The Forger

by Paul Watkins

  Tessel picked up a piece of bread and laid a slab of ham on top. He chewed at it thoughtfully. “It could be years before anyone comes back for these paintings,” he said. “We might all be long gone by then.”

  It was night when we finally pulled out of the abbey, leaving the two men to plaster up the wall, repaint it and remount the tapestry which had hung over the space.

  We drove back to Paris, through towns whose street lights had been switched off as a precaution against air raids.

  I tried to imagine the paintings staying hidden, not just for years but for centuries, and what it would be like for those who found them far into the future, whether the people who found them would even know what they were, or how much the world had valued them. I wondered what precious objects in the past had been hidden by people whose civilizations were being overwhelmed. Perhaps they felt the way I felt now as they hurried their treasures into hiding, too tired to think straight, too frightened for their own lives to envision the death of whole nations. I thought of the great tribes that had vanished—the Minoans, the Etruscans, the Vandals and the Easter Islanders—becoming first legends, then rumors, then finally nothing at all, while somewhere deep inside caves in the shuddering earth lay the relics of their sacred lives and the bones of those whose stories had died with them.

  Chapter Eight

  PANKRATOV DECIDED TO MOVE.

  From now on, he decreed, we would work at what he called his warehouse. In fact, this was a cramped little space, formerly a stable, in a section of an old brick viaduct. It stood between the Père Lachaise cemetery and the Rue des Pyrénées. The viaduct had once been used for a railway, but new tracks for the Chemin de fer de Ceinture had been laid down beyond it. There were dozens of these little warehouses all along the base of the viaduct. Each one had its own arched door, painted with thick coats of glossy green paint.

  On Pankratov’s door, in stylish orange letters, was A Pankratov. Réparation d’Antiquités. Each word was underlaid with a shadow effect in red paint.

  “It’s too risky at the atelier,” he told me, as he rummaged through his keys for one that would unlock the door. “Besides, all my supplies are here.” He swung the doors wide and a smell of dank air wafted out.

  The ceiling inside was high and vaulted. Several electric bulbs hung on cords from the ceiling. When Pankratov switched them on, they threw out a sinewy glare. Piles of junk clogged the shadows, consisting mostly of ruined paintings. Proud faces glared from white-flaking canvases of old portraits, as if emerging from a snowstorm. There were also frames, jars of old nails, various pots of powder for mixing paints and bottles of dirty linseed oil, bins of rags and so many jars of brushes that they looked like strange plants that had learned to grow in the damp darkness of the warehouse.

  “Where do you work exactly?” I asked. The stone space echoed with my voice.

  “Eh?” said Pankratov. “Work? Well, wherever I feel like it.”

  “Do you know where we are, Pankratov?” I told him. “We’re not in a warehouse. We’re inside your brain. All this junk…”

  “Stop!” He raised his hand like a traffic conductor. “You can stop right there. From this junk, in a couple of weeks, I can conjure up a Caravaggio, all with a trick of the dust.”

  “Poof,” I said, and waggled my fingers as if I were casting a spell.

  “Forgery,” said Pankratov, “isn’t just about painting a good copy of something. In fact, it isn’t really about copying at all.”

  “Then what is it about?” A train clattered past on the tracks beyond the viaduct. It was a steady, comforting sound.

  Pankratov scuttled into the gloom. His shadow lumbered after him, huge and crippled against the sloping walls. He emerged a moment later with the remnants of a frame. “It’s about this!” He held the frame in front of him as if he were a talking portrait of himself. “Look at this frame. Come here and look at it.”

  Obediently I went across. “It smells in here,” I said.

  “It’s the smell of authenticity,” he replied.

  I stood in front of him, the two of us on either side of the frame.

  “Look here,” he said, nodding down at one corner, since he had no hands free. “What do you see?”

  Tiny holes peppered the wood and the old gilded plaster. “Looks like wormholes,” I said.

