In the Full Light of the Sun

by Clare Clark

  ‘You’d think the risk of doing nothing was higher.’

  ‘If they do nothing they can’t lose. Staking two hundred and fifty thousand marks on a test tube is a serious gamble.’

  Mina is silent as we leave the gallery, gnawing away at that poor lip of hers. I suggest a walk in the Tiergarten, it is always cooler there than anywhere else in Berlin, and she nods but she’s not really listening. We take the double-decker bus along Unter den Linden. Mina sits at the front of the upper deck and stares out of the window. All down the wide boulevard the buildings are hung with swastikas. I suppose I should be pointing out the sights as we pass them, the Zeughaus, the Berlin State Opera, but instead I look up at the trees. The sunlight plays through the leaves and makes patterns on the seats of the bus, it is like being underwater. Someone told me that the Nazis mean to cut the lindens down to make more room for their goose-stepping parades. I wish I could believe it wasn’t true.

  The bus slows as it approaches the Brandenburg Gate and, as it squeezes between the central pillars, I suck my stomach and my elbows in, I cannot help it, the gap seems too narrow to pass through, and when I look at Mina she is sucked in too, her arms folded tight over her chest, and I laugh.

  ‘Breathe in,’ I say and she looks down at herself and back at me, and as the bus shudders forward it’s as if something has broken open inside me, I cannot stop it, the laughter spills out of me until I am helpless with it and Mina laughs too, astonished, she can hardly believe what she is seeing, and her laughter makes me laugh again, and it is only when the conductor rings the bell that we see that we have reached our stop and, still laughing, we stumble down the steps and out into the bright hot noon.

  Monday 31 July

  I go to the office early, the sketchbook safely tucked inside my briefcase. I slept poorly last night, I was afraid I would find other things missing from Rachmann’s tea chest, but, thank God, everything’s there. I put the items back carefully, one by one, marking them off against the docket.

  I pause at a large photograph in a cardboard mount. I remember it. A print of a van Gogh self-portrait, it was the only piece of evidence directly pertaining to van Gogh that the police found in Gregor Rachmann’s studio. It was never shown in court. The idea that the self-portrait Matthias sold to Stransky might have been copied from the print was scuppered the moment the police saw a print of the Stranksy painting. The two portraits were quite different.

  Gregor Rachmann told the police that the self-portrait in the photograph belonged to Köhler-Schultz, or, more accurately, to his son, part of a trust set up for the boy when Köhler-Schultz divorced his mother. According to Gregor, the photograph had been a present from Köhler-Schultz to Matthias, but when I mentioned the photograph to Köhler-Schultz, just to tie up loose ends, he knew nothing about it. Most likely, he said, Matthias had arranged the photograph for insurance purposes. When Julius finally convinced his ex-wife that the painting should remain in his collection until his son was of an age to inherit it, it was Matthias who had arranged to have it brought back from Munich to Berlin.

  ‘My ex-wife didn’t want me to have it, she wanted it locked up in a vault,’ he said. ‘We had to make sure Matthias did everything by the book.’

  I never thought to doubt Köhler-Schultz’s explanation. The photograph had no bearing on the case, I was content to account for it and move on. It is only now, as I slip it into the tea chest, that I wonder why an insurance company would require a photograph enlarged to sixteen inches by nine.

  I run my pen down the docket, checking off the ticks. It’s all there. Only one thing puzzles me. The sketchbook is not listed. I go through the docket again more slowly but it’s not there. Is it possible that Mina was right all along, that it was A’s and she hid it where Gerda would not find it, but if so who gave it to her, where did she get it?

  I open the book, look once again at the flyleaf, but there is no name, only BERLIN and the date. I turn the pages, looking at the faces. It’s stupid, I know, but I want to see them as Mina saw them, through A’s eyes.

