The Forger

by Paul Watkins

  We crouched down over the box of photos.

  “Here.” Pankratov held one out to me.

  It was a glossy black-and-white of the Géricault. The entire center of the painting was gone. It had been replaced by tatters of canvas and the wall behind it, which stood pitted and white beneath its dried blood–colored paint. For a few seconds, my eyes drifted around the outside of the picture, where the painting was still whole and recognizable, my mind not wanting to admit what it was seeing.

  “Last year,” said Pankratov, “a man named Alphonse Gradovich walked into the building, right down that hallway there.” He gestured to where Sevier was sitting, back at his perch, massaging his feet with tiny groans of pleasure. “He was carrying a double-barreled shotgun. Nearly blew Sevier’s head off. Sevier!” Pankratov shouted past me. “Show this man the shotgun marks!”

  Obediently, as if he had rehearsed the movements, Sevier stopped rubbing his feet and aimed his finger at various scrapes along the wall where the pellets had ricocheted. The places had been painted over, but they were clear to see now that Sevier had pointed them out. “This close! With both barrels!” he said and pinched the air in front of him. “And if I hadn’t been so quick—” With a broad cutting sweep, he slapped one palm across the other.

  “He was asleep,” whispered Pankratov, “and when Gradovich walked in, Sevier woke up and fell backwards off his chair.”

  “If I hadn’t been so quick—” Sevier said again.

  “You’d be only slightly less active than you are at the moment,” Pankratov finished his sentence.

  Sevier waved him away. “Brother, you wait until you have been shot at.”

  Pankratov straightened up. “I have been shot at.” He took the picture back from me and looked at it himself. “Gradovich walked into the room with the Géricault. He went right up to it, reloaded his gun and emptied both barrels into the painting. He blew out the whole center, as you can see. The guards caught up with him before he made it out to the street.”

  “And I can tell you,” said Sevier, “that Gradovich may be the only man in history to have his head beaten against the Nike of Samothrace.”

  “It took me every night for eight months to repair the damage to the Géricault,” said Pankratov.

  “You restored it?” I asked. “But there isn’t a mark on it now! I want to see it again.”

  “You don’t need to,” he said. “You are right. There is no trace.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said slowly. “I never heard about any of this. It would have been news all over the world.”

  “No,” he said, “you didn’t hear about any of it. The whole thing was kept quiet. The curators here didn’t want that painting to become famous for the damage that was done to it. They just wanted it to go on being famous for itself.”

  “What happened to the man with the gun?”

  “He’s in an asylum. He escaped from one to begin with. Now he’s back inside and no one believes a word he says, which no one did before.”

  “Why did he do it?”

  “Ah.” Pankratov nodded, expecting the question. “Gradovich claimed to be the descendant of someone who died aboard the Medusa. He said he hadn’t known there was a painting about the shipwreck until he came to Paris and went to the Louvre. Once he’d set eyes on the painting, he couldn’t stop thinking about it. It was driving him more mad than he already was. Gradovich said he had to destroy it. I used to think about that when I was working on the Géricault. I believe I understand what he was going through. So you see”—Pankratov flicked the photograph with his fingernails—“this is what I do best. When there’s a call for it. Not every piece is as important as this one. Not every one must be secret. But many of them are. It requires a negation of everything I used to live for. Not to seek fame. Not to require attention.”

  “How did you find out you were good at it?”

  “Not just good,” Sevier corrected me. “Pankratov is the best.”

  “I discovered it by accident,” explained Pankratov. “There was some work belonging to another painter which got damaged in the fire at my old studio. My own paintings were too far gone, but in trying to mend this other piece, I suddenly understood that I could do it. I thought I was a painter,” he said, twisting his hand in on itself, as if tracing the path of a wisp of smoke, “but this is what I really am.”

  “You were a painter. A great one, from all I hear.”

  “All right,” he said, “maybe I was good. But I exhausted myself. I got so tired in here.” He bounced the heel of his palm off his forehead. “Some days, I would set up the canvas and stare at it for an hour and then be so exhausted I’d have to go back to bed. But with restoration, it’s different.” He drew his fingers close together, like a man learning to pray. “It’s about the creation of the paint itself. Using only those materials available at the time. Then the lacquer. Then the aging process. The precision of it. The cheating of time! Do you know that my finest work in that Géricault is the part Géricault got wrong.”

  “Got wrong? What do you mean?”

  “He was experimenting with different pigments and mediums. Not all of it worked. Did you see those patches on the canvas that look like tar?”

  I nodded.

  “The pigment corroded after a couple of decades. It is actually eating away through the primer and into the canvas. Or it was, anyway. My job was to re-create the exact look of the experimental pigment, but to make it in such a way that it no longer damaged the canvas underneath it. Now that was difficult!”

  “People should know about this,” I said. “About what you have done.”

  “No,” said Pankratov, “they should not. I am not doing this for people. Not even for Géricault. Not even if he came back from the grave to ask me to do it himself. I am doing it for me. Don’t you see? If people knew, if they all came to admire the work the way they came to admire my paintings before they were burned, then it would no longer be my art. Then I would be doing it for someone else. There is only one real sacrifice an artist can make, and that is to accept the possibility of being forgotten. Once you have done that, then it is possible no longer to care.”

