Pictures at an Exhibition (19 page)

I tried to take this in. He had entered directly?

“I don't know what he was doing that night. He didn't come in.

He was never at my door, as far as I know. That would have been very different, Max. I would have left the house in a moment, in my dressing gown, calling for the police and President Lebrun.”

“Really?”

“What do you take me for?” She laid a warm hand on my arm, her second touch. “I cut my hair to become invisible,” she said. “And it worked.”

Somewhere within the Mairie, a siren started up. The circle of policemen scattered. One jumped on his motorcycle and, with a violent kick to the ratcheting levers, roared past. The church chimed again, seven o'clock.

“I'm invisible even now,” she said. “Except to you, Max Beren-zon.”

I leaned down and kissed her. She tipped backward, repeating, “No, no, no.”

“I don't understand,” I gasped.

“I stand by what I said, that day, after we left Mother's hospital.”

“When can I see you again?”

“Whenever you want.” She removed my jacket. “Max, how have you managed without your coat? Paris is a Frigidaire!”

“Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?”

“As early as possible. Before the sun rises.”

“Old man.” She laughed, imitating Bertrand, and we both grew serious again. Rose did not finish her sentence. I wanted to ask her about our paintings, but she was already pulling away from me.

“By the fountain, at five in the afternoon,” she said, naming four days hence.

“Promise me you will be here.”

She nodded solemnly. “Now turn,” she ordered, and reached to put her hands on my shoulders, as one spins a blindfolded child on his birthday. “I don't want you to watch me walk home.”

I walked toward the fountain. A flock of crows had landed on the head, shoulders, and knees of the great stone bishop. The birds shrieked. The statue seemed alive. I hardly knew what I had seen.

Chapter Sixteen

I
WENT FROM THE CAISSE DES DéPôTS ET CONSIGNA
tions, to the Office des Biens et Intérêts privés, to the Union Générale des Israélites de France on rue de Téhéran. At the last office, a young secretary whom I had met before said, “It's useless to try to find these paintings. At least, now it is.”

I would ignore her. I left the building and gave the American soldier by its door a mock salute.

Then it was Wednesday and then Thursday, and Rose was beside me again, skin glowing and white and almost translucent at the temples, the crest of her skull visible through her cropped hair, her smile wide and her lips chapped. She wove her arm through mine.

“It's wonderful to see you again, to see you twice,” she said. I smiled stupidly. “We are such old, good friends.” She patted my cheek, waving at me the scent of her leather gloves and their mink oil. “Don't frown, Max. You are man and boy. One of your many charms. Tell me more about your parents. When do I get my audience?”

I said I did not want to talk about my father.

“How can we talk about your paintings if we do not talk about him?” she asked.

I told her my story, quickly, about Father giving up on the paintings and about the stolen hat, wallet, map, and address book.

Rose considered me in silence.

“I could use a drink,” I said, with forced cheer. “One of Bertrand's haunts is nearby.”

Georges was a bar below street level on rue des Canettes, where they served wine in jam jars and the walls were bare stone and medieval. A gypsy boy with wild licks of dark hair played flamenco guitar in the corner and howled and wailed, his voice breaking between the minor intervals.

“On Sunday you were going to tell me how to become invisible.”

“I can still do that.”

“Well, go ahead.” I poured wine into our glass jars.

“In November of 1940,I worked all my hours at the Jeu de Paume. Researching Giotto, doing Jaujard's bidding—I hardly remember. We all moved like bees in the cold, sleepy, stumbling around, half dead. Then one morning we were shocked into motion by the sound of boots, marching in step, echoing through the museum. We congregated in the central hall, and there was Jaujard with a Nazi colonel he introduced as Baron von Behr. He had a wrinkled face with a sharp nose and wore a shining helmet and a long redingote with a wolf's-fur collar. The Germans announced they were to take over the Jeu de Paume and use it as a warehouse for
biens sans maîtres
, goods without owners. Vichy owned the belongings of all emigrants, von Behr said. The Reich deserved Jewish goods because of war costs, and by consolidating ownerless artwork in the Jeu de Paume they ensured state control over anarchy. My head spun with the details and the logic. This was a short-term solution for a problem easily remedied. They would handle all bookkeeping themselves—Vichy could sleep soundly—anyway, soon the ‘collecting for safekeeping’ would stop. Then von Behr explained that, since the Louvre's storerooms were all filled, the Jeu de Paume's new use was effective immediately.”

