Pictures at an Exhibition

by Sara Houghteling

  I wanted to flee, but if I ran would they suspect me? I stood up, and my hands scrambled around on the dark sofa for my overcoat.

  “You say Claudine is your aunt?” one of the men asked me.

  In the entryway, I swayed a moment as I leaned into the door, and the gust of wind blew the candles to and fro. I steadied myself against the door frame and the jerking candlelight illuminated what Cailleux's hulking frame had blocked as I entered: There was Manet's Almonds, with a little red dot on the wall beneath it.

  Chapter Nineteen

  I STUMBLED BACK IN THE DIRECTION OF RUE DE Sévigné. I lost my key somehow and banged on the peeling door of Chaim's apartment with a closed fist. Chaim answered, already chattering.

  “I just can't see the worth of keeping this when I could starve and you could starve or you could not care. It's not even a picture of someone in your family.” Chaim's words ran over each other, and I could neither understand what he said nor to what he referred. “After I did it, I knew I did something terrible to you, Max. I thought, I don't know Max very well, but I know I have done something that will make him spin away from me like a top.” He made a frenzied gesture with his finger. “But you did not seem to understand how close we were to starving, and this morning at the aid society, once the grenade came through the window, and the explosion, I thought the smoke was gas and—”

  I held him by the shoulders. “Be calm, please.” The war wrecked his mind, I thought. He's deranged, just like Madame de La Porte des Vaux said.

  Chaim pushed my hands off. “There was a grenade at the aid society today! Someone threw it in the window after I had waited in line all morning, just when I got inside. They say it was some anti-Communist, but I didn't realize it was a Communist aid society for political prisoners. I thought they would still help me, but when the grenade went off we all pushed out of the building and I fell and they stepped on my hands until I grabbed on to the legs going by so someone would help me up.”

  “And then what happened?” I asked.

  He looked down. “I sold your painting.”

  “What? Where? To whom?” I sputtered.

  “I don't know. In the Eighth. Or the Sixteenth.” There were dozens, if not scores, of galleries in those two neighborhoods.

  “We'll retrace your steps,” I said.

  Chaim said, “I have to sit down. You, too.”

  We sat speechless next to each other at the kitchen table. “I know it was a very valuable painting,” Chaim said. “I did not realize what a treasure it was until I sold it. But once I gave it to the art dealer, I could not stop myself. I thought only of how we would buy ourselves food and that I needed to go to a doctor.”

  He held up his left hand. It was purple, and the first three fingers were swollen and askew at the knuckles.

  Chaim was calmer now. “The dealer called all his associates over when I took out the painting, then had his wife come downstairs from their home on the floor above. ‘Where did you get this?’ he asked, then said, ‘No, no, don't tell me, I don't want to know.’ He took a special picture of it and had his assistant rush it to the Curie laboratory. With this I can go to the doctor. What do I know with money anymore? I have not had money for years. I think we could buy an automobile. We could buy two. I don't know how much it is worth. He said a huge sum. Max, if you had explained to me it was a once-in-a-lifetime chance, your prized possession—well, I suppose you tried to tell me you had hidden savings but you sounded like a liar to me. If only I had believed you! But would you have sold it if we were starving? We were starving and you didn't sell it. You kept it from me.”

  “Do you have the money with you?” I asked, suddenly calm.

  Chaim stood and began pulling ten-thousand-franc notes from his pockets. “The man tried to give me a bank check but I said I wasn't going to trust the banks, so his assistant opened a vault behind a bookcase. At first I thought there were bricks in the vault, and then I realized they were blocks of money.” Chaim pulled money from one pocket and then the other.

  The bills began to blow around the room and underneath the table. He dropped to the sofa, sitting on four hundred thousand francs or so. I gathered up the notes and tucked four and then a fifth into the velvet bag where Chaim kept his prayer shawl and phylacteries.

  Then I wrapped a blanket around Chaim's shoulders, led him to his room, and filled the kettle. I had a sister named Micheline, I told myself while I waited for the water to boil. Almonds is in the Cailleux Gallery. The teakettle whistled. What a lot of money the Morisot fetched. My father would be proud.

