The Painting

by Alison Booth

  ‘There’s no need to be sarcastic. I’d like to see if the gate’s locked.’

  ‘I’ll look upstairs while you do that.’ Although Anika wanted to race up the stairs right away, she was frightened of what she might find.

  ‘Don’t go up,’ Tabilla said, seizing hold of Anika’s arm. ‘Someone might still be up there, with a gun or a knife or something. I’ll phone the police. We’ll let them do the checking.’

  Tabilla dialled the emergency number and in a few seconds was connected to Balmain Police Station. After she put down the receiver, she said, ‘They want us to wait out the front until the police get here, in case there’s someone upstairs still.’

  The two policemen, who arrived almost immediately, might have been pensioned-off rugby players. Ryan and Warburton, they were called, thick-necked burly men at least six feet tall, and wide too. One of them reeked of tobacco smoke and they seemed to take up all the space in the hallway. While they searched the house, Ryan said, Tabilla and Anika were to wait out the front under the streetlight.

  Anika and her aunt stood next to the police car. They didn’t wait alone; in next to no time Mrs Thornton was on the scene. While Tabilla explained what was happening, Anika leaned against the car, nerves stretched taut while her thoughts skittered around. The police presence in the house made her feel even more nervous than she already was. The past and the present, in her heightened emotional state, seemed jumbled up together. She began to think of the day five years ago when the police had ransacked the samizdat boutique in Laszlo’s Budapest apartment. She’d been right there, browsing the illegal literature. After the police had burst through the front door, she’d managed to get out the back door unnoticed. On the way, she’d tucked into her trouser pocket the leaflet she’d wanted, the one about the protest march near the Danube Bend, the march against the construction of the Nagymaros Dam. Afterwards, she’d heard from her brother Miklos – who’d got it from a friend – that the police had seized all the dissident literature and the duplicating machines and shifted Laszlo into a flat on the outskirts of Budapest. ‘And didn’t that raid give you a clue that the Communist Party is cracking down on protesters?’ Nyenye had raged days later, after Anika had been released.

  Yet the Sydney police weren’t like the Budapest secret police, Anika reminded herself now, as she twisted a strand of her hair, tighter and tighter until it pulled at her scalp. And maybe even the secret police were changing, just think of that march in Kossuth Square she and Tabilla had witnessed on television. Her thoughts shifted again to her painting, and her worries gathered around it like moths beating against a lamp. Keep calm, she told herself. Art thieves didn’t hit on a suburb like Rozelle. Not when there were rich pickings in the Eastern Suburbs or the North Shore.

  The neighbours were appearing in the street one by one. As soon as Tabilla finished telling Mrs Thornton her tale, they were joined by the neighbour from their other side, an old man who had trouble hearing; it must have been the flashing blue light that disturbed him. Anika felt disengaged from the scene. Detachment was one way of staying calm. Hiding your nagging little fears from others helped to conceal them from yourself. This remoteness didn’t stop her observing things though, clocking Mr and Mrs Opposite coming out of their terrace in their matching navy-blue terry towelling bath robes, and then Ty Nguyen from down the road. Again, Tabilla told the story of what had happened, with Mrs Thornton nodding her head all the while, as if she’d been present in the kitchen with them. And none of them had seen anything.

  When the policemen had finished their search, they called Tabilla and Anika inside. The taller one said, ‘All’s clear. There’s no one here and the place looks OK. You’ll need to see if anything’s been taken, but we want to ask you a few questions first.’

  ‘What about the back yard?’ Tabilla said.

  ‘We’ve checked that. The gate wasn’t fastened. You might want to get a padlock for that bolt. We reckon that they got out through your gate but they got in via next-door’s yard, the one that’s a bit closer to Victoria Road. Then they took down a few palings from the side fence to squeeze into your place. You’ll want to find a handyman to fix that. The palings look rather old and that whole fence probably wants replacing.’

