by Paul Watkins
Just then, Pankratov emerged from the gate. He was carrying the painting, still wrapped in its white cloth.
“It’s not too late,” said Marie-Claire, her voice an urgent whisper.
Fleury was looking off down the road, as if to see Allied soldiers advancing through the dappled shadows of leaves upon the shady road. Then he glanced at me.
“It’s all right,” I said. “You stay.”
“What about you?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Got to try,” I told him.
One more time, Fleury looked down the road. Then he got back in the ambulance. He rolled up the window, and the dirty glass rose around him like floodwater. He sat very still.
“You’re leaving, aren’t you?” asked Marie-Claire.
I stepped over to the door of the ambulance and opened it.
Fleury sat with his Craven A tin on his lap. He was down to his last cigarette, which was often the case. He seemed to be debating with himself about whether or not to smoke it.
I opened the door and leaned down to him. “Look,” I said. “Stay if you want.”
Fleury smiled. He took hold of the door and pulled it shut. A moment later, a wisp of smoke rose up around his head.
Marie-Claire took my arm. “What’s happened to you people?”
Pankratov reached the ambulance, carrying the painting. He got down on his haunches, back against the door of the Citroën. He tore off the painting’s white cloth cover and wrapped it around his neck like a scarf. The painting was small. He held it at arm’s length, gripping the honey brown frame.
I sat down next to him. We stared at the Astronomer in his blue robe, long hair down around his shoulders. One hand touched a globe. The other gripped a table, as if the shock and vastness of whatever knowledge was about to reach him might throw his body back across the room. A tapestry bunched on the table. Yellowy light through the window lit up the brilliance of the threads. It was the first time I’d seen the actual painting. Now I understood how someone could become obsessed with it.
The Comte de Boinville appeared at the entrance. He was lugging two watering cans made of tin with brass spouts. As he came close, I could smell that they were filled with gasoline. “I’ve been hoarding fuel for months,” he said. “I thought you’d need some now.” He glanced at the painting and looked unimpressed. “All this work for that?” he asked.
“All this,” said Pankratov.
The count shook his head and smiled wearily, as if Pankratov had just told him a joke he’d heard before. “I tell you, I’d trade that thing for fifty liters of petrol, and so would almost everybody else around here.”
Marie-Claire slapped him on the arm. “Max,” she said. “You talk such rubbish.”
“No, I don’t,” he insisted. “I meant it. I think you’re all insane to be taking such risks.”
“And what do you value?” asked Pankratov.
“Peace of mind,” said the count, without hesitation.
Pankratov opened up the two doors at the back and stashed the Vermeer under a pile of blankets that were folded and strapped to a stretcher.
I wondered what it must be like to see The Astronomer through the eyes of the Comte de Boinville—just canvas, wood and paint.
Marie-Claire hugged me good-bye. As she stepped back, she let her hands trail down my arms until they reached my fingertips.
It was dusk as we drove the long way around Caen and onto the main road back to Paris. The moon was out and lit up the fields. We saw the silhouettes of tanks and guns lined up, preparing to advance. German soldiers passed us on the narrow roads, their helmets wet with dew. Whenever we came to a roadblock, where trench-coated military police held up lollypop signs that said, HALT, we handed them our papers and they waved us on our way.
At one point in the drive, while Pankratov was snoring in the corner, I noticed that Fleury was awake. “I wanted to thank you,” I said.
“Thank me for what?” he asked.
“For coming back with us. You didn’t have to do that.”
“Yes, I did,” he told me. “I wanted to. I know you’ve found it difficult to trust me. I don’t say it should have been any different. The best I could do was to show I trusted you.”
* * *
WE REACHED THE OUTSKIRTS of Paris by two in the morning.
Five hours later, at Pankratov’s warehouse, I began work on the forgery.
Chapter Seventeen
IN THE WEEKS THAT followed, I started and stopped and restarted so often that I no longer had any idea of which version I was working on. I ruined three canvases simply by working on them and then scraping them down too many times.
