The Forger

by Paul Watkins

  We looked around at each other. None of us had seen Valya in several days. We had assumed it was because Pankratov wanted us doing other assignments and that Valya wasn’t needed.

  “She left to see a friend. She was due back.”

  “Which friend?” I asked, thinking of that man I’d seen her with at the Polidor.

  “She doesn’t talk to me about her friends.” Pankratov went over to his sacred chair. He turned it to face the wall and then sat down. He didn’t give us any work to do.

  The only thing on the stage was Valya’s chair.

  We began, one after the other, to draw the empty chair.

  * * *

  TEN MINUTES LATER, THE door boomed shut downstairs, echoing through the building. The footsteps of more than one person climbed up and up.

  I waited for them to stop on one of the other floors, but they kept coming. I listened for voices, to pick up some laughter which would take away the menace that was coming with this quake of boots on each worn stair.

  There was no knock. The door swung open and three policemen walked into the room. Their black uniforms each had a row of large silver buttons down the front. It was raining outside and they were wearing short, dark capes made of waterproofed canvas, on which the rain still rested in beads. They had flat-topped caps with short, stiff brims. Their boots came up to their knees, crisscrossed with long leather laces. Their faces carried the expressions of men who have come to do an unpleasant job, the same look I once saw on a man who came to shoot a sick horse that belonged to our next-door neighbors.

  The man who stood in front produced a piece of paper from his pocket. It was neatly folded. He shook it open. “Artemis Balard,” he said.

  We all turned to look at Balard.

  The policeman had only to follow our stares to know he had come to the right place.

  Balard had a pencil clamped between his teeth. It looked as if someone had pulled the plug on his heart and his blood had drained out through his shoes. He pulled the pencil slowly from his mouth. “What do you want with me?” he asked.

  “One week ago,” said the officer, holding the paper in front of him at such a distance that it was clear he needed glasses, “you were notified to report to the barracks of the ninth arrondissement. You are to come with us now.”

  The man out in front made some comment to the others, who stepped past him and walked over to Balard.

  Balard stood up from his stool. “I am exempt!” he said indignantly. “My heart is weak.”

  “Your heart is not so weak,” said one of the men.

  “What is that supposed to mean?” asked Balard.

  The two policemen took him by each arm. It is a strange moment when one man takes hold of another in this way. Only two things can happen. The man who’s being grabbed can either fight back with all the explosive energy he possesses, and fight crazily, even knowing he will lose. Or he can submit. He can make noise and protest and pretend to struggle, but in his mind the decision has already been made to give in. And so it was with Balard. He made a fuss and swore at them horribly, which I suspected he would regret within a few minutes. He turned from one officer to the other, giving them equal doses of his rage. At last, before they hauled him out the door, he turned to look at me. “Why did you tell them?” he asked me, his voice gone high and wild.

  “I didn’t,” I told him. “I swear.”

  “I’m coming back for you!” he screamed.

  The police dragged him out. When they had gone, the only sign they’d been in the room were the raindrops which had run down off their capes and sunk into the roughed-up wooden floor.

  The police were having words with Balard as they carried him downstairs.

  Don’t talk back, I thought, as if to telegraph the words to him.

  But Balard didn’t know any better and he did talk back and they threw him down a flight of stairs to shut him up.

  Pankratov left his chair and went over to Marie-Claire. He stood awkwardly in front of her, hands knotted behind his back, bending down slightly to look into her eyes. “Are you all right?” he asked quietly.

  Marie looked up at him and smiled weakly. “Yes,” she said. “I will be perfectly all right.” Her face seemed unnaturally peaceful. She glanced across at me. “He didn’t mean it, you know. What he said. He knows you didn’t do him any harm.”

  I knew he had meant every word of it.

  Balard did not return the next day. Or the next or the next. By the fourth day, we knew he wasn’t coming back.

  Pankratov and I fussed over Marie-Claire, who never once lost her composure. We figured her heart must be broken, but she was refusing to admit it. We admired how bravely she took it.

