The Painting on Auerperg's Wall

by Erika Rummel

  THE TROUBLE WAS THAT, in spite of everything, Cereta had already taken action. It started when Zoltan gave her a copy of The Rescue while she was convalescing in the guest house. Why, why, why did he give it to her? Couldn’t that have waited? When he said he was keeping two copies for his daughters, Nancy thought he meant for the distant future, a time too far off to worry about, but he gave one to Cereta before she went back to Europe, and so of course she chewed the cud: Leo Auerperg had taken advantage of the situation, the painting was worth a great deal more than he had paid, the Nagys were entitled to compensation. God, what would Cereta say if she knew the whole story, the story Max had kept to himself until the end? That young woman was a minx, and — a horrible thought occurred to Nancy — perhaps Max wasn’t the only one who knew. Perhaps Livia was in the know as well and had told Cereta. It didn’t bear thinking of, it would be awful because Livia was insane, she could tell when they were introduced in Vienna years ago, and Zoltan said she got worse over the years, that’s why he had to get out of the marriage, he couldn’t deal with it any longer. Livia had always spooked her. Those eyes, so dark and menacing, as if she wanted you dead already! She was one of those brooding women, you could never tell what went on in her head, Cereta on the other hand was easy to read. She just wanted money, that was the bottom line, and she wanted it now because Hungary was joining the European Union. Hungary would eventually catch up with the rest of the world, but that wasn’t fast enough for Cereta. She was in a rush to have it all right now, was going to divorce her accountant husband and go to Vienna, apply for jobs, and make a brand new start. She needed money to make it all happen. That was the point of the email she fired off to Zoltan, making sure to cc. Nancy.

  “Why don’t we settle this business once and for all?” Zoltan said when she asked him if she should reply to Cereta? What could she possibly say?

  “Let’s take the painting to the Dorotheum for an appraisal,” he said. “In fact, why don’t you offer it for sale at auction with a high reserve, and see what buyers are actually willing to pay for it. Then we can talk.”

  And so Nancy told the concierge to give Cereta the keys to the apartment in Vienna and allow her to remove the Liebermann painting and have it offered at auction, and there was an empty space now where the painting had hung, it hurt her to think of it, the imbalance that empty space created in the décor of the room. She just hoped Zoltan was right, and the matter could be settled for good. Nancy was willing to pay if it came to that, but, God, this business of offering the Liebermann for sale, yet not really for sale, because she had no intention to part with it, the whole thing was another one of Zoltan’s tricks that made her heart go out of sync.

  I should have booked an hour with Stanley and told him the whole story, Nancy thought. It’s such an awkward business, and why is Zoltan putting me through this, everything would be so easy if he proposed to me, it would be the right thing to do, but he says he’s not the marrying kind. Really, that’s what it all came down to: It wasn’t a legal question. It was a question of love. And perhaps she should talk to Zoltan about what Max said, on his deathbed, devolving the burden on her. She couldn’t quite forgive Max for that, but, no, she waved away that thought, so ungenerous of her. Dear Max.

  She turned into Wadsworth, and, surprise! Zoltan’s black Mini was parked at the curb. But he said he’d come by tomorrow, so why? She left her car in the driveway, too nervous to pilot it into the garage, where the giant garbage bins took up so much space, maybe she should leave them by the side of the house, but that was so untidy, if the colours at least, but black and blue, no.

  She went through the garden gate and saw the champagne cooler on the table by the pool, with the top of a Dom Pérignon bottle peeking out, and a tray with caviar on ice, and toast, still wrapped in plastic. The door to the guest house was ajar, which made her think, with a pang, of Zoltan’s charade, making her believe that Laura would move in. She thought of everything that could have gone wrong, like now David and Laura, which was sure to lead to complications, and Zoltan talking about bumps in the road to keep the driver awake. She liked her roads smooth, without bumps.

  Zoltan appeared at the door of the guest house, spreading his arms wide, giving her a dazzling smile full of promise.

  “Nancy-love!” he said, and bussed her on the cheek, deftly avoiding a lipstick smear.

  “Zoltan,” she said. “Why didn’t you phone ahead and tell me you’d come?”

  “It’s a birthday surprise.”

  “But my birthday is tomorrow. You said you’d come tomorrow.”

