Pictures at an Exhibition

by Sara Houghteling

  “It's wonderful to see you again, to see you twice,” she said. I smiled stupidly. “We are such old, good friends.” She patted my cheek, waving at me the scent of her leather gloves and their mink oil. “Don't frown, Max. You are man and boy. One of your many charms. Tell me more about your parents. When do I get my audience?”

  I said I did not want to talk about my father.

  “How can we talk about your paintings if we do not talk about him?” she asked.

  I told her my story, quickly, about Father giving up on the paintings and about the stolen hat, wallet, map, and address book.

  Rose considered me in silence.

  “I could use a drink,” I said, with forced cheer. “One of Bertrand's haunts is nearby.”

  Georges was a bar below street level on rue des Canettes, where they served wine in jam jars and the walls were bare stone and medieval. A gypsy boy with wild licks of dark hair played flamenco guitar in the corner and howled and wailed, his voice breaking between the minor intervals.

  “On Sunday you were going to tell me how to become invisible.”

  “I can still do that.”

  “Well, go ahead.” I poured wine into our glass jars.

  “In November of 1940,I worked all my hours at the Jeu de Paume. Researching Giotto, doing Jaujard's bidding—I hardly remember. We all moved like bees in the cold, sleepy, stumbling around, half dead. Then one morning we were shocked into motion by the sound of boots, marching in step, echoing through the museum. We congregated in the central hall, and there was Jaujard with a Nazi colonel he introduced as Baron von Behr. He had a wrinkled face with a sharp nose and wore a shining helmet and a long redingote with a wolf's-fur collar. The Germans announced they were to take over the Jeu de Paume and use it as a warehouse for biens sans maîtres, goods without owners. Vichy owned the belongings of all emigrants, von Behr said. The Reich deserved Jewish goods because of war costs, and by consolidating ownerless artwork in the Jeu de Paume they ensured state control over anarchy. My head spun with the details and the logic. This was a short-term solution for a problem easily remedied. They would handle all bookkeeping themselves—Vichy could sleep soundly—anyway, soon the ‘collecting for safekeeping’ would stop. Then von Behr explained that, since the Louvre's storerooms were all filled, the Jeu de Paume's new use was effective immediately.”

  “How is that possible?” I asked. The Louvre had hectares of underground rooms and corridors.

  “Exactly,” Rose said. “This was our first glimpse of the scale of their theft. The French curators were all dismissed, and we began to file out of the main hall. We had surrendered our museum in less than five minutes. Then, as if it had been planned, one of the electric bulbs high in the ceiling burst and scattered glass everywhere. ‘There are maintenance issues to attend to!’ Jaujard shouted, like a madman. ‘The building will not care for itself!’

  “The colonel pointed to me and said I could stay. Like that, I was assigned from one army to the other. To work for the Germans and maintain the Jeu de Paume's facilities. I remember shaking so violently that two colleagues held my arms. Jaujard said, 'since Mademoiselle Clément will be here on behalf of the French museums, she will keep her own lists of artwork,’ and von Behr conceded.

  “Within an hour, a constant stream of men in the various uniforms of Parisian moving companies traveled back and forth in the building, wheeling in crates of artwork and carrying crates out as they were emptied. There was such a frenzy of hanging pictures! Half a dozen that I saw fell from walls and were kicked underfoot in the mêlée. A portrait by Santerre was stamped on and torn in two.

  “I drifted from room to room, looking for my counterpart, the dutiful German doing his half of the double bookkeeping. Yet no one was writing. They were only hammering apart the boxes so that the air was filled with blows and the sound of splitting wood and the smell of pine. There was no bookkeeping. Von Behr, of course, had lied.

  “I thought the walls could not support all the paintings they hung. Four hundred crates were carried in—and that was just the first day. Something rattled around inside me that had wanted to come undone for some time; maybe it had even been loose before the war. I can't explain it. I continued nonetheless to establish lists as complete and precise as possible. On the surface, this was to show the Germans that a Frenchwoman knew how to obey orders. Yet, without speaking to him, I knew Jaujard had named me for this task so that, when the day of our liberation came, we might begin to retrace the paths of the stolen paintings and return them to their rightful owners. At the time, we could not grasp that this would be difficult for the most horrific of reasons.