Pankratov never told me to quit, but I knew he was thinking about it.
Fleury was also patient. He fended off calls from Dietrich and told him we were still trying to get hold of the painting.
Dietrich’s old confidence was gone now. Things were falling apart at the ERR. Most of the staff had departed for Germany, leaving Dietrich in charge. The Fabry-Georges were looking to be paid off, but Dietrich had nothing to give them because almost all ERR’s funds had been transferred back to Germany. Even Touchard had become insolent and was making demands that he be evacuated to Spain with enough gold bullion to start a new life. It was all Dietrich could do not to shoot the man himself. Now that things seemed finally to have fallen apart with him and Valya, the only thing keeping Dietrich in Paris was the chance of that Vermeer.
My days ran together. I lost track of time. I worked alone all day. I had a sense of things moving too quickly around me, as if all of us in the city were trapped in some whirlpool of anxiety which had become a separate living thing, swirling through the streets.
There were times, toward the end of the day, when my mind was exhausted but my body still hummed with nervous energy, that I had the sensation of standing half outside my own body. I felt like an image seen through a pair of misaligned binoculars.
I felt myself trespass in the mind of Vermeer himself. It made no difference that he had been dead for centuries. His thoughts were still alive, and I moved like a burglar through the dark rooms of his mind. Afterwards, when these brief but overpowering visions had passed, I could not tell whether I had truly glimpsed the genius of the artist or had wandered out instead into the lake of madness.
In the evenings, I’d take the subway to the Rue Descalzi and stagger into the Dimitri. It was here that I heard the names of Resistance groups spoken out loud for the first time, as people grew bolder in their talk of liberation. By eavesdropping, I was able to learn about the different groups that were competing for control—Le Front National, Ceux de la Résistance, the Parti Communiste Français, the Liberation Organization, the Parti Socialiste, the Union des Femmes Françaises and the Mouvement de la Libération Nationale. They all had their abbreviations—CNR, CPL, CGT, CFTC and so on. Some groups seemed to be advocating a general insurrection before the arrival of the Allies, who by now were through the city of Rennes and making for Alençon. Others were trying to prevent any uprising, convinced that the Germans would flatten the city. A rumor began to circulate that a special cannon was being brought in by rail that could destroy an entire city block with just one shell.
One day, in the second week of July, there was a parade of British and American prisoners of war through the streets of Paris. I hadn’t known it was going to take place and only saw it because the parade passed by on the route I took to work. The streetcar stopped to let the lines of shuffling men go by. At the front of the parade was a German staff car with a megaphone bolted to the roof. The loudspeaker announced that these men were criminals who had been released from prison to fight against the Wehrmacht. The soldiers were still in their combat clothes. Some men tried to keep step and march in military order, but it seemed to me that the German guards who flanked them made sure they kept falling out of step. I saw German soldiers take out cigarettes, light them and take just one puff. Then they threw the smoldering cigarettes among the soldiers,
some of whom scrambled to pick up the smoke. Other soldiers, realizing that this was being done to humiliate them, stepped on the hands of those who groveled for the tobacco.
Crowds gathered on the street corners to watch the men go by. I saw a few French people, mostly women, shouting and spitting at the Allied soldiers. The soldiers looked astonished at this display of hostility. One woman darted into the crowd and began screaming at a man who had a small American flag sewn on the left arm of his tunic. The man tried to ignore her. She slapped him in the head. Then she spat in his face. The man spat right back at her. A German soldier pulled the woman out of the ranks.
I wondered if some of those people who shouted at the Allied soldiers had been put there specially by the Germans, but when the parade had passed, these same people went back into their houses and shops. The nasal hum of the loudspeakers faded away down the road.
When I saw those soldiers degraded like that, I felt the same rage I had seen in the eyes of people who stared at me when I emerged from fancy restaurants or the opera, living the life of a collaborator.
