Pictures at an Exhibition (24 page)

Cailleux sat forward on the sofa, drawing his breath in starts, eager to tell the end of
his
story. “I sold every last damn painting in the show. Even the paintings Gabriella said were ugly.” He looked down at his daughter, sleeping in his lap, one shoe fallen to the floor. He kissed the part in her hair. “It was nearly a miracle. Utrillo was so happy, he embraced his boy in front of me when he learned we'd sold everything. Sold everything, just like tonight!” Cailleux and the bald man clinked their glasses. The bearded man had his eyes closed. His slack jaw revealed a mouthful of weasel teeth.

“Utrillo, one of those?” Mike asked, in a skimming voice, light and dangerous.

“How could you not know this?”

Cailleux called over to the women's group, “Sometimes the women don't mind, eh?”

“We need sensitivity.” The dark woman's French sounded like Italian.

“Haw-haw!”
Mike laughed again and stood up, stretching. “Listen to La Macaroni!” He mimed a golf swing.

The Italian raised her voice, tossing her words over the backs of the sofas. “Mr. Berenzon knew how to talk to women.”

Her companion spoke for the first time. “He listened carefully, not interrupting, not giving advice.”

“Bof
, it's not even all that,” said the Italian wife, gesturing with her hands as if she were opening a book. “He'd experienced sadness.”

“What sadness?” Cailleux asked.

My skin pricked.

“I heard his kid joined the Free French. Then, when the son was approaching Paris, they stopped a Nazi train bound for Germany, and on board were all of Berenzon's paintings.” I swelled at this heroism, misattributed though it was.

“No, that was Paul Rosenberg's son,” Cailleux's Italian wife said. “I read a piece in
Libération.
“

“I can make some coffee,” her friend said. “Who wants a coffee?”

Everyone nodded, and the two women disappeared through a Roman arch at the back of the gallery. The room was still, except for Cailleux's wheezing.

“Let's turn off the lights in here and just sit with candles,” Mike said.

“You have the strangest ideas.”

“It will be beautiful,” Mike insisted. He lit the candles and turned off the lights. The faces floated around me, glowing and rosy.

“So what happened to Berenzon?” Cailleux asked, yawning.

“His kid ran away,” I offered.

“His boy ran away?”

“I didn't hear that,” the bald man said.

“No,” said the Italian wife, returning with the tray of coffee. The other woman stood behind Mike and put her hands on his shoulders. “I mean the daughter.”

I could barely make out their words over my own thoughts. This is it. This is what I have known all along. It has finally come. I watched us from the ceiling.

“Oh, that's true, that was decades ago, right—I'm tired. I should get going, boys—born with a problem in her skull. It couldn't grow—my cousin's wife had that, too, the baby seems fine at first, but then it doesn't develop like it's supposed to. The soft part is fused… or she had a horrible fever. That's what happened to his baby girl.” The women clucked their tongues. “Poor thing. At least they had another. And then there's that Picasso picture of her with her rabbit.” It flashed before my eyes, as if lit by a bulb, its blues and grays.

Micheline.

“That's when he gave up collecting, had that huge sale. Did you purchase anything? I didn't go the first day. They say it was empty. It felt like tomb looting. He even sold the portrait of the daughter. Then Stefania made me go. I bought a gorgeous Renoir. It was still expensive—he wasn't giving away the stuff for free—
Au contraire.
I sold the Renoir last year for ten times the profit.” Cailleux wheezed, and I heard a little whistle while he spoke. “Drouot's was amazed I had a Manet still life in my collection, asked how I possibly could
have acquired it. They know I'm not the biggest cat in the chicken coop. I sold it privately, of course—why hang it in the entryway then? To boast! When I sold the Renoir, the buyer was worried that all the papers were in order.”

Coffee cups clinked and the candlelight reflected one hundred times in the gallery's windows and off the bald man's glasses and my head spun, dizzy with the flickering light.

I remembered the baby we examined on the last day of the anatomy semester, under its awful square of rubberized cloth: its too-small skull.
Failure to thrive
, the doctor said.
Note the link between microcephaly, craniosynostosis, and what we call
kleeblattschädel,
the beaten copper pattern on the inside of the child's skull.

You would make a wonderful pediatrician
, my father said, after that day's lesson.
Yes
, my mother agreed,
there are never enough good ones.

