The Painting on Auerperg's Wall

by Erika Rummel

  Von Auerperg kept his word. He sent Eva a package through Liese. Just some clothes of my late wife, he told his secretary. An envelope with money was folded in with the clothes.It was less money than Eva had expected but sufficient to buy a birth certificate for the child and a death certificate for a man named Andras Nagy that turned Eva into a widow. In return for the money, she sent Auerperg a receipt signed with a squiggle since she was between names. It was a letter of thanks, she told Liese.

  What could have offended Nancy in this account? Auerperg’s offer to buy the Liebermann and the Persian carpets seemed humane, even if the transaction was legally questionable. So what if his motives weren’t entirely altruistic and he got a bargain? Eva and Zoltan got the better deal. They escaped the long arm of the Gestapo. And where was the Liebermann now, David wondered. Did Auerperg sell it or was it still in the family? Nancy might be able to answer those questions, but David couldn’t ask her, or she’d know that he had been nosing around her bedroom.

  A feeling of unease crept up his spine, a tingle of shame at doing something surreptitious. He had an irrational fear of being caught and humiliated. He no longer had the peace of mind to give Zoltan’s book a leisurely reading. He started skipping pages. The sooner the book was restored to its place in Nancy’s bedroom the better. What if she sprung a surprise on him and returned early? What if a cab pulled up this very moment? He would have to explain. She would know that he had rummaged through her belongings. Idiot, he said to himself, paranoid idiot, she’s due back tomorrow. You’ve got all the time you need to give Zoltan’s memoirs a thorough reading. But he couldn’t get rid of the feeling that he was a voyeur, had no right to look at a book that was deeply personal and didn’t belong to him.

  No, he argued with himself, Zoltan didn’t mean it to be private. He had been looking for a publisher. He meant to describe a moment in history, a subject that concerned David. He was a historian. It was his professional duty to keep himself informed even if, after Derrida, the historical truth was unknowable because the life of the writer had no parallel in the reader’s mind and could therefore not be absorbed. The experience remained outside his ken, forever abstract. Zoltan was right, he realized. To understand another man’s experience, a mechanism was needed to clone it and make it your own. David’s own life, an American life, quiet and privileged, was no preparation for understanding Zoltan’s experiences or those of his aunt and the upheavals of life in Vienna, 1939. The words in Zoltan’s memoir touched his optical nerve but did not enter his bloodstream.

  With diminishing hope, David skimmed the next chapter of The Rescue: Eva moving from Vienna to Budapest, the shabby apartment there, the ration cards, the postwar years with the Iron Curtain descending and shutting Hungary off from the West, the revolt of ’56, refugees trudging through the snow toward the Austrian border, Zoltan among them.

  The narrative switched to the first person, and David slowed down over the account of Zoltan’s flight to freedom in ’56. He was riding in the back of a van. Cars, trucks, and refugees on foot clogged the road leading to Austria.

  The van came to a halt, Zoltan wrote. We were out of gas. Someone helped us push the vehicle to the side so that others could pass. We joined the refugees on foot, carrying what we could. Someone said that the border with Austria, that crack in the Iron Curtain, was about to close. Someone else said the Russians had searchlights trained on the no man’s land separating Austria from Hungary. There were rumours that the Russians had mined the tract along the border, that it was an impassable marsh now that the snow had turned to sleet. You couldn’t get across to Austria because the Russians demolished the bridges. No one knew what was true, what wasn’t. We fanned out cross-country, individuals and little family groups. An old man limping along beside me said the Russians had bloodhounds, trained to sniff you out. Everyone’s guilty to the dogs, he said. They can smell your fear. But I saw only a sheepdog circling a bleating flock. The sheep moved slowly across my field of vision, flanks rubbing, filling my nose with the smell of dung and wet wool. No mines, I thought, at least not where those grey-faced sheep are. The ground was marshy, though, too soft to sustain the weight of an adult. My boots sank in and made a sucking sound. I belly-crawled the last few hundred yards toward the barbed wire, where someone had cut a hole and thrown logs across the narrow canal that marked the border.

