The Forger

by Paul Watkins

  Even as seven-thirty became eight o’clock, Pankratov would be sitting at his corner table in the Dimitri. He would be smoking exactly half a cigarette, having sliced it in two with a wood-handled Opinel knife and struck a blue-tipped match on the buckle of his belt. He ordered a demitasse, which was served in a cup so small it looked as if it had been stolen from a doll’s house. Before he drank it, he would set a sugar lump between his cheek and gum, the way people used chewing tobacco back home. The coffee was followed by a cup of steamed milk. While Pankratov drank the milk, he chewed on a single date that the café owner placed by itself on a small white plate beside him. When he had smoked his half-cigarette down to the point at which it might burn the prints off his fingers, he would raise an ashtray up to his face and quietly spit into it. Then he would roll the end of the cigarette in the spit until it was extinguished. Either this little gesture continually went unnoticed by the others in the café, or they had seen it so many times they no longer cared to watch. I wondered why he did this, rather than simply squashing the butt dead among the ashes. I couldn’t just go up and ask him. It seemed to me you couldn’t do a thing like that with Pankratov. It was his private world, and not to be visited by anyone but him. He seemed to possess some mighty secret, the knowledge of which had absolved him from participating in the life the rest of us were living.

  I knew this much about his habits because one morning I went to the Dimitri before he got there and sat at the far end of the café. I hid behind a newspaper, waiting for him.

  The Dimitri was larger on the inside than the four skinny windows made it seem. The furnishings were a strange mixture of Arabian rugs, Russian tea samovars, crossed Cossack swords on the walls and a single white képi, hung above the oval mirror at the bar. Here, you could buy a drink made from mint that had been packed into a glass and doused with sweet green tea. Or coffee made with goat’s milk. There were few other concessions to the outside world. No music of the kind that filled other cafés, the endless warbled croonings of Edith Piaf. At the Dimitri, there was only the rustle of papers kept on wooden rods and stored each day on a rack. No special furniture. Plain, zinc-topped tables with iron legs and chairs with tightly woven wicker seats. The bar was plated with copper, scrubbed clean with lemon juice and bicarbonate of soda, which added to the pleasant smell of the café.

  The owner was named Ivan Konovalchik. He ran the Dimitri from 6:30 A.M. until midnight, and then slept on top of the bar, laid out like a corpse at a wake, hands folded on his chest. He wasn’t a large man, but he was formidable. He wore the uniform of most Paris waiters, a short black coat with wide lapels, almost like a chopped-down tuxedo, and a low-cut waistcoat with big pockets in which he kept his change. Around his waist, he wore a long white apron that stretched to the top of his shoes. His short-spiked hair had gone gray, but his eyebrows were still dark. His hands were thick and it was clear from the white flecks of scarring that a long time ago he had worked with them in jobs that gouged and pinched and cut. He had been, he told me, a Foreign Legionnaire in the Moroccan Sahara in the twenties, and before that he was an officer in the Imperial Russian Cavalry. Just like Pankratov, he said.

  The Dimitri was named after a famous café in Morocco, a Legionnaire’s café in a place called Mogador. This explained the trappings, and the Arabs who spent their mornings at the bar and the old Legionnaires with their elephant-hide skin burned permanently red from sun and drink and fear, as if the red dust of the Sahara lay in a fine and gritty layer beneath their translucent flesh. Even though the Arabs and these Legionnaires had been at war, both sides clung to this place. They didn’t speak much. They greeted each other with the words Leh Bess, which Ivan told me was Moroccan for “No Harm” or “I mean you no harm.” Considering how much harm they once had done each other, Ivan explained to me, it seemed like the right thing to say. The Arabs and the Legionnaires kept to their separate tables but seemed to need each other’s company. There was something here, in the name and the particular date-sweetened bitterness of the coffee and the mint tea, that made more sense to them than the life of Paris thundering past outside the door.

