Lie in the Dark vp-1

by Dan Fesperman

  “Yes, it came from what is known as the transfer file, a very important but little-known part of ‘our cultural heritage,’ as the art bureaucrats like to call it. I told Mr. Vitas that I was very surprised to see that he had the card at all, and he merely smiled and said nothing. So I proceeded to tell him all that I knew of that card, and of hundreds of others like it, and I suppose you’d like a repeat performance, even though you have only Drinas, not Marlboros, and most likely you haven’t got any coffee with you, either.”

  “Not a grain.” Vlado smiled.

  “No. I should think not. And I have no hot water anyway, although I suppose I could have imposed on one of my lovely neighbors by offering a spoonful of Nescafe in exchange. But you have none, so …”

  Then, with great effort, Glavas took as deep a breath as his wheezing lungs would permit, as if steeling himself for a dive into deep water. He looked down at his hands, as if he might have been holding the very card that Vitas had brought that day. And he began his story.

  CHAPTER 10

  “The card is all about art, you see,” Glavas said. “Fine works of art.”

  Vlado felt a twinge of worry. So would this be the essence of the secret Vitas had died for? Some paintings from the museum? A bit of culture wrenched from a wall?

  “Ah,” Glavas said. “I see that I bore you already. Not even interested enough to take notes.”

  Vlado realized with a flush that he had put his pen down.

  “Was I that obvious?” he asked. “I guess I had hoped that it might be something more. More than a few cases of liquor or cigarettes, or a few sides of mutton. And I’m sorry, but a few pictures strike me as an even less inspiring reason for getting yourself killed with a war on. Assuming that that’s where this might lead, of course. Meat, at least, you can eat.”

  “Yes, meat,” Glavas said. “That and alcohol and gasoline and cigarettes can make you rich on the black market. Over time. And with a great deal of competition to worry about. But with a mere few pictures, as you put it, you can make yourself wealthy almost overnight. A millionaire, several times over, if you make the right choices. Even with the meager offerings of this town.

  “And in the process, you can begin the destruction of an entire culture. Either one of those things alone, Mr. Petric, would seem reason enough for killing someone in this climate of looting and genocide, wouldn’t you agree? After all, what could be more calming to one’s conscience, being able to boast that you were destroying a nation’s emotional heritage even as you were lining your own pockets with a fortune to last a lifetime.”

  “I guess if you look at it that way, it does seem a little closer to the heart of things.” Vlado pulled his own cigarette from the pack of Drinas that lay between them.

  “And in the case of the transfer file, or these cards with the red circle on them,” Glavas said, “we’re not only talking of paintings, but also of manuscripts, sculptures, icons from the churches, both Catholic and Orthodox. Even a few old Jewish relics that the Communists managed to lay their hands on. A few old coins here and there, and some swords, vases, nice old boxes, that sort of thing. And each piece, or at least each piece of art in the ‘transfer file’ has ended up in the museum’s inventory files with a little red circle in the upper right corner, and my name on the bottom. And if you care to explore further, you’ll find that each of these cards tells its own tale of the way art moves and migrates, comes and goes, hither and yon, depending on the fortunes of war, the greed of bureaucrats, the cunning of politicians, and the whims of fate. Because, make no mistake, Mr. Petric, in every tale of war there is always a tale of art on the move, of one culture trying to steal the soul of another, whether in the name of booty or under the gentling guise of ‘preservation.’

  “Which is why, in telling you of the transfer file, I must first go back to the spring of 1945, at the wretched end of yet another wretched war. So we’ll start there, if you don’t mind.”

  “Please do.”

  Glavas eased forward on the couch, shifting the rough blanket about his shoulders, collecting himself again with another deep breath.

  “It was a hell of a lot worse then than now, I will tell you,” he said. “And that’s not just the generational carping of an old man determined to prove he’s had it worse than anybody nowadays. I sit here now under a pile of blankets with no heat and maybe two hours a week of running water, and that’s on a good day. And by God this is luxury compared to that war. The food now is the same every day, but it is food. The walls now are full of shrapnel, but they are still standing. The enemy shoots at us but he at least stays in the hills. This is a bad game of roulette. That war was one massacre after the other. You want to learn about some real ethnic cleansing? Then go back and read about that meat grinder. Or better still, ask your father, or your uncle.”

