Lindstrom's Progress

by Moss, John

  “That’s why I sent you my Klimt,” she said.

  Harry waited, putting his desire for logic on hold.

  She settled back into the soft contours of the sofa. After a bit, he turned to look at her. He was astounded. She had fallen asleep.

  My God, Harry, what do you expect? You should have called the police or taken her to a hospital. The poor woman has struggled through the proverbial Slough of Despond and you’re surprised she’s exhausted? At least, despite her own prediction, she’s not dead. And neither are you, my darling Humphrey. Not yet.

  Harry and Karen used to listen to online recordings of a 1950s radio program called Bold Venture. It starred Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall as Slate Shannon, soldier of fortune, and his sultry sidekick, Sailor Duval, and took place in the days when murder was something that happened in newspapers and novels. When life was sweet and their academic careers at Huron College were burgeoning with promise, they used to call each other Slate and Sailor in bed, his voice toothy and rough, hers smoky, almost a whisper.

  They still talked that way sometimes, but it wasn’t the same.

  Harry shifted around so his back was against one arm of the sofa and he drew Madalena gently into the protective curve of his body. She stirred slightly as she settled against him. He pushed her glass of scotch back from the edge of the table and drained his own, wincing with satisfaction as it burned his throat.

  His mind surged with unanswerable questions. Why did she send him the Klimt? Did she anticipate torture and rape? Was she surprised to survive? Why involve him at all?

  Maybe you’re the key to what’s happening. Keys open locks.

  The only unopened lock is my ignorance, Sailor. Your argument circles back on itself.

  Keys also provide symbols for reading a map.

  In unfamiliar territory, that amounts to the same thing. Look, Lena Strauss didn’t just happen on my name in the phone book.

  Do they still exist?

  So why am I here?

  That’s an existential question, Harry. You can’t expect an answer from me. I’m a ghost.

  Ghosts don’t exist.

  Neither do I.

  But Harry was convinced that she did. She was as real to him as he was himself.

  He shifted and Lena winced. Her eyes flashed open to see Harry then fell closed again. He eased her head back onto a throw pillow, and then found fresh bedding in the hall closet to make up the cot in her office. He doubted she had many guests. He fluffed up two pillows, then folded the top sheet back. After rolling up the soiled gabbeh and tucking it away in the hall closet, he returned to the living room and, finding she was still asleep, eased her up into his arms, cradling her as carefully as he could. She groaned from the pain. God, he hoped there was no internal damage. He supposed there was not, given the cuts had been meticulously done to release blood but not bleed out and that the cigarette burns were applied with sadistic precision to inflict pain but weren’t, of course, lethal.

  He lowered her fully clothed onto the clean sheet and pulled the top sheet over her. She tried to smile through swollen lips as she nudged her head against the depths of the pillows and fell back into sleep as he watched.

  Harry pulled down the blind and closed the curtains. He turned out the light and, leaving her door open a crack so he could hear any movement, went back into the living room. He sat on the sofa and stared at the Klimt, which seemed radiant as the pale glow of morning ventured through the window to compete with the lamplight off to the side.

  Beside it, the alpine landscape painted by Madalena’s grandmother and used to disguise her great-grandmother’s likeness seemed dull, its mawkish colours and derivative contours eclipsed by Klimt’s inspired luminescence. Perhaps sentiment gave it value beyond aesthetics.

  You think?

  Harry walked over to extinguish the lamp. As he bent to feel for the switch his eye caught an anomaly in the surface texture of the painting. He paused then stood straight and examined it closely. He took the painting down from the wall and walked with it to the window.

  In the natural light, it had a peculiar patina. He was no expert, but it seemed like the brush marks revealed an absence of resilience, as if the painting had been applied to a solid surface. Even on the pale washes that were meant to convey flesh, where the weave of the canvas would be expected to bleed through, there seemed to be a hardness beneath the skin.