  I slid along the makeshift bridge and was in Austria. There was a long line of Red Cross ambulances, army field kitchens, buses provided by a disaster relief organization. Each of us, who made it through, got a mug of hot tea and a bread and butter sandwich. We sat down wherever there was space to sit down. People slept on chairs with blankets and hats pulled over their faces and feet propped up on their belongings. I had abandoned my bundle crossing the marsh. I brought only myself across the border.

  David hurried on to the last chapter. He was no longer reading line for line. He was just trawling for Laura’s name, looking for capital Ls and keywords like “marriage” and “birth,” but Zoltan’s post-revolution private life was apparently beside the point. The Zoltan on the pages of the memoir was a historical figure, an emblematic casualty of racial politics and postwar manoeuvring. His studies at the University of Vienna occupied a few lines. His move to California was squeezed into the epilogue, a paragraph to cap the story.

  David shut the book and patted down the cover. The first twenty pages wanted to open and fan out, betraying his selective reading. No doubt, his fingerprints were on the margins of the pages. The paper was stamped with his DNA, bore permanent traces of his secret borrowing.

  It was best to go back to Nancy’s house at once, return the volume, and slip it into its old place under the memorial pamphlet. He shouldn’t have taken it away in the first place. He should have read it in Nancy’s bedroom, standing up. He should have put it back immediately after reading it, exactly where he had found it, under the pamphlet. He tried to remember whether the edges of the pamphlet and the book had been flush. Would Nancy notice the difference? He might have to confess everything to her in the end.

  BACK HOME, DAVID tallied his gains. What had he learned about Laura from reading The Rescue? Nothing. That she had fantasies or false memories about her grandfather and a painting that belonged to him? David felt a historian’s frustration with the inadequacy of his sources, the gaps in Zoltan’s story. The period that interested him — his life in Vienna, Laura’s childhood — were missing from the account. They weren’t relevant to Zoltan’s subject: his rescue, Auerperg’s courage and goodwill. The solution, he realized, was to go to location in Vienna and track down the sources in person.

  Thinking of The Rescue as a document and of unravelling Laura’s story as a research project made him feel better about the whole enterprise. His skin stopped radiating heat, and the nervous tingle in his spine abated. His conscience no longer nagged him for snooping around in Nancy’s bedroom or in Laura’s past. He was on solid ground. Historical research was his profession, something he knew how to handle. It was a matter of developing the right methodology, of approaching his meandering feelings for Laura in a critical manner. His desire wasn’t prurient, he told himself. It wasn’t a subdermal irritation, an urge coming up from the reptilian part of his brain. It was a professional interest, a genealogical inquiry. His feelings for Laura were vague like an unidentified fever, disturbing like a badly stitched scar. But his interest in Laura’s family history was a defined field, subject to method and ratiocination. So why not combine his planned visit to the manuscript collection at the National Library in Vienna with an inquiry into the history of the Nagys?

  Once David sat down at the computer and put his fingertips to the keyboard, he saw his way clear. There must be documents in the archives of Vienna relating to Laura’s grandparents, the Wassermanns. Their art collection must be traceable. In The Rescue, Auerperg mentioned Waldmüller, Pettenkofen, Hobbema. Those names by themselves might not produce useful leads — they
were ubiquitous in the history of eighteenth and nineteenth century art — but he had one specific piece of information: Liebermann’s Herbstwald.

  He googled Liebermann and scanned the results — biographies of the artist, images of his paintings, recent sales. Herbstwald. The image of an autumn landscape under a cloudy sky popped up on his screen. Was this the landscape Laura’s eyes saw while she listened to someone telling her fairy tales?

  Offered for sale. The words entered David’s mind like a flash flood. The painting was for sale in Vienna, at an auction house called the Dorotheum. Herbstwald. Est. value 400,000 Euros, he read. The painting that changed hands and saved Zoltan’s life. David saw his research trip turning into a pilgrimage to the shrine of an auction house, to lay his eyes on the miraculous, life-saving Herbstwald.

  And who was the owner of the painting now? Could it be Nancy? Was she the seller?

