The Painting

by Alison Booth

  They sat on in silence apart from the ticking of the grandfather clock. The tight band of anxiety around Anika’s throat began to relax as the seconds passed by, and then a minute and another. She started to feel her identity slipping slowly back into place, enveloping her like a reassuring pashmina. Knowing who Nyenye was meant that Anika better understood who she was, and this lightened the burden of suspicion she’d been carrying around ever since the Rocheteau had been stolen.

  But there were more questions that she needed to ask, and when the clock finished chiming the hour, she said to Nyenye, ‘Do you know why Tabilla didn’t want Tomas’s painting?’

  ‘Maybe it’s not so much that she didn’t want it,’ Nyenye said carefully, ‘but that she wanted to pass on something to you. Something from the past. Something from home.’

  Nyenye’s tone as she mentioned Tabilla’s name was warmer than it had been when she’d told her about the Revolution and Tabilla’s escape, and Anika was pleased at this.

  ‘I’ll make some more coffee,’ Nyenye said, struggling stiffly to her feet.

  ‘I’ll do it.’

  ‘I make it better than you.’

  While Nyenye was clattering about in the kitchen, Anika wandered around the room peering at the paintings in the gloom. She felt a bit better about the collection after what Nyenye had told her but without having the provenances Nyenye would have no way of proving they weren’t looted and she guessed that her grandmother could be in trouble. Distractedly she inspected a little watercolour of the Danube Bend. The hills were blue smudges and there was a grey lilac mist along the river banks. Although the sky was not in the painting it was still a presence, reflected in the water. The scene looked peaceful, a far remove from the time she’d been arrested in the nearby forest.

  Turning away, she noticed that her grandparents’ collection had a remarkable number of blue paintings. Or perhaps it was just that the predominantly blue ones appeared at eye level all the way around the three sides of the room. Many shades of blue. Darkness and light. There was the cellist in the cobalt blue dress, her face pale, the cello glowing. There was the procession of women in brightly coloured hoop dresses – red and orange and yellow – winding their way through a blue landscape. Above this picture was the gap where the Rocheteau used to hang – that painting that was never theirs – and Anika averted her eyes from that blank space. Instead she stopped in front of the picture that Nyenye had once told her was of the Italian Riviera, though it didn’t look in the least bit Italian but more like some northern landscape, with an extraordinary sense of depth and enclosure. It was beautiful but bleak, with the merest touch of warmth in the ladder of reflections from the sun on the water’s surface.

  How many of these paintings were stolen, she asked herself. Not by Nyenye and Nagypapa, but by the people who were selling them. Perhaps you never owned anything but were just the custodian of it for a generation or so. No one was able to see all these beautiful pictures, it seemed such a shame. They were just stored here in this fusty room worrying Nyenye. They were supposed to be an investment from which she could reap returns, and Anika wondered when she would realise them. She was still healthy enough to enjoy travel and she could certainly do with some nice clothes.

  ‘You’ve got so many pictures,’ Anika told Nyenye when she returned with the coffee. ‘You could sell some and travel a bit. Or give them to the National Gallery where everyone could see them.’

  Nyenye looked shocked at this. ‘Never ever mention anything about these paintings, Anika. Not to anyone, do you hear? You don’t know what sort of trouble you might get me into.’ Her voice cracked and that twitch appeared under her eye again.

  There was something not quite right here. Nyenye had told Anika so much about Tomas and the Rocheteau but Anika now thought she was concealing something about her collection. She wondered if it was the provenance of the collection, or perhaps the lack of it. Or it could be her fear that the communist state – they were still in power and the free elections wouldn’t be held until March – might prosecute her for accumulating wealth over those years when savings were not allowed.

  Nyenye was too upset for Anika to push her for answers, and looked so drained that Anika left soon after, knowing they would have to revisit these issues before she flew back to Sydney.

