The Painting on Auerperg's Wall

by Erika Rummel

  THE NEXT MORNING, invigorated by the hours he had spent at the library breathing in the spicy air of parchment and old books, David resumed his research into the Nagy family saga. This time, he avoided the risk of getting lost in a maze of baroque angels and arcane ritual. He decided to confine himself to the modern age and go after the secular places in Zoltan’s story. It was too early to go to the auction house and view the Liebermann. Instead, he walked down the Herrengasse, slowed to look into the shop windows of high-priced boutiques, admired the classic façade of the Palais Modena, lost himself in the aisles of a fancy delicatessen, recalled his purpose and began looking for the café where Zoltan’s aunt might have fed him sugary milk to stop the infant’s crying. There was an abundance of possible locations. Vienna had a high ratio of cafés to street corners. David stuck his head into one or two places. He wasn’t sure what clues, what commemorative traces he expected to find — shadows on the wall, echoes of a mewling child, vibrations of a trembling hand? The first two cafés were too modern to evoke the war years. In the third, he found the stage he had been looking for. The Café Hawelka was dark and filled with the inertia of tradition. Its wooden floors smelled of wax. Newspapers, clipped to bamboo frames, were hanging from coat pegs by the door. The atmosphere was a heady mix of warm bodies, smoke, and ashes. A lanky waiter in a red vest took David’s order and brought him an espresso, setting the tray on the table with a sweeping motion. The foaming black liquid eddied dangerously close to the rim of the cup, barely resisting the centrifugal force. The movement had something mesmerizing about it, pulling David into the past. The set was right. It could have been circa 1939, but the atmosphere did not gel. The patrons had a contemporary look, and the dialogue was all wrong. Someone at the next table was talking about a rock concert. In the mosh pit…some sort of gigantic…drone heavy. The snatches of conversation undercut his mood.

  David checked his watch. The auction house would be open by now. He paid and walked on.

  The Dorotheum was in a street of antique shops that gave the appearance of being permanently closed. Their interior looked dark and deserted. The sculptures and gold-framed paintings on display had a patina of dust. But the auction house was a going concern. It occupied a large building, museum-like in its architectural glory, with banners trailing from the upper storey announcing the next auction date. David entered the white, vaulted foyer and made his way through the crowded galleries, looking at the paintings on display and reading the tags. He was getting close to the core of The Rescue, the part Nancy had found so distasteful, the transaction involving the Liebermann painting. It seemed more than a coincidence that a Liebermann was being offered for sale, here, so close to the scene of the historical transaction. It seemed fated. David felt a shiver of anticipation, of something momentous about to happen. LIEBERMANN — the name was printed on a small card taped to an empty spot on the gallery wall where the painting was supposed to be.

  HERBSTWALD BY MAX LIEBERMANN

  HAS BEEN WITHDRAWN FROM SALE

  David felt a sudden drop in air pressure as his expectations collapsed, a pain in his ear as if someone had slammed a door shut and left him in the dark, fighting for breath. The essential clue was missing. Why had the painting been withdrawn from sale? He looked around for an attendant, someone who could explain the circumstances to him. And there was Laura! No, his mind was playing him a trick. How could it possibly be Laura? It was a woman who looked like her. Or was it Laura after all? His mind went into overdrive. He set off in pursuit, following Laura’s avatar through the corridor to the exit. By the time he reached the street, she was half a block ahead, walking briskly. Her coat fluttered like the garments of St. Peter’s saints. She seemed to be tapping out a message on her high-heeled pumps, an imperious “Follow me,” leading him back to the Herrengasse. She quickened her pace and made it to the other side of the street just before the lights turned red. David broke into a run and was about to cross recklessly, when a man put out his arm and wrenched him back.

  “Sans lebensunlustig? Sehns net, dass’ rot is?” he asked David in broad dialect.

  David could barely make out his meaning. Something about crossing against the light. “Are you suicidal?” Is that what the man said?

  Halfway down the street, the woman who looked like Laura stopped and pulled out a set of keys. Her saw her profile. There could be no doubt. It was Laura. Every detail matched the image in his mind.

