Girl in Hyacinth Blue (3 page)

Now, for good or ill, there it hung. He felt its presence whenever he came into the room.

On this silent Sunday afternoon, years after his father's quiet burial, and the day after Merrill's, Cornelius sat in the same study, his now, reading Eichmann's trial records and drinking rum and cof fee. Outside his window a heavy snow was flatten ing what had been his father's garden, and across the city it was pressing down on the new grave of Dean Merrill. Inside, he looked up, saw the life in the girl's eyes, and wished—no, longed for some one, Richard, anyone to enjoy the painting with him. No, not just anyone. Richard was safe. He knew art but not art dealers. That old wild need rumbled up from some molten place within, that need to say, "Look at this stupendous achievement. Look at this Vermeer. Pay attention on your knees to greatness."

At least he'd had that with his father. Once, years earlier, his father had called him long distance when he discovered what he thought was a brush hair left in a mullion of the window. That hair, from Vermeer's own brush, ah! He should have shown it to Richard. To dissolve his doubt. Once he be lieved, Richard would have the passion to enjoy it like his father had.

His eyes fell to the page and stuck on a line said by Eichmann's judge: "The process of extermina tion was a single, all embracing operation, and cannot be divided into individual deeds." No. He didn't agree. He thought of the nameless, graveless little boy kicked out the door who may have played with a wooden toy his last free morning in the world.

Did the toy windmill get appropriated too? A souvenir from some hapless Jewish home taken at an advantageous moment in spite of its missing hinge? He imagined his father encased in a glass booth, being interrogated: "And did you not re move this windmill from the house at 72 Rijnstraat after breaking in on the night of 3 September, 1942?" His own third birthday.

Willed or not, the painting didn't belong to him.

It would be doing penance for his father if he himself wouldn't enjoy it more. He tore newspaper into strips, fanned them out and crumpled them over the grate. Then the kindling, crosswise, then the quartered logs. The fireplace opening was barely wide enough. He was grateful it wasn't a large painting; it would be a shame to do it injury with a razor.

He stood up to lift the painting off the wall. This one last afternoon, he would allow himself a luxury he'd never permitted himself before: He touched her cheek. A quiver ran through his body as the age cracks passed beneath the pads of his fingertips. He stroked her neck and was surprised he could not grasp the tie string hanging from her cap. And then her shoulder, and he was astonished he could not feel its roundness. She hardly had breasts. He moistened his lips suddenly gone dry, and touched there too, more delicately, two fin gers only, and felt himself give in to a great wave of embarrassed and awkward pity, as when one glances in a hospital doorway at a person partially naked.

Where her skirt gathered, he felt the grooves left by Jan's brush. Jan. Johannes. No. Jan. The fa miliar name the only appropriate one for a moment like this. Jan's brush. He thought perhaps his fin gers were too rough to feel Jan's mastery. He went to the bathroom, shaved with a new razor, dried his face carefully, and, back in his study leaning toward the wall, he placed his cheek next to her dress. The shock of its coldness knifed through him.

He had no right to this.

He laid the painting on the carpet and lit the fire. Kneeling, waiting for the flames to catch, he imagined them creeping toward the pale blue pearl of her eye. The quiet intensity of her longing stilled his hand a moment more.

If he turned the painting over, maybe he could do it.

Such an act of selfishness, he thought, to de stroy for personal peace what rightly belonged to the world at large, a piece of the mosaic of the world's fine art. That would be an act equally cruel as any of his father's.

No. Nothing would be. Not just his father's looting—the safe job of thievery behind the battle lines—not just his father's routing them out, but the whole connected web. In Eichmann's trial record, he'd read, "The legal responsibility of those who deliver the victim to his death is, in our eyes, no less than that of those who kill the victim," and he'd agreed.

Now, waiting for the fullness of the flame, it oc curred to him, if the painting wasn't authentically a Vermeer—after all, he had no solid proof—he could do it, couldn't he? He could burn the thing, put the whole sorry business to rest so as not to keep his nerves raw.

