Red Square (36 page)

   
Arkady had last seen Ali with his grandfather Makhmud at the South Port car market in Moscow. Ali smacked the table with his hand like a body hitting the ground and started to roar all over again. When an empty bottle rolled off the table on to the gravel, Ali didn't deign to pick it up. The other man at the table was also Chechen, older with eyebrows brushed like fans. The kids in leather jackets found the laughter offensive, but after some cautious glances left the two men alone. Ali spread his arms like wings, pretended to flutter, then to drop. Waved away praise for his acting from the man across the table. Lifted his glass and lit a cigarette with satisfaction.

   
No one else wanted to jump for Ali's entertainment. After fifteen minutes, he and the other Chechen left and walked to Potsdamer Platz, where they got into a black VW Cabriolet and drove away. Arkady couldn't follow on foot, but he turned back in the direction of the Ku'damm with a freshened eye.

 
  
In front of the Ka-De-We department store he found two Chechens resting on the fender of an Alfa-Romeo. Up the Ku'damm, outside the great glass rectangle of the Europa Centre, four Lyubertsy mafiosos were squeezed together in a Golf. A sidestreet called Fasanenstrasse had elegant restaurants with French doors and wine stands, and also small, hairy Chechens tucked in the booth of one of them. On the next block a Long Pond mafioso patrolled the boutiques.

   
Arkady went to Zoo Station again. The telephone books and the operator had no listings for TransKom or Boris Benz. There was a number for a Margarita Benz. Arkady called.

   
On the fifth ring Irina answered, 'Hello?'

   
'This is Arkady.'

   
'How are you?'

   
'I'm fine. I'm sorry to bother you.'

   
'No, I'm glad you called,' Irina said.

   
'I was wondering when this event was tonight. And how formal it is.'

   
'At seven. You'll come here with Max and me. Don't worry about formality. Do what German intellectuals do: when in doubt, wear black. They all look like widows. Arkady, are you sure you're all right? Is Berlin completely confusing?'

   
'No, actually it's starting to look familiar.'

The address for Margarita Benz was only two blocks away, on Savigny Platz. On the way Arkady passed a short commercial section of electronics shops with notices in Polish. Polish cars were parked in front. Men unloaded aromatic bags of cheap Socialist sausage and loaded VCRs.

   
He found the address at a genteel doorway just off Savigny. The legend below the third-floor button was
gallerie benz.
He hesitated, then turned away.

   
Savigny Platz itself was a square with two matching mini-parks, each surrounded by a tall box hedge. A formal garden was laid out with marigolds and pansies. Set deep into the hedges were arbours designed for trysts.

   
Something about the neatly trimmed palisade of the hedge made him walk through the park and to a corner. Across the street were the outdoor tables of a restaurant under a filigree of shade lent by a beech. As he crossed, he heard the clatter of cutlery. A waiter poured coffee at a sideboard framed by honeysuckle grown over a yellow wall. Four tables were occupied, two by executive types efficiently eating, two by students resting heads in hands. The tables inside were hidden by reflections of the street. In the windowpanes the box hedge of the park looked like a solid wall of green.

   
It was the Bavarian beer garden from Rudy's tape. Arkady had thought it was in Munich because it had been inserted into a travelogue of the city, an assumption so stupid in retrospect that it made his stomach hurt. He was hungry, but it was stupidity that was sharp.

   
A waiter was staring at him. '1st Frau Benz hier?' Arkady asked.

   
The waiter checked the end table, the same one she sat at in the tape. Her regular table, obviously.

   
'Nein.'

   
Why insert Margarita Benz into the tape? The only reason Arkady could think of was identification if she had never met Rudy before and didn't want to give him her name. But she was the son of woman who had her own table at an attractive restaurant on a stylish plaza in Berlin. What business could a Moscow money-changer have with her?

   
The waiter was still staring. 'Danke.' Arkady backed away, catching his own image in the glass, as if he had stepped into the tape, too.

On the way back to the flat, Arkady bought blankets, towel, soap and a pullover in intellectual black. At six thirty p.m. he was collected by Max and Irina on their way down to the garage.

   
'You're thin; you can wear something like that,' Max said. Covered by a jacket with brass buttons, he looked as if he'd stepped off a yacht.

   
Irina wore an emerald outfit that accented the red in her hair. She was so nervous and excited that in the lift she was like an extra light.

   
Arkady was fascinated by this whole new life she had. He said, 'This is a big affair. You don't want to tell me what it is?'