  Halfway through the book, the style changes. A series of heads, rough peasant faces with noses like potatoes and wise, weary eyes. A woman in a scarf with her hands in the earth. A cluster of tumbledown cottages. Some of the pages have been cut out, only the narrowed strip of paper remains. Then, near the back, on a loose sheet tucked between the pages, haystacks under a roiling sky. I stare at it. The sketch is boxed by pencil lines and divided by a grid, four pencil lines up and down and diagonally, all intersecting in the middle, like looking through a window, and there is no colour in it, but I would know it anywhere. I spent the whole of the first trial staring at it when I was trying to think.

  The knock startles me. I push the drawing hurriedly into a drawer. ‘Yes?’

  It’s Böhm. ‘I’m sorry to bother you,’ he says. ‘I was just wondering when you thought you might be able to move your crates.’

  His civility shames me. He’s had those crates for almost a month. When I apologise and tell him that I’m still waiting to hear from Rachmann he nods.

  ‘Of course,’ he says. ‘Just as soon as you can.’ It’s only as he turns to go that I think of the sketchbook. Köhler-Schultz and Böhm have been friends for years.

  ‘A quick question,’ I say, paging through the sketchbook for Köhler-Schultz’s portrait. ‘I don’t suppose you have any idea who might have drawn this?’

  Böhm stares at it. ‘Good God. Where did you get this?’

  ‘You know it?’

  Böhm is silent. He doesn’t deny it. I explain about the tea chest.

  ‘I don’t know how it came to be among Gregor Rachmann’s things, but I think it might shed some light on the case,’ I say. ‘There are copies of van Goghs in it: I’m pretty certain one of them is a sketch of a painting Rachmann sold. If I could just find out whose it is, where it came from—’

  ‘No,’ Böhm says firmly, putting the sketchbook on my desk. ‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, but this has nothing to do with Rachmann.’

  ‘How can you be so sure?’

  Böhm is silent. ‘Because it belonged to a client of mine,’ he says reluctantly.

  ‘But that’s impossible. How did it get into Gregor Rachmann’s box?’

  Böhm sighs. He is bound by his duty of secrecy. The sketchbook was discovered at Rachmann’s gallery when the scandal first broke, he tells me. When allegations were made about his client’s relationship with Gregor Rachmann, she was arrested.

  ‘They were lovers?’

  ‘Of course not. The allegations were malicious and without foundation.’

  ‘The police files didn’t declare any arrests.’

  ‘My client’s arrest was unlawful. The police agreed to strike it from the record.’

  I raise an eyebrow. Böhm looks at me blandly. He must have threatened the police with a formal complaint. Those were the days. Even so, it is still quite something to have magicked Gregor Rachmann’s maybe-lover into thin air.

  ‘I’d be happy to arrange for its return,’ he says but I shake my head.

  ‘That’s kind but you know how it is. Safer to go through the proper channels.’

  He nods. I can tell from the way he looks at the sketchbook he wishes he could take it with him. I spend the afternoon studying the drawings more closely. I can’t believe Böhm succeeded in suppressing it, a book containing copies of van Goghs made by a woman alleged to be Gregor Rachmann’s lover. If the prosecution had got hold of it Matthias wouldn’t have stood a chance.

  I look for a long time at the sketch of the haystacks, its grid of careful lines. It is like looking through a window. Haystacks was one of the paintings smuggled to The Hague in 1929. Hendriksen declared it genuine, then bought it for himself. No one knows how much he paid. I remember very little of Hendriksen’s testimony—when taken together, pretension and self-importance are a powerful anaesthetic—but what I do remember is the expression on his face when de Vries took the stand and declared five of
Rachmann’s van Goghs to be genuine after all.

  One of those five was Haystacks.

  Wednesday 2 August

  More scraps and peelings of work. The blessedly irresolute Frau Craemer is changing her will again. We will not starve, or not yet. At home I’m hardly through the door before Mina is tugging at my sleeve. She has something to ask me, she says, it cannot wait. I kick at a pair of discarded sandals.

  ‘I’ll break my neck on these things one day,’ I say and Mina sweeps them up by the straps and kisses me on the cheek.

  ‘Don’t be cross, Uncle Frank,’ she says and I glance at Gerda but she only smiles a little and goes into the kitchen. She used to smile at me like that in the old days when she had a secret. I want to go after her. Instead I roll my eyes at Mina.

