The Last Painting of Sara de Vos (37 page)

Hendrik navigates them toward Heemstede with a tattered road atlas. He tells her that this district was once filled with old estates and summering aristocrats from the cities. “Now it's filled with tired old bed-and-breakfasts and villas where nouveau riche German tourists can bunk down with their entire brood.” She looks over and sees that he's still clutching the piece of fax paper he'd been holding when she first arrived. He's an odd accomplice for this errand, but she feels herself softening toward him.

When she arrived at the private gallery in Leiden, he'd stood in the threshold, the fax paper clenched like a winning lottery ticket. Given their interactions in Sydney, she was expecting him to be aloof, even a little hostile, but he was in thrall to something that made him seem boyish and friendly. He explained that an anonymous buyer from America had offered twice what they'd paid for
At the Edge of a Wood
. The wire transfer of funds had gone through just hours before, after Hendrik had tracked down the owner of the collection by phone in Switzerland. “When I got your e-mail that you were coming here to return the painting I was very confused,” he said. “But now it all makes perfect sense. The buyer has instructed you as his private courier. You have come to tender the paperwork and receive original signatures before you deliver the painting to America. My employer returns tonight.” The halting, World War II spy diction was still there, and so was the patchy goatee and the four earrings in his left ear, but on his own turf, he no longer seemed especially stiff and dogmatic. Perhaps he now had nothing to prove. She came inside the three-story brick canal house, too flustered to take much notice of the chandeliers and hanging artwork. Only in Holland does an archivist answer the door to an opulent brownstone dressed like an anarchist. She asked him whether the painting would be safe in the trunk of her rental car. “We'll watch your vehicle from the front window. My bicycle is chained right in front of it. Shall I make us some tea?”

He told her to keep an eye on the street and went to make the tea. She stared out the window, letting everything settle over her. Surely he thought it was odd that they were returning the painting a few days after the exhibition had opened. Ten minutes later, he was pacing in front of the window, cup and saucer in hand. “Mr. van Foort is prowling through old Swiss attics,” he said, blowing across the rim of his teacup, “like an old hungry tiger looking for an easy kill.” After a few moments of such talk, something occurred to him and he got up and returned with another piece of fuzzy gray fax paper. “This one came through in the middle of the night, marked for your attention.” Hendrik handed it to her facedown, as if to suggest he hadn't already read its message.

I trust you will know what to do with the painting, Ellie, now that all the claims against it are settled.

Very truly yours, MdG

She could tell that Hendrik had no clue as to its cryptic meaning and he knew better than to ask who
MdG
was. The art world honored anonymity, upheld it like a rank of purity. Hendrik said, “The buyer from America must want the picture very badly if he wouldn't let it hang for the exhibition.” He smiled to himself. “Perhaps he doesn't want the public to see his private jewel.” Hadn't van Foort questioned the logic of the return? Or was he possessive enough with his own acquisitions that he could relate perfectly to this zealous American buyer? She sipped her tea and waited for the words of confession to come out of her mouth. She waited for the moment when she would produce the fifty-page material analysis report by Helen Birch, the head material scientist at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, that proved beyond all question that the painting in Ellie's rental car was a fake created in the twentieth century. On the long-haul flight she'd imagined what she would say to Hendrik and his employer. She would apologize and take full responsibility. She would ask them how much they wanted as compensation, to take the liability off their hands. She might even repeat a line from one of her sealed but still unsent resignation letters—
Eventually, I was undone by time and circumstance and lead-tin yellow
. In the northern light of the plush sitting room, this explanation seemed melodramatic and false to her. The truer statement was that she'd used the de Vos canvas as a testing ground for her own thwarted talents, that she was reckless and lonely and angry with the world, that she craved a kind of communion, to find a layer beneath the glazes and scumbles and lead white where Sara herself still trudged through the fog of antique varnish, racked by grief but somehow dispensing painterly wisdom.
For a thousand hours, I wanted to think with Sara's mind and hands and shut everything else out.
These confessions were much closer to the truth, she thought. But there was no audience in her life—least of all Hendrik—for this brand of self-examination. Who besides her actually cared why she did it? It was certainly no longer Hendrik's problem. He and his employer had been neatly removed from the equation.

