Pictures at an Exhibition (22 page)

“Did you know the painting had belonged to my father?” I asked.

“Certainly not. I gave not a thought to its origins. I hung it in my own home for several years and forgot all about it—something new eventually becomes so familiar it grows invisible. However, my financial situation has been more difficult of late, so Lola, my daughter, reminded me of this small Morisot and suggested we sell it.

“Mr. Berenzon, I pity your plight, I really do. I can't imagine how I would behave if I were as distinguished and established as your father in this field, and if all my life's treasures
went poof !”
She made the shape of an explosion with her hands. “Where
is
the elder Mr. Berenzon? Why doesn't he make these inquiries?”

What could I say? That I had seen my father unhinged? “I don't know,” I said.

“Oh, you're just a dear young boy.” Madame de La Porte des Vaux wrapped her bony fingers around my wrist. “You have suffered. I know how you must have suffered.” She tightened her grasp. “I want to help you, Monsieur Berenzon. But I've done my part in the war effort, no? I see that you're a fine young man, if lost in the world. I know you will be tempted to come see me again, but resist this urge. The urges we feel most strongly in life are the ones most essential to resist. If you do not make me regret my kindness, I shan't mention to the other dealers that you're on the hunt. If I do, your search will run as dry as the desert.” She buzzed the exit to the gallery and, wordlessly, I left.

WHEN I ARRIVED ON ROSE'S DOORSTEP AND TOLD HER
I had found the Morisot, it made her call out as if in ecstasy.

“With one name from you, I found this,” I said. Rose nodded. “Did you know it was there?” Rose said she did not, and for the first time I doubted her honesty. She refused to look at me yet invited me in. I joined her in the wire elevator, not with the sense of elation that a young man should feel in a small space with a girl but with the dull
desperation of an action he feels powerless to defy. We did not speak. She opened her door with a key on a ribbon, took my coat from me, and hung it in the closet-office, out of sight.

“Give me another name, like Madame de La Porte des Vaux,” I asked.

“You're a pawn,” Rose replied. “She's suspect, so you've just allowed her to privately dispense with some of her looted goods. She's a shrewd businesswoman. She will be pleased to have you frightening other dealers to sell quickly or, better yet, to give you their paintings outright. A Morisot is not nearly as precious as a Manet. What she has parted with is not priceless—which is in comparison to the high personal value that she correctly imagines you place on it. She has made the better deal, still.”

“Of course,” I said loudly. I had not thought about the value at all, only the sensation that this was the first of many doors unlocking, at the end of which stood my father.

“Hush,” Rose said. “The neighbors will think—”

“Your neighbors are all indecent,” I said. “Unless you tell me they've been in the woods with the partisans.” I gripped her arm.

“Max, I'm sick,” she said. “That hurts, let go.”

I put my hand on her forehead. It was clammy. “Have you seen the doctor?”

“Look, I'm going gray,” she said, and parted her hair for me to see. It was streaked with white. “Max, I want you to have ordinary happiness.”

“What?”

“May I have a cigarette?” Rose asked. “I think that you are looking for extraordinary happiness, with me, with these lost paintings, and it is not here. Not in this lifetime. Only aspire, Max, to ordinary happiness. It makes me feel hopelessly sad to see you, when you are so alive and gay, and it's wasted on me. Go back to medical school. Stop looking.

“I know you're asking me for another name. But don't you understand that if you appear at the door of every suspect art dealer, and they draw the line connecting you and me, they'll know I know about their trades and I'll be unable to carry on my work?”

“We're running out of time.”

“Some will sell, but some will not. I'm only one woman. No one understands what has happened like I do.”

“Let me help you.”

“Don't be ridiculous. You're made entirely in your father's image. You don't know what you're stumbling into. I told you—let me carry on with my work.”

Rose stood and filled the teakettle. After four silent minutes, it whistled hysterically.

