Pictures at an Exhibition

by Sara Houghteling

  I asked if the crates in the photographs were filled with art.

  “No,” Rose said. “Napkins, napkin rings, tablecloths, forks, spoons, silver baby spoons, pocketknives, combs, pens, writing tablets, hand mirrors. Children's rattles, toothbrushes, tooth powder, and eyeglasses. There was a whole room just for violins.

  “German colonels made tours of the furniture storehouses and told their visiting wives or their local girls to choose new décor for their apartments. If any of the furniture was broken—well, no time to fix it. It was given away to a German of lower rank or, occasionally a French employee. So,” Rose explained, “every day there were a hundred minor accidents with the tables and chairs.”

  She handed me a report in German, marked, I gathered, SECRET. Rose read first to herself and then translated out loud in spurts. “It's from 1942, a report by M-Aktion. They dealt with furniture. By that date, 69,619 Jewish homes had been emptied. Of these, 38,000 were in Paris … a matter of great personal pride and responsibility—this is Baron von Behr writing … In the Jeu de Paume remain 2,703 paintings and 2,898 decorative objects.”

  She took the report back. “And this is why I brought you upstairs last night,” she said, her voice catching. It was a work order for a moving company. Forty trucks were to be dispersed to the following addresses:

  MM. Veil-Picard, 63, rue de Courcelles

  David-Weill, château de Mareil-le-Guyon (S.-et-O.)

  Alphonse Kann, 7, rue des Bûcherons, à Saint-Germain-en-Laye

  Wildenstein, 57, rue de La Boétie

  Berenzon, 21, rue de La Boétie

  And there I stopped.

  “Worst of all, after I saw this, I had to wait. Then there was your gallery, all at once: Woman in White. The Vuillard Nude Hiding Her Face. All those Sisley winter scenes. The Toulouse-Lautrec advertisements. Bonnard's Breakfast. When I saw Almonds, propped against the floorboards of the Salle des Martyrs, I knew that not only had the vault been discovered at twenty-one, rue de La Boétie, but that the coffers of the Chase Bank had been opened as well.”

  “And you could do nothing, when you saw them?”

  “What, set them aside and take them home under my coat, one by one?” Rose said. “We were searched, very carefully, each night.” She looked miserable.

  I asked Rose if I could keep the paper and she said no. We sat side by side in bed. Rose continued, “The chef emballeur, Alexandre, collected the moving orders each afternoon so he could determine how many trucks to dispatch to the different arrondissements and how many men he needed on hand at the museum, how many paintings were being prepared to be shipped east and therefore brought to the station, and so on. Each night Alexandre gave his papers to me, and I took them to a man with an illegal darkroom in his basement who photographed them. This way we preserved what documentation we could. We also carried on the pretenses of an affair to avoid suspicion. I had my own lists—of what paintings I knew were going where, of where I believed they had come from when no information was available. I went home each night with my mind bursting with all I had to remember.”

  She handed me a photograph of a room filled with paintings.

  “This is the Salle des Martyrs,” she said. “So many modern paintings passed through this room. Because of my training with your father, I could guess which collection a painting came from, even if I had never before seen that painting itself. Your father turned me into an encyclopedia.” She gestured at the stacks of papers. In one, I could just make out the word Rembrandt. “And now I have had all my pages torn out.

  “I took note of each painting's departure, hoping to coordinate it with what I knew of its arrival. Then I gave copies of Alexandre's orders to the rail workers in the Resistance. Thus they knew which boxcars contained paintings, and I knew which paintings were on board the train. The Resistance, in turn, told General de Gaulle in London which trains should not be bombed and even which parts of a train should be spared. We were piecing together clues for the day when the Germans were defeated and the reassembling could begin. In the morning, I returned the packers’ and the drivers’ orders to Alexandre's office, carefully filed. Toward the end of the war, the photographer was killed and so my work was greatly slowed and many documents were lost. I copied everything I could by hand.”

  “You must help me to find our paintings now,” I said. Rose looked pained. “Isn't this the easiest thing I've asked of you?”