  That night she fell into a deep sleep from which she woke with a start, fear striking her like a hard slap to her face. In her nightmare the woman in the Rocheteau painting was no longer beautiful. She had become an ogre, her hair a writhing mass of red-bellied snakes, her eyes glittering, and her face a ghastly painted mask that belonged in some grotesque expressionist painting. This cursed thing was Julius Singer’s history, her uncle’s history, Nyenye’s history. And although Anika didn’t want it to be her history, there was no escaping it. Once you knew about something it became stuck in your head and there was no way of avoiding it.

  Chapter 28

  A reunion of Anika’s old friends from years back, a dozen of them squeezing around a long table in the café on the Buda side of the river that was once a favourite meeting place. Their voices were loud, the volume escalating, they were laughing at nothing and everything. Candles stuck into old wine bottles illuminated their faces. This friend was doing this, that one was doing something altogether different; some of them were married or partnered, some were single, and one of them had come out as gay and turned up with a boyfriend Anika had never met before. Funny how you couldn’t always tell whether or not a man was gay. Somehow she found it easier with women to know right away which way they were inclined. This random thought made her think of Daniel. He could well be gay. The kiss she might have given him the night the Rocheteau got stolen would have been unwelcome. She had another swig of wine.

  At around eleven o’clock, after her fourth or fifth glass of wine – she’d somehow lost count – fatigue hit her and she got up to go. Three of the group joined her while the others stayed put. Together they went out into the cold crisp night and one by one her friends peeled off, going their different directions, a metaphor for their lives, she thought, and perhaps this was the last time they would meet like this. Already they were different to the way they’d been at their last meeting.

  Soon she was walking home on her own through lonely streets by the river. The too-many glasses of wine she’d consumed, coupled with fatigue, made her feel slightly out of control, as if her legs were being operated by someone else, a tipsy puppeteer pulling the strings. Lurching to a stop, she clutched on to a tree for support. Suddenly her stomach felt too full and for an instant she wondered if she was going to throw up. She inhaled deeply and after a while the nausea passed. For a moment longer, she held on to the tree. Her loyal supporter. No criticism from you, my friend, you would have seen a few drunks in your day.

  She looked up at the bright moon: if she were a wolf she might bay at it. Almost full, it loomed large and low, casting bars of light on the smooth-flowing river. A cloud blew across the moon and blocked out some of the light. It was then that she saw a solitary figure standing on the quay. A few hundred metres away, he was staring out over the water. He hadn’t been there when she passed by that spot a few minutes ago. She wished there were people around. Perhaps he hadn’t noticed her. He was tall with broad shoulders and what she assumed was a head of thick dark hair until realising it was a dark woolly hat pulled down over his ears.

  She shifted behind the tree so the man moved out of view. This lonely stretch of river was not the place to loiter when you were drunk. It wasn’t safe any more for a young woman to be wandering through the streets on her own. Only yesterday Mama had told her that she’d seen a bunch of skinheads throwing their weight around in the old Jewish quarter. And muggings had become more common. Under communism, people had been too afraid to commit crimes. Not so any longer.

  After a few seconds, Anika squared her shoulders and stepped out from behind the tree.
The man had gone. Perhaps he was a trick of her imagination, a fantasy brought about by too much alcohol. More likely he was a man on his way home from an evening out and struck by the beauty of the Danube.

  Suddenly sober, she hurried on through the streets of inner Pest, heading away from the river. She knew this route well, all the back alleys and shortcuts, the dark bits and the less dark bits. This evening was so cold you could almost feel frost forming in the air. She ducked into the shelter of a long colonnade with ponderous pillars and heavy Romanesque revival arches. Trapeziums of moonlight fell across the stone flags, interspersed with strong diagonals of shadow. There was no one else around, and little sound apart from her footsteps and the distant clattering of two-stroke engines from the main road. Racing along the colonnade, she breathed through her mouth to avoid the stench of urine. She was nearly at the end when a figure popped up a dozen or so paces away. Tall, with a dark coat and a dark scarf wound around the lower part of his face, and a dark woolly hat pulled down low on his forehead.

