by Clare Clark
‘Is that a problem?’
‘I don’t believe it. If he’s here, why is he—’
‘We should go, Julius,’ Salazin interrupted smoothly. ‘Good day, Fräulein Eberhardt.’
‘You too,’ Emmeline said and rang the bell again.
The young man had got fat, or perhaps it was just self-importance. The gallery was closed, he told her, and Herr Rachmann away on business. If she wished to see him she would have to make an appointment.
‘I don’t want an appointment,’ Emmeline said. ‘I’m just here for my sketchbook.’
‘Your sketchbook?’
‘I left it with Matthias last time I was here and now I need it back.’
‘No one has mentioned a sketchbook to me.’
‘Then perhaps you could look? I mean, I could always telephone Matthias and ask him, but isn’t it your job to make sure he isn’t bothered with things like that?’
The young man glared at her and instructed her to wait in the vestibule. As soon as he was gone she slipped into the gallery. To her surprise the drawings had been taken down. In their place hung three paintings. Three fishing boats on a beach; haystacks in a field; a sower in a straw hat. The spotlights had still to be adjusted—light flared against the pewter spaces between the frames and smudged darkness like soot between the thick strokes of paint—but even badly lit the canvases were unmistakable. A fourth, dark cypresses against a tumbled purple sky, was propped on a pallet against the wall.
In the middle of the room, a lectern displayed a large book. Emmeline stepped closer. It was a copy of de Vries’s catalogue raisonné, the definitive record of every work ever made by van Gogh, opened to show the painting in front of her. Beneath the colour plate, de Vries gave its title, Boats at Saintes-Maries, and a brief description of the work along with its assigned catalogue number, V583, and its provenance: Collection privée suisse.
‘Don’t move.’
Emmeline turned. Gregor Rachmann stood in the doorway of the gallery, a drawing board propped against his hip.
‘I said, don’t move,’ he said sternly, his eyes on her as his pencil moved across the paper. She shifted self-consciously, unsure of her expression, of how to be. She was not used to being the one who was looked at. Unhurriedly Gregor Rachmann considered his drawing, then propped the board, paper inwards, against the wall. Emmeline wanted to ask to see it, but she said nothing. She could feel the fingers of electricity moving through her as he crossed the gallery towards her, tracing a path upwards through her stomach and into her chest, quickening her pulse.
‘I’m going to move now,’ she said but he shook his head.
‘Don’t do that,’ he said softly. He stood very close to her, his eyes on the book, his elbow grazing her arm. She could feel the burn of him through her sleeve.
‘I didn’t know you drew,’ she said.
‘There are lots of things you don’t know about me. Yet.’
‘Tell me one I’d never guess.’
‘All right. I paint the boxes for a taxidermist. Thanks to me, the dead pets of spoiled wives frolic in ersatz Monet gardens for eternity. Don’t laugh, it’s true.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Tragically. Your turn. Tell me something I don’t know about you.’
That I want to touch you, Emmeline thought. That I want you to touch me. She blushed. ‘I didn’t know Matthias was showing paintings.’
Gregor Rachmann looked at her. ‘I think we both know you’re going to have to do better than that.’
‘I asked you to stay in the vestibule.’ Matthias’s assistant stood in the doorway. ‘This gallery is closed. No one is allowed in here.’
Rachmann rolled his eyes. ‘Fuck off, Zedler. She’s my guest—if I say she can stay, she can stay. Not that you can see a fucking thing in this shithole. At least at the Cornelius there is light, air, the work can breathe.’
‘I’m going to have to insist,’ Zedler said stiffly. ‘Herr Rachmann’s instructions were very clear.’
‘As clear as mine? I said fuck off, Zedler. Do you know what that means? Fuck off back to whatever filing cabinet you crawled out of and leave us in peace.’
Zedler’s ears were scarlet. ‘I work for your brother, not for you. Fräulein, if you would like to follow me?’
‘I said get the fuck out of here, you maggot!’ Rachmann hissed, his face contorted, spittle flying from his mouth as he raised his fists. The effect was both frightening and crude, and instantly the swirl of arousal in Emmeline’s belly curdled to distaste.
