by Peter Golden
Yuli said, “Marshal Ney. Hemingway writes about the statue in A Moveable Feast and The Sun Also Rises. Ney helped Napoleon invade Russia. He got the same welcome as the Nazis—winter and Russians that did not give up. The French came with half a million soldiers. They go home with twenty thousand. What do countries want with Russia? Most of the people have nothing.”
I felt bad that even here, in this golden city, her history was with her. I took her arm, and we went to the café and sat at a table by a window with the sunlight warming us. Yuli asked me to order for her and gazed glumly out toward Marshal Ney. Her mood improved when we finished a basket of pain aux raisins and pain au chocolat.
As we sipped our second cafés au lait, Yuli said, “How are the French not fat?”
“Because they don’t eat whole baskets of croissants.”
“Their loss.”
From an inner pocket of my denim jacket, I took out the page torn from the Picasso book and reread the list Emma had written in the center of the paper.
Art dealer Charleston?
Gak?
Ask Picasso?
Joost Ter Horst?
Why does God write our stories in vanishing ink?
Yuli shifted the paper toward her. “You never hear of these people?”
“Picasso.”
Yuli grinned. “No joking. Did your grandmother know him?”
“If she did, she never mentioned it. Charleston could be an art dealer, but it’s also an American city.”
“In South Carolina. Your Civil War started there.”
“It did?”
“They do teach in your schools?”
“You have to pay attention.”
Yuli laughed.
“Emma wasn’t a great speller in English, but every word on the list is correct, so she must have used the dictionary in her apartment. Thing is, she usually wrote notes to herself in Russian.”
“The notes could be for someone else.”
“Gak? Gak would read Russian. And his name’s on the list.”
Her forehead furrowed, and I felt as if I could see the wheels spinning in her head. “Michael, your grandmother knew you couldn’t read Russian?”
“She did. You’re saying the notes were for me?”
“Perhaps she worried something would happen to her and wanted to write it down for you. Or they were notes to remind herself to tell you later. And this God and vanishing ink. Is this words she says. An American—how you say, ‘proverbial’?”
“Proverb. No, I haven’t heard it before from my grandmother. Or anybody. And I never heard about Gak or this Joost Ter Horst. Where would Emma meet a Dutch guy?”
Yuli was studying the page and drawing an index finger back and forth over Joost Ter Horst. When at last she looked at me, her expression was serious, hesitant, regretful. Spreading her map on the table, she said, “I want to see Notre-Dame. There is a bookstore near it, Shakespeare and Company, on Rue de la Bûcherie. We could look up Gak and Joost in art books. Good plan?”
“Excellent,” I said, though I already had put together a plan of my own. When Yuli got up to use the WC, I told her I’d wait outside, went to a telephone booth on Boulevard Montparnasse, and made a call.
* * *
Books make the prettiest wallpaper, I decided, because with the high wood shelving crammed with volumes the walls were every shade of the color wheel. At midmorning, the store was quiet, with the sweet, cozy mustiness of a library, and what I remember most about our two hours there was Yuli, in a red beret and a well-worn leather flight jacket—which she said Der Schmuggler had bought for her on one of his trips to Munich—lovingly opening up the books to read the indexes.
“Maybe Gak and Joost weren’t famous enough to write about,” I said.
We were crossing the Pont au Double again, and the wind was blowing off the Seine.
Yuli said, “You read French. There is a national library in Paris. We could try there.”
“Or go in there and pray.”
Notre-Dame was up ahead, its towers and spires etched into the soft gray light.
“You pray. I want to see the gargoyles.”
We were in the square in front of the cathedral when I said, “I’m going to ask Picasso.”
“Ask Picasso? How do you ask Picasso?” The incredulousness in her voice suggested that I’d misplaced my mind.
“Four Freedoms Radio has an office in Paris, and I called the news director. They did a story on Picasso we ran in Munich. The news director had his address and told me that Picasso, if he’s in the mood, is approachable—even friendly. He talks to people at the beach and in cafés. Sometimes he’ll sign autographs, and supposedly he once painted a journalist’s car and signed it. He lives on the Riviera, in the village of Mougins. We can fly to Nice, take a taxi to the village, and I’ll ask him about my grandmother’s list.”
