Florian's Gate (37 page)

“It was time, the Captain-Sir declared, for their undercover man to get out. His situation was becoming too dangerous, and they needed his information back in London. Your grandfather was very concerned, because this man was a friend. The Red Army and the Polish government were cracking down quite severely. No Poles were being allowed out—of course, this had been the situation since the Russians had invaded, but it was growing continually worse. Stalin's paranoia was mounting. He had secret police planted everywhere.”

Gregor cradled his cooling glass with both hands, his gaze bright with remembering. “The captain and Piotr were discussing a plan to make their man a set of American documents. You see, there were quite a few Americans going in and out of Poland on these inspection-evaluation missions for reconstruction and foreign aid. What concerned them, and what they were trying to work out, was how to get the documents safely into Poland and in his hands.

“I positively jumped forward, as though struck by a lightning bolt. ‘Send me,' I said.

“ ‘Impossible,' Piotr replied. ‘There's a slim chance you could get through, but it's very unlikely. The situation is becoming impossibly tough at the borders. They could ransack everything you have, find an American passport among your things in someone else's name, and then what?'

“The captain agreed. ‘They would have you drawn and quartered, and our missions both in England and in Poland could collapse.'

“ ‘Then send me with one set of travel documents,' I replied. They did not understand. ‘I will enter on the American passport, then turn it over to your man for him to exit with. We will simply need to have someone on the other side insert his picture where mine had been before. Or place his under mine, so that I can peel mine off. There must be a way to do that.'

“The captain thought it could work. The document would be stamped upon entering Poland, and there would be no problem exiting a few days later.

“ ‘Impossible,' Piotr repeated. ‘Gregor gets in, delivers the documents, and then what? He'd be trapped there.'

“Alexander spoke for the first time, and told them, ‘That has been my cousin's plan all along.' He looked at me with an expression of sadness and defeat, because he knew I had found the one way of returning to Poland to which he would never object. Then and there, it was decided that I would be the courier.”

Gregor smiled at Jeffrey. “As you know, Piotr by then had a very good connection in the American Embassy.”

“My grandmother?”

He nodded. “She was already his wife by that time, your grandmother. She was so much in love, terribly infatuated with Piotr. When he asked for her help, she could not refuse. Her first sense of loyalty was to him and his causes.

“She dug out an American passport from the vaults, one of hundreds that had been returned to the embassy over the years—perhaps stolen, perhaps lost, who knows. It did not
matter. She found one for a Mr. Paul W. Mason. Older than I, not as old as the man waiting near Warsaw. A few travel stamps—Mexico, Canada, Italy, some of the places that I had once dreamed of visiting and now never would.

“Your grandmother prepared a lovely letter of introduction on embassy stationery, and once I had used the letter to obtain a Polish visa, she arranged for a Mr. Paul W. Mason to travel to Warsaw with an American engineering delegation. She booked his return for four days later with a different group.

“Then Piotr worked his magic. He substituted my picture on the passport and forged the embassy seal that covered the photograph's right side. He then took a photograph of the man in Warsaw and embossed it with the same quadrant of seal. I hid this photograph in my package of playing cards, glued between the joker and the ace of hearts. Once I was safely in the country, I lifted my photograph off with a razor and glued his into place. The documents were passed on to our man, and he returned to London in my place.

“When I arrived in Cracow, I informed the authorities that we had fled the Nazis and wound up in a small Carpathian village, someplace so remote that they would not bother to check. There my wife fell ill, I explained, and after her death I returned.”

Jeffrey asked, “And all this time, you could never tell anyone here you ever went to the West?”

“The world of an oppressed people is a world of secrecy, my boy,” Gregor replied. “There were many things no one told anyone, not even their family. It was not discussed, it was not questioned, it was simply done. For myself, I was forced to pretend that the West had never existed for me.”

“Did you ever regret coming back?”