‘It’s all right,’ she said to Zedler. ‘I’m leaving.’
‘Don’t let that fucker tell you what to do,’ Rachmann snarled. Emmeline recoiled, noticing his dirty shirt, the oily coarseness of his skin, and it was as though a magnetic force had been inverted, she wanted only to get away.
She went back to the Cornelius Gallery. The round-faced man had gone and she had to join the back of the queue. A frozen sleet was falling. By the time she was finally admitted, her teeth were chattering and she could no longer feel her feet.
And then she was inside and she forgot the cold, forgot everything but the paintings, the sheer chromatic shock of colour. She thought of the final pages of Julius’s famous book, the colours crowding into Vincent’s cramped room to pay tribute to the artist on his deathbed: Orange garbed in fire, Carmine and Geranium Red like wide-winged butterflies, Yellow, his almond-eyed mistress in her oriental robes, she had copied whole passages into her journal, but all of Julius’s verbal virtuosity could not capture the emotional power of van Gogh’s pictures, the prodigality of feeling in every brushstroke. She walked around the gallery in a daze, stunned by the paintings’ urgency, their feverish insistence on a God, not in church or in the Bible but in skies and trees and mountains, in the flaming ball of the sun.
She did not miss her sketchbook. In the face of such paintings a pencil did not stand a chance. Instead she stared and stared. She wanted to be able to remember them for ever. In the second room she found the Self-Portrait at the Easel that Matthias had used for the catalogue of his exhibition, the one bound for Amsterdam, and, on the opposite wall, another self-portrait, again at the easel, only this one showed van Gogh against a background of brilliant blue, the paint laid down in overlapping brushstrokes like the plumage of an exotic bird. The label identified it as a loan from Julius Köhler-Schultz. Beside the dazzling colours of Köhler-Schultz’s painting, Matthias’s van Gogh looked washed-out and evasive.
Two women came and stood next to her. ‘You heard Bruno Cornelius killed himself last year?’ one was saying. ‘Ghastly business, signed his divorce papers at the lawyer’s office, then stepped outside and shot himself in the hall. It’s the lawyer I feel for, think of the mess . . .’
Emmeline wanted to cover her ears. She wished there was a rule of silence in galleries, gags tied around every chattering mouth so that people would finally stop talking and just look. She glowered at the women but they were on to van Gogh’s sliced-off ear and did not give her a second glance. Slowly, reluctantly, Emmeline made her way towards the exit. A woman in spectacles stood at the sales desk, a copy of the exhibition catalogue open in front of her. As Emmeline turned the pages a picture caught her eye. Three fishing boats drawn up on a sandy beach. She peered closer. Under the title, Boats at Saintes-Marie, was the number assigned it by de Vries, V583, and the attribution, Collection privée suisse.
‘Excuse me,’ she said to the woman behind the desk. ‘This painting, Boats at Saintes-Maries, is it in the exhibition?’
The woman glanced at the page and shook her head. ‘Ah, no, not that one, I’m afraid. A last-minute withdrawal, the catalogue had already gone to print.’
‘Right.’ Emmeline searched through the catalogue. Beneath a plate of haystacks in a wheat field she found the same attribution, Collection privée suisse. ‘And this one?’
The woman eyed her warily. ‘Might I enquire as to the nature of your interest in these particular paintings?’
The woman pressed her lips into a line. Then, turning away, she smiled at a man in a green overcoat. ‘Herr Professor, a pleasure to see you again.’
Emmeline had been at boarding school for long enough to know when she was dismissed.
6
Olga replied to Emmeline’s letter. Had Emmeline thought of registering with an illustration agency? She included the address of a place an acquaintance of hers had recommended.
Emmeline made an appointment. She was glad to have something to do. The shapelessness of her life had begun to unnerve her. She drank too much, to silence the voices in her head, to celebrate getting to the end of every day. Drunk, she drew more easily, the images moving from her eyes to her fingers without getting snarled in the brambles in her brain. She woke, gritty-eyed and nauseous, in a tangle of blankets, her sheets speckled with ink spots and pencil shavings.