  Clutching the frame firmly with one hand and against all deference to a great work of art he extended the index finger of the other and let it rest gently on the painted surface. It was a wood panel that had been prepared with gesso, a hard compound of plaster of Paris and glue. Nothing surprising in that. But the back of the painting indicated canvas stretched over a wood frame.

  He carried the painting into the dining area off the kitchenette where the lighting was better. He placed the painting face down on a newspaper spread out on the table. Small wooden tabs inserted into slots in the larger frame held the stretcher frame in place. These had been varnished over or perhaps it was only the accumulated dust and grime from the office in the Mauthausen town hall where it had resided under the careless eyes of the Wermacht administrators, the same men who signed the documents that sent Lena’s grandmother and great-grandmother to be killed and burned. Getötet und gebrannt.

  Trembling with anticipation, he realized there was only one explanation for the differences between the front and the back of Madalena’s fabulous Klimt.

  Several scrape marks and some lines along the edges of the outer frame suggested Madalena’s grandmother had struggled to hide her own mother’s Klimt inside the frame for her landscape. She was probably not even aware that more than one painting was being concealed. And Madalena, when she removed the Klimt, had no reason to look for another. One Klimt was more than enough.

  Carefully, using the dull edge of a kitchen knife, Harry worked the tabs free, two each from the top and bottom and three from each side. Gently, he inserted the knife into the clefts between the frames. He slowly edged the interior frame upward until it slipped free. Then he gingerly lifted it away.

  There was writing on the back of the larger wood panel. It looked like a name and a date. 1902, probably the year it was painted. The name Rachel Damboch meant nothing to him. He turned the hidden canvas to catch the morning light. He gasped.

  He had seen the picture before. On Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze in the Secession Building on Friedrichstrasse. It was breathtakingly erotic, splendid in its nakedness, a detail from the segment of the frieze called The Forces of Evil.

  In the frieze a woman with a voluptuous cascade of copper red hair poised languidly against the shoulder of a stylized gorilla, the embodiment of depraved bestiality. Beside her was a blissed-out young blonde, and above a pot-bellied woman who seemed oblivious to her own vulgarity. To the left of the gorilla were three world-weary muses with black pubic curls flashing against ghastly pale skin. Over them, a crone with an emaciated body was surrounded by horrified faces as she glared lasciviously across at the woman with the red hair who, alone, looked out of the painting and into the eyes of the onlooker.

  The detail Harry held in his hands eliminated everything but the woman with cascading red hair who floated in a swirling mosaic of gilt and shadow. Her right leg was drawn up so her knee touched her cheek, exposing an expanse of pale naked thigh and the underside of her buttocks. The space between her legs was filled with long copper strands of her hair draped to conceal and yet emphasize her genital folds. Waves of hair flowed across the contours of her body, and the swirling vermillion that surrounded her face was embedded with a constellation of flowers.

  But it was the face that mesmerized.

  In a painting illuminating the salacious forces of evil, it stood out as a contradiction. It was infinitely beguiling, but it was playful, hinting at the profound innocence of open sexuality. Her head bent against her knee, with her chin pushed slightly askew, her broad mouth and parted lips, the narrow bridge of her long
nose curving up into bold eyebrows, her eyes, darkly outlined, the blue-green irises aslant to the tilt of her face, looking upward and to the side, with an unrelenting, glamorous, and whimsical gaze, all this promised intimacy, affection, passion, not as sin or vice but as the enthralling allure of forbidden virtue.

  It was a portrait of Madalena Strauss.

  If the maquette for The Kiss caught her worldly appearance, this reached into her soul. And into Harry’s, as well. Despite its association with a painting called The Forces of Evil, this was so visceral and sensually evocative, it was the closest thing to the spiritual he had ever encountered.

  It was an allegory, of course. But haunting and beautiful and terrifying, all at the same time. If I ever write a book, he thought, I’ll put this picture on the cover. No matter what the book is about.

