The Painting

by Alison Booth

  ‘Look under the bed, Anika,’ Nyenye said. ‘You’ll have to do a bit of crawling about for me.’ She settled herself on the chair with its ugly turned legs and gestured towards the bed. ‘I don’t relish the thought of getting down on my hands and knees. But there’s something I want to show you.’

  The provenances, Anika thought. If Nyenye really had them, rather than documents that she thought were provenances. But surely she wouldn’t have put them under the mattress. Anika knelt on the rug next to the bed and slipped her hands under the mattress.

  ‘No, not there, szeretet. That’s way too obvious, no?’

  On hands and knees, Anika peered under the bed. As a child she used to hide from Miklos in this space between the wire mattress-base and the floor. There was a china chamber pot here, decorated with roses. There had for ever been a chamber pot here, blessedly always empty. Next to it was a rust-freckled tin trunk some seventy centimetres square, and nearly reaching the sagging wire base on which the mattress rested. ‘Not in the trunk, I hope,’ she said.

  ‘Nowhere so obvious,’ Nyenye said. ‘But pull it out anyway.’

  Anika slid it out, slowly, ducking her head below the bed-beam, but not enough to prevent her head knocking against it painfully.

  Nyenye said, her tone impatient now, ‘Get right under, Anika, so you don’t damage yourself again.’

  ‘It’s all dusty, Nyenye. You haven’t mopped under here for a while.’

  ‘No matter. You’ve got your old clothes on; I’ve already noticed that your jumper has a hole on your right elbow and another one on your right cuff.’

  It was dark under the bed and hard to distinguish the floorboards clearly. Anika ran her hands over them; each was about fifteen centimetres wide. Beneath the film of dust, she could feel how smooth they were. Then she encountered two rough-sawn raggedy-edged boards. Fingering her way along them, she discovered they were each cross-cut in the same place, and that forty-five centimetres along they were sawn again. When she exerted pressure on them, they jiggled. They were loose. Not nailed in place, not screwed down. A real giveaway, this. After she managed to manoeuvre up one of the boards, lifting out the other was easy.

  Nyenye, kneeling on the floor next to Anika’s feet, directed a wavering beam of torchlight in her direction. ‘Stick your hand into the hole.’

  Anika had enough experience with Australian spiders to think it was folly to be shoving her hands into small dark places. But she pulled down the sleeve of her jumper so that it covered her hand to below the knuckles and slipped her thumb through the hole on the right cuff, before feeling her way into the opening. In the gap between the floor joists there was a large plastic-covered box-file. After pulling it up, she backed out from under the bed using her foot to guide the box ahead of her.

  ‘This is my documentation,’ Nyenye said, beaming.

  ‘You need a better hiding place than this.’

  ‘Yes, yes. But let’s open the box, Anika, after we have gone to all this trouble.’

  ‘Can I look?’

  ‘Of course, that is why you have been crawling under the bed, no? It is not for your amusement. But hand-on-heart you must tell no one. No one.’

  Inside the box-file there were a number of manilla folders tied with black tape. Anika sat cross-legged on the bed and Nyenye perched beside her. ‘Your grandfather organised these documents. So meticulous, always. That’s one reason we did well.’

  Inside the top folder were some papers and two black-and-white photographs. Anika picked up the first photo; it was of a young woman standing next to an easel on which a painting rested. This was one of the paintings hanging in Nyenye’s living room: the watercolour with its strong diagonal movement of girls in pale dresses on a green-gold hillside, against a background of dark red-brown mountains and sky.

  ‘This lady is the artist,’ Nyenye said, pointing to the woman next to the easel. ‘See her name? It’s Kodály.’

  Anika thought the photo looked convincing, though she was no expert. In the second photograph, an elderly woman wearing a cloche hat and a fur coat was holding up the same painting.

  ‘That’s our art historian friend, Mrs Szabo,’ Nyenye said. ‘She passed away in the 1970s. We had to take that photo secretly, for no one was to know what we were doing. It was the black market, you see. Mrs Szabo was such a lovely woman. She taught us of the importance of the provenance. We didn’t buy anything where there was no proof of ownership.’