  Vlado didn’t need to ask anyone. He’d heard most such tales in all their gory detail. And while the more glorious tales of heroism tended to be exaggerated-just ask Damir’s father, for example-the stories of hardship and horror had if anything been toned down. Croats killing Serbs, Serbs killing Muslims, Communists killing royalists, the Germans killing practically everybody-and for the survivors the old anger and mistrust had never been far from the surface. From their memories had come the embers that now burned so brightly across Bosnia, as if the fire had only gone underground for half a century.

  “My village was gone, burned to a cinder, a small place in the east, barely a dozen houses altogether,” Glavas said. “Wiped out by the Nazis and those nasty Croats in the Ustasha. I’d been a university boy before everything shut down, an art history major with dreams of someday running a state museum, and I’d just won a curator’s internship in Belgrade when the fighting started. All that was over then, of course. And the village was gone in about the time it took you to buy your groceries. By the time the soldiers came I’d made it out of town on a farm wagon with four other boys my age. Then we ran from a roadblock and through the woods until I reached here. None of the other three made it. Shot while we ran, though I never once looked back. Just felt them falling around me, going down as if they’d suddenly gotten tired and given up on the spot. Amazing I wasn’t hit. For three days I lived on snow and a single heel of bread, and I spent the rest of the war holed up in cellars and back rooms, hiding from what passed for the authorities then.”

  Glavas went on for another twenty minutes about those times, his voice rising with a passion as if the events had occurred just last week. Vlado sought a way to steer him back toward the subject at hand, but it was obvious Glavas was going to have his say. A man like this didn’t get much in the way of visitors anymore. So let him talk it out, Vlado figured, glancing at his watch. By the sound of it, Glavas was finally nearing the end of World War II.

  “By the time you survived something like that you not only had the fear of God worn out of you, you also had the fire of revenge burning in your belly, and you were ready to take this revenge any way you could get it. My chance would come through art. A few months after the war ended I was invited to join the delegation going to Germany to recover the items that had been plundered from the new nation of Yugoslavia during the war. I say delegation, which makes it sound grand, but it was actually just me and one other fellow. If so many museum people hadn’t been killed or taken off to the camps, I never would have been chosen. But as it was I was an easy choice for them. My training made me stand out, and when I heard they were looking for help I jumped at the chance. I could extract revenge canvas by canvas. And let me tell you, from the very beginning I had no intention of sticking by anyone’s rules. I was full of zeal, ready to claim anything and everything that wasn’t tied down, particularly if I suspected it was a piece that really belonged in Germany. My chief worry was how I’d be able to keep my boss from finding out-Pencic, the museum director from Belgrade. And then, of course, I’d also have to deal with the Allied officers in charge of the operation. The Monuments officers, they called themselves. Americans
, mostly.

  “But Pencic was way ahead of me. When we met to go over our battle plan before leaving he showed me all the documentation we’d be taking. Every available certification and stamp and insurance form for every item we knew to be missing, several thousand items in all. Amazing what all had been taken, the complete thoroughness of it.

  “Then he pulled out a stack of blank certification forms. Blanks! And what are these for, I asked, as if I hadn’t already guessed. For whatever we might also be able to bring back, he said, and I knew that I had found my master. These were the tools of careful larceny before us, and he had not been content with planning on taking a dozen, or twenty, or even fifty. If he was going to risk fraud and deception, then he was by God going to do it full throttle. He had two hundred blank forms. Two hundred! And we would use these wisely, not for just any claimable piece of trash, and nothing for our own personal gain. We were on a mission for God and country.”

  Glavas paused, sighing.

  “Have you got another Drina-this one’s running low. Thank you.” Outside a screaming whistle was followed by a huge explosion. The building seemed to tremble. Glavas glanced toward his plastic-covered windows.

