Pictures at an Exhibition (10 page)

“Bertrand hasn't said anything to me,” I said. “If he had wanted to, he would have mentioned it.” Fanny shrank away. “Maybe this wasn't your secret to tell after all. You're ruining a friendship with your big mouth,” I said. “Telling lies.”

“I'm not telling lies,” she said. She threw back the bedclothes and put on her robe. “He sent me here to tell you.” A single sob escaped from her, capable of waking every one of the house's many sleepers. Fanny ran from the room with one bare foot—she had not waited to retrieve her other slipper.

WHEN I LOOK BACK ON THAT NIGHT IN JANUARY OF
1940, I shout at my adolescent apparition, “Run after her! Apologize! Take poor Fanny in your arms!”

And then I wonder. If Fanny and I had been tied to each other, if I had loved her rather than shamed her, would she, or even her whole family, have followed my own through what happened next? I often dream that I am standing, silver-haired and stooped—true to my present age—with Fanny's satin bedroom slipper in my hand.

That dawn, however, I dressed hurriedly. An army of servants patrolled the halls at all hours, so an invisible exit, even at six in the morning, was impossible. I pulled the heavy drapes aside, threw open the window sash, stood on the sill, and—final proof of my inebriated state—dropped two floors down to the ground below. I registered a shout behind me as I fell. My knees buckled, and I pitched forward, tearing my palms against the stones of the terrace.

I rose, gingerly. Behind me, Bertrand stood in his bedroom window. He gestured with his cigarette toward the balcony from which I had leaped. I turned away from him, and the front gate opened automatically, at a hidden command from inside the house.

Only later would I realize that Bertrand had sworn to tell me two
secrets on my twentieth birthday. One, Fanny had revealed to me: in fact, on the day Bertrand had promised to tell me himself. By the time I ascertained the second, it was 1945 and I had not so much as spoken to or seen Bertrand or any member of his family in that half of a decade. No one had considered that France could fall.

PART THREE
A
UGUST 27, 1944

Salle des Martyrs, Jeu de Paume Museum, circa 1940-1944

Chapter Seven

T
HE SILENCE OF THE CITY AT HALF-PAST FIVE IN
the morning felt supernatural. The sky was gray and low, as if someone had stirred ash into milk. From the passenger's window, I watched petals, confetti, ticker tape, a woman's glove, and a handkerchief spin past, lifted and twirled by an invisible presence that still celebrated yesterday's rout of the
Boches
from Paris. We drove a wood-burning car resurrected from a bygone era and bought from a butcher. The tires of the
gazogène
thudded softly as they rolled over upturned cobblestones, broken bottles, and bullet shells. They had lost much of their air in the fifteen-hour drive from Le Puy From behind where my father and I sat in the truck's cab, the old butcher's meat hooks rocked against each other and the engine gave off a drowsy smell. The auto made a wide arc onto rue de La Boétie, and Father pumped its brakes. The rhythmic crunching and clanking noises slowed, and I heard the celebratory pop of rifles to the southeast, in the direction of the place de la Concorde. Then all was quiet again, save for the knocking from the meat hooks and the crackle and drop of a piece of wood burning in half and breaking into the fire.

Up and down rue de La Boétie, our neighbors’ windows were darkened by blackout paper, and at first glance I thought our home was no different. With a grinding of gears, the vehicle came to a halt.

Another piece of wood broke and settled in the combustion box. We were home at last, and neither of us moved. I had not seen my street in four years and three months.

Father thumped the steering wheel with his hands. When he turned to me in the murky light, his eyes looked bruised. “Shall we?” he asked.

The familiar flooded my senses: the bronze post, the depression in the curb from trucks driving up to the gallery door, the tile facade of the bakery, and the gold address integers—2 and
1.
By the time my years numbered the same, we were living in Nice at the Palais de la Méditerranée, which my mother referred to as “the dog pound.” Other hotels held ten or fifteen people to a room. We were three when we should have been a hundred.