  Under the photos were some stamped receipts, a page torn from an auction catalogue dating back to the 1920s, and a few sheets of foolscap paper describing the work and its passage from owner to owner and tracking its appearance in several exhibitions. This was more like it, Anika thought. This was what she had imagined a provenance would be like.

  ‘This is a full history,’ Nyenye said. ‘Some of our paintings only had one or two owners. Those are the ones that are easy to follow. But others were more difficult. So much was destroyed in the war.’

  It took more than an hour to go through the documents in the box-file. Nyenye looked happy, Anika thought. She might have been stimulated by this exploration of the past or perhaps she was pleased to share it with Anika, though she did regularly punctuate her comments with exhortations about secrecy. ‘Nothing is safe, Anika. Nothing. You can trust only close family, no one else.’

  ‘I know that, Nyenye. I know that. But for some things it’s possible to open up a bit.’

  ‘As I have done this evening,’ Nyenye said. ‘With you. And I trust that what you’ve seen and what I’ve told you will go no further.’

  ‘Of course.’

  At the bottom of the box-file was a small black-and-white photograph.

  ‘Ó, Istenem, I’d forgotten about this,’ Nyenye said, her words ragged and torn. ‘Your grandfather must have put it there.’ She handed Anika the picture.

  It was of a boy aged eleven or twelve standing in front of a ruined building, a boy with an open smiling face and thick brown hair.

  ‘Tomas!’ Anika felt her heart start to hammer too hard as she stared at Tomas. He was holding the portrait of the auburn-haired lady skew-whiff in front of him. Though it was only a black-and-white photo, you could see the sun was catching her hair and glowing from her shoulders. It was unmistakably the Rocheteau.

  ‘Maybe you’d like to have this photo,’ Nyenye said. ‘I’ve got plenty more of Tomas. Take it with you.’

  Anika turned the photo over. On the other side was written, in her grandfather’s hand, the words Tomas Molnar, 1946. Her eyes filled with tears. Tomas looked so young and he was only to live another ten years. ‘Thank you, Nyenye. I’ll show it to Tabilla.’

  ‘And now, my darling Anika, we are going to pack everything away again and get the box back between the floor joists.’ Nyenye’s voice cracked, and when she continued it was almost falsetto. ‘And after that we shall have another little tot of brandy and then you will go home to your parents who will be wondering what is keeping you here. And you will tell them nothing.’

  Anika put an arm around Nyenye’s shoulders. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘But you really do need to speak to my father.’

  ‘I shall indeed speak to György. Although isn’t there a saying in English, don’t teach your grandmother how to suck eggs?’

  ‘There is, Nyenye. But that saying is about how to suck eggs. It says nothing about when to suck eggs.’

  She could tell from the way Nyenye was pursing her lips that she was trying not to smile.

  ‘You have become so wise, Anika. Let me tell you again that I shall indeed speak to your father. But that will be in my own good time, szeretet.’

  Anika hugged her, feeling the smallness of her, that tiny frame housing her indomitable spirit. Her darling grandmother was safe. No investigative journalists were going to be able to come up with a story of her being
a conduit for looted art. And at that moment Anika suddenly realised that Nyenye almost certainly wouldn’t have been quite so willing to reveal the truth about her documentation if Jonno’s visit hadn’t given her such a fright.

  Nyenye said, her voice slightly muffled, ‘Surely you didn’t think your grandfather and I would be so naïve as to buy things without proof of purchase. We were traders, Anika. That’s who we were. A family of traders. Meat and pickles and paintings.’

  ‘A diversified portfolio.’ Anika’s words were rendered indistinct by laughter that might at any moment turn to hysteria.

  ‘But in fact it’s only the meat and pickles that we trade nowadays,’ her grandmother said firmly. ‘The paintings are not for sale.’