  “I know, but then it wouldn’t have been a surprise, right? Now, close your eyes, love. I have a birthday present for you.”

  She was a little afraid of Zoltan’s surprises, but she closed her eyes obediently, and he took her hand, leading her to the guest house.

  “Okay, open your eyes.”

  She blinked, staring into the semi-darkness of the shuttered room, and there, propped up on the daybed, inexplicably, unframed and obscurely blooming, was the Liebermann painting, no, surely not the Liebermann painting. A copy, a very good copy.

  Relief washed over Nancy, because it was a surprise of the pleasant kind.

  “Zoltan,” she said, “you darling man. You had a copy made for me. And I must say…”

  He didn’t let her finish the sentence.

  “It’s the original,” he said. He looked at her sideways, waiting for her reaction.

  The unease was back. “I never know when you are joking,” she said.

  “The safe thing is to ask me.” He gave her an encouraging squeeze. “Ask me, Nancy, and I’ll tell you.”

  “Is it a joke?” she said.

  “No, it’s not,” he said. “It’s the real thing,” and her heart started pounding. How could it be the real thing, he must be bluffing because Cereta had taken the Liebermann to the auction house, he had her completely confused.

  Zoltan wrapped his arms around her. “I’ll explain it in a minute, but first let’s drink to your health, wealth, and everything your heart desires.”

  He uncorked the champagne and unwrapped the spread. They clinked glasses, and she sipped, but she didn’t enjoy the Dom Pérignon because she was afraid of what was to come.

  “Don’t look so worried, Nancy-love,” he said, and kneaded her shoulder. “Maybe I should give you a massage first. You are shallow-breathing, love.” He kissed her. “Om-mani padme hum,” he chanted, om-ing into her mouth, om-ing into her hair. “Say om,” he commanded.

  Om she intoned obediently, and did feel a little better, but she was still afraid it was one of his, she didn’t know what to call them, another of his…. “Really, Zoltan,” she said, “I’m not up to another of your surprises, your exciting bumps in the road.”

  “Every hill and mountain shall be made low,” he crooned, “and the rough places plain, says the psalmist, although it’s the upticks that make life bearable. That’s what I tell students when they come to me with their dyspeptic stories. You don’t need to inhabit the plains of reality, I tell them. You are free to take flight and leave the earth behind. Be surreal, I tell them, be post-real. Have some fun, for crying out loud. Think Gaudi. Picasso. Koons. Hirst. People pay out millions for their conceits. Sheep in formaldehyde, steel-balloon bunnies, doodles on napkins.”

  She gave him a distracted look. What did Gaudi, Picasso, Koons, and Hirst have to do with the Liebermann?

  “I’m not saying you should allow people to pull the wool over your eyes all the time,” he said. “Just occasionally, Nancy-love, give yourself permission to step outside the boundaries of reality and believe in nonsense.”

  “Zoltan, please,” she said, “don’t go on like that. You are making me nervous.”

  “Free advice, Nancy,” he said. “Take it. At the Hope Center I charged people two hundred dollars an hour for it.”

  The long preambl
e made her anxious. “Alright,” she said weakly. “How did the Liebermann get here? Tell me the story.”

  “Once upon a time…” He saw her dismay at the fairy-tale beginning and changed course. “Okay, in the sixties, Leo complained about the cost of insuring the Liebermann painting. Have a copy made, I told him, and put the real thing into a bank vault. If it’s a good fake, no one will catch on, and if you have a craving for the original, you can always go to the bank and admire the Liebermann there.”

  Zoltan paused and gave her a quizzical look. Was that the punchline? No. Zoltan went on.

  “Leo thought about my suggestion. That’s one way to go, he said — hang a copy on the wall and lock the original away. Or, I could give the original to you.”

  Zoltan stopped again, waiting for her reaction, but she didn’t know what to say. If you put Leo’s offer together with Max’s last words, my God! Maybe Zoltan was telling her, in a roundabout way, that he knew the whole story. It would be such a relief if he did, and they could talk about all the ramifications. In the meantime, Zoltan was still waiting for her reaction.

  “He actually offered me the Liebermann,” he said, prompting her.

  She hesitated. “Did he explain why?”