  “Exactly! Do you have any idea how long it takes to get worms to eat holes in wood?”

  “To get them to?”

  “Yes! It takes years and years. Which we don’t have. Do you know what inexperienced forgers sometimes do to fake wormholes? They put the frame against a tree and fire buckshot at it. It makes little holes like these. The trouble is, worms don’t make straight holes when they burrow, the way shotgun pellets do. Besides that, you have to dig the buckshot out again. And that’s the sort of thing they’ll be looking for, these experts. If you really want to fool someone, you start off with something old. You don’t get new stuff and then kick it around or pour all kinds of solvents on it. You need as much authenticity as you can get.” The frame shook in Pankratov’s hands as he laid out the laws of his obsession. “Now do you understand?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “Worms are my friends.”

  “They are for now,” he told me.

  * * *

  WHEN I WOKE UP up on the morning of May 22, I read in the paper that the Germans had reached the English Channel near Abbeville. Now they were driving north to cut off the ports of Boulogne and Calais. The city of Rotterdam was surrounded and ordered to surrender, and then bombed before the surrender deadline expired. De Gaulle’s 4th Armored Division attacked north of Laon and was repulsed by German Stuka dive-bombers. The seventy-year-old French general Gamelin was fired and replaced by the even older general Marshal Pétain. The roads to northern France were jammed with refugees.

  So much was happening that by the time I read about these events, new battles had already broken out. I could keep up with the general flow of information, but my ability to imagine the magnitude of suffering was becoming exhausted. I could no longer picture the dead, civilians abandoning their homes, towns that had been burned. They were now simply facts. I used to feel guilty about my lack of emotion. Then even the guilt went away. There was nothing to do but wait and see what happened when the war at last reached Paris, which by now we knew it would. I think it was like that for most people, who waited in dread for the moment when the war would come to them and they would know its full brutality firsthand, no longer suffering in the abstract.

  I set down the paper and walked to the open window. The sun was gentle and warm, and the air filled with pollen from trees in the Tuileries.

  Down in the street, I saw cars ride past with suitcases piled up on their roofs, fleeing the city.

  The man with the Dragoon mustache from the Postillon company was carrying out boxes. He stacked six of them, one on top the other, and then took off the tops. They were filled with documents. He brought out two bottles of what looked like brandy and poured them on top of the papers. After that, he selected a match from a little wooden box that he took out of his pocket, struck it and then flicked it at the pile.

  He wasn’t prepared for the force of the flames, which jumped into the air with a thumping boom. He backed away, arms in front of his eyes, swearing. Frantically, he patted his fingers against his mustache, in case it had been singed.

  Soon the street was filled with smoke. Half-burned papers flicked up into the air.

  Out across the rooftops was the smoke of other fires.

  The Dragoon brought out a large broom and swept stray papers back toward the fire. The bristles of his broom were smoldering.

  The fire burned away to ashes, leaving a large black stain on the pavement. The Dragoon swept the ashes into a large dustpan. Then he washed down the pavement with buckets of water, but some of the black stain remained. When it was all done, he leaned the broom against the wall and sat down in the sun to smoke a cigarette. After a few puffs, he st
ubbed it out on the sole of his shoe. Then he locked up the warehouse and pedaled away on his bicycle.

  * * *

  BY JUNE 9, THE British Expeditionary Force had evacuated over a hundred thousand troops out of Dunkirk, leaving forty thousand French troops to be captured. After this, the bulk of the French army was in full retreat, slowed down by thousands of refugees clogging the roads. German Panzer columns had advanced to the east and west of Paris.

  Italy declared war on France.

  On June 11, Paris was declared an open city. Billboards went up overnight, stating that there was to be no resistance offered when the Germans reached the city. These posters covered up the posters from a few months before, summoning all soldiers and reservists to their barracks. Cars with loudspeakers strapped to their roofs, like corsages of giant metal tulips, trundled through the streets advising everyone to stay inside.