Cailleux's cigarette crackled and hissed as it lit. I was sitting so close to him, he could have been my father smoking in the dark in the gallery on rue de La Boétie. He, who never told me. I wiped my cuff against my eyes. I needed to leave. Her name was Micheline. I knew it then but I had also always known it.

Cailleux asked, “Who got us started talking on this? You did, Mike.” “Not me, he did.” They were talking to me, at last. “Why do you want to know? Don't I recognize you from somewhere?”

I wanted to flee, but if I ran would they suspect me? I stood up, and my hands scrambled around on the dark sofa for my overcoat.

“You say Claudine is your aunt?” one of the men asked me.

In the entryway, I swayed a moment as I leaned into the door, and the gust of wind blew the candles to and fro. I steadied myself against the door frame and the jerking candlelight illuminated what Cailleux's hulking frame had blocked as I entered: There was Manet's
Almonds
, with a little red dot on the wall beneath it.

Chapter Nineteen

I
STUMBLED BACK IN THE DIRECTION OF RUE DE
Sévigné. I lost my key somehow and banged on the peeling door of Chaim's apartment with a closed fist. Chaim answered, already chattering.

“I just can't see the worth of keeping this when I could starve and you could starve or you could not care. It's not even a picture of someone in your family.” Chaim's words ran over each other, and I could neither understand what he said nor to what he referred. “After I did it, I knew I did something terrible to you, Max. I thought, I don't know Max very well, but I know I have done something that will make him spin away from me like a top.” He made a frenzied gesture with his finger. “But you did not seem to understand how close we were to starving, and this morning at the aid society, once the grenade came through the window, and the explosion, I thought the smoke was gas and—”

I held him by the shoulders. “Be calm, please.” The war wrecked his mind, I thought. He's deranged, just like Madame de La Porte des Vaux said.

Chaim pushed my hands off. “There was a grenade at the aid society today! Someone threw it in the window after I had waited in line all morning, just when I got inside. They say it was some anti-Communist, but I didn't realize it was a Communist aid society for political prisoners. I thought they would still help me, but when the
grenade went off we all pushed out of the building and I fell and they stepped on my hands until I grabbed on to the legs going by so someone would help me up.”

“And then what happened?” I asked.

He looked down. “I sold your painting.”

“What? Where? To whom?” I sputtered.

“I don't know. In the Eighth. Or the Sixteenth.” There were dozens, if not scores, of galleries in those two neighborhoods.

“We'll retrace your steps,” I said.

Chaim said, “I have to sit down. You, too.”

We sat speechless next to each other at the kitchen table. “I know it was a very valuable painting,” Chaim said. “I did not realize what a treasure it was until I sold it. But once I gave it to the art dealer, I could not stop myself. I thought only of how we would buy ourselves food and that I needed to go to a doctor.”

He held up his left hand. It was purple, and the first three fingers were swollen and askew at the knuckles.

Chaim was calmer now. “The dealer called all his associates over when I took out the painting, then had his wife come downstairs from their home on the floor above. ‘Where did you get this?’ he asked, then said, ‘No, no, don't tell me, I don't want to know.’ He took a special picture of it and had his assistant rush it to the Curie laboratory. With this I can go to the doctor. What do I know with money anymore? I have not had money for years. I think we could buy an automobile. We could buy two. I don't know how much it is worth. He said a huge sum. Max, if you had explained to me it was a once-in-a-lifetime chance, your prized possession—well, I suppose you tried to tell me you had hidden savings but you sounded like a liar to me. If only I had believed you! But would you have sold it if we were starving? We were starving and you didn't sell it. You kept it from me.”

“Do you have the money with you?” I asked, suddenly calm.

Chaim stood and began pulling ten-thousand-franc notes from his pockets. “The man tried to give me a bank check but I said I wasn't going to trust the banks, so his assistant opened a vault behind
a bookcase. At first I thought there were bricks in the vault, and then I realized they were blocks of money.” Chaim pulled money from one pocket and then the other.

The bills began to blow around the room and underneath the table. He dropped to the sofa, sitting on four hundred thousand francs or so. I gathered up the notes and tucked four and then a fifth into the velvet bag where Chaim kept his prayer shawl and phylacteries.