  From the chambre de bonne upstairs, someone who did not know how to play violin was playing slow open-string double stops on an untuned instrument, arcing the bow over the strings in ascending and descending pitch. I kissed Chaim's forehead. He slapped my cheek and then gave me the hot tea bag, which burned my palm. I opened the cabinets. They were not bare. I bought a bottle of whisky from our neighbor, whom we all pretended was an honest-dealing man, and watched Chaim while he drank some down. I took him to the hospital, and though I dreaded it was a mistake, it seemed criminal to do otherwise.

  We returned by evening. I left the apartment again immediately and hitchhiked a ride with a young doctor who was driving in the right direction. He wore a khaki-brimmed hat and a coat of the same color, like a man on safari.

  I held his black bag on my lap. “Now all the babies are being born,” he said. “New armies of French sons, every day. We'll be ready to fight Germany again in twenty years.” To what hospital did they take my sister? Where did she die? Where was she buried? I pictured a small headstone, chiseled with my last name, rose-colored stone turned gray by city soot and creeping graveyard moss and mold.

  “You all right?” the doctor asked me.

  “Yes,” I said. We were idling at a red light, and he turned to look at me. The car's engine thrummed in my bones.

  “I'm done for the evening. I can let you off at your destination,” he offered. I said I would be much obliged and asked him to take me to rue Washington.

  The doctor nodded. “I know it well. A week ago, a Sicilian lady called me. She had been married two weeks and her husband became possessed with the idea that she was unfaithful, so he slashed her face, in the old tradition of scarifying one's lover to make her unattractive to other men.”

  “Barbarism,” I said.

  “Everywhere,” he replied, and we did not speak again until he deposited me on the street corner and his car sped off into the distance, driving, as all Parisians did, with only the low parking beams, a lingering habit from the days of the blackouts. There were many traffic accidents.

  When I turned to the Cailleux Gallery, I was surprised to find its owner standing in the doorway. His eyes were beady and wine-brightened and his mouth purplish and slack. He opened the door. I glanced over his shoulder: Almonds no longer hung on the wall.

  “Monsieur Berenzon, at last,” Cailleux said.

  “I want Almonds back,” I said. I did not tell him that I had 400,000 francs in my pockets.

  “You're making an offer?”

  “There's no offer. This is theft.” Yet in fact, I was prepared to make an offer, should we come to that. I was less interested in justice than in the painting itself. I had long given up on justice.

  “I can ask Almonds’ owner to name his price, but I warn you it will be very high. Eight hundred thousand. Maybe a million. My client has had his eye on that Manet for decades. Your father did you no favors today, Berenzon, by making it so dear. It's a prize now”—he put his hands around my neck—”like a stag's head.” I pushed Cailleux away. “May twenty-fourth,” he said, naming two days hence. “I want this for you, Berenzon, I do.”

  “Meet at this same time,” I said.

  Cailleux nodded, scratched a match, and unsteadily lit his cigarette. I could tell that he was nervous and this pleased me, though it should not have.

  I turned toward home. The streetlamps, the closed shutters, the line that separat
ed the sidewalk from the street, the grate over the gutter—everything seemed too sharply outlined. I had a sister and her name was Micheline and she would have died when I was too young to remember and young enough to be lied to. I ground my teeth. A vagabond half lay across the sidewalk, as if he were a legless doll propped into a sitting position. Eyes shut, he thrust a tin cup toward me. Had he seen Bertrand? I asked him. He said he had. They were sailors together at Gallipoli. I gave him some coins and wandered away.

  Bertrand was missing in the vast sea of humanity. I yearned to numb my mind. I tried to reel in the long loose trail of my memory. There was a photograph on my mother's dresser that she said was me, but it did not resemble my other baby pictures. A lock of hair. It is too late now, Max, I thought; too much time has passed. You have memorized too many other things. I cursed my father for filling my brain with paintings. Had he hoped that all those names and pictures would crowd out the sunken tragedy? I gripped my head and wished I could pull from my coiled brain the Cézanne, pull from it the Bon-nard, the Morisot, and, last, the Manet. Give me my sister.