Everyone else was busy. Dora was always rushing off somewhere, to the newspaper office or a party or the public library. She was working on a story about politics and fiction, she thought she might know someone who would be interested in buying it. When Emmeline suggested having an extra key cut so she could look in on her grandmother from time to time, Dora shook her head. She would give Emmeline a key for emergencies, she said, but her Oma was proud, she refused to be a charity case. It did not occur to either of them that the charity might be all the other way.
As for Anton, he was in love. He and Emmeline still met occasionally but he was usually late and once he failed to turn up altogether. He expected her to understand. He took her to KaDeWe so they could look at Kurt’s windows.
‘Aren’t they extraordinary?’ he said, stroking the glass with his fingertips. He was not interested in anything but Kurt. Kurt liked to juxtapose the everyday and the strange. Kurt was inspired by the evening gowns his mother wore when he was a child. Kurt believed that every window should tell a story.
‘He completes me,’ he said, dazed with the wonder of it. ‘Until I met Kurt I didn’t know how to be me.’
His elation left Emmeline dried out and empty, a skin abandoned by its snake. One evening, after Anton had vanished, rapturous and too early, into the neon night, she went to Zanzibar. They had taken down the red Chinese lanterns and hung strings of white fairy lights in their place. Perhaps that was why the women on the dance floor looked faded and faintly dusty, like exhibits in a provincial museum. The paint was peeling from the walls, so that the naked ladies wearily spreading their legs seemed to be suffering from impetigo. On the stage a bottle blonde in a red dress was singing one of the old American songs from before the war.
Beneath the banyan parasol, she couldn’t talk my talk at all,
But, Oh, how she could Yacki, Hacki Wicki, Wacky Woo!
That’s love in Honolu-lu
The lights rolled over the stage, catching the corner booths. Two girls sat close together. One was a skinny scrap in a turquoise negligee, her knobbly spine puckering the silk like a badly sewn seam. The other was Irina. Her hair was shorter than Emmeline remembered, she did not know if she liked it. She looked both unfamiliar and heart-stoppingly the same. Emmeline had almost decided to go over when she saw Irina gesture angrily at the turquoise girl, spreading her hands wide, then bringing them down in fists on the table. The gesture was so familiar to Emmeline it was as if her own body had caused it to happen and she was flooded with a kind of homesickness she had not felt since her first day at boarding school, the grief that comes not from the loss of something precious but from the realisation that there was nothing precious to lose.
Abruptly all she wanted was to be somewhere else. As she forced her way back through the crush a plump girl caught her arm. She was dressed like an Egyptian belly dancer in diaphanous chiffon with a sequinned brassiere, and her hair was carrot red. Pouting seductively, she swivelled her hips at Emmeline, one hand on the pale swell of her stomach, the other drawing patterns in the air. Her eyes were outlined in heavy black kohl, the lids painted a bright metallic green that only served to emphasise their lashless pinkness, the pink-brown splatter of her freckles.
‘Dance with me,’ she shouted, her accent pure Saxon bumpkin, and Emmeline did not know whether to laugh or to burst into tears. The Saxon Salome put her arms around Emmeline’s waist, pulling her close. Emmeline thought of the Russian curses Irina had taught her and, extracting herself, shook her head.
‘Sorry,’ she mouthed above the music. ‘Maybe next time.’
Salome curled her lip. ‘Next time you may not be so lucky,’ she said and, raising her arms above her head, she gyrated haughtily away.
Balz Inc. was on the fourth floor of a building at the wrong end of Friedrichstrasse. Aside from a harassed-looking typist in an alcove on the landing, Herr Balz appeared to be the company’s sole employee. His desk was in the middle of the room, a cluttered clearing in a forest of filing cabinets. Drawers gaped, battered papers and cardboard files pushing up through the gaps like weeds, and portfolios of every size were piled in towers on top of the cabinets and wedged into the narrow spaces between them.
‘We file by style,’ Balz said airily. There was a large smudge on the right lens of his glasses. ‘What is your style?’
‘I don’t really have one. I can do anything your clients want.’
‘Which would be fine, only most of them only know what they want when they see it. That’s your job, to dramatise the possible.’ He leafed unenthusiastically through her portfolio. ‘The Modernist style is very now. Bold shapes, bright colours. Think picture-book illustrations for grown-ups. Do you have anything like that?’