  Fear grabbed hold of her heart and squeezed it. Pulses pumping too hard, she stepped through an archway and into the square. Automatically she arranged the fingers of her gloved hand into a vee. What a fool she’d been to come this way, anything could happen and no one would know. She thought of the self-defence classes she’d done when starting university. If he attacks you, drive the forefinger into one of his eyes and the middle finger into the other. Crouch low if he puts his arms around you. Jump up so that the top of your head crashes into the underside of his chin and raise your arms to wriggle down and out of his clasp.

  ‘Hello Anika,’ the man said.

  She stared at Jonno Jamison, relief and anger fighting it out in her breast. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I’m sorry if I frightened you,’ he said, grinning. ‘I thought you might be pleased to see me after that fond farewell in Sydney.’

  ‘That was months ago.’ Her cheeks grew hot at the memory.

  ‘Only half a year.’

  ‘You’re following me.’

  He didn’t deny it and this inflamed her fury even more. ‘How long have you been doing that for?’

  ‘I wanted to know where in Budapest you’re staying so I could drop by.’

  ‘What for?’

  The moonlight illuminated half of his face, casting the rest into deep shadow. ‘To ask you out for dinner,’ he said. The one eye she could see was staring fixedly at her, as if willing her to swallow his story, but she didn’t believe a word of it. He continued, ‘When I saw you last time you did say that if ever I was in Budapest I should drop by to meet your parents. It’s a shame you forgot to give me their address.’

  ‘I can’t remember saying that. I think you’re making it up. As I recall, you said you’d send me your address.’

  He carried on as if she hadn’t spoken, a ruthless bulldozer ignoring obstacles in his way. ‘I met some of your friends who told me where your grandmother lives but not your parents. Your grandmother wouldn’t give anything away when I dropped around there. She’s a bit protective, isn’t she?’

  The smallest criticism levelled at family by an outsider was guaranteed to raise the passions of anyone, let alone someone who’d just seen a large man bob up in front of her in a lonely part of the city. But Anika’s voice was calm when she said, ‘If you’d been through what I have, you’d be defensive too.’

  ‘I’m sorry I offended you. Can I walk you home?’

  She would have liked to refuse but there was no point in that. Since he would follow her anyway, he might as well be useful and she could possibly charm him into telling her what he was up to in Budapest. Smiling, she said, ‘If you’re going my way, we can walk together. What are you doing in Hungary?’

  He didn’t answer. It was not like him to be without words, so she prompted him. ‘I saw a couple of your pieces in the colour supplement just before I left Sydney, one on East Germany and the other on Poland. They were good. A different slant. Interviews with lots of different people. I particularly liked that article about the children. The ones in the East German village, I’ve forgotten its name.’ After the Berlin Wall came down, people from Western Germany were driving over the border and throwing the kids sweets – that the children had never had much of before – and this was one of the things that Jonno had written about. ‘The photographs were very touching.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Did you take the pictures as well as write the text?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Clever you. What are you doing in Hungary?’

  ‘More human-interest stories.’

  ‘What are they?’

  ‘I’m not really sure yet. I’m just nosing around to get a feel.’ His eyes flickered, before their focal point wandered off into the distance.

  ‘Do you speak Polish as well as German?’

  ‘I had a translator with me for the Polish story but I do speak a bit of German.’

  ‘So my grandmother told me. You didn’t win hearts and minds there.’

  ‘I only asked her about you and the paintings.’

  ‘I didn’t realise you were an art collector. I thought it was just your relatives who collected. You know, the ones whose artworks you took into the Art Gallery of New South Wales to get identified every month or so.’

  ‘How did you know about that? Let me guess, it was Daniel.’

  ‘Well actually, Jonno, it was just a wild stab in the dark on my part,’ she said. ‘And so my hunch was right.’

