by Peter Golden
“Did Gak sell that painting?”
Picasso removed his cigarette from the holder and stubbed it out in the ashtray. “His early paintings were handled by a Russian dealer. A few were sold, but most of them were stored in the dealer’s mansion in St. Petersburg, and they were seized by the Soviets after the Revolution. His later work was shown in a gallery in Paris owned by a Jew who fled when the Nazis marched in, and the Gestapo burned the gallery to the ground along with the paintings.”
“Did Gak survive the war?”
“He moved to Nice soon after that evening at La Rotonde. There were a lot of Russians in Nice then. They had been wintering on the Côte d’Azur since the nineteenth century. And Matisse—Matisse had been living in Nice for years. Conducting his love affair with the Mediterranean light. He occasionally saw Gak. Matisse told me that Gak had a Russian woman with him. A blonde with the greenest eyes Matisse had ever seen. Was this your grandmother?”
I twirled my wineglass in a circle. Taft Mifflin had asked me why Emma had visited Nice on her annual European jaunts. Now, it seemed, I had the answer. “Sounds like her. My grandmother came to America in the late forties, but I never heard about Gak.”
Picasso shook his head—sadly, I thought. “I’m glad she survived, and I can’t explain her not mentioning him. But no one hears of Gak anymore. He was a wonderful painter, but so many who knew him and his art are gone, and his work has vanished. I was in Paris during the war, and for a while I believed Gak was safe. The South of France was controlled by the Italians, who left the Jews alone. Actually, Jews from around Europe went there to live. Then at the end of 1943 the Germans came, and they started putting Jews on trains. Most were taken to Auschwitz.”
Picasso slid a Gauloises from the pack. He placed it in the holder and looked at me, his brown-black eyes shining. “There is a village, Haut-de-Cagnes, thirteen or fourteen kilometers from Nice. Matisse told me that a priest there had hidden Jews in his church, but I don’t know if Gak was among them. Three years after the war I visited Auschwitz. I remember standing inside the gates hoping that Gak, his wife, and his two daughters had not died in those gas chambers.”
I was so stunned I reverted to English. “Gak and my grandmother had two daughters?”
Picasso seemed puzzled. Yuli nudged me with her elbow to alert me to my mistake, and I switched to French, “Gak et ma grand-mère avaient deux filles?”
“That is what Matisse told me, but last I heard, ten, eleven, years ago, no one had seen Gak or his daughters. Will you try to find Gak?”
“Oui.”
“Bon, bon. If you do, tell him his old friend Picasso wishes to argue with him again.”
“I will. By the way, do you know an art dealer named Charleston or one who lives in Charleston in America?”
“Non.”
“Was there another artist, friendly with Gak—Joost Ter Horst?”
“If there was, I never heard of him.”
Picasso stood, and the waiter hurried over. Picasso gave him some franc notes.
I said, “Thank you for the wine and the drawing.”
Picasso smiled, mostly at Yuli. “De rien.”
When he’d gone back to his table, Yuli said, “He knew Gak well?”
“They were friends,” I said, and told her about the church in Haut-de-Cagnes where Gak might have waited out the war.
“And he and Emma had two daughters?”
“Had or have.”
I gazed at the shadows falling across the port.
“Michael?”
“Let’s go look for Alexander Gak,” I said.
28
It was a two-hour ride back to Nice, and as the setting sun lacquered the hills of the Riviera with crimson and gold, I sat with Yuli in the taxi trying to understand why Emma had hidden the most important details of her life from me. I could understand why she didn’t talk about her younger sister Maria being hanged by the Nazis. She must have preferred to lock that memory in its own box so it couldn’t hurt her anymore, and she had always been protective toward me. Yet I was angry that she hadn’t told me about Gak and their daughters. Even if my aunts had been murdered by the Germans, I wanted to know about them, feeling that my conception of myself was incomplete—bogus, even—without that information.
