Circles of Confusion (5 page)

When Charlie had invited her to share the house in Multnomah Village, Claire had said yes without even having to think about it. They made a good team. Charlie gained a renter who paid enough to cover the property taxes and who also kept the old house from falling apart. For Claire, the benefits had been even greater. She was thirty years old. Before she moved in with Charlie, she had feared that she was already in others' eyes, if not quite yet in her own, the kind of woman who lived alone with her mother. Now, while she stood in the white claw-footed tub under the showerhead she had installed herself, Claire remembered how her mother had panicked when she told her she was moving two miles away. "But what will I do without you?" UUV1S

"Heating something up" turned out to be a savory stew redolent of herbs from Charlie's window box, accompanied by freshly baked bread. Charlie had taught Claire to bake the European way, not hurrying the dough, but allowing it to rise overnight in the refrigerator, where it tripled in bulk. The result was like nutty brown velvet. After one bite of Charlie's bread, Claire had forever abandoned the store-bought white loaves she had grown up eating, the kind where a single slice could be rolled into a tiny grayish pill.

Charlie poured them both another glass of red wine. "So, what was it like, cleaning out your great-aunt's trailer home?"

"Incredible. There was junk everyplace. I thought my mom was a pack rat, but this was worse. Aunt Cady must have saved everything she ever owned, and it was all covered in dust. You can guess what that did to Evan's allergies."

Charlie made a muffled snort, but Claire heard it, as she was meant to. It was no secret that Charlie thought she could do better than Evan, with his thin mouth and calculated approach to life.

"Evan was a saint, Charlie. He just kept shoveling through all this, this—crap she had saved, just methodically clearing one space and then moving on to the next."

Charlie sat back in her chair. She was so small that her shoes dangled two inches above the floor. She looked like an aging little girl playing dress-up. "And your aunt, she had no friends, no family of her own? She had lived like a hermit?"

"Well, she never married."

"No lovers?" Charlie arched an eyebrow. Even at eighty-three, she could still draw men to her.

"Before this trip, I would have said no." Claire got up from the table. "I found something that I want your opinion on. Evan didn't think it could be real, not if Aunt Cady owned it."

Kneeling on the floor, she unfastened the suitcase, which she had carried on her lap all the way back to Portland. She lifted the lid and began to set aside the papers that cushioned the painting. A low moan interrupted her.

"Nein." Charlie's face had gone pale above the edge of her rose- colored sweater. Her eyes were fastened on one of the pamphlets. It showed a half-dozen men in close-cut, neatly pressed uniforms, their backs to a bonfire spitting flames into the darkness that surrounded them. Behind them, another soldier was tossing a stack of books into the flames.

Charlie's mouth fumbled. She raised her hand to cover it, the hand that still bore an obscene embroidery of green numbers along her wrist, ending in the web between her thumb and forefinger. One human being had done that to another, the better to keep track of inventory.

Claire was conscious as never before that the older woman had walked through another world that to her was only a brittle pamphlet, a yellowing photo, a documentary. Charlie had labored in Dachau, that much Claire knew.

"Why do you have these?"

"The papers were in the suitcase, but I don't know why she had them. Maybe she didn't even remember they were there. All this had been untouched for years. Maybe even since the war. Aunt Cady was over there, in Germany. But that's not really what I wanted to ask you about." Claire lifted the last of the papers that cushioned the painting. Its beauty struck her with fresh force, and she heard Charlie gasp.

Across time, the woman's liquid gaze met theirs. She seemed as real as the two women regarding her. Together, Claire and Charlie bent over the painting. For the first time, Claire began to look closely at the things that lay around the woman. The chair, topped by lions' heads, had a row of brass studs across the top, and a pattern of gold diamonds painted on its back. At the edge of the picture, a fringed oriental carpet, patterned in red and blue and cream, lay bunched in folds on the table beside the woman. Claire ran her fingertips across it, almost surprised to feel tiny brushstrokes instead of thick tufts of wool. On top of the carpet a white jug with a curving handle and brass lid rested in a shallow brass basin. The basin held an exquisite mosaic of reflections from the room, tiny chips of paint in all colors.