   
'It's a surprise,' she said.

   
'Do you know anything about art?' Max asked Arkady as if including a child.

   
Irina said, 'Arkady will recognize this.'

   
They drove in the Daimler along the Tiergarten to Kantstrasse. Irina turned around to Arkady, her eyes were huge in the shell-like gloom of the saloon. 'You are all right? It worried me when you called.'

   
Max asked, 'He called?'

   
'I'm looking forward to this, whatever it is,' Arkady said.

   
Irina reached back and took his hand. 'I'm glad you came,' she said. 'It's perfect.'

   
They parked at Savigny Platz. Walking to the gallery, Arkady became aware that he was approaching a cultural event of some size. Men so distinguished that they could have been the kaiser escorted matrons draped in beads and jewels. Academics in black marched with wives in knitted coats. There were even berets. Photographers crowded around the nondescript entrance to the gallery. Arkady slipped in while Irina endured a short bath of flashes. Inside, a queue had formed at a brass lift. Max led the way to the stairs and pushed along the banisters past people inching up.

   
On the third floor, a throaty voice called out, 'Irina!' Arrivals showed invitations at a desk, but Irina was waved forward by a woman with a broad Slavic face and dark eyes that contradicted a mane of golden hair. She wore a long purple dress that looked like the vestment for a cult. Her make-up shifted when she smiled.

   
'And your friends.' She kissed Max three times, Russian style.

   
'You must be Margarita Benz,' Arkady said.

   
'I hope so, or I'm at the wrong gallery.' She let Arkady touch her hand.

   
He considered mentioning that they had met before, car to car, she with Rudy and he with Jaak. No, he would be a good guest, he told himself.

   
The doors were opened. The gallery was a loft with a high ceiling and movable partitions stationed to create an open section on one side, a theatre on the other, and lead the eye in between. Arkady was aware of Irina, Max, waitresses, the alert faces of security guards, the anxious faces of employees right and left.

   
On a stand in the middle of the gallery was a weathered, rectangular crate of wood. Though the corners were chipped, it was obvious that it was well constructed. Through stains, Arkady could see a blurred stamp of the eagle, wreath and swastika of the postal authority of the Third Reich.

   
However, his attention had gone to the painting that hung alone on the far wall. It was a small square canvas painted red. There was no portrait or landscape or 'picture' in it at all. There was no other colour, only red.

   
Polina had painted six almost like it to blow up cars in Moscow.

Chapter Thirty

Arkady also recognized it as
Red Square
, one of the most famous paintings in the history of Russian art. It wasn't large and it wasn't a true square either, because the upper right-hand corner rose in a disorienting manner. And it wasn't just red; as he approached, he saw that the square floated on a white background.

   
Kazimir Malevich, the son of a sugar-maker, was perhaps the greatest Russian painter of the century, and certainly the most modern, even though he died in the thirties. He was attacked as a bourgeois idealist and his paintings were hidden in museum cellars, but, with the perverse pride that Russia took in the quality of its victims, everyone knew the images of Malevich. Like every other student in Moscow, Arkady had dared to paint a red square, a black square, a white square . . . and produced junk. Somehow Malevich, who did it first, created art, and now the world genuflected to him.

   
The gallery filled rapidly. A separate room was hung with other artists of the Russian avant-garde, the brief cultural explosion that had started with the last days of the tsar, heralded the Revolution, was stifled by Stalin and was buried with Lenin. There were examples of sketches, ceramics and book jackets, though none of the gum wrappers that Feldman had mentioned. The room was almost empty because everyone was drawn to the simple red square on a white field.

   
Irina said, 'I promised you the show would be beautiful.' In Russian, the word for 'beautiful' was the same as the word for 'red'

   
'What do you think?'

   
'I love it.'

   
'You said the right thing.'

   
The painting reflected Irina. She radiated.

   
'Congratulations.' Max arrived with glasses of champagne. 'This is a coup.'

   
'Where did it come from?' Arkady asked. He couldn't imagine the Russian State Museum lending one of its most valuable possessions to a private gallery.

   
'Patience,' said Max. 'The question is what will it bring?'

   
Irina said, 'It's priceless.'

   
'Only in rubles,' Max said. 'The people here have Deutschmarks, yen and dollars.'