  “We never got around to that because I didn’t accept his offer. I would have loved to, of course, but it came at an awkward time. Livia and I were talking about a separation. I didn’t want the painting to become marital property. She hated it. She called it conventional garbage, bourgeois shit. If we get a divorce, I said to Leo, Livia will insist on selling the Liebermann. In that case, he said, I’ll keep it for the time being. I really would like the painting to stay in the family.”

  “He considered you family?” she said carefully.

  “I don’t think so. He wasn’t a sentimental man. The fact that he supported me and Livia financially gave us no standing in the Auerperg clan. No, I don’t think he considered me family. When he said he wanted the painting to stay ‘in the family’, he meant my family, the Wassermanns, the original owners. Perhaps he had qualms about the deal he made with Eva. I don’t know. I didn’t press the point. But he took my advice and commissioned a copy.”

  Then Zoltan doesn’t know about the situation, Nancy thought, and it is up to me to bring it out. It isn’t fair. Max should have told Zoltan. Or —and a horrible thought occurred to her. Or he didn’t want Zoltan to know. Could Max have been that calculating? That covetous? No! Why did life present her with such ugly questions?

  “I don’t know at what point he substituted the copy for the real thing,” Zoltan said. “Every time I visited him in the Herrengasse, I looked at the Liebermann and wondered: Was it the original or a copy? Could I even tell the difference? Well, when you and I got back from Cairo this summer, and after I drove you to the spa….” He looked at her admiringly. “Great results, by the way,” he said. “You know, Nancy-love, you pretend you don’t like hoaxes, but you do. You take a holiday from reality yourself once in a while. You disappear into a spa, you reappear, and ta-da! Forever forty.”

  “Zoltan!” she said, shocked. “You are not supposed to notice.”

  “Oh, I’m willing to suspend disbelief, Nancy. I’m willing not to notice. I’m only bringing it up to prove that you, too, love the unreal. You want to hear the rest of the story?”

  “Go on,” she said, resigning herself to the inevitable slippery slope of contingencies and unanswerable questions.

  “Okay, so after I came home from driving you to the spa, I took down the Liebermann and inspected it. It was a copy. There was a card attached to the backing with the name of the painter, Hans Reichard, and the year 1969. Then I had a brilliant idea — if you don’t mind me saying so myself — I checked the storage space off the entrance hall, the crawl space, you know, where Leo kept the overseas trunks and the antique photo equipment? I had an idea that he never moved the original to a bank vault, or Max would have known about it. There would have been a receipt among Leo’s papers. I was right. I found the Liebermann at the very back, leaning against the wall, wrapped up in a surprisingly flimsy bit of paper and strips of cardboard. Very unlike Leo to treat the Liebermann like that, but maybe he wasn’t up to the job. Maybe he had Thea take the painting down and wrap it for him. Naturally, he wanted to keep the exchange private, but that woman, Thea, was in Leo’s confidence. He shared everything with her. In fact, if you ask me, he shared his bed with her — well, never mind. Requiescat in pace. May his soul rest in peace. ”

  “Thea was…?” Nancy started.

  “Wait, love. Let me finish. I have no idea when Leo exchanged the paintings, or who helped him take down the original. Maybe it was Thea, maybe the man who made the copy, Hans Reichard. He died in 1971. I checked that. So we can’t ask him, and more importantly, he can’t tell. Anyway, I took off the card with Reichard’s name and attached it to the original, in case there was a problem with customs. In fact, I declared it: Gift, estimated value, five hundred dollars. They didn’t even ask me to unwrap it.”

  Then it was probably alright, Nancy thought. The congestion around her heart eased. And Stanley was of the opinion that Eva had no right to sell the painting in the first place so that the transaction between her and Leo had absolutely no force before the law. Zoltan was the legal heir and the owner of the painting, and if he wanted to make her a present of it, he could. She took a deep breath — yes, it was all above board and perfectly legal.

  “So do I get the golden seal of approval?” Zoltan said.

  “Let me have another look,” she said, feeling the pull and subtle seduction of beauty. It was a lovely painting.

  Zoltan followed her. “Go ahead, touch it,” he said. “Touching is an important step in testing and comprehending reality.”

  She touched the Liebermann tenderly. She felt a great love rising up in her, a tremor of desire, the passion of the collector.

