Pictures at an Exhibition (12 page)

“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, “Don'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.”

“Home to where?”

“To Le Puy.” Mother refused to return to Paris until the Germans and the Japanese surrendered. “I spoke with Auguste today,” Father said, not looking at me. “He was kept on in the house up until the fire.”

“How did you find him?” I asked.

“I had a flash of brilliance.” He snapped his fingers and grew animated as if turned on by a switch. “It came to me while I was waiting in the bread line. I remembered his sister's name, and that she lived near Chartres and worked at the candle factory for the cathedral. When I rang her up, Auguste answered.” Father pulled the blanket over his feet and leaned back against the bed pillows.

“How is he?”

“We were both overcome when we realized we were speaking to each other after five years.”

“And Lucie?” I asked.

“Still in Paris. And married, for the first time. And at her age.” Lucie would have turned fifty-five or so, I imagined, though she had not seemed to change at all in the twenty years I knew her—not her jet-black hair, or her pinched face, or her fat man's laugh. “Her surname is Zbrewski or something difficult to pronounce. I have it written down.” He gestured toward the leather address book on the bedside table.

The conversation with Auguste had mainly concerned my father's library of photographic plates. Before the war, Father used the plates to show collectors paintings he thought they might buy, as well as to keep documentation of the hundreds of works that had passed through 21, rue de La Boétie. The plates occupied seven cabinets, each three drawers tall, in a storeroom in our basement. Father would have preferred to keep them closer to his office, but Mother was afraid that the film would catch fire.

The Germans emptied the cabinets into paper sacks and labeled each with a painter's name. Then they put an announcement in the dailies that there would be a sale in two days’ time. Picasso arrived four hours before the sale was to begin, and Auguste let him into the gallery. He purchased the complete collection of his own works, and those of Georges Braque, and filled the seats of a taxicab with the paper sacks.

“The plates sold for very little—each bag cost thirty francs,” my father said. “I did not ask Auguste if he considered acquiring any. Who knows? Maybe he thought it fruitless to buy only thirty or forty plates when there were hundreds. Maybe any cost was more than he could spare. Perhaps he worried that we would not return to Paris to repay him.”

“Picasso could have bought all the plates, ten times over,” I said.

“You see, Max”—Father's fist came down on the bedside table and the lamplight quivered—”this is why we do poorly when we affix ourselves to objects. They lead to longing and to speculation. This makes a man sick.” Father coughed. The curtains billowed, although the window sashes were closed.

“Like Goethe,” I said, with hollow cheer.
“Let the observer look steadfastly on a small colored object and let it be taken away after a time while his eyes remain unmoved. The spectrum of another color will then be visible on the white plane. It arises from an image which now belongs to the eye.”