“You do not just go see Picasso.”
“Why? He speaks French, I speak French. You know something about him the news director didn’t know?”
Yuli snickered. It wasn’t a nice sound. “He is a member of the Communist Party and won the Stalin Prize.”
“What’d he get for winning? Ten years in Siberia?”
I was trying to lighten up the discussion, but Yuli ignored my joke. “He is the most famous artist in the world. He will be busy.”
“So what’s the worst that’ll happen? He’ll hit me with his easel?”
“You Americans—you have everything and respect nothing.”
I took one of her hands. She tried to pull away, and I held on. “Why are you angry?”
She answered by gazing down at the rough cobbles of the square.
“I’m tired of your secrets, Yuli. Tell me.”
“Papka did not give me money to ride around Europe.”
I didn’t buy her explanation and speculated that her anger was a brick in the wall that she’d built between us. Yet because that was all she was giving me, I replied as if I believed her problem was economic. “I have the money to do this—my grandmother left it to me—so I’m going. You can come along or wait in Paris.”
Yuli looked up at me. I couldn’t read her face, but she didn’t let go of my hand.
26
Getting out of the cab at Emma’s, I asked Yuli if she wanted to accompany me to Mougins. She nodded, and I gave her the key to the apartment and went down Rue de Turenne to the Air France office. I bought tickets to Nice on my American Express card and cashed traveler’s checks at a bank. When I got back to the Place des Vosges, Yuli was sitting under a heater on the terrace of Café Hugo, her smaller suitcase at her feet, and had ordered another glass of Beaujolais. She gave me the key, and upstairs I stuffed some things into my canvas rucksack, forming a loop with the shoulder strap and tugging the top through until the bag was closed tight.
We rode the Métro to Orly, where Yuli downed a petit rouge before we boarded. I had to help her up the stairway to the plane, and before takeoff she was asleep. Halfway through the flight I noticed Yuli looking at me.
She whispered, “I’m scared.”
“Of?”
Yuli shook her head as if she had no explanation for her fear, and I put my arm around her, and she drifted off again. After we landed, she was quiet in the taxi as the blue of the Mediterranean flashed by, and then the old churches in the town squares and, outside the towns, the winter-brown vineyards and gray stone hills with patches of greenery and stucco houses up on the hillsides painted the color of walnuts and lemons with orange clay-tile roofs.
In under an hour, the taxi was bouncing along the cobbled streets of Mougins, past the art galleries and artists’ studios, and we got out at a bistro. Yuli had recovered enough to tease me. She grinned, swiveling her head side to side. “I don’t see Picasso. Now what?”
“Eat.”
The weather was better here than in Paris, like a sunny autumn day, and we ate outside. I had never seen a waxed mustache until I met our waiter, who with robotic precision se
rved us duck with red currant jam. I ordered both of us Evian water instead of wine.
My rucksack was on the chair next to Yuli, and she glanced at the olive-green bag. “Where did you get this?”
“We used it at the candy store to bring cash and coins to the bank.”
“ The Red Army carried them.”
“The Red Army? This was Emma’s.”
Yuli smiled. “More mystery. How do we find Picasso?”
“We consult the waiter.”
There was more than a hint of skepticism in her laughter. “Perfect. Waiters know everything.”
When he brought the bill, I said, “Pardon, monsieur Savez-vous où réside Picasso?”
“Oui.”
The waiter glared at me with the hostility of a palace guard confronting a commoner, and clearly he had no intention of providing me with any further information until I recalled Emma saying, in Yiddish, that if you grease the wheels, you’ll ride. I paid the bill and added a hundred francs, approximately twenty dollars, double the cost of the meal.
“Picasso n’est pas à la maison,” he said.
I told Yuli that Picasso wasn’t home, then asked the waiter, “Où est-il?”
He folded his arms across his chest. I ponied up another hundred francs, and the waiter replied that Picasso was in Saint-Tropez. Every afternoon, by four o’clock, he would be eating and drinking at Sénéquier.
I checked my watch—it was already past two—and the waiter flicked his hand at us as though shooing flies. “Go! It is not a short ride.”
Once we were in the cab, Yuli asked, “Do you believe Picasso is there?”