  Thick black tornadoes of smoke rose from burning oil storage tanks on the outskirts of the city.

  That night, there was the sound of breaking glass as looters ransacked shops whose owners had left the city.

  I heard a story that hospitals were injecting Prussic acid into the hearts of patients who could not be evacuated.

  I also heard that three million of the five million people who lived in Paris had gone. There was a constant line of traffic along the Boulevard St. Michel, where I saw everything from cars to bicycles to farm tractors hauling people away.

  The newspapers stopped coming out.

  Factories shut down.

  Trains shut down.

  There were no taxis.

  Food markets shut down.

  The bars and cafés, on the other hand, stayed open twenty-four hours a day. People drank themselves stupid. Some places were giving their stock away.

  At first, it seemed as if everybody who stayed behind had a different reason for doing so. Some were too proud, others too poor. By now, reasons no longer mattered. The city had been divided between those who fled and those who didn’t.

  * * *

  “BALARD IS DEAD,” SAID Pankratov, when Fleury and I arrived at his warehouse the next morning. Pankratov made no attempt to soften the news with any words of consolation. He blurted it out and then began to tidy up the place.

  “When?” I asked.

  Pankratov’s head popped up from behind a pile of broken frames. “A week ago. His parents called to tell me. They found out from a man from Balard’s unit who was sent home wounded and stopped by to tell them the news. Otherwise, they probably wouldn’t have found out for months.”

  “Where did he die?” asked Fleury.

  “Somewhere near the Meuse River,” Pankratov said. “That’s all they told me.” There was silence after that, except for Pankratov’s clumsy rearranging of his junk into different but no less chaotic piles of junk.

  I hadn’t known Balard well enough to feel the kind of sadness I wished I could have felt. I regretted that we had argued. Somehow, the fact that he had been dead for two weeks made it seem like the very distant past. It seemed so strange that, even though I hadn’t thought about him much, Balard had still taken up some space inside my head. And in this space he had continued to breathe, half-remembered but alive, until this moment when the space suddenly contracted into nothing and vanished.

  Soon Balard’s face and the memory of his voice became blurred and distant. As time went by, fragmented images of him would return unexpectedly, but only for a second, and then they would be gone again.

  * * *

  THE ONLY THING THAT stopped me from going crazy in those last days before the German occupation was my work with Pankratov. We still hadn’t received instructions on what to paint, so all we could do was prepare.

  A chill crept around me every time I walked into the warehouse. It drilled through each layer of my clothing, coiled around my bones and threaded through my joints. It clung there all day. I could never get warm in that place.

  Fleury was in his own frenzy of activity. For reasons he at first declined to spell out, he had set himself the task of buying as many old art books as he could find. Many came from the bouquinistes who sold secondhand books from green metal display cases balanced on top of the walls that overlooked the Seine. The old art books didn’t have illustrations printed directly onto the pages. Instead, color postcards were glued beside descriptions of the works. Fleury explained that he would have postcards made of our own versions of the various paintings or drawings. Then he would remove the original postcards and replace them with his own. That way he could fake the provenance of a work.

  After a week, Fleury decided he had enough books and that there were no more jobs to be done. This left him at a loose end. Rather than stay at home alone, he came to the warehouse and sat in an old chair with half its stuffing gone. He wrapped himself in a red and gray striped horse blanket, reading books by the light of a candle jammed into a wine bottle and starting up conversations whenever he got bored.

  We tried to remain optimistic. Each of us fed off the other’s fabricated nonchalance, until we had built up a kind of lie between ourselves as a barricade against the panic that might otherwise overwhelm us. The only thing I could compare it to was in the autumn of 1938, when I had gone up to Narragansett to help my brother and mother board up the house before the arrival of a hurricane. We had finished the work and were sitting in the basement of the house, listening to radio broadcasts which tracked the path of the nor’easter. It was going to be a bad storm. My mother’s house stood four blocks back from the sea, which had always put it clear of any storm damage, but this time we were beginning to wonder if we should have evacuated inland, along with half the neighborhood. But my mother had been stubborn about it, and by the time I arrived on the train from New York, my brother had already started laying in supplies—bottled water, cans of food, lanterns, blankets, and a pistol in case looters came by after the storm.

