The Painting on Auerperg's Wall

by Erika Rummel

  It will be heaven to wake up and see the Liebermann and pretend to be in Vienna, she thought. Just as well that she had run out of time and didn’t tell Stanley everything. In the end, the question of ownership had nothing to do with the law. It concerned the family. In which case, she thought, I should talk to Zoltan about what Max told me because I need to tell someone. It’s hard to live with ugly truths.

  IV. CERETA

  CERETA SURFACED FROM THE BLUE ocean of sleep at the sound of her alarm. It took her a moment to realize where she was and why she had set the alarm for this ungodly hour. She was in Nancy’s apartment in Vienna. She had set the alarm because she had phone calls to make, to a neighbour in Hollókõ, and to Zoltan, who was time zones away in California.

  She got out of bed, brushed her teeth, passed a washcloth over her face and hands, catlick-style, and decided against getting dressed. It was too early. A slice of sky was visible through the gap in the panels of the damask curtains. No rosy dawn. Drizzle, it looked like. She padded into the hall barefoot, picked up the Liebermann — the pseudo Liebermann, as it turned out — from where she had left it on the floor, leaning up against the wall, and brought it into the study.

  She turned on the desk lamp, and in the yellow ring of light, saw the empty spot above the old desk, a square where the wallpaper had faded, the contour of a ghost painting. She took the Liebermann out of its protective wrapping and hung it in its old place.

  The last of a series of bad decisions, she thought. I hope it’s the last.

  She sat down at the desk, crouching a little, looking up at the painting from below, the way she had seen it as a child sitting at the desk with Opa Auerperg, leafing through his books or listening to his stories.

  That’s how she remembered him: In her peripheral vision an old man, in her ear the creak of his chair when he leaned forward to point at the pictures in the book, in her nose a scent of patchouli. And all over a feeling of coming first, holding the # 1 spot in Opa Auerperg’s heart, at least for that afternoon.

  The chase after the painting, anya’s campaign, had been going on for as long as she could remember. It had started with hints and innuendos. She remembered listening to the arguments that went on between anya and Zoltan, the angry voices coming from their bedroom when she and Laura were children.

  He stole it, she said. Don’t be ridiculous, Zoltan said. He has no right to it, she said. Even if he didn’t pay full price, Zoltan said, he’s made it up to you and me, many times over. He is a criminal! anya said. It was a soap opera recitativo, overheard by Laura and Cereta and stored up for later use in a skit, “The Case of the Stolen Painting.” The skit was never performed because a new, real-life dialogue took over: Who will go with Zoltan to America, who will stay behind with anya?

  Laura was the lucky one. She left, quit midway through the dramatic season, deserted their stage. No more plays after she was gone. There was no one who knew the secret lines, the blinks, the special looks, no one who understood the rules of their game. Anya’s game was different, for adults only. She waited for Cereta to grow up, groomed her carefully for the role she had in mind for her as the lackey, the translator of her poems into action. Anya had a keen sense of occasion and how to spoil it. She rewrote “The Case of the Stolen Painting.” The play opened on the day of Cereta’s high-school graduation. Instead of kisses and congratulations, anya offered her daughter a poem, a monologue on Leo Auerperg, the thief, the criminal. She celebrated Cereta’s graduation from university with another poem on the same theme. And Cereta’s wedding was the signal, to launch a new production of the same old show.

  “The Liebermann never belonged to Leo Auerperg,” anya said, standing in the door of their shabby living room, watching Cereta and Laszlo pack for their trip to America, paid for by Max — his wedding present to them.

  “Ask Max for the Liebermann painting,” anya said. The crusading spirit was in her eyes, a trumpet flourish in her voice.

  “The family heirloom? The one Leo Auerperg finagled out of your aunt?” Laszlo said, raising his head and sniffing the air for money. He had picked up on “The Case” by then, and his accountant’s mind was on the alert.

  “Keep out of this,” Cereta said to him.