  6 CAFÉ SPERL

  Harry retrieved their watches from the bathroom. The crystal on hers was cracked, but it still kept time. On the back, the words mors certa were engraved. Death is certain. He left it on the kitchen table and when he went for provisions she put it on. He replenished their liquor supply with another bottle of scotch and a magnum of generic Beaujolais that he drank chilled while Lena drank her scotch neat. She slept a lot on the cot in her darkened office as her body began to heal. After he accepted that she wouldn’t submit to police or medical intervention, they had spoken very little. She needed to recuperate. He read from her limited selection of books in English. Although he threw out her bloody bedding and then scrubbed and flipped her mattress, he preferred to sleep on the sofa in the living room.

  On the third day he woke at noon to the smell of fresh coffee. Lena had changed into a loose-fitting magenta top over a pale green skirt, both of which flared from her body as she moved with uncomfortable grace and disguised her bruises in a swirl of colour and material. She had applied makeup strategically and brushed her hair.

  She passed him a plate of pastries and an outsized cup of coffee.

  Instead of joining him, she busied herself rearranging magazines on the shelf under the Klimt, which Harry had replaced on the wall after sliding the detail from The Forces of Evil back into its hidden sanctuary behind The Kiss. He had decided not to tell her of his discovery until he figured out what it might signify. She moved a pair of brass candlesticks to a side table. With Klimt restored to his proper place, the smoke from tapers made of rolled beeswax posed a hazard. They smelled of honey and flowers.

  The pastries were room temperature but had a faint odour of the refrigerator about them. After a few sips of coffee, he focused on Lena as she moved with casual determination around the apartment. He noticed her office curtains had been drawn back and the cot was made up.

  After he washed and shaved, Harry sat down across from her at the kitchen table. She gazed at him expectantly and offered a warm crooked smile. He smiled in return.

  She appeared fragile and yet more reckless and vital than when they had met at the Kressler or in the Café Central. Damaged but not overwhelmed. Resilient and resolute. Improbably enhanced by the pain she’d endured,

  You’re thinking in adjectives, Harry. That could be problematic.

  Real people don’t say problematic.

  “Madalena,” he said gently. “I need you to talk to me. Can you tell me what happened here?”

  “Here?”

  “Three days ago. Can you talk about it?”

  “Sakarov.” She spat out his name as if it explained everything.

  “Why would he do this to you?”

  “I will tell you about the painting,” she said, as if that were an appropriate answer. She got up awkwardly, betraying her pain, and poured herself two fingers of Glendronach.

  “It’s a little early for this, but it helps,” she said, waving her glass in his direction. She resumed her place, sitting forward in her chair. “Harry, this painting is my life; it is my great-grandmother and my grandmother and my mother and it is me. They are all dead. I am dead.” She glanced at the floor then up again into his eyes. Her expression was almost apologetic. “Do you know about the picture of Dorian Gray?”

  “Oscar Wilde.”

  “Yes, well, this picture in my own attic garret stays the same. It doesn’t age like Dorian Gray’s. Not in outward appearance. But it has absorbed our lives just the same. When I look at that picture, time collapses. Art Nouveau and the Belle Époque, two World Wars, the Holocaust, the Occupation, the Cold War, the dwindling Détente, they are all swallowed up in that picture. Look in her eyes, Harry. She sees everything and reveals nothing. She is my past and my only future. And that is why I sent it to you. Do you understand?”

  Harry rubbed his chin then pressed his fingers together in front of his mouth and blew across them, as the blue-haired gatekeeper at the zentralkommando office had done. Air from inside his own body, warmed by the lifeblood coursing through his veins, was reassuring. He was not in the slightest mystical and yet her account of the picture had made perfect sense. Except for the parts about sending it to him at the Kressler and about herself being already dead.

  “Harry, for three days I shadowed you. We scoured Vienna together for Klimts on display. You explored like a determined tourist, visiting old haunts, perhaps, places you’d shared with your wife. You attended a performance of the Lipizzaner stallions, but you didn’t enjoy it so much. You toured the ossuary at St. Stephen’s Cathedral. I didn’t go down to the crypts, but you seemed satisfied when you emerged. You drank mélange each morning, drank white wine with spritzer in midafternoon, and trockenbeerenauslese as a digestif after good Austrian dinners in several small bistros. You ate Milchrahmstrudel à la Sacher at the Sacher Hotel. Twice. And you seem to have brought only one jacket with you. Scandinavian nubuck; quite new I think.”

