Vater must have sensed our disbelief about his intentions to procure the tickets. In the morning he would rail: “The swindler doubled the price on me!”
Did he say “Jew”? Probably not. A few years later he might have. He was one of those people who liked being stylish, à la mode. The truth is, he disliked many sorts of people equally.
Finally though, he achieved his goal and could enjoy those three weeks when he already had the tickets and could spend every day leading up to the event boasting to anyone who would listen. I would like to think it made Mother happy, to hear him crowing in the next room. I suppose it was better than hearing him weep, as he also did, late at night when Mother was tranquilized on morphine and he lay, fully dressed, on the damp sheets next to her, thinking that neither Greta nor I could hear.
But remembering is bad enough. I certainly didn’t want to sympathize with him. He was the kind of man who would soften your heart just in order to grab it more easily, to squeeze it inside his purple fist. As he did the day of the major track-and-field events, during that first week of August. I had begged not to go. Attending a spectacle just four days after a funeral struck me as tasteless. But he had bullied and pouted, until even Greta cornered me, pleading for me to relent. Much better for her to have him off in Berlin for a few days, drinking beer there instead of at home. My sister had much to do—putting the house back into order, writing cards in response to the first round of condolences and yet more letters to far-off acquaintances who were still uninformed, sorting through the bills that neither parent had paid in the last eight or twelve weeks (bills to remain unpaid, given the cost of two train tickets to Berlin, even at the foreign-guest Olympic summer discount price, which Vater had obtained by faking the worst French accent I have ever heard in my life). Yes, Greta was right. She deserved a break from him.
The trip to Berlin; the stay overnight at a distant cousin’s flat where Vater boasted the entire evening, trying to steer the conversation away from more serious family subjects; the day itself—I’d found all of it exhausting. I’d never enjoyed traveling, and this trip was no exception. And finally, the interminable hours once we’d found our stadium seats.
“That could have been you out there,” he started as soon as we’d made ourselves comfortable.
“Not really, Father.”
“Yes. Of course. If you had done a little more.”
And now we had our leitmotif, the melody to which he would return again and again, every time a sprinter broke the tape or cleared a hurdle or climbed to the podium to bask in public acknowledgment of his mastery.
“I was never that fast.”
“When you were fourteen, almost. When you were fifteen, yes. And getting faster every day.”
“Not like these talented fellows.”
“And think, with the best coaching, how much you could have done . . .”
I ignored him when I could. I stared out at the field, as everyone stared—a hundred thousand pairs of eyes and even more watching—miracle of miracles—by the innovation of television. While all around us people clapped and shouted and shook their little flags, I kept my jaws clenched tight, unable to partake in my countrymen’s revelry and joyful abandon.
“The opportunities your generation has. Unimaginable in my time.”
Opportunities, he meant, like the training camp for which I had been wait-listed and then accepted at the last minute, after four athletes had been excluded—three for their non-Aryan roots, one for rumors of homosexual perversion.
“But I did what I could,” he said minutes later, as if there’d been no delay. His thoughts were clearly looping and cycling, around and around, like the runners below us, trying not to see what was in the center of the field, the dark hole of the truth of the funeral service we’d sat through four days earlier. “You, on the other hand . . .”
He extracted the flask from his jacket pocket, made a silent mock toast to the crowd in front of us, and sipped. The golden liquid clung to the untrimmed whiskers of his mustache. He had thought about cutting it shorter, into the short broom-end style of a certain eminent personage, but Greta had begged him not to, for there were some styles not meant to be imitated. Vater, who thought he was always just one step away from some bestowed favor, some bit of luck, some elevation in status, was—Greta and I feared—really just one step away from embarrassing himself, or worse.
He was attracting too much attention even now, as his voice gained volume and stridency. “You should have gone to that training camp. If not for your—your—shyness.”
“Have you forgotten why I couldn’t go, Father? It wasn’t shyness.”