  ‘So what’s all this about?’ I ask and she’s off, the words running so fast her tongue can barely keep up with them, something about a competition at her school, how the students must make an argument for a particular area of scientific discovery that would bring great honour to Germany, something that has not yet been done, and the best idea will win a prize and if hers was the best they would have to change their minds and let her go back, they’d just have to, so all summer she’s been trying and trying to think of something, not just curing diseases or faster trains because that’s what everyone will do, but then she found out about the paintings and about how the Dutch wanted to humiliate Germany by telling the world they wasted quarter of a million marks on a picture that wasn’t even by van Gogh and there was no science Germany could use to prove them wrong, and she realised that this was it, this was something science had to work out how to do, so she went to the library, the big one on Oranienburger Strasse, she went through everything they have, even the never-looked-at books they keep in the basement, and there wasn’t a single one on the science of pictures, but it didn’t matter because the woman there told her about the library at the Nationalgalerie that keeps every art book ever written, or almost every one, and anyone can go there, as long as there’s no other library that can help, so the librarian wrote a letter for her and all they have to do is to telephone for an appointment.

  ‘So can we?’ she asks breathlessly and, before I can reply, she says she has the number, the librarian gave it to her, and she could go tomorrow, she remembers the way and anyway everyone in Berlin knows where the Nationalgalerie is, and she’s so fizzy with excitement that she can’t keep from bouncing up and down. I smile lopsidedly. Her eagerness is agonising.

  ‘All right, all right,’ I say, holding up my hands. ‘We’ll telephone them tomorrow.’

  ‘Tomorrow?’ Her face is stricken. ‘Why not now? Please, Uncle Frank? Please?’ She holds her hands up to me as though she’s praying, and I laugh. She must be putting something in my coffee. Gerda is standing in the doorway.

  ‘Isn’t it supper time?’ I ask and she smiles.

  ‘It’ll keep,’ she says.

  Mina scrabbles her sandals on. We walk together to the corner, Mina straining like a puppy on a lead, but when we reach the kiosk there is a man inside and we have to wait. Mina grimaces and squirms. I have to take her arm to keep her from knocking on the glass.

  He leaves at last and I dial the number Mina gives me. The telephone mouthpiece is unpleasantly warm. The woman who answers offers me an appointment for the following Wednesday. She tells me students under eighteen must be accompanied by an adult. I hesitate, I don’t want Gerda missing one of her precious Wednesdays, perhaps another day, I say, but Mina is frowning at me through the glass, her face screwed up with anxiety, and I tell the woman Wednesday will be fine and give her my name.

  Perhaps I should stop drinking coffee. Less than a month and already I cannot bring myself to disappoint her.

  Saturday 5 August

  I wake to find Gerda sitting on the floor, her knees pulled up against her chest. It is very early, or very late. Moonlight gleams through the thin curtains, touching her with silver. She has pulled the suitcase out from under the bed. The lid is open, clothes spill out. In her hands she holds A’s lop-eared rabbit.

  Pushing myself up on to one elbow, I stroke her hair. She closes her eyes, stretches her neck, pushing against my hand like a cat. I lean down, press my lips lightly against her temple.

  ‘Do you remember that picnic in the Düppel forest when Philip got left behind?’ she murmurs. The words make tiny movements under her skin. I close my eyes and read them with my lips like braille.

  ‘I remember,’ I say. ‘Anke made a home for him in a hollow tree. The next day, when we went back, every other tree was absolutely definitely the one, do you remember? It took the whole morning to find him.’

  When Gerda smiles her cheek presses against mine. ‘I remember.’

  ‘And when we finally found him she cried because it wasn’t fair, that Philip had camped out a whole night in the woods and she never had?’

  Gerda’s soft laugh is almost a sob. I slide my hand over her shoulder and ease her towards me and she turns, her arms reaching up to fold around my neck, and though the embrace is awkward we hold each other tightly and neither of us lets go.

