by Clare Clark
Tuesday 22 August
I need to talk to Böhm. I have to tell him I am moving out, that I can no longer sub-let his office, but when I go upstairs he’s not there, and anyway how can I leave him in the lurch now, after all that has happened? The last time I greeted him on the stairs he stared at me blankly, as though I was speaking in a foreign language.
At supper I’m relieved when Mina rattles on about her project. The Nationalgalerie librarian has arranged for her to meet with one of the gallery’s picture restorers, she wants to ask him how long it will be before scientists can guarantee the provenance of every painting in the world. I nod absently. It’s nearly the end of the school holidays. What will happen to Mina then? The city schools are not safe for Jews and the Jewish ones cost money we don’t have. And at Christmas the lease on the apartment is up and we will have to find somewhere cheaper. Somewhere with just one bedroom.
I don’t have thoughts any more. I have columns of numbers, zeros like looming faces on the credit side and debits that grow bigger every day.
Wednesday 23 August
As I cross the courtyard this morning the caretaker beckons me over and asks me to step inside. Closing the door behind me, he asks me what I know about Alfred Böhm’s political affiliations. I tell him I know nothing, it’s the truth, but he shakes his head as though I am a botched repair. We all have a part to play, he says, and he jerks his head towards the wall behind me. I turn. A new set of cubbyholes, labelled by number, each one with a file. I feel sick.
‘Vigilance, that’s what counts,’ he says with satisfaction. ‘Steady drops wear away stone.’
At supper, as if she reads my thoughts, Gerda asks about Urschel.
‘How are you getting along together, you two?’ she asks and it is only in that moment that I see how much I have left unsaid, how narrow the distinction between omission and betrayal. I look at Gerda and it is as though I am on one bank of a stream and she is on the other, only it is not a stream any more but a rushing river and I cannot see how I am going to get across.
‘I like him,’ I say weakly and I turn to Mina before Gerda can ask anything else. ‘How was your day? What did you do while Aunt Gerda was out this morning?’
‘I went with her. We went to the market. You wouldn’t believe the kittens we saw, Uncle Frank, they were so small, truly, they would have fitted in my hand.’
I look at Gerda, surprised, but she quickly looks away, adjusting her knife and fork on her empty plate. ‘You took Mina to meet your friends?’
Gerda is silent. Then, standing, she begins to pile the plates. ‘Actually I didn’t see them today. Mina, the glasses, please.’
‘Really?’ I ask, concerned. ‘But you’ve hardly missed a Wednesday in years.’
Gerda looks at me helplessly, then picks up the plates and takes them out to the kitchen. Mina follows her with the glasses, the water jug with its chipped spout. I hear Gerda say something, the cough of the pipes as water gushes into the sink. Her shoulders hunched, Mina walks back across the room towards the corridor.
‘Where are you going?’ I say but she doesn’t stop. I hear the click of the bedroom door closing. When I look round Gerda is standing in the doorway.
‘I should have told you before,’ she says. She stares at her hands as, in a flat voice, she tells me she has not had coffee with the other mothers since January. After the Nazis took power she thought it best not to go, she did not want to put her non-Jewish friends in an awkward situation, but then she bumped into one of the women out shopping and she told Gerda that they all missed her, that she must come again, they would not dream of letting her stay away, and so the next Wednesday Gerda went to the café as usual, only the little table that was always reserved for them in the corner was empty. Not one of them had dared to come.
‘I understood,’ she says. ‘They have families to think of, they couldn’t take the risk. I should have told you but I knew how you would worry if I did. I thought it would be better for you—’
I stand up and take her in my arms. She presses her face against my chest as I tell her about Urschel’s arrest, about giving up the office. I tell her I’m afraid we will have to move out of the apartment. I have not wept for years but I weep now, I cannot help myself. Gerda tightens her arms around me and I weep quietly into her hair.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I say and she shakes her head.
‘Hush,’ she says and she holds me as she used to hold Anke, when everything that mattered in the world could be contained inside a single pair of arms.
