by Paul Watkins
“They rode across the lake. Just as we thought. Some were carrying torches and the rest were waving sabers above their heads. All shouting at the tops of their lungs. This was their big moment, after all. Six weeks out of Leningrad and all for this. All for just two of us and a woman and a little girl, but they were still going to put on a show. Seeing them come across the frozen ground, they looked like meteors bouncing along on the ice.
“What they didn’t know, and what the locals didn’t tell them, was that we’d had enough time to dig a trench out of the ice in the middle of the lake. We let it freeze over again, but not enough to hold any weight. The horses ran across the ice until they reached the trench and then they all fell into the water. The horses coming behind had no chance to stop. Some reared up and fell and crushed their riders. Other riders skidded on their backs, on their bellies, howling as they slid into the water in their heavy greatcoats, weighed down with swords and rifles and bandoliers of ammunition. They went under as well. Seventeen men and horses went into the lake. The torches went out one after the other. The horses and the men were screaming. The sound of those horses was the worst thing I had ever heard. I could see the heads of the horses in the water as they tried to stay afloat. In ten minutes, it had gone back to being one of those dead still winter nights when everything is frozen so solid that there is nothing for the wind to move when it comes except little whirlwinds of snow across the ice.
“Rokossovsky and I ran out onto the ice. We ran toward the place where we had dug the trench. Even at that distance, I could smell the sweat of the horses. And I could smell Makhorka tobacco, the rough kind that Russian soldiers smoke. The stench of it gets in your clothes and your hair and your skin, no matter how often you wash. It tattoos itself into your lungs. It was hanging in the air. Rokossovsky and I breathed it in.
“We went back to the shore and waited until morning before going out onto the lake again. We found the men frozen completely solid, some of them on their hands and knees, as if they were waiting to give some child a piggyback ride. Even those few men who were able to climb back onto the solid ice froze to death in their waterlogged clothes before they reached the edge of the lake. And out in the middle, where the trench had been, we looked down and saw men and horses staring up at us. They hadn’t sunk to the bottom. They got stuck between the layers of broken ice and were trapped there like specimens between two microscopic slides. Some of them had their mouths open as if they were trying to talk to us. That’s why I don’t sit facing the window. The way this old glass twists the light reminds me of looking down into the ice.” He ran his fingers through his hair and sighed.
“We knew that it would take the infantry several days before they found out what had happened and several more days before they got to Alakiemi, if they made the trip at all. At first, Rokossovsky and I decided we would have to go. But then he backed out. He believed it was only a matter of time before the Reds caught up with us, so he and his wife made up their minds not to run. Ainu was too ill to survive a future of always moving on. I still decided to leave. On the night before I was due to depart, I brought most of my homemade furniture out into the street and gave it away. Rokossovsky and his wife came to me with Valya. They asked me to take her. They knew what would be left of this place by the time the Reds were through with it, and what their own chances were. Even though Rokossovsky and Ainu were prepared to take those chances, they wanted to make sure their daughter stayed safe. I offered to take her away and bring her back in a couple of months, if I could. But Rokossovsky shook his head and said that our old way of life was over now, and that I should just take her and start again someplace. Ainu agreed. What could I say? What kind of person would I have been If I’d refused? I brought her with me. Valya was almost two years old then. I packed up a few things of my own. I had a horse for me and Valya and another to carry my belongings. I even took my paints. And the chair of course. It comes apart. You can roll it up in a bundle.”
“The paints I understand,” I said. “But why the chair? And why do you still wear that old belt?”
Pankratov shrugged, as if he wasn’t sure. “We all need things to remind us of who we were. Besides, so many of my memories were wound around it and around that chair, like invisible vines. Each night, when I was on the run and heading out through Finland into Sweden, I would set up my tent in the forest or out on the tundra. Then I would build a fire and I would assemble the chair and Valya and I would just sit there, she on my lap and bundled in my coat, looking out into the dark. I had no books. It was too cold to paint.”