  “Yes, that’s what I’m talking about,” anya said ignoring Cereta’s objection and answering Laszlo’s question over her head. “The one Leo Auerperg got from Eva under false pretenses or worse.”

  “Worse? What are we talking about here?” Laszlo said.

  Cereta glared at her mother. “Anya, can we talk about this another time? In private?”

  Laszlo stuffed a pair of socks into the corner of his suitcase and straightened up.

  “You want me to leave the room, Cereta?” he said. “Okay, fine. I’ll wait in the kitchen. I’ll leave the two of you to discuss this in private.” He gave Cereta a tight smile before pulling the door shut behind him.

  She turned to anya. “So what are you talking about?”

  “Rape.”

  “Please, anya, try to make sense. You are saying Leo Auerperg raped Eva, and in return, she gave him a valuable painting?”

  “He demanded sex and the painting before giving Eva the money she needed to get out of Vienna.”

  “How would you know?”

  “I just know,” she said with a breathless rush that made objections impossible.

  “And you want me to confront Max with that magical knowledge of yours and demand the painting back?”

  “I already did. I wrote to him. I told him to keep his wedding present and give us back the Liebermann.”

  “You didn’t! Atkozott. That was a crappy thing to do. He pays for our trip, and you bring fantastic accusations against his father.”

  “I didn’t accuse him or his father of anything. I simply asked Max to return the painting. I didn’t need to explain it to him. He knows the transaction wasn’t legal. Eva gave the painting to his father under duress. She needed the money. She had to get out of the country.”

  “And did Max answer your letter?”

  “He wrote back and said he wasn’t going to fight with me over the painting.”

  “You mean he is willing to give it to you?”

  “Or compensate us for it. You go and tell him: I want that painting appraised by a professional.”

  Cereta felt a spasm of shame when she remembered the scene she had made on her mother’s behalf. She faced Max with the dizzying confidence of someone fighting for a just cause, anya’s cause. She argued with him, and after his death, with Nancy until she agreed to have the painting appraised and put up for auction to see what it would fetch. It wasn’t anya’s letters or Cereta’s word power that persuaded Nancy to go along. You couldn’t get a handle on that woman. She had such a smooth finish that words slid off her. Zoltan must have talked her into it, made her see some advantage in the procedure because Nancy wasn’t as stupid as she pretended to be. That giddy laugh of hers, with the emphasis on breathing in, that wide-eyed look she gave you as if poised for immediate flight — those were poses, Cereta thought, to trick you into thinking she was a silly goose. When she agreed to have the painting appraised, she knew exactly what she was doing — making nice with Zoltan. She was after him, that much was clear, and she was ready to sacrifice the Liebermann if there was a chance of getting Zoltan in return.

  Cereta tried to imagine her as Mrs. Nagy and Zoltan as her husband, the two of them in Nancy’s immaculate house in Santa Monica. Impossible. Perhaps Nancy would banish Zoltan to the cabana, restrict his messy habits to the backyard.

  In any case, the painting wasn’t valuable after all. The appraiser had warned her right away. “As you wish,” he said in the flat voice reserved for difficult clients. “We’ll list Herbstwald at 400,000 euros, pending authentication.”

  “I don’t think it’s an unreasonable price,” she said. “I’ve done a little research.”
She saw his lips contract. He could barely disguise his disdain for lay opinions, but she continued. “Liebermann paintings have sold for considerably more than that, closer to one million euros in fact.”

  He looked at her over the top of his rimless glasses and nodded, as if he had expected to be drawn into foolish arguments.

  “You realize of course that potential buyers will raise questions about the provenance,” he said, shuffling the papers on his desk to indicate that it was pointless to continue their conversation. It was just too obvious. “We know that the artist sold the painting to Samuel Wassermann in nineteen thirty-two. That much is documented. But there is no record of a subsequent sale to Leo Auerperg. You say the transaction records were lost during the war…”

  He paused discreetly, as if to say: You understand, don’t you? Samuel Wassermann died in a concentration camp. How do we know Auerperg acquired the painting legally?

