Last Rights

by James Green

  That was how I became friends with Sarah. We were the same age and when I went with my mother to Sarah’s house we would play together. She was an only child and her parents, who were kind people, liked her to have a friend with whom she could play. Sarah was a cripple, she had contracted polio when very young and was confined to a wheelchair. Her family were very rich, her father was a merchant and had many contracts with the military in the town, the Border Protection Brigade, the 20th Infantry Division and the Cavalry Brigade whose officers bought my father’s boots. They lived in a big house with many fine things.

  Sarah’s father was a cultured man and had a great love of art, which Sarah had inherited. He had a fine collection of paintings and I would spend many hours wheeling Sarah from picture to picture while she explained to me how wonderful each one was. I had no interest in the pictures but I had a great love of Sarah so I pushed and listened and tried to sound interested. I visited Sarah often as we grew older and we became more like sisters than friends. Sarah was educated at home and her father had been keen that although she was too delicate to travel herself, she should be able to travel in her mind through art and literature. He arranged for her to have lessons in Russian and English; Russian to talk to our eastern neighbours and English to talk to the world. I was allowed to join in Sarah’s language lessons so that she would have a companion to talk to and so learn more quickly. Sarah didn’t like the language lessons, they bored her, but I enjoyed them and between us we made good progress. I would sometimes stay at her house for a whole week and, once, the family took me with them when they went on holiday to the country. That was the happiest time of my life.

  The next year the war came. The Red Army arrived and took over everything. The Polish army seemed to melt away from the town. The Jews of Baranowicze welcomed the Soviet troops. We had all heard of what was happening to Jews in Germany and although it was bad to come under the Soviets it would be much worse to be under the Nazis. Children went into the parks to pick the flowers to give to the soldiers as they arrived. The troops settled into the barracks and life more or less went on for a while. Sarah’s father came to some sort of agreement with them about supplies and my father and brothers found work repairing the soldiers’ boots. The soldiers’ boots were of very poor quality and gave my father and brother plenty of work although the pay was poor and didn’t always arrive, so things didn’t change for us so very much. The Soviets didn’t seem to care one way or the other about Jews so we made the best of it and thanked God that it was the Red Army who had come and not the Wehrmacht. There were nearly ten thousand Jews in Baranowicze and not long after the Soviets took over another three thousand Jewish refugees arrived who had fled from Western Poland in front of the German invasion. The stories they told made us thank God even more. Then, in June 1941, the bombing began and the Germans invaded. We found ourselves gathering what we could and became refugees heading east, away from the Germans.

  Everything was chaos and on the fifth day on the road I got parted from my family. I looked for them but it was hopeless. The Luftwaffe were bombing and strafing the roads and when the planes weren’t attacking us we were driven off the roads to make way for the Red Army, which seemed to be going both ways at once, reinforcements coming to the front and convoys of retreating men and supplies. It was a time of madness. I continued to make my way east, always looking for my family, but I never saw any of them again.

  Eventually, after almost two weeks on the road, I arrived at a village where there was a group of three Red Army lorries. There were five men under the command of a corporal, they were sitting by their lorries cooking a meal. I knew that if I carried on walking I would soon die. I spoke Russian so I asked if they would take me with them wherever it was they were going. They had food and could offer some sort of shelter and to me that was all that mattered. I wasn’t pretty but I was a girl and the soldiers were all young men who had been away from their girlfriends in Russia for a long time and didn’t know if they would ever get back. They talked it over and agreed that they could take me with them for a while.

  I travelled with them to the next village but before we went into the village they hid me in the back of one of the lorries. They loaded up what they had come to collect, boxes, ammunition I think, and then they pulled out. Once we were out of the village they stopped. The corporal climbed into the back and told me that now we would have sex. I was a virgin, completely without experience, but I knew it had to be done so I pulled down my underwear, lifted my skirt and lay down as the lorry started again and bumped along the road. When the corporal tried to push into me I cried out in pain and he stopped. The corporal banged on the back of the cab and the lorry stopped. The corporal got out and I heard the men talking, then the corporal came back. By this time I was crying. He told me to get out of the lorry. I thought they would leave me or kill me but when I got out they all looked at me kindly. The corporal asked my name and my age and asked me to tell them about myself. When I finished telling them they talked for a while and then told me that they would take me to the place they were going and hand me over to an officer. If I told the officer that I was eighteen and could drive a lorry then I might be allowed to join up. It was that or be left where I was on the road. It was all they could do for me, a chance. Did I want to take it?

  What could I say? I said yes. We all got back into the lorries. I sat in the cab beside the corporal. He started the lorry and made me take the wheel. He sat close beside me so he could help me and straight away he began to teach me to drive. I knew I had to learn so I made myself do it and by the time we reached the place where we were going I could manage to give an imitation of someone who understood the rudiments of driving a lorry. There were many soldiers in the village where we stopped, and lorries and a few tanks. No one took any notice of me as the corporal took me to a building to see an officer. The officer I was taken to listened to the corporal who told him I was a farmer’s daughter who could drive. He said my family were dead and I had asked them to bring me with them so I could join up. The officer wasn’t interested in me, he had a bandage round his head with a dark stain at the side and looked terrible, as if he hadn’t slept for days. He asked me a few questions, name, age, where I had lived, nothing of any importance. Then told me I had joined the Red Army. He sent me with another soldier to get a uniform and that was that. I was a driver in the Red Army.