  “Ah, the skies are clearing. A noisy afternoon ahead, most likely. So, then. We left for Berlin on a Monday in June. In a captured old Fokker, repainted white. My first time in an airplane, and I still remember the marvel of it. We left from here, and it occurred to me how beautiful the city was. Before, even when visiting here as a wide-eyed country boy, I’d always seen Sarajevo as some scar upon the mountains, a great gray gash in the green. But from up there it became a living thing, a long graceful body settled into the valley for a nap after a terrible night without sleep, smoke curling up out of the chimneys. And the river-it was early morning when we took off, in a brilliant sun-the river was like some lovely gold necklace on a very elegant woman. A wonderful moment. Then, up, over the mountains, and onward to Germany “Berlin. My God, Berlin. If you want to see the wastage of war you should have seen Berlin. Even after all that had happened I pitied those people. Whole blocks turned to bricks, except now it was becoming neat. Everywhere were these Prussian stacks of bricks, and everywhere these stout women in kerchiefs were making more of them, stacking them higher and higher, passing them in long assembly lines, some of the women actually quite young and pretty, wispy from the lack of food, widowed ghosts roaming the rubble. And if you think women here will do anything for cigarettes, well … But what I remember most is the stench. Heaven help you if you ended up downwind of the grand River Spree. It was a giant sewer, and still full of bodies, swollen like dead rats, black and bloated, the size of small whales.”

  He paused for a drag on the cigarette. Already Vlado could see why this might take a while, so he nudged Glavas back toward the topic at hand. “And then you began your search. For the looted art.”

  “Yes. We settled in and checked in with the authorities. First with the Russians, over in their occupation zone, which was mostly fruitless. It was all we could do to find anything at all in their zone without them carting it off for Moscow. They were looting the looters, and certainly the way we were thinking we didn’t blame them a bit, especially after what they’d gone through. Although by the end of the first week I was as disgusted with them as with the Germans. Strutting around in their boots and greatcoats, rolling their tanks over the rubble, checking everyone’s papers. Making silly arrests. And helping themselves to half the female population over the age of ten. They really were beasts, although their art people were top notch. Knew exactly what to take first.”

  The next twenty minutes were a wandering exploration of the ways and means of the Russian art squads, fascinating but maddeningly distant from the subject at hand. Vlado interrupted a few times, but it was like trying to steer a derailed locomotive. Glavas would leap back on the tracks when he pleased.

  “Next came the Western allies,” Glavas said, finally leaving the Russians behind. “Not much easier to deal with, but at least you weren’t worried they were shipping half of what they had back home on the very next boat. And the French would have been just as bad as the Russians if they’d had half a chance. Although don’t believe the Brits and the Americans weren’t taking things, too. Everybody got something out of it.

  “The main collection point for the Americans was in Munich, but in those days there was still plenty of stuff scattered in the countryside, a lot of it out in the middle of nowhere, places where the Germans had stashed things in the last months of the war that still hadn’t been collected. We got out our maps and went off with our American guide on one subterranean tour after another, visiting old dungeons, caves and mines, cellars of convents and monasteries, wineries, breweries, castles. Everywhere we went was one magnificent collection after another. I couldn’t hold my eyes in my head for days at a time. And slowly we made progress. I had my list and began to tick things off, one by one. They’d crate our items for packing and ship them to a central point for sending back to Yugoslavia.

  “And of course along the way we always kept looking out, as Pencic used to say, for ‘the lost lambs of art,’ the items wandering unclaimed in empty pastures. It was our job, he said, to welcome them into our flock as if they were family. And so we did.”

  Glavas chuckled, smiling.

  “I can still recall some of the tales we told, some of the finesse that it took to stake our claims. And I know that sometimes people just flat didn’t believe us. But in the end they often had no choice. Quite often these were not curators we were dealing with, anyway, except at the larger collection points. We only had to swindle clerks and low level officers, paper pushers who wouldn’t have known the difference between a Boticelli and a Beaujolais. So, in nine exhausting weeks we quite outdid ourselves. By the time we were ready to board our fine little white Fokker back to Sarajevo we had used up one hundred sixtyfive of our two hundred blank forms.”

