The Forger

by Paul Watkins

  “Pankratov doesn’t strike me as an aristocrat.”

  She shrugged. “He’s not. He just had the bad luck to have been drafted before the Revolution and got sent to some outpost by the side of a lake on the Finnish border. Up in the Arctic. Some place where the sun never set in the summer months. At midnight it used to bounce off the horizon like a ball of cantaloupe melon and then start to climb again. The Revolution was half over before anyone even told them about it. And then, because they had no idea who was winning, they decided to stay with the Tsar, even though the Tsar was dead by then, although they didn’t know it. It was the winter of 1921 before a detachment of Red Guards came hunting them down. He tries to talk about it but every time he goes into a kind of trance. Something about horses underwater. Something about meteors. I don’t know. Maybe you can get him to tell you and you’ll understand.” She flipped her hand. “Anyway, when he fled from the Communists, he brought that chair with him. You see, you can collapse it into a kind of bundle. He took it with him all the way through Finland, into Sweden, and when he ended up in Paris five years later, he still had it. He has spent more time with that chair than he has with any other thing.” She had been walking around the pedestal as she spoke, as if seeing for the first time how exposed she was when she stood up there alone in front of us.

  “You hate it here, don’t you?” I asked.

  “What?” she snapped.

  “You don’t seem very happy.”

  “What business is it of yours if I’m happy? You have the right to paint me, but not to look inside my head.” She went over to the window, where she had left her handbag. She picked it up and slung its strap across her shoulder. “Are you finished with me here? Because if I’m not in your painting anymore, I can go, can’t I?”

  “Why do you come here every day if you don’t want to be here?”

  “Why are you so nosy? Are all Americans like you?”

  “A lot of them. Look,” I said, “you wanted to talk. If you want to talk about nothing, then go ahead and leave. I bet I can draw you from memory. I’ve been staring at you every day since I got to Paris, sketching you this way and that way every time Pankratov claps his hands. I probably know your body about as well as you do.”

  “That’s outrageous,” she said, but she made no move to leave.

  I realized that, in those weeks of living in her own world up on the pedestal, we who hid behind our easels had stopped being real to her. Perhaps, I thought, it’s the only way she can stand to be up there, with each wrinkle of her self exposed.

  It grew very quiet in the room.

  “Why did you come to Paris?” she asked.

  “To paint,” I said.

  “You could have stayed home and painted.”

  “All right,” I said. “I came to paint in Paris.” I was beginning to get a headache from the turpentine fumes. Some days they got to me that way. The bitter, slippery vapors drilled through my head like the vise clamp of a hangover—the kind that has you wishing you were dead only to stop the pain from cracking your face like a smashed pottery bowl.

  “You should leave while you still can,” she said.

  “Are we going to talk about the war again?” I asked.

  “No,” she replied. “This has nothing to do with the war. Take a good look at Pankratov.” She gestured at the chair, as if he were sitting in it, invisible and listening, touching the tips of his fingers as if they formed some kind of radio antenna, transmitting to him signals that no one else could hear. “That’s how you’ll be, if you stay in Paris.”

  Finally I set down my brush. “I think he’s got things pretty well figured out.” I didn’t mind Pankratov’s eccentricities. He knew who he was, after all.

  “Is that why you all worship him so much?”

  “What makes you think we do?”

  She clapped her hands together, the sharp sound vanishing into the cork-plated walls. “It’s the one thing I can tell from where I sit. I can’t see how bad your drawings are, or even if you’re drawing me at all.” She flipped her hand at the place where she had lived in my painting until a few moments before. “But I see how you all bow to him. If you really knew him, you would never have such respect.”

  She was missing the point. Of course, we wouldn’t hold him up so high if we knew all his faults. We didn’t want to know them. We wanted him to be larger than life, so that we could work toward the ideal of who he seemed to be, not who he really was. That was what we needed from him, and he knew it, which was why he kept his distance from us. That much I had figured out.

