Pictures at an Exhibition (9 page)

Before dawn one October morning, I awoke to the sound of a handful of gravel thrown against my windowpane. I kicked off the covers. My mouth tasted like stale cigarettes and beer and I had taken to falling asleep in my clothes now that I no longer slept beside Rose.

I pulled aside the curtains and saw, in the gray light of the courtyard, my friend Bertrand.

“How did you get in?” I asked.

“Magical powers,” he said. “Abracadabra. Now, hurry.”

Although Bertrand was also one of the few young men left in the city, I had not seen my closest friend in two months. He would not speak of his draft board meeting, beyond saying that the examiners had found him “psychologically unfit.” He cursed them. “You cannot imagine what a shame this is in my family. I was the first man at the commissioning officer's door.”

I met Bertrand on the street a few moments later. He wore a green Tyrolean hat and was feeding a baguette to a stray dog that had rested a paw on each of Bertrand's knees. Bertrand spoke to the animal. She tilted her head to one side, tongue lolling, and barked, as if in reply.

“She doesn't like the Germans either,” he said, rising. He hooked his arm through mine. “We must walk with alacrity. There's something you've just got to see. And on the way you must pour out your heart's contents to little Bertrand, as I am full of selfishness and spite for our fellow man.”

THERE WAS SOMETHING UNREAL ABOUT MY TIME WITH
Bertrand, as it was often late at night when we saw each other. We sped down damp sidewalks, past the quiet black bridges and their watchful statues. Childhood friendship initiates comfortable silence, too—a boyhood intent on toy trains, sand, rocks, insects, and a desire not to draw the adults’ attention.

Bertrand stopped abruptly, across the street from an unidentifiable middle section of the Louvre along the rue de Rivoli. “Here we are,” he said.

He pointed to eight white trucks parked in a line. Beside them, tense and unspeaking, stood the vehicles’ drivers, burly in shirtsleeves and suspenders, with shadowed faces and prodigious mustaches. A trail of excelsior led from the trucks to the Denon gate entrance.

“They're evacuating the Louvre,” I said. “If they're in Poland today, they're over Paris tomorrow.”

“Look at those legs,” Bertrand murmured, and tipped his hat in the direction of the legs in question. “They can't bomb Paris. Our women are too beautiful.”

“That's Rose,” I said, surprised. She held a sheaf of papers, and her face was hidden by a red hat.

She saw us and approached. “You shouldn't be here,” Rose said.

“Max is
in
on the ins-and-outs of the city,” Bertrand drawled. He spread his hand before him, as if brushing aside a curtain. “He is Baudelaire's flâneur of 1939, the cataloger of the city's thousand beauties and tragedies, unsolved mysteries, and unspeakable crimes—”

“You must be Bertrand.” Rose interrupted him. Somehow, I had kept one from the other.

“Mademoiselle.” He bowed and kissed her hand. Rose blushed.

“What's happened here?” I asked.

“It's what hasn't happened that everyone fears.”

She explained it thus: Her British counterparts had delayed emptying their museums, as such an act would crush the public's fragile morale. But with the threat of the Soviet-German alliance, King George, it was said, realized his mistake and gave orders to evacuate the Tate and the national galleries, overseeing himself the departure of the royal train, which moved at a speed of only fifteen kilometers per hour so as to reduce the effect of the vibrations on the artwork inside. The Louvre, then, had feverishly followed suit. Only such an emergency merited recalling all its employees (and others too, packers from the Samaritaine department store and the Bazar de l'Hôtel de Ville, dressed in their striped uniforms) from their holidays.

Most paintings were taken off their stretchers and carefully rolled. Those too fragile were fitted with giant wooden cases and moved in scenery trucks from the Comédie Française.

There had already been a debacle with the van carrying the
Raft of the Medusa.
All the trucks were driving at night, without lights, on unlit roads. First, the trolley wires in Versailles were lower than in Paris and, amid a terrifying tangle of sparks, the truck had nearly caught fire. Gingerly extricated, its roof singed but undamaged, the truck set off again with postal workers in tow who used insulated poles to lift up any dangerous trolley lines. The van of Watteau's works had also been lost for several hours. Its driver, like many others, had never been more than a few kilometers outside of Paris, let alone to the château in Chambord. The driver mistook a bicycle's light for a signal from the caravan and followed the wrong road for hours until he stopped, by chance, on the crest of a riverbank

Bertrand and I followed alongside Rose as she spoke. She was warm and vague at the same time. I knew better than to take her hand.