Tuesday 29 August
I go by myself. Mina wants to come but I tell her it’s work and she doesn’t protest. The studio is in what must once have been a factory, a hulking building in a weedy stretch of waste ground near the docks. I pick my way along a cracked path. Mina asked to look at the sketchbook again last night. She knows it isn’t Anke’s and never was, but somehow knowing hasn’t altered her attachment to it. I understand that well enough. When facts shift their shapes to suit the times it’s only our faith that holds us steady.
The metal door is open. Inside, a hangar-like space is divided between eight or ten artists, barricaded by metal shelving units and rusting bits of machinery. A shop mannequin painted in wild patterns presides over one corner, a foot-wide paper smile glued to her blank face. Light bulbs dangle from the ceiling on fraying cables. The vast windows are grey with dirt and cobwebs but the sunlight still spreads itself in tiled sheets over the cracked cement floor. It must be bone-shrivellingly cold here in winter.
She is arranging prints on a table. When she sees me she crosses her arms. She wears oversized canvas trousers and paint-spattered work boots, and her hair is tied up in a scarf. ‘Herr Frank?’
‘I know. I’m sorry.’ I look down at the prints spread out on the table. A series, a woman and a child, the two of them fitted together like jigsaw pieces. They summon memory like a familiar smell, instantaneously. The impermeable oneness of mother and child, the sense, always, of being on the outside. My heart bursting and aching at the same time.
‘What’s this about?’ she demands. ‘Why have you come here?’
I open my mouth to answer. Then I close it again. The truth is I’m no longer sure. If she did do it, if she was the painter of Rachmann’s fake van Goghs, what exactly is her crime? She only did what our esteemed Reich Minister for Propaganda will soon require all artists in Germany to do: to produce work to an approved form that can be relied upon to elicit the desired public response. It’s already happened to the newspapers; we all know the rules. In February a story would be tolerated provided it observed strictly specified parameters and arrived at the correct conclusion. Six months later the only acceptable news story is a faithful regurgitation of the Party line, untainted by interpretation or imagination, a bundle of stock phrases repeated until the words lose their meaning. If Herr Goebbels has his way every artist in Germany will be a forger or finished.
‘I’m sorry, Fräulein, or is it Frau Dumier now? Congratulations, by the way. Look, I should never have—the name, it was stupid. I’m not here to cause trouble.’
‘Right.’ Her gaze is unnervingly direct. ‘Or to buy, I suppose.’
‘No. That is, I would if I could, one work in particular in your show, I mean, Upstairs IV, I thought that was remarkable, really, but no. I’m sorry.’
‘Me too.’
I watch helplessly as she gathers up the prints. ‘How’s Ivo?’ I say.
‘He’s fine. But I don’t imagine you came here to discuss him either.’ She looks at me, her arms crossed, and her dark eyes seem to see straight through me to the shadows beneath, to pierce skin and bone as if they were water. ‘Then why have you come here, Herr Berszacki? What do you want from me?’
‘Frank, please,’ I say. I mean it as an apology, a sign that I have come in good faith, but when she glares at me I remember Herr Frank, and, flustered, I shake my head. I’m getting this all wrong. ‘Look, I’m sorry, I’m going to leave now. I just want
ed to return this to you.’
I put the sketchbook on the table. I somehow expect her to flinch but she only gapes. ‘Where did you get this?’ she says, opening it. ‘I thought it was lost.’
‘It was. Someone at Alexanderplatz must have misfiled it. It was found among the items seized from Gregor Rachmann’s studio when the state finally released them.’
‘Gregor asked you to give it to me?’ Gregor, the first name summoned without self-consciousness. The speaking of it alters the shape of her: her voice is sharper, shriller, and her eyes scan the room as though she might see him hiding there. Perhaps they were lovers after all.
‘Gregor Rachmann has not been involved. I’m holding his property on his behalf until we can track him down. This turned up when I checked the crates.’
Fräulein Eberhardt pauses at the drawing of the girl with the cropped hair. In the silence I can hear birdsong, the muffled whistle and clatter of a passing train.
‘Herr Böhm would have given this to me, you know,’ she says.
‘I know.’
She studies me. ‘I suppose he told you what happened?’