Before coming to France, I hadn’t devoted much thought to the fact that I had no family, but now I was aware that it set me apart from everyone I knew growing up, and the strangeness of it was as awful to me as the loneliness. Yuli was the only other young person I knew in that situation, and at least she had Der Schmuggler. If Emma’s daughters were alive, then I had two aunts and perhaps uncles and cousins. I wanted to meet them, and I was suddenly angry that Emma had saddled me with the mysteries of her secret life—mysteries that could have been responsible for her murder and the murder of Dmitry in Munich.
And what, I asked myself, had my father known? He probably knew about Maria Adaskina—he had been in Rostov-on-Don when she was alive. So he had kept that from me, possibly because Emma had insisted on it. Had his mother told him about Gak? That was trickier. Maybe Emma didn’t want my father to know that she had more children. That was possible, but couldn’t she have told me after my parents died?
“Damn it, Emma,” I said, and when Yuli tapped my arm, I realized that I had spoken out loud.
“You are all right, Michael?”
I nodded and asked the driver to recommend a hotel on the main street in Nice. When he dropped us off at the Hôtel Ruhl, a domed limestone relic of the belle époque, I could see the streetlights and the neon signs of the other hotels on the Promenade des Anglais reflecting on the tops of the palm trees and footprints of moonlight marching across the Bay of Angels.
Yuli and I were exhausted, both of us yawning as I gave the desk clerk my American Express card, and to dodge any discomfort about sleeping arrangements I requested a suite.
“Take the bedroom,” I said.
Too tired to bother with the pullout bed, I lay on the couch, replaying everything Picasso had told me and wondering if I was kidding myself that I’d learn more about Gak or the others on Emma’s list, the art dealer and Joost Ter Horst, or what had led my grandmother to ask God why our stories are written in vanishing ink.
My mind was racing, and I rotated from my side to my stomach to my back, despairing of ever falling asleep.
* * *
“Misha,” Yuli said, and I opened my eyes.
The balcony doors were open, and the cool, breezy sunstruck morning air filled the suite. Yuli, in her black cashmere sweater and Levi’s, was sitting in a chair that she had moved close to the couch. Her hair, as lustrous as honey, was swept up behind her head in a loose twist.
“Been sitting there long?”
She smiled. “I like watching you sleep.”
There was something in her smile that I couldn’t identify—not happiness, to be sure, or wistfulness. It was an impenetrable smile, a smile to hide behind.
“You okay?”
“You are asking if I am still scared?”
“I wasn’t, but that’s a good question. You have seemed preoccupied.”
She showed me that smile again. “It is nine thirty. I went out to buy you a double espresso and croissant. The man at the desk tells me where to get the bus and gives me a map.”
I washed up, put on fresh khakis, a polo, and my corduroy sport coat, and went out to the balcony with my breakfast. People were strolling and riding bicycles on the wide promenade, and the Baie des Anges was a translucent green near the pebbled beach and then a luminous turquoise all the way out to the horizon. So this was the Côte d’Azur, the Blue Coast. Aptly named. The sun and sea and sky seemed to infuse the air with a scintillating blue, and it was comforting knowing that on her visits to Nice, Emma had seen it, too.
* * *
Haut-de-Cagnes was a medieval walled village, and we stepped off the bus at the bottom of a long steep road. At the top were pale amber stone houses and a castle with the
French flag flying from the turret.
“Do we walk up?” Yuli asked.
“No, we fly.”
Yuli wasn’t amused, and we hiked up, the sun on our faces. The one-lane road cut left and right with a low fieldstone wall on the outside so no one would drive off the road, and I wished that I wasn’t wearing penny loafers. Yuli stopped to take off her flight jacket, and we rested by siting on the wall. Below were green hills and sun-faded tile rooftops and the bright blue sea. At the edge of the village, before the main cobblestone square, a jitney was parked at a bus stop in a turnaround, and it was a relief that we wouldn’t have to hike down.