The dominant colors of the painting were shades of blue and yellow. What could be seen of the woman's dress under the yellow jacket was a deep ultramarine blue. There were echoes of color in the blue tracery of the carpet's flank and in the shadow of the open window's frame. The room was not merely revealed by light, but constructed by it. Even the shadows of the table and the chair shone.

"Look," Charlie said, her finger tracing the wall behind the woman's back. "Do you see what is missing?"

Claire narrowed her eyes. The chair and the table, the pitcher set on the carpeted table—all cast shadows in shades of blue and gray, but the woman herself, the woman who stared back at them with half-parted lips, she cast no shadow at all. This should have made her look one-dimensional, a flat figure painted on top of a real background, but instead it gave her a greater reality. It was as if the woman existed someplace halfway between the painting and the room where the two women returned her gaze.

"She is beautiful," Charlie said. Claire heard the tiny click of her manicured nail as it tapped the dried paint. "And, I would say, genuine. Of course, you would need more confirmation than an old woman's memories." Charlie sat back in her chair, closed her eyes. Her skin was so translucent that Claire could see the delicate blue threads of veins in her eyelids. "We were, you know, a bourgeois family. Before." Claire didn't have to ask before what. "I grew up surrounded by old manuscripts, medals, golden fans, Louis the Fourteenth furniture, vermeil flatware with precious stones on the handles. And paintings. Paintings that had been with the family for generations. AH gone now. When I married, I had as part of my dowry a Rembrandt. Or at least a painting from his school. A little painting of a woman sewing. Four hundred years old, and it was as if she were there in the room with you. Like this woman." Charlie opened her eyes, but they remained unfocused, cloudy. "Of course, what do I know, just an old woman with memories."

"What happened to the painting?" Claire knew enough of the answer not to ask what had happened to the family.

Charlie's mouth tightened against the answer. "Goring collected art. Sometimes, it was said, he was willing to trade rather than to simply take. My husband traded the Rembrandt to someone who worked for him, traded it for safe passage to Switzerland. But the official said it was only worth papers for two, not three. When he came back, Richard said I must go, take our son." She pronounced her dead husband's name the German way, with the "i" a guttural long e, followed by a hard k sound and the second r rolled in the throat. Ree-kard. "I argued. I said I would not go without him. Our son, he was just four. Finally I took our son and went away, as we knew I must. But at the border we were turned back, told our papers were no good. And when we returned home, Richard was gone."

That night Claire took a nail file to the mouth of Aunt Cady's diary, prepared to force it open, but the brass band sprang apart as soon as the point slipped inside. She flipped through the pages, reading entries at random. The diary started in 1943, when her great-aunt had joined the Women's Army Corps. Claire counted backward in her head. Aunt Cady had been 26, but in the first few dozen entries she sounded more like a high school girl, listing everything in breathless detail, from the items that made up her clothing ration ("rayon khaki underwear pants—ick!!") to complaints about GI soap ("horrible brown stuff that is mainly fat and lye"). As Claire read further, she began to recognize the story beneath the surface, the story of a woman considered an old maid destined to take care of her aging parents, who had grabbed her one chance to get out in the world.

Claire skimmed the first third of the diary, which covered basic training and a few months of clerical work at Fort Des Moines, Iowa, as well as Aunt Cady's reassignment to Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia. Gradually, Cady began to sound older, seasoned, not such a giddy girl. Diary entries grew further apart in time, appearing only when something had deeply disturbed her. She was sent to England as a typist, survived the buzz bombs.