  At this moment there was a knock on the front door. It was Mrs Thornton. Stepping into the hall, she said, ‘I’ve just remembered something. You know the dunny lane that runs along the back of our houses? Penny – that’s the girl who lives down the road,’ she explained to the police, ‘told me she was looking out of their upstairs rear window a few days ago. Late afternoon, it was, and she saw someone walking along it.’

  ‘Is that so unusual?’ the taller policeman said.

  ‘He was walking up and down it like he was looking for something.’

  ‘Maybe he’d dropped something.’

  ‘Furtive-like,’ Mrs Thornton added.

  ‘What did he look like?’ Tabilla said.

  ‘Penny said it wasn’t light enough like to see, and anyway he was wearing a hat. But he seemed to be shaking the back gate of each yard. Maybe he was figuring out how to get into your place.’

  ‘We’ll interview Penny afterwards,’ the taller policeman said. ‘What number house?’ He wrote down this information in his notebook. ‘Thanks for letting us know,’ he said. ‘If there’s nothing else you can tell us, you can leave now. You’re next door, right? If we need a statement we’ll know where to come.’

  He shut the door after Mrs Thornton, and turned to Tabilla. ‘Were you in all evening, Mrs Molnar?’

  ‘No, I was at a concert with a friend.’

  ‘Who’s the friend? We need a name.’

  ‘Julius Singer.’

  Anika clutched at the stair rail. It was clammy. Even its thick varnish couldn’t block out the humidity. There was silence apart from the scratching of the taller policeman’s pen on paper. ‘Julius?’ she said. ‘But Tabilla, I thought you never saw him.’

  ‘I hardly ever do but he called me on Thursday night. They’d been given some concert tickets and his wife was unwell. Your visit must have reminded him that years ago we used to go to concerts together.’

  ‘Did Julius mention me?’

  ‘No, not a word. It’s been ages since I last saw him. And as soon as the concert ended he had to rush home to see his wife. She’s not been well, as I said, and he was worried about her. I came straight home and started watching the news.’

  ‘Can I go upstairs now?’ Anika asked the taller policeman, her voice cracking. Her aunt never went out with Julius. Why tonight, the same night that there’d been a break-in?

  ‘Once we’ve finished with the statements,’ the taller policeman told her, before asking Tabilla what time she got back, and jotting down some more notes.

  After filling a couple more pages of his notebook, he turned to Anika, and wanted to know where she’d been that evening. Meticulously – and slowly, oh so slowly, if only he’d get a move on – he wrote down the time she’d got home and where she’d been and who with. When he snapped his notebook shut, she noticed that his fingers were stained with nicotine. He must be a heavy smoker, she decided, and began to feel even more jittery, as if she’d drunk too many cups of coffee. ‘I’ve got to go upstairs,’ she muttered, taking the steps two at a time, the policemen and Tabilla not far behind.

  Her bedroom was in darkness and the door was wide open. She counted to seven, her favourite number, before flicking the switch. The room blazed with light.

  It looked different. Somehow bigger. There was a gap on the far wall. A gap ringed with a faint mark. A mark framing nothing.

  The painting had gone.

  Part II

  Sydney, March 1989

  Chapter 12

  It was as if Anika were floating out of her body, as if she were hovering above it, looking down on the two policemen and her aunt
and what must be her exoskeleton. She could hear no sounds, apart from the clock on her bookshelf that was counting out the seconds, but their passage was distorted, not the usual regular tick-tock. The interval between each sound was longer than usual, and indeed it seemed to vary. This made her feel suddenly dizzy, even vertiginous. Yet it was impossible to halt the strange elevation she was experiencing. Up and up she went. Now she seemed to be outside the house, and floating above it. Glancing down at the roof, she saw that some of the slates were sliding and there was nothing she could do to stop them. Alarmingly, Rozelle was getting smaller and smaller. The Rocheteau was floating just ahead of her, like a magic carpet that she needed to reach to take her safely back home. As she floated higher and higher, she began to feel queasy. The sky started to pulse with waves of darkness and she felt herself falling falling falling.

  ‘She’s fainted,’ Anika heard Tabilla saying. ‘It’s a terrible shock.’

