Pictures at an Exhibition (27 page)

A FEW MOMENTS LATER, I FOUND MYSELF ON THE
street. My knee was scraped where my trousers had torn. I sat on the curb and considered ways to reenter the building. With the eyes of a stranger, I studied my reflection in the darkened glass of the auction house. The war's rations had exaggerated my thinness, so that I seemed taller than ever, with wide shoulders but not enough flesh below them. My curls were in need of a shearing, like a caveman in a diorama I had seen once, long ago, in London, with my mother. Why had we taken that trip? I wondered. A doctor.
Micheline.

Mnutes later, the door to Drouot's slammed again and another man was shoved out onto the sidewalk, this one with a childish face and a balding pate. He too had torn the knees of his pants.

He squinted in the darkness in my direction. “Come out, don't lurk,” he said. “I know who you are.”

He took a step toward me, examining my face with a frown.

“You're a friend of Bertrand's!” he exclaimed, after a pause. “That's it. After they threw you out, there was a fair amount of clucking from the hens in the audience, and the rooster had to quiet them down, saying you weren't who the card said you were and it had expired five years ago. Well, anyway, as soon as they got rid of you, I figured I'd be next. I'm Artur Stein.” He thrust his hand toward me. “Picture me with a full head of hair. Then you'll remember.”

I tried to, and conjured up a night of Bertrand, Artur, and me on bicycles, following a taxicab with Fanny Reinach and her companion, en route to the Odéon movie theater.

Artur smiled. “Now you recognize me?”

I said I did. “Have you—” I began.

“Heard from Bertrand?” He shook his head. “Nothing. These days no news is the worst kind of news.” He lit a cigarette. “They
were going to leave Paris at the same time we did, but some distant relative named Le Tarnec had connections to the police and promised to keep the Germans off their backs. A protector. You know how connected those Reinachs were. And Léon, too, Fanny's husband, with his father running the Villa Kerylos in the South and practically every Manet, Renoir, you-name-it painting in the Jeu de Paume donated by their uncle.

“At first, Bertrand argued in favor of leaving,” Stein said. “He was always pessimistic. Said they would be punished for indecision. That it wouldn't be so bad to leave the city, since they could always come back. But Léon and Fanny were worried about the Camondo museum.

“Just a month before all this, Bertrand had written a play. He called it
The Collector.
He mailed the script to some types he knew in the theater but hadn't heard any news. It sent him into one of those terrible depressions. It made him want to flee this cursed city even more. But then a theater troupe wanted to stage it. They idolized him, said he was the next Molière, and if you're a fellow who's been searching and searching and found nothing you like except hashish and Antonin Artaud and then—
whoosh!
—these twenty unwashed bohemians think you're better than Ibsen, and some of them want to sleep with you, too? So Bertrand convinced Léon to stay. That's all I know.”

We sat in silence on the curb, and the sewers murmured beneath us. In the sky, the stars were bright, sharpened by a dark city in which most people still used their blackout shades at night.

“And Fanny?” I asked. He shook his head.

“There's some central office where you can see if someone was arrested or not,” Artur said. “There's a red book where all this is printed. I've known about it for months,” he said miserably, “and I haven't gone.”

“I've known, too,” I admitted. And yet Chaim went twice a week.

“Where did you hide?” Artur asked.

I told him about Le Puy, Monsieur Bickart, and the root cellar. As I spoke, I pictured my mother's hands playing piano concertos on the
bottom rung of the ladder that connected the kitchen to the cellar. She said the ladder had three octaves. Her right foot pumped an invisible pedal.

It was later than I thought. Artur would catch the last train to Vincennes. We walked south along rue Drouot, past the yellow post office and its raised portcullis, toward the Métro. Artur said his family had also hidden in the Massif Central, with a widow who ran a grocery. His grandmother had been rounded up from a hotel in Nice. The family believed she died on the journey to Poland. (I pictured a woman in a white fur coat.) Artur had one brother, younger by ten years.

We descended into the station and waited. Our train arrived, and we changed it for another at Strasbourg-Saint-Denis, then made our way toward the Gare d'Austerlitz.

