by Clare Clark
‘They look heavy,’ Emmeline said.
Dora grinned. ‘It’s Oma’s birthday today. I may have overdone it.’
‘Are you having a party?’
‘Not unless you want to come. Do you?’
Emmeline thought of the diary she had written as a schoolgirl in Switzerland, the elaborate fantasies she had spun about her glittering future in Berlin. Behind her in the kitchen the tap dripped, steady as a clock.
‘Of course I do,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’
‘We’ll see you later, then. Seven o’clock?’
Emmeline was late. She had not meant to be, she had spent most of the afternoon lying on her bed playing patience, but it was only when it was time to go upstairs that she realised she had nothing to take with her and she had to run out to Veniero’s, the Italian café on the corner of Möllstrasse, and persuade them to sell her a fat-bellied bottle of Chianti in a woven basket.
‘Sorry,’ she said, handing it to Dora. ‘It was meant to be flowers.’
Dora grinned. ‘Good choice. Flowers taste awful.’ She stepped back to let Emmeline in. It was barely dusk but inside the little flat night had already fallen. A lamp burned in one corner and the table was bright with candles. The room smelled deliciously of herbs and slow-braised meat. Dora put the bottle of wine on the table, then held out a hand to help her grandmother up from the armchair wedged in by the bedroom door. With the three of them there was hardly room to move.
‘Oma, this is Emmeline who lives downstairs,’ she said. ‘Emmeline, this is my grandmother.’
Dora’s grandmother was small and bent and very wrinkled, her sparse white hair pulled back into a bun. Emmeline could see the liver spots on her scalp, a patch of purple like a birthmark near her right temple. A wiry tuft of darker hair sprouted from her chin. She peered at Emmeline appraisingly, her eyes sharp as a bird’s.
‘So you’re the one who’s been getting my granddaughter intoxicated?’
Emmeline glanced at Dora, who laughed. The old woman patted Emmeline’s arm.
‘Good for you,’ she said. ‘Dora’s much more fun when she’s tipsy.’
‘What she means is I lose at pinochle,’ Dora said.
‘What I mean is she loses worse than usual. Last time I finished thirty-five pfennigs up.’ The old woman grinned at Emmeline triumphantly, showing a missing front tooth, and despite the sunken cheeks and the wrinkles Emmeline could see exactly what she must have looked like when she was a little girl. Dora shook her head and kissed her grandmother on the top of her head.
‘Pride comes before a fall, little Oma,’ she said. ‘By the time I’m finished with you those thirty-five pfennigs will be a distant memory.’
Dora gave Emmeline the corkscrew and asked her to open the wine. When it was poured they sat at the table and Dora brought out a goulash, its surface cobbled with herb-flecked dumplings. The meat was meltingly tender, the gravy rich with silky slivers of onion, sweet chunks of carrot and turnip and swede. Dora’s grandmother leaned over her bowl, a wide linen napkin tucked into the collar of her dress. Her hands were bones wrapped in a purple-stained tissue of skin. They shook as she raised her spoon, spilling gravy down her chin.
‘Hell,’ she said, clattering the spoon against the side of the bowl.
‘It’s nothing.’ Leaning over, Dora took a corner of her grandmother’s napkin and gently wiped her mouth. ‘Gone.’
The old woman shook her head at Emmeline. ‘Don’t get old. There’s no dignity in getting old.’
‘You’re not old, Oma,’ Dora said. ‘You’re just a messy eater.’
‘Says the girl who goes to work with butter in her hair. Just this week, out of the door and off to work with a great yellow blob of butter in her hair.’
‘I told you already,’ Dora said, ‘all the fashionable Berlin girls wear butter in their hair these days. It’s absolutely the latest thing. Isn’t it, Emmeline?’
‘It is,’ Emmeline agreed gravely. ‘I put some in myself for tonight, only it melted on the stairs.’
‘An occupational hazard,’ Dora said.
‘Not in this building, surely?’ Her grandmother screwed up her face. ‘That stairwell is so cold you’d chip a tooth on your soup.’
‘Soup,’ Dora said. ‘Now that’s a thought. I don’t know about you, Emmeline, but I have a feeling butter’s almost had its day.’