There was nothing to do about it, except get on with the work.
My turpentine-fogged brain turned into a maze of technical complications concerning The Astronomer. Like most Vermeers, of which there weren’t many, it was a complicated work. This was particularly true in Vermeer’s use of shadows. They were not merely shadows but incorporated all the colors of the objects—the wall, the armoire, the Astronomer’s robe, the book being consulted by the Astronomer, Metius’ Astronomicae et Geographicae. There was more to his complexity than any nameable sum of its parts. The painting, to a greater degree than any other work I’d studied, contained something overwhelming and mysterious. I became fixated on one thin line of white that showed on the Astronomer’s left forearm, where his shirt peeked out from under the robe. I made myself dizzy thinking about the repetition of circles in the painting—in the globe and the Astronomer’s head and the curve of his shoulder and the chart on the wall and the stained glass in the window. Sometimes I could hold all these ideas inside my head in some fragile scaffolding of thought. Other times, the whole structure would crash down around me and I would be left staring at the frosted windows of the Dimitri, too dazed even to talk. I thought about Hitler’s art expert, Hermann Voss. I had imaginary conversations with him. I dreamed about him, and in those dreams he took on the face of the man in the painting.
On one of these nights, I heard voices. First I thought it was people in the adjoining apartments. Then I thought it was people out in the street. I wondered if I might be dreaming. But I was wide awake. Listening to them was like the times I had talked on the telephone and heard conversations on other lines. I couldn’t make out the words, just the voices. They didn’t seem to be aware of me. I felt as if I had come up against some kind of veil that lay between us. It was as if the voices themselves made up the fabric of this veil. They seemed to come from more than one place. I had no sense of where they belonged in space or time. I thought there must be some trick to pushing past this veil, but I couldn’t grasp it. Each time I reached for it, even in my thoughts, the veil would disappear.
I’d had the same sensation as I worked on The Astronomer. It was an overwhelming feeling of being in the presence of something whose complete meaning I could not comprehend. Even to try would open up a vastness that could not be contained within the flinty casing of my skull.
After a while, the voices faded away. In their place was the familiar rumble of the sleeping city.
* * *
FINALLY, AFTER SIX WEEKS of work, I was close to completing a version that I believed might be succesful if Pankratov could age the canvas properly. In all this time, there had been no word from Tombeau or Madame Pontier.
By then, it was the beginning of August. The situation in Paris became precarious. A new German military governor named von Choltitz was installed at the end of the first week. There were rumors that he planned to destroy the entire city, after engineers had been seen attaching explosive charges to all the bridges over the Seine.
There was a transport strike. It looked as if I was going to have to get out to the warehouse by bicycle, which would have added hours to each working day. But Pankratov told me not to bother. He said it was time for him to take over. It would take him at least a week to complete his own work. He told us to let Dietrich know he could have the painting in ten days.
“Dietrich will never be able to get the Gottheim Collection to Paris in time,” said Fleury. “The city could be liberated any day now.”
I put in a call to Dietrich and asked him if he could still get the Gottheim Collection.
He laughed. “It’s already here in the city. How soon can you get me my painting?”
“Ten days,” I told him.
“You haven’t got ten days!” he shouted. “Neither have I! I need it sooner.”
I paused. The sound of static was like water rushing through my head. “I’ll do the best I can,” I told him.
“David,” he said, “you’ve got to bring me that painting. I will give you until the twenty-third. After that, you stand to lose more than just the Gottheim Collection. Do you understand?”
On August 15, the Paris police went on strike.
French officials of the collaborationist government fled the city.
The German radio station, Radio Paris, stopped broadcasting.
On the morning of the eighteenth, the postal workers went on strike, followed by most other services later in the day.
I was sitting in the Dimitri that evening when two men burst in carrying rifles. “Ferdinand Le Goff,” they said.