  Anika was lying on her bed under a rug, with her feet propped up on two pillows. Her face felt cold and clammy, and her legs surprisingly heavy. Again, she could hear the clock’s tick-tock tick-tock, it was a regular beat now.

  And at that moment she remembered what she’d lost.

  Anger would come, she knew it would. It was just hanging around the edges of this numbness, waiting for a chance to burst out. Breathe, breathe; it was necessary to be on your guard. With a setback you had to be careful, you had to stop your feelings showing. Revealing any emotion would give them information, these two police officers, here in her room and too close for comfort.

  Suddenly her anger was replaced by terror. She shut her eyes. A moment later, she was in a cold and windowless cell that reeked of cigarettes. There was a grey man sitting opposite her. Ashen-faced, ashen-haired, charcoal-uniformed, this man fired questions at her. He grinned as she stumbled through responses that were always the wrong ones. Grinned as she struggled against something that was holding her down. Grinned as he lit another cigarette. Panicking, she opened her eyes. Tabilla’s concerned face was looking down at her.

  ‘They are detectives,’ Tabilla murmured to Anika in Hungarian. She was holding Anika’s left wrist, smoothing the scar, soothing the skin around it. ‘You are in Sydney, dearest Anika. Everything is fine. Painting is only stuff. People are what matter. Everything is OK.’

  ‘What’s it a picture of?’ one of the policemen asked Tabilla.

  ‘A woman in a blue dress,’ Tabilla said. ‘A portrait in blue.’

  Anika had to focus, she had to get that dreadful memory out of her head. ‘A portrait of a woman with auburn hair,’ she muttered.

  One of the policemen scribbled some words in his notebook while the other man told her that nothing had been taken from Tabilla’s room and did she have anything else missing.

  She sat up. Her room looked tidy, nothing appeared to have been rearranged. Then she noticed that the photograph of her family outside Molnars’ Butchers had been moved a few centimetres. Someone had been in here, going through her things and checking her stuff and choosing the painting to steal. How she hated the thought of someone she didn’t know rummaging through her belongings. It felt like a violation. She got up and with trembling hands opened the drawers and the cupboard. Nothing else had gone.

  The policemen began to talk about photographs, did they have any that might help them recover the painting. Tabilla led them out of the room. Anika could hear them talking on the landing. Words like measurements and police report and getting the back door fixed.

  Her room seemed sullied. She was feeling increasingly disturbed by the fact that someone had known to go straight for the painting. Someone with information. Someone who was able to distinguish between her picture and all the others that Tabilla had on her walls, modern prints mostly. John Olsen and Fred Williams were her favourites. Again, Anika looked at the blank wall where the painting used to hang: the portrait was home, it was family, it was the uncle she’d never met, it had become a part of who she was. Frantically she struggled to fight down the rising waves of panic.

  The taller policeman stuck his head back into her room to ask if they could take away a photo of the painting. She had only one picture of it and, after a bit of rummaging, she found it in the top drawer of her bedside table. As she held it out, stupid little fears flooded into her mind, flushing out rationality. Fears that her only photo would blow out of the police car window, or that one of the men would use it as a coaster once he got it back to the police station and would return it with an ugly brown ring on it from a mug of coffee. Or maybe he’d just bin it, and later tell her it had been lost. As the officer took hold of the photo, she said, unable to hide her anxiety, ‘Can I have a receipt please?’

  For an instant the man looked at her strangely. That was when hysteria hit her and she burst into tears, great sobs that wrenched their way painfully out of her chest. It was as if a part of her family, part of her, had been torn away. And at the same time, she felt humiliated by this weakness, this inability to contain her emotions. The two policemen began to shuffle awkwardly.

  Tabilla took her arm and said to the men, ‘The painting means a lot to her and this photo is her only record. I tell you what, I’ll photograph it with my Instamatic.’

  After Anika had recovered a bit and blown her nose several times on a wad of tissues, they trooped downstairs and Tabilla got her camera out of the drawer in the sideboard. The surface of Anika’s photo was so shiny that when Tabilla used the flash the picture would come up with reflections glaring back at the viewer. Tabilla seemed to understand this and took several photos from different vantage points with different lighting. ‘I’m a wizard at photography,’ she said, as if to reassure her niece.