  * * *

  WHEN FLEURY FOUND OUT about Valya’s disappearance, he went into a funk that lasted for days. On our way home from the Dimitri, where we often met these days, he would ask me again and again to describe that time I had seen Valya at the Polidor.

  “Face it,” I said, finally. “You’re not likely to see her again. You never even mentioned to her how you felt. She has no idea you’re fond of her.”

  “I didn’t say anything to her, because I had no idea she was Pankratov’s daughter instead of his mistress! And it’s not just being fond of her. It’s more than that. I just never had the opportunity to tell her.”

  “You could have made the opportunity,” I told him.

  “You’re no help,” he muttered.

  “You ought to get over her,” I said. “For your own sake.”

  We walked through the entrance of our apartment building and stepped into the elevator cage. The humming clank of the machine surrounded us as we rode upward, stopping at the third floor, where Fleury had his apartment. He stepped into the hallway and shut the elevator door. He looked at me through the black iron grille. “I know you think it’s insane that I should fall for a woman like that,” he said, “but I did fall for her, and I’m always going to wonder if she might have fallen for me.”

  I wondered if Fleury ever would tell Valya how he felt. I doubted it. It seemed to me he had grown comfortable with the idea that they would never be together. Perhaps he had become fixated on her for precisely that reason. He wanted her to be close by but still unreachable. Fleury preferred to live in some ecstasy of languishing. It was the languishing he loved. The pleasure of possibility.

  He didn’t mention her again for a long time.

  * * *

  IT WAS THE LAST day of our classes with Pankratov.

  Marie-Claire left quickly, saying she was no good at farewells and that she had to pack her bags for the trip home. She shook our hands and kissed each of us on the cheek. She wrapped her arms around Pankratov’s back and groaned sadly. Then she hurried away down the stairs.

  “Poor woman,” said Pankratov, after Marie-Claire had gone. It was his first acknowledgment that he had known how they felt about each other. He turned to me, as an idea popped like a soap bubble in his head. “We should see if we can find Balard. Maybe he’s still in Paris. Maybe he failed the medical exam.”

  “He’s in perfect health,” I said, “except for all that pencil lead he eats.” Considering that I was the one Balard blamed for his arrest, I was in no mood to track him down and have him go crazy on me again. “Besides, if he could have come back, why didn’t he?”

  “That’s what I’m asking,” Pankratov had adopted his usual stance, head tilted back slightly, hands in the pockets of his tattered canvas coat, weight balanced on his heels. “You don’t have to do this for Balard. Do it for Marie-Claire.”

  “Why don’t you go?”

  “Because I would lose my temper dealing with bureaucrats.” Pankratov blinked at me, knowing he was right.

  “All right,” I sighed. “But you go tell her.”

  Pankratov thumped downstairs after Marie-Claire, catching up with her on the street. At first she told him that there was no need to go to any trouble. Then she said she might be better off not knowing. But Pankratov
was insistent. He wanted to do her this favor. Finally, reluctantly, she agreed to meet us at the Dimitri later that afternoon, in case I managed to turn up some information.

  I went to the barracks of the Ninth Arrondissement. It was a gray stone building with large windows and wide stone stairs that led up to the main door. There was a plaque on the side of the building that explained how the soldiers of the regiment of the Ninth Arrondissement marched out of Paris with Napoleon at their head to take part in the battle against Russia in 1812. It was busy with men reporting for military service. Most of them arrived alone, already feeling awkward in their civilian clothes, perhaps remembering old soldier days, the heaviness of army boots and guts clenched tight behind a military belt. Men who had arrived with families climbed grimly away from wives with hands pressed to their mouths and crying children waving chubby arms.

  Inside was the sound of shouting and doors slamming and showers hissing and laughter and the smell of cigarettes and soap and that particular oily reek of military clothing. Men stepped past in scruffy uniforms with wide brown leather belts and boots that creaked with newness.

