by Shira Nayman
I knew the paintings were stolen; I do not deny that. I had, however, incorrectly assumed a different act of theft from the one that in fact had taken place.
You will think I am making excuses, and perhaps I am. But I believed my source, especially concerning the Cranachs. They looked like they belonged in a museum, and the story about their theft—rescue, really, during various bombardments, including, toward the end, the destruction of Dresden—convinced me thoroughly. Yes, a more honorable man might have questioned the veracity of my source’s claims. But the fact is, I didn’t; and the fact is, I passed the paintings along. To dozens of aristocrats, of whom the culturally inflamed gentleman I spoke of earlier was but one.
The painting is homeless, I reasoned; it needs a home. I was simply uniting a wayward work of art with a soul in search of edification—I prided myself in supplying only those I deemed deserving, having developed a set of criteria to determine who was and who wasn’t. Sold: to the screened and willing adopter, who expressed his gratitude in a gaze of disbelieving joy directed at his new foundling, and in a significant sum of pounds sterling, wired to one of my off-shore accounts.
The story my source told me had gripped me from the start. Paintings whisked out by some rebel underground from the basement of various German museums in the midst of unearthly poundings—I envisioned a building shuddering and, within the sound of shrieking alarms, the ghastly silence of the newly dead. Who would not cleave to the idea of rescuing from Germany the art it no longer deserved?
My original intention was naïve. That I would donate the paintings to the British Museum. My source pointed out that their origins—the alleged museums (which turned out to be a lie)—would soon be determined. That the war would end and then, some years hence, an impossible snarl of international controversy would ensue. Who knew where such a turn of events might lead.
No, my source said. There are buyers here, in England. Let some Englishmen take possession, my source said. He knew how the aristocracy functioned: a painting would stay in the family two, maybe three generations. Ultimately, it would find its way to the public weal—too long after the fact for anyone to bother about its provenance.
Needless to say, he did not in the same breath mention the rolls of banknotes that would change hands, half going his way, the other half going mine. Though he did add knowingly, “I’m sure you have pet causes, a man like yourself.”
There really is no connection between the crimes I am accused of and those I have committed, if you can call my gobetween activities crimes.
Or is there?
Yes, the paintings.
But there were also other crimes.
I knew Marilyn was working on an exhibition. I suspected it might have to do with the war. I’d presumed the focus was on England, as I knew she’d spent time photographing there. How could I have known she had a friend whose photographs are to be shown alongside her own? A friend who had gone in with the Liberators. Who had been among the first Americans to see, to really see, just what they (they? I must say they? Am I not a German?) had done.
How could I have known that the large stack of photographs Marilyn slid across the stainless steel bench in my darkroom, a room I’d never taken the time to use myself, would contain those hellish scenes? Scenes depicting the camps, mere days or weeks after their liberation—places I am now forced to consider in my search for my sister and mother. Erla. Dachau. Bergen-Belsen. Buchenwald. Visited and documented by Marilyn’s photographer colleague, who carefully marked the names, in red, in a bottom corner of each proof sheet.
My right hand flies to the spot on my left upper arm; I stroke it, though I know this will not ease the poisonous ache.
The wooden door, I see it now, the patchwork of faded color: generations of old paint long since flaked away. A tint of blue, the merest hue of rose, a cross-hatch band that perhaps once was green, now muted to grayish-white. In among the hints of color, I see the battered grain—feel, as if I might reach up and strip away long splinters by the fistful.
The sound of Klauss’s phlegmy cough—hacking, insistent. His boot on the door, caving it in.
I will not recover from having seen Marilyn’s photographic images.
My visitor has not gone unnoticed, after all.
Marilyn seemed quite distressed this evening, here, in my office. I don’t know what she was trying to accomplish. I felt at a loss—betrayed, in that moment, by my years of strategizing, of carefully constructing every action and response, left not knowing how to respond. Of course, she has no idea what is really going on. How could she? Perhaps she is trying to help. But it seemed impossible, like trying to unweave a spider’s gossamer creation. Where would one begin? And what would be the point?
