by Clare Clark
‘I’m not laughing, I’m thinking.’
‘What about this de Vries? He’s not a dealer, so he won’t be worried about sales.’
‘Except people like de Vries broker sales all the time. They authenticate paintings, then put buyers and sellers together and take a fat commission.’
‘Isn’t that a conflict of interest?’
‘Absolutely, but it’s how it’s always worked. Who knows which of those paintings de Vries has made money from? Which, by the way, would have to be returned if he admitted that they were fakes, which he won’t. He authenticated all four of them in the first place. And included them in his catalogue raisonné, which has taken him a mere decade to complete. So any admission of error—’
‘Fine,’ Dora said, frowning. ‘Not him. What about Köhler-Schultz?’
Emmeline shook her head. She had told Dora about dancing with Matthias at Julius’s house, though not what happened afterwards. ‘I can’t see him talking either. He and Matthias—let’s just say I spent that whole evening trying to work out what was going on between them.’
Dora blinked. ‘You’re not saying they were—’
‘Lovers? I don’t think so. But there was something in the way Julius watched Matthias, that dazed, naked look people have when they’re in love.’
‘Naked?’
‘Exposed. You know, like they’ve forgotten to put their outside face on.’
Dora smiled. ‘Sometimes I think you notice everything.’
‘God, I wish. Most of the time I’m blind as a bat.’ Squirming on to her stomach, Emmeline took two cigarettes from the pack and put them between her lips. She lit them with a single match, sucking redness into the tips, and handed one to Dora. For a moment they smoked in silence. Dora closed her eyes to think better. Suddenly she opened them and sat up.
‘What about the Russian prince, the one who smuggled them out of Moscow? The only reason no one knows anything about where these pictures came from is because Rachmann won’t say who he is. So if we could find him—’
‘How? I mean, where would you start?’
‘He has to be somewhere. A fugitive prince can’t just disappear into thin air.’
‘He can if he doesn’t want to be found.’
‘And why would he want that, unless his famous van Goghs are actually forgeries? In which case we have to find him. It’s in the public interest.’
‘Or perhaps he’s just afraid for his family. Horrible things are happening in Russia. What if exposing him puts innocent lives at risk?’
‘Seriously? You’d let someone rip off the art world for hundreds of thousands of marks, just because he has a family?’ Dora upended the wine bottle into her cup but it was empty. ‘Oh God, it’s so late. How late is it?’
Emmeline peered at the clock. ‘Quarter past three.’
‘No, it can’t be, I have to be up at half past seven.’ Grimacing, Dora fumbled for her shoes. Her dress was rumpled, and her hair, and there were smudges of mascara under her eyes. Emmeline’s heart was suddenly too big for her chest. She wanted to slide her hand on to Dora’s thigh, to feel the softness of her skin against her mouth, but though her body was liquid with wanting she did not move. Whatever it was, this full-up dizzy drowning feeling, it could not be reduced to that. She could feel the throb of her pulse in her throat.
‘I don’t even know why I’m going,’ Dora said. ‘I won’t sleep.’
‘You’re going so I can.’
‘So selfish.’ Smiling, she bent down and touched her lips lightly to Emmeline’s cheek. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’
‘It’s tomorrow now.’
‘Don’t say that. If you don’t say it, it’s not really true.’
Curled in her bed, Emmeline hugged her pillow, listening to Dora’s footsteps, the creak and click of the front door. All this time she had been only two floors up. Even the blindest bats were not as blind as that.
Dora tried everyone but, though they had all heard the rumours, nobody would talk. No one wanted to admit that forgeries even existed. The Cornelius Gallery had expressed doubts over a few paintings, so what? Rachmann had done what any respectable dealer in the circumstances would do and taken the pictures back. That was the end of it. Besides, who was to say that the Cornelius was right? The Rachmann paintings had all been properly authenticated, most of them several times. There were plenty of experts willing to swear that they were absolutely genuine. That was the business of art. There were always more opinions than anyone knew what to do with.
Pieter de Vries did not answer Dora’s letters. His office in the Netherlands told her to direct any questions about the catalogue raisonné to his publishers. His publishers insisted that she talk to his office. Julius Köhler-Schultz was on a lecture tour in the United States with his wife. Emmeline could not imagine tiny Amelia Köhler-Schultz in America, where everything was ten times the size it was in Germany. Even Julius would be small in America.
