Girl in Hyacinth Blue (2 page)

"Forgive my indelicacy, but how did you obtain it?"

He fixed on me a stony look. "My father, who always had a quick eye for fine art, picked it up, let us say, at an advantageous moment."

"An estate sale or an auction? Then there'd be papers."

"No. No Vermeer has been auctioned since World War I. Let's just say it was privately ob tained. By my father, who gave it to me when he died." The line of his jaw hardened. "So there are no records, if that's what you're thinking. And no bill of sale." His voice had a queer defiance.

"The provenance?"

"There are several possibilities. Most of Ver meer's work passed through the hands of one Pieter Claesz van Ruijven, son of a wealthy Delft brewer. I believe this one did not. When Vermeer died, he left his wife with eleven children and a drawerful of debts. Five hundred guilders for gro ceries. Another sum for woolens for which the mer chant Jannetje Stevens seized twenty-six paintings. Later they were negotiated back to the widow, but only twenty-one of them were auctioned in the set tling of his estate. Who got the other five? Artists or dealers in the Guild of St. Luke? Neighbors? Family? This could be one. And of those twentyone, only sixteen have been identified. Where did the others go? A possibility there too. Also, a baker, Hendrick van Buyten, held two as collateral against a bread bill of six hundred seventeen guilders. Some think van Buyten had even obtained a couple others earlier."

I had to be careful not to be taken in. Just be cause Cornelius knew facts about Vermeer didn't make his painting one.

"Later, it could have been sold as a de Hooch, whose work was more marketable at the time. Or it could have been thrown in as extra puyk, a give away item in the sale of a collection of de Hooches or van der Werffs, or it could have been in the es tate sale of Pieter Tjammens in Groningen."

He was beyond me now. What sort of person knew that kind of detail?

"Documents report only 'an auction of curious paintings by important masters such as J. van der Meer that had been kept far away from the capital.' There are plenty of possibilities."

All this spilled out of him in a flood. A math teacher! Unbelievable.

But the question of how Cornelius's father ob tained the painting, he deftly avoided. I did not know him well enough to press further without be ing pushy. Not knowing this which he so carefully kept private, I could not believe it to be genuine. I finished the brandy and extricated myself, politely enough, thinking, so what if it isn't a Vermeer? The painting's exquisite. Let the fellow enjoy it.

His father. Presumably the same name. Engel brecht. German.

Why was it so vital that I concur? Some great thing must be hanging in the balance.

I drove home, trying to put it all out of my mind, yet the face of the girl remained.

Merrill's funeral the day before had made Cor nelius thoughtful. Not of Merrill particularly. Of the unpredictableness of one's end, and what re mains unpardoned. And of his father. Snow had blanketed his father's coffin too—specks at first, then connecting, then piling up until the coffin be came a white puffy loaf. That jowl-faced minister saying, "One must take notice of the measure of a man" was the only thing said during Merrill's serv­ ice that he remembered.

Cornelius had to admit on his father's behalf that Otto Engelbrecht was a dutiful father, often stern and then suddenly tender during Cornelius's childhood in Duisburg, near the Dutch border. On this lonely Sunday afternoon with snow still falling gently, Cornelius, reading in his big leather chair, looked up from the page and tried to recall his ear liest memory of his father. It may have been his fa ther giving him the little wooden windmill brought back from Holland. It had painted blue blades that turned and a little red door with one hinge missing that opened to reveal a tiny wooden family inside.

He remembered how his father had spent Sun day afternoons with him, the only child—took him to the Düsseldorf Zoo, gave him trumpet lessons himself, pulled him in a sled through the neighbor hood, and when Cornelius suffered from the cold, how his father enfolded Cornelius's small hand in his and drew it into his pocket. He taught him chess strategies and made him memorize them, ex plained in a Dutch museum the reason for van Gogh's tortured skies, the genius of Rembrandt's faces, and when they moved to America, a result of his father's credo to seize advantageous moments, he took him to see the Yankees in Yankee Stadium. These facts Cornelius saw now as only the good in tentions of a patched-up life.