“Why would the waiter lie?”
“For money.”
“An evil capitalist? I doubt it.”
Yuli patted my knee. “My optimistic American.”
27
Yuli saw him first. We were walking up through the port of Saint-Tropez, past the sailboats and yachts tied up along the quay, and Yuli pulled off the trick of both keeping her voice low and exclaiming, “There he is!”
Picasso was seated with a group of men and women under the red awning of Sénéquier, and all of them seemed to be talking at once. I felt my pulse quicken and it hit me that my optimism hadn’t included a plan.
“Let’s wait till they’re done,” was the best I could do, and we took a table on the terrace from where we could see him.
Yuli ordered each of us a café crème. To calm my nerves I removed my sketch pad from my rucksack and began to draw Picasso—the silver horseshoe of hair circling his bald tanned head and his face deeply lined, as if carved from a grainy block of teak. I was rehearsing my approach to him and studying my sketch when I heard Yuli say, “Michael, Michael . . . .”
I glanced up, and Picasso, short and stocky and wearing a white-and-blue-striped collarless shirt under a black sport coat, was standing at our table.
“You drew me,” he said in French, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet like a schoolboy incapable of standing still. “Now I will draw you.”
Picasso held out his hands, and I gave him my pencil and pad. He studied us and suddenly looked away, drawing with swift deft strokes, his arm moving up, down, to the left and right, as if he was doing nothing more than covering the paper with scribbles. In a couple of minutes, he was done and, after returning my pad, set the pencil across the ashtray on the table and resumed his rocking.
It didn’t seem possible, but in maybe fifty lines he had captured the essence of Yuli and me, our eyes narrowed against the afternoon light and the stunned expressions on our faces.
I looked up from the bottom right corner of the drawing, where he had written Picasso. “C’est merveilleux, monsieur Merci beaucoup Vous êtes très généreux.”
He grinned, nodding at Yuli, then at me, and as he turned to go back to the other side of the terrace, I said, “Excusez-moi, Monsieur Picasso. I hope you do not think I am being presumptuous, but I hoped you could tell us about the artist Alexander Gak.”
His face hardened, the lines deepening. “And you are?”
I introduced myself and Yuli, and told him that Gak had been a friend of my grandmother—Emma Dainov.”
“Emma Dainov? Je l’ai pas rencontrée.”
I was disappointed that he’d never met my grandmother, but figured anything I could learn about Gak would help, so I asked, “Did you know Gak well?”
Picasso studied me as though preparing to do another sketch. “You have never seen his work?”
“Regrettablement, non.”
He sighed. “C’est dommage.”
“I was told that my grandmother was in love with him. She wrote his name in the back of a book of your paintings.”
A sad smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. “Oui, that makes sense.”
“Pourquoi?”
Picasso sat across from us, planting his elbows on the table, then took the pencil off the ashtray and leaned back. “Because I used Gak’s face for my painting The Old Jew.”
“It was in my grandmother’s book. The old man and the boy sitting together.”
I wasn’t sure Picasso had heard me. He was silent, rolling the pencil between his thumb and forefinger. Then: “I have not spoken about Gak in a long time. I can still see him; he might as well be sitting here. His beard was the reddish-brown of Van Gogh’s, but not so neatly clipped, and he had a pious mouth. It was his eyes, though, his eyes . . .”
Picasso put the pencil on the table and signaled a waiter for a bottle of wine by holding up his hand and making a pouring motion.
Staring past us, he spoke slowly, as if each word weighed more than it should and refused to roll so easily off his tongue: “I could never paint precisely what I saw in Gak’s eyes. Not on my first try, not on my tenth. My perception always disagreed with the image my brush left on the canvas. I did notice a shadow of his expression had made its way into a self-portrait of mine from—what is it now, fifty-eight years ago? But the expression wasn’t the same, never the same. Gak had the eyes of an old man and a child. How do you paint that? The compassion and fury all at once? Like he ached for anyone who suffered and would never forgive the world its cruelty.”
Picasso picked up the pencil again, tapping it on the table until the waiter arrived with a rosé and three glasses. After pouring some for Picasso to sample and approve, he filled glasses for Yuli and me.
“To Gak,” Picasso said, raising his glass.