I do not believe she was telling the truth; I am sure my visitor must have said something damning about me. How else to explain, at the end, the look in Marilyn’s face of fright? What other reason could she have to fear me? I dread to think of what he might have said. And dread the thought that Marilyn would believe his words to be true.
When the envelope arrived today in the mail, there was something unreal about it—I’d waited so long for news about them. I knew that the odds of the news being good were extremely remote, virtually nonexistent, in fact. But the human heart is blind to probability—a shred of hope is the same as a great mountain of it.
I left the envelope on my desk and paced back and forth before it, holding onto this last moment of—what? Of not knowing the truth, whatever it might be? Terror, exhilaration—both coursed through my veins. And a sudden awareness, that whatever the outcome, I would be brought closer to them—to my mother, to Else. The perhaps of: oh, wonder of wonders! To know I might see them again! Or the other, unthinkable perhaps: to be brought to the fullness of grief, the great pool of sadness itself a dark rejoining.
Aware that until I opened the envelope, neither possibility had any claim to certainty.
I do not know how long it lay there, the letter, unopened.
I could not get the photographs out of my mind’s eye, the vision of Marilyn’s proof sheets. The diffuse gray sky in one grainy shot of wire fencing, a guard tower. The cloudy light that fell upon the photographic paper to make the image—could it have been the same light that fell upon my mother and sister in their final days? Hours? Moments? Or was this the light only of other people’s ends?
I must have opened the envelope, though I have no recollection of doing so, because here it is, on my desk, the top neatly sliced by my silver letter opener.
I see them, taking off their clothes with everyone else, walking naked into the chamber where they would breathe in deeply and die.
The blow is worse than I could have imagined.
Was it the last thing they saw? A brown uniform? The armband: red and black, black and red?
And the woman, rocking by the hearth. Looking out from dark eyes that seemed not to see and yet saw nonetheless—their movements proved this well enough. Klauss’s brown uniform—or perhaps my own?—was the last impression her eyes would claim.
After the explosion that destroyed the milk cart, I stayed in that cold ditch all night. If I slept, it was the sleep of purgatory.
Cold morning light slapped me to consciousness and I crawled from the ditch. Such a heavy silence. Before I saw the grisly scene I remember thinking: This is the silence of the grave.
How could I have not known that Alfred was dead? My mind was not working; it had slipped from its moorings.
Alfred’s body lay by what remained of the cart in an oddly strewn posture—a rag doll flung down by a distracted child: elbows, ankles, wrists, and knees working against the usual mechanical positions of joints. The fatal wound was to his gut; his entrails hung casually from a gaping slash, like a bunch of bruised wine-dark grapes. No more than a pace away lay another dead man, his body by comparison orderly and neat, the limbs arrayed cleanly like those of someone in sleep. Brown uniform, black and red armband. As luck would have it, Alfred must h
ave dispatched the soldier with a single, close-range shot to the face, which no longer resembled a face: just shattered bone and black-red blood and a halo of splattered brain. I saw the gun still clutched in Alfred’s hand, the fingers curled—already turned to granite—around the handle and through the mechanism of the trigger. I tried to figure the logic of the scene: Nazi soldiers, tipped off that this milkman is harboring a Jew. They attack. One of them lunges at Alfred with a knife; Alfred manages, perhaps while falling, to execute a perfect close shot to the enemy’s head. The others, not finding their Jew, head off in different directions to track him (me?) down. Perhaps they would return later for their fallen comrade.
I quickly removed my navy jacket, and then the outer of my two sets of clothing—the woolen cardigan and flannel pants—leaving them crumpled on the ground, then put my jacket, with the secret pockets my mother had sewn, back on. I approached the dead soldier and found myself removing his jacket, aware of the sticky red rim on the inside of the collar. The blood must have flooded down his neck, as the inside of the jacket was drenched to the waist. From the outside, the dark blood was visible at the collar’s edge; the front of the jacket had spatterings, as did the pants. But this was war: blood was a normal enough stain. I removed the pants too, my hands working free of thought. The dead soldier was larger than me, though not by much. I avoided looking at him; I continued my actions by feel. And then, I walked away—from the soldier, and, with a tremendous pang of grief, from Alfred. He had saved my life twice: once while alive and again in his dying moment, when his finger squeezed the trigger of his gun, giving me a relatively clean brown uniform in which to take cover.
