by Clare Clark
‘Come on, Ira,’ she slurred, tugging at her hand. ‘Don’t be a drag all your life.’
‘For fuck’s sake,’ Irina said again, only this time it was not a boot stamping on a face but a glass wall between them, impervious and ice cold. Crushing the stub of her cigarette beneath her heel, she pushed away into the crowd.
2
Emmeline looked at the invitation card. Dove grey and expensively engraved, it was as thick as a slate and almost as heavy. To celebrate the opening of the Rachmann Gallery, Viktoriastrasse, 13. On Viktoriastrasse chauffeurs kept their own chauffeurs and even the trees were a more expensive shade of green.
‘What do you mean, maybe?’ Anton protested. ‘I thought you adored van Gogh.’
‘I did. I do.’
‘Then come. You’ll like it. There’ll be champagne and scores of bankers just aching to drape you in diamonds. Seriously, darling, just look at this dump. Isn’t it time you snared yourself a chic little pied-à-terre on Ku’damm?’
Emmeline glanced around at the stained and peeling wallpaper, the window she stuffed with newspaper to keep out the draughts. ‘I like it here.’
‘You don’t. You couldn’t.’
‘Anyway, I told you, I’m finished with men.’
‘Nonsense,’ Anton said, propping his feet on the arm of the broken-down sofa and stretching out. ‘You’re a magpie. You’ll take anything as long as it glitters. Still, every magpie needs a nest, and this would be business, not pleasure. The older and vainer and more preposterous the better.’
An exhibition of van Gogh’s drawings and aquarelles. The invitation was edged in pewter. ‘You make it sound irresistible.’
‘Well, I know you. It’s not as though you don’t have form.’
‘Ha bloody ha.’ She swatted him half-heartedly with the invitation, then dropped it on his stomach. Laughing, Anton picked it up.
‘Go on, say you’ll come,’ he coaxed. ‘He’s your old friend, you can introduce us.’
‘He probably won’t remember me. I haven’t seen him for years.’
Not since the morning he had come to plead with her to stay away from Julius Köhler-Schultz. She remembered it distinctly, his distress, the way he stared at his feet and shook his head and said that Julius was a wonderful man but weak, so terribly weak, that he had already made so many mistakes, hurt so many people. Emmeline had not understood what he was talking about. It was only when Matthias said something about a secret fiancée that she realised he was warning her off, that Julius was genuinely afraid that after one faintly regrettable fuck she would be flexing her claws and dreaming of happily ever after.
‘How can Julius be engaged?’ she asked Matthias. ‘Isn’t he still married?’
‘He’s getting divorced. They’ll marry then. I’m sorry.’
‘What is there to be sorry for?’ She laughed, rolling her eyes. ‘Seriously, you have to stop looking as though someone died. We drank too much and screwed, that’s all. It happens. Sometimes it’s even fun.’
She thought Matthias would smile then, but he only grew more agitated. ‘You don’t understand,’ he said. ‘I’m asking you to stay away from him.’
‘But that’s ridiculous. So he’s engaged, so what? Does he really think I’m going to hunt her down and tell her everything? I’m hoping to forget it myself.’
‘It’s not that simple.’ Matthias grimaced, raking a hand through his hair. ‘Look, I’m sorry, I wish there was an easier way to say this, but he never wants to see you again. He’s asked that you don’t try to write to him or telephone.’
Emmeline gaped. ‘But he can’t do that. What about me, my future? Elvira only agreed to art school because he said he’d act as my guardian. If he refuses now I’ll lose everything.’
‘Perhaps you should have thought of that before you dropped your knickers.’
‘Perhaps Julius shouldn’t be such a fucking hypocrite,’ she retorted furiously. ‘It was one night, Matthias, one stupid night. So he regrets it, so what? That’s no reason for him to ruin my life.’
Matthias clenched his fists. ‘Except she’s pregnant.’
‘And?’
‘For God’s sake, don’t you see? He’s terrified. If she was to find out about you, if there was even a possibility—Julius has already lost one child. To lose another, it would break him.’