  “He has explained it to me,” said Sevier, rustling the newspaper in front of his face, “and I still don’t get it.”

  “But you do,” Pankratov told me. He stood, knees crackling as if his legs were filled not with flesh and bone but with tiny pebbles that rearranged themselves each time he moved.

  Suddenly I understood why he had brought me here. Because even in his world of anonymous brilliance, he still needed someone to understand what he was doing. The only thing I didn’t see was why he had chosen me. Perhaps, I thought, it’s because I’m a stranger here. Someone just passing through. He needs someone to grasp the enormity of his work. The sacrifice of it. Pankratov needs to see in someone’s face the proof he isn’t mad, because he is no longer sure himself.

  We walked out past Sevier, who had gone back to massaging his feet and was saying, as if someone else were doing it for him, “There. Oh, there. Magnificent.”

  The purple twilight wrapped around us as we headed home along the sidewalks, past the late-working people with their thousand-yard stares of fatigue, trying to switch off the blind-rushing energy of the day so they could sleep that night.

  “If it weren’t for the fire,” I told him, “you might never have known.”

  He considered this. “If the Germans take over Europe, it won’t matter whether there was a fire or not. I was officially disapproved of by the National Socialist Party,” he said. “My paintings were declared entartete Kunst.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “Art whose existence degrades all other art,” he said with a sigh. “Something like that. Along with Van Gogh, Monet, Manet, Munch, Braque and a few dozen others. Many of them were publicly burned in Berlin last year by the Nazis as a protest, just as many in the Louvre will be, or the Jeu de Paume, if the Germans reach Paris.”

 
“I saw Valya back there,” I said.

  “Back where?”

  “At the museum. She was in the next room over. She was looking at some paintings. She was taking notes.”

  “No,” said Pankratov. “That couldn’t have been her. She’s not interested in any kind of art.”

  “It was her.”

  “Valya would rather spend her afternoons sitting up on the platform at the atelier than wandering around the Louvre, and she doesn’t much care for that platform, as you well know. Believe me, I may not know my own daughter as well as I should, but I know that much about her.”

  I felt as if I had been punched in the stomach. “Your daughter?”

  “Yes,” he said. “She’s my daughter.”

  “I had no idea! Neither does anyone else!” I was practically shouting in his ear.

  “She’s not actually my daughter,” said Pankratov, “but I raised her.”

  “I thought you came out of Finland!” I shook my head. “Just you and that chair of yours!”

  He waved the flat of his hand toward the ground to make me lower my voice. “Me, the chair and Valya. She always leaves herself out of that story.”

  “Well, Jesus,” I sighed. I tried to imagine the look on Fleury’s face when I told him about this.

  “She doesn’t like people to know,” said Pankratov.

  “Why not?”

  Pankratov rolled his shoulders, wincing slowly. “Here in Paris, she is a refugee, the same as I am,” he said. “But she is also an orphan. That is too much for her. When you are displaced, you always think about where you come from. It’s a question that people who are not displaced never have to ask. You, for example, you know where you come from.”

  “Narragansett,” I said. As I spoke the word, some distillate of memory splashed suddenly into my eyes. I went blind from the fast-returning images of the spray off breaking waves across grayish-khaki sand the consistency of granulated sugar.

  “But if you don’t know,” Pankratov continued, “your life becomes about not knowing. Some people can stand it. Some people can even profit from the lack of knowing. But she’s not one of those. To create a balance in her life, she has made for herself a world of ideals that neither she nor anyone else can maintain. So nobody gets to belong. That is the hard ground on which she lives.”

  “But you still work together,” I said, trying to be optimistic.

  “She is too idealistic to stay employed anywhere else.”

  “If it weren’t for you, she’d probably be dead.”

  “That’s true.” He tilted his head sharply in agreement. “But it wasn’t her choice to live or die. She doesn’t owe me for that.”

  Now I understood why she hated him. And she did hate him. Part of him anyway. And it didn’t matter if she loved him as well, because that didn’t reduce any of the hate. The two extremes existed side by side in her image of Pankratov. What she hated most was that he didn’t love her best. What he loved, more than her or any other living thing, was his work. That was why he stayed alone now.

  I wondered if it was inevitable. Maybe you could not be devoted to the work without letting everything else suffer. It was not about how much time you had in each day. It was about the expenditure of passion.

  The night crowds were gathering. People walked more slowly, some with broad and careful footsteps, as if they were measuring the number of paces between one place and another. Eventually, we reached the place where Pankratov would leave to go to his home and I would turn down the Rue Descalzi. The city hummed and roared around us, the gears of its great engine winding down.

  I was no longer thinking about Valya. I was thinking about what Pankratov had said. About being forgotten and accepting it. I thought how hard Pankratov’s knowledge was to come by, and harder still to live it out. The way Pankratov explained things, he had merely adapted to a series of coincidences. But I knew there must be more to it than that. Pankratov was not a man to be swept along by circumstance.

