The Forger

by Paul Watkins

  About halfway through the day, there was a knock on the door of the atelier. A figure loomed strange and crumble-edged behind the rippled glass. Pankratov launched himself out of his chair and strode across the room. We had all stopped what we were doing. Valya was not there that day. Instead, Pankratov had built an elaborate still life consisting of the skull of a horse, pottery jugs, old dried-out branches, candlesticks, a bird’s nest and a German spiked helmet from the Great War.

  Pankratov reached the door, then whirled around and glared at us. “Did I tell you to stop?”

  We went back to work, scribbling or dabbing brushes or mixing paint with dirty palette knives, but as soon as he was at the door and had his back to us, we all stopped working again.

  It was a boy at the door, in gray uniform with red piping around the lapels of his jacket and one thin stripe down the side of his trouser leg. He was slightly winded from climbing the stairs, which he appeared to have climbed on the run. He handed Pankratov a yellow envelope and made him sign for it.

  Pankratov looked at the envelope, then turned and raised his eyebrows at me.

  I felt bad news approaching, like the ground-shake of an avalanche. “What is it?” I asked.

  Pankratov rummaged in the pockets of his baggy corduroys and hauled out a handful of change. Into the boy’s hand he dropped a coin, squeezing it as if there were moisture in the metal which had to be pressed out. Then Pankratov walked across to me. “Telegram,” he said.

  The boy stood there a moment longer, peering into the atelier, then jogged away down the stairs, taking them in leaps.

  With this news approaching, whatever it was, I suddenly wished I were the boy, and not myself in this paint-smelling room, with this man bearing down on me like a train, his gray hair like chugged-out plumes of steam from an overstoked engine. I wanted to be that boy, with nothing in my life but running and the pleasure and the need of it.

  Balard and Marie-Claire had stopped working again. This time, Pankratov did not seem to notice.

  The sound of me tearing open the envelope was unnaturally loud, all other sounds having vanished. I pulled out the yellow sheet, which was marked with a heavy, blurred stamp showing the time and place of destination. Stuck on the paper were little strips of white ticker tape on which words had been typed:

  WAR IMMINENT STOP IMMEDIATE RETURN HOME

  STOP ARRANGEMENTS TO BE MADE BY THE

  COMMITTEE STOP LEVASSEUR

  I was no closer to figuring out who the Levasseur people were than I had been when I arrived. Somehow, the fact of their secrecy made me believe for the first time that there might really be a war. I felt a terrible shifting of the air around me, in the entire mottled fabric of the world. There was not supposed to be another war. The last one was the war to end all wars. I wondered how many people like myself had clung to this idea.

  Everyone was looking at me.

  “War,” I said.

  Nobody spoke.

  Three days later, it started.

  * * *

  “WHAT DO YOU MEAN, you’re not going?” Pankratov stood in front of me, eyes wide with disbelief.

  It had been a month since the outbreak of war.

  In the first few days since the German invasion of Poland, Paris had been swept up in hysteria. Now, on the surface at least, life seemed to be returning almost to normal. The most noticeable difference on the Rue Descalzi were the black and white posters of an Appel Immédiat, the calling up of all military reservists. So many left their civilian jobs that whole sections of France had stopped moving. Trains. Streetcars. Restaurants had to close. Many reservists were released again. The yellow piece of paper on which my telegram arrived had been passed around our little group so many times that it eventually disintegrated, as if the war itself had disappeared.

  Under the surface, however, our lives had become like a funhouse-mirror reflection of the way we’d lived before. I realized that I had begun to deliberately ignore certain things that were going on around me—the convoys of military trucks that traveled through the empty streets at night, the stacked rifles and packs of soldiers at the train stations and the soldiers sleeping on the platforms or staring into space, grimly chain-smoking their cigarette rations, the sight of handcuffed deserters being dragged through the streets by the white-belted military police. My selective blindness to these things began to disturb me even more than the chaos had done earlier.