  By the time the lights turned green, she had disappeared, passed through an imposing oak portal, a portal large enough to admit a coach and four. A square entrance had been cut into it, sized for pedestrians.

  David hurried after her, put his hand on the doorknob and found it locked. He stepped back and looked up at the façade, expecting what? Expecting Laura to appear at a window and wave to him? The building was one of those stately complexes built at the end of the nineteenth century, with rows of windows crowned by little triangles, netted to keep the pigeons from roosting there. Beside the entrance was a wall-mounted intercom. There were no names, only apartment numbers and codes that were of no use to David because he was missing that piece of crucial information. The number of the apartment was just one of many things he did not know. A terrible uncertainty took hold of him. He could no longer tell the time or the season, whether he was moving or standing still. He could no longer think. A volcano of doubt exploded in his chest, leaving uncouth holes, dark grottoes, and clefts where his heart and lungs were supposed to be. He had difficulty breathing as he walked back to his hotel, troubled by a stitch in his side, the pain of longing for certainty.

  He wanted to turn back the clock and feel the reassurance of his former convictions, the density and overwhelming stability of The Truth — the what-you-see-is-what-you-get kind of truth. But doubt had taken root in his system, entered his bloodstream, corrupted the oxygen supply, leaving him short of breath. He was stuck with doubt.

  II. LAURA

  FROM HER DESK, LAURA COULD SEE the Getty Museum garden, bowl-shaped with a pond at the centre, a garden that was, like her life, in transition, in need of improvement. There was too much empty space. The newly planted trees didn’t offer enough canopy, and the blooms were too sparse. The bougainvillea was only halfway up the trellis, leaving the iron crown at the top bare, black spears silhouetted against the honeyed travertine of the museum walls. The walls, too, needed something more, like the patina of time. They were so new, so bland, the eye slipped off them. There was nothing to hold the interest.

  The phone buzzed.

  “Laura Nagy,” she said, hoping for something that would hold her interest.

  “How are you, dear?”

  Oh God, not her.

  There was no need for Nancy to identify herself. Her voice was instantly recognizable, breathy, floating the words on a cushion of air.

  “Laura, darling,” she said, “I have bad news. David Finley spotted you in Vienna.” She emphasized you, leaving a pause, allowing Laura to substitute another pronoun: him/her/them? “He came back from Vienna yesterday and phoned me right away. I’m sure it was Laura, he said. Not possible, I said. She’s back at the Getty. I talked to her yesterday.”

  “Nancy! Why would you say that? It contradicts everything Dad told him: that I was moving with him to Irvine, that I was taking a leave of absence from the Getty. I’m sick and tired of living the lies the two of you concoct, the charades you expect me to play.”

  “I beg your pardon, Laura? I didn’t concoct any lies. I told David the truth.”

  “And now he’ll be hounding me for answers.”

  “Laura, darling, be fair. This whole thing wasn’t my idea. On the contrary, I thought it was deplorable, and I told Zoltan so. Why are you blaming me for everything? It’s still about Jerry, isn’t it? Deep down, you think it was my fault.”

  “Don’t bring Jerry into this. I won’t go there.”

  “Fine,” Nancy said. “I do
n’t want to get into an argument.” Laura could hear her drawing in her breath, imagined her lips compressing into a thin line so that the words came out pinched: “I just wanted you to know, Laura, so you can handle the situation accordingly.”

  “Thanks,” Laura said and hung up. It was a messy situation, exactly what she’d been afraid of, but there was no use discussing it with Nancy. She was an airhead.

  “How can you stand Nancy?” she said to her father when she saw what was going on between them. “She’s such an airhead.”

  “I think she’s delightful,” he said, “but you are too young to understand the charm of innocence.”

  “I understand the charm of innocence,” she said, “but it should be reserved for children.”

  “On the contrary,” he said. “I admire Nancy for holding on to it, in spite of everything.”

  I wish he found someone else to admire, Laura thought. I wish he hadn’t involved me and Nancy in his ridiculous scheme, in his fantastic idea.