“Bah.”
“It was raging infection.”
“Bah!”
There was a long pause in the events below, as we all waited for the medalists to take the podium. Cornelius Johnson, the Negro, had won gold; another American Negro, I forget his name, had won silver. At that moment, I think a few Germans might have been wondering if our Aryan rules had been a little too strict. We had excluded a number of our own excellent athletes from competing, such as the women’s high jumper, Gretel Bergmann, and here was the result right in front of us. Excellence rises above all—above prejudice, above politics. Excellence speaks for itself. And then, of course, there were many in the audience who weren’t thinking anything at all but just enjoying the excitement of the day—the anthems, the crowds, and the amazing feats taking place. Innocent human pleasures.
The problem was, with no one competing at the moment, with no one cheering in the crowd, everyone could hear my father’s voice. It didn’t bother him that people were turning to stare.
“A good bandaging, and you could have gone!”
“Father—” My voice caught. “I had a high fever. I was unconscious. And then I didn’t walk for days. The infection weakened me for several months. How could I have run?”
“You probably think I shouldn’t blame your mother.”
That was too much, hearing mention of her, and the way he said it—as if she were still at home, waiting for us to return, ready to take any amount of abuse. “Blame her?”
“It was her indulgence of your timid nature. It was her indulgence of your . . . oddity.”
“Father.” And this is when I stood up to go, to the consternation of the men behind me, straining to watch as the gold medal was placed around the American athlete’s neck. “It was your knife.”
CHAPTER 5
Appetite is a funny thing. Sometimes, when you don’t desire food, it’s impossible to tell whether it’s because you’re not hungry at all or you’re so overly hungry that you’ve tormented your stomach into rebellion.
One way or the other, I had lost my appetite during the last quiet hours of driving on the dry Italian roads, thinking of the Flädlesuppe, of the smell of spilled beer and sauerkraut in the dining hall where I retreated after storming out of the Olympic stadium only to realize I had brought little cash with me. I’d sat there two hours when a man who had just been served called out to me, and I turned and recognized his face as one of the stadium men who had nodded at my awkward exit. Though I could tell from his gesture to the barmaid that he was offering to buy me a beer, I wanted no company of any kind, and I promptly dropped some money on the table and fled. There was no choice but to return to my cousin’s flat, to wait for my father’s return later that night. Vater and I hardly spoke for the next three days, even on the train trip home to Munich. The full détente came only once I was offered my Sonderprojekt curatorial job several months later, my reprieve from the army, in September 1936.
But it was not as easy as perhaps I am suggesting—the years before that last argument with my father, when I dared to say what I had not managed to say for six years. It was only slightly easier now, in Italy. Despite Herr Keller’s cynical pronouncements and my own initial doubts, it struck me on this trip that travel did indeed offer more than mere amusement or escape. The dry, clean air and blue skies of another country did lend som
e clarity. I could not know at the time the nature of events still to come, but what I was starting to realize—what I look back and confirm even now, testing the memories for the feel of truth and finding them convincing—was that distance alone could be a reprieve. Distance of geography and of time.
A reckoning with the past seemed possible at that moment. As unpleasant as the memories were, the steady drone of our engine, the rise and fall of planted hills as we passed, and the occasional appearance of ancient villages of closely fitted stone houses and maze-like streets all made me feel, at that moment, safely removed from anything that could harm me. It took effort to remember that, in fact, I was supposed to be on my guard.
We had made a short diversion into a small town in order to buy some basic groceries. Enzo seemed completely unconcerned about the truck we’d left behind us long ago. Cosimo, while willing to risk a stop, remained vigilant. He insisted on standing outside the back of the truck while Enzo shopped, and I stood alongside him, stretching my legs. From what he had told me in bits and pieces throughout the afternoon, I gathered it was Enzo who had arranged this unusual freelance job, Enzo who had requested permission for time off from their municipal police captain. Those facts seem to have increased, not lessened, Cosimo’s sense of responsibility.