  I felt an idea taking shape inside me. It was there, but I couldn’t see it clearly. I became afraid it would slip away. I squinted into the murkiness of my own mind and gradually it began to appear. It was as if Pankratov had held out a handful of dust on the flat of his palm and had blown it in my face, and now the dust had settled. “You set the fire,” I said. “You burned your own paintings. Is it true?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “But how did you do it?” I demanded. “Did you pile them all up and cover them in turpentine? What did you do?”

  “Much simpler than that,” he said. He took the cigarette from his mouth and almost without thinking he flicked it away. It bounced in the street and glowed and then blew out.

  Now I knew why he spat into his ashtray at the Café Dimitri. “But what about the ones that had been sold?”

  “I got them back. They were all being gathered for a retrospective.”

  “Are there no paintings left?” I asked. “Not one?”

  He shook his head. “The only one I didn’t get my hands on was in a German collection and it was burned by the Nazis in that fire I told you about.” He spoke in a low voice that matched the thrum of the city and vanished into it, indecipherable, except in the close space between us.

  “Why did you take me to see the Géricault?” I asked. “Why tell me the secret?”

  He smiled. “You wanted to know who I am. It’s why you spied on me at the café. You needed me to earn your trust, so that’s what I’m doing now. I’m earning it by telling you the truth. Do you see?”

  “Yes,” I said quietly.

  He held out his hand.

  For the first time, we shook hands, as if this was our first meeting, and everything that had gone before was just some long illusion.

  That night, I dreamed of Pankratov setting fire to his paintings. I saw them vanish into an upward-flowing stream of multicolored flame as the different paints ignited, the blaze contained for a moment in the wood of the frames, dripping fire, each thread of canvas crumpling brittle into black dust, then the frames collapsing in on themselves, even the nails curling over like fingers drawn into a fist. I saw the tubes of paint exploding and shimmering gargoyles emerging from the floor where old turpentine had soaked into the wood and now ignited. Glass melting out of the windows. The guttural furnace roar of the fire eating through Pankratov’s life. It was as if I stood there in the center of that blazing room, and felt the heat and saw, through the smoke and poppy red of flames, each object that burned and disintegrated. I felt that if I opened my mouth, smoke might pour from my lungs, gathering behind my eyes like cataracts and boiling the blood in my skull. The sound of it was deafening.

  Through all this, the pigeons dreamed on my window ledge. The city grew quiet but not still. The sky that night was filled with meteors, cartwheeling above the chimneypots.

  Chapter Five

  I WAS ON THE streetcar again, on my way home from seeing Rocco, the King of the World. The pads of paper I’d bought were heavy and dusty on my lap. They gave out a smell like an attic in the summertime.

  A man and a young girl got on at Château Rouge. The man wore a brown wool suit with a black check pattern woven into it. The little girl, who was about three years old, had on a black velvet dress and black patent leather shoes. On one hand she wore a white glove. The other hand was bare. I guessed she had lost the other glove and that her father had not yet noticed. I imagined the slightly exhausted look on his face when he found out, more because of what his wife would say than the cost of a new set of gloves.

  “Ocean?” the girl was saying. “Oceanoceanocean?”

  “No, puppy,” said the man, “we’re not going to the ocean today.”

  “Ocean coming!” she announced, as if it would be there when she called it.

  The father motioned for the little girl to take the seat next to mine. But then he took a closer look at me, and his expression changed. He motioned for his daughter to take the other seat, and sat next to me himself, turn
ing his shoulder away from me.

  I looked at my tie, with its paint splatter at the end and the knot worn at the throat. I looked at my unpolished shoes. My jacket smelled. Worse, it smelled of someone else’s sweat because I had bought it at a secondhand shop in Clignancourt. My other jacket had become so filthy from charcoal dust that the cleaner said he could do nothing for it. I didn’t have enough money for a new coat.

  No one had ever given me that kind of look before. It was the kind of look you give a tramp when you can’t help staring at the filth that burnishes his skin and clothes. I wasn’t angry at the man, only ashamed at myself because I was dirty and my clothes were so shabby.

  At home, I took a bath and scrubbed my skin raw with coal tar soap. I put on clean clothes and just sat there, feeling revulsion like an oily shiver around my ribs.

  * * *

  THAT EVENING, I RAN into Fleury outside our building. He liked to chat with Madame La Roche in the evenings. He would squat down on his haunches and smoke cigarettes while she smoked her pipe.

  “Why don’t you come out to dinner?” he asked me. “I’m heading over to the Polidor again.”

  I had been on my way to the corner store to get some bread and cheese for dinner and maybe an apple for dessert. I told him I wanted to keep painting. My work had gone badly that day. I needed a break, but it was hard to set myself loose from the canvas when I didn’t have anything to show for the hours I’d put in. The other thing was that I didn’t want to owe him.

  “It’s only dinner,” said Fleury. “Believe me, I want you to be producing work as much as you want to produce it. But you have to eat sometime.”

  I couldn’t afford to go out to dinner, but I had to get out of that apartment or I thought I would go crazy.

  As we set off down the street, I turned to wave good-bye to Madame La Roche.