Pictures at an Exhibition

by Sara Houghteling

  Gutman nodded in a pleasant, comfortable way, unaware of my growing agitation. “Your picture had new canvas stretchers and that horrid varnishing. But the black light showed me that nothing new had been painted onto it. “

  “Perhaps you'd prefer not to know,” I said. “A lawyer visited the forger in prison, who confirmed it was his work.”

  “And why would a forger ever tell the truth? He was in prison, no? What did he have to lose by telling you the Manet was his own? His reputation as a copyist could only be improved when others learned he fooled the house of Berenzon. Satisfy yourself with having recognized a master when others could not.”

  “It was Baron von Horty,” I said. “He's infamous.”

  Gutman smiled. “That daft fellow's a hero now. During the war, a woman who worked in the Louvre—or was it the Jeu de Paume?—sprang him from prison to paint fake Vermeers, van Eycks—anything Dutch. Goering and Hitler bought them up, every last one.” Rose? I was seeing her hand everywhere.

  “I'd like to offer you another rare piece from my collection,” I said hastily. Gutman sat back in his chair. “A Morisot. It's only fitting to buy a Manet with a Morisot, is it not?”

  He sniffed and nodded at my satchel. I withdrew the painting. He offered me a good price. I asked for thirty thousand francs more. He nodded silently. “It does make a man look twice to see a painting in which one woman has drawn another undressing.”

  “I've never seen a Morisot nude,” I said. Gutman's voice lowered. He was as excited as I by the Woman in White.

  “Cézanne could barely paint them either,” he said. “You'll do well to take eighty thousand,”—which was twice his original offer. We stood and shook hands. His fingers were damp and fleshy.

  “You're a fine young man. I'm pleased to do business with you,” he said. “I shall certainly tell your father as much when we see each other next at the association meeting.”

  “Association meeting?” I asked.

  “Of Art Dealers, at Drouot's, on June thirteenth.”

  “I had forgotten,” I said. A lie. I had heard of no meeting, of course.

  Unbidden a well-dressed young man appeared and wrote out a draft for the Morisot. I did not know if I had enough money for the price Cailleux would name, but I hoped that I was close. Gutman and I bid each other good-bye.

  I had sold my first painting, I was ready to purchase my second, and yet I felt desolate. I went to the bank to exchange Gutman's check for currency, and then to the Louvre to find Rose. She was not there, so I returned to Chaim's and washed my shirt, shaved, nicked my upper lip, brushed my teeth, ironed the shirt, and dressed in it again, though the collar was still wet, bought a bottle of cologne and some flowers, and appeared again on the stoop of Rose's apartment on rue de Mézières. It was May 24 and eight o'clock at night. I would meet Cailleux at eleven.

  After several minutes, Rose came to the foyer to greet me. As unwell as I had felt, she looked worse. There were dark circles under her eyes and her clothes looked like they were hung on a metal fame.

  “Have you been eating enough?” I asked.

  “Doubtful,” she said.

  “My God,” I said. “Please, let's eat dinner.”

  “Is it dinnertime?” She looked up at the pale solstice sky. There was a restaurant still open along the Luxembourg Gardens, and I practically carried Rose there. When she first looked at the menu, her eyes welled up. “Only the crème brûlée sounds good,” she whimpered.

  “You're absolutely right,” I said, and we ordered two of those, and wine, then omelets. Rose devoured hers, then much of mine. I drank my glass of cloudy water. Color crept back into Rose's cheeks. Her eyes shone at me. If she were not half-mad over the food, I would have mistaken the light for passion.

  “We're in a medieval calendar,” Rose said, and her laugh too was a sound from another time. Bright clementines dotted the trees around us, and the sky unfurled like a blue fan.

  The air smelled like rain while the park's keepers watered the garden's dusty paths. I hummed the Satie Gymnopédie that my mother had taught me to play as a child. Rose peeled apart the bread in the basket and gave me the crusts while she ate the soft parts.