Then I wrapped a blanket around Chaim's shoulders, led him to his room, and filled the kettle. I had a sister named Micheline, I told myself while I waited for the water to boil.
Almonds
is in the Cailleux Gallery. The teakettle whistled. What a lot of money the Morisot fetched. My father would be proud.

From the
chambre de bonne
upstairs, someone who did not know how to play violin was playing slow open-string double stops on an untuned instrument, arcing the bow over the strings in ascending and descending pitch. I kissed Chaim's forehead. He slapped my cheek and then gave me the hot tea bag, which burned my palm. I opened the cabinets. They were not bare. I bought a bottle of whisky from our neighbor, whom we all pretended was an honest-dealing man, and watched Chaim while he drank some down. I took him to the hospital, and though I dreaded it was a mistake, it seemed criminal to do otherwise.

We returned by evening. I left the apartment again immediately and hitchhiked a ride with a young doctor who was driving in the right direction. He wore a khaki-brimmed hat and a coat of the same color, like a man on safari.

I held his black bag on my lap. “Now all the babies are being born,” he said. “New armies of French sons, every day. We'll be ready to fight Germany again in twenty years.” To what hospital did they take my sister? Where did she die? Where was she buried? I pictured a small headstone, chiseled with my last name, rose-colored stone turned gray by city soot and creeping graveyard moss and mold.

“You all right?” the doctor asked me.

“Yes,” I said. We were idling at a red light, and he turned to look at me. The car's engine thrummed in my bones.

“I'm done for the evening. I can let you off at your destination,” he offered. I said I would be much obliged and asked him to take me to rue Washington.

The doctor nodded. “I know it well. A week ago, a Sicilian lady called me. She had been married two weeks and her husband became possessed with the idea that she was unfaithful, so he slashed her face, in the old tradition of scarifying one's lover to make her unattractive to other men.”

“Barbarism,” I said.

“Everywhere,” he replied, and we did not speak again until he deposited me on the street corner and his car sped off into the distance, driving, as all Parisians did, with only the low parking beams, a lingering habit from the days of the blackouts. There were many traffic accidents.

When I turned to the Cailleux Gallery, I was surprised to find its owner standing in the doorway. His eyes were beady and wine-brightened and his mouth purplish and slack. He opened the door. I glanced over his shoulder:
Almonds
no longer hung on the wall.

“Monsieur Berenzon, at last,” Cailleux said.

“I want
Almonds
back,” I said. I did not tell him that I had 400,000 francs in my pockets.

“You're making an offer?”

“There's no offer. This is theft.” Yet in fact, I
was
prepared to make an offer, should we come to that. I was less interested in justice than in the painting itself. I had long given up on justice.

“I can ask
Almonds’
owner to name his price, but I warn you it will be very high. Eight hundred thousand. Maybe a million. My client has had his eye on that Manet for decades. Your father did you no favors today, Berenzon, by making it so dear. It's a prize now”—he put his hands around my neck—”like a stag's head.” I pushed Cailleux away. “May twenty-fourth,” he said, naming two days hence. “I want this for you, Berenzon, I do.”

“Meet at this same time,” I said.

Cailleux nodded, scratched a match, and unsteadily lit his cigarette.
I could tell that he was nervous and this pleased me, though it should not have.

I turned toward home. The streetlamps, the closed shutters, the line that separated the sidewalk from the street, the grate over the gutter—everything seemed too sharply outlined. I had a sister and her name was Micheline and she would have died when I was too young to remember and young enough to be lied to. I ground my teeth. A vagabond half lay across the sidewalk, as if he were a legless doll propped into a sitting position. Eyes shut, he thrust a tin cup toward me. Had he seen Bertrand? I asked him. He said he had. They were sailors together at Gallipoli. I gave him some coins and wandered away.

Bertrand was missing in the vast sea of humanity. I yearned to numb my mind. I tried to reel in the long loose trail of my memory. There was a photograph on my mother's dresser that she said was me, but it did not resemble my other baby pictures. A lock of hair. It is too late now, Max, I thought; too much time has passed. You have memorized too many other things. I cursed my father for filling my brain with paintings. Had he hoped that all those names and pictures would crowd out the sunken tragedy? I gripped my head and wished I could pull from my coiled brain the Cézanne, pull from it the Bon-nard, the Morisot, and, last, the Manet. Give me my sister.