  Wednesday 9 August

  Mina insists on leaving before I have finished my coffee. Punctuality is the politeness of kings, she says loftily, and it’s not just the proverb that is Stefan’s but the angle of her voice. And Germany is a republic, I almost say, but the words die in my mouth. A res publica, a public thing, a state where power rests with the people and their elected representatives. A month ago the NSDAP became Germany’s only legally recognised political party, the Nazi-controlled DAF the only trade union. It’s getting harder to see where it ends.

  In the tram Mina gets out her notebook. She has a list of questions, she wants to know if there is anything she has forgotten. From her place by the door, a middle-aged woman glares at us. She looks worn and exhausted and I rise and offer her my seat but she recoils, clutching her bag against her chest.

  ‘I’m not sitting where one of your kind’s sat,’ she hisses. The other people on the tram look at their laps or out of the window. Nobody says anything. Mina and I travel the rest of the way in silence.

  When we get there the Nationalgalerie is not yet open.

  ‘About that woman—’ I start to say but Mina scowls at me.

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ she says and stamps away towards the river. I sit on a bench in the shade. It’s already stickily hot, the air thick with all the things we can’t say. Perhaps I should ask Mina why she cares so much about a competition she’ll never be able to enter but I know I won’t. Not when I already know the answer.

  When the gallery finally opens we show our papers and go downstairs to the basement. The library is low-ceilinged and crowded with metal stacks pushed in too close together. There’s no one else here. The wired-glass windows run in narrow strips along the tops of the walls like sliced-out cornices. When Gerda said she would bring Mina, that I would be needed at work, I told her that I wanted to come, that I hoped the library might know who the sketchbook belonged to. I don’t imagine she believed me—it’s a library, not a detective agency—but though she hesitated she didn’t protest. Her Wednesdays with the other mothers mean more to her than she is willing to admit.

  I have given Mina the names of the experts who testified at Rachmann’s trial but beyond that she doesn’t want my help. I’m sorry, she said, but it has to be mine. She shows the list to the grey-haired librarian who studies it, then takes her over to a wall of narrow wooden drawers. As they leaf through the index cards Mina looks over her shoulder and frowns at me to go away, so I turn and walk away through the stacks. Some of the shelves are newly emptied: in the dust I can see the ghosts of the books that have gone.

  At the end of the room there is a door with LIBRARY DIRECTOR painted on it in neat white letters. I’m only a few feet away when it bangs open and a man in shirtsleeves strides out, pushing his way past me into the stacks. He is greyer than when I last saw him but I
know him immediately: Gustav Stemler. Through the open door I see a jacket slung over the back of a chair, a curl of smoke from a half-smoked cigarette in the ashtray. So that’s what happened to him. They did not boot him out. They buried him alive.

  I wait for him to return. ‘Herr Direktor, might I have a quick word?’

  He frowns at me. ‘Have we met?’

  ‘Frank Berszacki. I defended Matthias Rachmann last year.’

  And just like that his face changes. His gaze slips uneasily around the library. ‘Berszacki, of course. Don’t tell me there’s to be another trial?’

  ‘No. I’m afraid that ship has sailed. For him and for me.’ A different kind of look passes between us. He’s Jewish, I know it now for certain. ‘Do you have a moment?’

  He shows me into his office. As I tell him about Mina and her project I can feel his impatience, he is waiting for his moment to refuse me, so I do what I would do with a recalcitrant witness, I sigh and then I shake my head. There are times when you want a witness to believe you have a brain like a box of knives. Mostly, though, bafflement is better. Witnesses like to explain. So I ask him how it was that the experts in the Rachmann trial could change their minds as they did, how some of the most expensive pictures in the world could be reduced overnight to worthless daubs and then, just as suddenly, magically restored to masterpieces.

  ‘How can it be,’ I ask, mystified, ‘that science, objective technical analysis, remains so approximate that even today there is no definitive means to prove those paintings genuine or fake?’

  And Stemler bites. ‘You think it was a failure of science?’ he scoffs. ‘It never occurred to you that the technical experts might have had other reasons to be judicious with their testimony?’