I sat in Rose's chair and listened to her story, which was not told in a single breath but, rather, with several pauses, over the greater part of the night. At times she narrated it to me; at times, when I neared sheer exhaustion, it seemed as if I told the story to myself. Rose was lucid and detached as she spoke, and for the first time I wondered if she had completely survived the war. She performed a strange, hypnotic dance around the piles of papers in the main room and in the closet-office, lifting the tilting stacks midway, as a magician takes any card from a deck but knows its number and suit, and then she would read out loud the list of figures or addresses or paintings’ names. I realized that these tens of thousands of documents were, in fact, all ordered according to the system she had arranged in her miraculous mind. The only other person who could also do this would have been my father.

“It was with your collection that I understood how Goering had organized a new economy. It benefited Hitler first, Goering shortly thereafter, and next the French art dealers. For example, in your case, Goering's insatiable lust found a French art dealer's
Portrait of a Bearded Man
—Italian school, sixteenth century—and a scene of the hunt supposedly by Jan Weenix. Dark masterworks of debatable authenticity. The market was flooded with forgeries precisely because the Germans wanted this so-called Aryan art, from centuries past, with no ‘degeneracy’ or modernity to it. Thus, at the Jeu de Paume, the
chef emballeur
was told to gather
Nature morte aux fruits
by Braque, Cézanne's
La Douleur
, Degas's
Madame Camus au piano
, three paintings from the Kann collection, one of your Sisley winter scenes,
Maternité
by Corot, three Matisses, and Picasso's
Mère et
l'Enfant
for shipment. All together, twelve of the best-known paintings in modern art, exchanged for those two morose Old Masters. No money changed hands. The Jews’ art replaced the need for currency. Goering kept his two paintings, and the French dealer obtained twelve masterpieces that he would quickly sell and set adrift on the active art market. Hitler's acquisitions are much easier for me to trace, since he insisted on ‘paying’ for his. He had a middle-class attitude toward finances. Goering, the rich man, took what he wanted. Abetz, too. They say he reconstructed your father's entire office as his own, on avenue Marigny. It's all dismantled now, of course.

“In July of 1941, a light on the roof of the museum was left on. In a hateful coincidence, the Reichsmarschall had visited that very day and we were to entertain an audience of Feldpolizei the next. The word
sabotage
was quick on everyone's lips. As a French citizen, I was naturally suspect for attempting, during the blackouts, to send a signal to the Allies. What luck that my first interrogation was for a crime I had not committed. Later, I could assume the same righteous manner when I was, under the circumstances, guilty. I adopted a German attitude during questioning; I reaffirmed my position over and over, without embellishment and without heat. I had only detachment, and my curmudgeonly reputation, and my ugly hair and clothes.

“On another occasion, a German soldier spied me copying the descriptions of paintings. He confiscated my notebook and de livered it to his superior, who tore it to bits. That was my second interrogation—which followed much as the first: the German's rapid-fire questions and my stubborn, repetitive answers—and this satisfied the soldier. I went home that night in a fever to re-create the notebook from memory, which I did.

“In May of 1943, a large shipment left the Jeu de Paume for Germany. Many of the staff went on holiday, as we were told there would be no work to do at the museum. Still, in the Salle des Martyrs—the so-called degenerate art repository—and in the storage rooms of the basement, there were more than five thousand paintings left behind. Their abandonment was a matter of concern. I complained to the
soldiers who remained in the museum of the faulty wiring in the Salle des Martyrs and the basement and, after I undertook a quick tour of these rooms’ lamps and sockets, though I nearly electrocuted myself in the process, I had a dozen easy reasons to stay behind.

“I walked among the paintings that had not been shipped—Masson, Miró, Picabia, Valadon, Max Ernst, Léger, Picasso, Kisling, La Fresnaye, and Klee. On May 26, they disappeared. On May 27,I arrived at work almost at dawn, and already a column of smoke greeted me above the terrace of the Tuileries. By sunset, the fire still burned, fueled, I assumed, by the five or ten thousand paintings that our occupiers considered so dangerous. After that, the museum was quiet, as if in hibernation, for almost a year.