They laughed a lot that evening. When the stew was finished Dora produced an apple tart. The glistening slices of fruit spiralled out from its centre, each golden half-moon baked to a darker brown on its outside edge, as if it had been outlined in ink. There were tiny cups of coffee with cream and sugar like chips of smoky quartz. When they had finished Dora settled her grandmother in the armchair while Emmeline stacked the dishes in the sink.
‘Leave that,’ Dora said.
‘Yes, leave it,’ the old woman said. There was an edge of childish excitement in her voice. ‘Come over here and sit down.’
There was nowhere to sit. Dora’s grandmother patted the arm of her chair.
‘Here,’ she said. Dora was already sitting on the other arm, the arm closest to the wall, her feet inside the chair to balance herself. As Emmeline sat the old woman stroked her granddaughter’s leg absently, as if she were a cat. ‘Ready?’ she demanded.
It was a habit they had got into, Dora told her later, when her grandmother grew too frail for the stairs. Every evening, after supper, the two of them would sit down and Oma would close her eyes and Dora would tell her what she had seen and where she had been, the taste of the air, the colours of the sky and the river and the window boxes, the clouds heaped up like whipped cream or the pink and gold streaks of sunset or the intricate pattern of dots on the pavement as the rain began to fall. The days when the wind chased leaves and bus tickets through the empty streets, or when the air was so warm and thick you could not tell where you ended and the city began.
Suddenly, Dora said, she found herself noticing things, little pieces of the city she could bring home to Oma. The child carrying a loaf so large it looked like the bread had legs. The labourers fifty feet above Alexanderplatz, strolling in their shirtsleeves along the arms of the cranes. The businessman battling with his umbrella blown inside out. The heat from the sausage stand rippling the air so that it was like you were looking through spilled water. The first snowdrops, the first fat stalks of white asparagus, the first glossy chestnuts in their prickly jackets. The woman singing ‘Sempre libera’ at an open window and the white dog with a little wheeled cart where his back legs should be. Fragments of days, of other people’s lives, dropped or forgotten or thrown away, saved like scraps of fabric and tipped each evening into Oma’s lap so that, for a few minutes, the walls of the flat disappeared and she strode through the streets with Dora, sharp-eyed and strong-legged and free.
When Dora finished talking her grandmother was quiet, her eyes closed and her hands folded in her lap. The light was low, the candles almost burned out. Somewhere in the building a man was shouting. There was the smash of something breaking. A door slammed. The old woman opened her eyes. Unfolding her hands, she patted Emmeline on the arm.
‘Your turn,’ she said.
Dora smiled and kissed her on the top of her head. ‘Good try, but you know what the doctor said. It’s late. Time for bed.’
‘Not so late surely,’ the old woman wheedled and Dora laughed.
‘Careful, Emmeline. Any moment now she’ll be demanding we take her dancing.’
‘And why not?’ her grandmother said. ‘Emmeline looks like the dancing sort. Come now, dear, won’t you tell us what it’s like in one of those nightclubs?’
‘Oma,’ Dora protested, and rolled her eyes at Emmeline. ‘Do you see now what I have to put up with?’
Emmeline smiled. She thought of Zanzibar and Mali und Igor and the Cocoanut Club, where the waitresses were slim-hipped and silky and all men, and she wondered if the old lady would be shocked if she knew what went on after dark in the blacked-out b
ackrooms and cellars of Berlin. Somehow she could not imagine it.
‘Next time,’ she said.
The next time she remembered to take flowers. White hyacinths giddy with scent, their juicy stems leaking into the cone of brown paper. It was April by then and the trees along the Spree were foamy with blossom. She picked a branch and some tiny new leaves from the linden tree on the corner, curled and damp and a brilliant chartreuse green. She took her sketchbook. She could not describe things in words like Dora could, so that they lived in your head, but there were other ways to bring the outside in.
The evening was fine. Dora had thrown the window open as wide as it would go and the sounds of children playing and people calling to one another and a band playing something almost familiar on a distant wireless and the smells of other people’s suppers drifted in on the faint breeze.