  The taller policeman looked at Anika appraisingly. ‘Your painting was upstairs. Nobody would see it from the window. Who knew about it?’

  ‘The curators at the art gallery. I took it in two weeks ago.’ Daniel knew about it. Julius did too, though he had an alibi in Tabilla. Jonno also knew of it. Yet he didn’t seem to have a clue about art, that much was clear from their conversation. And it couldn’t have been Daniel because Anika had just spent the whole evening with him and he’d been by her side all the time.

  Yet Daniel did look at his watch when the wine had loosened Anika’s tongue. She’d thought at the time she might be boring him with all her talk about the points system for immigrants, and maybe she was. Yet he could also have been wondering how long he had to wait before he could take her home. It was possible that he was the robber’s accomplice, someone charged with keeping her out of her bedroom while the house was broken into and the painting stolen. He could even have been working with Julius Singer, who had managed to get Tabilla out of the house at the same time.

  Of course, the other curators would know about the painting too. For instance, that elegant and beautifully dressed woman who’d identified the picture as being by Antoine Rocheteau. And you could bet they would have all been discussing it afterwards. Maybe one of them could have arranged to have it stolen. Yet these were reputable people with reputable jobs and Anika could hardly accuse them. Anyway, they wouldn’t have known where she lived, unless Daniel had told them.

  ‘The only people who knew where the painting was are Julius Singer and the curators of the art gallery,’ she told the policemen. ‘They’re hardly going to steal it.’

  ‘Which gallery?’ The police had become more interested and Tabilla gave them a detailed account of why Anika took the painting to the Art Gallery of New South Wales and how Tabilla had suggested it, after she’d seen the advertisement in the Sydney Morning Herald.

  Then they asked Anika for the names and addresses of everyone who knew about the painting. And one thing led to another and they wanted to know where the painting came from. Tabilla shut up at this, so Anika burbled on, explaining how it was in her family, that it had belonged to her deceased uncle. The taller po
liceman gave her his odd look again but it was probably just because of the way she said deceased. That was a word she’d picked up from the cop shows on television, the ones who spoke in their own police jargon, and maybe normal people didn’t talk about deceased relatives, but what else could she have said? She could hardly have said dead uncle. Then she had a lightbulb moment: she should have said, ‘my uncle who passed away’. She began explaining this but the taller policeman, the one called Tom Warburton, interrupted her. ‘Calm down, young lady,’ he said.

  His tone was avuncular but Anika disliked being told to calm down and hated being called young lady. Those words were so patronising although she didn’t want to tell him that. They’d been sympathetic, these men, unlike the security police where she’d come from.

  ‘Julius Singer knows about the painting,’ she said to the policeman, her voice pitched too high. ‘That’s the man Tabilla went to the concert with tonight.’

  ‘But he was with me all evening,’ Tabilla said gently. ‘And anyway, they’ve already taken down his details.’

  The second policeman looked at his watch and Anika realised they probably had other more urgent jobs on, like domestic violence and road accidents, and that their break-in was one of many calls.

  Once the police had gone and the emergency glazier had patched up the broken pane in the back door, it was nearly three o’clock in the morning. Too tired even to draw the curtains, it was all Anika could do to drag herself to bed where she fell deep into an all-embracing unconsciousness. Before too long, cocooning sleep became a vivid nightmare; she was caught up with her brother Miklos at the Danube Bend near Visegrád, in a peaceful demonstration that morphed into a riot. Faceless figures wielding truncheons seized hold of her and dragged her to a vehicle. Only when the doors slammed shut did she realise she’d been thrown into the back of a hearse. Peering through the back window, she saw Miklos – together with the other demonstrators – receding into the distance. Abruptly she wrenched herself awake, her muscles tensed for flight and her body slick with sweat. Trapped between nightmare and wakefulness, she was pulled into the moment by the screaming of an ambulance from Victoria Road.