I imagined him sitting by the fire, his arms around the sleeping girl, the vastness of the night sky fanning out above him. I pictured him staring up at it, breath frozen white on his eyebrows, like some Norse god carved from the ice of his kingdom.
“I reached Paris almost two years later,” said Pankratov. “I started painting again.”
“I don’t understand why Valya…”
“Why she is so bitter.” He finished my sentence. “It’s one thing to know where you come from, and to know that you were cast adrift, the way I was. But to know that your own father handed you to his friend, rather than stay with you, no matter what the risk. Well, she thinks she was abandoned.”
“But it saved her life.”
“It doesn’t make any difference,” he said.
“Then she should be angry with her father, not with you.”
“It makes no difference,” Pankratov said again. He brought out a box of cigarettes and a yellow box of matches. He broke a cigarette in half, put one piece in his mouth and offered me the other.
We sat in silence, the smoke from our cigarettes curling without a shudder toward the dusty rafters.
* * *
IN THE WEEKS THAT followed, Pankratov put me on a schedule that obliterated my already meager social life and had me studying with him every waking hour. But he had no complaints from me. Not under these circumstances. As the days went by, I began to refine my skills. I grew more hopeful and more confident, but never far from my thoughts was the frustration that my own work had been put on hold indefinitely.
Pankratov’s teaching methods were erratic, but his lessons broke down into three basic categories. First, we studied the work of a particular artist. In the beginning, we focused entirely on the work of Lucas Cranach the Elder. This was no random choice. Cranach had been selected by Tombeau’s superiors, whom we still had not met, as an artist whose work would be in demand once the Germans arrived. The next category was study of materials—everything from brushes to paint to wood panels and canvas. Finally, Pankratov instructed me in the art of aging the work.
We dodged from topic to topic according to whichever one obsessed him at the time. He was particularly manic about the mixing of paints. He showed me how to measure out the powder on a small ceramic dish. He did this with a spoon that was made of horn. The scoop was wide and shallow and the horn was almost transparent, run through with smoky veins of black and brown. It was the same kind of spoon I had seen used for eating caviar.
I loved to watch him mixing paints. I loved his precision and the way the dull brightness of the powder turned glossy when he turned it into an emulsion, as if it gave out its own light.
He liked to quiz me about what pigments had been invented when.
“Ultramarine. First used in what century?”
“Twelfth century.” I focused on the workbench behind him, where the brilliant red, blue and white powders and copper pans and spirit lamps were laid out from the lesson.
“Wrong. Thirteenth century. Prussian blue?”
“Eighteenth century.”
“Right! Would you see Prussian blue in a painting by Goya?”
“You could.”
“Right again. Good. Cobalt blue?”
“1802.” I knew that because I had made a rhyme of it. “Cobalt blue in 1802.”
“Titanium white?”
“1830.”
“Wrong!” He clapped his han
ds. “1930! Do you realize what will happen if you put titanium white in a painting by Delacroix?” When he spoke this way, he would never say “a forgery of” or “a painting in the style of.” He would say “a painting by,” as if somewhere in his warlock’s book of recipes was hidden the secret by which we would become the artists of our imitation. We summoned their flaked bones back into flesh and marrow and teeth and hair and eyes, then stepped into the framework of these men and wore their spirits like cloaks of thickened blood.
“All right,” he said. “Start again. Cadmium yellow?”
“1850.”
“1851. Close enough.”
There were times when we both became so exhausted that we would sleep for an hour or two on the floor of the atelier, our coats bundled under our heads as pillows, the quiet of the room broken only by the rattle of windowpanes, loose in their lead frames in the glass mosaic of the great window. It was always night by the time I reached home again. Sometimes I had such skull-cracking headaches from paint fumes that it felt as if smooth river stones had lodged themselves beneath the skin of my neck.