  She shook her head, unfolded herself from the sheets, and stood by the window smoking, tapping the ash into the courtyard below. An hour passed like this and the sky grew light. We heard the clink and whir of the flower market stalls unfurling their awnings.

  She finished another cigarette and said at last, “My life is a life of negativity. I see my future in negatives, a future of what I did not do, what I did not find, what I could not explain, what I could not answer. I was predestined for this.”

  “I want to find my father's paintings.”

  “You can't.”

  “Then some.”

  “No.”

  “Then just Almonds.“ I was not even certain why I said it.

  “Why that one?” Rose asked.

  “Because it was the only one my father wouldn't sell.”

  Rose finally left the window and pressed her cheek to mine. The thought that she had been deciding whether or not to leap from the window coalesced and evaporated. “We're corresponding shapes.”

  “I couldn't understand you less,” I said.

  “Don't try.”

  “All I do is try.”

  “That is why we're halves.”

  “We lasted the war.”

  “It's true.” Rose took my hand.

  “Your apartment is terrible,” I said. “Let's go out and I'll buy you some flowers.”

  “Flowers make everything look better,” Rose said. “The table, the walls, the furniture, you, me.”

  “Me, not you,” I said.

  “Especially me. They make up for what I lack.”

  “What do you lack?” I asked.

  “We don't have time to discuss it,” she replied. We left the apartment and descended in the elevator.

  We bought daffodils, because they were the brightest and the least expensive. Rose looked as if she were carrying a lit torch wrapped in paper. We returned to her building and I made a motion to follow her in the door again. She shook her head, but touched my face and said, “The owner of the Galerie Zola was never known for his morals. Not before the war, and certainly not now.” How strange it was to name the gallery after Zola—Zola, who had defended Dreyfus; Zola, preoccupied with the heredity of violence. Rose put her hands on my shoulders again and said, “Go there.”

  As I walked back through the flower market, I compared my father to the workers around me, jovial, uncomplicated men who worked with their hands. Further along—around rue de La Boétie and the surrounding neighborhoods where once I had sat in the empty chair next to my father (tilted backward, neck and cheeks white with foam) or watched him in a mirror as a man with pins in his mouth hemmed Father's pants—I felt as if I could conjure his outline from those that had once cared for him, these men who had cut his hair and shaved his chin and shod his feet and clothed his back. Yet none among them were there. I understood then another horrible calculation in the formula of the war. One class that had always served another served it one last time by being killed first. I remember my father marveling, with his appraiser's eye, at the beautiful artistry of our false papers. Chaim had shown me his, and they were imperfect work indeed.

  Chapter Seventeen

  THAT SPRING, THE FIRST AFTER THE WAR, WAS A cruel trick. Even in May, grayness flooded the city from sky to street, from the pigeons roosting forlornly on lampposts to the granite plaque on rue Bonaparte where, as it read, Manet had been born in 1832, when the street was called rue des Petits Augustins.

  I walked along the damp cobblestones onto rue des Beaux-Arts, past Manet's birthplace, stopping at the granite facade of the G
alerie Zola, where Rose had sent me. Inside, I saw a woman dressed in a man's black suit, with hair the shade of a sunset in a Technicolor movie.

  I tried the gallery's door, but it was locked. The woman in the suit reached under her desk, the door buzzed, and I pushed it open. A man beside her stared at me from behind a pair of bottle-rimmed lenses.

  “Better him than Léon Blum,” he said, turning back to the orange-haired woman.

  They both laughed and then stopped abruptly. The man said something in a hushed voice and the owner said, “‘Tsk, tsk.”

  While they spoke, I stood by the door and examined the gallery. The walls were covered in a brown fabric that gave the air a muddy quality. Picasso prints, all signed in 1944, filled the front room.

  “Is this open?” I asked, stepping into the unlit side gallery.

  “Yes, yes,” the orange-haired woman said, in a voice indistinguishable from a man's, and turned on the dim lights.

  Even before my eyes could adjust, I saw the Morisot emerge from the gloom. My father's Woman in White. At last.