  “I figured that it is twenty-eight centimeters from my elbow to my wrist and that the flat of my bent forefinger is four centimeters. This way I could measure the paintings inconspicuously. I worked quickly and was proud of my accurate records. I told myself I would be a model of French deference. If I demonstrated my obedience, I would become invisible in the epidemic of French submissiveness.

  “Yet if I so much as pulled back my sleeve to try to measure a painting, one of Goering's men would appear, grinning, and ask me in horrid French was I too hot or did I need him to help me off with my coat. On the second day, I was warned to stop keeping lists and concern myself only with the building's maintenance, but I did not obey. I continued to draw up my lists in secret.

  “The building's maintenance was a position of nominal importance. But I felt myself embody, for the Germans, their mania for discipline. It was more practical, and adhered to their sense of hierarchy, to address their collective complaints to me. I then reproached the personnel. Still, I used this to my advantage. If I were beloved by none, my work would be less suspect. And no one knew I spoke German.

  “I had allies inside the museum, sent to me first by Jaujard and then through their own network, packing men who would visit my tiny office to say, ‘Yesterday's shipments were all from the Rothschilds on avenue Marigny. Today they're from rue Saint-Honoré’—yet no ally could stay for long, because in the next moment he would be ribbed, within my earshot. ‘Hah, sweet on Clément, are you?’

  “The day I heard, ‘Don't you know von Behr's reserved her for himself?’ I panicked. I had let my hair grow out of superstition. I vowed not to cut it until your gallery was restored.” Angrily, she rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand. “And then there was a sign in a wig shop that they would pay well for hair forty centimeters or longer. So I went to the woman and sold her my hair. She asked me if I cared how close she got to the skull, and I said, ‘Cut it as short as you can.’ If I was going to look as unwomanly as possible, I didn't want her to cut carefully. And I needed the money.”

  “Didn't my father provide for you?” I asked.

  “I declined his offer, which frustrated him to no end. Remember, I expected your family to return any day. So the old wig weaver tied my pretty hair into three ponytails like I was a Chinaman, braided each one, and then lopped them off. She laughed a little when she saw me. When I looked into the mirror, I cried.”

  Rose paused and drained her wine. The glass was ringed with purple sediment. The gypsy boy sang and knocked his knuckles against the soundboard of his guitar. When he smiled at the crowd's applause, he could not hide his missing front teeth. He loosened a red scarf from his neck, used it to wipe his face, sang another ballad, and strummed its minor chords.

  “And then at the Jeu de Paume, I heard one of the packers—there were hundreds of them, working shifts even when the rest of us were not allowed in the museum—say, ‘Well, if the girl's cut her hair off, at least she still has her nice shape for us to look at,’ and I thought, Oh, no, you don't, and found someone to give me a man's uniform. And when my transformation was a fait accompli, I felt a huge sense of relief, as if I were a thousand kilos lighter and heavier at the same time.

  “I had erected a fence around myself,” she continued, her voice as taut as a wire. “When, in my presence, the men began discussing the women whose bedroom
s they could spy into, and their sweethearts and their whores, I could have skipped for joy. I see your face! I did this without any sadness, Max. When I understood what was most important to me—that I turn myself into a registry of lost art, a dictionary for when the missing returned—everything else fell away.”

  We were quiet for a while. The gypsy boy wailed in ecstasy. I pictured myself as a clock with its springs bursting out. Rose said, “Did I tell you how cold that winter was, in 1940? We crossed over the frozen Seine directly, rather than take the bridges.”

  I ran my fingers through her short hair. “And cold without your mane.”

  She tossed her head like a horse. “Terribly.”

  I reached over, draped a massive arm on either side of her slim shoulders, and lifted her onto my lap. “Sit here, I'll keep you warm.”

  “No, I shouldn't,” she said, slurring a little.

  “Everyone here is drunk,” I said, which may have been true. “No one will notice.”