  There were many rumors about Ivan Konovalchik. He had acquired them like limpets on the hull of a boat. The relics he hung upon his walls were only talismans that let you know how much it was you would never know about him. One story was that he had been to America, but when I asked him about this, he gave a curious reply.

  “If I went there,” he said dreamily, “I don’t remember it.”

  “Do you mean you went there as a child?” I asked.

  “No.” He shook his head.

  It occurred to me that Ivan probably was the kind of man who could forget such a thing.

  “Halifax.” He said the word as if to feel it in his mouth.

  “Yes?” I replied.

  “Halifax,” he said again. “That is a common name in America?”

  “Not too common, I guess.” I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “And perhaps you have a relative named Charles. Charlie. Perhaps.”

  My head jerked up. “That’s my uncle!” My voice was loud with surprise. “Do you know him?”

  “I met him a long time ago.” Ivan began polishing a glass, holding it up to the light. “Probably not the same person.”

  “My uncle was a pilot. An American who flew for the French.”

  “Ah, well,” said Ivan. “Then it is him after all.”

  “He disappeared after the war,” I said.

  “Yes.” He spoke as if he were talking in his sleep. “I think we all disappeared around that time.”

  I could get no more out of him and felt the frustration of having come very close to something, then suddenly finding myself as far away as ever.

  At last Pankratov arrived, dressed in the thigh-length canvas coat he always wore. It was a gray-green color, with two flapped pockets at the waist and dull gray buttons up the front. The buttonholes had worn out and were clumsily restitched in black thread. The collar had frayed, as had the cuffs. It was a garment that should long ago have been put out of its misery, but Pankratov seemed determined to wear the thing until it turned to vapor and drifted away from his body, leaving the buttons to rattle across the floor. He didn’t take the coat off, as if he feared someone would steal it. He smoked his half-cigarette, which he took from a black and orange box labeled “Impériale.” He drank his doll’s portion of coffee, strained through the whiteness of his teeth and the dissolving sugar cube. He ate one fat and crinkled date, then spat and extinguished his cigarette. Finally, he set two coins on the table and lifted his chair as he stood, so that it would not drag across the floor. “Shokran,” he said to Ivan.

  “Shokran, effendi,” replied Ivan Konovalchik, without looking up.

  Pankratov started out across the road toward his atelier.

  I left a moment later, and raced up the stairs, not catching up to him until just before he reached the open door of the studio. Inside, it was completely silent. Everyone was watching us. Valya turned in her chair, breaking from her naked statue pose, and surveyed us critically.

  “I’m sorry I’m late,” I mumbled as I tried to move past him into the room.

  “Monsieur Halifax,” he said, not letting me go by.

  “Yes, sir,” I answered, breathing hard from the climb.

  “You would make an incompetent spy.”

  I was quiet for a moment. “All good spies appear incompetent,” I said.

  Pankratov’s eyes opened for a moment, raising the thick visor of his eyebrows. “Yeess,” he said quietly, “and if someone would employ you as a spy, you might have an excuse for your incompetence.” He jerked his head, ordering me inside.

  I sat down at my easel.

  “Begin to draw!” His voice had the power to jolt all other thoughts from my head.

  I set up my paper and began to draw Valya.

  She came only in the mornings and left as soon as she could. She was always on time, striding in, eyes fixed on
the platform where she would take her place. She walked across to a set of brass coat pegs screwed haphazardly into the wall and began to undress. She shed her clothing with an angry sensuality, letting the coat slide from her shoulders and catching it before it hit the floor. She kicked off her rope-soled shoes, heel against toe, heel against toe, then undid the fiddly buttons on her shirt with less patience than the job required. Her hips swung slightly as she let her skirt fall to the floor, then bent her legs down to pick it up, holding her upper body straight.