“I have only one regret. And that is, when I die I will not be buried next to my beloved Zosha, whom I laid to rest in London. I must leave it to the Lord above to bring us together somehow.” Gregor glanced at his watch. “Goodness, look
at the time. You must be on your way, my boy. This is one appointment for which you cannot be late.”

Florian's Gate was one of the few remaining portals from the fortified medieval city walls. Beyond it ran a street open only to pedestrian traffic and lined with small shops making the transition from dingy government-run outlets to colorful Western-style boutiques.

Just to the right through the archway was a long stone wall where dozens of artists hung their works in hopes of obtaining a few foreign dollars or marks or francs—anything that would help them to buy further art supplies and feed the hungry mouths at home. Most of the art was very bad—amateurish landscapes, gaudy nudes, predictable still-lifes. A few were good, two or three truly exceptional.

Jeffrey strolled along the makeshift outdoor gallery until he came upon a man fitting the description Gregor had given him. The man was of small stature, with a long thick silver moustache and hands with fingers like stubby cigar ends. He wore a pale gray oversized shirt as an artist's smock over navy-blue pants and shoes so scuffed the color had long since disappeared. He was working intently on what appeared to be a Monet landscape, a scene from the artist's garden at Giverny.

“Mr. Henryk?” When the old man turned toward him, Jeffrey continued. “Gregor tells me you speak English. Your work is good. Very good.”

The old man turned and bowed his head slightly. “Parlez-vous francais?”

“Some,” Jeffrey replied in English. “A few words. From school, one long vacation a few years back, and now I have some business there.”

The man switched to English. “I love France. I
adore
France.”

“You've lived there?”

“Ah, no. The closest I've ever come to France is copying a
Frenchman's brushstrokes,” the old man replied. “But it has always been my dream to go to Paris, to see the art. Yes, that has been the lifelong dream of this artist.”

“If it's so important, why not go? You have your freedom now. You can take the train.”

Henryk faced Jeffrey straight on. “These eyes are still good,” he said. “These hands are still steady. But these legs, no; I could not manage on my own. For me the end of communism came ten years too late.”

“Perhaps you can find someone to take you.”

“My wife, yes, she would go. But her dream of Paris is a dream of luxury. Fine hotels. Famous shops. Wonderful food. Things that would require much money. And once seeing these things, my wife would not wish to ever return to the hardship of life in Poland.”

The man went back to his painting. “Yes, I should like to see Paris before I die.” He dabbed at his easel, said casually, “I should also like to tell my secret.”

“And what secret is that?”

“If I tell you my story, will you make it possible for my wife and me to live in Paris?”

Jeffrey laughed. “That depends on how good your story is.”

“I have reason to believe,” Henryk said, “that a painting by Peter Paul Rubens hanging in the Vavel Castle Gallery is a forgery.”

“And what makes you say that?”

The old man turned slowly around. “Because I painted it.”

Jeffrey worked at keeping a straight face. “Maybe we should go somewhere and talk.”

“An excellent idea.” Swiftly the man packed up his brushes and paints and folded his easel. He walked over and set them down before another artist, exchanged a few words, returned to Jeffrey, said, “I am at your disposal.”

At the man's guidance they walked the half block to the Jama Michalika. Once they were seated, the man said, “This is a cafe by day and a cabaret by night. It gained a most
positive reputation under the Communists by being closed down many times. They staged very strong political satire. How do you describe the way you clean metals?” he asked, making a dipping motion with his hand.

“An acid bath?” Jeffrey guessed.

“Exactly. They gave the Communists an acid bath. The Communists did not approve.”

The room was decorated with dark hues; it had a warm and snug feeling despite its size, an atmosphere of intimacy despite the lofty stained-glass ceiling. The lighting was indirect, the framed drawings along the walls mostly savage caricatures, the numerous showcases full of Punch-and-Judy puppets depicting Communist politicians.

When the waitress appeared, Jeffrey asked, “Coffee?”

“No, a small glass of champagne, if you don't mind. I want to get into the mood for Paris.”