‘Böhm? Of course not, he told me nothing, he’s your lawyer, he can’t discuss your affairs with me. He’s bound by professional secrecy.’ I’m protesting too much, I can hear it, I know quite well that if Böhm had thought for a moment that I might find out who owned the sketchbook he would never have said what he did, but Fräulein Eberhardt says nothing, only turns the pages. The early drawings touch her, I see the way they move across her face like clouds, changing the light. The van Gogh sketches she flicks through, but when she finds the loose sheets tucked into the back she frowns. Shuffling through them like playing cards she sorts them into two piles on the desk. Most of the drawings go on to the left-hand pile.
She has almost finished when abruptly she stops. Her eyes widen and her ears go back like a cat’s. I glance over her shoulder, the drawing is the haystacks one with the ruled grid. She puts it down, finger and thumb calipering a diagonal line. Then, turning to scan the metal shelves behind her, she pulls out an oversized book and hefts it on to the table between us. There is a painting of van Gogh on the cover. Gaunt and grey, his orange hair cropped almost to his skull, he stares at his easel like a prisoner with no hope of reprieve. Fräulein Eberhardt flips through the pages until she finds what she is looking for.
‘Shit,’ she says.
The book plate shows a pen-and-ink drawing of two poplar trees by a path, a rocky outcrop rising behind them. Someone has marked up the drawing in pencil. A grid of four lines, horizontal, vertical and two diagonals, dividing the drawings into eight equal segments.
‘Was there a Two Poplars among the paintings Matthias sold?’ she asks. ‘Because there was a Haystacks, I’ve seen it. A reproduction, anyway.’
I think of the five paintings de Vries changed his mind about, the day after Hendriksen got to him. Three of the pictures were in the courtroom. One showed two poplars by a path, a rocky outcrop rising behind them.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘There was a Two Poplars.’
Fräulein Eberhardt closes her eyes. Her face is stiff, her lips pressed into a line, when she puts a hand to her temples I’m afraid she might cry, and suddenly I wonder if she is playing me, if she has been playing me all along.
‘But then I think perhaps you knew that already,’ I say.
Fräulein Eberhardt is silent. She rubs her forehead, then looks at me steadily, wearily. ‘You’re wrong. I didn’t know. I didn’t know any of it. I thought Matthias . . . I thought he was the scapegoat, but he knew they were fakes. He knew all along.’
‘What possible evidence do you have for an allegation like that?’
‘Because I drew this.’ She picks up the haystacks. ‘See here, along this edge where it’s been cut out from the book? I copied it in the Rachmann Gallery, I remember doing it. But the grid, that’s not mine. Someone else drew that in afterwards.’
‘And why would they have done that?’
‘People use grids to break down a picture, to fix line, perspective. Van Gogh did it himself. He had a frame made when he was teaching himself to paint, two stakes and four wires just like this, intersecting in the middle, and he’d set it up outside and draw the same grid on his canvas. He said it made sense of what he was looking at, that it gave him the courage to make marks.’
‘You seem to know a lot about it.’
‘I’ve read the letters. Of course I know about it.’
‘And you’re asking me to believe that it was Matthias Rachmann who added these grids to your drawing, to this book, and not you, the artist who just happened to have read all about them?’
‘Jesus Christ, are you serious? We’ve been through all this, ask Böhm if you don’t believe me. Ask Matthias, for Christ’s sake. Why would I have done it? I didn’t have this sketchbook, Matthias did, and anyway I’ve never drawn with a grid in my life, it’s not the way I was taught. Someone took my drawing and used it and whoever it was Matthias knew, don’t you see? This was Matthias’s exhibition catalogue, he lent it to me, I was supposed to give it back, only—this was his copy. From the gallery. My sketchbook, his catalogue. It can’t be a coincidence. Whoever made the fakes made them with his blessing. He knew.’
There are two spots of colour on her pale cheeks. Her eyes blaze. If this is an act, Fräulein Eberhardt is in the wrong profession.
‘If he knew, he’s never said so,’ I say quietly. ‘He always insisted he sold them in good faith.’
‘Protecting his Russian to the grave.’