She suddenly wanted to be alone in her hotel room where she could take in the enormity of what Marty had just done. With three lines of smudged fax ink he'd not only taken the fake off the books but also given her permission to get on with her life. She felt a moment of fearlessness but also anger that she was getting off so easily. Instead of confessing, she found herself asking questions about the provenance of
Winter with a Child's Funeral Procession.

Hendrik looked out the window and said, “My employer keeps all those records in his office. All I know is that it came from a widow in Heemstede who was selling off the family inheritance one oil painting at a time. She couldn't keep up with the maintenance of an old house or something.”

Ellie watched him pacing at the window and wondered how deeply his ambitions ran. She said, “Perhaps we could partner together on something related to de Vos. While I'm here I'm going to do some additional research, see if I can connect a few more dots.”

He turned to her. “Don't you have to get the picture to America?”

“I have a few days. I'll put it in secure storage.”

He looked back out the window. “Partner how?”

She said, “What if we could set the record straight about what really happened to her? We know she continued painting after Amsterdam and there must be more to find out. Perhaps we could coauthor a paper on Sara de Vos? On her final chapter.”

He cut his eyes at her through the sitting room, the halo of a sunlit canal behind his head. “That is a record that you largely created,” he said. “Your career is built on hers.” He said it a little testily, but she also understood from imagining his days toiling for an absentee employer, from his rusting bicycle chained to the metal spikes of the front fence, that he was at loose ends, underutilized and waiting to break into the major leagues of public museums. A joint paper could be his ticket out of this enormous, unvisited brownstone.

“That's true,” she said. “But now I want to set it right.” She felt emboldened, like she could say anything. She was twenty-six again, at the beginning and full of ambition. “How old are you?”

“Thirty-two.”

“Do you want to keep curating paintings that no one ever gets to see?”

He emptied his teacup and looked out the big window.

She said, “Your career passes in a flash. Take it from me.”

From behind, she saw him take in a big breath and let it out slowly.

When he turned, she saw a different person looking back at her. He was trying to hold back a big grin.

“Follow me, please,” he said, leading her toward the stairs with a set of keys in one hand and his cup and saucer in the other. They went upstairs to the owner's
kantoor
and he unlocked the door. “He documents everything,” he said, “right down to the name of an art collector's cat.”

Now in the rental car, she looks over at him as the Spaarne comes into view, the riverbank dotted with linden trees and wooden boathouses painted bottle green and sky blue. He navigates with his outdated road atlas, tells her that the driveway to the bed-and-breakfast should be “appearing before us in approximately three hundred meters.”

*   *   *

The cold air burns her cheeks as she skates along, pushing into long glides, her hands behind her back, the sound of her skate blades like the sharpening of a knife on a whetstone. She wants to skate for miles, to fall until midnight into this bracing pleasure. The bare trees glitter with ice along the riverbank, a complement to the winking stars. The night feels unpeeled, as if she's burrowed into its flesh. Here is the bone and armature, the trees holding up the sky like the ribs of a ship, the ice hardening the river into a mirror too dull to see the sky's full reflection. Everything flits by except the sky and her thoughts, both of which seem to widen and gyre in a loose, clockwise procession. She thinks of paintings and meals and Kathrijn, one somehow leading to the other, then Barent and Tomas, then her mother knitting by the fire, then a bowl full of oranges in winter light. Everything is strung together on the line of her skates, swooping curves and perfect delineations of her wistful thinking. She is light upon the ice, a weightless passenger.