  Rose tipped back in her chair. “This is pretty, old man,” she said, using Bertrand's nickname for me, as if she could replace him. My friend, I wondered, where are you? I imagined my father, sitting on the lowest rung of the ladder that led to Monsieur Bickart's root cellar. Where was he now, in Le Puy? In the South? Would he forgive me when I returned?

  “In a month I will have to go away again. Back to Germany.”

  “Stay here,” I said. “I found Almonds. I am going to buy it back tonight. It belonged to a little sister—or an older sister, really—who died before I was four. She was kept a secret from me. Her name was

  Micheline and the painting belonged to her. At Cailleux's, they talked about my father starting the gallery after she died.”

  “Cailleux?” Rose asked. “How did you know to go directly to Cailleux? You found his name in my room, didn't you? You spy!” She was white-faced again. “Cailleux didn't know I suspected him, so he kept operating in Paris and selling to Parisians. Now he knows. Don't you understand, Max? Cailleux will be gone by now. You've frightened him away. Why didn't you consult me first? You've ruined it all.”

  Chapter Twenty-one

  THAT HAPPENED AFTER CAILLEUX'S DISAPPEAR-ance is difficult to recall. I moved from Chaim's flat and left him a rambling letter, for when he returned from Pithiviers, and a small fortune tucked under the chocolate bar he kept in his bedside table. I rented a student's room in the Latin Quarter, as it was close to Rose and to the medical faculty. No one knew I was there.

  Whereas I had attended medical school in a desultory fashion before the war, I now visited its facilities religiously. As I had been expelled under the Statut des juifs, now I was readmitted without question. My anatomy course began again as if I had lifted the needle from a record in the spring of 1939 and laid it down in the same groove in June of 1945. The semester had stretched into summer because of the interruption of the war. I found some solace in memorizing the bones of the body, in my classmates’ singular obsession and competition, and in the ornate writing of my textbooks. I walked along the quays, singing to myself, “The ethmoid bone is a light cancellous bone consisting of a horizontal or cribriform plate, a perpendicular plate, and two lateral masses or labyrinths.” Labyrinth indeed!

  The lectures continued with their comforting air of déjà vu until the professor announced that the next week our lessons would take the form of case studies on the classification of synarthroses, amphiarthroses, and diathroses—joints of the immovable, slightly movable, and freely moving variety. I had missed these lectures years before. Yet I recalled Rose asking me if I wanted Ivan Benezet's notes on the subject.

  I arrived late on the third day of case studies. “In healthy children at birth,” the professor intoned, “the bone consists of two pieces, which later become united along the middle line by a suture which runs from the vertex of the bone to the root of the nose. This suture usually becomes obliterated within a few years after birth. This was not the case, however, for today's study, a child of Polish decent, whose death certificate was issued in 1923 at age four.”

  I tore myself from the lecture hall and was soon outside in the summer air. This was the illness that Cailleux's wife had spoken of. So my sister's case made it into my textbooks as well. A coincidence, perhaps, but not such a great one when I considered how many we studied. Was it possible, then, that Micheline was also in Ivan Benezet's lecture notebook, dated March of 1939, right before the fall of Madrid and the suicide of Professor Negrín?

  I understood then that Rose had known, for as long as she had known me, of Micheline. When I had named a sister, my sister, buried from word and memory, Rose was not surprised. She could have first learned through artistic circles, or perhaps my parents had told her. She slept in the Nurse's Room, after all. If Rose had once ke
pt Micheline from me, now she wanted me to find her, if only because the tragedy would stop me from interfering with her work. Rose had, after all, encouraged me to return to medical school. Whereas Father had not wanted me to look for his paintings because any search would lead me to Micheline, whom he and Mother had so carefully buried. I understood it all only as betrayal. I did not take into consideration my parents or Rose's separate grief, only my own.

  My steps brought me to the Marché aux Puces, as they might bring one man to his church and another to his whorehouse. A flea market would be the lowest circle of Purgatory for a painting, here amid carpets and paste jewelry, sandals from Calcutta, enameled pots, Czech beads and Scottish tartans, Moroccan leather, maps cut from old books, birdcages, patched tires, and engine parts for cars no longer produced on Europe's great assembly lines because their cities of origin were now piles of rubble.

