A Mind of Winter (32 page)

I recall an odd thought. Christine and I were celebrating my birthday—perhaps two years after we met; Christine had fashioned an apple pie from coarse ration flour, lard, and a single spotted piece of fruit, and we were savoring a bottle of wine I’d managed to get my hands on. I remember thinking, looking into Christine’s clear eyes, startled by a happiness I thought I’d never again feel, that we were twins, both ageless and aged, outside of time, outside of place.

Here I am now, sitting in the soft round of light cast by the desk lamp in my study at Ellis Park, the rest of the room sunk in comforting shadow, quickening to the feeling of being united with Christine. For six long years I have cast her from my mind, along with everything else; I had supposed her lost forever. And now I am almost giddy with the sense of her. I have only to close my eyes and she springs to life: here, really here—and also there, really there,
back then.
The past no longer the past. I see her crossing the room to where I await her by our usual table at the club. Other eyes, too, follow her progress; she is a figure one wants to watch—the strawberryblond hair pressed close to her small head in glossy ripples, the clear complexion, the nonchalant and absolute selfpossession of a woman who has all her life known the power of her own beauty. As she comes closer, I see the unsettled intelligence of her face—eyes in search of something, an unyielding impatience about the mouth. And when our eyes meet, the dazzle of her generous, uninhibited smile.

I never tired of watching Christine move. I never tired of listening to her expound on this or that enthusiasm. I never tired of touching her, of breathing her in.

I recall another moment at the club, something that puzzled me at the time but which I’d put from my mind until now. We were at the award ceremony, the night I was honored by Harcourt and Goode for the work I had done. All evening, I’d been aware of something slightly altered in the way Christine looked at me. I’d assumed it was simply the newness, for her, of the situation—seeing me, well, at the center of things. Toward the end of the evening (which had, to my embarrassment, been rather too glittering, given the circumstances; we were still a nation at war, though the end was in sight) I was surrounded by a little group of well wishers when I found Christine suddenly at my side, that odd, appraising look on her face. I was doing my best to utter the expected gracious remark to yet another compliment when Christine stood up on tiptoe—not easy, I imagine, in the high-heeled silk evening shoes she was wearing—and whispered in my ear:
Who are you, Robert?
(My old name. My real name. I was not yet Oscar.)
Really, I’d like to know.
I was more than a little thrown by the question and responded, I’m afraid, by simply pretending I’d not heard what she’d said.

Upon meeting Barnaby, I saw in his eyes that he, too, had loved Christine. Strikingly, this inspired in me little jealousy. Though Barnaby has tremendous erotic magnetism, I imagined that Christine, with her near incapacity for returning love—I count myself as the only exception—would have had for Barnaby no more than light affection. He was simply too, well, conventional; and likely to have come in too close (I picture troops astride steeds, crashing across the drawbridge), not knowing how to keep the right distance. Another might suppose me self-deluded here, but I really knew Christine (I fancy I know her still) and feel certain that whatever the liaison with Barnaby, our own intimacy—exclusive, irrevocable—remained unrivaled. So rather than being the cause of any friction between Barnaby and me, our shared knowledge of Christine actually bound us from the start.

As far as covering my tracks was concerned, it was my only lapse—dropping that postcard to Christine, newly arrived in Shanghai, into the mail. I sent it to the American Express office in the Foreign Quarter. Christine used the service in London; I assumed she’d do the same in Shanghai. In any case, the expatriate community was legendarily insular; I had no doubt card would end up in her hands.

What sort of disappearing act is it, you might ask, if you let people know your new alias as well as your whereabouts? Well, it wasn’t people, it was Christine, and what I wrote on the postcard was my new name and the name of my solicitor in New York, nothing more. She knew my handwriting—she had, after all, been my teacher—so I was certain she would realize it was me.

I’d had a premonition that one day she might need my help. Though I admit it cut more deeply than that: a feeling that I couldn’t go on, couldn’t seize my new identity, with Christine completely in the dark. It was easy to slough off the rest; I could quite happily never set foot on European soil again. But leaving behind Christine, truly disappearing from her consciousness: that was not something I could bear.

* * *

Had I not so assiduously covered my tracks (my reasons for doing so were, of course, entirely unconnected with the matter at hand), I would not now be under this suspicion. There are certain things, though, that one cannot foretell.