‘She was an absolute dragon, the housekeeper,’ Dora said. ‘Wouldn’t even tell me when they were coming back.’
‘I can ring and ask her, if you like?’ Emmeline offered. ‘She knows me.’
‘You’d really do that? I thought you disapproved of my journalist’s ethics.’
‘I approve of you. We’ll cross your ethics when we come to them.’
But Dora’s letter to Matthias made Emmeline uneasy. Typed on purloined Merkur headed writing paper, its tone was both sycophantic and faintly threatening. She had recently been approached by an art world insider, Dora wrote, with a startling story. Her newspaper was not in the business of publishing unsubstantiated allegations but, given Herr Rachmann’s public profile, it would surely not be long before another, less scrupulous rag splashed them all over the front pages. The subsequent scandal, however riddled with inaccuracies, would cause irreparable damage to his reputation. Would he not prefer to put his side of the story, exclusively, to the readers of the Merkur?
She received a two-line reply signed in his absence by his assistant. Herr Rachmann was unable to grant her request for an interview. Any requests for publicity materials should be directed to the gallery’s press office.
As for the Russian, there were rumours, but Dora could not find anyone who had ever actually met him or knew of anyone who had. Certainly no one knew his name. Among Anton’s coterie of gallery assistants it was generally agreed that he and Rachmann were lovers but, as Anton was the first to admit, that was always their explanation for everything.
8
Emmeline opened Balz’s letter reluctantly, expecting a third-class ticket to Hamburg. Instead she was summoned to his office. The Wahr people loved her idea, they wanted it everywhere, on posters and cigarette cards and displays in tobacconist shops. They wanted to start straight away.
The man from the advertising agency was pale and twitchy, with a rabbit’s pink eyes.
‘What kind of a person is your product, that’s the question,’ he said, and when she looked at him blankly he nodded in satisfaction. The Wahr cigarette, he said, was a sophisticated man about town. Suave, rich, cosmopolitan, young but not too young, accustomed to the finer things in life. He was not a melting Norwegian madman screaming on a bridge. And he was most definitively not a Dutch madman who cut off his own ear.
‘But van Gogh’s one of the best,’ Emmeline protested.
‘A suicidal self-mutilating lunatic. Does that sound like the Wahr man to you?’
‘No, but then it doesn’t sound like van Gogh. That madman stuff, it’s a myth. If you read his letters, you’ll see—’
He cut her off with a shrug. ‘If the Wahr customer thinks van Gogh’s a madman then he’s a madman. And it isn’t good for business.’
Women were not good for business either. He turned down the Mona Lisa and Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring with her toothbrush in her headwrap, and, though he hesitated over the Velázquez Venus, it was plain his curiosity was not commercial. The six he finally settled on were, in Emmeline
’s opinion, the dullest of the lot. But when he left and Balz handed her the envelope containing her advance, she discovered she did not give a fig. Just having the money in her pocket made her giddy.
At home she went straight to Dora’s flat. ‘Dinner’s on me,’ she announced triumphantly. ‘A table for three at Veniero’s.’
‘Veniero’s? But we can’t, not with Oma, what about the stairs?’
‘Not there. Here. Tonight the mountain comes to Muhammad.’
Or the mountain’s sons, at any rate. Marcello Veniero, seventy years old and at least as wide as he was tall, got out of breath climbing the one step from the street to his restaurant. But he sent his boys, both grown men, who brought platters of scarlet tomatoes and creamy mozzarella, rose-pink slivers of Parma ham, dark red radicchio leaves stuffed with goat’s cheese and herbs, balls of saffron arancini. They brought garlicky spaghettini with breadcrumbs and anchovies, bowls of green beans and spinach, flattened fillets of chicken striped black from the grill, the hot dishes wrapped in towels to keep them warm. Squeezing into Dora’s tiny flat, they covered the table with a starched white cloth and set it with tall glasses and heavy silver cutlery, with white napkins and red candles and bottles of pale vinegar and green-gold olive oil. When everything was ready Emmeline poured the wine and the three women raised their glasses and toasted the Veniero family and Wahr cigarettes.