We drank Cokes at a café, and I asked the waiter for directions. Eglise Saint-Pierre was across from the castle, and the church was cool inside and dark except for the sunlight filtering through the stained glass and forming rainbows on the stone floor. The nave was several steps underground, and no one was there until, on our right, the door of a confessional opened and an old woman in a black dress with a black scarf over her head shuffled out.
Yuli whispered, “How wonderful that a woman can still be sinful at this age.”
A young priest with a reddish-blond beard and bowl-cut hair longer than that of any of the Beatles emerged from the confessional and came past the altar to us. I introduced myself and Yuli in French and told him I’d heard the church had offered sanctuary to Jews from the Nazis.
“I am Father Paul-Louis,” he replied in English, and I was too anxious to hear what he had to say to be offended by his implied criticism of my French accent. “Father Philippe would have been here then. He dies three years ago.”
I had a terrible sinking feeling.
Yuli said, “Could the painter, Alexander Gak, have been protected by the church?”
Father Paul-Louis responded with a noncommittal shrug. “Sister Bernadette was alive in these years of the war.”
Yuli asked, “Is she here?”
“Sister Bernadette takes care of Monsieur Gak.”
“Gak is alive?”
“Bien sûr, he is alive. I tell you he is alive. I have been to visit Monsieur Gak.”
As I pondered what quirky Gallic turn of mind had prevented him from telling me this when I first mentioned Gak, Yuli asked, “And where does Monsieur Gak live?”
“In Vieux Nice—the Old City above the market. At 2 Rue Honoré Ugo. On the top floor.”
“Thank you, Father,” Yuli said.
My head was pounding, and outside, I sat on a bench.
Yuli stood, looking down at me. “You want to know, and you don’t want to know.”
“That’s about right.”
In Russian, she said, “Better the unhappy truth than a happy lie.”
“Who says?”
“Papka. He used to tell me that when I was a little girl, when I asked him what happened to my mother.”
Taking my hands in hers, she pulled me to my feet. “And I will be with you, Misha.”
29
Beyond the open-air market of Old Nice, we walked through a tangle of streets no wider than alleyways and perfumed by fresh-baked bread from the boulangeries and frying potatoes from the cafés. We went up flights of stone stairs toward Rue Honoré Ugo, the stairways hemmed in by old houses with facades of saffron or rose or cream and pistachio-colored shutters. Gak’s building was five stories high with a creaky metal cage for an elevator, and his door was as weathered as driftwood with M. GAK engraved on a hammered-tin nameplate.
I knocked, and an elderly diminutive nun in a black dress and white wimple appeared, her face a pale, chubby-cheeked oval and remarkably unlined, a reward for decades of praying indoors.
“Bonjour,” she said, pleasant and businesslike, as if she thought I was seeking a donation to a worthy cause.
Good manners required me to say hello and explain myself, but I was staring over her at a room where, except for two tall windows, the walls were chock-full of ebony-framed paintings in black and white and gray—the eternal snowstorm through which, Picasso claimed, Alexander Gak saw the world.
Yuli also noticed the paintings. “They’re all of one woman.”
“My grandmother.”
Some paintings were impressionistic renderings, presumably of Emma—her image obscured by dense layers of oils and swirling brushstrokes. Most were done with an obsessive attention to detail. Emma, young, sitting in a café with bubbles rising in the champagne flute she holds; Emma pregnant in a floppy hat and floral shift strolling the Promenade des Anglais; a series of Emma running on a beach, stepping from the sea, and astride a faceless man, making love. Embarrassed, I looked away. And felt sad. The hyperrealism of the paintings magnified Emma into an Olympian distortion, a goddess rendered in fine lines and somber shadings, as though Gak had labored to prove that the woman animating his sun-blessed walls was immortal.
