Pictures at an Exhibition (11 page)

I descended into the train station and rose again at Les Halles, intending to return to our hotel on the boulevard Sébastopol. As I climbed to the top of the Métro stairs, I had a sudden feeling of the vast tunnel behind me and the locomotive whisking away with swaying, stupefied bodies inside. A black van idled at a stoplight. It was the only car on the street, which struck me as uniquely sinister. We had heard that there were mobile vans in which deported Jews were poisoned, a story that we had dismissed at the time as too ghastly to be true. The black car sped forward, its tailpipe streaming fumes, and I had again the sense that I had ascended from the Métro into the wrong city and in a body that could not quite contain me.

At the hotel, the concierge told stories of girls who had once consorted with the enemy left with shaved heads and an O branded on their brows, a vengeance carried out unchecked because everyone was afraid of being called a collaborator, and, in those days, we heard that many such accused were shot. One late night, I thought I heard
Rose's name bounced over the concierge's counter (though I also heard it while listening to water drop from the faucet into the sink, in the jingle of money on the bus turnstile, in the straining of the violins in a Rossini broadcast), but when I asked the speaker to repeat himself, he eyed me strangely and said, “I'd stay away from politics if I were you, young man.”

AS IF I COULD NOT ACCEPT THE WORLD I HAD EMERGED
in, during those first days in Paris, I awoke persistently expecting to find the dark rooms in which we had spent the war: those of Monsieur Bickart's farmhouse in Le Puy, and its odor of the chicken coop, the dray's stamp and whinny, the earthy smell of the green lentils, and the fond way our protector rubbed their stalks between his fingers. The relative simplicity of that time now seemed like a luxury. I worked in the fields alongside Monsieur Bickart. The soil was black and rich from the volcanoes that had spread themselves over Le Puy a millennium before. Above the distant town stood a bronze Virgin, who blazed when the morning sun found her hillside.

Monsieur Bickart called me Jacques, the name of his nephew who had worked a summer on his uncle's farm in 1931, after the Depression. Jacques's boots, which I wore, were a size too big, and I stuffed their toes with newspaper. If any of the citizens of Le Puy believed I was Jacques, they were either very young or so old they had become young again. My parents were required to remain hidden in the house and, often for long stretches, in the root cellar. We supposed Monsieur Bickart did not want to test his neighbors’ tolerance as, to begin with, he was a Protestant and so already under suspicion.

Bickart possessed an accordion, of which both he and my mother were jealously fond. Each waited impatiently for the other to finish playing. One day, in passing, a neighbor complimented Monsieur Bickart on his astounding progress on the instrument. That evening, the accordion broke, which was nearly a crisis in the household, as our host decided it was best not to fix it. Mother sulked until Monsieur Bickart gave her the lace-making kit that had once belonged to his grandmother. Following a manual printed in the 1860s, Mother
taught herself to make guipure, the kind of filet lace for which the Massif Central is known throughout the world.

We paid Monsieur Bickart for our protection and care, a single enormous sum, the total of which I never learned, that had been withdrawn from my father's safe before we left Paris. Withdrawn from the safe because, by the time we fled, access to our accounts at the Chase Bank was already compromised. It took my father and Auguste days to realize no bank teller would let them do anything other than make a deposit, and so they left empty-handed. Those accounts, though, in the weeks after our return to Paris, in the dingy hotel by the markets of Les Halles, were my one comfort. It was said that the presidents of the Banque de France, Crédit Agricole, and Crédit Lyonnais all kept their money and treasure at the Chase Bank. Surely, these would have been untouchable.

IDLY, ONE SEPTEMBER AFTERNOON, WHILE TRYING TO
engage my father in something other than reading the newspaper, I asked him if, while I looked for the paintings, he should purchase anew the works of his former artists.

Father replied, “I bought paintings in the twenties and thirties, expecting to sell them in the forties. I can no longer afford what I once owned.”