  “He is degenerate,” said Valya, “just like this whole country.”

  “And this from a woman who stands around naked all day,” I blurted without thinking.

  Her voice grew viciously calm. “There are changes coming. You’ll see. One good kick and this entire rotten, decadent society will collapse. And you, Mr. American, should make sure you are not around when it happens.”

  “The war again,” I said.

  “Yes,” she told me. “And for once Pankratov is right. It is coming.”

  “I think I’ll stick around and take my chances,” I said.

  She shrugged. “Pankratov is talking about closing down, so it might not be worth sticking around after all. I watch you all come and go. One group of students after another. And each time, I think this will be the last class. That Pankratov will not do this anymore. That he will go back to his own painting again. But each time there are more of you.”

  “Where are his paintings, anyway?” I asked, since she had brought it up.

  “Don’t you know?”

  I shook my head. “Nobody’s told me anything.”

  “They’re all gone. Destroyed. He kept his own studio on the Avenue Beauregard. He was a great star in the late twenties. He had shows all over the place. He was really quite famous. Everyone was jealous of this man who had walked out of the snow and arrived in Paris with nothing but a chair and then in a couple of years became one of the most promising artists of his generation. He used to have photos on the wall of himself with Picasso, Giacometti and writers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald and one with Cole Porter, too, I think. I don’t know who else. But then there was a fire in the building where he kept his studio. It was in 1929. His paintings were there, even the work which had sold and which he had borrowed back to be placed in a show—all of it, you understand—burned to nothing. The whole art world of Paris was in shock. In the weeks that followed, they gave Pankratov the one thing he had never received in his life before and the last thing on earth that he wanted. They gave him pity. There were maybe even some who knew what pity would do to him, who wanted him out of the way. They showed him the most pity of all. His reputation as a painter grew far greater after the fire than it had been before. They treated him the way they treat famous people who have died. Forget the faults. Remember only the good. It was as if Pankratov had passed away, too. He hasn’t painted since. He is afraid that if he did, people would think he doesn’t deserve the reputation he has.”

  “Does he deserve it?”

  She shrugged. “Pankratov is a genius. And if I, who am always calling him a shit to his face, say he is that good, then you know you can trust what I say. He is greater than all the people who claim to be great who are still breathing in the world. You could see the relief on their faces when he quit. And the fact that he quit when he did is another act of genius, if you think about it.”

  “So why do you hate him?” I asked, “and then show up every day to work here?”

  “I don’t hate him. Whatever you see going on between us, it’s not hate. Pankratov is one of those people who at first seem so rude you will forgive them nothing. But once you know who they are, you will forgive them anything. Like paying me, for example.”

  “He doesn’t pay you?”

  She shrugged. “Well, he’s supposed to, but he has no money. Most people would starve on what he makes. His principal form of nourishment is Bouillon Zip and that
one date he eats so carefully each day at the Dimitri.”

  Bouillon Zip was what people had in Paris when they were down to their last few centimes. It came in little paper packets which contained a tablespoon of gray-brown powder. I bought Zip regularly when I first got here and used it for adding flavor to soups, but since I’d heard about the associations, I’d stopped using it. The jokes I heard made about Bouillon Zip were a little too close to the bone.

  “So how do you survive?” I asked her.

  Her face was lost in the fading light. “I survive because Pankratov is not the only person in whom I forgive everything.”

  Valya was gone by the time Pankratov came back. He returned smelling of cigarettes and coffee. He had been down at Café Dimitri. “Where did she go?” he asked.

  I explained how I had painted her out.

  “About time someone did that.” He showed no trace of amusement. “So,” he said, unbuttoning his coat and settling himself in the sacred chair. “In America. You have had some success?”

  “Some,” I told him. I waited for him to ask who had been sitting in his chair. I had a feeling he could tell.

  “You should”—he hesitated—“you should try to get a show together here. Get someone to represent your work.”