“You are Misha,” the nun said in English. “I am Sister Bernadette. Emma tells me of you and always has your new school photographs. And you are the girlfriend I hear of. Pardonne-moi, I am too old to remember names well.”
Apparently Emma had told her about Beryl, and Yuli glanced at me, with a wry lift to her eyebrows, then smiled sweetly at Sister Bernadette. “Yulianna.”
“This is a beautiful name,” she said, using a fingertip to give herself a self-deprecating tap to the head. “Only an old woman forgets that beautiful a name. Please, you both come in.”
The room was furnished with a sofa and tufted armchairs covered in burgundy brocade, glass-topped end tables with candelabra lamps girded by bronze grapevines, and a russet-and-green Persian rug that, after years of baking in sunlight, was as drab as a desert.
“Alors,” Sister Bernadette said, sitting in a chair and waving at us to sit on the sofa. “Tell me how is your grandmother, and then we have café and tarte tatin.”
Her serene expression was shot through with such kindness that the news got stuck in my throat. Yuli, her voice subdued, said, “It hurts me to say, but Emma was murdered.”
Sister Bernadette trembled, her body tilting from one side to the other. “Je suis vraiment désolée, Misha. Je suis très désolée.”
I didn’t know if Emma had told her that I spoke French or if she had unintentionally slipped into her native language. “Merci.”
A tear trickled down her cheek. Sister Bernadette didn’t bother to wipe it away. “And you have come to me with questions?”
“To you and Monsieur Gak. Because the police have found nothing.”
“Gak is very old and no longer speaks. The doctor says he suffers from dementia. Emma says he suffers from suffering.”
“Is he home?”
“He goes out alone once a day for one hour, and I bring him back home.”
“Where does he go?”
“We will walk there together, but it’s not yet time.”
“You met Emma through Monsieur Gak?”
“First, I hear about her. When Gak hides from the Nazis in the church. He talks about a woman. They are not married, but have two daughters. The woman was visiting her family in Russia with the girls when the Germans came, and she cannot return here. I meet her when the war finishes. After Emma comes, Gak becomes silent and remains silent.”
“And their daughters?”
Sister Bernadette gazed at me with such compassion I guessed that the news about the girls would be bad. “You will see, but let me continue. Emma was married before Gak, and she misses her son in America.”
“My father.”
“D’accord Votre père. And Emma could not live with Gak in Nice. He sleeps for days, he does not speak, and none of the doctors Emma brings can help, and they advise her to take Gak to an asylum. Emma refuses. I have retired a year after the war, and Emma arranges for me to care for Gak and goes off to America and comes in the summer. Gak even begins to paint again when she is here. Your grandmother is—how does astucieux go in English?”
“Astute.”
“Astute, d’accord. Emma is very astute. In the beginn
ing, she uses money from her candy store to support Gak, but then she sells some of his work.”
My pulse quickened as Yuli asked, “To an art dealer in Charleston, South Carolina?”
“Yes, Emma calls him Monsieur Thaddeus, but I have his name and address in a drawer. And with the money from him, Emma buys this building. She rents the other apartments, and the rents go into a bank account in Nice I use to pay the bills.”
I was impressed by Emma’s financial acumen, and once again angry and bewildered by her hiding so much from me. “Sister Bernadette, why would Emma rent an apartment in Paris?”
“Je ne sais pas.”
“Did she mention a Joost Ter Horst?”
“Non.”
Failing to prevent my frustration from leaking into my voice, I asked, “Why didn’t Emma tell me any of this?”
The kindness in her bittersweet smile was soothing, verifying that I wasn’t the sole person mystified by my secretive grandmother. “Who can say, Misha? Emma, I always feel, is une voyageuse avec trop de bagages.”
“A voyager with too much baggage? I don’t understand.”
“Her life, I used to think, her past and present, was too heavy for her, and she wants no one to see her burdens. That would worry Emma, and the worry would make her burdens unbearable and her traveling impossible. But this is my guessing.”