Pictures at an Exhibition (20 page)

“I'll walk you home,” I said to Rose.

“Be a gentleman,” she said. The barman winked at Rose as she left. “No winking,” she called out to him. “The king has decreed it!” I was certain she was flirting. I did not realize that, in trying to hold back tears, she was exaggerating gaiety.

As we walked through the quiet square, we passed a father teaching his son to ride a bicycle along the empty streets. He ran beside the boy, flickering a flashlight across the dark cobblestones and holding the back of the bicycle seat.

Rose said, “For Goering's visit, there were yellow silk sofas and chrysanthemums everywhere, so that the museum smelled like the cemetery at Montparnasse. Ten times that year I smelled those flowers of evil, and ten times Goering came and stole. There were rooms of Gobelin tapestries and others of Flemish art. At the museum, the boys were disappointed when he came dressed in mufti. They wanted to count his ribbons. He was tremendously fat. I once had the eerie experience of seeing him decide whether or not to take a painting of Cronus eating his children.”

Rose touched my elbow, and we turned down rue de Mézières. It was quiet and dark, though the moon lit a stream of light down the pavement as if the street were a river. Rose stopped before a white building, withdrew a jangling ring of keys, and pushed the door open. I hesitated.

“I want to show you something,” she said. She called the rickety elevator while the concierge's dog barked and scratched at the door. The carpets in the building were all red and had once been rich but now were worn. We stepped into the tiny square of the lift and ascended, past the smells of onions and the sinister violins of a radio melodrama and the whistle of a teakettle. Rose tripped down the hallway ahead of me. “Wait till I show you, Max,” she chanted.

She unlocked her apartment door and turned on the light in the
cramped room. I took in the folded Murphy bed, the hot plate and dirty sink, the gold-leaf Giotto reproduction on the wall, the vase of tulips, the broken lampshade. Rose, in a room. But she had disappeared. “Where are you?” I called. The room smelled dusty and airless, like an attic.

“In the cloffice,” she called from behind a green curtain. I pulled the drapery aside and found her in a closet, seated on a stool, grinning madly. On shelves that another tenant had built for shoes or sweaters were thousands of papers, some tied with twine, others sliding from their stacks into reams of unbound documents. The floor was a sea of blue wartime paper. Piles in the corner teetered higher than Rose's head. Drunk, she forced the joke. “Don't you see? It's a closet and an office!”

Whereas the mess in the Nurse's Room on rue de La Boétie had amused, even charmed me, this was something else. Rose, with her hair cropped like an invalid, looked unwell.

I remembered that Father had taught me a German word that meant
museum
and
mausoleum;
this was part of his explanation for preferring to own a gallery rather than a collection. He believed that collecting had a second motive that was an attempt to ward off death.
We must confront ourselves boldly and without delusion
, he said. So therefore the Camondos, in their attempt to re-create the ideal eighteenth-century mansion, had been blind in other ways. Rose, here, had constructed her own museum in her tiny apartment, of papers for paintings that belonged to Jews who, I presumed, were all dead, and Rose had entombed herself with them yet still would not love me, the living. Museum and mausoleum in one. “You don't take down the bed” was all I could muster.

She shook her head. “Not unless I am very tired.” There was an armchair in the corner, with only a few stacks of paper on it. She must have been sleeping there. “And tonight I am very, very tired,” she said. “I feel like an empty tin can. And rather sick.” I picked her up under her arms and took her into the bathroom to splash some water on her face.

“Brilliant, Berenzon,” she drawled.

The apartment had an unusually large separate bathroom, which
ran the whole length of the single room. It had a bidet, a toilet, and a
baignoire sabot
—a short bathtub shaped like a Dutch shoe. “We could put papers on shelves in here,” I said to Rose as she hung on to the rim of the sink.

She looked up at me, aghast. “Near the water? They would be ruined.”

While Rose stayed in the bathroom, I stooped and lifted stacks of papers, trying to make room for the Murphy bed. In a moment, she hovered over me, wheedling. “Max, there is a special order. Everything had its place.” I gently pushed her out of the way and pulled down the bed. Rose sat on it, reached for a pile, and then began handing me pieces of paper, letters—several in German—and photographs. I took them out of her hand and put them on the floor. My mind was blank. I lay down and she lay beside me. I touched her odd duckling hair, then her lips, her cheek, her ear and delicate earlobe and pearl earring. I kissed her closed eyelids. She let me unbutton the hundreds of buttons on her blouse.