Tomas skates many yards behind her, no longer calling out, but occasionally letting out a howl of laughter or exhaustion. She has half a mind to skate all the way to the village ruins and sing at the top of her lungs until Griet comes out of her hermitage to see what all the commotion is about. She forgets for a whirring moment that Griet is dead, her bones bleaching in the frozen earth beside her children and husband and neighbors. Toward the end they brought her to the house and Sara nursed her during the final weeks. A slow winnowing, so unlike the outward rush of Kathrijn's death. She would come into the guestroom to find Griet vanished from the feather bed and sleeping on her animal pelts by the open window. She died as she lived, like a Spartan or a mendicant. Sara misses their conversations, the stories of the old village. She turns around to ensure Tomas is still within eyeshot and sees him coming around a bend in the river, both arms up, waving like a goose trying to take flight. She laughs, skating backward, her breath smoking in front of her face. There are pockets of time, she thinks, where every sense rings like a bell, where the world brims with fleeting grace.

For an instant she doesn't know that she's fallen through. The river, under all that ice, is a burning flood. The moonlit sky replaced by a dome of shattered white glass. A searing underworld of distorted shape and sound. It's only when she tries to take a breath that she knows she's been swallowed up. Her hands rake above her head, as if she's trying to climb a ladder. Everything dims away as she sinks toward the cold sludge of the riverbed.

Her feet are two leaden weights, her pockets full of stones. She kicks her feet but can't feel anything below her. She can hear Tomas's skates cutting and scraping along the ice above. And then she hears her own voice—not a garbled scream but someone moaning in her sleep from a dark room at the bottom of the river. The sound terrifies her. She sees her own panic rise in the stream of bubbles and understands that everything she wants is up above, through that jagged rent in the ice. The glimmering night has been wrenched cruelly from her grasp. It seems so impossibly far away. Her vision blurs; a dead tree limb looms through the murk. She coughs and feels the river burning inside her chest. Then everything slows. She can see elegant spirals of current passing above her, bearing fish and flotsam downriver. She can see stars embedded in the ice, a second muted sky with its own constellations. Tomas is there, lowering a long tree branch into the water, plunging his face into the icy water, his voice vibrating as he moves between realms.

*   *   *

The widow—Mrs. Edith Zeller—runs the bed-and-breakfast without any flair for hospitality. Wealthy Germans and Amsterdammers show up, materialize out of her guest register, and she sets them loose on her overdecorated, cold rooms. If the plumbing goes south in the winter, or there's a dip in reservations, she sells off a painting or an antique desk. It's been that way for years. Antiquity pays for maintenance; tourists pay for the utilities and the petrol in her car. A cash-poor widow sitting on millions in accumulated wealth. Ellie sees all this in the way she signs them in, sees it on the wallpaper blanched with the ghosts of sold-off paintings, in her instructions and laminated signs for brief showers and turning off the water while brushing teeth. The widow somehow carries the burden of inherited wealth. They are shown to their ground-floor rooms. Ellie's is narrow and a little threadbare, makes her think of convalescence and bedpans—a washbasin on the bureau, an embroidered hand towel, a view of the summer garden gone to seed.

At dinner they broach the subject of the funeral painting, gently interrogate the widow about how she came by it, how long it had been in her family, et cetera. Mrs. Zeller has warmed them up a stew of root vegetables and smoked sausage for dinner and Ellie wonders whether they'll be charged for these days-old leftovers. They eat in one of two disheveled kitchens, the dining room closed off to guests long ago. The widow recounts the stages of household decline as if they were acts of God—the plague of ruin and dustcovers when her father died, the eternal cold and damp of the upper rooms when she and her mother couldn't afford kerosene or firewood, the dwindling of the spirit as she lost her own husband and her children moved away. A banker in England; a concierge in Paris.

“Where did your picture collection come from?” Ellie asks.

“Some came from a distant uncle on my father's side and others were bought by my father himself. During the second war there was looting and German soldiers all around here. The old families tried to hoard their treasures with neighbors and in old barns, to keep their heirlooms hidden from view. A lot of the paintings disappeared.”