Yuli and I followed his lead. Picasso finished his wine, and he looked at us now, and his voice was more animated when he said, “I met Gak not long after coming to Paris. In 1901 or 1902. Gak had money when none of us did. Family money, I think, because he wasn’t selling his paintings. Someone said that he was the bastard child of a cousin of the tsar and a Jewish girl. From the Gak family. Wealthy liquor merchants who lived in St. Petersburg.”
“Leningrad,” Yuli said. The name of the city had been changed to memorialize Lenin, but I had no idea why Yuli was correcting Picasso. Maybe to give him the impression that she understood French and shared his Communist sympathies.
“Oui, Leningrad,” Picasso replied, opening his luminous eyes wide to gaze at Yuli. She returned his gaze, and he gave her a small smile before busying himself taking a cigarette from a powder-blue pack of Gauloises and sticking it in a short, lacquered wooden holder. “Gak used to travel between Paris and St. Petersburg. He sometimes taught at an art school there, which is how he met Chagall. But it was much better for the artists in Montmartre when Gak was in town. We would have frozen to death if he hadn’t bought coal for us, and he saw to it that we ate and drank at Spielman’s and Au Coucou by promising to pay our bills. And Modigliani—Modigliani would hardly have had the stone to sculpt if Gak hadn’t taken care of the supplier.”
The waiter appeared, flicked a lighter and refilled our glasses. Picasso puffed on the cigarette. “Gak had a lovely apartment and studio.”
“Sur la Place des Vosges?” I hadn’t planned to interrupt him, but
I was anxious to know how Emma had wound up with an apartment in Paris.
“Exactement. Above the Café Hugo. I would visit him, and we would walk in the park or go to the café.”
Picasso stared out toward the harbor, and I couldn’t tell whether I heard nostalgia or a deeper sadness in his voice. “You wouldn’t know the meaning of stubborn until you argued with Gak. We agreed with Cézanne that our job was to deconstruct the things around us. Gak applied that to the soul. His one subject. ‘A delusional Expressionist,’ I called him. When he painted, he sawed open every hideous chamber of the heart. His images were Russian, and whether he painted the steppes in spring or the tsar carving up children on a platter and eating them, his pictures were as blurry and terrifying as a nightmare that still haunts you in the morning.”
At home and in Paris, I hadn’t understood Emma’s interest in art books. Talking to Picasso had solved that mystery. Yet I struggled to imagine her, a woman who was the opposite of flighty, as the companion of an artist. Maybe that was why she had fallen in love with him. Or maybe I just had trouble imagining her as young, full of joy and, even harder for me, lust.
Picasso dragged on the Gauloises, the sharp smell of the smoke cutting through the aromas of coffee and the sea breeze. “Gak hated bold colors. His paintings were done in black and white and gray. I told him, ‘Gak, you see the world through an eternal snowstorm,’ and he’d reply, ‘Picasso, you blind me with your palette, make me dizzy with your shapes, but you teach nothing about the inner and outer hideousness that people ignore.’ I thought about Gak often while I painted Guernica and The Charnel House. He would have applauded them.”
“He never saw those paintings?”
“Je ne sais pas. We were no longer in touch. The last time we met was at La Rotonde. The café was crowded. It was a cold fall evening, the braziers were lit, but I don’t recall the year. After 1933, because Hitler was in power. Gak and I were arguing about my Seated Bather. An argument we had whenever we drank absinthe together. He asked me how good a painting of a naked young woman on a beach could be if when you saw it, you had no desire to make love to her. I said, ‘Who says no one wants to make love to her?’ and Gak replied, ‘She has arms and legs like cobras, Picasso. She is not welcome in my bed.’ We were laughing when Chagall rushed over to us with a fierce expression that one never saw in his paintings. He shouted at Gak in Russian, and they almost came to blows. You see, Chagall was in the midst of painting his Bible stories, and Gak had painted his response: The Tower of Babel. A canvas four meters high and three meters wide, filled with fire-blackened towers of the dead—men, women, and children that were as mutilated as any that Bosch ever conceived. At the opening, Gak told the critics that he was dedicating the painting to Herr Hitler, who would soon be supplying the corpses, and to Monsieur Chagall, who believed in fairy tales.”