The Forger (16 page)

These separate voices clashed so furiously inside me, warring back and forth across the tundra of my brain, that it seemed to me my sanity was fracturing in hairline cracks across my skull. I couldn’t sleep, hearing the volcanic rumble of the city. The wind blew in off the rooftops, carrying the smell of baking bread and the distant clank of trains. I wondered how many others out there were like me, among the hundred thousand sleepers, hounded through their dreams by such confusions.

*   *   *

L
ATE
F
RIDAY EVENING
, I finished the last of the paintings.

All Saturday, I sat with the canvases set up around me, trying to decide what to do.

Before it all happened, I’d never have thought I could stay friends with someone who pulled a stunt like this. Now it didn’t seem so black and white. You start out with some image of how things will need to be, clear-cut and defined, and it all seems reasonable to you at the time. But when the image gets dented and scarred, as it always does, you remember the promises you made yourself about what you would do and what you wouldn’t. Maybe you never do find out what is in another person’s heart, or in your own. It boils down to whether you can live with the uncertainty, and in some ways want it even as you fear it, just as you want and fear the few things that are certain in a life.

By the end of the day, I had made up my mind.

That evening, I wrapped up each of the paintings in brown paper and string and brought them downstairs to Fleury’s apartment. I had to make several trips in the elevator, and found myself hoping he didn’t hear the racket I was making in his hallway.

He answered the door wearing a smoking jacket made of lurid red and black velvet. “Ah,” he said, tilting back his head the way he always did.

I waited for him to say something else, but that was all he said. A breeze blew in the window of his apartment and past him and into my face. I smelled soap and aftershave. I looked into his apartment and saw how small and clean it was. I had stopped by a few times to pick him up before we headed out to the Polidor, but mostly he liked to meet in the hallway downstairs. I thought he might be a little ashamed of his place, since he liked to give the impression of living more grandly than he did. The windowsills were busy with flowers in tiny white pots with designs painted on them in orange and blue. An empty red glass bowl stood on the kitchen table. His polished shoes were lined up just inside the door—one pair of black and one pair of brown—and he wore a pair of fancy slippers on his feet.

“You’ve brought your paintings with you,” he said.

“That’s right,” I said.

His eyebrows bobbed. “I thought you’d had enough of me.”

“I kind of thought that, too,” I said.

“I wondered if perhaps you were coming down to rough me up a bit. For my crimes and misdemeanors.”

“I didn’t come here to rough you up. Look,” I told him, “if you still want to work together, there’ll be no more going behind my back.”

“Yes,” he said. “Of course.” He scratched at the back of his neck. “I’m sorry. I made a mistake.”

I helped him carry the paintings into his apartment. We opened them up and I told him what they were about.

“Do you think you can sell them?” I asked.

He breathed in sharply. “I’ll do my best,” he said.

I was very tired now. As I said good-bye to him, he insisted we shake hands. I walked down the corridor and pressed the elevator button. When I turned to look back, he was still standing in the hallway. “Where the hell did you get that jacket?” I asked.

He looked down at his chest, then back up at me. “This is my armor,” he said.

“Armor?”

“Oh yes,” he replied. “It’s a different kind of armor. But it is armor, all the same. And it never fails me.”

*   *   *

M
Y PAINTINGS WERE SHOWN
at Fleury’s gallery the following month. I sold eight of them during the time they hung in the show, and all but one sold soon after that. They didn’t go for a great deal of money, and it made me realize that even if I was successful here, survival in this place would not come easily.

I had, by now, taken over the rent payments on my apartment. Madame La Roche seemed impressed. “You’ve given up painting?” she asked me. “You have taken up employment?”

“Painting is my employment,” I replied.

She blinked in slow astonishment, unable or unwilling to make the connection.