They sat over supper for a long time, Dora and her grandmother teasing one another and finishing each other’s sentences. The strip of blue sky above the chimney pots turned pink and then lavender and finally indigo. Pots clattered and water coughed and thudded in the pipes. As the last of the children were shouted for and chivvied in, Dora’s grandmother smiled a child’s enormous smile and put her hand on Emmeline’s.
‘Show me,’ she said and Emmeline settled herself on the arm of her chair as if it were something she had done all her life and put her sketchbook in the old woman’s lap. The old woman gazed greedily through her lorgnette as she turned the pages. When they reached the Reinweiss lady with the toothbrush in her mouth she burst into laughter.
‘My father would have approved of her,’ she said. ‘When my sisters and I were little girls he used to tell us that if we didn’t brush our teeth every day we would end up like—what was her name, the famous woman, the one Napoleon Bonaparte had in his bedroom?’
Emmeline shrugged, baffled. ‘Empress Joséphine?’
The old woman laughed so helplessly that Emmeline laughed too, even though she did not know why. ‘Not Joséphine. The portrait. The famous portrait.’
‘She means the Mona Lisa,’ Dora said.
‘The Mona Lisa. He told me that if I didn’t look after my teeth, I would end up like the Mona Lisa. Obliged to smile with my lips shut even when I had my portrait painted by the most famous artist in the world.’
7
The office was warm and airless. Balz spread Emmeline’s drawings over the milk-scummed coffee cups on his desk and studied them thoughtfully.
‘It wouldn’t have to be these ones,’ she said. ‘It could be any portrait, any artist. Whatever they wanted.’
Balz put down the Mona Lisa with her wide white smile and picked up the self-portrait of van Gogh at the easel. Emmeline had copied him from the front of Rachmann’s catalogue, applying the paint in van Gogh’s swirling style, but instead of a paintbrush he brandished a toothbrush. Froth spilled from his mouth and into his beard and his palette was dotted with curls of white dental cream.
‘No one looks at the Reinweiss posters,’ she said. ‘It’s as if they’re not even there. But these are funny. People would notice them. Isn’t that what they want?’
‘Of course.’
‘So why won’t you show them?’
‘Because that’s not how it works. We draw the ideas our clients commission us to draw. We don’t come up with our own.’
‘And what if ours are a million times better than theirs?’
Balz shrugged. ‘Then we still draw theirs. That’s what they pay us for. Besides, Reinweiss dental cream is not one of our clients.’
‘All right. Then I’ll do it.’
‘Do what, exactly?’
‘Take my ideas to the Reinweiss company.’
‘Reinweiss is a product, not a company.’
‘But a company must make it.’
‘Hoesch-Lorenz. In Hamburg.’
‘Then I’ll go to Hamburg. And if they don’t like it I’ll take it somewhere else. It’s not as if Reinweiss is the only dental cream in Germany.’
Balz watched her leave, her cheeks flushed, her drawings clutched under one arm. They both knew she would never go to Hamburg. Emmeline supposed that was the end of that, he would want nothing more to do with her, but two days later she received a letter. Balz had an idea. He asked her to come back.
Cigarettes, Balz said. A simple substitution: cigarettes for toothbrushes, smoke for foam. He had a client who had been trying unsuccessfully to woo the Wahr cigarette company for months. Perhaps this would be the idea that seduced them.
Emmeline was unconvinced. Dental cream was funny. Cigarettes were not. There was a reason why film stars were always photographed smoking, not brushing their teeth. Balz only shrugged. Ideas were free. If she did not want to draw up the concept there were plenty of other artists who would.
‘Who knows?’ he said. ‘This might be just what Wahr has been waiting for.’
‘And if it isn’t?’
‘If it isn’t I’ll buy you a third-class ticket to Hamburg.’
He gave her five days. An idea was like a head cold, he said, somehow it got into the air and before you knew it everyone else had caught it too. For the first two days Emmeline stalked the Nationalgalerie, jotting down every possibility that occurred to her. On the third day she started to paint. She worked late into the night, her world shrunk to a foot-wide circle of light.
It was very late when Dora banged on the door. Frightened, Emmeline hurried to open it, but Dora shook her head.
‘It’s not Oma, she’s fine. She’s sleeping. Can I come in?’