  When Nancy returned the next day, David had his questions under control and distilled into a research project and a travel plan. He walked across the driveway to return Nancy’s keys, hoping to catch in her eyes an afterimage of Vienna, the city of wonders. She did look wonderfully reconfigured. She seemed to have shed a few years. The lines of her body had shifted, giving her a more streamlined appearance.

  “How was Vienna?” he said, suppressing the real question: Who put the Liebermann up for sale? Had Nancy inherited it from her husband?

  Nancy gave him a flawless smile. “I had a great time,” she said. “I love Vienna. You should come and visit. You’d enjoy the parks, the architecture, the concerts, the museums…”

  “I’ve been thinking about it,” he said. “In fact, I checked out flights for next week. They have incredible last-minute prices.”

  Nancy gave him a distracted look. Was the information too generic for her? Was she searching her mind for a list of transatlantic airlines with service to Vienna? Lufthansa. Austrian Airlines. Swissair.

  “I’m planning to do research in the National Library in Vienna,” he said. “I think I mentioned to you that I’m working on a manuscript. A fifteenth-century herbarium.”

  “Oh, yes,” she said, recovering her composure. “You did mention it. Vellum. Illuminated. Historiated borders. It sounded lovely. I wish you had told me earlier that you were going to Vienna. You could have stayed at my apartment, David, but I’m having a new heating system installed, and everything is at sixes and sevens. Bad timing, I’m afraid.”

  “That’s okay,” he said. “I’ve booked a hotel.” Reasonably priced and in the right location, near the church where Zoltan’s aunt had met with Leo Auerperg. In his head, David had mapped out a historical walk, a step-by-step reconstruction of Zoltan’s rescue, an outline of Laura’s prehistory. It included a stroll down the Herrengasse in search of the café where Eva had fed the baby, and a stop at St. Peter’s, where she had concluded her bargain with Auerperg.

  “Oh,” Nancy said. “Oh, that’s alright then.” She trailed off, looking at him in wonder. The newest procedure seemed to have erased all lines around her eyes and left her with the wide-open look of an ingénue, permanently surprised at the wickedness of the world.

  DAVID PACKED HIS carry-on with a flailing energy. He was impatient to grind through the three days separating him from the date of departure. He arrived at the airport too early, paced the lounge, seethed through the abbreviated night on the plane, and had no time for jet lag after landing in Vienna. He was unwilling to rest, but once he was in his hotel room, he could not shake the torpor of exhaustion. He lay down on the bed, fully dressed, meaning to get up shortly and check out the city’s nightlife. Instead, he slept fitfully through the night, through a series of stop-motion dreams with fenced yards, blind alleys, and groaning beasts.

  Quite possibly his dystopian dreams were inspired by the view he had glimpsed from the window. His room looked out across a narrow lane at the curved back of St. Peter’s. The grey stucco walls of the church were claustrophobically close. When David opened his eyes at dawn, he saw, through the sheer curtains, two baroque stone angels writhing in a slow dance of religious intoxication, calling on God with lips parted in moaning exultation. In the first moments between sleeping and waking, he mistook them for live performers, and even when he hitched himself up to a sitting position and turned a steady eye on them, they remained precariously balanced in their shallow niches, in danger of falling off their pedestals, it seemed to him, and shattering on the pavement below.

  He checked the time: It was too early for breakfast, too late to go back to sleep. At home, back in L.A., he knew how to steady himself with a routine, with the morning ritual of coffee and local news. Here, nothing kept his heart from playing a drum solo of nostalgia for the past, another man’s past. Studying the lives of others was a kind of avoidance, he thought, something to keep him from thinking about his own life, which was sad but lacked the heroic quality that made sadness bearable. Art had the same effect on him. Beauty like heroism made life bearable. Studying artworks, especially illuminated manuscripts, was a way to keep depression at bay, he thought. It removed the third dimension and flattened all grief. But there was no artifact at hand here in his hotel room, no manuscript whose beauty might placate his mind, whose vellum pages might soothe his anxiety. He had to wait, sit still in an upholstered chair, whose flowery pattern annoyed him. He closed his eyes against the print above the bed, another floral assault on his senses. He had no way of dealing with the impatience humming in his brain like a tuning fork. He was at the mercy of the local time zone.