We walked steadily east through the museum. Dust-covered men reeled past us like dazed ghosts. “We have been here three days and nights,” Rose said. “The châteaux are all ready now. They've sand on their floors, fire teams standing by, and the hygrometers are working.”

“Father just sold a Boucher to build a steel and concrete hut along the Maginot line,” Bertrand said. “The
ouvrage
will have an eclipsing turret, and they'll name it after Uncle Nissim. Then my sister will go there to plant rosebushes around the bunkers, because the front is ugly and the soldiers are bored.” This sounded like a Bertrand concoction, but from other sources I knew it to be true.

The Louvre's galleries all led, like spokes to the center of a wheel, to the
Winged Victory of Samothrace.
We had arrived there, on the museum's first floor, looking up to the score of steps that led to its third, over which a wooden ramp had been constructed. Scaffolding sufficient for a house surrounded
Winged Victory.
The famous bosom was covered by a heavy piece of leather and encircled with rope. A second box of slatted wood was built around the statue, this one with
wheels at its corners. The wings of solid marble still looked ready to take flight. A noose cinched where the head had been a thousand years before.

“There is Monsieur Michon,” Rose said, “the curator of Greek and Roman antiquities.” The hall grew silent. The bespectacled curator must have given a signal. The statue was hoisted a millimeter, then rocked forward. Four men, two on each side, strained against the ropes that controlled her descent. The wings quivered under their own weight as she rolled down the incline. When the wooden cart reached the ground floor, no one spoke.

Someone called Rose's name, she took her leave, and a guard showed us to the exit. When Bertrand turned his face to me, it was ashen. His eye twitched.

“Get some sleep,” I said to him. “If you could see yourself!” We were walking along the Seine.

“Max, I have two secrets to tell you. Something makes me think I should say them now.”

“All right,” I said, unwillingly.

We paused midway across the Pont des Arts. The metallic bridge creaked in the wind that rose off the water.

“I've been keeping these secrets for years. Practically decades.” We leaned over the hand railing on the bridge, overlooking the Île de la Cité. I did not face him as he spoke. “I promised Léon”—this was his father—”I wouldn't tell you until you were twenty.”

“That's in five months. And a promise to the patriarch, that's biblical.”

“Or that fathers betray their sons. That's biblical, too.”

Bertrand gave a shrill laugh and spun his cap out over the river like a discus. We watched it float away on the green water.

“What was that for?” I asked.

“Why not?” he said. “Some impulses we give in to, others we do not. I have just resisted my impulse to tell you my two secrets, but I gave in to my curiosity about how my favorite hat would look twirling over the water. It's all a balance.”

“Let's go to La Palette,” I said. “Maybe the flamenco dancer you like will be there.”

He shook his head and began to walk backward, away from me. “I'll wait till you turn twenty,” he shouted as he receded. “Now I've given you something to look forward to. It's my early birthday gift.”

He flashed me the V-for-Victory hand sign, turned on his heel, and descended the stairs that led to the embankment of the Seine, where derelicts from the Great War lived in tents and burned rubbish and their hungry dogs barked. If I had remembered my hat, I too would have thrown it into the river.

WHEN I SAW BERTRAND AGAIN, WE HAD PASSED INTO
a new decade. Two million Britons had been conscripted. French soldiers ambushed their first detachment of Germans near the Vosges. And while there were rumors of mental patients killed en masse in Germany, in France it was merely illegal to sell beef, mutton, or veal on Monday or Tuesday. Friday remained meatless. On rue de La Boétie, we ate well. Winston Churchill warned the neutrals, “Each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last,” which our French papers reported widely, as it was such a fine quote. Bertrand and I went to a strip club in Pigalle. It was my twentieth birthday.

Inside Le Chat Noir voices murmured, a woman sang onstage, and another laughed behind a closed door. The cash register sprang open with a cheerful ring as we threaded our way to our seats between waitresses towering on high heels. I took it all in: the shapely ankles, polished toenails, jewels, and, in close proximity, the feathers and the breasts. I wondered if any of the dancers were secret German agents. Bertrand and I ordered two whiskies from a waitress with cleavage like a ravine.