I did not know what to say and left the room. As I stalked about outside, my thoughts returned to Rose. She, of all people, seemed to offer a solution. We had been in Paris for eighteen days and I had not yet seen her. The thought struck me as nearly inconceivable. The Louvre remained a locked fortress. I had even been to the lycée she attended as a prize scholarship student before she entered university. I haunted 21, rue de La Boétie, too: the first time, I saw a young man sleeping on the floor with a rifle beside him. When I returned that day, the gate was locked with a chain as thick as my wrist.

At our hotel I asked the concierge to ring the museum once more for me. As he did, I studied his face with its florid skin and webbing of blood vessels. His hands shook when he held the telephone, as mine did when he passed me its receiver. I gave my name and asked
the switchboard operator to connect me to Rose Clément. She said, “Who?” I repeated Rose's name. I knew then that she was married. The concierge smiled at the crossword in his lap and clucked his tongue, while I waited and blinked at the ceiling.

The operator returned and requested that I not contact this person again. I sputtered to the dead line. I wondered what my crime had been. The concierge gazed at me unsteadily when I handed him the telephone. His nose was red and resembled a potato. “Hope is the devil wearing a new coat,” he said, after a long pause, and returned to his puzzles.

I climbed the stairs to our empty rented room and stood by its window. The trucks rumbled by and belched their fumes into the dim space. There was the bell of the knife grinder, with his grindstone attached to his motorcycle by a rickety cart. Housewives, maids, and cooks streamed outside, their hands thick with knife handles, the blades pointing down like mechanical fingers. I too wanted to make my dull self sharp.

MY MOTHER COULD NOT PLAY AN OUT-OFTUNE PIANO
, but I could, so I walked down to the Seine, past plane trees and their bark flecked as if a thousand boys with pocket knives had been at them, to the
antiquaires
on the quay.

I looked in several shop windows before I found my vendor. His wares were not prints of great value, but were on quality paper with clear colors and lines. From the stoop, I examined the engravings: a map of Versailles and its emerald gardens and fountains impossibly blue, an eighteenth-century curricle, and a preening cockatoo with a stiff red comb. The shop's owner had displayed his prints in frames of good taste—in fact, the frames were finer than the prints themselves, so as to trick the untrained eye. I felt my father's presence.

As I walked into the shop, my eyes adjusted to the smoke-dimmed haze. I ducked to avoid a low-hanging chandelier. A figure in a black coat with a hairless head hunched over a desk, studying a paper he held close to his face. I planned to stride toward the man at the front of the store—I was a newly sharpened knife, after all. Instead, the
long sleeves and swinging hem of my jacket, sized in the years before the war, threatened towers of teacups with every step.

The shopkeeper lowered his paper. He had a glass eye. The marble fixed on me, while the other jerked up and down. He took in my person—the fray at my sleeve, the wrinkles in my pants, the muddy specks on my shoes.

“You look familiar,” the Cyclops said, in a voice like a radio actor.

“I have a familiar-looking face,” I said. Perhaps my father had been in this store after all? I had his eyes, I supposed, and the nose, long and round at its end.

“You were here once before.”

“Yes.” The eye slid toward the door as a couple paused in the store window. The woman wore a cape with long white gloves. After a moment, her escort pulled her along by the crook of her arm.

“Now that the old guard is gone, you've all grown so young,” he said. I tried to tell where his eye was focused. “Would you like to see my acquisitions since your last visit?”

“Very much so.”

“I'm a family man,” he said. “I wouldn't keep this kind of a collection. But how else is one to stay in business?” He opened a drawer marked
ARCHITECTURAL DRAWINGS
and took out a box covered in leather.

I was shown one pornographic photograph after another. They were all of children, little boys and girls. The legs and hair-covered hands of grown men hulked in the background, or to the side of the frame. The lips of the girls shone with lipstick. I winced inside as each page sliced to the bottom of the pile and another sliced to the top.

“You don't like them,” he said. “I can tell. The collection is picked over, I admit it. I'll have new ones by next Thursday. You can leave just a small payment and I'll lay aside the very best. I have an eye for a gentleman's favorites.”

I saw that there were drawings underneath the photos. “I've considered starting a collection,” I said. “Nudes from the middle or so of the last century.” He set down the box. “I can't pay much. But every man deserves his own treasure trove of beauty.”