We approached a flock of pigeons crowded on the pavement beneath the sign posting tracks and times. When we drew too close, the birds took flight and, as if on cue, each slot on the Departures board became a whirl of flying letters and numbers as its information changed. Artur's train did not leave for another thirty minutes. We sat in awkward silence.

“Our business has always been furniture,” Artur began. “That's how we got to know the Camondos. My father sold the kind of furniture Bertrand's grandfather collected.
Tout est Louis.
Very traditional, Louis Seize, gilt. Can you imagine trying to tuck a chandelier or a harp sichord out of the way? Of course not. When we came back, everything was gone. Mother bought some mattresses for us and we moved back into the house. My parents have started to buy a few pieces, mainly chairs. Father always said that to build a collection one had to start with chairs, since they make the measure of a craftsman's art.”

Artur rubbed his hands against his scraped knees.

“Father can buy furniture again because other pieces have reappeared at our gallery. We'll look out the window during breakfast to discover six fauteuils on the curbstone, as if someone would sit on three-hundred-year-old armchairs on the street. Or a truck will rat-tle our saucers, and the next thing we know a Chinese chest is on our
stoop. Or someone will ring the bell late at night, and when we go to the door there's no one there, but instead of some swaddled orphan child there's a set of console tables.

“My parents say, ‘Isn't this nice, a neighbor must have known what happened and they're trying to help.’ But you and I know it's more sinister. These mysterious donors can either burn their loot, or keep it until they die. But then, when the children sell papa's desk, they'll find out that their sweet dead papa was not such a good man after all. We have arrived at the end of the great shuffle.”

“Or the beginning.”

“Six weeks ago, my younger brother and I were at an auction preview. I lost sight of him for a moment. Then I heard him shout, ‘Artur, this is ours!’ so loudly that everyone in the room looked up. The dealer turned seven shades of purple and ran over. There was my brother, on his haunches, staring at the shelves inside a mother-of-pearl-inlaid armoire. My brother recognized the armoire when he bent down to look at it—because that was the height he had been when we went into hiding.

“The dealer rushed us into another room and offered to sell our own armoire back to us. He gave me a fair price, probably what he had paid for it—that is, if
he
paid for it. He said to me, ‘A bad agreement is better than a good lawsuit,’ and Father bought it that day.”

The same well-turned phrase had made its way around Paris. Was this how the dealers comforted each other when, on a rare occasion, they were forced to correct their collections?

Artur's train appeared at the far end of the station, its front window a glowing band in the gloom.

“Come to the deportees’ office with me, tomorrow?” I asked.

“Where?” he asked. “When?”

I told him the address: the Service Central des Déportés Israélites, 23, boulevard Haussmann, Ninth arrondissement, where I had left Chaim before.

The train stopped with a screech and a pneumatic sigh. “Till daylight, old man.” Artur hung from the train's open door. “At nine, a few short hours from now.”

I walked across the pont d'Austerlitz, planning to visit Chaim. Yet
as I approached his apartment, I feared I might frighten my friend if I were to wake him, and so I changed my course.

Streetwalkers loitered on both sides of the boulevard. They had dead-looking hair like the wigs in the wig shops that flanked the arcades. Three pimps lurked nearby. One in a leather coat talked with the women, while two others leaned in the shadows, sleeping.

The women called out to me.

“You're beautiful,” I said. “But you would tire me out. Plus, I'm as poor as the pavement.”

An ancient whore, her hair pinned by a sequined bow, trotted alongside me. “Sweetheart,” she said. “A special rate for you.” She eyed the pimps.

“Not tonight, young lady,” I said.

“They think you look like a rich man pretending to be poor,” she whispered, her painted cheek against mine. “So run.”

I ran. For what felt like an eternity but could not have been more than three or four minutes, I thought I could outrun the two men who had pretended to doze against the wall. But they were faster than I anticipated. Their breathing sounded like dogs’—easy, animal, enjoying the hunt. In a moment, they were upon me. One wrenched off my overcoat and tore the money pouch from around my neck, and the other knocked me to the ground. The taller of the two loomed over me, raining blows on my cheeks and jaws and kicking my stomach. I heard my keys chime against the metal sewer grate before they landed with a splash. Then the men were still. The taller one sniffed the air. “Enough,” he said, and ran off. The other followed until they were running with their legs in unison.