  Valya was harshly beautiful. She had an intolerant crookedness to her lips, and usually wore her hair tied back severely in a ponytail. I watched the way her skin pressed against the wooden seat and the way she drew her legs together, covering one set of toes with the other. The pale curve of her hips and the way they slid into the narrows of her waist sometimes forced me to lower my head, in case she read the thoughts inside my eyes.

  Pankratov never brought the thunder of his voice to bear on her. She seemed beyond any harsh words that he could muster.

  I found I could not distill Valya into the lines and shadows and planes of light that would allow me to draw her correctly. I could see her only as a whole, and it was as if my pencil could find no place to start on the snow field of the sketching page. I was always relieved when we turned to other subjects, hauling out the paints and mixing boards, brushes stuck in the belt of my smock like the knives of a Japanese chef.

  We would begin our sketches of the shivering Valya the moment she sat down in her chair on the stage. Mornings were always cold in the atelier, before the sun had reached into the room. We kept our coats on, long scarves looped around our necks. The undersides of my coat sleeves were shiny black like a tramp’s from wearing it as I drew with charcoal in those early mornings.

  The moment Pankratov arrived, he would tell Valya to sit or stand a certain way, or he would walk over to his junkpile of props—broken umbrellas with the silk domes in shreds like the tattered wings of ravens, baskets of eggshells and various animal bones. They were bleached and dry and drank the moisture from my fingers when I picked them up. He would hand one of these to Valya and make her pose with it. Like a marionette without strings, she obeyed.

  After a while, we gave up sketching before Pankratov’s arrival. Whatever work we were doing at the time he walked in would be brushed aside and ignored, the paper wasted, and a few more centimes lost from my too-small bank account. Even though we weren’t drawing, Valya still undressed and sat down on her chair. She rarely joined in our conversations. Sometimes she smiled at one of Balard’s one-liner jokes. Or she would groan in agreement if Marie-Claire did one of her imitations of the way Pankratov critiqued her paintings. Mostly Valya just sat there, as if the two-foot height of the stage had placed her out of the range of any friendship she could find at lower elevations.

  Valya offered no explanation as to why she sat there naked when she didn’t have to. It seemed to be some kind of punishment she’d chosen for herself. One day, I went ahead and asked why she undressed before Pankratov arrived. Immediately the room went silent, as if I had just rolled a hand grenade across the floor. Slowly, almost wearily, Valya turned to face me. “Did you say something?” she asked.

  “We’re not drawing,” I said, as if that would explain everything.

  “No,” she said slowly, as if talking to an idiot who could at any moment become violent.

  “And we don’t draw until he shows up,” I said, my courage beginning to fail me.

  She let her head fall back a little, without releasing me from her gaze. “I’m paid by the hour,” she said.

  “But why do you have to take your clothes off now?” I asked.

  “Do you mind that my clothes are off?”

  Balard laughed behind his easel. I heard the clunk and switch of his lighter as he lit himself a cigarette.

  “It’s not that,” I said.

  “If I just come in here and sit down,” she explained, “Pankratov can say I’m not working. That I haven’t started yet. But if I strip like this, it’s work. And my work starts when I get here, not when he gets here.” The wind batted up against the windows and Valya shivered. She folded her arms across her chest.

  I raised my hands and let them fall again in a gesture of surrender. “Fine,” I said.

  “No,” she snapped. “It is not fine. To hell with all artists and to hell with me for spending time with them.”

  I opened my mouth, ready to ask—So why are you here? What power does that crazy Russian have over you?

  But there was no more talk between us, because Pankratov had arrived. He stood in the doorway, nostrils flared from the effort of climbing the stairs. His bright eyes swept across us like the beacon of a lighthouse. “Begin to draw!” he shouted, with a voice of such authority that it was as if he held in his command the actual rotation of the earth.

  Chapter Three

  IT WASN’T LONG BEFORE Balard began to take exception to me.

  Even though I had no designs on Marie-Claire, my arrival had thrown off Balard’s monopoly of charm. Now he was trying too hard. He spoke at great length about artists he’d studied and exhibits he had seen. Then he would express concern that we hadn’t been to the exhibits, even though they might have taken place years before any of us had come to Paris. Balard was the only native Parisian among us.