  “But what am I going to do with it?” she said. “Where am I going to hang it?”

  “In the master bedroom,” he said, “for your and my enjoyment. We won’t tell anyone.”

  She could not take her eyes off the painting. She kept stroking the edges, feeling the charm of its beauty. She was a believer in the healing power of art.

  “Above the bed?” she said.

  “No, on the opposite wall so that we can see it when we wake up and have the feeling, for a moment, that we are back in Vienna.”

  “What a lovely idea,” Nancy said. It filled her with happiness until she remembered that Cereta had taken the Liebermann to the auction house — the copy, that is. “But what about Cereta?” she said. “The people at the Dorotheum will tell her that the painting isn’t genuine.”

  “That’s the point. She — or rather, Livia, because I’m sure she’s the driving force behind this campaign — will realize that the painting is of no great value, and that will be the end of the affair. You know, I feel sorry for Cereta. She’s just a pawn in Livia’s hands. But when she comes back to me with the information about the Liebermann, I’ll tell her to forget about it and go after the real money, the money my uncle deposited in Switzerland. I tried that route some years ago, but there was no way of getting at those numbered accounts. The situation is about to change, I understand. The Swiss banks will have to open their ledgers.”

  “You mean, there is a real chance of recovering your parents’ money?” Nancy asked.

  “Yes, and I may be a rich man one day. Think about it, Nancy: I might be able to afford you.”

  “What do you mean, ‘afford me?’”

  “Take you on fancy cruises and pay my own way.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I thought afford to marry me.”

  “Nancy-love,” he said, “you know I’m not the marrying kind.” But his mind was already elsewhere. He was looking across the lawn to the driveway and waving to someone. David Finley.

  “David! How are thing
s?” Zoltan raised his voice to cover the distance. “Join us for a glass of champagne!”

  “What are you celebrating?” David asked, coming into the yard.

  “Do we need a reason to enjoy a bottle of Dom Pérignon?”

  “I guess not,” David said.

  Zoltan poured him a glass. “We’ll make it a toast to happiness,” he said, raising his glass. He eyed David. “You are looking sceptical, David. You don’t believe in happiness? Alright, let’s toast to the illusion of happiness.”

  They clinked champagne flutes.

  “Speaking of illusions,” David said. “Did Nancy tell you? When I was in Vienna last week, I saw Laura. At least I thought it was Laura, but it couldn’t have been. She was here in L.A. So it must have been an illusion.”

  “Well, maybe it was Laura’s twin,” Zoltan said.

  Nancy’s heart skipped a beat, but David grinned.

  “Oh, really?” he said. “Another manifestation of the Great Systems Theory?”

  Nancy laughed helplessly and snatched at Zoltan’s hand to keep him from saying more.

  “I swear it’s the truth,” Zoltan said. “As much as anyone can know the truth after Derrida.”

  “Didn’t you tell me the other day that postmodernism is dead, and we are back to certainty?” David said.

  “I’d love to follow up on that,” Zoltan said, “but it will have to wait because I’m taking Nancy out for dinner. A pre-birthday dinner. And tomorrow, we’ll have a birthday lunch. And the day after that, a post-birthday breakfast. It’s an old Jewish custom, you know. Like the Twelve Days of Christmas.”

  “Or the Arabian Nights,” David said, and the two men laughed uproariously.

  Poor David. He was a good sport but clueless. Well, perhaps if he couldn’t tell the difference between Laura and Cereta, he needn’t be told.

  “You’ll excuse me, gentlemen, I have to get changed,” Nancy said and escaped into the house. Upstairs, in the master bedroom, she closed her eyes and imagined the Liebermann on the wall instead of the Picasso that was there at present. She always had doubts about the colour scheme, in spite of the interior decorator’s assurances. Let’s face it, when it comes to personal taste, the advice of an interior decorator, even if he was as famous as Kelly Berman, was worth only so much. Colour scheme apart, the combination of glass and wood was too rough-hewn. It didn’t go with the delicate material of the bedspread, and never mind Kelly saying that the juxtaposition was charming. She didn’t get it, the glass, and wood thing. It was one of Picasso’s sly jokes, Kelly said. And that was the problem. There were days when Nancy wasn’t in the mood for sly jokes.