“Max,” she said, “I am a nun to all but my work.” But she drew me to her.

My mouth found her neck. Rose's breath was fast. Uncertain about what was happening, I began to undress her, trying to be gen-tle, trying not to snag a zipper on skin or a button on her necklace. I did not want to hurry.

Then I realized she was hyperventilating.

“My God, Rose,” I said.

“I would do this only to please you,” she said.

I rolled away and sat up, without facing her.

“Do you want me to?” she asked, in a small voice.

I did not answer for a long time. “What a ridiculous question,” I said first, bitterly. Then, “No, that would be terrible.”

I handed her a dressing gown. Over my shoulder, she gave me my shirt. Without looking at her, I found my other things and put them on.

“Come here,” she said, and pushed my head toward the pillow. “Now lie on your side.” She stretched alongside me, her stomach to my back, put an arm around my waist, and I held her cold hand.

“Don't cry, Max,” she said. I felt her shaking. “When everything has been disordered, then you try—” Her voice broke off.

We lay in the bed like that until, at some point after dawn, I fell asleep.

IN THE MORNING, WHEN AT LAST SHE AWOKE, HOURS
after me, I asked her, “Please, Rose, tell me where my paintings are. You're the only one who knows.”

She sat up, looking haggard and pale, and reached down to the pile of papers I had put on the floor a few hours earlier. She handed me a photograph.

“Goering,” she said, “with a Corot. Look at them pouring champagne in the background.”

“Next,” she said. The newspaper pages were brittle, although they were not yet old. “This one is of Colonel Rosenberg—a German-Jewish name though he was anything but Jewish—surveying the storerooms at the Tolbiac sorting warehouse for domestic goods. They're Jewish prisoners, there, on the left, brought in from some camp outside the city.”

I asked if the crates in the photographs were filled with art.

“No,” Rose said. “Napkins, napkin rings, tablecloths, forks, spoons, silver baby spoons, pocketknives, combs, pens, writing tablets, hand mirrors. Children's rattles, toothbrushes, tooth powder, and eyeglasses. There was a whole room just for violins.

“German colonels made tours of the furniture storehouses and told their visiting wives or their local girls to choose new décor for their apartments. If any of the furniture was broken—well, no time to fix it. It was given away to a German of lower rank or, occasionally a French employee. So,” Rose explained, “every day there were a hundred minor accidents with the tables and chairs.”

She handed me a report in German, marked, I gathered,
SECRET.
Rose read first to herself and then translated out loud in spurts. “It's from 1942, a report by M-Aktion. They dealt with furniture. By that date, 69,619 Jewish homes had been emptied. Of these, 38,000 were in Paris …
a matter of great personal pride and responsibility
—this is
Baron von Behr writing … In the Jeu de Paume remain 2,703 paintings and 2,898 decorative objects.”

She took the report back. “And this is why I brought you upstairs last night,” she said, her voice catching. It was a work order for a moving company. Forty trucks were to be dispersed to the following addresses:

MM. Veil-Picard, 63, rue de Courcelles

David-Weill, château de Mareil-le-Guyon (S.-et-O.)

Alphonse Kann, 7, rue des Bûcherons, à Saint-Germain-en-Laye

Wildenstein
, 57,
rue de La Boétie

Berenzon, 21, rue de La Boétie

And there I stopped.

“Worst of all, after I saw this, I had to wait. Then there was your gallery, all at once:
Woman in White.
The Vuillard
Nude Hiding Her Face.
All those Sisley winter scenes. The Toulouse-Lautrec advertisements. Bonnard's
Breakfast.
When I saw
Almonds
, propped against the floorboards of the Salle des Martyrs, I knew that not only had the vault been discovered at twenty-one, rue de La Boétie, but that the coffers of the Chase Bank had been opened as well.”

“And you could do nothing, when you saw them?”

“What, set them aside and take them home under my coat, one by one?” Rose said. “We were searched, very carefully, each night.” She looked miserable.