They ate until their bellies groaned, licking the oil from their fingers and wiping their plates with chunks of warm bread studded with rosemary and crystals of salt.
‘In parts of Italy they still harvest the salt like the Etruscans, in pans cut into the rocks beside the sea,’ Oma said. ‘They call it white gold.’
Dora laughed, her cheeks flushed with wine. ‘You wait. One more glass of wine and she’ll be telling you that even the poverty in Italy is beautiful.’
‘Italians know how to be happy, Dodo. They have the sun in their bones.’
‘And Germans?’
‘Coal dust and potatoes.’
Emmeline smiled. It made her happy to see Dora laugh. Since the disappointment of the Rachmann story she had grown smaller somehow, like a doll whose sawdust had leaked. She had tried to talk to her editor, had begged for an apprenticeship on the news desk, she had ideas, plenty of them, but he smiled, shaking his head, cutting her off before she could tell him even one.
‘Do you know the secret of your success, my dear?’ he said. ‘You don’t attract attention. No one sees you. Invaluable on the social pages, catastrophic in news.’
She would have resigned there and then but she thought of the bills and the queues outside the unemployment office and the hours and hours she had spent failing to persuade anyone to talk to her about Matthias Rachmann and she went back to her desk before he could decide to cut her pay. Stuff the moral high ground, she told Emmeline later with a weary laugh. By the end of each day she could barely make it up the stairs to the flat.
‘Have you ever been to Italy?’ Dora asked Emmeline.
‘Never.’
‘Me neither. We’ll go together, shall we, when you’re a millionaire advertising tycoon and I’ve used up every adjective ever invented to describe a party dress?’
‘Surely we don’t have to wait till then? We’ll be ancient.’
‘Speak for yourself. According to my calculations I’ll be done by next week.’
The candles burned low. Oma was falling asleep. Her head nodded forwards, then jerked up again. She blinked, rubbing her eyes with her knuckles, but before her hands found her lap her eyes were closing again, her mouth falling open. Dora smiled, rolling her eyes at Emmeline, and slid her chair sideways till it touched her grandmother’s. When she put her arm around her the old woman murmured something, lifting her face towards Dora, but she did not wake. Dora kissed her forehead and she softened, tucking herself into the crook of Dora’s shoulder, one gnarled hand against her cheek, the other abandoned in Dora’s lap.
Reflexively Emmeline reached for the paper that had wrapped the bread. It was crumpled and pearly with oil but she used it anyway, the moment so strong in her that the pencil moved fluidly over the paper without thinking, the marks already familiar before they were made.
‘Show me,’ Dora asked quietly but Emmeline shook her head. Without looking at it she tucked the drawing into her pocket.
‘It’s nothing,’ she said.
Dora made a face at her, resting her cheek lightly on her grandmother’s head. ‘It’s not nothing. It’s us. I’m sure that gives us some kind of rights.’
‘None whatsoever.’
‘You could still let me see it.’
‘Not yet. When it’s finished.’
‘That’s what you always say. You never show me anything.’
‘What are you talking about? I show you things all the time.’
‘Only your advertisements. I mean, they’re funny and brilliant, of course they are, but they’re not yours. They’re not real.’
Emmeline was silent.
‘Show me something of yours,’ Dora said softly.
‘I can’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because there’s nothing to show!’ The exclamation made the candle flame gutter. Emmeline watched it as it steadied, the dark hollow at its heart. ‘I haven’t done anything for months. I—I don’t seem to know how.’
‘So all this time—’
‘Nothing. Nothing good, anyway.’
Dora looked at Emmeline. Then, careful not to wake her, she detached herself from her sleeping grandmother and leaned across the table, putting her hand on Emmeline’s. ‘Then you just have to keep going.’
Emmeline did not answer. She kept staring at the candle flame, burning the glare of it on to her eyes as Dora ran her thumb over the back of her hand, tracing the fan of bones beneath the skin. She did not want to talk about her failures. She wanted to take Dora in her arms and kiss her until the stars sang.