One dancer, a brunette, wore her hair curled in two Cs against her cheeks. This made my pulse race, to see a hairstyle like Rose's when she first came to rue de La Boétie. Her nipples were dark red and the size of twenty-franc pieces. Soon I was very thirsty. Bertrand muttered something unintelligible and left the table. I finished my whisky and, a while later, Bertrand's. I ordered another round of drinks. The waitress recommended a new American cocktail. I
ordered two and enjoyed one after the other. The women danced to Mistinguette, Josephine Baker, and Fréhel. Peacock feathers floated in the air. When Bertrand hadn't returned by the waitress's third visit, I stood unsteadily and went in search of him.

He was not in the WC or by the bar but sitting at a far table, half-lit by a bulb from the hallway, hunched over a notebook.

“I've had an idea,” he said, “for a play.”

“That's fine,” I said. “I have better company than you, Molière.” From the corner of my eye, I saw that the brunette with the pageboy like Rose's had returned to the stage.

Bertrand shook his head. “Like Rose?” he said. I must have spoken out loud. “Whom your father has his way with every night? Oh, no, old man.”

My pulse was like the snare drum accompanying the striptease unpeeling onstage. I reasoned drunkenly that I had never been in a fistfight but that my twentieth birthday was as good a time as any. As my fingers curled and my hand swung of its own accord, I marveled with a feeling like grief that desire could switch so quickly to rage. Bertrand deflected my punch. “You fool,” he said. I lost my footing, fell backward, and helped myself to unconsciousness.

I AWOKE IN AN UNFAMILIAR BED WITH A WOMAN NEXT
to me. I touched my forehead, which felt like a bruised melon. One of my eyes refused to open.

“Good morning, Max,” she whispered, leaning over me.

In the half-light, I could barely make her out. Long black hair falling around her face. Cheekbones like the balconies in a church. Lipstick, perfume, and powder. A face more interesting than pretty. Ghostly limbs moving as if in a dance. A kimono embroidered with dragons fell back from her arms. Then I remembered where I was, and who she must be.

“Hello, Fanny,” I said to Bertrand's sister. “I like your robe.” I recalled a day, years before, when Fanny was a pallid thirteen-year-old in mourning, wearing her customary black, passing a nargileh to
the other children who had come with their parents to mourn her grandfather's death. “It's not black,” I added.

She counted on her fingers. “That was seven years ago, almost to this day.”

Fanny slid the kimono from one shoulder, and then the other. She had small breasts and a narrow waist with almost no hips. She lifted her hands over her head so that her breasts rose and her stomach stretched taut.

“Good Lord, what happened last night?” I asked.

“Bertrand brought you home after a fall. He said the hospitals were all already full of drunken soldiers. Anyway, you're not that hurt. But it was enough to make you pretty amorous.”

“Did we—?” I asked.

She smiled. “You're still clothed.”

“You're very beautiful,” I said, trying to cover my tracks with this gallantry. As I kissed her, I was aware that I was also still drunk, as I sometimes forgot who she was and could only think of what I touched. I never said her name, certain I would say someone else's.

Outside, wind pushed against the house and the windows shuddered with rain. A dog whined and scratched at Fanny's door, then set to howling. We froze. There was the squeak of bedsprings, the rumble of feet, and a whispered command to the dog, which continued to growl.

Man and beast left the hallway, and the bedsprings creaked first under the returning weight of owner and then—a light leap—hound.

We waited for the house to become silent again.

Fanny sighed. “Bertrand will be jealous of me,” she whispered. I was not thinking of Bertrand. I pressed my thumbs into the parentheses of her hips. Fanny kissed me between my brows.

“What?” I asked.

“He wouldn't mind being in my place right now.”

I sat up in bed. My head ached cruelly.

“What?” I said again. I tried not to shout.

“I can't believe you didn't know,” she said. “Why do you think they didn't let him into the army? What do you think ‘psychologically
unfit’ means? We've all suspected it forever, though no one dared breathe a word until the last of Grandfather's generation died. It's not something we tell everyone, but it's 1940, for goodness’ sake. Don't look so shocked. It's no different from our kind of love.”