  I took it off the wall. My hands shook. Behind me, I heard the gallery owner hurrying her customer out the door. I strode over to her.

  She gave me a quick, alarmed look and said, cowering, “Please, be reasonable.”

  “This belongs to my father,” I said.

  “Fine,” she said, backing away toward her desk. The light reflected off her witchy shoes.

  “You even kept the frame,” I marveled.

  “You can have it,” she said. “I bought it for a song. I always thought I would have to give it back, and here you are. But now you must never come back here, and you must not tell anyone how you acquired this painting. I don't want to ever see you again. Don't even tell me your name.” The fright was gone from her voice; this was a speech she had planned to give. She walked to the front door and held it open, waiting for me.

  It can't be this easy, I thought. “How did you get this?” I asked.

  “Do you want the painting? Because if you want the painting, then you shouldn't ask any questions. Let's keep this simple.”

  I paused. I thought of Bertrand then, who wouldn't have listened.

  “Leave,” she said, and this time I obeyed. I ran toward the Seine, clutching the painting under my gray coat. My feet felt like lead. I could not move them quickly enough.

  THE SENSATION THAT THERE WAS A REAL WOMAN IN the room with me, and that she was lovely but remote, was nearly painful. I leaned the Morisot on the glass table next to my valise, wedging its corner into a jagged crack that streaked across the table-top like a bolt of lightning.

  It was Friday evening and Chaim had already set out for the synagogue, so I could study the Morisot alone: the half smile, the averted eyes, and the hatch of paint blurring the middle of her lips. In her dressing room there were a mirror, a washbasin, some jars suggesting powders and paints. A few shelves with perfume bottles, linens. I cupped my hands on either side of my eyes, as if peering in a store window at midday, and looked at the Morisot again.

  The gesture, familiar all of a sudden, conjured an afternoon with my father in May of 1940, before the city fell. The days were lengthening and the gray sidewalk in front of the gallery was scattered with geranium petals from the flower boxes on the building's upper floors. The weather was so glorious, it nearly promised victory. However, at home, in addition to news of the bank panic and fear of the German invasion, my mother had been unable to find a reliable piano tuner. Father and I were in the gallery, trying not to listen to her argue with the day's third browbeaten tuner in the parlor above. The gallery darkened and then lightened as if cued by the intervals upstairs. Father shielded his eyes to look at the Morisot on the wall before us.

  “I find it helpful to study Morisot like this. You do it, too,” he instructed me, and then I saw what he saw. There was a claustrophobia to Morisot, or the sense of standing too close to someone else. I always wanted the painter to paint from one step farther away, as in Morisot's portrait of her unlovely sister Edma, mountainous in a black frock atop a floral settee.

  Now with my hands around my eyes, I looked at Morisot's Woman in White, and the model's averted gaze suggested she knew I was there and looking. The circular mirror in the painting reflected nothing back, and the mottled impasto on the model's chest was a lighter shade than on the figure's face. Her left hand was engaged in pulling off the right sleeve. Soon, one hoped, the whole nightdress would follow.

  “When Manet died in 1883, five of his portraits of Morisot were part of the estate,” my father had said. “Manet kept the pictures he had painted of his sister-in-law for all those years, out of a sense of love or propriety, that no one else should possess such an intimate sight. What makes one man keep a painting when he could have a thousand others? It pleases me to think we've reunited Morisot and Manet here, even for a few days. They can whisper to each other in the gallery after dark.”

  Father leaned closer to the painting. “The Impressionists respect me,” he said. “I like the unfinished quality of their work. It may be what I like best. And Morisot leaves her paintings unfinished as well as any of them. She says to you, ‘Let your eye finish the picture. Let it notice what isn't here and add it in, let it resolve the features on this woman, see what I saw in this moment, what stood out to me, what remained and what did not.’ There's a modesty to that vision that I admire. One that respects what the viewer will see.

  “I'm not a modest man,” my father said.

  We heard Mother pound an angry arpeggio and scold the piano tuner.