She did not sit down. She stood in front of Emmeline’s easel, arms crossed, her fingers twitching against her elbows. ‘Smoke rings—inspired,’ she said distractedly.
‘Dora, it’s the middle of the night. Do you want to tell me what’s going on?’
Dora frowned, and bit her thumbnail. Then abruptly she sat down. The newspaper had sent her to cover a late-night party at the Opera, thrown in honour of Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes. The room was crowded and halfway through Dora slipped outside, taking refuge in a darkened doorway to scribble down some notes. The two men in dinner jackets who emerged from a side door to stand beneath a streetlamp did not see her. Dora recognised the art dealer Zeckendorf, a fixture of the Berlin scene who featured regularly in her column. The other one was slight and sandyhaired, with a distinct Dutch accent. They spoke urgently, their voices low, but Dora could hear every word. They were talking about a deal, a painting sold to a gallery in Amsterdam that was suddenly going to New York instead. The Dutchman was agitated, he kept repeating himself.
‘A month ago, Arendsen was so desperate to acquire the painting he had Rachmann bring it to him in Amsterdam in person,’ he said. ‘A fortnight later he summons de Vries to an emergency meeting. They are seen together at the Rijksmuseum, looking at the van Goghs. Two days after that the deal’s off and the painting’s going to Stransky in New York. You don’t find that suspicious?’
Zeckendorf was expansive, most likely a little drunk. At the parties Dora covered he was usually a little drunk. He waved away the Dutchman’s concerns. Stransky was a dogged little bastard with money to burn, he said, he must have outbid Arendsen, made Rachmann an offer he could not refuse, but the Dutchman shook his head.
‘Or perhaps Arendsen heard about the Cornelius paintings and got cold feet. They say Rachmann did the decent thing and took all four back without a murmur, but four canvases, all of them his, doesn’t that worry you?’
Zeckendorf snorted. ‘What worries me is that you would walk away from a deal like this on the strength of idle rumours. Our painting has five expert authentications, five! What more do you want? Köhler-Schultz and Ruthenberg, de Vries, they’ve all signed on the dotted line.’
‘Köhler-Schultz and de Vries authenticated all four of the disputed Cornelius paintings too. It didn’t stop the gallery sending them back.’
Dora did not hear any more. A couple came out of the theatre and the two men stopped talking abruptl
y and hurried away, but Dora stayed where she was, in the doorway, her notebook forgotten in her hand. She did not know exactly what she had heard but she knew what it meant.
What if some of Matthias Rachmann’s van Goghs were fakes?
Emmeline and Dora talked for a long time that night, sprawled side by side on Emmeline’s bed, sharing a bottle of wine Dora had smuggled out of the party.
‘Medicinal,’ Dora said. ‘For the shock.’
They drank it out of teacups because there were no clean glasses, and smoked the packet of Wahr cigarettes that Balz had given Emmeline because an artist should feel an emotional connection with her subject. Emmeline thought he was joking until she smoked one and nearly coughed up her lungs on the first puff. Dora smoked rapidly, breathlessly, hardly able to contain her excitement. If she could prove that some of the most expensive and sought-after paintings of modern times were forgeries, well, it would be the scoop of the century.
‘If I can just get someone at the Cornelius to speak on the record—’
‘Except they never will,’ Emmeline said flatly. ‘Even if the gallery’s right and the four paintings they sent back are fakes, the art world is like the Freemasons without the funny handshakes, it looks after its own. No one talks.’
‘But the Cornelius Gallery have done the decent thing; they’re protecting the market. Why wouldn’t they want people to know that?’
‘Because they want to protect the market. If some of the most expensive pictures in history turn out to be forgeries, buyers will run a mile.’
‘As well they should. These paintings go for seventy, eighty thousand marks.’
‘Exactly! Why would the Cornelius risk losing sales like that? Besides, they took six of Rachmann’s paintings for the show. They only rejected four.’
Dora was silent, twisting round to lie on her back. ‘So if they won’t talk, then who?’ Upside down, her chin suddenly a clumsy nose, her face looked slack-jawed and adenoidal. ‘Don’t laugh. I’m not giving up before I’ve even started.’