Thirty minutes after the doors were opened, security guards herded everyone into the theatre section, where the video artist Arkady remembered from Tommy's party was waiting beside a VCR and a parabolic rear-projection screen. There weren't enough chairs, so people sat on the floor and crowded along the walls. From the back Arkady overheard some of their comments. They were devotees and collectors, far more knowledgeable than he, but one thing even he knew: there was not supposed to be any
Red Square
by Malevich outside Russia.

   
Irina and Margarita Benz went to the front of the theatre while Max joined Arkady. Only when the room was absolutely still did the gallery owner speak. She had a hoarse voice with a Russian accent, and though Arkady's German wasn't good enough to catch every word, he understood that she was placing Malevich at the level of Cezanne and Picasso as a founder of modern art, perhaps a little higher as the most relevant and challenging artist,
the
genius of his age. As Arkady recalled, Malevich's problem was that there was another genius residing at the Kremlin, and
that
genius, Stalin, had decreed that Soviet writers and artists should be 'engineers of the human soul', which in the case of painters meant producing realistic pictures of the proletariat building dams and collective farmers reaping wheat, not mysterious red squares.

   
Margarita Benz introduced Irina as the author of the catalogue, and as she stepped forward Arkady saw her looking over the seated rows at him and Max. Even in his new pullover he was aware that he looked more like an uninvited guest than a patron of the arts, while Max was the opposite, practically a host. Or were he and Max bookends, meant to be a pair?

  
 
The lights went out. On the screen was
Red Square
, four times its actual size.

   
Irina spoke in Russian and German. Russian for him, Arkady knew; German for everyone else. 'Catalogues will be available at the door and they will go into much greater detail than anything I say now. It's important, however, that you have a visual understanding of the study this painting has undergone. There are some details you can see on a screen that you wouldn't be able to find if we allowed you to pick up the painting and examine it by hand.'

   
It was both comforting and odd to hear Irina's voice in the dark. It was like hearing her on the radio.

   
The red square was replaced on the screen by a black-and-white photo of a dark man with serious brows, fedora and top coat standing before an intact Kaiser Wilhelm Church, the one that was now a war memorial on the Ku'damm.

   
Irina said, 'In 1927 Kazimir Malevich visited Berlin for a retrospective exhibition of his paintings. He had already fallen into disfavour in Moscow. Berlin at that time had two hundred thousand Russian émigrés. Munich had Kandinsky. Paris had Chagall, the poet Tsvetayeva and the Ballet Russe. Malevich was considering his own escape. The Berlin show contained seventy Malevich paintings. He also brought with him an undetermined number of other works - in other words, half of his entire life's output. However, when he was summoned back to Moscow in June, he returned. His wife and small daughter were still in Russia. Also, the Communist Party's Central Committee's agitation and propaganda section was putting artists under more pressure and Malevich's students appealed to him to protect them. When he boarded the train for Moscow, he left instructions that none of his art be returned to Russia.

   
'At the end of the 1927 Berlin show, all the works were crated by the art-transport firm of Gustav Knauer and sent for storage at the Provinzialmuseum in Hanover, which waited for further instructions from Malevich. Some works were exhibited there, but when the Nazis came to power in 1933 and denounced 'degenerate art', which included, of course, avant-garde Russian art, the Malevich paintings were returned in their Knauer crates and hidden in the museum cellar.

   
'We know that they were still there in 1935, when Albert Barr, the director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, visited Hanover. He purchased two paintings and smuggled them out of Germany rolled in his umbrella. The Hanover museum decided that possession of the rest of the Malevich collection was too dangerous and shipped them back to one of Malevich's original hosts in Berlin, the architect Hugo Haring, who hid them first in his house and then, during the Berlin air raids, in his home town of Biberach in the south.

   
'Seventeen years later, the war over and Malevich dead, curators of Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum traced the route of the Knauer crates to Haring, who was still alive in Biberach, and acquired the paintings that now comprise the largest collection of Malevich work in the West. But from photographs of the Berlin show, we know that fifteen major paintings are missing. We also know from the quality of the Amsterdam collection that some of the finest paintings Malevich brought to Berlin were not exhibited in the Berlin show at all. How many of those private works are missing we will never know. Did they burn during the Berlin Blitz? Were they destroyed in transit by a zealous postal inspector who had discovered 'degenerate art'? Or, in all the confusion of the war, were they simply crated, stored and forgotten in Hanover or in the East Berlin warehouse of the Gustav Knauer transport firm?'