‘No, but I can do it. Tell me what you want me to copy and I’ll copy it.’
‘My dear girl, we don’t “copy” here. We provide our clients with innovative advertising solutions. Of course the Belle-Époque is always popular. A touch of French glamour.’
‘I could do Belle-Époque.’
‘I suppose at Zuerst it was mostly the New Woman, was it? Some of our clients are very hot on the New Woman.’
‘You mean like this?’ Taking a torn envelope from Balz’s desk, Emmeline sketched a Zuerst girl in a tennis dress on the back. Balz looked at it. Then, sighing, he took off his glasses and rubbed them with the end of his tie.
‘I can deal with no references, you’re not the first,’ he said. ‘But no drawings?’
Emmeline thought of Horst, tearing her drawing of the police officer snorting cocaine from the Zuerst girl’s outstretched hand into tiny pieces. ‘They keep all the drawings,’ she said.
Balz sighed. ‘Six months at Zuerst magazine?’
‘That’s right.’
He drummed his fingers on the desk. Then, yanking open a drawer, he extracted a clutch of crumpled papers. ‘You’ll need to sign this.’
Emmeline stared at the mimeographed form. ‘You’re taking me on?’
‘I can’t promise anything. But Zuerst magazine, it’s new. People like new.’
‘But that’s—thank you.’
Balz shrugged. ‘Don’t thank me yet. We’ll keep your portfolio. If there’s any interest we get in touch, you do some preliminary sketches—gratis, of course—and the client considers his options. If you get the job we negotiate your fee, you deliver the artwork, if the client’s happy you get paid. Minus our commission at forty per cent.’
‘Forty per cent?’
‘Artists are two a penny in Berlin, Fräulein. Without the knowhow your picture’s just a pretty piece of paper.’
She signed the form. As she walked away without her portfolio she felt uneasy, incomplete, but as she turned on to Unter den Linden the sun came out from behind a cloud and her spirits lifted. All along the wide street the trees were hazy green and studded with the scarlet nubs of new buds. She stopped, looking up, and for the first time in months the sunshine was warm on her face.
Emmeline had never really noticed how many advertisements there were in Berlin. Not just in the night-time daz
zle of flashing logos and slogans but all day and at every turn, painted on the sides of buildings and pasted on to trams and buses and stuck up in the windows of shops and on the sides of telephone boxes and clock towers and the illuminated advertising pillars on almost every street. You could not cross a road in central Berlin without falling over the Nigrin chimney sweep or a person-sized box of soap flakes or a man in a sandwich board declaring that the suits were better value at Weitz’s. Everywhere you looked someone was trying to sell you something.
And yet at the same time it was as if none of it was there at all. Opposite Emmeline’s building, near the bus stop, there was a billboard on a blank wall. The poster was changed regularly but the latest one showed a blond woman baring perfectly white teeth. FOR A CONFIDENT SMILE, the poster declared, and underneath, in bigger letters, REINWEISS DENTAL CREAM. It was a busy corner, people walked past it all the time, but no one seemed to see it. Their eyes slid over the poster as they slid over the streetlamps or the edges of the pavement, keeping them steady, but their faces stayed folded up, as though everything that mattered was happening inside their heads.
One morning, sitting on the tram, Emmeline found herself drawing the Reinweiss woman. She worked quickly, catching the tilt of her head, the neat waves of her blond hair, then, clamped between the woman’s perfect teeth, she drew a toothbrush, the handle jutting from her mouth. She drew white foam spilling from between her lips and dribbling down her chin and, peeking from between her clasped hands, an unscrewed tube of dental cream, the squeezed-out paste snaking in a thick worm of white down her fingers.
It was funny. It was just not quite as funny as she had imagined.
On Saturday afternoon Dora knocked on Emmeline’s door. She was wearing canvas trousers and carrying two lumpy-looking string bags. A loaf of bread wrapped in paper protruded from one, something green and leafy from the other. Emmeline was hazy about vegetables. Dora put the bags down. The handles of the bags had striped her palms with red.