In the weeks that followed, she treated me with grudging respect, even introducing me to one of her landlady’s friends as “a painter of things.” This other woman, Madame Coty, was a near duplicate of Madame La Roche, in her flower-patterned housecoat and thick, fleshy stockings. The two of them used to sit outside the front door in the sun, perched on rickety chairs, smoking their pipes. Their expressions reminded me of two old jack-o’-lanterns that had been left out on a doorstep after Halloween. Their once savage faces had sagged like the slowly rotting pumpkins. Now they just looked drawn and ornery, with only rudeness to chase demons and children away.

It was only after months of living here that I began to find myself on friendly terms with the people who lived on my floor. I rarely saw them. We seemed to live in completely different schedules, like employees of some nonstop factory, all working different shifts. On those rare moments when we did pass in the cramped hall, or rode the elevator down to the street, our greetings were so filled with awkward flinching that it seemed easier, even more humane, to pretend the other person wasn’t there at all. I hated the silence in the black cage of that elevator, as it seemed to close in around me like some complicated torture device, while the other person seemed to be expanding until there was no place for me to look. Eventually, I took it upon myself to start conversations. To my surprise, it worked. An old man with the watery eyes introduced himself as Laurent Finel. He had been invalided out of a job in a coal mine ten years earlier and had come to live in Paris with his sister. The sister died and Finel continued to live in the apartment. He was one of the men who stood outside the Postillon warehouse every morning, more I think because he wanted something to do than because he needed the money, as he had a disability pension. From then on, I recognized him when I looked out the window at the line each morning, the stoop of his back and the type of floppy cap he wore.

There was a young family, the Charbonniers, who had a six-month-old son named Hubert. At first, when I knew there was a baby on the floor, I had worried that the child would keep me up at night with his crying. But the little boy was so quiet that I started hoping he
would
make some noise, because I had begun to worry that there might be something wrong with him. It turned out that there wasn’t. He was just fat and cheerful and quiet. And there was a woman who worked as a dance instructor. She was originally from Norway, a little place called Krossbu that I never could find on the map. She had flaming red hair, lots of it, and huge bright eyes which made her look, depending on whether her eyebrows were raised or lowered, as if she were either in a state of realizing something very important or having just forgotten what it was. Her name was Madame Lindgren. She never did let me know her first name, which I took to be a signal that she didn’t want to get involved. One day, in the elevator, she showed me a couple of dance steps. “It’s jazz,” she said, pronouncing it “tchazz.”

“Not when I’m doing it,” I told her.

From then on, whenever we bumped into each other, she would teach me new steps and I would mangle them and we would laugh about it.

With each of these people, I developed a small but consistent list of topics, which would last us the forty-five seconds it took to travel up or down the elevator. Even if that didn’t amount to much, at least I didn’t find myself listening to the door to see if the hall was empty before venturing out.

All through the winter of 1939–40, I made more paintings and Fleury was able to sell them. There was a moment when Fleury joked with me about making a new series of sketches and selling them as old originals. I pretended he was joking. He got the message, and we left it at that. Sometimes I worried that the sketches would be exposed as forgeries, but as time went by, the chance of that seemed less and less likely. After a while, I stopped worrying about it altogether. Instead, like everyone else, I worried about the war.

By the beginning of October, the Polish army had been defeated. The Germans were torpedoing ships all over the Atlantic, but lost their big battleship, the
Graf Spee,
in December. In that same month, the Russians invaded Finland. The Germans didn’t attack the Maginot Line. After a while it became possible to think that they might not.

In Paris, the war still seemed a long way off, but its presence could be felt in higher prices for things like bread, bacon, butter, sugar, milk. Some foods could be sold only on certain days, like baguettes, while croissants, for reasons I never understood, could be bought any time. Cafés could serve alcohol only three days a week. Tobacco prices went up sharply and coffee became almost extinct. Instead, the cafés began serving something called Café National, which was made of roasted acorns and chickpeas. The only way it could be drunk at all was if you didn’t try to pretend it was coffee. There was very little gasoline, and because of this, fewer cars in the street. Officially, the government was rationing all these things, but in the beginning you could still buy what you wanted. This was lucky for me since although I was granted a ration card, mine took longer to process because I was a foreign national. I received two eggs a week, about three ounces of cooking oil and two ounces of margarine. The only food that could be found in any quantity was turnip. I boiled it, mashed it up like baby food and forced it down without thinking.