  Here I stopped, as if fixed to the flagstones. The church bells began their banging and echoing. My hands were clenched. My palms were sticky with sweat. A girl with sticky hands had danced with me before Almonds, singing a nonsense song—or the garbled speech of an imprisoned brain. She had not been a dream at all.

  I returned to Chaim's apartment and, as I unlocked the courtyard gate, saw the concierge's liver-spotted hand draw back her curtain. I walked up the five flights, resting at the fourth, and wondered how Chaim had found my Morisot's hiding place. I had shoved the monstrous armoire in his hallway with all my might in order to squeeze the picture behind it, and then forced it back into place with my shoulder.

  When I entered Chaim's hallway, there were his wife's lavender gloves waiting on the table, next to a note in Chaim's left-handed scrawl that said he had found a man to drive him to Pithiviers, near Orléans, where he hoped to find word of his wife and son. I felt like weeping but told myself it was only the fatigue.

  Pithiviers, Pithiviers, Pithiviers, I chanted as I studied the armoire to see how far Chaim had moved it in order to extract the Morisot. It was nearly flush against the wall and there were no scrapes on the floor. How hard I had to push to move the armoire! I thought. I heaved against it again, for good measure, and heard a crash. When I withdrew the broken object, I held the Morisot that Chaim had sold, the Woman in White, ever averting her eyes, receding further into her quiet mysteries.

  He had sold something else, then. But what? I looked out the window, into the courtyard, and saw a man in a felt hat checking the sky for rain. Standing where he stood, I had seen Chaim's face in this window days before. I had returned home from my second visit to Madame de La Porte des Vaux. That day we had burned one of the chairs from the kitchen table because we had not had sufficient fuel, and we argued and I threw a teacup against a wall and it did not break. I recalled thinking that Chaim was rummaging through my luggage but had not concerned myself with it further, because the valise had nothing of more than sentimental value inside. I threw open the case. There were the playbills of my mother's performances, a comic book of Rose's, her first letter to me, and my father's scarf with the moth hole at its hem. And then I understood: Chaim had sold the Ham. The fake Manet. The talisman of my hubris and failure. Someone had bought it for a handsome sum because he believed it was real.

  Chapter Twenty

  MY NEXT VISIT TO MADAME DE LA PORTE DES Vaux was brief. I found her sitting at her tall desk with a liquor bottle beside her. I knocked at the window, she reached out of sight to press the buzzer, and the door clicked open.

  “Have a drink with me,” she said. “Courtesy of the Russians. They admired my suit. They're my dead husband's suits. Not a bad one in the lot.” She fingered a lapel. “Didn't you behave poorly at the Cailleux Gallery opening! I had to hear all about it from his wife. Why are you here again?”

  “He has Almonds.”

  “Oh?”

  “But it's already been sold.”

  “So you buy it back. No one wants a row, that I can assure you. It will be easy. That Mademoiselle Clément, she is causing messy scenes.”

  “I haven't spoken with her since before the war.”

  “She's crazed—a vigilante. Accuses everyone: Christians, Jews, art dealers, buyers, the prime minister. Now, share some of this with me.” She slid the vodka bottle toward me. I touched the violent Cyrillic on its label.

  “I haven't the money to buy Almonds.”

  “Bah.” She rolled her eyes and poured more vodka into her glass.

  The Russians’ drinking glasses were pushed to the far edge of the high table. She swept them over its rim and they shattered in the dustbin below. “Look what you've made me do,” she said.

  I ignored her.

  I figured whoever had bought the Ham from Chaim might have bought another Manet—Almonds, for symmetry's sake. But there was an additional symmetry for me. The Ham could lead me to Almonds. I could circumvent Cailleux.

  “Have you heard of another Manet for sale?” I asked.

  She twirled a silver pen between her fingers. “I don't know anything about what you are asking, but here's an intuition. An American opened a new gallery on the Right Bank. Only Americans have money these days. Goodman, Gutman, Gutfreund—you figure it out.” Her voice seemed to pick up. She was pleased, I suspected, to have me off haunting another dealer. “Yes my boy, try him ….”