Fleury, meanwhile, had thrown himself into his work. Now that things were out in the open, he made no attempt to keep secret from us the fact that he had been selling forgeries for years. Sometimes it seemed to me that the gods had played some kind of trick on him, to make his brilliance a crime.
The hours I spent with Pankratov were so consuming that I had no sense of what was going on beyond the walls of the atelier. On those few nights when Pankratov grew so tired that even he thought he wasn’t making any sense, he might let me go a few hours early. Then I’d go find Fleury and the two of us would head over to the Polidor. The menu was skimpy these days, and the prices much higher than before, but it was still the Polidor. Fleury became my only contact with the world outside. He told me about Finland’s surrender to Russia in the second week of March 1940, and the battles for Norway in April.
We swapped stories of this strange new life. I would find myself both disgusted and amused by the depth of Fleury’s schemes for dealing with the Germans if they ever arrived, while Pankratov’s recipes for paint paraded in front of my eyes like mathematical equations come to life. The war was a loud but distant prospect. It still seemed possible, even likely, that the Germans would never attack France, and that all this work would be for nothing.
By the end of March, Madame La Roche had turned the roof of her building into a garden, where she grew tomatoes, carrots, beans and cabbages. She also kept rabbits in a large chicken-wire cage. The rabbits were always escaping. We’d find them hopping around the hallway, or riding the elevator up and down. Fleury liked it when they came to visit. He left his door open and baited them in with scraps of turnip. The rabbits hopped around Fleury’s apartment, while he sat in his armchair reading art history books. Every evening, Madame La Roche would round up the bunnies. They were very tame. She scooted them down the corridor with a broom, then carried them by the scruffs of their necks back to the roof.
I was still broke half the time. That much stayed the same. I had not painted anything of my own since the arrest, so no money was coming in from that. I relied instead on rations and a small weekly stipend grudgingly paid to me by Tombeau.
One day, along with the stipend, Tombeau dropped off my new French passport. It was the same size as my American one, but red instead of blue and had République Française in gold-leaf writing on the front. The picture from my old passport had been removed and placed in the new one, along with several travel stamps, one from London, another from Irun on the Spanish border.
I showed it to Fleury, who flipped through the pages, noticing the stamps.
“Looks like you’ve been doing some traveling,” he remarked.
“I wonder if I enjoyed myself.” I tried to make a joke of it, but couldn’t hide a feeling of emptiness that spread inside me when I saw my picture in that unfamiliar little book.
* * *
PANKRATOV CAME TO MY door at five in the morning. It was May 9.
I stood there in my flannel nightshirt, sleep like cobwebs in each wrinkle of my brain.
He strode into the room. “The Germans are advancing through Belgium. They’re going through the Ardennes Forest. Bypassing the Maginot! That whole ridiculous parade of guns and tunnels will be completely useless.”
“I thought the Maginot Line went up into Belgium,” I said.
“They haven’t finished it. They didn’t want to offend the Belgians.”
“The French army,” I told him. “They’ll drive the Germans back.”
Pankratov ordered me to get dressed.
My heart was clattering behind my ribs as I pulled on my clothes and then sat down on the bed to lace up my boots. My breathing came shallow and fast. It was the same feeling I used to get when I was going out onto the football field to play a team I knew was going to beat us. I just wanted it to get started. When things were in motion, I had no sense of fear. Only before and afterwards.
We both went down to get Fleury and I stood in Fleury’s apartment while Pankratov gave him the news.
Fleury was lurid in red smoking jacket, which apparently doubled as a dressing gown. He didn’t have his glasses on, and his bright blue eyes looked small and useless. “The French army will stop them,” he said confidently. “And there’s still the British Expeditionary Force. They’re in Belgium.”
“The French and British armies,” said Pankratov, “are falling back toward the sea.”
“I don’t believe you,” said Fleury. He turned to me. “You mustn’t believe what he’s saying.”