  I lost track of what to call rumors and what to call the truth. I ended up doubting everything I heard. It gave those weeks a dreamlike quality unlike anything I had ever experienced before. Slowly, I grew used to the idea of living in the war. At first, I was ashamed of myself. But in time I came to understand that if I didn’t adapt, I would go mad in a vortex of anger and sadness and guilt.

  In the time it took for the Levasseur people to prepare my travel documents, I decided once and for all that I would stay here as long as I could. I had waited too long to get to Paris. I had visions of myself returning home, only to find that the war had ended by the time I reached New York. I wouldn’t have the funds to turn around and go right back. I had momentum here. My work was selling. If I gave this up now, I would never forgive myself.

  Despite this reasoning of mine, I was bothered by a series of nightmares. They were all about the Maginot Line. I found myself wandering its underground tunnels, trying to wake soldiers who were sleeping in their beds, gunners asleep at their posts, telephone operators heads down and snoring while their switchboard lights flickered with messages.

  Pankratov had asked me to stay behind after the day’s classes. He held out a bundle of documents—train tickets, boat tickets, a hotel reservation in Cherbourg—his hand shaking almost imperceptibly, as if the papers held an unnatural weight which was too much for him.

  That was when I told him I’d be staying. “I’ve made up my mind,” I said.

  “You’re not thinking straight.” He stuffed the papers into the pocket of my coat, then patted the pocket reassuringly and stepped back.

  “America isn’t in this war. France hasn’t been invaded.”

  “Not yet. And that isn’t going to stop you from getting hurt,” he explained with exaggerated calm. “The Levasseur Committee doesn’t want the responsibility of looking after your safety.”

  “Who the hell are they, anyway?” I took the documents from my pocket and tossed them down onto the chair where Valya had been sitting naked only a few minutes before.

  “How else do you expect to survive?” he asked.

  “I’ve been selling my work.” I was proud to tell him this. Glad to have the excuse.

  Pankratov folded his arms. “Ah,” he said. “Fleury.”

  “My work is selling,” I told him. “This is what’s supposed to happen.”

  Pankratov ignored my words. He took the papers off the chair and waved them in my face. “The committee is trying to save you!” he shouted. His patience had failed him, as we both knew it would.

  “You tell them, thank you, but I don’t need saving.” My head was filled with brave ideas. I wouldn’t leave, I told myself, until the Germans were walking these streets, and even then not until they started shooting, and even then not until they were actually shooting at me. I could say these things to myself because I couldn’t imagine them happening. I left Pankratov in his atelier and clumped downstairs.

  He caught up with me just as I reached the ground floor. He was red-faced from the exertion. “I have to tell you something,” he said, wheezing faintly through his teeth.

  “If it’s more of the same,” I told him, “you can save your breath.”

  “No.” He shook his head. “This you have not heard.” He walked me across the road into the Dimitri, but instead of sitting us down at a table in the main room, he ushered me straight into a windowless chamber at the back, where the waiters hung their street clothes on wooden pegs that lined the walls and changed into their black and white outfits. There was a table in the middle of the room. On it
was a bottle of wine and a pack of cards dealt out and set down in mid-game. “Sit,” said Pankratov, and disappeared out of the room.

  When he reappeared a moment later, Ivan was with him. Ivan carried a bottle of cognac, a rare commodity these days, and three small Moroccan tea glasses. He didn’t meet my gaze to say hello.

  “What’s wrong with you two?” I asked.

  Without answering, they sat down, one on either side of me. Ivan filled the glasses with cognac.

  “What’s this all about?” I asked.

  “This first,” said Ivan.

  We raised the glasses and drank. The alcohol’s heat splashed warm and smooth inside me.

  Ivan set his fists on the little round table, as if operating the controls to a machine. “Alexander said this might happen. But I told him you would listen to reason. We were never going to tell you, but now we have to.”

