spoke as if he were continuing a conversation with himself. “Eventually, my other paintings will rise. They will float to the surface, as the bodies of the drowned do. But not in my lifetime. Perhaps in yours. Which explains your zeal.” His speech was unin-flected, an accusation lying flat, almost a threat: You will outlive me. Then, lock-jawed, “Now we must go home together.”