  I buried my face in her collar and closed my eyes and listened to her talk. She explained that for four months the Jeu de Paume processed only the collections of the Rothschilds. She saw The Astronomer, one of their Vermeers, but nothing from rue de La Boétie. The Nazi organization that ran the lootings, collecting, and dispersals east (via the Gare de l'Est or the airport at Le Bourget to the Reich's new and expanding frontiers) was called the ERR and was led by Alfred Rosenberg, who, Rose said, resembled a ferret.

  The drunker Rose grew, the more sober I became. What she was telling me, I realized stupidly, the whole tapestry of it, was amazing and terrible. I lifted her off my lap and began taking notes on what she said on the newspaper that covered our table.

  Rose continued, “Against the floorboards were generations of portraits. The family line laid out. Even portraits of pets. King Charles spaniels. A cockatoo! And then a Modigliani nude and a Chagall bride. Floating.” Her hand drifted in the air as if she were hypnotized. “Only the Boucher was hung on the wall. See, the Boucher would be kept, and the modern works—mixed in with those of only personal value—they would go somewhere else. Every painting has a vanishing point, Max. In the Jeu de Paume, I was in the vanishing point of all of them.” Her voice shook.

  We were both silent. “And then the chef emballeur says to me, ‘Reichsmarschall Goering will visit the Jeu de Paume tomorrow. With ten Germans here tomorrow for every one of us—and more! On the roof, in the gardens, on the balcony of the Crillon, in the Métro at Concorde—only those with an Ausweis signed by the Reichsmarschall can even come to work. So you may as well stay home.’

  “But I had an Ausweis. So Jaujard was afoot in this decision. He wanted me to see what happened.”

  Rose took the pen out of my hand and tucked it behind her ear. Then she put her hand in my own.

  “Sometimes I feel like you are my brother,” she said.

  I carefully folded my scrawled-upon newspapers rather than look at her as she said this.

  “You've been heroic,” I said. “They will give you the Legion of Honor. I heard you had been a traitor.”

  “And yet you still cared for me? That's bad morals, Berenzon.”

  “You are drunk,” I said.

  “And you are smart,” she slurred. “And terribly handsome. It's a pity. And—write this down—I don't want the Legion of Honor. Not from any government that still has the Vichy stink on it.”

  “I'll walk you home,” I said to Rose.

  “Be a gentleman,” she said. The barman winked at Rose as she left. “No winking,” she called out to him. “The king has decreed it!” I was certain she was flirting. I did not realize that, in trying to hold back tears, she was exaggerating gaiety.

  As we walked through the quiet square, we passed a father teaching his son to ride a bicycle along the empty streets. He ran beside the boy, flickering a flashlight across the dark cobblestones and holding the back of the bicycle seat.

  Rose said, “For Goering's visit, there were yellow silk sofas and chrysanthemums everywhere, so that the museum smelled like the cemetery at Montparnasse. Ten times that year I smelled those flowers of evil, and ten times Goering came and stole. There were rooms of Gobelin tapestries and others of Flemish art. At the museum, the boys were disappointed when he came dressed in mufti. They wanted to count his ribbons. He was tremendously fat. I once had the eerie experience of seeing him decide whether or not to take a painting of Cronus eating his children.”

  Rose touched my elbow, and we turned down rue de Mézières. It was quiet and dark, though the moon lit a stream of light down the pavement as if the street were a river. Rose stopped before a white building, withdrew a jangling ring of keys, and pushed the door open. I hesitated.

  “I want to show you something,” she said. She called the rickety elevator while the concierge's dog barked and scratched at the door. The carpets in the building were all red and had once been rich but now were worn. We stepped into the tiny square of the lift and ascended, past the smells of onions and the sinister violins of a radio melodrama and the whistle of a teakettle. Rose tripped down the hallway ahead of me. “Wait till I show you, Max,” she chanted.

  She unlocked her apartment door and turned on the light in the cramped room. I took in the folded Murphy bed, the hot plate and dirty sink, the gold-leaf Giotto reproduction on the wall, the vase of tulips, the broken lampshade. Rose, in a room. But she had disappeared. “Where are you?” I called. The room smelled dusty and airless, like an attic.