“Two more witnesses,” my visitor said last evening. “I suspect the case will now proceed.” I detected a trace of sympathy in his voice.

I knew the paintings were stolen; I do not deny that. I had, however, incorrectly assumed a different act of theft from the one that in fact had taken place.

You will think I am making excuses, and perhaps I am. But I believed my source, especially concerning the Cranachs. They looked like they belonged in a museum, and the story about their theft—rescue, really, during various bombardments, including, toward the end, the destruction of Dresden—convinced me thoroughly. Yes, a more honorable man might have questioned the veracity of my source’s claims. But the fact is, I didn’t; and the fact is, I passed the paintings along. To dozens of aristocrats, of whom the culturally inflamed gentleman I spoke of earlier was but one.

The painting is homeless
,
I reasoned; it needs a home. I was simply uniting a wayward work of art with a soul in search of edification—I prided myself in supplying only those I deemed deserving, having developed a set of criteria to determine who was and who wasn’t.
Sold
: to the screened and willing adopter, who expressed his gratitude in a gaze of disbelieving joy directed at his new foundling, and in a significant sum of pounds sterling, wired to one of my off-shore accounts.

The story my source told me had gripped me from the start. Paintings whisked out by some rebel underground from the basement of various German museums in the midst of unearthly poundings—I envisioned a building shuddering and, within the sound of shrieking alarms, the ghastly silence of the newly dead. Who would not cleave to the idea of rescuing from Germany the art it no longer deserved?

My original intention was naïve. That I would donate the paintings to the British Museum. My source pointed out that their origins—the alleged museums (which turned out to be a lie)—would soon be determined. That the war would end and then, some years hence, an impossible snarl of international controversy would ensue. Who knew where such a turn of events might lead.

No, my source said. There are buyers here, in England. Let some Englishmen take possession, my source said. He knew how the aristocracy functioned: a painting would stay in the family two, maybe three generations. Ultimately, it would find its way to the public weal—too long after the fact for anyone to bother about its provenance.

Needless to say, he did not in the same breath mention the rolls of banknotes that would change hands, half going his way, the other half going mine. Though he did add knowingly, “I’m sure you have pet causes, a man like yourself.”

There really is no connection between the crimes I am accused of and those I have committed, if you can call my gobetween activities crimes.

Or is there?

Yes, the paintings.

But there were also other crimes.

I knew Marilyn was working on an exhibition. I suspected it might have to do with the war. I’d presumed the focus was on England, as I knew she’d spent time photographing there. How could I have known she had a friend whose photographs are to be shown alongside her own? A friend who had gone in with the Liberators. Who had been among the first Americans to see, to really see, just what they (
they?
I must say
they?
Am
I
not a German?) had done.

How could I have known that the large stack of photographs Marilyn slid across the stainless steel bench in my darkroom, a room I’d never taken the time to use myself, would contain those hellish scenes? Scenes depicting the camps, mere days or weeks after their liberation—places I am now forced to consider in my search for my sister and mother. Erla. Dachau. Bergen-Belsen. Buchenwald. Visited and documented by Marilyn’s photographer colleague, who carefully marked the names, in red, in a bottom corner of each proof sheet.

My right hand flies to the spot on my left upper arm; I stroke it, though I know this will not ease the poisonous ache.

The wooden door, I see it now, the patchwork of faded color: generations of old paint long since flaked away. A tint of blue, the merest hue of rose, a cross-hatch band that perhaps once was green, now muted to grayish-white. In among the hints of color, I see the battered grain—feel, as if I might reach up and strip away long splinters by the fistful.

The sound of Klauss’s phlegmy cough—hacking, insistent. His boot on the door, caving it in.

I will not recover from having seen Marilyn’s photographic images.

My visitor has not gone unnoticed, after all.

Marilyn seemed quite distressed this evening, here, in my office. I don’t know what she was trying to accomplish. I felt at a loss—betrayed, in that moment, by my years of strategizing, of carefully constructing every action and response, left not knowing how to respond. Of course, she has no idea what is really going on. How could she? Perhaps she is trying to help. But it seemed impossible, like trying to unweave a spider’s gossamer creation. Where would one begin? And what would be the point?