  I went up to the registration desk.

  “Name?” asked the clerk, without looking up. He was dressed in a khaki uniform with the sleeves of his shirt rolled up. His cap was tucked under the epaulette of his left shoulder.

  “I am here for…” I began.

  “Name?” he said again in an irritated monotone.

  “David Halifax,” I said, to humor him.

  He wrote down the names, misspelling Halifax. “Papers.” The man held out his hand.

  “I have no papers.” I gave him a tolerant smile.

  Now he looked up. “What?”

  I thought about giving up. I’d tell the man I was sorry for bothering him and leave and report back to Pankratov that I’d had no luck. But I knew the way he’d look at me then. I knew what he would think. So now I found myself doing this not for Balard or even for Marie-Claire, but for Pankratov. There was only one thing to do if I was to get the information I needed from this soldier, and that was to pretend that I had more right to be there than he did. “I am looking for Artemis Balard,” I told him.

  He glared at me for a moment.

  In ten seconds, I thought to myself, either I will have been thrown out into the street or I will have what I want. “Look him up,” I commanded.

  “Why? On what authority?”

  “Has he signed in or do I have to track him down?” I asked mysteriously.

  The soldier behind the desk stared at me. He was sizing me up, waiting for me to flinch.

  It was at this moment that I had the inspired idea of taking out a small notebook I carried with me for sketching and drawing from its spine a tiny pencil. I licked the tip and stepped forward. “What is your name?” I tilted my head back, eyebrows raised.

  It worked. The soldier hesitated, assuming perhaps that I was a plainclothes policeman or something even worse. Who else would dare to talk to him that way?

  He turned in his swiveling chair and hauled a heavy book down from the shelf. The book was about eight inches thick and ragged at the corners. He heaved it open and it fell with a thump on his blotter. He flipped through some pages and ran his finger down a column. “Balard, Artemis,” he said. Then he spun the book around and showed me the place. Balard’s scrawled signature was next to his name, as well as the date of his arrival, the same day the police had hauled him off.

  “Where is he now?” I asked.

  “I couldn’t tell you. Once they leave here, it’s out of my hands.”

  “That’s all I need to know.” I put away my notebook.

  “At your service,” he said, with the voice of a conspirator.

  I arrived back at the Dimitri to meet Marie-Claire.

  She was sitting at our usual table, along with Pankratov and a distinguished-looking man I’d never seen before.

  Pankratov looked uncomfortable. As soon as he saw me, he stood sharply, sending his chair skidding back across the floor. “Well,” he said, his voice almost falsetto with relief. “Here he is!”

  The stranger rose to his feet. He was tall and thin, with a gentle, honest face.

  “This is Maxim de Boinville,” said Marie-Claire. “My husband.” She looked at me with a rigid smile on her face.

  “Oh, hello!” I said, and shook his hand wildly.

  We all sat down at the table.

  I said nothing about my search for Balard.

  “Maxim has come to take me home,” explained Marie-Claire. “We live in Normandy, you know.”

  I thought of that day on my way back from Clignancourt, when I’d sat in the streetcar and the warm summer breezes had blown in through the open window. All the way from Normandy.

  “Marie-Claire is very grateful for your friendship,” said Maxim de Boinville. He looked around, taking in the strange reek of the Macedonian tobacco favored by the old Legionnaires who haunted this place, and the coffee and mint tea. His gaze darted out into the busy street. It was all too much for him, just as it had been for me when I arrived. I knew he couldn’t wait to be on the next train out of Paris as it chugged away across the fields toward the place where he could breathe the scent of apple trees and ocean-salty air.

  “We have a train to catch,” said Marie-Claire.

  “I’m so proud of her,” said Maxim. “The works of art that she has made.”

  Marie-Claire smiled at her husband. Then she looked at me. “Did you find who you were looking for?” she asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Ah,” she said quietly, and glanced down at the table.