Yet if it weren't genuine, the enormity of the crime shrank. Why not enjoy the painting? It was still exquisite. He looked again at her honeycolored profile, as yet unmarked by cruelty or wis dom. The throat moist with warmth from sunlight pouring into the room. The waxen idleness of her hand. So exquisite it had to be a Vermeer. He'd staked his solitude on it. He felt the injustice, look ing at the girl, that she would never be known as a creation of Vermeer. He had to get Richard to ad mit that it was a Vermeer, and then he'd do it an other day. A promise.

In spite of his paintings, Vermeer was among the dead. And his father, and the boy. Cornelius's life, like theirs, like Merrill's, was measured. He wouldn't live forever. He had to know that his years of narrow, lonely anxiety had been required. He had put him self together so carefully: allowing himself no close friends with whom it would be natural to invite to his house; teaching math, which he liked less, rather than history because of what he'd be forced to dis cuss; taking care to behave identically to people of all races and religions; suppressing anything in himself that might be construed as cruel or rigid or Ger man—and now this boiling need threatening to crack the eggshell of his scrupulously constructed self. The one thing he craved, to be believed, struck at odds with the thing he most feared, to be linked by blood with his century's supreme cruelty. He'd have to risk exposure for the pure pleasure of de lighting with another, now that his father was gone, in the luminescence of her eye. To delight for a day, and then to free himself. A promise.

But Richard still did not believe. He had left the night before saying, "Whether it's an authentic Vermeer or not, it is a marvelous painting." Mar velous painting, marvelous painting. That was not enough. There were hundreds of marvelous paint ings in this city. This was a Vermeer. Nothing less from Richard would satisfy. He had to find some authentic reason for living as he had. The possibil ity of illegitimacy of what he'd suffered for was like a voice that had the power to waken him from a dream, but the dream gripped hard, as it does to an awakened, crying child, and he would not give it up.

Richard had admired the work. He was, per haps, only a brush hair's breadth away from believ ing. The relief from sharing with one person who did not laugh was intoxicating. Why he didn't do it years ago, he couldn't say. He'd wasted years in a miser's clutch, protecting a father who had pro tected no one. He wanted more. For the first time, he imagined himself telling it all, the history and his father's part of it, so Richard would believe, telling it with burning eyes right there in front of the painting, and he would not die. He would not die from shame.

He kept repeating it—I will not die—while the flames burnt down to coals.

The painting bound me to Cornelius with a cu rious tie, compelling but misbegotten, so that when I saw him mornings at the faculty mail room, the thought of that strange, secretive evening and his perverse insistence troubled me still. I felt I'd been plucked by the sleeve and commanded to fol low him into a dangerous sea of judgment that could rise up against me as well.

We kept a coded language. One day I asked, not to goad him, but strictly as an aesthetics issue, "Would you enjoy it any less if you were to learn it wasn't authentic?"

"But it is."

"Yes, but just supposing it weren't?"

"I don't have to think about that. I know."

His bloated sureness irritated me.

I had the distinct impression that he was not at home in the world, and I knew it had to do with that painting. I did a bit of reading, talked to my art historian friend, and one Friday afternoon in the parking lot at school I asked him, "Did you know that a Dutch painter named van Meergeren forged some Vermeers in the 1930s?" He froze there by his car. "So real he had the art critics and curators believing him?"

"Yes, I was aware of that." Cornelius straight ened up stiffly.

"And you know how they found out? He sold a few to that Nazi, Goering, and the Dutch govern ment arrested him for treason—collaborating with the enemy, letting Dutch masters leak out of Hol land into the hands of the Reichstag. And so he confessed."

Cornelius's eyes darted back to his car where his hand trembled trying to find the keyhole. In that quiver I knew I had inadvertently stumbled onto something. Maybe he knew it was only a Van Meegeren all along, and was trying to make a dupe of me, or sell it to me for an exorbitant price. A friend might let it pass, but we were only col leagues, committed, both of us, the mathematician and the artist, to truth. "I'd like to see it again, if you wouldn't mind," I said.

"Whenever you'd like," he said, all cordiality, and made a move to get into his car.

"How about now?"

He stood still a moment, gathering himself, it seemed to me. "No time like the present."