I do not believe she was telling the truth; I am sure my visitor must have said something damning about me. How else to explain, at the end, the look in Marilyn’s face of fright? What other reason could she have to fear
me?
I dread to think of what he might have said. And dread the thought that Marilyn would believe his words to be true.

When the envelope arrived today in the mail, there was something unreal about it—I’d waited so long for news about them. I knew that the odds of the news being good were extremely remote, virtually nonexistent, in fact. But the human heart is blind to probability—a shred of hope is the same as a great mountain of it.

I left the envelope on my desk and paced back and forth before it, holding onto this last moment of—what? Of not knowing the truth, whatever it might be? Terror, exhilaration—both coursed through my veins. And a sudden awareness, that whatever the outcome, I would be brought closer to them—to my mother, to Else. The perhaps of: oh, wonder of wonders! To know I might see them again! Or the other, unthinkable perhaps: to be brought to the fullness of grief, the great pool of sadness itself a dark rejoining.

Aware that until I opened the envelope, neither possibility had any claim to certainty.

I do not know how long it lay there, the letter, unopened.

I could not get the photographs out of my mind’s eye, the vision of Marilyn’s proof sheets. The diffuse gray sky in one grainy shot of wire fencing, a guard tower. The cloudy light that fell upon the photographic paper to make the image—could it have been the same light that fell upon my mother and sister in their final days? Hours? Moments? Or was this the light only of other people’s ends?

I must have opened the envelope, though I have no recollection of doing so, because here it is, on my desk, the top neatly sliced by my silver letter opener.

I see them, taking off their clothes with everyone else, walking naked into the chamber where they would breathe in deeply and die.

The blow is worse than I could have imagined.

Was it the last thing they saw? A brown uniform? The armband: red and black, black and red?

And the woman, rocking by the hearth. Looking out from dark eyes that seemed not to see and yet saw nonetheless—their movements proved this well enough. Klauss’s brown uniform—or perhaps my own?—was the last impression her eyes would claim.

After the explosion that destroyed the milk cart, I stayed in that cold ditch all night. If I slept, it was the sleep of purgatory.

Cold morning light slapped me to consciousness and I crawled from the ditch. Such a heavy silence. Before I saw the grisly scene I remember thinking:
This is the silence of the grave.

How could I have not known that Alfred was dead? My mind was not working; it had slipped from its moorings.

Alfred’s body lay by what remained of the cart in an oddly strewn posture—a rag doll flung down by a distracted child: elbows, ankles, wrists, and knees working against the usual mechanical positions of joints. The fatal wound was to his gut; his entrails hung casually from a gaping slash, like a bunch of bruised wine-dark grapes. No more than a pace away lay another dead man, his body by comparison orderly and neat, the limbs arrayed cleanly like those of someone in sleep. Brown uniform, black and red armband. As luck would have it, Alfred must have dispatched the soldier with a single, close-range shot to the face, which no longer resembled a face: just shattered bone and black-red blood and a halo of splattered brain. I saw the gun still clutched in Alfred’s hand, the fingers curled—already turned to granite—around the handle and through the mechanism of the trigger. I tried to figure the logic of the scene: Nazi soldiers, tipped off that this milkman is harboring a Jew. They attack. One of them lunges at Alfred with a knife; Alfred manages, perhaps while falling, to execute a perfect close shot to the enemy’s head. The others, not finding their Jew, head off in different directions to track him (me?) down. Perhaps they would return later for their fallen comrade.

I quickly removed my navy jacket, and then the outer of my two sets of clothing—the woolen cardigan and flannel pants—leaving them crumpled on the ground, then put my jacket, with the secret pockets my mother had sewn, back on. I approached the dead soldier and found myself removing his jacket, aware of the sticky red rim on the inside of the collar. The blood must have flooded down his neck, as the inside of the jacket was drenched to the waist. From the outside, the dark blood was visible at the collar’s edge; the front of the jacket had spatterings, as did the pants. But this was war: blood was a normal enough stain. I removed the pants too, my hands working free of thought. The dead soldier was larger than me, though not by much. I avoided looking at him; I continued my actions by feel. And then, I walked away—from the soldier, and, with a tremendous pang of grief, from Alfred. He had saved my life twice: once while alive and again in his dying moment, when his finger squeezed the trigger of his gun, giving me a relatively clean brown uniform in which to take cover.