But I did believe it. If the Maginot Line had not stopped the Germans, nothing would. I had held on to the flimsy faith that the Maginot would simply prevent them from starting. I imagined that people all over France, all over the world, were encased in that same numbed helplessness that I felt at this moment. We had believed it wouldn’t happen. Now we would stand by in our helplessness while it did.
I had no real image of the Germans as an enemy. They had remained a vague menace. But slowly they were taking shape, a rolling thunder in the dense pine forests of the Ardennes. A human flood. Unstoppable. “What are we going to do?” I asked Pankratov.
“I need your help,” he said. “We are going to move some paintings to a safe place.”
“All right,” I said. “When?”
“Now. Immediately.” Pankratov glared at Fleury. “You, too. If you have some food, bring it along.”
Fleury shuffled off to get dressed, then laid out some food on the kitchen table—bread and apricot jam and some apples and chocolate and some cervelas sausage and a bottle of wine. We stuffed as much as we could into an old canvas satchel. I slung it over my shoulder, feeling the wine bottle dig into my hip.
A little white Citroën van stood parked outside the building. On its side was the logo of a bakery: GALLIMARD ET FILS. BOULANGER. PROVISANT DE PATISSERIES DE MAISON.
“Where’d you get that?” I asked.
Pankratov didn’t answer. “Just get in,” he said.
It was cramped with the three of us in the van. There were old chocolate bar wrappers balled up on the dashboard. The seats were torn and shined with use, the grain of the leather worn off. The floor showed the marks of someone with large feet who had rested his heels on the same spot many times.
Pankratov crashed the gears, jolting us forward. Then he crashed them again, swearing in Russian. He clung to the steering wheel as if it were a snake with its tail in its mouth that would slither away out the window if he didn’t keep his grip.
“Would you like me to drive?” I asked.
“Of course not!” he snapped. “Don’t be ridiculous. Stop asking questions!”
Fleury glanced at me and rolled his eyes.
Five blocks later, Pankratov had chewed up the gears a few more times. The grating, zipping sound of crunched metal made us all wince. Pankratov swore in several languages within the same sentence. Eventually, he pulled over, go
t out of the van and walked around to the other side. As he did this, he pounded his fist on the hood, as if it was all the van’s fault. When he reached the passenger side, he hauled open the door. “God damn all machines!” he shouted.
I drove us the rest of the way. The light was grayish-purple, the way it is before dawn on a cloudy day.
Pankratov gave me directions to the Jeu de Paume museum. It was a long, rectangular building made of pale khaki stone. It stood at the far northeast corner of the Tuileries Gardens, right where the Rue de Rivoli intersects with the Place de la Concorde. It had been built by Napoleon as some kind of indoor tennis court and was then converted into an art museum. The front had two large letter N’s engraved on it. It was an ugly building, compared to the grandness of Concorde and the tall houses along the Rue de Rivoli.
We joined a line of other trucks in the Place de la Concorde, at the base of a short flight of stone stairs. The trucks were all different types. Some were mail vans. Others were delivery trucks, with company names painted ornately on their sides. They kept their engines running. I saw a wisp of tobacco smoke seeping from the cracked-open window of the truck in front. A hand held out a cigarette, flicked ash from its tip, then retreated from the cold air.
The main doors of the Jeu de Paume were wide open. Through a screen of trees that grew between the road and the museum, I could see a table set up on the gravel outside. On the table was a storm lantern. A man with round glasses sat at the table, encased in the light of the lantern, alternately writing and then handing out sheets of paper to the drivers of the trucks, who jogged back down the steps to their vehicles. Others were carrying paintings wrapped in white sheets and stacking them in the trucks. A few men in civilian clothes stood guard at the top of the steps, shotguns slung over their shoulders. They wore heavy sweaters and the cuffs of their trousers were rolled up around their boots.
The only noise I could hear was the puttering of engines and wind shuffling through the trees of the Tuileries.
One after the other, the trucks were loaded up. They gunned their engines and left in different directions.