  “Your mother isn't modest either,” he said. “But Max.” He said my name almost plaintively. “Somehow, you are a modest fellow. It is a great virtue, and I admire it in you.” I flushed and tried to look into my father's face, but his eyes were still fixed on the painting. A flock of swallows glided past the skylight in formation, and their shadows flew across the illuminated patch of green carpet. The sounds of the piano tuner were comical and sporadic.

  I ticked the time off on my fingers: by that evening in Chaim's apartment, it had been five years since I had last seen the Morisot. The church bells outside tolled eight-thirty. Somehow I had missed the intervening hour and a half, lost in my thoughts and the study of the painting. Chaim had left me two unripe apples, the day's newspaper folded in two, half of a baguette, and a hard triangle of cheese. I was touched by his silent generosity even while he worried about how much money we had left and the dwindling number of cans in the cupboard.

  I polished off the apples, followed by the bread and cheese, hid the Morisot in the valise, tucked the newspaper under my arm, and went in search of something else to eat. I crossed over rue de Rivoli and out of the Jewish quarter. I found a grocer selling sardines for a good price near where rue de Rivoli becomes rue Saint-Antoine, bought a tin and a stale roll, walked to the church of Saint-Paul, and sat down on its steps. I unfolded the newspaper and read an account of the American battle for the Chinen Peninsula. Okinawa was nearly theirs. In Paris, the wife of Robert Wagner, former district leader of Baden, committed suicide upon her arrest. The newspapers were always especially curious when women were involved.

  I ate my sardines on the roll, soaking the stale bread in the oil at the bottom of the tin. The oil dripped and spattered onto the newspaper, and two pigeons with iridescent heads and lidless beady eyes waddled over to inspect.

  On Friday nights, before the war, Bertrand and I might have tried to sneak into a movie or have loitered in the place de la Sorbonne to see if any girls wanted to talk to us. Tonight, I licked the sardine tin clean and walked back to Chaim's apartment and to my painting, which I propped next to my bed. Before succumbing to sleep, I considered that my father would be proud of this recovery. It was nearly enough to take me back to him.

  THE NEXT MORNING, A SATURDAY, I AWOKE TO THE sight of the Morisot.

  I rolled over in bed and turned away from the window, the light streaming in from the open shades. I watched the dust motes an
d fell into a languid half sleep.

  In a dream, Rose appeared at the foot of my mattress, carrying a child in her arms. The bundle cried out twice, sounding much like Chaim's neighbor's cat, and then vanished. Rose was the girl as I remembered her before the war, in the same gauzy déshabillé as the Morisot woman. I could smell her laundered nightdress and her damp skin and its talcum powder and perfume. The collar of the déshabillé brushed against me. But this fantasy was broken by a second one. In the painting was a mirror. I dreamed then of a second mirror, covered with a black sheet. Where was this memory from? When the Count de Camondo died when I was thirteen? Yes, and another house as well, with lotus flower wallpaper. But I could remember nothing more.

  I woke with a cry and leaped from bed. It was essential to hide the painting, which I did, behind the giant armoire in Chaim's hallway. Then I set out in the direction of the rue des Beaux-Arts.

  I ARRIVED ONCE AGAIN AT GALERIE ZOLA AND PEERED in its window. The owner's elbow was propped against the desk and she was engrossed in an auction catalog. A long ash dangled off her cigarette and piled on the page opened before her. I rang the buzzer and she started, then walked to the door but did not open it. She touched the glass, leaving the cloudy imprint of five fingers. Judging by how she had sent me away, I was prepared for a fight. But to my surprise, she pressed an unseen button and let me in.

  The gallery was stuffy after the brisk air outside, and I could smell the wilted flowers rotting in the wastebasket. I noticed an ashtray that bore the name of a Swiss hotel.

  “Please sit down,” she offered. I sat.

  “So you're Daniel Berenzon's son.” She could not hide that she was impressed. So my father's reputation had meant more than my own efforts.

  She eyed me down the length of her Camel. I looked at her hands. They were ringless, with nails bitten to the quick.