  It took a solid breakfast of bacon and eggs to bring order to the jagged disarray of David’s inner life. The fatty acids had a settling effect, and he was ready, finally, to embark on the historical trail, the story of Zoltan’s rescue. First stop: St. Peter’s.

  David had planned to sit in one of the pews and savour the atmosphere, but a mass was in progress, and a sandwich board at the entrance told visitors in three languages not to loiter and disturb the devotions of the faithful. All he could do was stand at the back and look down the centre aisle of the nave leading up to the main altar. The pews were crowded. The nave was brightly lit with chandeliers, shining a searchlight on the congregation, probing their consciences. The priest at the altar genuflected and lifted up the host. The altar boys in lacy surplices tinkled their bells. It was a ritual to banish all ghosts and admit only God’s Truth.

  David had barely set foot on the historical path, and already his progress was impeded. Already he had come up against the conundrum of Truth. How could he find truth here, in this baroque confusion, where painted columns seemed to jut out, and turned flat against the palm of his searching hand? Where the touch of a master’s brush had changed hard plaster into soft flesh and created a dizzying, curlicue movement the eye could not arrest? David ducked out of the church, fled the house of illusion.

  But even in the street, he felt unsteady, a time zone traveller. His life was distorted, wrenched from its context and twisted into something touristy and fantastic. A horse-drawn carriage passed him, with a coachman wearing a top hat, pointing out the sights to his fare with a furled whip. Their heads turned to the right and left, following his whip pointer. David longed for familiar American sights, the square shape of high-rises, the names of chain stores, the L.A. vernacular, but he was surrounded by classical façades, unfamiliar words on striped marquees, and the lilt of Austrian voices. The newness of the impressions was exhausting. Time to hit the refresh button and switch to his default project, the Habsburg collection. The manuscripts were David’s escape route to a familiar world, to a reality he could recognize, a world in which he could claim competence. He wanted to be comforted and enjoy the peace of reading words written long ago, in a time of certainty.

  The solution was to spend the remainder of the day in the manuscript room of the National Library, doing conventional research, the kind that was like a mother tongue to David, so familiar it calmed the heartbe
at. He needed time out from the Nagy project, and the National Library provided the pure atmosphere conducive to restful contemplation — and the hope that the past could be brought into the present. On the marble stairs leading to the reading room, he saw a clerk carrying from the vault a pile of rare books and manuscripts. He lugged them on his back in a hod that looked like something a peasant might have used for hauling firewood long ago. And yet the receptionist who renewed David’s library card was firmly anchored in the present. Her office was state-of-the-art. She made him look into a camera connected to her computer, punched a few keys, waited for the machine to spit out a plastic card, and handed it to him for signing. David replaced his old card, a laminated piece that had taken on the curve of his wallet, with the new one that bore his instant photo, the photo of a man looking like a rabbit on the run, surprised and red-eyed.

  He filled out the requisition slip for the Habsburg manuscript, put his things into a locker, as instructed, bringing with him only a writing pad and a sharpened pencil. Then he waited in the hushed reading room, where the air conditioning was at the glacial level required for the conservation of historical artifacts. He watched the three other readers in the room, bent over their books with myopic concentration, and felt at home, one of a small, like-minded community.

  The walls of the reading room were lined with shelves containing reference books, largely unused now that a computer had been installed in one corner and the data contained in bibliographies and encyclopedias could be had at the click of a mouse. On impulse, David walked over to the computer, typed in “Dorotheum,” the name of the auction house where the Liebermann was offered for sale, and double-checked the viewing times. Next, he clicked on the auction catalogue and zeroed in on Herbstwald, until the Liebermann painting filled the screen, dissolved into blotches and turned into a Rorschach test. Yes, what did it all mean?

  Out of the corner of his eye, David saw the archivist on duty signalling to him. He logged off. The manuscript he had requested was waiting for him at the counter. He signed for it, returned to his seat, and a few minutes later, was looking at the Burgundian Herbarium, set before him on foam supports to protect the fragile spine of the codex. With a contented sigh, he embarked on the sacred ritual of dealing with the past.