‘Or his brother.’ An unguarded and inflammatory remark, I regret it as soon as the words are out of my mouth.
She frowns at me. ‘You think Gregor Rachmann—’
‘I don’t think anything. I have no evidence, as you so ably demonstrated. And anyway I’m not so sure it matters any more. A man’s behind bars. Justice has been seen to have been done. What else can we hope for?’
‘That the law will protect the innocent. That people who break it will be caught and punished.’
‘You’re right,’ I say. ‘We should hope for that.’
We stand together silently, lost in our own thoughts.
‘I should go,’ I say and she nods.
‘Thank you for returning my sketchbook.’ She hesitates. ‘You should ask him, you know. Gregor, I mean. You should ask him what you asked me.’
‘Yes, well. Perhaps I will. If I ever find him.’
When I leave she doesn’t walk with me to the door. She stands where she is, grave-faced behind her table, a slight figure in her oversized clothes beneath the wide white grin of the painted mannequin.
Thursday 31 August
A letter on the breakfast table. The address on the envelope is typed, stamped URGENT in red ink. I open it reluctantly but it’s not a bill. It’s a letter from Stefan’s lawyer. The letter is couched in business jargon, it refers to the consignment, but I know what it means. Stefan is ready. He wants Mina to return to Hannover. In two weeks they will leave for Antwerp. I hand Gerda the letter and she looks at me. It is a blessing. Of course it is. Mina will be with her family. I put my hand on Gerda’s and she threads her fingers through mine, her wedding ring a hard ache against my skin.
‘She’ll be safe there,’ I say and she nods and does not look at me.
‘She must miss her family,’ I say and she nods again and tries to smile.
‘It’s for the best,’ I say and she turns to look at me, her eyes hard and full of tears.
‘No,’ she says and she pulls her hand away. ‘None of it is for the best.’
In her room Mina is making her bed. She looks up as I come in. I tell her about Stefan’s letter. I tell her that the plans have been made, that we will miss her. I do not tell her it is for the best. Gerda is right. Everything is getting worse and there is nothing I can do to stop it. We stand together side by side in the room that is hers and Anke’s, by the chest of drawers with the embroidered runner and the s
ilver hairbrushes and the porcelain pot with its painted flowers. I have grown accustomed to them there.
‘What about my project?’ Mina says. ‘I can’t just leave my project.’
‘You still have two weeks,’ I say. ‘And if you have to you can finish it there. Surely if Belgium’s good enough for Albert Einstein it’s good enough for you?’
She does not smile. She looks up at me, her bottom lip caught between her teeth. ‘But what about you? What about Aunt Gerda? What will you do?’
‘We’ll be fine,’ I say and she looks at me for a moment, her gaze fierce, and then she sighs and turns away and it tears at my heart because I love her, this girl of my brother’s, and all I have to give her are my lies.
Saturday 2 September
Böhm comes to see me. I haven’t seen him for more than a week. He looks ill. He checks the landing before he closes the door. His hands are shaking, it makes the paper he is holding rattle. He tells me he is sorry but the Rachmann crates will have to be moved. The caretaker has issued a warning, he says that the storage of crates contravenes a term in the lease, he has given Böhm a week to get rid of them. They both know there is no such term, but the caretaker is a Party member and a block warden, and Böhm would prefer to avoid trouble. When I promise that they will be gone he apologises for being a bother. His politeness leaves me shame-filled and appalled.
As I am putting on my coat the telephone rings. It’s Frau Dumier, she asks if I will meet her tomorrow. She doesn’t say why and I don’t ask. No one trusts the telephone any more. The Floraplatz in the Tiergarten, she says, four o’clock. As soon as I agree she rings off. I realise as I hang up the receiver that it’s the first time I’ve heard her use her married name.
Gerda and I go to bed early but I can’t sleep. The moon is full, or as good as, and the light slices through the gap in the curtains and lies like a knife across the end of the bed. I wonder what Frau Dumier wants to see me about. Rachmann, I suppose, or her husband. I hope to God it isn’t Böhm. I can still hear it, the rattle of the paper in his shaking hand.