She argued. It was only when Matthias produced the van Gogh drawing that she understood that it was already decided, that Julius would never change his mind. Van Gogh was his checkmate, there were no moves left after that. So she agreed. She would go back to Munich and she would never contact Julius again. Her only condition was that Julius did not tell Elvira, that when Emmeline returned to the Academy he continued to pretend that he was acting in loco parentis. As for the drawing, she refused to accept it. Julius, she said tartly, could save his pieces of silver for his luckless fiancée.
Afterwards the drawing was the only part she regretted. She could still summon every detail of it, the young girl in the striped jacket with the faraway expression and the sprig of flowers in her lap. La Mousme, van Gogh had called her, the Japanese girl; he had painted her in Arles, Emmeline had looked her up. Julius’s drawing must have been a preparatory sketch, though it hardly looked like one. She should have kept it. Instead she had given it back to Matthias. If you ever need anything, anything at all, he said as he put it back into his briefcase, and he handed her his card. After he left she tore it in half and dropped the pieces into the wastepaper basket.
That was the last time she had seen him, though like everyone else she read about him in the newspapers. His van Goghs had made him a celebrity, the impoverished blacksmith’s son from Düsseldorf who had turned an impoverished Dutch madman into the most expensive artist in German history. That the paintings had been smuggled out of revolutionary Russia, the property of a mysterious Russian prince-patron whose name Rachmann refused to divulge, only added more delicious intrigue to the tale. The newspapers gobbled it up with a spoon.
‘All right,’ Emmeline said to Anton. ‘I’ll come. But only if you swear you won’t abandon me the moment we get there like you always do.’
‘I’ve never done that. Well, maybe once or twice, but only in extremis. When my entire future happiness is at stake.’
‘Your entire future happiness until you wake up and can’t remember his name.’
‘Hark at you,’ Anton retorted. ‘One on-again-off-again girlfriend and you’re the patron saint of monogamy?’
There was a silence.
‘I need a drink,’ Emmeline said. The vodka was Irina’s, bought from the Russian shop on the corner. Irina always pretended to be German when she went in there, she said it was the only way to avoid the hand-clutching, the incontinent reminiscences.
Emmeline rinsed two mugs and poured them both a large slug. Before Irina the only Russian women she knew were Chekhov’s, bolt upright in their corsets and aching for Moscow. Irina never ached for Moscow. She said Russia would never change, that however many times the Bolshevists turned the country upside down and shook it, it would cling to its history like a baby monkey clinging to its dead mother. There were far too many Russians for Irina in Berlin. She wanted to go to America.
Anton peered into his mug, wrinkling his nose, then downed the vodka in a single gulp. ‘Where is the Kuckuck, anyway?’ he asked. The cuckoo, his nickname for Irina from the start. She’s the kind of girl who lays her eggs in other birds’ nests, he said with a shrug when Emmeline asked why, but the provocation was plain, the German idiom old-fashioned but still familiar. Weiss der Kuckuck! God only knows.
‘She’s out,’ she said crisply. ‘What do you care anyway?’
‘I care. You like her, even if I don’t.’ He held out his mug and Emmeline sloshed more vodka into it. She had heard nothing from Irina since their last terrible argument, but the flat was still scattered with her things: a scarlet woollen scarf by the bed, an open book face down beside the sofa, a splay-bristled toothbrush in
a jam jar by the kitchen sink. Emmeline had left them where they were. That way it was easy to pretend she was coming back, that any moment the bell would ring and Irina would be there, smelling as she always did of patchouli and cigarette smoke, and they would get drunk and go to bed and for a few hours, as darkness narrowed the world to the width of a sagging bed, Emmeline would know exactly who she was.
It had to be Irina who came back, though. Emmeline would not be the first to crack.
She had known it would be sumptuous, it was Viktoriastrasse after all, but the palazzo splendour of the Rachmann Gallery still took Emmeline by surprise. The rooms were huge and high-ceilinged, papered in a discreet pewter, one leading to another through a series of archways so that the space appeared to go on for ever. As she followed Anton through the crowd the carpet yielded beneath her feet like moss, absorbing the babble and jostle of the guests so that, despite the crush, the overall impression was one of expensive hush. Against the smooth dark gleam of the walls, the drawings seemed to float, picked out in soft circles of light.