  ‘Of course they’re not. They belong to you.’ Anika’s voice was shaking. Abruptly, face averted, she collapsed on to the floor next to Nyenye and rested her head against her knee.

  ‘You’re a good girl, Anika,’ Nyenye said, smoothing her hair. These were the words she used when Anika was very young and used to trail around after her. ‘You’re a good girl.’

  At first, Nyenye said nothing about Anika’s sniffles that morphed into tears of relief. Tears that were spiced with a dash of remorse that she’d ever thought that Nyenye might be the receiver of stolen goods.

  ‘There is no need to cry, Anika. We’re not thieves in our family, we never have been. Though you were not to know that.’

  ‘The trouble is, we don’t talk about those things.’

  ‘We don’t talk about them because it’s too painful. And also because it’s too dangerous. You know that, darling. Even your generation can remember the knock on the door at night, the people vanishing. We’ve avoided thinking about those things by withdrawing into ourselves, by trying to appear invisible.’

  Anika blew her nose and dried her eyes.

  ‘That’s partly why your grandfather and I loved our paintings so much,’ Nyenye continued. ‘And I still do. We could escape into the worlds the artists created. We didn’t need to run away when we had those other places accessible on our walls. Art became an escape from the regime. And after a while the secretiveness becomes ingrained. It becomes a part of who we are.’

  She carried on stroking Anika’s hair, her touch infinitely comforting. ‘I’m sorry you’ve suffered, Anika,’ she said at last. ‘You thought my paintings might have been looted, no? Not by us, perhaps, but by those who sold them to us. I hadn’t realised that you were so worried.’

  ‘I didn’t know, that’s the thing. I didn’t know anything until ten months ago when I took Tomas’s painting to be identified. After that, it was like everything was unravelling.’ Anika didn’t tell her that she’d wondered if her family was a mob of crooks as well as traders.

  But she felt as if a weight had been taken off her shoulders, that burden of worry she’d been carrying ever since the afternoon Daniel took her on the walk from Taronga Park to Clifton Gardens.

  In the kitchen, Nyenye poured two glasses of palinka. Anika raised her glass in a toast to her grandparents. Hard-working people with an eye for beauty. Hardworking people who took a few risks operating outside the system when their business became more successful. That’s what she’d once thought. That’s what, for months, she’d hoped for.

  And that’s who they were.

  Chapter 31

  The phone started ringing when Anika was in the bath. She heard her mother’s lively voice but not her words. When ten minutes later Anika came out of the bathroom, hair wrapped in a towel, her mother called out, ‘Tabilla’s on the phone. We’ve had such a lovely conversation.’ Mama was looking very pleased with herself as she handed Anika the receiver.

  ‘It’s wonderful to hear your voice,’ Tabilla said, speaking very quickly. ‘One of the reasons I’m calling is that I wanted to thank you for that gorgeous present. Mrs Thornton from next door came by this morning. She’s been away and got back only yesterday, and she brought it in.’

  ‘I didn’t know she was going away or I would have left it with someone else.’

  ‘She didn’t know she was going either. A last-minute trip that her children organised. Thank you so much, Anika. The slippers are lovely, just my size.’

  ‘And similar to your others but without the holes.’

  Tabilla laughed. ‘I’m not nearly so down at heel now.’

  Anika told her aunt how good it was to be back in Budapest and how Miklos – it’s a shame you’ve never met him, Tabilla – had come up for the best part of a week, but now he was back at Szeged. It was his girlfriend who was pulling him back, he was besotted with her. ‘And what have you been up to, Tabilla?’

  ‘Catching up with the garden. I’ve been out a bit with friends, and I went away for a few days with Magda and Janos. They rented a cottage at Five Mile Beach. It was lovely to have a break and not do any sewing for a bit. But there’s another reason for my call, Anika. Something happened this afternoon that I think you’ll be thrilled with.’

  Anika’s heart skipped a beat. ‘Is it news about the painting?’

  ‘Yes, and such an amazing thing! Someone from police headquarters called me. Your portrait has turned up again.’