Out of reflex, everyone looked at Le Goff, who was sitting at his regular table, in his usual mud brown clothes, and smoking a cigarette pinched between one of his hooks.
One of the men dragged him out into the street and bundled him into a car.
Le Goff shrieked and wept and flailed his chrome-clawed hands.
The other man stayed in the café. “The traitor Le Goff,” he announced, “is responsible for the deaths of thirty-four members of the CPL, executed by Germans in the Bois de Boulogne the day before yesterday. He gave up their names for a thousand francs apiece,” he said, before ducking back out into the street.
The car sped away.
* * *
IT HAD HAPPENED SO quickly that we only looked at each other in confusion, knowing that Le Goff was as good as dead. We could do nothing about it. Our emotions had long ago been overtaxed. There was nothing left to feel for him. I could find neither pity at the certainty of his inevitable execution, nor anger at his betrayal of the Resistance fighters, nor even fear that I might be the next to get dragged off. Like so many things in those days, it became simply a fact, to be filed away and worked through at some later date, as other facts piled up inside my head.
Slowly, inevitably, we turned back to our drinking. A woman came in and sat in Le Goff’s place. She ordered a drink, and Ivan served her.
Posters appeared on the morning of the nineteenth, announcing that the Comité Parisien de la Libération had taken control of the mayor’s office and were promising to restore services as soon as possible. At the bottom of the posters, in block capitals, was VIVE LA REPUBLIQUE! VIVE LE XIV ARRONDISSEMENT! VIVE PARIS! VIVE LA FRANCE! VIVE LES ALLIES ANGLO-SOVIETO-AMERICAINS!
In the afternoon, Germans troops attacked the Préfecture of Police, but agreed to a cease-fire, which lasted through most of the twentieth. By then, the town hall was also in the hands of the Resistance.
Early in the morning on the twenty-first, a German truck that had been stolen by a member of the French Communist Resistance blew a tire while it was racing down the Rue Descalzi. The driver lost control and crashed through the front of the Café Dimitri. The café wasn’t open yet, but Ivan was still sleeping on the bartop. The room filled with dust and broken glass and the first thing Ivan saw when he opened his eyes was the front of the truck and the face of the astonished driver, who tu
rned out to be a regular customer. The driver got out of the truck and looked around at the wreckage of the café. He was dazed and bleeding from a cut on his chin. “It’s all right,” he told Ivan. “It’s only me.” Then he ran away before the Germans arrived.
Later, when the truck had been towed off, the café floor swept and the damaged chairs and tables thrown away, Ivan hung a sign in the place where the window used to be. The sign said: MORE OPEN THAN USUAL.
On the twenty-second, Resistance fighters patrolled the streets in cars. They carried bird-hunting shotguns and ancient pistols and swords. Men clung to the runningboards and sat on the roofs and the cowlings. They wore armbands painted with the double Cross of Lorraine and the letters FFI beneath, the letters of the Resistance movement. Others became stretcher bearers, carrying wounded to makeshift hospitals set up in pharmacies or restaurants. All across the city, people who had been forced into apathy by the years of occupation at last found themselves able to act. Even the smallest gestures became things I would never forget, like a woman I saw who lowered a pot of soup down from her window and left it hanging a few feet above the ground for anyone passing by who might be hungry. I knew also that scores were being settled. Before the Allies reached Paris, Parisians would die at the hands of other Parisians, payback for the years of collaboration. I had no doubt that we were on somebody’s list, probably on a good many lists, and that we would have no chance to explain before their vengeance overtook us.
“Pankratov asked for my help at the warehouse tonight,” I said to Fleury, when we met that afternoon at the Dimitri. We had a table in the corner, where we could talk without being overheard, as long as we kept our voices down. “We’re almost done.”
“Good,” said Fleury. “I can’t stand much more waiting. I sit around the apartment…”
“In your armor.”
“Yes, indeed, but I tell you it is straining the image a bit to wear a smoking jacket when one has nothing left to smoke.”