“How is that possible?” I asked. The Louvre had hectares of underground rooms and corridors.

“Exactly,” Rose said. “This was our first glimpse of the scale of their theft. The French curators were all dismissed, and we began to file out of the main hall. We had surrendered our museum in less than five minutes. Then, as if it had been planned, one of the electric
bulbs high in the ceiling burst and scattered glass everywhere. ‘There are maintenance issues to attend to!’ Jaujard shouted, like a madman. ‘The building will not care for itself!’

“The colonel pointed to me and said I could stay. Like that, I was assigned from one army to the other. To work for the
Germans
and maintain the Jeu de Paume's facilities. I remember shaking so violently that two colleagues held my arms. Jaujard said, 'since Mademoiselle Clément will be here on behalf of the French museums, she will keep her own lists of artwork,’ and von Behr conceded.

“Within an hour, a constant stream of men in the various uniforms of Parisian moving companies traveled back and forth in the building, wheeling in crates of artwork and carrying crates out as they were emptied. There was such a frenzy of hanging pictures! Half a dozen that I saw fell from walls and were kicked underfoot in the mêlée. A portrait by Santerre was stamped on and torn in two.

“I drifted from room to room, looking for my counterpart, the dutiful German doing his half of the double bookkeeping. Yet no one was writing. They were only hammering apart the boxes so that the air was filled with blows and the sound of splitting wood and the smell of pine. There was no bookkeeping. Von Behr, of course, had lied.

“I thought the walls could not support all the paintings they hung. Four hundred crates were carried in—and that was just the first day. Something rattled around inside me that had wanted to come undone for some time; maybe it had even been loose before the war. I can't explain it. I continued nonetheless to establish lists as complete and precise as possible. On the surface, this was to show the Germans that a Frenchwoman knew how to obey orders. Yet, without speaking to him, I knew Jaujard had named me for this task so that, when the day of our liberation came, we might begin to retrace the paths of the stolen paintings and return them to their rightful owners. At the time, we could not grasp that this would be difficult for the most horrific of reasons.

“I figured that it is twenty-eight centimeters from my elbow to my wrist and that the flat of my bent forefinger is four centimeters. This way I could measure the paintings inconspicuously. I worked
quickly and was proud of my accurate records. I told myself I would be a model of French deference. If I demonstrated my obedience, I would become invisible in the epidemic of French submissiveness.

“Yet if I so much as pulled back my sleeve to try to measure a painting, one of Goering's men would appear, grinning, and ask me in horrid French was I too hot or did I need him to help me off with my coat. On the second day, I was warned to stop keeping lists and concern myself only with the building's maintenance, but I did not obey. I continued to draw up my lists in secret.

“The building's maintenance was a position of nominal importance. But I felt myself embody, for the Germans, their mania for discipline. It was more practical, and adhered to their sense of hierarchy, to address their collective complaints to me. I then reproached the personnel. Still, I used this to my advantage. If I were beloved by none, my work would be less suspect. And no one knew I spoke German.

“I had allies inside the museum, sent to me first by Jaujard and then through their own network, packing men who would visit my tiny office to say, ‘Yesterday's shipments were all from the Rothschilds on avenue Marigny. Today they're from rue Saint-Honoré’—yet no ally could stay for long, because in the next moment he would be ribbed, within my earshot. ‘Hah, sweet on Clément, are you?’

“The day I heard, ‘Don't you know von Behr's reserved her for himself?’ I panicked. I had let my hair grow out of superstition. I vowed not to cut it until your gallery was restored.” Angrily, she rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand. “And then there was a sign in a wig shop that they would pay well for hair forty centimeters or longer. So I went to the woman and sold her my hair. She asked me if I cared how close she got to the skull, and I said, ‘Cut it as short as you can.’ If I was going to look as unwomanly as possible, I didn't want her to cut carefully. And I needed the money.”

“Didn't my father provide for you?” I asked.