Primed by Anton, Emmeline had expected bankers and businessmen. Instead the party was a roll call of the Berlin art establishment. She saw Hugo von Habermann and the sculptor Fritz Klimsch and Max Liebermann who was also president of the Academy. It was only when you saw them all together that you realised how antique most of them were. In his speech at Emmeline’s graduation Liebermann had made a point of declaring himself a modernist. He did not seem to realise that his modernism was already ancient history.
Girls in grey silk offered trays of champagne. She took a glass. Beside her Anton talked to a man she did not recognise. In the years since art school Anton had scraped together a living as an assistant in a small avant-garde gallery on Friedrichstrasse but he meant to be famous and he made it his business to know everyone. He had loathed the Academy, loathed the classical teaching technique, the relentless copying of Old Masters, hundreds of them, over and over again. He said the professors were relics from the Middle Ages, that their solitary aim was to stifle their students’ creativity. Anton thought drawing was dead. He spent his time in the darkroom, splicing images, inverting negatives, manipulating the developing process so that some parts of the photograph were deliberately obscured or damaged. He said that truth lived in the spaces that technology opened in the imagination. The pictures he made were stark, off-kilter, stripped of sense or context. Emmeline thought some of them were beautiful, but she did not know what they meant.
At least Anton was making art. Since the Academy Emmeline had not completed a single large work. Half-finished canvases crowded the apartment, their faces to the wall, each one differently and disastrously derivative, a failure of courage and imagination. She tried new subjects, fresh compositions, but each time the work of other, better artists forced its way up through the paint, burning off the tentative haze of her own ideas like the harsh summer sun.
‘Munich and Switzerland and the Berlin Academy and you wonder why you have nothing to say?’ Anton said. ‘You need to live.’
So she lived. She took a job as an illustrator at a fashion magazine, part time and badly paid, and she drank too much and ate too little and went to bed with people she did not know, both men and women, and she held it all close, the hunger and the hilarity and the humiliations and the hangovers, because an artist was the sum of her experiences and how could great art be forged without great heat, in the fire of a life lived without limits?
It felt strange to be at a party without Irina. Emmeline had grown accustomed to the way people turned to stare at the two of them hand in hand, the double jolt of shock and admiration. Alone, she felt smaller, less visible. She tried to squeeze through the crowd towards the drawings but the crush was too dense, it was impossible to move. A man knocked her elbow, slopping champagne down her dress. He did not apologise. Fat and sleek, he looked like a seal in a wing collar.
‘Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Rachmann Gallery.’
An exquisitely tailored Matthias smiled down from a dais at the end of the room, his voice sliding out of the walls and from underneath the cornices, unrolling like silk. As he embarked on a laundry list of thank yous, Emmeline let her gaze wander around the room, over an actress she recognised and the artist Emil Nolde to a tall figure with a shock of thick grey hair. Julius Köhler-Schultz, she realised with surprise. The grey was new. A diminutive woman stood beside him, her hand in the crook of his arm. So that was the second Frau Köhler-Schultz. Elvira had written to tell her about the wedding, before she stopped writing altogether. Emmeline had been startled, it was two years by then since Matthias warned her off and she had assumed him long married already. Her mother had not mentioned a child.
On the stage Matthias held his hands out to the crowd. ‘Van Gogh himself believed that drawing was “the root of everything”. Even in the wildest ecstasies of painting, he stayed true to the line. May we all learn from this extraordinary artist. May we all stay true to the line.’
Matthias moved through the room like a medieval king, magnificent and blithe, his long fingers lightly touching sleeves and shoulders as the crowd parted to make way for him. Slipping away from him and from the Köhler-Schultzes, Emmeline took refuge in the rearmost room. In one corner a peasant woman gazed impassively from beneath her hood, her dark eyes quiet with despair. Emmeline had not brought her sketchbook but she rummaged an old envelope from her bag, a stub of pencil. She drew quickly, with firm strokes.