I continued to sleep in ditches by day, rising to walk endless cold hours through the night. Though the uniform made me less visible, I still felt I was a target.
Snatched from sleep—a rough shaking at the shoulder—a moment of panic as I saw that the man shaking me was wearing a brown uniform. A flash, and then I recalled that I was wearing a brown uniform too.
Why, then, the suspicion in his face? It was a square, blunted face, with eyes that were resentful and dull with ignorance. His name was Klauss, and we trudged alongside one another—I don’t know for how many miles. He was not given to much talk, which I welcomed. Now and then, I felt the sting of a sidelong glance filled with that same suspiciousness of his first regard.
Why he stopped at the moment he did, I do not know. He grabbed my shoulder with such force I felt a pain shoot down my arm.
“Drop them,” he said curtly.
“I beg your pardon?” I had no idea what he was talking about.
“Your pants. Drop them.”
I did what I was bidden, turning my face away while Klauss inspected my naked penis, which shrank toward my body at the cold breath of the wind.
He seemed disappointed at the sight of my intact foreskin. He issued his hacking cough and wiped his dripping nose on his sleeve.
“We’ll find a use for that,” he said crudely, indicating my private parts with a jerk of his head. He resumed the march, leaving me to fumble at two sets of flies—I’d been careful, in pulling the two trousers down in one swift movement, to make it seem I was wearing only the one pair. I saw that light was beginning to wash over the heavy black sky.
The previous night, which was our first together, I’d intended to steal away, make my escape from Klauss, the minute he fell asleep. I’d willed myself to stay awake but had failed, finding myself awoken again some hours later by his rough shaking. Now, I vowed to myself anew that when we next stopped to sleep, I would dig my nails into my legs, bite the inside of my lip, anything to keep exhaustion at bay so that I might free myself of Klauss’s unpleasant and dangerous company.
It was not, however, to be. Not until too late—until there would never, for the rest of my days, be any possibility of escaping Klauss.
I am, after all, to be arraigned. Remarkable, the way the manner of my late-night visitor, through everything, has remained professional; he treats me with no sign whatsoever of condemnation. After conveying the news, he took his leave for what we both knew would be the last time. After he was gone, I removed all the materials from my file drawers: ledgers and notebooks and numerous files of returned mail. I had not seen it all gathered together before and was surprised by the sheer volume. Useless, dead documents. The search over.
I hear the voice of my friend, Oskar. The real Oskar. My fellow refugee from the Internment Center next to whom I’d slept in the dormitory. Oskar, who had dressed the wound on my forearm—the blackened gash that might have become gangrenous but did not. I had willed the wound to go bad, fixated on this, as if losing my arm might relieve me also of the burden of my actions (and inactions); as if losing some of my capacity to reach out might serve as punishment, and permit me to go on as a free man.
But against all the odds, the arm healed. Oskar took this as a point of pride. “I should have been a nurse.” He said this drily. I’d turned away to hide my distress. And disgust at my own failure of courage: that in plunging the wet red tip of the knife into my arm when I did, that long-ago cold and distraught day, I’d not done myself a greater injury.
And how did I repay him? This friend who helped deprive me of the punishment I deserved?
I took his name. I should say stole, for it was not a name he freely gave or to which I had any right. I hear him now: Over? How could the past ever be over?
I know it now: the dead do not die.
I shed the uniform as quickly, as effortlessly, as I have shed outer garb before and since. For this, I believe I have a singular talent. Two counts of good fortune: that it was terribly cold, and that the uniform was too large. Which made the wearing of my other clothes both possible and an advantage. Later, when I was finally able to break away, I could peel off the uniform and stash it in some bushes, and find I was still fully clothed.