  “Tell me what?”

  Ivan glanced at Pankratov, indicating that he should be the one.

  But Pankratov shrugged and jerked his chin toward me. “Go on,” he said. “You do it. Just tell it to him straight.”

  Ivan sighed. “I knew your uncle,” he told me. He was looking at his empty cognac glass. “Your uncle, Charlie Halifax.”

  I remembered the way he had brought up the subject and then dropped it again.

  “He and I served in the Foreign Legion together,” Ivan continued. “Back in the twenties in Morocco. The circumstances. How we got there”—he steered this imaginary machine, clenching and unclenching his fists—“none of that matters. We were just two people among thousands who did not want to go home or who had no home to go to when the Great War ended. He was a pilot and I was his mechanic. We both wanted to get out of there and eventually we did. We traveled here to Paris and we bought a plane…”

  “Tell him the name of the plane,” said Pankratov.

  Ivan glanced at me and then away again. “Levasseur.”

  “You!” I shouted. “You are the Levasseur Committee?”

  “We both are.” Ivan jerked his head toward Pankratov. “He saw an article about you in some magazine…”

  “Le Dessin,” said Pankratov.

  “We got to talking,” continued Ivan, “and we thought we might do something for you, in memory of your uncle Charlie.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked. “Why keep it a secret?”

  “It was in appreciation of your art,” said Pankratov. “We saw the pictures. If we’d told you about your uncle, you would have thought it was just about him.”

  “I am not so much a connoisseur,” Ivan added, “but I take Pankratov’s word for it.”

  “Where’s my uncle now?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Ivan, his head tilted to one side, dark eyebrows crooked with concentration. “In 1926, we flew that plane all the way to America, two years before Lindbergh. We were trying to win the Orteig Prize, which was for the first nonstop flight across the Atlantic. But our plane crashed. We landed in the woods in the state of Maine. The plane was destroyed. The thing was that by the time we reached America, we had stopped caring about the prize. We no longer wanted the fame it promised us.”

  Pankratov slapped his palm against the broad expanse of Ivan’s back. “That’s why we understand each other.”

  “But what happened to my uncle Charlie? Surely you must know where he went.”

  Ivan sat back and sighed, his fists opening up and coming to rest on the lap of his white apron. “We were together for a while, Charlie and I, but then we parted company. I said good-bye to Charlie at a train station in Boston. He was heading west. I don’t think even he knew where he was going. It didn’t matter really. I wonder about him sometimes. Where he ended up. I think he might have gone and gone until he reached the western sea. He would have done a thing like that. I traveled back to France. I came here, and this is my life now.”

  In the back of my mind, I had always kept alive the notion that I might see my uncle Charlie again some day. But now I knew I never would even if he was still alive. I was part of a world he had left long ago and to which he would never return. I looked from Ivan to Pankratov and then back again. “So,” I said. “The Levasseur Committee.”

  “We want you to go home,” explained Pankratov. “Now that the war has started.”

  “But you are so stubborn,” said Ivan. “It’s like dealing with him!” He pointed at Pankratov.

  “My staying is not your responsibility,” I said. “And whatever happens, I want to thank you for bringing me here.”

  Pankratov made a pff noise. “You may not thank us later.”

  “I owe you a great debt, both of you. I don’t know how I’ll ever repay it.”

  And that was the end of it. They didn’t try again to convince me, and I was left with the impression that they had convinced themselves I should stay, after all.

  I went out into the main room of the café. I saw Marie-Claire and Balard sitting half hidden in their world of whispered secrets, most of which were nowhere near as secret as they would have wished. They waved at me and Balard set his heel against an empty chair and shoved it out toward me.

  “So you’re really not going home?” asked Balard, once I had told them the story.

  I shook my head. “This is where I belong now,” I said.

  “What happens if America does go to war and they call you up?” he asked.

  “I’ll think about that when it happens,” I told him. “How about you?” I asked. “Have you been called up?”