  That would have been the time to tell Pankratov about Fleury’s offer, but I knew how much he disliked Fleury. So I said nothing.

  “Unless Fleury is doing that for you,” mumbled Pankratov, staring off to the other end of the room.

  “Oh,” I said. I should have guessed he would already know.

  Now Pankratov was grinning.

  “What do you have against him?” I asked. “He seems nice enough.”

  Pankratov coughed out a sarcastic laugh. “It’s his job to be nice, when he thinks he can make a profit. You know who makes the money around here? It’s the dealers! Not the artists. Do you know how much of a percentage the Parisian art dealers make off what they sell?”

  “Well,” I said, “back home it’s twenty-five percent.”

  “In Paris, it’s forty percent. That’s what I have against him. And all the other damned dealers in the city. This boy Fleury. I tell you. He’s the slyest of the lot.”

  “Fleury?” I asked, my voice rising with disbelief.

  “Oh yes!” Pankratov fitted a cigarette into his mouth. He broke it in half and fitted the spare piece back into the packet. “Fleury might look like an incompetent fop, but believe me, he knows what he’s doing.”

  Shadows filled the studio. Out across the rooftops, sun was still shining on the city.

  “I heard about the fire,” I said to Pankratov.

  “Congratulations. Valya talks too much.” The ragged-tipped cigarette wobbled between his lips. There was the tiny roar of his match flaring. He lit the cigarette and his cheeks bowed in with the smoke.

  “I wish I could have seen your paintings,” I told him.

  “So do a lot of people, I think. For various reasons.” Pankratov turned to me and fluttered his hands jokingly around his head, as if to wrap himself in some rippling, magical light. “Are the rumors true? Was I as good as they say? Now we’ll never know.”

  “We’d know if you started painting again.”

  Pankratov dropped his hands. “Those days aren’t coming back,” he said.

  “It gives you more pleasure to spend your days running this atelier?”

  “Believe it or not, I do enjoy your company—Balard, Marie-Claire, you, the ones who came before. You remind me of myself. Each of you in one way or another.”

  “So what am I to think? That I’ll end up not painting anything?”

  “I don’t paint,” Pankratov said slowly, measuring in his head whether to say the words that were gathering in his throat, “because I discovered I am better at something else.”

  “What?” I asked.

  He stood up and buttoned his coat, the roughness of his fingers on the dull gray zinc of the buttons. He narrowed his eyes. He was getting ready to close up like an oyster.

  “Tell me,” I asked.

  “All right,” he said, after a moment, “but remember you asked. Let’s go. We’ll have to move quickly.”

  Pankratov walked me across town. There was still some light in the streets that ran east-west. We didn’t talk. He didn’t say where he was taking me. It was only when we reached the Tuileries Gardens that I realized we were heading toward the Louvre. Evening glimmered off the powdery yellow stone walkway that led to the huge building. Pankratov brought us to a door beside the main gates.

  There was a guard just inside the little door, which was propped open with a chair to let in the breeze, despite the chill. He sat at a desk, reading a paper. He was a short man with a scrubby black mustache. In a hammered brass ashtray on his desk was a pile of crooked cigarette stubs. The paper of the cigarettes was brown, what the French call papier mais. His blue uniform was rumpled and his cap rested on his foot, which he had up on the desk. When we blocked the light in the entranceway, he took his feet off the desk and crammed his cap back on his head. He squinted at our silhouettes.

  “On your feet, Monsieur Sevier!” said Pankratov.

  Sevier launched himself upright. Then, recognizing Pankratov, he slapped down his paper. “I wish you wouldn’t do that. Now I have to get comfortable again.”

  “That shouldn’t take long.” Pankratov signed his name in a book on the desk.

  “On the contrary,” said Sevier, “it is an art form in itself.”

  “You see,” Pankratov told me, “in Paris, everyone is an artist in one thing or another.”

  Sevier wore an unsteady grin, not quite getting Pankratov’s joke.