  “Weren’t you worried you’d be caught?”

  “Oh, we knew we’d be caught, eventually anyway. And we were. By the late fifties it was quite apparent what had happened. Our behavior became a well-known minor outrage in come circles of the European art world, not so much for the volume and value of what we took, quite small in the grand scheme of things. What enraged them was the idea that two little people like us had pulled it off with such brazen ease and weren’t about to apologize. And of course memories grow old quickly, especially among the great hordes of army clerks who could no longer remember anything about what they’d signed over to us, much less the details of our little fictions and embellishments. But the ones at the top knew we’d made off with the goods.”

  “So you had to give everything back?”

  “Oh, no. We’d anticipated from the start we’d be found out. The rightful owners, we knew, would eventually become known in some cases. So we took precautions from the beginning that would make it as difficult as possible for these items to be retrieved. And that’s where the transfer file comes in.”

  “How?”

  “We knew we couldn’t leave them with our museum collections. Too easy to track down that way. So we immediately began to spread them around. Some pieces went to government ministries, beautiful paintings that would end up hanging behind some gray, grim clerk scribbling on forms all day. The icons went to churches, usually small rural parishes that were more than happy to have them. It was the one bit of government benevolence for religion that Tito ever allowed.

  “Some pieces went to a few of the big state-run hotels. But the bulk went to individuals. Party functionaries. Ministry bigwigs. It was the moral equivalent, I suppose, of a millionaire collector hiding pieces in his closet. But it was the best way to display them at all while still ensuring we’d keep them in the country. So once outsiders started asking if they might please have these items back, we could honestly say, ‘Oh, dear me, these pieces are no longer in our museums, and to track them down would take ages, and, well, we’ll certainly get on the job but it can’t
possibly be a priority, you see.’ Only we knew all along where everything was.”

  “Because it was all recorded in the transfer files.”

  “Yes. And I was their lord and master. Even as my duties here at the museum began to broaden, I held on to this role. Partly because I knew more about it than anyone else, but partly because I felt an emotional attachment. I’d rescued them and brought them back.

  “But then a funny thing happened. All the Party officials and ministry chieftains who were beneficiaries of our scheme found that they quite liked to have nice artworks in their homes. And of course, their underlings were all jealous. They wanted art for their houses, too. As the bureaucracy grew, so did the demand. And of course we had nothing left to give them then but our own museum pieces.”

  “And did you?”

  “But of course. Just because they weren’t ministers didn’t mean they couldn’t make your life miserable if you crossed them. So we complied, and the transfer files began to grow. Museum art began moving, piece by piece.”

  He chuckled again.

  “I even ended up with a piece, one of the original transfer items, in fact.”

  He pointed across the room to the oil painting that had so impressed Vlado when he’d first entered. It was a verdant field of lilies in the light of later afternoon, an impressionist masterpiece.

  “It’s nineteenth century. Chances are it belonged in a small museum in Stuttgart. ‘Tut mir leid, ’ as the Germans say.”

  “Aren’t you worried it will be damaged?”

  “At first I was. When the war started I put it in the building’s cellar in its own locked cabinet. But after a while I couldn’t stand the thought of it down there with the mice and the rusting bicycles and the grubby street urchins, with the huddled families too scared to move every time the shelling started. So I went down one night to get it, and a good thing I did. The cellar was ankle deep in water from pipes that had burst in the shelling. The water was only a few inches from destroying it altogether. It was strange. It was exactly how they’d found a lot of the old German sites in cellars and mine shafts. In standing water or encrusted with salt. Blighted with mildew. Some things ruined or half ruined. Others caked in dust or nibbled by mice, or buried alive by cave-ins. They’d shoved paintings between mattresses, draped them with lingerie, blankets, and lace curtains. Amazing what they’d done with some of it. And there was my own precious old canvas, slowly dying as the waters rose. So I brought it up here. If the shells get it, if some sniper puts a hole in it, well, better a quick death than slow torture by moisture and mildew. At least this way I can enjoy it until either it or me is finished. Anyhow, where was I?”