  Pankratov pretended to be busy, using his fingernail to pick at something stuck to the tabletop.

  We exchanged addresses and promised to write and said it would not be long before we all met up again. Then we hailed them a cab and they headed for the train station.

  Pankratov and I stood side by side.

  I felt the space between us. “Balard signed in at the barracks on the same day the police took him away,” I told him. “That’s all I could find out.”

  Pankratov stared straight ahead. “Did you ever wonder how they found him?”

  “I don’t know.” I shrugged. “I guess they tracked him down.”

  “I know how,” said Pankratov.

  I turned to him. “You do?” I asked.

  Pankratov nodded down the road to the place where the cab had disappeared. “She turned him in.”

  “No.” I shook my head. “That’s not possible.”

  “She told me herself,” insisted Pankratov. “Right before her husband arrived. She came right out and told me.”

  “Why did she do it?” I asked.

  “She didn’t tell me, but I know all the same. This way, they never have to fall out of love,” said Pankratov. “Now it will always be the war that drove them apart. I suppose you could think of it as merciful, if you thought about it long enough.”

  I recalled the strange calm on Marie-Claire’s face when Balard had been dragged away, calling out obscenities through his charcoal-blackened teeth. She had known all along, despite any promises made in their long waking dream, that it could not last. But Balard had not known. She found it necessary to show him. Now Balard would learn things the hard way.

  I said good-bye to Pankratov.

  He treated me with a distant formality, as if he had already said all the good-byes he was ever going to say in his life. It was almost as if he no longer recognized me and my face had become part of the past, fragmented by time.

  I was quietly miserable about leaving the atelier. In my time there, I’d persuaded myself that I knew Pankratov. Now I realized that I didn’t and would never have the chance to know him better. “I’ll come spy on you at the Dimitri,” I said, trying to sound cheerful.

  “I’ll be waiting,” he replied. “Same as always.”

  Chapter Six

  I RETURNED TO MY work. I was glad to be free of those long hours at the at
elier, but I missed our old group and the Egyptian mummy dryness of Pankratov’s humor.

  I completed another set of sketches, these ones charcoal studies of several works by Gauguin, and handed them over to Fleury.

  He had them all sold within a week.

  I felt more fortunate than ever to be working with him.

  We were good friends now. I did not measure my words before I spoke, the way I used to do in his company.

  Having put aside my worries about paying the rent, at least for now, I grew more confident about my chances of remaining in Paris without some imaginary boundary between staying and leaving. The more time I spent here, the less I thought of my old home and my mother and my brother. When we met up again, we would pick up where we left off, as we always did. But for now, the vast silences that stretched between us were proof to me of the different worlds we had come to inhabit.

  Aside from Fleury, I hadn’t made many friends in Paris. I missed the company of women. In the past, I had thought no good would come from beginning a relationship when I would have to break it off and disappear as soon as the Levasseur grant ran out. I didn’t want to get involved simply for the feeling of being involved. When I first arrived, I had promised myself no entanglements that would take away from my work. Keeping that promise had proved hard enough even without the distractions of a romance. I hoped all that might change from now on.

  I’d been figuring this out one Saturday afternoon, when Fleury and I had gone to see a movie at the Cinéma Coloniale on the Boulevard du Montparnasse. It had been a matinée show, and afterwards we were dazed to find ourselves back in the daylight. It had been stuffy in the theater and I said I wanted to get some air. We walked down the Avenue de l’Observatoire to a fountain that lay in a shaded area of the Luxembourg, just in from the café called La Chaise Bleu on the Rue de Vaugirard. The stone of the fountain was damp and peppered with algae, and the statues that spat water from their mouths looked bleary-eyed and ancient, as if they too had just found their way back into the light from centuries spent underground. With each gust of wind, leaves blew down from the trees in flickering browns and reds and ambers. They settled on the surface of the fountain, skimming around like little boats in the breeze until they became waterlogged and rested flattened on the surface of the water like confetti left over from a wedding.