  In the end, the question of provenance became moot. A more thorough examination of the painting revealed that it was a copy.

  Cereta had a sense of relief, as if she had dismantled a booby trap that might have exploded and torn her to pieces. She took a deep breath and allowed herself a laugh. It was a little crazy to be laughing in Opa’s study all by herself. Was anya’s craziness contagious? If you are exposed to madness day after day, does some of it flake off on you, or was the madness in her blood, a genetic liability? Maybe it was a matter of entangled particles. That’s what Zoltan called the phenomenon in one of his impromptu performances, playing the joker at dinner on their last night together in Irvine.

  THEY HAD SPENT that last night in his apartment, surrounded by moving boxes, a cardboard stockade, as if they were under attack and needed protection, and perhaps they did, against the rays emanating from the dark mysterious core of anya’s mind, which threatened their sanity.

  Zoltan hadn’t bothered to unpack in his new place. He uncrated only the essential furniture: a table, two chairs, a pullout sofa, a futon. The rest was stacked up against the walls. The fridge and the kitchen cupboards were empty. They were eating take-out food from paper plates, using plastic cutlery, drinking Chardonnay from Styrofoam cups. Zoltan seemed content to live a temporary life.

  It was the evening before her departure, the end of the charade. She was once again Cereta, although Cereta reborn. For a month now she had tried to patch herself together, taking bits of Laura, bits of her early self before things started to go wrong, and bits plucked from her surroundings. She was waiting for something good to emerge, a new persona. She lay in the hospital bed in a cold sweat of thought, sticky with the effort of beginning a new life, more exhausted by the labour of starting over than by her illness. At last, under the benevolent eye of David, under the quirky direction of Zoltan, she began to take on a discernable shape, but the skin holding it together was still new, thin, and transparent, as if the old slavish Cereta could break through at any time. And now she was afraid of exactly that happening on her return to Hungary, on breathing in the old air, taking in the old sights and sounds. She was afraid anya’s first word would pierce her skin, and leave her deflated, her delicate new persona collapsed in a wet heap of old habits.

  Over Krispy Kreme doughnuts, she said to Zoltan: “I don’t want to go back to Hungary. Anya is crazy, and she is driving me crazy, too.” At the same time she thought: Why do I even bother telling him? He knows. That’s why he left her and got a divorce. He and Laura got away. Me, I have no choice. I don’t have the option of staying in California. It was childish to say, “I don’t want to go back.” It was wishful thinking. Maybe that’s why Zoltan put on a song and dance routine, a little after-dinner entertainment to go with her fantasy of breaking out of anya’s prison of guilt, of never returning to her.

  “A crazy person can do that to you — teleport qubits of madness across the room,” Zoltan said, pulling his face into a lopsided smile. “Did you know that qubits can travel as far as a mile? It’s a principle of quantum mechanics first explored by Charles Bennett in 1993.”

  He pushed away the plate with the crumbly remnants of his doughnut and leaned back in his chair with a sly grin, which suggested that qubits were something he had made up on the spot, that he expected applause. Although you could never tell whether or not Zoltan was joking. He was full of obscure bits of information that sounded fantastic and turned out to be true after all. She would have to google Charles Bennett to be sure. When she was a child, she always fell for Zoltan’s jokes. He was a stand-up comedian in those days, but the number of his performances had tapered off, she noticed, as if he had run out of stage material. He is getting old, she thought. He is turning into a practical man. And this was good because she had business to get through after dinner, family business. She needed an answer to a question anya wouldn’t answer.

  She brought out the “Rape” poem and the English translation she had made for Laura.

  “Anya gave me this poem for Laura, and I made a translation for her,” she said. “Could you look it over? I don’t know if I got it right.” It was hard for her to figure out the elaborate system of pulleys and levers that made up anya’s mind, but Zoltan had a blueprint, she knew.