  With several hours still to go before the hurricane was due to hit us, we had nothing left to do but sit in the basement on old lawn furniture and listen to the wind pick up. We heard the monotonous radio broadcasters, advising everyone along the coast to leave their homes, and then the station went dead. We opened up the storm door to the basement and looked up at the sky through the thrashing leaves of the oak tree in our garden. Obscenely muscled clouds bunched grayish-yellow in the north. When the storm finally arrived, it made darkness out of daylight, smashed the waterfront to pieces, threw sailboats up onto the road, hit Point Judith so hard that the place was almost removed from the map, flooded the city of Providence and tore off half my mother’s roof. It was the most powerful hurricane anyone could recall, but still the worst of it was the waiting. That was exactly how it felt now.

  Pankratov and I were in the process of stripping the paint off an old canvas, which we would then re-cover with a painting of our own. The original work was an early nineteenth-century portrait of an overweight, middle-aged man. The painting had no frame and was on a stretcher that had one spar cracked, so that the man’s face sagged down, making him look simple and deformed. The man was sitting in an ornate chair with a greyhound lying at his feet. His hands, which dangled off the arms of the chair, were fat and pink like uncooked sausages.

  The canvas was very dirty, but rather than just see this as the cause of the painting’s ruin, I had grown to appreciate the finer points of dirt. I was now able to tell the difference between a painting that had hung in a room where there had been smoke fires, which veiled the painting in a hard, old-iron grayness, and one that had been exposed to sunlight, which lightened the colors, or still another that might have been stored away for a hundred years, whose colors would be dark and sinister.

  Pankratov worked with acetone soaked in a little sea sponge. He mopped away the colors. The sausage-fingered man slowly disappeared, perhaps the only image left of him in the world. Eventually, Pankratov reached the white undercoat, drawing the faintest white smudge from the canvas. At this point, he would grunt and I immediately
applied a sponge soaked in turpentine, which stopped the action of the acetone. Over the past few days we had “cleared,” as Pankratov called it, more than a dozen paintings in this manner, and had hung them up to dry. It was an odd sight, these blind white rectangles hugging the warehouse walls.

  The fumes made us dizzy. Often we had to stagger out into the alleyway and sit there in the sun, breathing deeply while the parachutes of dandelion seeds drifted down from the old railroad tracks above.

  For the first few days, I didn’t use rubber gloves, because I couldn’t work as well in them. But now, after exposure to the chemicals, my fingers were so creased with deep and painful cracks that I had trouble doing up my shoelaces. I also had tiny black spots appearing like freckles. The sight of these frightened me into buying gloves, which I wore now whether they made me clumsy or not.

  “What I don’t understand,” I said, giving voice to a conversation that had been going on in my head all morning, “is if the picture is beautiful and we enjoy it, who cares who painted it? Why should one work that was done by a famous artist be worth so many hundreds of times more than another picture which is just as beautiful?”

  “Who’s to judge what’s beautiful?” asked Pankratov.

  “What I mean is,” I said, “if someone buys a painting because they like the look of it, then that should be their only judgment. You can call it an appreciation of beauty. You can call it an appreciation of skill. Call it whatever you like. I’m sure it has a hundred names…”

  “So does the devil,” said Pankratov.

  “And then suddenly,” I continued, “they find out that this painting isn’t by Van Gogh, after all. And immediately, they can’t stand the sight of it.”

  “What they can’t stand,” said Pankratov, “is being reminded how much they paid for it.”

  “But that’s my point!” I told him. “My point exactly. Do they value it because of how much money they paid for it or because they are drawn to it?”