It was a very cold winter. Madame La Roche turned down the heat so that the radiators were barely warm to the touch. She turned them up for only one hour a day, right before dawn, when the building would fill with grumbles and hisses and clanking, as if some midget were crawling through the heating pipes with tiny hobnailed boots. Other landlords turned off the heat altogether.

The snow that fell was thick and wet. It froze against the manes of horses pulling carts along the Quai d’Orsay. I saw people being towed around on skis behind cars whose tires were wrapped with chains. The river froze on either side of the Isle de la Cité and bargemen hit the ice with huge and hollow steel balls attached to the ends of bamboo poles. The sound they made was like the ringing of a cracked bell, echoing past the ice-bearded windowsills and shop signs. Paris bums, the
clochards,
froze to death beside the Pont d’Austerlitz and the Pont de Tolbiac, where they had set up huts made from cobblestones and canvas sheeting stolen from barges moored on the banks of the Seine.

One day I noticed that Madame La Roche’s heavy, wooden family crest was missing from its perch in the front hallway. When I asked her if it had been stolen, she flapped her hand at me and frowned. “I burned it,” she said. “There was three days’ worth of fuel in that old thing.” She tottered off toward the elevator on her stiffened legs. “It wasn’t my family crest, anyway,” she called back without turning around.

“Whose was it?” I asked. I was thinking maybe an uncle or something.

She climbed into the black cage and closed the door. “I don’t know,” she said. “I bought it for ten francs at Clignancourt.” She laughed as the elevator rumbled her up out of sight.

There were times that winter when I wished I’d had my own fake family crest to burn. I got used to sleeping in my overcoat and with a wool blanket under the bottom sheet as well as on top of me. I wore my wool socks until they fell apart and then I learned to darn and repair them myself.

Military uniforms were everywhere, along with rumors of soldiers abandoning their posts, less out of fear than the crazed boredom which the French called
le cafard.
The French army took these incidents very seriously, remembering the mass desertions that had taken place in the last war. There was also widespread drunkenness among the soldiers. Each French
poilu
was issued with two liters of strong wine per day. They called it “Pinard,” and would riot if the wine did not arrive. The train stations had special rooms set aside for soldiers to sleep off their hangovers before heading back to the front, where nothing seemed to be happening, except for the occasional firing of heavy guns for the benefit of visiting officials.

I made no plans to leave the city and remained optimistic about my luck. I had a stubborn faith it would not fail me.

In those harsh months, I came no closer to expanding my circle of friends. I was so near to being broke most of the time that I didn’t get out to the places where I might have met people. Slowly I grew used to the idea. I didn’t get too worried about the fact that I didn’t have a girlfriend, or that I wasn’t invited out to parties, the way I might have been in normal times. The war had set everything off balance. There was no such thing as normal any more.

*   *   *

“M
R.
H
ALIFAX
!”

I had just walked into my building when a voice called to me from the street.

“Mr. Halifax,” said the voice again.

I turned to see a man with short-cut hair and a tweed sports jacket with a white polo-neck sweater underneath. He had the dented nose and shallow eyes of a boxer. It was a face built for taking punishment. The daylight blinked as he stepped inside the foyer.

“What can I do for you?” I asked cautiously.

“My name is Tombeau. I’m with the French police. I was wondering if I could have a word with you.”

“Go ahead,” I said, sudden worry hollowing me out inside. “What’s it about?” But I knew what it was about.

His face showed no expression. His hands stayed by his sides. “I need you to come with me.”

“Now?” My throat had dried out so quickly that I could barely talk.

“Now,” he said. “We’re pressed for time.” He turned and looked out to the street.