  I stood and hurried to the door. “Thank you, Madame,” I said, from a safe distance. “You are always so kind to me.” She poured more vodka from the garish bottle and lifted the glass to me.

  “Santé,” I said.

  “Dosvedanya,” she replied. “That means You have a pretty face in Russian.”

  AS MADAME DE LA PORTE DES VAUX HAD PREDICTED, my path was easy, or nearly so. That same afternoon I found the new American dealer, Hans Gutman, who was not American at all but Swiss. He was plump with gray hair drawn across his scalp and bifocals perched low on his nose. I explained who I was. He seemed happy to see me. Yes, he had bought the Ham. No, he didn't know anything about Almond's buyer.

  “Cailleux sold it, right? I assume you asked him. And I assume he didn't tell you. This is happening everywhere.” I was silent. He told me that he had always admired my father's taste in the avant-garde.

  “The man who brought me the painting, he is who exactly?” Gutman asked.

  “My uncle,” I said. “Of a sort.”

  “Your uncle,” he repeated. “How is his health?”

  I told him it was much improved, and he said he was glad. We stood in the gallery's main room, each waiting for the other to speak. At last, he motioned me into his office, where a Rembrandt portrait of a young woman in a fur collar was propped against an easel. The desk itself filled much of the room. It was as long as an operating table and twice as wide. Four odd lamps stood at each of its corners: a Deco gooseneck, one with a fringed shade, a kerosene Rayo lamp, and a plain metal light such as one might see on the bench of a chemist in his laboratory.

  Gutman stood by the door with his hand on a switch. “Let me begin by demonstrating my latest technological curiosity.” He turned off the lights and passed behind me in the darkness. “I thought this would be of particular interest to you, because, if the rumors accurately retell the Manet's history, when you bought it at Drouot's everyone thought you were a fool. They judged it a fake, and with good reason. The poor painting has more varnish on it than the string section of an orchestra. Nor is its perspective altogether convincing.”

  The room went dark except for the glowing purple bulb of the chemist's lamp. “I have here a black light,” he said. I looked up at Gutman, who gave me a violet and toothy smile.

  “Remarkable, isn't it?” I agreed. Next, he lifted the Rembrandt portrait from the easel and held it flat beneath the light.

  The signature, Rembrandt, with its wide swooping R, seemed to float abo
ve the surface of the painting and shone with the same purple light as Gutman's teeth. “We say it fluoresces,“ Gutman said. “Anything illuminated indicates new paint.” The fur collar, too, shone. Dimly visible beneath it was painted a plain white strip of fabric. Ghostly lines shimmered around the woman's mouth and eyes. “Someone has tried to give this woman more of the famous Rembrandt sensibility and to dress her up as a noblewoman rather than a housemaid. Hence the fur collar, lightly painted on in later years. To the naked eye, it maintains the same craquelure as the older parts of the painting and hence seems all of a piece.”

  “A forgery,” I said.

  “Yes, which I can say with certainty because of this miraculous light. My economist friends tell me fakery is a market response to a demand.”

  “Why do you keep it?” I asked.

  “I can't destroy it, and to sell it would be irresponsible. It makes an excellent teaching tool,” he said. “This forgery has been in my possession since before the war. The director of a museum in Berne was so dismayed to discover it was a fake that he gave it to me practically for free. I've performed all other sorts of experiments on it. Linseed oil, for example, dissolves the newest paint pigments—it's a mystery why. I haven't a degree in chemistry, but it works.”

  I asked to see a Ham under the light. Gutman's breath was audible. “That was sold the same day your friend brought it to me.” He turned on the lamp with the fringed shade.

  It seemed obscene to me, like the short dresses of the women at Le Chat Noir on the evening of my birthday and my rift with Bertrand. The wrinkled man continued. “Surely your father had the same arrangements with his collectors as I do—that I will buy any Boucher or Fragonard or, as in this most recent transaction, Manet, that appears on the market. My client accepts it sight unseen.”

  “Everyone at the auction told me it was a fake,” I said. I remembered the crooked white number 6 over the auction hall door at Drouot's, and Rose's shame on her pale cheeks. I touched my own cheeks, and they were fiery.