  A voice like a barking dog interrupted my reverie.

  “On the subject of outlandish! Here is the son of my nemesis, hat in hand.”

  The speaker was blowsy, bald, and much too tall for a Frenchman. If there was any man in Paris whose career had been the twin to my father's, it was this Jew from Mannheim, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler.

  “You mustn't tell anyone you saw me here, aux Puces,” he said.

  “You're rather recognizable. But you have my word if you want it.” I wondered, Had Kahnweiler known of Micheline, too?

  Kahnweiler rummaged through a shelf filled with paintings and made the frames clack one against another.

  He held up a cheap Abstract imitation. “For this dross, this whole nonsensical movement, I blame Rousseau with his student paint kit and taxidermified animals. And also that pedophile in Tahiti. In the Cubist's work, the viewer is coauthor. What he sees of the painting is reconstituted in his mind; the pieces reassemble. This Abstract school”—he made a spitting sound—”there is no point of entry on the canvas. It is only calligraphy, only brushstrokes.” Oblivious to the effect his German accent had on those around him, he studied another painting in a battered frame. “I still have an eye out for my paintings taken in the fiasco of 1914,“ he said.

  This was the root of his enmity with my father: Kahnweiler had been Picasso's dealer until the outbreak of the Great War. Yet because he had never bothered to obtain French citizenship, with the archduke's assassination he was classified as an enemy and forced to surrender all his belongings to the French state, which auctioned off his trove of Cubist masterpieces at fire-sale prices to his competitors. Meanwhile, Picasso had been awaiting a payment from Kahnweiler and was enraged when the suddenly penniless man could not produce it. And so my father extended his hand to Picasso and the painter took it.

  “And from this war?” I asked Kahnweiler. “Have you seen any of your paintings here?”

  Unable to resist a smile, he said, “I've no need to look. They're in my gallery, just as I left them. A miracle, you think? No, of course not. When my brother in Munich told me about the mobilizations, I transferred the title of my gallery to my Catholic daughter-in-law, and my wife and I passed the war in the Norman countryside. We read Trollope and Dickens. Pity you didn't think to marry that gap-toothed girl working for your father. You might have had the same arrangement, too.”

  Kahnweiler thrust his face closer. He smelled of camphor ointment.

  “I told myself that if I lived to be seventy years old, your father would have passed the gallery down to you and I would get back in the old gladiator ring, where my intelligence would win over your youth. By all accounts you were a terribly bright child. How this gave me unhappiness! Then it occurred to me, as I watched my own son falter in his adolescence: wait until the Berenzon boy turns sixteen, that fateful age when his father's own dearest papa was killed. And falter you did, no?

  “I remember the day of the accident well because it was on the same day as the Salon des Indépendants, which your father and grandfather were on their way to visit. Paul Rosenberg had witnessed the crash, so within the hour the whole salon knew that Abraham Berenzon had died. Of course, at the time I had no premonition of the importance your family would hold for me, or that my suffering would mean your father's good fortune and now, conversely, that his is mine.”

  Across the lane, a canteen in a rickety shack opened. A woman slopped a bucket of water over the tables outside.

  “Does your father ever mention me?” Kahnweiler asked.

  “Never,” I said.

  I roamed through stall upon stall of paintings. The market would close soon. Here was a stall, run by a child. I moved from crate to crate and made my way through her wares.

  And, for the second time, fate flung me a painting. It was a study in oil of a fat, muscular, white Percheron horse, the punctilious work of Rosa Bonheur, who had perfected her painted animals by dissecting real ones and visiting the slaughterhouses in which they were killed.

  The study was small, no bigger than the cover of a novel. I lifted it from the crate and looked over my shoulder. It was not Kahnweiler staring at me but another man in the lane. On second thought, he appeared not to see me at all, but to look right through me. I saw his yellow shoes first. I said to the child, “Let me show my friend this painting. I'm not stealing it, you have my word,” and ran into the street after the man, who wore the same shoes as the absents at the Hôtel Lutetia.

  “Do you have any money?” I asked him.