“I declined his offer, which frustrated him to no end. Remember, I expected your family to return any day. So the old wig weaver tied my pretty hair into three ponytails like I was a Chinaman, braided
each one, and then lopped them off. She laughed a little when she saw me. When I looked into the mirror, I cried.”

Rose paused and drained her wine. The glass was ringed with purple sediment. The gypsy boy sang and knocked his knuckles against the soundboard of his guitar. When he smiled at the crowd's applause, he could not hide his missing front teeth. He loosened a red scarf from his neck, used it to wipe his face, sang another ballad, and strummed its minor chords.

“And then at the Jeu de Paume, I heard one of the packers—there were hundreds of them, working shifts even when the rest of us were not allowed in the museum—say, ‘Well, if the girl's cut her hair off, at least she still has her nice shape for us to look at,’ and I thought, Oh, no, you don't, and found someone to give me a man's uniform. And when my transformation was a fait accompli, I felt a huge sense of relief, as if I were a thousand kilos lighter and heavier at the same time.

“I had erected a fence around myself,” she continued, her voice as taut as a wire. “When, in my presence, the men began discussing the women whose bedrooms they could spy into, and their sweethearts and their whores, I could have skipped for joy. I see your face! I did this without any sadness, Max. When I understood what was most important to me—that I turn myself into a registry of lost art, a dictionary for when the missing returned—everything else fell away.”

We were quiet for a while. The gypsy boy wailed in ecstasy. I pictured myself as a clock with its springs bursting out. Rose said, “Did I tell you how cold that winter was, in 1940? We crossed over the frozen Seine directly, rather than take the bridges.”

I ran my fingers through her short hair. “And cold without your mane.”

She tossed her head like a horse. “Terribly.”

I reached over, draped a massive arm on either side of her slim shoulders, and lifted her onto my lap. “Sit here, I'll keep you warm.”

“No, I shouldn't,” she said, slurring a little.

“Everyone here is drunk,” I said, which may have been true. “No one will notice.”

I buried my face in her collar and closed my eyes and listened to
her talk. She explained that for four months the Jeu de Paume processed only the collections of the Rothschilds. She saw
The Astronomer
, one of their Vermeers, but nothing from rue de La Boétie. The Nazi organization that ran the lootings, collecting, and dispersals east (via the Gare de l'Est or the airport at Le Bourget to the Reich's new and expanding frontiers) was called the ERR and was led by Alfred Rosenberg, who, Rose said, resembled a ferret.

The drunker Rose grew, the more sober I became. What she was telling me, I realized stupidly, the whole tapestry of it, was amazing and terrible. I lifted her off my lap and began taking notes on what she said on the newspaper that covered our table.

Rose continued, “Against the floorboards were generations of portraits. The family line laid out. Even portraits of pets. King Charles spaniels. A cockatoo! And then a Modigliani nude and a Chagall bride. Floating.” Her hand drifted in the air as if she were hypnotized. “Only the Boucher was hung on the wall. See, the Boucher would be kept, and the modern works—mixed in with those of only personal value—they would go somewhere else. Every painting has a vanishing point, Max. In the Jeu de Paume, I was in the vanishing point of all of them.” Her voice shook.

We were both silent. “And then the
chef emballeur
says to me, ‘Reichsmarschall Goering will visit the Jeu de Paume tomorrow. With ten Germans here tomorrow for every one of us—and more! On the roof, in the gardens, on the balcony of the Crillon, in the Métro at Concorde—only those with an
Ausweis
signed by the Reichsmarschall can even come to work. So you may as well stay home.’

“But I had an
Ausweis.
So Jaujard was afoot in this decision. He wanted me to see what happened.”

Rose took the pen out of my hand and tucked it behind her ear. Then she put her hand in my own.

“Sometimes I feel like you are my brother,” she said.

I carefully folded my scrawled-upon newspapers rather than look at her as she said this.

“You've been heroic,” I said. “They will give you the Legion of Honor. I heard you had been a traitor.”

“And yet you still cared for me? That's bad morals, Berenzon.”

“You are drunk,” I said.

“And you are smart,” she slurred. “And terribly handsome. It's a pity. And—write this down—I don't want the Legion of Honor. Not from any government that still has the Vichy stink on it.”