When the waitress left, Henryk continued. “Oh, Paris. You can't imagine what magic that name holds for me. When I was a little boy, my father gave me an album filled with prints from the great French masters. I loved that book. I would spend hours studying each page. That book is why I wanted to become an artist. I too wanted to create something so beautiful, so moving. And to go to Paris . . . well, the dream started then.”

“About the Rubens,” Jeffrey pressed.

“Ah yes. In the late nineteen-thirties, as a young graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts, I was hired by the curator of the Vavel Castle Museum. It was my job to inventory paintings, clean the frames, do occasional touch-up work. I was very good at that, you see. Very good. So I began to undertake more and more complex restorations for them. There is a real art to that. You can't imagine. You have to be so careful about texture and color and lines and tension and brushstrokes. Your brush must move like the brush of the master.”

The waitress returned, set down the two glasses of
champagne, and departed. The old man raised his glass, inspected the golden bubbles for a moment, said, “To Paris.”

“To a good story,” Jeffrey replied.

Henryk sipped, then set down his glass and went on. “I had a very good boss, a fine man whose heart and soul were broken by the war. A man who dreamed of leaving Poland, much as he loved his country. He asked for my help. He knew he could trust me, and I knew in turn that he would take care of me, that my job would be secure, that I could stay with my art, and not be forced into the factories like so many of my generation.

“You cannot imagine the displacement during and after the war. Displacement of everything. People, families, governments, and art. There was a tremendous stockpile of paintings just outside Warsaw in an old warehouse. The Nazis started the collection in their raids throughout much of Europe, and the Soviets inherited the collection when they marched into Warsaw in 1945. What was there in that warehouse, I cannot even begin to imagine. All of the great names. Treasure troves of jewelry. Tons of silver, literally tons. Crystal. Furniture. Eventually the Soviets loaded a convoy of lorries and hauled most of the treasures to Moscow.

“One of the
aparatchiks
came up with the clever propaganda idea of rewarding Stalin's new Polish allies with a few pieces of art from our own warehouse. Plans were made to disperse a portion of the collection to Poland, to Czechoslovakia, and to Hungary. And so one morning, May 19, 1950, a truck pulled into the castle courtyard and started unloading crate after wooden crate of these masterpieces. “You can imagine how we felt as we opened up these crates, unwrapped bales of tapestries, opened treasure chests, examined the cabinets and chests—so many that we could not even store them in the museum's unused chambers. The mind boggles at what the Soviets must have taken with them back to Russia.

“A few days later, the curator came into my workshop. It
was a funny place for an atelier really, deep in the basements with just a little light through a grimy window set at street level. But I was left completely undisturbed, and I had room to work. Such space and freedom was an unknown gift for my generation. I counted myself blessed and rarely spoke about where I worked or what I did. That day, the curator said he had a special assignment for me. And a favor to ask.

“He brought with him a flat wooden crate, about the size of this table. He set it in front of me, and with the tip of a screwdriver slowly loosened the edges and lifted the top. In one sweeping motion he drew out the Rubens. The Portrait of Isabel of Bourbon, painted in 1628. It was absolutely stunning. There was a tiny brass name plaque on the frame in the center, as if a Rubens really needed to be labeled. The curator asked, ‘Can you do this kind of work?'

“ ‘Well, sir,' I said. ‘A Rubens. It would be an honor, a challenge. But it does not look in such bad shape to me.'

“The curator was sweating very heavily. ‘It is perfectly all right,' he said to me. ‘It does not need to be repaired. It needs to be traded for my freedom.'

“And so I began my work. First I had to find an old canvas, which I did by painting over a meaningless portrait that had sat in our cellars for several centuries. Millimeter by millimeter of painstaking effort, and four months later I was ready to bake and oil and smoke and in this way age our new work by the old master. Or so the world would think.

“We placed my work in the original frame, tagged with the little brass plaque that said Rubens, and hung it with great ceremony. The delay was explained by the need for substantial restoration work.