  At the end of the gloomy corridor was another door, which Pankratov opened. We found ourselves in a gallery with huge paintings bracketed in ornate gold frames. My first impression was not the artwork, but how much these paintings must have weighed. Pankratov closed the door behind me.

  When I turned, I saw that the door had no handle from this side. It disappeared into the paneling.

  Pankratov led me over to one of the great wall-length paintings. It was the Raft of the Medusa by Géricault. The canvas was about ten feet high and about fifteen feet wide. It showed a group of people on a raft waving to a ship in the distance. Most of the castaways on the raft were dead or dying. Their skin was gray and their faces contorted like a dozen variations of Christ on the Cross. Their clothes had rotted from their bodies. They had been at sea a long time. If this boat did not stop to pick them up, they were finished. Huge, glassy waves rose up jagged between them and the distant ship, its sails full and making speed. I knew a little bit about the story of the Medusa. It went down off the coast of Africa and no one stopped to pick up the survivors because the people on board were poor immigrants. It caused a scandal that almost brought down the French government. In places, the paint on the canvas was bubbly and black, the way creosote gets on old railroad ties.

  I had barely noticed the grandeur of the room in which the painting hung, alongside several other massive canvases. The walls were painted flat hunter green and gilded where they met the ceiling.

  The last visitors were being herded out by a guard who walked with his arms spread, making slow swishing motions with his hands, like a scarecrow come to life. One person stopped to make a note in a tiny book. It was a woman. I was admiring the braiding of her hair, and wondering how one braided hair so exactly, when she turned and I saw that it was Valya.

  She hadn’t seen me, and it caught me so much by surprise to find her here that I didn’t call out her name.

  People were shuffling past.

  “Il est temps, mesdames et messieurs,” said the guard in a droning voice. “Messieurs, -dames. Il est temps.” It is time. It is time.

  Valya moved on out of sight, flowing with the crowd.

  I turned to Pankratov, to see whether he had noticed Valya, but his eyes were fixed upon the painting of the Medusa. He was lost in it. “This,” said Pankratov,
“is my art.”

  When he said that, I forgot about Valya.

  His art, he had called it. I ran the words around in my head a few times. My teeth slowly clamped together as I hesitated to believe what now seemed obvious—that Pankratov was crazy after all, past the line of eccentricity and the twilight world of genius, having lost track of the boundary between the world of dreams and the less satisfying world that surrounds it. The fact seemed unavoidable. It was as if one of the Louvre guards was walking through my head, swishing his hands, shooing the last reservations from my own mind. Il est fou, messieurs, -dames. Il est fou.

  I glanced uneasily at the painting and then at Pankratov.

  Pankratov still had his hands raised toward the Géricault, his mouth set hard with pride.

  “It’s by Géricault,” I said quietly.

  “Of course it is.” He dropped his hands. “Come with me,” he ordered.

  We returned to the space in the wall where the door had vanished. He pressed against it and the door clicked open. We returned to the dim passageway that led out to the street.

  “Sevier,” said Pankratov, calling to the guard as he strode down the hall, “I want to see the Géricault pictures.”

  “Very good.” Sevier had taken his shoes off and was now massaging his feet. He unclipped a set of keys from his belt and handed them to Pankratov. “You know where they are.”

  Pankratov opened a small door beside the desk. A smell of paper billowed out, musty and faintly sweet. A smell of patience and quiet. Inside, the room was stacked with boxes of documents, which lay on shelves that divided the space.

  “Go on.” Pankratov waved me in. “Go on.”

  I obeyed.

  He walked straight over to a box, hauled it down and let it thump onto the floor.

  Coppery light filtered in through the blinds. The air in the room was still and warm. I felt around me the great solidity of the building. The permanence of it. As if it knew somehow that even though it had been built by man to glorify man, it was greater now than the people who had built it. It glorified only itself. I felt that about a lot of the great buildings in Paris. I sensed that they knew what they were.