  Those soldiers who had taken me in their lorries had saved my life and in return I served the Soviets with all my heart. For weeks it was a mess, full retreat and constant bombardment and air attacks. But I survived and got back to Russia where I fought on. Twice I was wounded and twice I recovered and returned to the fighting. After one year I was a corporal myself and by the time it was all coming to an end in 1945 I was a sergeant working with a specialist group.

  Our job was taking art from occupied German museums and galleries and moving it back into Poland so it could be sent back to the Soviet Union. One day I was given orders to take two lorries and pick up some pictures from a chateau. It was a special job. The chateau had belonged to a top Nazi who had a big collection of stolen art. My orders were signed personally by a high Soviet functionary. They could not be questioned by anyone in the military. There were two lists of pictures. One list had thirty pictures that we were to crate up, put into one lorry and send on its way back to Poland. There were seventeen pictures on the second list. These had to be crated by me and my co-driver and loaded onto a lorry I would drive. Once these pictures were loaded and ready to go I had been told to open another envelope which contained a second set of orders.

  We loaded the pictures as we were instructed, then I opened the envelope. It was an order signed by the same high functionary to take my load to Switzerland and see that they were deposited in a bank in Zurich under the name of the functionary who had signed the orders. There would be no difficulties, they were expected by the bank, all arrangements had already been made. Also in the envelope was a diplomatic pass and some Swiss
francs.

  I set the other lorry off on its way back to Poland and me and my co-driver got going. The co-driver asked where we were headed and I told him. He didn’t care, in fact he said that if we made it all the way and he liked Switzerland it might be worth thinking about taking up permanent residence and we both laughed. There were no problems on the journey, we stayed in the east of Germany and headed for Austria so we were in Soviet-controlled territory all along the route. All we had to do was show our orders and we were made welcome and then helped on our way. About ten kilometres from the Swiss border I told the co-driver who was at the wheel to stop. He stopped and I shot him through the head. I pushed his body out into the deserted road and drove on.

  There was no trouble at the border, everything went well. Once in Switzerland I drove on to the first big place I came to. It was called St Gallen. There I used some of the money I’d been given to store the lorry in a secure garage then buy some civilian clothes. I looked around St Gallen until I found a place that sold paintings. It was a furniture shop, quite a big one and prosperous-looking. The sort of place where the well-off would buy things. I spoke to the man who owned the shop. I told him I was a Polish refugee. I said I came from a respectable family of modest wealth. I had got out of Poland but needed money. I had one small picture which my father had said was very valuable, a Corot. Would he look at it and perhaps buy it from me? He agreed to look at it. I went back to my garage, took one small picture from the lorry, un-crated it and wrapped it in some cloth and then in newspaper. It looked like an ordinary parcel. I took it to the shop owner. He asked me questions about it, he was not a dishonest man. I told him my name was Sarah Perlmann, we had lived in Baranowicze and my father was a merchant who had collected art. He listened to me as I described Sarah’s house and her father’s collection. I told him about the picture I had brought him, a rural riverside scene painted around 1865 called Le Pont d’Avray. I said my father had bought it from a dealer while on a visit to Paris in 1928. I had no papers to support any of what I told him but he believed me, that the picture was truly mine, and agreed to buy it for what seemed to me a small fortune. I handed over the picture and he handed over the money. The reason he believed me was because I had seen that very painting hanging in the drawing room of Sarah’s house many times, it was one of her favourites. Everything I had told the dealer, Sarah had told me. She loved it and the Nazis had stolen it from her father and from her and taken it back to Germany. I had recognised it as soon as I had seen it at the chateau. How funny that I should have been given the job of stealing it from the Germans for the Soviet State. And now a high Soviet functionary had arranged for me to steal it from the State so he could have it. So many thieves. And I had become like them. I had stolen it from them all.

  After selling the painting I had plenty of money and bought a good forged passport. That was not so hard to do in those times. Many people needed passports and there were plenty of people who could supply them if you could pay. I had my paintings moved by rail to Genoa. In Genoa I arranged for me and my paintings to go to London. Everything was in chaos but if you had money and a good passport everything could be arranged. I went to London because I spoke English and I thought it would be safer than anywhere else in Europe. In London I told the same story and sold two more of Sarah’s father’s paintings. That was as many as I dared sell, any more and I would attract too much attention. But there was more than enough money from the two paintings to plan carefully what I wanted to do. I wanted to get far away from the war and from Europe, but the paintings were a big problem. In Genoa no one had cared what was in my crates so long as I paid. London was not like that, questions would be asked, crates opened. The authorities were always on the lookout for contraband and for anything that might be stolen. I needed to be able to move them without any trouble from the authorities. I decided to have them disguised, painted over. But for that I knew I needed a real artist, someone who knew what they were doing, who would know how to cover them without destroying the original paintings. I also needed an artist who would do what I asked for payment and then keep his mouth shut. I went to several galleries but found nothing until I went into a gallery in Bond Street. Although it was in Bond Street it wasn’t much of a place, small and up on the first floor. There I saw three paintings which were truly hideous, how anyone could paint such things was beyond me and I was sure that no one in their right mind would give money for them. But the artist might be the man I was looking for. If this was what he was trying to sell then he must need money. The three pictures were very big and were described as studies for figures at the base of a crucifixion. They were like nothing I had seen before, meaningless, awful things, but they gave me an idea, the perfect way to hide my paintings and be sure that no one would take any interest in the pictures that covered them. The painter was a man called Francis Bacon. I told the gallery I wanted to meet him to discuss a commission and they arranged it.