  Laura wanted more excitement in her life, but not the kind that was her father’s specialty, the zany kind. She should have said no, refused to have anything to do with his crazy games.

  She looked at the stack of catalogues on her desk. They had turned into a cement block and become impenetrable. Her concentration was gone.

  I always pick the wrong man, she thought. Zoltan, to begin with. You don’t pick your father of course, but I had a choice: I could have stayed with mother. She made us call her anya. She made us speak Hungarian at home when we were children. She wanted to shut out Vienna and its German sounds, was homesick for the dark, velvety sounds of Hungarian. I could have stayed with anya. Would that have been better than staying with my father? No, I was thirteen. I wanted to go with him to America and live on the wealthy side of the world where kids had skateboards, ghetto blasters, and Commodore 64 computers. I wanted to learn English, the language that contained all the words in the Top Pop Songs Chart. I wanted to get away from anya’s poetry cloaked in Hungarian, a language that had no connection to anything, a language that was unsuited to dating, a language full of ornamental rhythms and old-fashioned courtesies. But most of all, I wanted to be myself, not one of a pair: Laura and Cereta, Cereta and Laura, the interchangeable Nagy sisters, dressed in matching outfits. Anya enjoyed it when people got us mixed up, until we revolted and insisted on being individuals.

  Opa Auerperg was the only one who never treated us as a unit, who unfailingly knew who was who even when we wore identical outfits, who had memorized our little souls. He was our substitute grandfather because we didn’t have one of our own. He wasn’t the cuddly grandpa type. He was more like God the Father, or a hero on a pedestal: steel-blue eyes, square chin, bold nose, and gold-capped teeth that became visible on the rare occasions when he laughed. Leo von Auerperg was born, bred, and by natural inclination an aristocrat. He bestowed his attention on me like divine grace, a favour freely given to redeem my life. He made me feel like the chosen one. Merit had nothing to do with it. I could never have earned his love. It was a gift magnanimously given and gratefully received, and reverently observed, like his instructions. His first commandment: One child at a time. Only one of us was admitted to the inner sanctum of his study on any given afternoon. He quoted Grillparzer to me: “Erträglich ist der Mensch als Einzelner…”

  Man is bearable only as an individual.

  “Why?” I said.

  “Im Haufen steht die Tierwelt gar zu nah.”

  In a crowd, he behaves like an animal.

  “Like the buffalo you dreamed about?” I asked him.

  “Yes,” he said. “Like an animal in a herd.”

  Opa Auerperg had a recurring nightmare in which he was in the midst of a stampeding herd of buffaloes. Their hooves churned up the ground and filled the air with thick brown dust, he said. He couldn’t breathe. He was afraid of being trampled to death. He told me his nightmare story the way other grandfathers tell a fairy tale. After a while, I forgot that the buffalo dream had anything to do with him. It was like something out of a book, became a tableau of illustrations. A darkened prairie sky, the hollow drumming of hooves, the musty smell of buffalo, a jostling mass of shaggy beasts.

  “It started after the Gestapo took away your grandmother,” he said. “Sometimes, I dream of her walking down the stairs, flanked by soldiers, with the Kommandant bringing up the rear. She is wearing a green, lacy dress, calf-length. Her hair is shiny black, piled on top of her head. There is blood gushing from her ears like a geyser, spilling over her neck, over her shoulders, running down the front of her dress in a jagged pattern of rivulets, but she takes no notice of the bloody river. She looks straight ahead as I pass her on the stairs. The Kommandant stops me. He asks me something, but I can’t take my eyes off your grandmother and miss his question. When I ask him to repeat it, there is a rushing sound, like water. It’s the blood, I realize. It’s cascading down the stairs, roaring like a waterfall. I can’t make out what the Kommandant is saying, and I’m afraid I’ll give him the wrong answer. I try to walk away, and suddenly I realize it’s me they are escorting down the stairs. They are taking me instead of your grandmother. The staircase is so dark I can hardly make out the steps. I lose my footing and stumble. The staircase has expanded into a huge cave, or maybe it’s the nave of a church. The men of the Gestapo are casting up strange shadows, like serpents, undulating shapes. I realize they are serpents — the Gestapo men have turned into scaly monsters. I can’t run away, my legs are paralyzed. They open their hinged mouths, saliva oozing out, dripping on me. They are about to sink their fangs into my throat when I wake up with a jolt.”