“It is an unusual assignment,” he admitted, digging into a pack of cigarettes. “But too many times before, I told Enzo what to do. So this time, I try to be a good brother. But being good is not being blind.” He pressed a fingertip to the skin just under his eye for emphasis. “I keep my eyes open, and then my job is done.”
Cosimo was on his third cigarette when Enzo emerged, grinning with an armload of food and a bottle of wine. He set everything down on the front seat, then turned toward the store again and went to the doorway, where we could just barely make out a young woman wiping her hands on a small white towel and following him out as they extended their good-byes. Remembering something, she darted inside and came out again, handing him some biscotti wrapped in paper.
“What?” Enzo said back at the truck, returning Cosimo’s indignant expression. “What?”
“One stop. Thirty minutes.” Cosimo tapped the gas.
“Now we have food enough for more than a day.”
“One girl. Thirty minutes.” Cosimo engaged the gear roughly, making the truck lurch. “And was she as pretty as Farfalla?”
Enzo smiled innocently. “Just as pretty, but so many girls are pretty. Why pretend it’s not true? Mr. Vogler, don’t you think?”
Cosimo grunted, “Never mind.”
Tension lingered in the truck. But it couldn’t compete with the smells of meat, cheese, and fresh-baked bread—all wafting up from the bags in Enzo’s lap.
We passed around the long, hard stick of fatty salami, the grease coating our fingers and the black steering wheel. We passed around crusty bread, crumbling cheese, olives, and a glass jar of what seemed to be dark brown mushrooms soaked in olive oil. We were too impatient to make sandwiches; we just bit and ripped and spread the food around—and yes, it was all better than I had expected. My appetite had returned, and each swallow was satisfying. Eight hours had passed since I’d last eaten, and everything tasted delicious, even while Enzo kept apologizing, “This is not a meal. This is nothing,” while he watched me from the corner of his eye, basking in my pleasure.
“More bread?” Cosimo asked Enzo.
“Here, I give you the heel.”
“Any piece.”
“No. My brother likes the heel. You want me to put on it the crema di olive or you want just the olio?”
Cosimo asked, “Mr. Vogler, you ate a good dinner in Rome last night?”
“I arrived late. But I had a sandwich I’d brought with me on the train, from home.”
Still chewing, he let his mouth fall open. “You brought German food all the way to Rome? All the way to Italy, and now you are going home, and you have not had one good prepared meal?”
“This is good enough. I’m not just being polite. It is excellent. Thank you.”
A dark, oily mushroom had fallen onto Cosimo’s lap. “I can steer for you,” I said, reaching across to grab the slippery wheel while he extracted a handkerchief from his pocket.
“Yes,” he laughed. “I’m not letting this little fish get away.”
Fish? A mistranslation, perhaps. But it looked like a fish, with its little damp fungal gills.
And it was while my hands were on the wheel and Cosimo’s attention was focused on the oily item on his lap that Enzo broke out in a shrill frenzy of cursing—“Maledizione! Al diavolo!” —as if he’d just been stung by a wasp. I startled at his unexpected outburst, tugging the wheel so that we veered nearly off the road, and then everything was shaking. Two of our four wheels were on the grassy, overgrown shoulder.
Cosimo reacted quickly, grabbing the wheel from me in a confusing, slippery motion of four colliding, greasy hands. We were bumping along and swerving, the view through the windshield blurry and confused. Cosimo overcorrected, and we were back on the road but almost to the other side now—“Too far, too far!”—Enzo still cursing at who knows what, and Cosimo cursing back even more loudly. The truck swerved briefly through a thicket of corn growing close to the road. Green stalks filled our field of vision.