  The lie came out easily. For reasons that she didn’t fully understand, she wanted to protect Daniel. It was as if learning from Nyenye how the Rocheteau came to be in her family’s hands had somehow knocked a few more holes in the barricade she’d constructed between herself and Daniel.

  ‘Do you know why I turned up at your aunt’s Rozelle place that time? I’d just read in the newspaper about your stolen painting. I knew from my research that quite a few Impressionist paintings found their way into German hands, confiscated from Jews after the Anschluss. And only a handful were recovered after the war ended.’

  ‘But you’ve always said you’re not an art expert.’

  ‘I’m not, but I’d read something about SS men who got into Australia masquerading as refugees from displaced persons’ camps, and I thought that there are probably more Nazis in Australia who haven’t been detected yet. I reckoned that I might be able to track one or two of them down through works of art that come up for auction. I even thought there might be a supply of paintings trickling into Australia from stashes hidden in Central and Eastern Europe.’

  ‘So you thought that by turning up each month at the art gallery with another painting for identification you might get some information.’ Anika made her tone incredulous and for some reason he found that funny. He laughed so much he started to choke and she banged him on the back harder than warranted.

  When he’d recovered he said, ‘You’re a bright woman, Anika. My trick was to hang around near the art gallery cloakroom on the first Tuesday of every month. I’d wait until someone turned up with a European accent and a picture in their arms. Then I’d follow them downstairs and listen to what the curators had to say. I’m lucky to have plenty of aunts and uncles who’ve accumulated a tidy collection between them, most of the pictures not worth anything much apart from my aunt’s Lister Lister. After I made that discovery, all the other relatives started queueing up, wanting to get their paintings identified. Of course, I had to string them out and only take in one at a time.’

  ‘So that’s why you invited me for coffee that day. You thought I was likely prey.’

  ‘That was one reason. The other was that I thought you were gorgeous.’

  ‘But you wouldn’t have had to buy me coffee if it hadn’t been for that chatty old dear.’

  ‘I would have ask
ed you anyway. But you’re right, she did bend my ear just as I was trying to learn the name of the artist who’d done your painting. All I heard was that it was by an Impressionist in the French School. And that was all you told me too. No wonder I was intrigued.’

  She remembered that morning when Jonno had tried to get her to talk about the painting over coffee. While she’d resisted his overtures, apart from telling him the suburb where she lived, she’d given him a perfect excuse to drop by on his way to his old mate’s house. He could have taken the painting and this story he was now spinning could be an elaborate concoction to find out how to steal more. But she decided this was all much too complicated. There’d be other easier ways to track down what to steal and his journalism was clearly not faked. On the other hand, while his strategy might have been complicated, it was also rather clever. She had to concede that, however reluctantly.

  When they reached her parents’ place, he bent his head to kiss her. Surprised, she pushed him away. For some reason he found this funny and that riled her. With fumbling hands, she unlocked the door to the apartment block. Murmuring goodnight, she glanced back through the door opening. That glimpse of his face unsettled her even more. He looked satisfied, as if he’d got out of the conversation everything that he’d wanted.

  ‘I’ll drop by again in a couple of days’ time,’ he called. ‘Let’s have that dinner.’

  Confused, she slammed the door and leaned against it. The entrance way was shrinking around her, the walls drawing in. Her breath came unevenly and she felt her face flushing with annoyance. Jonno was using her to further his career. He was handsome and talented but she had no intention of dining with him. She listened to his footsteps as he strode away, back in the direction they’d walked from.

  All men were hopeless, it wasn’t worth bothering with them. That spark of feeling she’d felt for Daniel only a few minutes back, that sudden surge of protectiveness, was completely misplaced. Daniel could look after himself. He’d been right about the Rocheteau and Jonno seemed to have guessed too. That was the reason each man was interested in her. That was the only reason each was interested in her.