He gazed at me with great feeling. “It is true, young man; they can take many things away but never that.” I studied his face. There were nicks from where he had cut himself shaving, short scratches as if a cat had leaped at his cheek and tried to cling to it. I looked down.

And there she was, an early Manet, fluttering on the top of the pile of sketches from another scaly box labeled
NUDES, XIXèME.
My Cyclops could not know, otherwise his hands would have trembled as mine did, now wadded and clammy in the pockets of my coat. Olympia was not yet the proud whore trying to pose as a grand woman. Here she looked half-witted, with a blond pompadour and a ribbon tied comically around her neck, as if she were a Christmas gift.

I thought of my father and Matisse.

I first showed interest in several lesser prints.

“A real Degas, monsieur,” the Cyclops assured me of another picture. “A pastel, a
café concert.
Any man would be proud to start his collection with such a masterpiece.”

I asked for a magnifying glass to admire the counterfeit Degas's faulty monotype. “Isn't this a beauty, monsieur. Yet surely it's too rich for me.” I inquired about two more cheap imitations and, gathering my grease-stained gloves, said, “Let me see that top sketch again. The nude with the red bow—that looks hastily done.” I hoped my voice did not quiver. They say those with poor vision have keen hearing.

“I've had trouble pricing this one,” the Cyclops said.

“Why?” I asked.

“A young man brought it to me after he'd bought the lot from someone in the government who was transferred to the colonies. You know how that went, those last few months.” He named a price, I hesitated, he lowered it, I frowned, he lowered it, and I bought a Manet for what Bertrand said he paid for a girl at Chez Suzy in Pigalle. I handed the man his bills, and I stepped out into the street—how could it still be daylight?—my face was wet and my Manet was in a wax envelope. It cannot rain, I thought.

I crossed the street to the Seine side. The black windows looked
like missing teeth in the white apartments on Île Saint-Louis, and in the distance the spire of the Palais de Justice pricked the sky.

My new sketch would not have lingered, unpurchased, on a legitimate market. The last honest owner of this Manet could only have been a connoisseur. Who he was, I would never know.

Chapter Nine

I
RETURNED TO BOULEVARD SéBASTOPOL. SéBASTOPOL
, I thought, another battle from another time. The trees that lined the street were beautiful, heavy with early autumn leaves. I followed the gated remains of the arcades, remnants of the older tangled Paris, and held the Manet close to me. The print could take us from this place.

I opened the door to our hotel room with a bang and had flung my hat down on the chair before I realized that my father was in bed, fully clothed and with his shoes still tied.

“Are you sick?” I asked. Father shook his head. “Didn't you go to the government offices today?” My father nodded. “And?” He held his palm out, to indicate
nothing.

“Don't you see, all the paintings are gone. They were taken, systematically or piecemeal, but there are none left.”

“We're not looking in the right places yet,” I said. I sat on the edge of his sagging bed and, with trembling fingers, withdrew the Manet.

He sat upright at the sound of the wax paper. “What's this?” he asked, in the old pleased voice.

I handed him the sketch. “From a shop along the quay. A talisman, sent to us from the past.”

“Nonsense,” he said. His face was gaunt and frightened.

“Look at it.”

Father ran his finger along the margin of the page, which was bent. He hesitated. “The damage to the picture is fresh and very minor,” he began. He spoke as if in a trance, as if I were not in the room at all. “The creases here are not yellowed. This was well cared for until recently.” He drew the room's single chair toward him, cleared it of its clothing, and rested the drawing on the seat. “I see no fading of the paper, so one presumes that it was not kept in a frame, on display, but was guarded as part of a collection. Hence its owner had others, larger, more beautiful oil paintings, for his walls.”

“It's stolen,” I said.

He looked at me with disgust. “No, looted.”

“I don't understand the difference,” I said.

“This is useless.” Father turned the sketch over to see if there were markings on it. There were none.

“How much did you pay for it?” he asked. I told him and he drew his breath in. “There's no question. You must give it back.”

“To whom?”

“Exactly!” Father shouted. “Don't you see how they made this happen?”

“No,” I said. My head felt leaden.