I lay over the sewer grate until I was certain they were gone. The street was silent again. I dragged myself to the curb, felt my face and stomach, and ran my tongue across my teeth. I thought of all that missing money. Two paintings’ worth, lost, found, and lost again. I vomited in the sewer. Blood slicked my nostrils.

I struggled to my feet and began to walk. My father had been right—the paintings were not to be found—and had turned back as soon as he sensed this, which was almost instantly. I had gone on, blindly. I was a work on paper: weightless, sketchy, all impulse.

I heard no bells that morning as I continued on to the Service Central des Déportés Israélites. I leaned against the door of 23, boulevard Haussmann until a figure appeared, pawing the ground with two crutches, then swinging her body between them. She wore a kerchief over her dark hair.

“Excuse me,” she said. “The office will open in exactly fifteen minutes. You will have to wait outside. I'm sorry. It's the rules.” She peered at my face. “Do you need a doctor?”

I shook my head.

When her back was turned to me, I studied her legs. At first, I thought they looked like the limbs of a starved person. On closer inspection, I realized her calf muscles had been entirely cut away. Only the femur and ulna were wrapped in skin.

The girl on crutches returned to the door. By the puckering and jumping of her mouth, I understood she was asking a question. She stood back, and I gathered I was permitted to enter the building. She pointed to a toilet and held out a towel to me. “I haven't any bandages,” she said.

When I emerged, I told her Bertrand's name, as well his sister's, mother's, and father's. She wrote them down in neat script on a pink slip of paper. Behind her were rows and stacks of books, which resembled photograph albums. She asked me a few questions: Were there alternate spellings to the Reinach name, and did I know the year in which they were deported? No and no, I answered.

“We don't have a precise system yet,” she said. “The Red Book is a list of all the people we know who are alive. The convoys, with the names alphabetized, are on the shelves in order of deportation date. I'll ask you to keep the volumes in order. They're quite heavy. If you put Convoy Forty in the place of Twenty, it's no chore for you to move them, but it's hard for me.” She looked at me fiercely.

I waited another half hour before beginning my work, hoping Artur Stein would still appear. At a quarter to ten I gave up and entered the reading room, which had empty bookshelves but twelve long tables. I began to read through the Red Book.

I did not find Bertrand's name under
R-REINACH.
Next, I scoured the book looking for anyone named
BERTRAND
or
CAMONDO
, his
mother's maiden name. I closed my eyes. I could hear the thump and swing of the girl moving about the office and the unintelligible rise and fall of voices on the street. Sometimes the building shook with what surely must have been the Métro running beneath. A shade was raised too quickly and it wound around its roller with a snap. The telephone rang and rang. Single men came and went from the room; there were very few women. When a couple did enter, they were father and son.

I moved to the black books, which were heavier for me than the girl had predicted. The sun traveled across the floor as I lifted book after book and skimmed through the names.

By the twentieth book, my eyes were exhausted from reading. I heard the girl on crutches speak in Yiddish to an old man in the hallway. Eventually, he shuffled into the room and began to work on the black books, too. He was unkempt, with crumbs in his beard. I felt badly that he had no wife to care for him. He grunted with each book he lifted down, and flicked through the pages quickly, licking his finger from time to time. I heard a strangled cry come from the old man.

I found Bertrand in Book 35, Convoy 62, which departed Paris on November 11, 1943. My friend was the 887th person listed on the convoy, with his sister as 888th and father 889th. As if Bertrand had stepped forward first, and announced his profession: carpenter.
Schreiner.
I continued to read.

Seven volumes later, I found his mother, in a convoy of 1,501 persons, deported on March 7, 1944. How had Madame Reinach née Camondo been separated from them? I could not fathom anything. I thought of what Chaim had said about Drancy and how children there wandered, forcibly separated from their parents, too young to know their own names. If an older child knew a younger one, he wrote the infant's name on a piece of wood and tied it with twine to the baby's neck.