  “No, thank you,” he said, stepping away.

  “I'm an art dealer's son,” I said. “Let me show you something: it's a Rosa Bonheur. You haven't heard of her, but she's Géricault in a dress. Not as good, but she has the same movement and theater and horseflesh. This horse is being put through his paces. This outline in the left corner is the hat of a prospective buyer. Can you see it? How much money do you have?”

  I spoke too fast, as if the tightly coiled spring inside me was about to be released.

  “Whatever it is,” I said before he could answer, “we can get it for less. A tenth, a twentieth of her price. Then take it to Madame de La Porte des Vaux at Galerie Zola. Z-O-L-A.”

  “Like the writer,” the absent said.

  “She's on rue des Beaux-Arts, right near the café La Palette. Don't sell it for a centime less than—” and I named an enormous sum.

  “Why are you here,” he asked, “in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart?“ His Viennese accent was as delicate as marzipan.

  My glance flickered across his shoes. “I haven't the money,” I said, “and it is not the painting I am looking for.”

  The man approached the girl, and I joined the crowds exiting the market.

  THAT SUMMER I WALKED BY THE WINDOWS OF MADAME de la Porte des Vaux's gallery nightly, studying the pictures in the light from the streetlamp. Though the display changed regularly, The Horse Fair study never appeared. Perhaps the man with the yellow shoes did not purchase the Bonheur after all. Perhaps Madame de La Porte des Vaux was unwilling to buy it. Or perhaps he had kept it.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  I ANTICIPATED THE FIRST POSTWAR REUNION OF THE Association of Art Dealers with a tingling sensation—excitement, surely. I could not admit that I hoped for my father to attend.

  I arrived at Drouot's at eight in the evening. Save for the queue of idling cars, it could have been a scene from the last century: the men wore round eyeglasses, pocket watches, and sideburns in the old style.

  We walked up the sloping entrance of the building, then followed signs to the second floor and Room Six, where men sat in white chairs and inspected each other. My father was not there. Neither were Madame de La Porte des Vaux nor Cailleux. I had prayed that the latter would be—I had brought the nearly half a million francs with me, buttoned into every pocket and folded into a pouch that dangled, beneath my shirt, against my chest, in preparation either to buy Almonds outright or to bribe Cailleux. A few men met my eyes and raised a hand in my direction. Though their faces were all unfamiliar, I greeted them, too.

  I began a mental tally, lo
oking for Paul Rosenberg, or Wilden-stein, or David-Weill, or a Bernheim, but they were nowhere to be found. Not even Kahnweiler was there, since his Catholic daughter-in-law now owned the gallery. Those who had ruled the art market before the war, those who had championed the lovely, deluded, poly-glottal art that marked the first half of this century, were gone. Was I the only one left? But I had never been among the greats.

  At ten past eight o'clock, when the room was full and growing warm, the association's president and his board appeared on the auctioneer's platform. After a few pleasantries, through which the audience continued to talk, the president called the meeting to order with his gavel and announced that the association's most pressing concern was the issuing of a report to the Direction Gén érale des Études et Recherches about the association's members’ commercial activity under the Nazi fist. I was shocked to see what was happening. Could the organization be so open about its collaboration?

  A young man rose from his seat on the platform to speak. “Lefranc and Fabiani, members of this same union, have done a grave disservice to our profession. I too read Le Monde's story of their arrest and the suicide of their commander in Paris, Colonel Kurt von Behr, with great interest. However, I have little more information about their fate, other than that they are held in Prison S——in the town of Le B——.” Immediately, I understood the scheme: Lefranc and Fabiani, then, would be blamed, and no one else.

  At this moment, as the men failed to stifle their sighs of relief, a broad-shouldered man appeared next to me and asked for my membership papers. I opened my wallet (in fact, my father's wallet) and, from behind a half-stamped card to the swimming pool on rue de La Boétie, which my father had last visited on May 2, 1940,I withdrew, to my surprise, my father's membership in the Association of Art Dealers. This was delivered up to the platform and handed to the president. He whispered to my inquisitor, who returned to my side. I could feel the heads turn toward me.