  Stunned, Anika dropped the receiver. It dangled at the end of the cord while Tabilla’s voice crackled on and on. Her words were lost to Anika, until she heard her shout, ‘Are you there, Anika?’

  ‘Yes, I’m here.’ She picked up the receiver. ‘Are you sure, Tabilla?’ It was an effort to pull herself together. Although initially numb with shock, she could feel joy starting to creep in around the edges of her disbelief.

  ‘Of course I’m sure.’

  ‘Who took it?’

  ‘That’s the thing,’ Tabilla said, ‘I just don’t know! All the police said was that it had been returned under mysterious circumstances. They wouldn’t give me any more details. Just as well you’ll be back in a couple of days, Anika.’

  ‘Who returned it?’

  ‘They wouldn’t tell me that either. But isn’t it marvellous that they’ve got it? I thought we’d never see it again.’

  ‘Me too. I wonder what mysterious circumstances means.’ The words sounded ominous to Anika. She hoped the painting wasn’t damaged.

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe somebody was feeling guilty and wanted to return it, or they discovered they couldn’t flog it without a provenance, or they found it in a junk shop. By the way, did that letter I forwarded to you arrive?’

  ‘Yes. It was from Daniel.’

  ‘I thought it might be.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘His name was on the back of the envelope. Didn’t you notice?’

  ‘No. I tore it in half and put it in the garbage bin.’

  ‘You are an unforgiving girl. And I spent good money on posting it to you.’

  ‘I took it out again afterwards and read it.’

  ‘Not completely unforgiving then,’ her aunt said, laughing.

  * * *

  Later that morning Anika bought a stamped postcard from the shop in the National Museum. The assistant, whose extravagant beehive hairstyle belonged to another era, slipped it into a small paper bag. Outside, Anika sat on a bench in the sunshine to compose the message to Daniel. I’m so sorry, she wrote on the back of the card, making the letters quite large, and then stopped, wondering what on earth to put next. Maybe she was so sorry for everything. Sorry she misunderstood him. Sorry for taking so long to realise that he was a reserved man, possibly almost as reserved as she. Sorry for what happened to his family and hers, to his country and hers, and to all those countries, in Europe and everywhere else, that were forever warring with one another.

  She gazed around for inspiration. There were some people perched on the broad steps leading up to the museum. A man and a woman sitting halfway up were blazing with light as if caught under a s
potlight, the sun angling down on their pale hair. All she could see of the man was the back of his head and the length of him as he leaned towards the woman by his side; she reached out a hand to touch his face and it was impossible to miss the tenderness in this gesture. A car on the street behind Anika backfired, a loud popping sound that startled the pigeons on the lawn around her bench, and they flapped around in consternation.

  Again she read the words she’d inscribed on the postcard, and she added a full stop after I’m so sorry. But a moment later she changed the full stop to a comma. I’m so sorry, but I will phone you on my return. This message looked odd, that but was not necessary. She crossed it out and inserted and above it. Daniel’s letter was in her handbag and she pulled it out, though she knew the words off by heart. It was the ‘With much love’ that she looked at first – his analysis of her character didn’t need to be viewed again, it was etched on to her heart – and she copied his address on to the card.

  She might have felt happy if it wasn’t for the prospect of leaving her beloved family and spending twenty-four hours in the canister, as Nyenye referred to it. That and the fact that a decision had yet to be made about how to sign off the card. Quickly she scrawled the words With much love and signed her name, before slipping the postcard into her bag.

  On the way back to her parents’ apartment, she spotted a postbox on the other side of the road and darted between two Trabants, in her haste nearly tripping over the kerb. She dropped the postcard into the postbox and carried on walking.

  * * *

  Coming from the kitchen with a tray of tinkling glasses, Anika heard Nyenye and her father in the living room arguing about something, their voices loud but the words indistinct. They rarely quarrelled and Anika hated to hear them do so on her last night in Budapest. The living room door was shut and she put down the tray on the hall runner. Hand on the brass doorknob, about to turn it, she hesitated when she heard the word provenance.