I inventoried impressions I had not known I might ever lose. This was the sidewalk where I had caught Rose's hand, her coat open though the day was brisk, and said,
Mother insists we leave
, and she said,
Your father gave me the key to the vault.
As if he already knew that she would refuse to come with us.

I told myself, that day in August 1944, that it was unreasonable to expect Rose to be at the gallery, standing on the sidewalk, awaiting us, her beauty shimmering like the heat on the road. Yet if she had been there, I would not have been surprised, as if the force of wishing could have made it so.

I took two strides away from the car and pressed my face to the gallery window. The blackness inside was granular and quivering. I could make out the white marble mantelpiece, gray in the dawn.

“What do you see?” Father asked. He stood next to the car, rubbing his hands above the brazier.

“The mantel,” I said.

“What, the shades aren't down?”

In five broad steps, he was over the curb and at the gate. His ring of keys jingled and the metal-barred door to the foyer opened, leading to a second door. Rust blossomed over its lock, as if it had been in a flood and the waters had withdrawn. Father stepped aside, and with a shove from my shoulder, it gave.

We took in the smell of burned things. There had been a fire.

The carpet had been seared away in large swaths. Holes were gouged in the walls where the fire had spread. The skylight had shattered, scattering glass. The spandrels clung like metal spiderwebs. Father jerked forward and the floor stuttered beneath our steps.

We entered the second room of the gallery. The fire seemed not to have stretched here, though the room was coated with a light ash. We passed into Father's office, with the vault beneath the false floor, where we had hidden the last ninety-seven paintings in the hours before we fled Paris for the South. We had hauled sacks of lime, each as big as a boxer's punching bag, into the corners of the storage room to protect the paintings from the damp for the months we expected to be away. Another 250 paintings—awaiting Father's next exhibitions or sale at a later year—were already in the depository of the Chase Bank.

We descended into the vault on steps that sprang out automatically when the floor slid back, with a mechanism like a cuckoo clock. There were no paintings, only exploded sacks of lime, sodden and gummy, and a cigarette stub on the stairs. Father rested with his hand against the wall. We stayed there only a moment—there was nothing to look at or for. I helped him up the stairs, out of the vault, my hand at his elbow. We were stricken and silent. There were no barriers between this moment (Father, moaning softly) and another one that I could not quite grasp, in which I also wandered around that second gallery room and wept and there was the smell of something burned, and the paintings on the walls were covered with black, and an identical great loneliness reached up a paw and knocked me aside so that I felt askew and utterly at a loss.

Father and I gathered papers from the floor. Communist propaganda, pamphlets with mangled spelling, copies of a Fascist newspaper that had been, it appeared, published in our house before the liberation, denunciation letters from neighbors I knew. In one, a veteran from the Great War demanded the government issue him a new pair of shoes since his cobbler had, much to the veteran's irritation, disappeared. We were archaeologists in our own tomb.

I looked toward my father and watched him grow pale. I thought, My father has begun to die.

Yet when I reached to take his hand, he snatched it back as if I had bitten him.

“This is no time for the sentimental,” Father said, and instantly I felt ashamed. “Someone's here.”

“I feel it, too.”

“Not that. There is a noise in the hallway.”

The voices belonged to two figures, one in a stockinged cap sewn with a red star. He opened his palm to show us his brass knuckles and then swiped his fist through the air. The other had a pistol and said, “Don't make me use this.” We ran.

Outside, Father stumbled over the doorstep, hurtled forward, and fell to the ground. His hands went to his mouth. For a moment, I thought he was uninjured. Then he parted his lips and blood burbled forth with specks of broken teeth in its stream.

At the hospital, while Father waited to be fitted with a bridge for his gums that would make all his food taste like tin, we listened as a nurse admitted a man who had shot himself while celebrating in the streets. Our victory had already become stupid.