In the anticipation of what would come next—a rollover? a collision with a low stone wall?—everything slowed, became taut and somehow fine, stripped of irrelevance. I never got to see it, I realized at that moment. I screwed up, and I missed my chance to see it. Yes, to save my own hide, I needed to deliver the Discobolus, but what I had wanted most, what I thought would deliver me, was just to see and to know what perfection looks like. Whether it made imperfection more or less sufferable. That’s what made it worth so much—not to him, Der Kunstsammler. Not to anyone else. But to me.
My heart thumped wildly: twice, three times. Followed by a loud thump that wasn’t my heart. It was the answering cry, the centrifugal response, from behind us, as the crate slammed once against the inside wall of the truck. This boom was answered by a softer slide and thump as the heavy wooden object shifted again, hitting the other side of the truck’s interior before settling.
“Scheisse.”
Cosimo cursed as he braked gently. “Maybe it was just the scooter falling against the crate. But the crate is well built. It should be all right.”
“Scheisse!” I repeated again, trying not to imagine the fracturing of marble fingers and toes, the split of ancient stone.
“No, no,” Cosimo tried to reassure me. “It’s all right. Give me one minute and I will find a good place to pull over, slowly.”
“Cosimo,” I said, taking deep breaths now, “I apologize for losing the wheel.”
“Everything will be fine.”
But Enzo’s face was in his greasy hands, distraught. He’d said nothing until now, but suddenly a whimper broke through, like a popping bubble rising from the pursed lips of a baby on the verge of sobbing: “You have to go back. I lost it.”
“Something at the food shop?”
He moaned, shaking his head.
When Cosimo interrogated him in Italian, I could make out only “lago,” which I understood, and “anello,” which I didn’t. At the mention of this last word, Cosimo stepped on the brake. He yanked the door open, stepped down, and stood at the front of the truck, glowering through the windshield. Enzo followed reluctantly.
Outside the truck, they resumed their argument. Enzo stood with hands in his pockets. Cosimo paced back and forth on the road, waving his arms, gesturing up to the sky, no longer able to keep it all inside.
I got out slowly, stepped around to the back of the truck and crawled inside. The crate was there, with no visible sign of damage from the outside, not a dented board, not even a splinter. The marble was surely harder than the wood, and it was packed well, one hoped—I hoped. Yes. Of course it was. The slamming sound hadn’t even been that loud, more of a soft bump, really. And the statue itself had surviv
ed worse insults than this. The scooter, tipped to one side, was now wedging the crate more firmly within the truck—a good arrangement, which I dared not disrupt.
My stomach settled; my breath deepened. If anything, I felt a giddy sense of relief: the worst had happened now, the fulfillment of a nagging premonition. A near accident, averted. As if we had made a small offering to the gods—a little sweat, a little terror. All could proceed without incident now. Ohne Zwischenfall. At the border, at the end of day three, the crate would be opened and I would see it then, I would have my unhurried moment in good light, before the Discus Thrower took its role as an object for other people, for other purposes. All day I’d been letting my mind wander through time, indulging memories, when perhaps I should have been concentrating on just that glorious moment. The near accident snapped me back into focus. I was here to do one thing only, and to do it dutifully.
Our jackets, near the truck’s back door, had shifted and come unfolded. As I pushed Enzo’s jacket back into place, something slid out of the front pocket: his folded blue tie, and with it, the picture of Farfalla.
A moment later, I approached him to ask, “Is this what you think you lost?”
The argument paused. Cosimo was still trembling with anger, his face tinged grayish purple with a cloud of capillaries ready to explode, in contrast with Enzo’s face, merely flushed pink and more healthy looking than ever.
Enzo sighed, taking the photo from my hand. “No. But grazie mille.”
He studied the photo, rubbing the corner gently, as if he could feel the girl’s cheek beneath his thumb. “Che bella.” And then, emboldened despite his brother’s anger: “We go back to get the ring. It is simple.”
“A ring?”
“An engagement ring,” Cosimo explained to me. He turned to his brother again. “How could you lose Mamma’s ring?”
The Art Lover Page 8