  “In the cloffice,” she called from behind a green curtain. I pulled the drapery aside and found her in a closet, seated on a stool, grinning madly. On shelves that another tenant had built for shoes or sweaters were thousands of papers, some tied with twine, others sliding from their stacks into reams of unbound documents. The floor was a sea of blue wartime paper. Piles in the corner teetered higher than Rose's head. Drunk, she forced the joke. “Don't you see? It's a closet and an office!”

  Whereas the mess in the Nurse's Room on rue de La Boétie had amused, even charmed me, this was something else. Rose, with her hair cropped like an invalid, looked unwell.

  I remembered that Father had taught me a German word that meant museum and mausoleum; this was part of his explanation for preferring to own a gallery rather than a collection. He believed that collecting had a second motive that was an attempt to ward off death. We must confront ourselves boldly and without delusion, he said. So therefore the Camondos, in their attempt to re-create the ideal eighteenth-century mansion, had been blind in other ways. Rose, here, had constructed her own museum in her tiny apartment, of papers for paintings that belonged to Jews who, I presumed, were all dead, and Rose had entombed herself with them yet still would not love me, the living. Museum and mausoleum in one. “You don't take down the bed” was all I could muster.

  She shook her head. “Not unless I am very tired.” There was an armchair in the corner, with only a few stacks of paper on it. She must have been sleeping there. “And tonight I am very, very tired,” she said. “I feel like an empty tin can. And rather sick.” I picked her up under her arms and took her into the bathroom to splash some water on her face.

  “Brilliant, Berenzon,” she drawled.

  The apartment had an unusually large separate bathroom, which ran the whole length of the single room. It had a bidet, a toilet, and a baignoire sabot—a short bathtub shaped like a Dutch shoe. “We could put papers on shelves in here,” I said to Rose as she hung on to the rim of the sink.

  She looked up at me, aghast. “Near the water? They would be ruined.”

  While Rose stayed in the bathroom, I stooped and lifted stacks of papers, trying to make room for the Murphy bed. In a moment, she hovered over me, wheedling. “Max, there is a special order. Everything had its place.” I gently pushed her out of the way and pulled down the bed. Rose sat on it, reached for a pile, and then began handing me pieces of paper, letters—several in German—and photographs. I took them out of her hand and put them on the floor. My
mind was blank. I lay down and she lay beside me. I touched her odd duckling hair, then her lips, her cheek, her ear and delicate earlobe and pearl earring. I kissed her closed eyelids. She let me unbutton the hundreds of buttons on her blouse.

  “Max,” she said, “I am a nun to all but my work.” But she drew me to her.

  My mouth found her neck. Rose's breath was fast. Uncertain about what was happening, I began to undress her, trying to be gen-tle, trying not to snag a zipper on skin or a button on her necklace. I did not want to hurry.

  Then I realized she was hyperventilating.

  “My God, Rose,” I said.

  “I would do this only to please you,” she said.

  I rolled away and sat up, without facing her.

  “Do you want me to?” she asked, in a small voice.

  I did not answer for a long time. “What a ridiculous question,” I said first, bitterly. Then, “No, that would be terrible.”

  I handed her a dressing gown. Over my shoulder, she gave me my shirt. Without looking at her, I found my other things and put them on.

  “Come here,” she said, and pushed my head toward the pillow. “Now lie on your side.” She stretched alongside me, her stomach to my back, put an arm around my waist, and I held her cold hand.

  “Don't cry, Max,” she said. I felt her shaking. “When everything has been disordered, then you try—” Her voice broke off.

  We lay in the bed like that until, at some point after dawn, I fell asleep.

  IN THE MORNING, WHEN AT LAST SHE AWOKE, HOURS after me, I asked her, “Please, Rose, tell me where my paintings are. You're the only one who knows.”

  She sat up, looking haggard and pale, and reached down to the pile of papers I had put on the floor a few hours earlier. She handed me a photograph.

  “Goering,” she said, “with a Corot. Look at them pouring champagne in the background.”

  “Next,” she said. The newspaper pages were brittle, although they were not yet old. “This one is of Colonel Rosenberg—a German-Jewish name though he was anything but Jewish—surveying the storerooms at the Tolbiac sorting warehouse for domestic goods. They're Jewish prisoners, there, on the left, brought in from some camp outside the city.”