  He was a strange man, driven in some way and at once passionate but detached. He listened to what I wanted and to my surprise he agreed. I think he had his own reasons for wanting to paint what I asked of him. I handed over the remaining fourteen pictures. Bacon said he wouldn’t paint over my pictures, that would destroy them. He would re-canvas over the original paintings and do his work on that. His work on the paintings took just over a year, I kept in touch but never saw the work until it was finished. It was exactly what I wanted. They were truly awful, hideous, revolting. No one would want such things, yet he seemed pleased with them, proud. He said that they would be his secret masterpiece, perhaps the greatest works he would ever do. And he laughed, he said it was wonderful. A great, wonderful, secret joke. I didn’t understand him, but I didn’t care. As I said, he was a strange man. I paid him what we had agreed. He didn’t sign any of the pictures but he gave me a signed letter of authenticity naming and dating the pictures. I had them crated and booked a passage to Canada. The authorities were on the look-out for anything that might be war loot being moved through British ports and the crates were all opened and the paintings checked before loading. But it was as I had arranged and once they saw that they were Catholic Stations of the Cross, recently painted religious works, and I had a letter showing my ownership there was no problem.

  I moved to Canada, to a small town in Alberta. I still had enough money but it wouldn’t last forever so I bought a house, put my pictures into one of the bedrooms and set about starting a business. All I knew was transport, lorries and driving, so I bought a good second-hand lorry and began a transport business. I found I was good at it, my Red Army training had made me perfect for the job. After six years I had four lorries and after ten years a fleet of twelve but I never forgot my pictures. I knew almost nothing about art but I was learning a lot about storage and it didn’t take long for me to decide that if the pictures stayed too long in a bedroom in crates they might become irreparably damaged. I needed them to be where they could be looked after. They were devotional works so the obvious choice was a Catholic Church. To keep my pictures safe I loaned them to the local parish church. The priest didn’t want them. I didn’t blame him, they were shocking things. But I told him that I had saved them from the Nazis, that they were commissioned by my father for the local church where we lived in the Sudetenland but the Nazis in the congregation had objected saying they were decadent filth. How can the depiction of the sufferings of Jesus be filth, I asked him? I told him that the rejection suffered by my father at the hands of his parish church made me give up the practice of my faith. But if he took the pictures I would feel able to come to church again. After that he couldn’t refuse, to reject them would make him no better than the Nazis, and as I was prepared to make a fat donation if he let them hang in his church, he took them. The parishioners were shocked, but when it was explained they accepted them. Once they were up I started to go to church on Sundays and, as far as the world was concerned, I was a Catholic returned to the fold. It wasn’t hard. I went and did what everyone else did,
no one bothered me and I bothered no one. My pictures were safe so I got on with my life.

  The business kept on growing, more lorries, longer runs, bigger contracts. After twenty years I had one of the biggest haulage and storage firms in central Canada and I decided that now I was wealthy enough it was time to go back to my pictures. I took them from the church saying that I wanted them cleaned. I found a man who could take the Stations off the works under them without harming either picture. I photographed the stolen pieces and then had the Stations put back over them and returned to the church. I paid the man well, very well, but he was greedy and tried to blackmail me. He had seen the pictures and guessed they were stolen and probably war loot. He threatened to go to the authorities. What could I do? I met him, gave him some money, and while he was checking it I shot him through the head. I took back the money and left him to be found. It was a lonely stretch of road and we’d met by night. No one saw anything and there was nothing anyone knew to connect me to the man. I waited. If he had written anything down and the police found it they would come and I would tell them what had happened. But no one came. After six weeks I set off for London. I told everyone that I was taking an extended holiday in England. I deserved a break after so many years’ hard work.

  I wanted to go to London to find out about my stolen pictures, how valuable they were, what their history was. Where had they come from before the Nazis took them? But when I got to London I found that Francis Bacon was becoming famous as an artist, very famous. The middle of the Canadian prairie is a long way from the art world and no one in the church took any notice any more of my Stations. But to leave them out in the open was too much of a risk. One day they would be noticed and questions asked. I returned to Canada immediately and said I had decided that I didn’t want a vacation, I wanted to retire. I was going to sell the business, sell up altogether and move away. I would, of course, be taking my father’s Stations with me. The priest wasn’t sad to see them go.