Later, in Philadelphia, he was embarrassed by his father's hovering nervousness whenever he brought home a school friend, and understood only vaguely his father's dark command, "If they ask, tell them we are Swiss, and don't say another word." By the time he brought home friends from college, his father had moved the painting into the study and installed a lock, secreting it with a nig gard's glee. His father's self-satisfied posture whenever he looked at the painting—hands clasped behind his back, rocking on his toes, then heels—became, for a time, a source of nausea to him.

After his mother died, his father, retired and restless, took over tending her garden. Cornelius remembered now the ardent slope of his shoulders as he stooped to eradicate any deviant weed sprout ing between rows of cauliflower and cabbage. Did he have to be so relentless? Couldn't he just let one grow, and say I don't know how it slipped through? Joyfully he planted, watered, gave away grocery sacks of vegetables to neighbors.

"Such wonderful tomatoes," one woman mar veled.

"You can't get a decent tomato in the super market these days." Smiling, he heaped more in her sack.

"We had a victory garden like this during the war," she said, and Cornelius saw him flinch.

Was that his father's Luger, grown huge in his mind, cracking down on a woman's hand reaching for a bun as she was hurried from her kitchen?

The line between memory and imagination was muddled by years of intense rumination, of horri fied reading, one book after another devoured with carnivorous urgency—histories, personal accounts, diaries, documents, war novels—and Cornelius could not be sure now what parts he'd read, what parts he'd overheard his father, Lieutenant Otto Engelbrecht, telling Uncle Friederich about the Raid of the Two Thousand, what became known to academics as Black Thursday, August 6, 1942.

From dark to midnight, they dragged them out of their houses, the raid ordered, historians said, because too few Jews called-up for deportation were reporting at the station, and the train to Wes terbork had to be filled. By mid-August they moved to South Amsterdam, a more prosperous area. In September, they were still at it, carting them off to Zentralstelle on van Scheltema Square.

Just like the assembly line at the Duisburg plant. From somewhere, his father's voice.

The rest was a tangle of the printed and the spo ken word, enlarged by the workings of his imagina tion. He played in his mind again the Duisburg memory of creeping back downstairs after bedtime and overhearing his father telling Uncle Friederich the story he, a ten-year-old, didn't understand then. This time he staged it as though his father, after too much Scotch, and bloated by a checkmate following too many losses to Friederich, told his brother when in family circles it was still safe to speak, "You've got to see opportunities and seize them on the spot. That's how it's done. Or, if a quick move isn't expe dient, make a plan. Like that painting. When my aide spotted a silver tea set in some Jew's dining room, he made a move to bag it. Wrong time. I had to stop him. Property of the Führer."

Cornelius had read of that, the Puls van follow ing the raids the next day, street by street, to cart away ownerless Jewish possessions for the Haus raterfassung, the Department for the Appropriation of Household Effects.

"That's when I saw that painting, behind his head. All blues and yellows and reddish brown, as translucent as lacquer. It had to be a Dutch master. Just then a private found a little kid covered with tablecloths behind some dishes in a sideboard cabi net. We'd almost missed him. My aide glared at me, full of accusation that I could slip like that and be distracted. With any excuse—the painting, for example, or my reprimand—he might even have re ported it."

What always rang in his mind with the crash of dishes, Cornelius would never now be sure was memory or his own swollen imagination: "So I shoved my boot up the Jew-boy's dirty ass. But I took care to note the house number."

What had happened next wasn't difficult to piece together. As soon as they delivered their quota, at 1:00 or 2:00 A.M., while other Jews still lay frozen in their hiding places and when the streets were dead quiet, his father went back. The painting was still there, hanging in spite of Decree 58/42, reported in several histories: All Jewish art collections had to be deposited with Lippmann and Rosenthal, a holding company. But this was not a collection, only a single painting, blatantly dis played, or ignorantly. What could his father have thought? That therefore it deserved to be taken? And then would come his father's voice resounding somehow through the years, "By the time I got there, the tea set was already gone."

Going over the same visions he thought his fa ther had, hoped his father had, kept Cornelius awake at night, filled his dreams with the orgy of plunder, mothers not chosen lining up to die, pain not linked to sin, smoke drifting across fences and coating windows of Christian homes, children's teeth like burnt pearls. Driven by imagination, he read like a zealot on two subjects: Dutch art and the German occupation of the Netherlands. Only one gave him pleasure. Only one might dissolve the image of his father's hat and boots and Luger.