In the daylight the painting was even more mag nificent than I remembered it. I sank into the chair in a trance. The luster of the glass of milk shining like the surface of a pearl made me believe—this was no copyist's art—but Cornelius's puffed-up manner the weeks before made me obstinate.

Yet now he had none of that smugness. There was only the intense pleasure of the painting. Lov ingly he pored over its surface with an intimacy I hadn't noticed before in his flood of facts. If ever a man loved a work of art, it was Cornelius. His face shone with the adoration of a pilgrim for the icon of his God.

"I'd like to believe. It's not that I want to kill your own belief. But there's still one huge ques tion."

"Which is?"

"Cornelius, you and I are teachers. Our fathers weren't millionaires. Unless you tell me how he ob tained it, I don't see how—"

The radiance drained from his face.

I let the suggestion lie there and took a sip of the beer he'd brought me. He finished his in one long, thoughtful draft, and held on to the bottle af ter he'd set it down, as if to anchor himself. I waited.

"I grew up in Duisburg, near the Dutch border . . . ," he began, keeping his gaze riveted to the young girl while he spoke of his childhood, as though ingesting strength from her calm.

"And here, after sweating through a high school history class, I asked in spite of Mother's solemn warning never to ask, 'What did you do in the war, Dad?' 'Worked in Amsterdam,' was all he said. Just like it was a job. 'Yes, but what did you do?' I asked. 'I have a right to know.' His body stopped all motion even out to his fingertips, as if he were feeling the first tremors of an earthquake. 'Took them to the trains,' he said."

Cornelius turned to me then.

"He took me to Yankee Stadium. Kept my hand warm in his own pocket. Planted daffodils for my mother. If I could have wept, if he had not trained it out of me . . . after that, he never was the same to me."

Cornelius's eyes, when he told me of the boy in the cabinet, became glazed like melted glass, and there was a hardness to his voice when he told of the missing tea set. When he said he'd tried to burn the painting, his whole body shook, and he slumped down at his desk, spent.

Worse, a hundred times worse than I'd thought. That he had tried to destroy it, I could hardly be lieve. That he thought such an act might atone sickened me. I did not, I was sorry to learn, find in myself any generosity or charitableness for this man in spite of his suffering.

Clutching the edge of his desk with both hands, he leaned toward me, his forehead a torture of grooves above that hook of a nose. "You won't tell, will you, the others at school? You see, now that you . . . now that one person in the world sees that it's authentic, it's all worthwhile, don't you think?"

His upper lip twitched in a repulsive way as though tugged by a thread. It became clear to me then why he picked me. He thought an artist might excuse, out of awe for the work, and if I excused, the painting could live.

"What happened to the boy?"

He stammered a moment, unable to put into words what we both knew.

"You know what they say, Cornelius. One good burning deserves another."

I left him hunched there, took another look at the painting I knew would be my last, and could not get out of there fast enough. Poor fool, ruining his life for a piece of cloth smeared with mineral paste, for a fake, I had to tell myself, a mere curiosity.

With that to do ahead of him now, how he'd face me, how I'd face him Monday morning, I didn't know.

A Night Different From All Other Nights

The day before, Hannah Vredenburg and her younger brother Tobias watcheddag their father let his partner's pigeons go, back to their home in Antwerp. One by one, waiting between each for safety, he released them from the attic coop when the early morning was still foggy so no passing offi cer might see and note the house number. The de cree against Amsterdam Jews keeping pigeons— their own or somebody else's—was eight months old, and Hannah knew it was getting too danger ous to disobey. Surrendering them this late at the German police station, as the decree had ordered, would result in repercussions.

"Quickly, Hannah, before Tobias comes up," her father had said, and handed her the paper and pencil in hands trembling too much to write. "Here, write this. Write small." It was the message to be placed in the tiny canister of his partner's last bird. "Kill my pigeons," he whispered, pausing be tween sentences. "I can't expect you to feed them for the duration. Don't endanger yourself and don't release them, but let them eat their fill first. Leo with the purple-edged wings likes lentils best. Henriette, the blue-barred female, likes to have her head rubbed. This will be the last message until it's over, God willing. We are well. May you be safe."