  She saw the alarm go on in his eyes when he read the title.

  “‘Rape III.’ One of her crazy poems,” he said.

  “What do you think it means?”

  He read it through and shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  “No,” she said. “You are ahead of me there. Anya told me the poem was a sequel. She wrote ‘Rape I’ and ‘II’ years ago. For you. To warn you, she said, but you refused to listen. You read her poems and ripped them up.”

  He sighed. “They were nonsense.”

  “And this one is nonsense, too?”

  “Look,” he said. “For some reason, Livia hated Leo Auerperg. She wrote the first poem after she came to Vienna in fifty-nine She said Leo was a rapist. I asked her: What do you mean? Is this a metaphor? It’s a fact, she said. Do you have proof, I said. I have no letters or photos or bloody sheets, if that’s what you mean, she said. I can’t offer you material proof. I just know.”

  “You never told me about that,” Cereta said. She had noticed it before. He didn’t talk much about Livia, and Livia didn’t talk much about him. They were protective of their life together, even after the divorce. They were secretive about their past. They spoke in code. Zoltan used jokes, anya used poetry. The effect was the same. It made the past unreadable for others.

  But now, Cereta had been initiated into the subterranean story. There was a set-piece dialogue, she realized. It went like this:

  A: Leo is a rapist.

  B: Do you have proof?

  A: I have no proof. I just know.

  Cereta had played that scene with anya. Like Zoltan, she had asked the question and received the answer:“I just know.” But what about the rest of the dialogue? Did anya tell Zoltan what she had told Cereta: “I read it in Eva’s eyes?”

  “I don’t know why she hated Leo,” he said. “Leo was very kind to us. He did everything he could to help us. Without him pulling strings, Livia wouldn’t have gotten an exit visa. But she didn’t consider that a favour. I never asked to come to Vienna, she said to me. I came because you begged me to come.”

  More subterranean stories. “You begged her to come?” Cereta said. “You put pressure on her?”

  “Pressure? I was lonely, and I was naive. I thought everyone wanted to leave Hungary and make a better life for themselves in Vienna. But she said, no, it wasn’t a good move for her.”

  “She was trying to make you feel guilty,” Cereta said. “She does that to everyone.”

  “I don’t know about making me feel guilty. She was unhappy. There were problems from day one. Leo and I went to pick her up at the train station. I expected — what did I expect? — smiles, embraces, gratitude. No, she gave us a frozen look and pulled away
from Leo when he took her suitcase as if she was afraid of touching him accidentally. And in the car, on the way to Leo’s apartment, she didn’t say a word. Not a single word. I thought she was shy in Leo’s company, didn’t want to bring out her faulty German, but it wasn’t a language problem.” He paused. His mouth worked as if he was trying out descriptions of Livia’s silence. “Like hiding from the enemy,” he said at last. “Livia was holding her breath, waiting for Leo’s next move, or planning her next move — that kind of silence.”

  The silence of the trenches. Cereta had experienced it as well. She understood what Zoltan was saying. They looked at each other like two survivors from a war, from an experience no outsider could understand: living with anya. Now that Zoltan had put it in words, Cereta, too, remembered the watchful, breathless silence anya kept in Opa Auerperg’s presence. When they were invited to his apartment for Kaffee und Kuchen, Livia came along unwillingly, coaxed by Zoltan. She did not refuse the cup of coffee Thea served her, but she did not drink it. Cereta could see her lift the cup to her mouth, careful not to let her lips make contact with the rim, and set it down again, untouched. She saw anya poke her fork at the piece of cake on her plate, break it up, crumble it, and move it to the side without taking a bite. She took it all in, for later use in their pretend games, but anya’s movements turned out to be too subtle for drama. How do you execute the almost imperceptible recoil when Leo put out his hand to her to say goodbye at the end of the afternoon?