As the end of the war in Europe drew near, she and twenty-one other WACs had been sent to Munich to free up men to go fight the Japanese—or as Aunt Cady put it, "the Japs." It was hard for Claire not to color each entry with her own knowledge, to remember that when Aunt Cady wrote in her diary she did not know there was a fixed date for the end of the war that events were moving inexorably toward, that even winning itself had been no sure thing.

Claire began to read more carefully. She was certain that the secret to the painting's past lay in Germany and what had happened to her aunt there. Aunt Cady had evidently worked as a secretary to one of the men overseeing the newly conquered enemy. "I keep track of things, from Harold's meetings to his parties. It's like being his wife with none of the perks. He is short with me unless he wants something, and then he is sweet."

May 10, 1945

They have billeted us in someone's old home. The rain comes in where the tiles are partially smashed or blown away, and the wind whistles through the dormer windows. My blanket has a peculiar smell. When I go into the courtyard, glass splinters grate under my feet. Our quarters are surrounded by barbed wire, and if we leave the area, we're supposed to be accompanied by an armed escort. But I'm so tired of never being alone.

The barbed wire can't keep out the smell of lilacs that still grow in the fire-blackened ruins. This last winter, when there was nothing to eat at all, they say children were dying with bloated bellies. People dug for roots in the woods. Old people ate grass, like animals. There is still a great hunger, pent up after years of want. We're not supposed to fraternize with the enemy, hut we do a bit. Ordinary people—never were they Nazis, never!—are our servants and our translators, our cooks and our washing women. And they all hint around or come right out and ask for chocolate, milk powder, cigarettes. Things go missing, laundry soap, cheese, even flour. People—our side and theirs—search through empty apartments, looking for something useful. Nowadays it seems like everything belongs to everybody. You see something you need, you take it. I don't complain. And people's lives were hard, you can see it in their eyes, dark and hollow. Our cook has a little girl, about four, and presumably no husband, since one is never mentioned. The two of them are pale and blonde and so thin their knees and elbows show like knots in a string. When I have something sweet, I often find myself giving it to the child. She can make a single chocolate bar last for hours, nibbling on it like a faded little mouse.

Sometimes I feel so lonely here. The other girls go about in great gaggles, inseparable. They are overjoyed at the idea of going home. They borrow lipstick from each other and fix each other's hair and those who aren't married are plotting to be.

The only person I really know here is someone from home, Al Patten. It's funny that I should say "know," because I didn't, not really. He moved in a different crowd, one of the boys who was destined to drop out and go to work in the mill, pulling green chain and making lots of money as long as he was strong. I used to see him standing on the street corner before class, smoking a cigarette, his face already needing another shave. He scared me a little. But war changes things. When he learned we were both stationed here, it was like we were old friends.

***

May 11, 1945

Went for a walk today, just down the block to what used to be a park, but still, strictly forbidden. The streets were empty and silent. Houses have been replaced by ruins, charred shells, masses of rubble and sometimes even mass graves. Everywhere remnants of the war, disemboweled cars, burned-out tanks, twisted gun carriages. Very few people. Once in a while a miserable figure staggered past me, a man in shirtsleeves, a ragged woman in bare feet. An old man rattling along on the metal rims of a tireless bicycle. They look at my uniform and they look away.

The park has been transformed into a desert. The trees have become stumps, lost to the need for firewood. You have to watch your step because of the trenches that are now filled with rags, cans, bottles, coils of wire, spent shells. It was a terrible place, but it was still good to be alone.

While I was in the park, I saw a group of POWs in the distance, trudging silently, dragging their feet. Some of them limping. Stubble-faced, sunken-eyed, out of step. They didn't look anything like the Germans in the posters at home, who were square-jawed and square-shouldered, with gleaming red eyes. These men were either very young or very old, Volkssturm men in patched uniforms sent out to guard the barricades, the last terrible harvest the German officials made from the male populace. Filthy, gray-bearded faces, or boys who had no need of a razor. I heard two of them talking to each other in high voices. Thin in their far-too-loose uniforms, they couldn't have been more than fifteen.