“On Bastille Day of 1944, Alfred Rosenberg's organization, the ERR, issued an internal report of European confiscations. Its author was modest, admitting that the numbers did not include the seizures of the East and regretting that ten thousand objects had not been cataloged at the time of the report's completion. Still, this balance was its own account of the German victory. The 22,004 works of art were categorized as:

10,890 paintings, watercolors, and drawings

684 miniatures, paintings on glass and enamel, books, and manuscripts

2,477 furniture pieces of acknowledged historical value

583 textiles: tapestries, rugs, and brocades

5,825 objets d'art: porcelains, bronzes, jewels

1,286 archaeological pieces from the Far East

259 objects from antiquity, including sculptures, vases, and jewels

“There was enough furniture to fill 29,436 railway wagons. As the summer progressed, and the rate of convoys leaving for Germany reached breakneck speed, I had a sense of the German army gathering its loot and preparing to evacuate it by rail, as that trip was much faster than the one by road. The ERR did not wait until the last minute to pack its bags. After the landings at D-Day, the Resistance grew bolder and their acts of sabotage increased. That was after the SS massacre at Oradour.

“Another grand shipment was arranged, with an air of finality about it. A museum's worth of Cézanne, Gauguin, Modigliani, and Renoir paintings were brought to the train station. There were twenty-four works by Dufy, twenty-eight by Braque, twenty-five by Fujita, four by Degas, three Toulouse-Lautrecs, eleven Vlamincks, ten Utrillos, sixty-four Picassos, ten Segonzacs, more than fifty by Marie Laurencin, and eight by Bonnard. At the Gare de l'Est, forty-seven railcars awaited the shipments from M-Aktion, the agency that collected quotidian goods and fine furnishings. M-Aktion moved slowly, and I had time to notify the Second Armored Division of the presence of this train. The convoy's destination, we believed, was the château of the Prince of Dietrichsten, in Nikolsburg, about eighty kilometers from the Austrian capital.

“The men in the railroads orchestrated their resistance. It went like this: When Colonel von Behr gave his orders for the train to depart, the tracks were in use! There was no one person who could be blamed for the masses of locomotives waiting to load, unload, refuel, cross, enter, and depart. Still, there was such traffic in Paris as had not been seen in years. The Germans were angered but hardly surprised. They looked for any excuse to point out our national disorderly malaise. Several more days passed, and finally the long train full of paintings made its way out of the capital, only to break down at Bourget. The mechanics explained it was too laden for the tired engine. In Aulnay, a pause was necessary to replace the locomotive. Engineers swore up and down that it would be ready to depart by six o'clock on July 27.

“And this was the opportune hour, the time that the men of the railroad had arranged with the Second Armored Division. The approaching armies of Leclerc arrived in Aulnay, seized the town, and stopped the train. The important story, that of the artwork, ends there, when the art was returned to French hands.

“On August 19, as de Gaulle's forces approached Paris, I returned to the Jeu de Paume to keep track of any remaining stores when the Germans retreated. I recognized the uniformed men on the museum's roof. They waved to me, and I waved back. There was fighting during the day and at night. I dozed at the desk in my office,
wakened at three a.m. by gunfire in the distance and again at five by gunfire overhead. At dawn, I counted nine bodies in brown sprawled dead around the museum. From the shapes they made in the dust, I gathered that they had fallen from the rooftop. Another gun battle lasted two more hours, and then the three hundred soldiers that held the Tuileries surrendered.

“I watched as our countrymen rejoiced. But I could not leave my post to celebrate with them: as soon as the Americans captured the German gunners in the Grand Palais, the Jeu de Paume was surrounded by razor wire and turned into a prisoner camp. I thought, This is what they mean by a war museum.

“Soon the Jeu de Paume was breached, filled again with the sounds of marching men, most of whom would have never set foot in a museum before. Three maintenance men and I, trembling all, were hidden at the back of the building. I went out to greet the conquerors first, hoping that the presence of a woman would calm them and that the lives of the maintenance workers would be spared. With a submachine gun trained on my back, I led the Allied soldiers through the museum as they kicked empty crates and flung open closet doors and dynamited the locks on the vaults, looking for the Nazis. I was lucky that no German soldiers were found. When I returned the following day, no trace of the
Boches
remained—not a single helmet, gun, leaf of stationery, flag, or plate bearing the insignia of the Reich. Somehow my papers, though they had been rifled through, remained an intact collection. In this, again, I saw the hand of Jau-jard.