  The fact that Marie-Claire knew very little about artists like Elisabetta Sirani, Luca Giordano and Andreas Benedetti didn’t bother Balard. He seemed to find it charming. But my ignorance he would not tolerate.

  When I said I wasn’t familiar with Sirani, he sat back on his stool, feet hooked into the rung at the bottom. “Not familiar?” he asked. “You’re not familiar with Elisabetta Sirani?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “I can’t believe you’re not familiar with her work.”

  “Why do you keep using that word?” I asked him.

  “What word?”

  “Familiar.”

  “I’m not using it at all!” He gave a forced-out deep-voice laugh. “You said it first. I am just surprised.”

  Marie-Claire watched, saying nothing. Perhaps she was even a little flattered that Balard would go to all this trouble over her. If Balard did succeed in making a fool of me, she would like him for it. It was a primitive thing, but it was there nonetheless.

  “You are not very educated in the arts, are you?” Balard asked me.

  I felt myself sighing. All right, I thought. Let’s get this over with. “I am,” I said, “too busy painting to talk about painting. There’s always the danger,” I told him, “of becoming an artist who doesn’t do any art.”

  Balard folded his arms and then unfolded them again. “Are you saying I’m not an artist? Are you saying that you are the only artist here?” He tried to make it seem as if my insulting him was an insult to Marie-Claire as well, but already Marie-Claire was watching him with different eyes. Balard held up his sketch. “I am an artist! What do you call this?”

  Both Marie-Claire and I looked at his half-done sketch of Valya and knew exactly what to call it. The room filled chokingly with silence, like a jar filling with milk.

  “I am an artist,” said Balard, his face gone fiery with blushing.

  Marie-Claire reached her hand across and rested it comfortingly on his knee.

  He looked at her. His gaze was bright and pleading.

  “You’re a very good artist,” she said.

  What I didn’t admit, of course, was that Balard had been right. Given the choice between painting and looking at other painters, I would always paint. There was never enough time to do both, so I was always painting.

  After the class, Balard came up to me while I was packing away my pencils and paper into the leather portfolio that I brought with me from home. He hovered there for a while, casting his gloomy shadow. “We got off on the wrong foot,” he said.

  I looked across at Marie-Claire. She had packed up her kit and was standing by the brass p
egs, ready to put on her coat. She glanced alternately at Balard and at me and then fussed with the buttons of her coat.

  “It’s just a crazy day,” I said to Balard, as we headed out.

  “Crazy!” said Balard loudly. “A crazy day! Oh, yes. Perhaps I can buy you a beer.”

  We made our peace and there was no more jousting between Balard and me across the worn-out floorboards of the Atelier Pankratov.

  * * *

  THE NEXT DAY, AT the end of our sketching, Valya stood up from her perch, stepped down from the platform and padded barefoot across the dirty floor to where her clothes hung on the brass coat pegs. She began to dress.

  I noticed that Pankratov turned away, even though his chair was facing where she stood. Still looking away, as if distracted by something in the dingy rafters of the room, he said, “Valya, I was thinking you could help me tidy up the place once the students are gone.” He reserved for her a softness of voice that he shared with no one else. I knew immediately he was in love with her and that she knew it and despised every measure of his devotion. He seemed humbled by her. She always got her way: whether it was refusing to stand naked up on the stage any more because she said she was cold, in which case we drew her wearing her fur coat and nothing else, or if she wanted to leave an hour early, Pankratov always gave in.

  The rest of us were packing away our things, untying the knots that belted our smocks to our bodies, washing out brushes. There was a general clatter of furniture being shifted and the hiss of the tap in the paint-splattered aluminum sink. We gave every appearance of not listening, but we were. Not one word passed between us as we strained our ears to catch each subtlety of breath.