It took me awhile to adjust to the loss of the layer—the cloth had been heavy and had served well against the wind.
Afterward I felt foolish recalling how, unthinkingly, I had folded the jacket and pants before shoving them into the hedge, which had materialized the instant I had need of it.
But I am leaving out one other detail. Before folding the jacket, I ripped the black and red armband from the sleeve, folded it into a tiny square, and stuffed it into one of the little pockets my mother had sewn inside the waist of my navy jacket.
The rest had gone without a hitch.
I’d become a true night creature. I had the map Alfred had given me, though no need to consult it, as it was long since committed to memory. When I reached Marseilles, I found my way easily to the dock. The barge was where Alfred said it would be: not a day or a week earlier, or a day or a week later, but right when I needed the boat to be there. I gave no thought to the serendipity of this; I was beyond such musings and besides, there had already been too many dark turnings of Fate for me to have any real regard for her occasional glitterings of gold (fool’s gold, only, after all).
On the practical side of things, I was, however, in possession of real coin; when I approached the helmsman of the barge, who eyed me coldly, the two gold coins I offered glinted in the oily moonlight. The helmsman examined them briefly, nodded his yellowish face, and blinked slowly once, twice, a hooded reptilian gesture that drew attention to his alert eyes. Raising his soiled shirt, he slipped the heavy coins into a pouch strapped to his waist. I approached the trapdoor in the middle of the deck, kept slightly ajar by a stump of wood, and caught a glimpse of what awaited me in the hold: a wedge of pure darkness.
It was a relief to be below deck, away from the wind, which had made light work of my clothing. I inched along the wall until I could feel the contours of the fourth bin, a rough hardwood box long enough for a man to lie stretched out and tall enough to crouch. Holding up the lid of the crate, I climbed in. Numerous holes the size of large coins had been bored into the side; I hunkered down in the boxed-in darkness.
Sounds filtered in
from the upper deck: voices speaking French, comings and goings, objects dragged from here to there. Then the stir of engines, distant and near as one’s own internal organs, and soon I felt the grinding pull away from the dock. I breathed in the soot that coated the inside of the coal bin and trained my ears on the darkness. The arcing motions of the barge steadied to a slow gliding. The sounds from above deck waned.
But then, the beat of a single set of footsteps. Moving down the iron ladder, across the old boards of the belowdeck, toward my bin and right up to the side of it. The lid to my crate was raised, and in the pulpy light of a small kerosene lamp, I saw the helmsman’s bulbous forehead and thin cheeks. He dropped in a heavy loaf, which bounced off my shoulder and thudded to the wooden floor of the box. The helmsman reached up and handed me a tinful of watery soup: various lumps and agglutinations floating in a thin, brown liquid. The lid above me was replaced. Again, the footsteps, this time leading away.
Sitting cross-legged, I broke off a piece of bread and chewed. I remember the gritty taste of the dark rye; I washed it down with a mouthful of liquid, which was faintly flavored with garlic. My meal over, I repositioned myself from the crouch to the lying-down-on-my-side position and stayed that way for some time, listening to my own breath—time and space reduced to numbness and bottomless, damp cold. After the nightmare weeks of endless marching, the constant threat of being seen, the coal bin encased me like a sanctuary. I gave myself over to a dreamless sleep.
* * *
I took two names—a first and a last, but only Oscar feels stolen. The name Harcourt, that of my mentor and now mine these last six years, was freely given, and also, somehow, my right.
A monochrome day, the London sky even flatter than usual, the light wan and diffuse. I remember my ill-fitting hand-medown shoes rubbing against my feet as I hurried along the thoroughfare. My suit, also given to me upon my arrival at the Internment Center, was a size too small; the knees rode high and there was a crease at the ankle where the fabric had been let down. (My own clothes, irremediably infested, had been immediately burned.) The ache in my bones, from two months of night trekking, the days spent sleeping in ditches.