  “I have an old and venerable Armani blazer as well.”

  “In case of unexpected funerals? I’ve only observed the nubuck.”

  Observed. It was uncanny how a woman with unruly cascades of red hair could have blended into the scene. Surely he would have noticed her following him. But he didn’t. She had been invisible.

  Equally unlikely was how, despite her brutalized condition, she could talk as if Harry’s comprehension was the only thing in the world that mattered. She spoke with an urgency born out of horror that seemed to defy what she had been through.

  “Harry, when you pointed out the fat man while we talked over coffee and biscuits at the Kressler, I knew it was Sakarov. I didn’t see him, but I knew it had to be him. When we met at the Café Central and you told me how he had presented himself and that you had dinner together, I realized how easily it would be for you to get drawn in over your head, if you weren’t already. You are a philosopher. I believe you are capable of moral outrage. And that has put you in far more danger than you could possibly realize. It is my fault.”

  Harry didn’t argue.

  “Could you get me another scotch, please?” She held out her glass. This time he poured one for himself as well.

  “Sakarov?” he asked.

  “A man to avoid. I really did want you to leave Vienna.”

  With a priceless painting under your arm.

  “I taunted you, challenged you, threatened you at the café. You got up from the table, how do you say, in a huff. That was good. I assumed, after that, that common sense would prevail. I had only to send you my Klimt. You were to receive the painting and go back to Toronto. I knew you would not be able to sell it—too many awkward questions. I also knew you were sufficiently principled to arrange for its eventual return. That was important. I have no relatives to speak of. I am Jewish by blood, but Austria is my spiritual source, for better or worse. My Klimt is a portrait of Austria. Do you understand?”

  She gazed out the window. Despite her wounds and liberal consumption of coffee and scotch, colour had returned to her pale complexion. As Harry watched, her eyes creased at the edges and slowly transformed to limpid green as they filled with tears that began to slide down her cheeks. She made no effor
t to wipe them away.

  He wanted to reach over but didn’t.

  Madalena shifted her head to the side and looked out across the street and over the rooftops to the hint of green hills on the far horizon. From her elevated vista, Vienna was an infinite panoply of greys and beiges, ochres and reds. Closer, the outside of the window sill was stained with dried raindrops. The metal frame and mullions had been recently painted. Flecks of paint that had been scraped from the glass glinted on the inner sill. Her reflection was distorted in the window closest to her that had been cranked open to let in the fresh morning breeze.

  “Harry,” she said, letting his name hang in the air. Then she again offered her crooked smile. “I need to tell you so much. I have a daughter.” She stopped and looked curiously puzzled, as if she had made a compromising disclosure and feared it might be an imposition. She soothed her mouth with a slow draught of scotch and resumed her story. “I am twenty-nine years old. My daughter turned twelve this spring. I have not seen her since she was four.”

  Harry shuddered. His Lucy had been five when she died.

  “She has beautiful red hair like mine and a resolute chin, a delicate nose and eyes like cracked emeralds.”

  He knew what she meant—radiant facets of colour shot through with slivers of darkness.

  “Her name is Freya. She is gone.”

  He could feel the depth of her pain as only a person who has lost a child can know it. Although her account was coming out awkwardly, he knew she needed to get it into the open. She needed to connect. To create a context for horrors she was about to describe. To absolve herself for what she had done. Or was about to do.

  He saw the terror in his own Lucy’s eyes in the instant before her head smashed against rock, the valiant flailing of eight-year-old Matt’s powerless limbs as water crushed the life from his body. In Harry’s mind, it was happening still. He tried to lose himself in Lena’s story, but her words excoriated his wounded soul, a soul he had no reason to believe existed except through the pain that defined him.