Dora squeezed Emmeline’s hand lightly, then held hers out, palm up. ‘Give it to me,’ she ordered. ‘Give me the drawing.’
Emmeline wanted to take Dora’s hand in hers, to put against her cheek, but the fear was too strong. Instead she put the folded paper in her outstretched palm and bowed her head, covering her face with her hands. She did not want to see Dora look. Behind her closed eyelids the candle flames gleamed, bright stripes of scarlet in the blackness.
‘Oh, Em,’ Dora murmured. ‘You can’t give up, not ever. I won’t let you.’
Emmeline looked up. Dora was staring at her, her eyes fierce and bright. ‘It’s just a scribble,’ she said.
‘But it isn’t, that’s the whole point,’ Dora insisted. ‘There’s something about it, I don’t know, something raw—’
‘Olive oil?’
‘Not olive oil, you idiot. Love.’
9
The Berlin season was almost over. One of the last of the parties was the opening of an exhibition of photographic portraits, Faces of Our Time, at a ritzy modern gallery on Unter den Linden. Dora found Matthias Rachmann hanging between Max Reinhardt and a naked Josephine Baker, sleek and glossy as an automobile. He leaned unsmiling towards the camera, his chin cupped in one hand, his long fingers against his cheek. Despite his youth he looked imposing, even distinguished. In black and white his eyes were driftwood silver.
‘Photography isn’t art,’ Dora told Emmeline sourly. ‘It’s propaganda.’
A week later the newspapers reported the acquisition by the Nationalgalerie of several van Gogh drawings for their modern collection. The seller? None other than Matthias Rachmann. At the same time, in New York, the painting Dora had overheard Zeckendorf and his Dutch friend discussing, the self-portrait Rachmann had sold to the American dealer, Stransky, had gone on public display: the New York Times declared it an indisputable masterpiece. According to the Berlin newspapers the painting had sold for thirty-two thousand dollars, over one hundred and thirty thousand German marks.
June was stifling, overcast. Swag
s of grey cloud sagged over the city and the famously invigorating Berlin air clung stickily to the skin, soupy and over-breathed. When the sky finally cleared, it was dizzyingly hot. The roads melted and the milk turned and along the wincing glare of the Spree the railings were too hot to touch.
Oma coughed incessantly. They propped open the window as wide as it would go but it only let in more heat and the fetid stink of drains. Dora wanted to send the old woman away to the country, to find a sanatorium with white sheets and breezes, but the doctor was reluctant to move her, he said that the upheaval was too much, and anyway she knew that the sanatoria were not like that, not the state-funded ones where the women slept in wards of twenty and there was never any silence, even in the middle of the night.
Not that there was much silence in the tenement building either. The weather made people argumentative. The nights were ragged, frayed with shouts and sudden smashes. Babies wailed. It was only in the heat-bludgeoned afternoons that a stunned quiet overtook the building. Oma slept a little then. Dora and Emmeline sprawled in the sitting room where they could hear her if she woke, Dora reading or writing, Emmeline with her sketchbook on her lap. She drew everything in the room that summer but mostly she drew Dora, the curves and the planes of her. Line by line, she learned her.
It’s looking at things for a long time that matures you and makes you understand more deeply, van Gogh wrote to his brother. Emmeline marked the page with a linden leaf. In Arles van Gogh had painted the same subjects over and over again, until he no longer knew where he finished and they began, until they were a part of him. In the same letter he wrote The time will come when I’ll have someone.
Oma grew impatient with the two of them. She said she was tired of them always worrying over her, that they should go and have fun. Why were they not picnicking in the Tiergarten or going to the cinema on Alexanderplatz where it was cool and matinée tickets cost only sixty pfennigs? The more they resisted her the more ambitious her suggestions became: the cycling races at the Sports Stadium; the roller coasters at Luna Park; the Rhineland Wine Terrace at Haus Vaterland, where an artificial river flowed indoors and every hour a mechanically operated rainstorm swept through the room amidst a barrage of thunder and lightning. She wanted them to climb to the top of the radio tower, to bathe in the lake at Wannsee. Dora was afraid of heights but she liked to swim and, stubborn as she was, she was not as stubborn as Oma. She told Oma she would bring her some sand in a jam jar.