I asked Rose if I could keep the paper and she said no. We sat side by side in bed. Rose continued, “The
chef emballeur
, Alexandre, collected the moving orders each afternoon so he could determine how many trucks to dispatch to the different arrondissements and how many men he needed on hand at the museum, how many paintings were being prepared to be shipped east and therefore brought to the station, and so on. Each night Alexandre gave his papers to me, and I took them to a man with an illegal darkroom in his basement who photographed them. This way we preserved what documentation we could. We also carried on the pretenses of an affair to avoid suspicion. I had my own lists—of what paintings I knew were going
where, of where I believed they had come from when no information was available. I went home each night with my mind bursting with all I had to remember.”

She handed me a photograph of a room filled with paintings.

“This is the Salle des Martyrs,” she said. “So many modern paintings passed through this room. Because of my training with your father, I could guess which collection a painting came from, even if I had never before seen that painting itself. Your father turned me into an encyclopedia.” She gestured at the stacks of papers. In one, I could just make out the word
Rembrandt.
“And now I have had all my pages torn out.

“I took note of each painting's departure, hoping to coordinate it with what I knew of its arrival. Then I gave copies of Alexandre's orders to the rail workers in the Resistance. Thus they knew which boxcars contained paintings, and I knew which paintings were on board the train. The Resistance, in turn, told General de Gaulle in London which trains should not be bombed and even which parts of a train should be spared. We were piecing together clues for the day when the Germans were defeated and the reassembling could begin. In the morning, I returned the packers’ and the drivers’ orders to Alexandre's office, carefully filed. Toward the end of the war, the photographer was killed and so my work was greatly slowed and many documents were lost. I copied everything I could by hand.”

“You must help me to find our paintings now,” I said. Rose looked pained. “Isn't this the easiest thing I've asked of you?”

She shook her head, unfolded herself from the sheets, and stood by the window smoking, tapping the ash into the courtyard below. An hour passed like this and the sky grew light. We heard the clink and whir of the flower market stalls unfurling their awnings.

She finished another cigarette and said at last, “My life is a life of negativity. I see my future in negatives, a future of what I did not do, what I did not find, what I could not explain, what I could not answer. I was predestined for this.”

“I want to find my father's paintings.”

“You can't.”

“Then some.”

“No.”

“Then just
Almonds.
“ I was not even certain why I said it.

“Why that one?” Rose asked.

“Because it was the only one my father wouldn't sell.”

Rose finally left the window and pressed her cheek to mine. The thought that she had been deciding whether or not to leap from the window coalesced and evaporated. “We're corresponding shapes.”

“I couldn't understand you less,” I said.

“Don't try.”

“All I do is try.”

“That is why we're halves.”

“We lasted the war.”

“It's true.” Rose took my hand.

“Your apartment is terrible,” I said. “Let's go out and I'll buy you some flowers.”

“Flowers make everything look better,” Rose said. “The table, the walls, the furniture, you, me.”

“Me, not you,” I said.

“Especially me. They make up for what I lack.”

“What do you lack?” I asked.

“We don't have time to discuss it,” she replied. We left the apartment and descended in the elevator.

We bought daffodils, because they were the brightest and the least expensive. Rose looked as if she were carrying a lit torch wrapped in paper. We returned to her building and I made a motion to follow her in the door again. She shook her head, but touched my face and said, “The owner of the Galerie Zola was never known for his morals. Not before the war, and certainly not now.” How strange it was to name the gallery after Zola—Zola, who had defended Dreyfus; Zola, preoccupied with the heredity of violence. Rose put her hands on my shoulders again and said, “Go there.”

As I walked back through the flower market, I compared my father to the workers around me, jovial, uncomplicated men who worked with their hands. Further along—around rue de La Boétie and the surrounding neighborhoods where once I had sat in the empty chair next to my father (tilted backward, neck and cheeks
white with foam) or watched him in a mirror as a man with pins in his mouth hemmed Father's pants—I felt as if I could conjure his outline from those that had once cared for him, these men who had cut his hair and shaved his chin and shod his feet and clothed his back. Yet none among them were there. I understood then another horrible calculation in the formula of the war. One class that had always served another served it one last time by being killed first. I remember my father marveling, with his appraiser's eye, at the beautiful artistry of our false papers. Chaim had shown me his, and they were imperfect work indeed.