   
Malevich was replaced on the screen by a battered box covered with stamps and yellowed documents. It was the one standing in the gallery. Irina said, 'This crate came to the gallery a month after the Wall came down. The wood, nails, style of construction and bills of lading are consistent with the Knauer crates. Inside was an oil-on-canvas painting, fifty-three centimetres by fifty-three. The gallery knew at once that it had found either a Malevich or a masterful fraud. Which?'

   
The crate faded and on the screen the painting reappeared in its actual size, a hypnotic beacon. 'There are fewer than a hundred and twenty-five oil paintings by Malevich in existence. Their rarity, as well as their importance in the history of art, accounts for their extraordinarily high value, especially such masterpieces as
Red Square
. Most of the Malevich paintings were suppressed in Russia for fifty years as "ideologically incorrect" art. They're still being released now, like political hostages finally seeing the light of day. The situation is complicated, however, by the number of counterfeits flooding the Western art market. The same forgers who once produced counterfeit medieval ikons now produce counterfeit works of modern art. In the West, we rely on provenance - exhibition catalogues and bills of sale that provide the dates when art was shown, sold and resold. The situation was different in the Soviet Union. When an artist was arrested, his work was confiscated. When his friends heard of his arrest, they hastened either to hide or to destroy whatever works of his they had. The artworks of the Russian avant-garde that exist today are survivors, with the unlikely stories that survivors have of being stuffed in false bottoms or hidden behind wallpaper. Many genuine works have no provenance at all in the Western sense. To demand the usual Western provenance from a survivor of the Soviet state is to deny its survival at all.'

   
On videotape, hands in rubber gloves gently turned
Red Square
over and delicately peeled a chip, which was analysed and found to be of German manufacture from the correct time period. Irina pointed out that Russians always used German art materials when they could.

   
There were paintings within paintings. Under X-ray,
Red Square
was a negative that revealed a rectangle painted over. Under fluorescent light, the border's lower layer of zinc white paint softened to a creamy hue. Under ultraviolet light, the brushwork of lead white turned to blue. Under oblique light, magnified brushstrokes were rapid horizontal commas with variations - a cloud of strokes here, a tidal swell of strokes there in a varying sea of different reds, broken by a crazing called 'craquelure', where red paint had not bonded to the yellow paint hidden underneath.

   
Irina said, 'While the work is unsigned, every brushstroke is a signature. Brushwork, choice of paints, repainting, lack of signature, even the "craquelure" is characteristic of Malevich.'

   
Arkady liked the word
craquelure
. He suspected that under the proper light he might show some 'craquelure' of his own.

   
The screen went white again, moving over a magnified weave of canvas and primer thrown into relief by oblique light to the telltale grain of a fingerprint faintly discernible through the paint. Irina asked, 'Whose hand left this mark?'

   
A face with deep-set, mournful eyes filled the screen. The camera pulled back to show the blue tunic and sorrowful face of the late General Penyagin. Hardly a person whom Arkady had expected to meet again, least of all in artistic circles. With a pen the general pointed to similar whorls and deltas in the enlargements of two fingerprints, one lifted from the gallery's
Red
Square
and the other from an authenticated Malevich in the Russian State Museum. An off-camera voice translated. It occurred to Arkady that a German forensic technician would have been faster, but a Soviet general was more impressive. By now he had recognized the off-camera voice as Max's. It asked, 'Would you conclude these prints are from the same man?'

   
Penyagin stared straight into the camera and worked up forcefulness, as if he sensed how short his starring role would be. 'In my opinion,' he said, 'these prints are absolutely those of the same individual.'

   
As the lights of the room came up, the most kaiser-like guest in the audience rose and asked angrily, 'Do you pay a
Finderlohn
?'

   
'Finder's fee,' Max translated for Arkady.

   
Margarita answered the question. 'No. Though a
Finderlohn
is perfectly legal, we dealt directly with the owner from the start.'

   
The man said, 'Such fees are notorious ransoms. You know that I'm referring to the fees paid in Texas for the Quedlinburg treasure, which was stolen from Germany by an American soldier after the war.'

   
'No Americans are involved.' Margarita almost smiled.

   
'Only one of numerous examples of German
 
art despoiled by the occupying forces. Like the seventeenth-century painting stored in Reinhardsbrunn castle and stolen by Russian troops. Where is it now? On the auction block at Sotheby's.'

   
Margarita assured him, 'There are no Russians involved either, except for Malevich. And, of course, I have some Russian background myself. You must be aware that it is absolutely against the law to export art of this period and quality from the Soviet Union.'

   
The art lover was mollified, though not without a parting shot. 'So it came from East Germany?'