  I thought Opa Auerperg’s dream was better than any ghost story.

  “You should write that down, Opa, and make it into a book with illustrations.”

  “Laura, have you ever had a nightmare?”

  I searched my brain for images of thrashing bodies, full-throated screams, phantasmagorical snakes. Nothing.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. I felt small and insignificant beside him. I had never been visited by an important dream. “Are you scared when you wake up from the nightmare?”

  “No, just sad.”

  I remember Opa Auerperg’s dream story the way I remember movie scenes: cut to, pan to, dissolve to. A cinematic version of my grandmother’s arrest. I wanted a part in her story, a heroic part, even if it meant I had to die.

  Cereta and I liked play-acting, but she preferred contemporary scenes. We took turns pretending to be each other’s pet. Cereta was my shepherd dog. I patted her head and took her for a walk around the living room on all fours. When I said “Heel,” she heeled and licked my hand. When I said “Sit,” she sat on her haunches and looked at me with soulful eyes, her head tilted to one side. Then I patted her and said, “Good dog,” and she yapped pleasantly. Sometimes, we pretended to be cats. We humped our backs and hissed at each other and clawed the air, but she was always the more plausible cat. She had more theatrical talent than I, especially when it came to playing pets, slaves, and victims. She was good at licking hands, making pleading sounds, staggering around wounded to the heart, and sinking to the ground, lifeless. She enjoyed playing scenes, I just went along. I wanted a real pet, but anya said she couldn’t deal with dog barks or cat hair. And I think she wanted to be the heroine in our lives. There was no room for another. Once or twice, Cereta and I put her into our play. Enter “Zoltan” and “Livia,” but neither of us was keen on playing our mother. We couldn’t think of any good lines for her. We moved stiffly, didn’t know what to do with our hands, and the scene folded for lack of dialogue.

  After Opa Auerperg told me about his nightmare, I came up with a new scenario.

  “Let’s do a snake fight,” I said to Cereta.

  “Like in Opa Auerperg’s dream?” she said.

  She knew! I was disappointed. I thought I was the chosen one, the exclusive keep
er of Opa Auerperg’s nightmares. I felt betrayed. I wasn’t special after all. He had told Cereta about the Gestapo snakes as well.

  “So which part of the story did you like best?” I said, covering up the jealousy souring my blood. “The fang attack? The blood spurting all over the green dress?”

  “He didn’t say anything about a green dress.”

  “He didn’t tell you?” I savoured my victory. I was unique after all.

  I liked Opa’s rule of “one at a time,” I relished my solo time with him. I didn’t like his other rules: No running and no jumping in his apartment. And no noise. When it was my turn to visit, we sat at his lacquered mahogany desk — a behemoth of a desk with brass legs in the shape of lion paws — and looked at the cartoons of Wilhelm Busch and his stories for children, which came with a moral. Do not play with matches. Do not tease your friends. Treat animals kindly.

  Sometimes Opa said, “Read on by yourself, Laura. I need a little rest,” and moved from the desk to his easy chair, leaned back and closed his eyes. You couldn’t call it napping because his body remained ramrod stiff. His eyes seemed to watch me from behind closed lids. His lips parted as if he was going to tell me a story, the spellbinding story of his dreams.

  This was my time to be a heroine, to defy Opa’s instructions and skip forward in the volume of Busch’ cartoons to less edifying stories. In one, a young man was steadying a ladder for a girl picking apples. He looked up her skirt and said rude things to her. In another frame, he came home drunk, late at night. He sat down, his head drooping, and the candle on the table set his hair on fire. It came out by the fistfuls, making him look like a mangy dog. But in the next frame, his hair had grown back. He was in the garden shed with the girl, kissing and petting her in a dark corner. There was no moral to the story.