Compelled by his need to know, Cornelius trav eled to Amsterdam one summer. He avoided van Scheltema Square, went straight to the Rijksmu seum, examined breathlessly Vermeer's works, and in one delicious afternoon, convinced himself of the authenticity of his family's prize by seeing layers of thin paint applied in grooved brush strokes cre ating light and shadow on the blue sleeve of a lady reading a letter, just like those on the sleeve of his sewing girl. A few days later he went to The Hague. At the Royal Cabinet of Paintings in the Mauritshuis, he saw points of brilliant light in the large, lovely amber-brown eyes of Vermeer's girl in a blue and yellow turban, the same as on his sewing girl. In the musty municipal archives of Delft, Am sterdam, Leiden and Groningen he pored through old documents and accounts of estate sales. He found only possibilities, no undeniable evidence. Still, the evidence was in the museums—the simi larities were undeniable. He flew home, hoarding conviction like a stolen jewel.

"It is. It is," he told his father.

Then came the slow smile that cracked his fa ther's face. "I knew it had to be."

Together they went over every square inch of the painting, seduced anew by its charms, yet the rapture was insufficient to drown out the truth Cornelius could no longer deny: If the painting were real, so was the atrocity of his father's looting. He'd had no other way to obtain it. Now with Friederich and his mother gone, only two in the whole world knew, and that, together with the twin images in their dreams, bound them willingly or not into a double kinship.

He started to tell someone else once, his one time wife who had laughed when he said it was a Vermeer. Laughed, and asked how his father got it, and he couldn't say, and her laughter jangled in his ears long afterward. She claimed he turned cold to her after that, and within a year she left, saying he loved things rather than people. The possible truth of the accusation haunted him with all the rest.

After his father's stroke, when the money from such a painting would set him up finely in a rest home, Cornelius agonized. Even an inquiry to a dealer might bring Israeli agents to his father's door with guns and extradition papers efficiently negotiated by the internationally operating Jewish Documentation Center, and a one-way plane ticket to Jerusalem, courtesy of the Mossad. More than a thousand had been hunted down so far, and not just Reichskommissars or SS Commandants either, so Cornelius moved back home to care for him.

Finally, when there would be no more after noons of wheeling him, freshly bathed and shaven, out to the sun of the garden, when pain clutched through the drugs, his father murmured fragments, in German, the language he'd left behind. In a room soured by the smell of dying, a smell Cor nelius knew his father could recognize, Otto whis pered, "Bring the painting in."

When they both knew the end was close, Cor nelius heard, faintly, "I only joined because of the opportunity to make lifelong friendships with peo ple on the rise."

Cornelius sniggered, then spooned crushed ice between his father's parched lips.

"I only saw the trains. That's all I knew."

He wiped with a tissue a dribble inching down his father's chin, and waited for his father's breath, suspended in indecision, to come again.

"No more than forwarding agents. Sending them from one address to another. What happened at the other end was none of my business."

Right. Of course. This way for the trains, please. Careful, madam. Watch your step. Coolly Cor nelius watched a pain worm across his father's fore head. How had he deserved to live so long?

"The thought of opposing or evading orders never entered my head."

Precisely.

Like a moulting snake, Cornelius thought, his father made pathetic efforts to shed the skin of sin in order to get down to the marrow of his inno cence in time. But on the last morning, with opaque gray snow fog closing in, came the truth of his grief: "I never reached a high rank."

That allowed Cornelius to bury him inexpen sively. Without notice. It wasn't a cruel thing, he told himself. Call it a memorial act, aimed at cheat ing the world of its triumph by ignominy, but by its very privacy, it failed. He did his best, that is, while his father was still living, did what he could, what he could pry out of himself. Nobody could say he didn't. Alone in this same study, sitting in his fa ther's leather chair that struck him now as being the color of a bruise, he'd read the will. He'd forced his eyes to register each line and not scan down the page to see what he knew he'd see, that "a painting of a young girl sewing at a window" was his.