‘Impressive,’ a man said, peering over her shoulder.
Emmeline folded the envelope. ‘It’s nothing. I see better when I draw, that’s all.’
The man nodded and proffered an open cigarette case. He was dark, powerfully built, his neck encased in a stiff collar a size too small. When Emmeline shook her head he extracted one for himself and lit it, inhaling deeply as he studied the peasant woman. The tip of the cigarette crackled.
‘Cantankerous old crone, isn’t she?’ Emmeline was silent, willing him to go away. Though the lines were mainly pen-and-ink, van Gogh had used a pencil for the fretwork of wrinkles on the woman’s cheeks. The effect was oddly tender.
‘Be careful what you wish for, isn’t that the old curse?’ the man said. ‘Better a life of Nuenen mud and potato-eaters than the lap of luxury with one of this lot.’
Emmeline blinked at him, surprised. He did not look like a man who would know about van Gogh. ‘I thought they weren’t for sale,’ she said.
‘Then you plainly don’t belong here. In this world everything’s for sale. The artists most of all.’
The intensity of his gaze unsettled her, the heat of it, like photographic lights. ‘So what about you?’ she asked lightly. ‘Do you belong here?’
The man shrugged, exhaling a slow streak of smoke. His cigarette between his lips, his eyes on hers, he tugged his bow tie undone, then twisting the stud from his collar, pulled it off and jammed it in his pocket. As Emmeline laughed he leaned towards her, his arm brushing hers.
‘It’s van Gogh who doesn’t belong here. He would have hated this circus,’ he said softly, so close she could smell the musky scent of his skin under the smoke. ‘Come on, let’s get out of here.’
‘But I’ve hardly seen anything.’
‘Then come back. Tell Matthias I sent you.’
‘How can I do that? I don’t know who you are.’
‘Come with me and I’ll tell you. There’s a place near here where we can get a proper drink. You’ll like it.’ Taking a last drag he dropped the butt of his cigarette, grinding it into the carpet. His hand was on the small of her back, warm and certain, she could feel the throb of blood through her skin where it pressed against her. She wondered if he could feel it too.
Matthias Rachmann stepped in front of her. She glimpsed the fleeting shadow of a look between the two men before he smiled at her. ‘Emmeline Eberhardt, my goodness, what an unexpected pleasure. How long has it been, three years, four?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Well, you look radiant. No wonder my brother has been monopolising you. Gregor, would you mind?’
Gregor shrugged, crossing his arms. As Matthias steered her away, Emmeline thought of the cigarette ground out into the silk carpet. She wondered how long Gregor Rachmann would wait before he attempted to reclaim her, whether she would consent to be reclaimed. She smiled without enthusiasm as Matthias introduced her to a man with a receding hairline.
‘Herr de Vries has devoted the last decade to putting together the first catalogue raisonné of van Gogh’s work,’ Matthias said. ‘A comprehensive list of every work van Gogh ever made. Hercules would have baulked, but this man has pulled it off.’
He turned, grinning, as a bearded man clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Do you know Paul Gachet?’ he asked Emmeline. ‘His father was van Gogh’s doctor in Auvers, several of the drawings here are from his collection.’
Paul Gachet nodded without interest at Emmeline and, turning to de Vries, launched into a stream of French. Another man sidled up beside Matthias and pumped his hand before drawing him into a group of women who laughed brightly, showing their teeth. The party was beginning to break up, waitresses moving through the rooms with trays of dirty glasses. Emmeline could not see Gregor Rachmann. In a corner a girl in a black dress scribbled frantically in a notebook, one foot twisted out as though her shoe pinched. There was something familiar about her, though Emmeline could not think why. Perhaps she was one of the hundreds of writers on the dozens of magazines in her building. Her shoes were cherry red with a red-and-gold T-strap and a pattern of three gold leaves on the toe. Somewhere in Berlin, Irina was talking, drinking, laughing. Snatching a half-drunk glass of champagne from a passing tray, Emmeline drained it in a single swallow.