  Balard began moving his mouth as if there was something stuck between his teeth. “I’m not fit,” he said.

  “What do you mean? You look fit to me.” I was trying to pay him a compliment.

  “My heart is weak,” he explained. “Blood pressure too high.”

  “You should tell him the truth,” said Marie-Claire.

  “What truth is that?” hissed Balard. His eyes were sharp.

  Marie-Claire sat back as if she had been pushed. “This is your friend. No one else is listening.”

  “I said not to tell anyone,” he snapped. “Anyone!”

  Marie-Claire pressed her hands together. “I’m sorry, dear.” She looked as if she were about to cry.

  Balard raked his fingers through his hair and moaned, “Ay-yaah.” Then he peered at me with weary eyes. “You can’t tell a soul,” he began. “I didn’t want to do any military service and I knew from a friend how I could avoid it.”

  Marie-Claire stopped looking sad. She started to tell Balard’s story. “He ate five tablespoons of salt and ran up and down the stairs in his building until he fainted. Then, when he woke up, he went to his medical exam. He failed it on the spot.”

  They reminded me of a couple who had been married a long time and who had stories that they tell together, each one with their separate part.

  Balard nodded. “No damned tramping about for me on that damp old Maginot concrete.”

  Maginot. There was that word again. It echoed in my head, like a part of some incantation whose meaning had been lost.

  Balard and Marie-Claire excused themselves after a short while. They often left early these days. Their stay at the atelier was coming to its end and they felt the sudden acceleration of time.

  * * *

  FIVE MINUTES LATER, JUST as I was getting ready to leave, Fleury walked in. “I’ve been looking for you,” he said. He sat down at the table and shoved aside the empty cups.

  “How’s everything?” I asked.

  He brought out another bundle of money, pinned as before with a brass paper clip, and tossed it over to me. “I sold the rest of the sketches.”

  Even with his commission taken out, that meant another month of living in Paris. More if I scrimped. “You are some kind of genius,” I told him. “If it weren’t for you selling these drawings, I’d be on my way home by now.”

  “What do you think about doing some more sketches for me?” he asked. “Same as the last lot. Similar, at any rate.�
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  “Shouldn’t I be working on the paintings?”

  “Those sketches went down very well. Let’s stick with them for now. Just do them exactly as you did the last lot. Same materials. Everything.”

  “Suits me,” I said. I would rather have been working on the paintings, but it was worth it to me to put things on hold for a while, if it meant staying longer in Paris. “Why does this collector want my sketches?”

  Fleury twisted his hand in the air, to show his slight exasperation. “Not everyone can afford original works. Those who can’t must make do with reproductions. They appreciate work like yours from a purely decorative standpoint. But don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with that. Most great artists have learned by copying the work of the masters who went before them. In time, even these copies become valuable. Until then, as long as your work gives people pleasure, you have a resource you’d be foolish not to exploit.”

  I nodded.

  “When can you have them ready?” asked Fleury.

  “I’ll get over to the Duarte tomorrow morning. I should have another batch for you in a couple of days.”

  “Very good.” He rapped his knuckles on the table. “I’ll be in touch. Back to work.” He gave me a quick smile, got up and walked out.

  * * *

  THE NEXT DAY, PANKRATOV showed up late to class.

  It had never happened before. He was so late that I even went down to the Dimitri and asked if Pankratov had been in yet.

  Ivan shook his head.

  I stood for a moment in the street. Windows reflected the clouds. There was no sign of him. Just as I reached the fifth floor of the atelier building, I heard a door slam down on the ground level. I listened for the footsteps and knew at once, by the heavy and relentless plod, that it was him.

  When Pankratov reached the classroom, he found us sitting at our places. He was pale and hadn’t shaved. The stubble made his face look as if it had gone moldy in the night. “I’m embarrassed to ask this of you,” he said, “but has anybody seen Valya?”