Chapter Eight

I
T WAS THEN THAT WE LEARNED. FATHER SAW TWO
skeletal men at the Hôpital de la Charité. The Soviets liberated a camp named Majdanek, which sounded like a bone stuck in my throat. We staggered into and out of a newsreel in which we saw the horror of the Jews in the extermination centers of the East. There was open weeping in the theater, and also a few who called out “prop aganda,” “lies,” and “unbelievable.” Then, posted on a wall near the Métro, printed on broadsheets of newspaper, were pictures of bulldozers pushing heaps of bodies. Soon these photographs were replaced by pictures of everyday German citizens led through the camps, in fur coats, with their handkerchiefs pressed to their mouths. Father went to the Red Cross agency with a list of friends we had not heard from, but they turned us back, saying it was too soon.

Father grew weak and listless. Distracted by this unfamiliar version of my once—gleaming father, thinking only of him, I went on a walk and was struck by a blowsy old man piloting a bicycle too small for his fat. A crowd knotted around, asking if I was injured. I said I was fine, that I had just had a bit of a shock. I wandered down the street, feeling shattered, trying not to stumble, repeating, “A bit of a shock, a bit of a shock,” like a children's nursery song.

One, two, three days passed. I felt half mad with my desire to search for Father's paintings, but some plan of his always held us
back, as if he were afraid of what we would find, and then another newsreel would be released and we would again be delayed.

On the first day that the Bureau des étrangers announced it would hear cases—we qualified, unbelievably, as foreigners—I stood in line three hours before it opened and my father joined me four hours later.

“Stop scowling, please,” Father said. “You shouldn't scowl around these people.”

Rose haunted me ever more strongly. Perhaps, finding the news from the reels incomprehensible, my mind sought a familiar sorrow. I ran into the street once, sure that I could feel her presence. And yet she, too, was invisible.

Through the mire of bureaucracy for which my country is so famous, I pursued my father's paintings. One agency required a form from a second, which necessitated a stamp from the third, which had to be filed by a date that had already passed in order to make an appointment with an officer at the first, who would soon leave his post and be replaced by a younger uniformed man who demanded a whole new set of papers. None of my father's records from before the war could be found. We presumed that most of them had been burned, though that did not explain why his accounting file at Chase Bank, which dated back to 1933, had also disappeared. Neither Matisse nor Picasso kept careful books; they relied on my father and his assiduous assistants. Hence we had no documentation for any painting Father had acquired or, just as importantly, sold, in the seven years before the invasion. The works he had bought through the auction houses would be accounted for, but those were often lesser ones; masterpieces were purchased directly from the master. Since my father had had no written contracts with either Matisse or Picasso, we learned (through a newspaper article) that both had adopted new art dealers in his absence. War stopped neither production nor commerce. Picasso went to Kahnweiler, his dealer from before the Great War, and Matisse, so we heard, betrayed my father with an American.

If Father was crushed, he hid it behind the soliloquies he delivered, maddeningly, in a raised voice, to the tailors, cobblers, upholsterers,
and grocers in line with us at the different refugee agencies: “The act of painting is munificent, and yet the artist himself is rarely generous. When his artwork is lauded and he is enriched, it is because of his genius. When his paintings are ignored and he has to tighten his belt a notch, it is the fault of the art dealer. And yet he can exist without me, whereas I cannot exist without him.” The agency had closed before we reached its door. We walked down to the boulevard Saint-Michel. Father shrugged and ducked into a four o'clock newsreel.

From there, I passed the Luxembourg Gardens, where, I had read, one of the final battles for the city had taken place. The dirt was churned up as if it had been chewed, and the remains of a German six-pounder gun were buried in a trench that zigzagged the length of the avenue. The bars of the park's gate stuttered alongside me. Before the war, on a rare snowfall, this section of the Luxembourg would have been closed off, so that passersby could admire how snow draped its fountains and grassy hillocks. In springtime, girls chased hoops and boys proudly carried their toy boats, still wet from the fountain, in solemn outstretched arms. Now it was unrecognizable, except for the gate.