The Thief of Auschwitz

by Clinch, Jon

  When she arrives at the apartment, the supplies that Vollmer has sent for are stacked up in the entryway, carton upon carton. The housekeeper brings a bread knife, and Eidel methodically unwraps each package, going slowly, moving as if under a spell. The things that she unwraps have extraordinary qualities both mystical and physical, and the merest touch of them takes her back to a world she’s forgotten. Everything is of the highest quality, as fine as any goods she’s ever laid her hands on, each bottle and tube and brush sent all the way from Berlin wrapped in a soft drawstring bag or a set of nested boxes, all of it cushioned with bale after bale of tissue paper. Vollmer has spent a fortune. Enough to feed the women of Eidel’s bunk three excellent daily meals for a month or more, enough to last years at their present rate.

  The housekeeper begins tidying the wreckage as Eidel picks out what she’ll need for today’s work, a sketch pad and a packet of soft graphite pencils and a gum eraser. She finds the sharpener and puts points on three of the pencils and sets the sharpener back down on a narrow table along the wall, between a vase and a small lacquered box. The housekeeper looks daggers at her and points to the sharpener and says that perhaps she should have asked Herr Vollmer for a supply chest rather than making a ruin of the furniture, and she sweeps it off onto the floor where it smashes to bits. More to clean up, she says with a curse.

  The sound of breakage draws the boy, little Karl in his embroidered bundhosen and his starched white shirt, careening through the kitchen door and stumbling upon the various wrappings and boxes as if he’s missed his own birthday. “Hey!” he says, the trussed-up little creature, red jam smeared across his chin. “What’s all this?”

  His mother comes for him before either of the women needs to answer. He’s tearing through the castoff boxes and bags and wrapping papers like some burrowing animal seeking cover, and she opens the door again and stands watching for a moment, amused. The girl, Luzi, pokes her head out from behind, arms around her mother’s knee, and peers into the tempest with round eyes. At last the woman speaks. “Now, Karl,” she says, just as he turns his attention from the empty wrappings to the carefully arranged jars and bottles and brushes, “I’m sure there’ll be time for you to play with those later on.” Sending him a sweet smile and letting some of it spill over in the direction of the other women.

  “If you please, Madam,” says Eidel, “it might be best to get him his own.”

  The woman of the house raises a single elegantly-penciled eyebrow and holds it there like the blade of a guillotine.

  Eidel goes on. “Water colors,” she says. “They’ll be easier for him to work with.”

  Slowly, slowly, the woman lowers her eyebrow.

  Heedless of anything, smirking up at the prisoner who would deprive him of his due, the boy chooses one tube of paint and jams it into the pocket of his snowy white shirt. The paint is a Chinese red, almost the red of the German flag, and although Eidel hadn’t requested this color in particular the supplier in Berlin must have felt it necessary. They’re all critics, after all. Everyone in the world. She doesn’t mind seeing it go, but because she’d still like to record a decisive victory over the boy she says to his mother, “These oils, you know—they never come out of anything.” And then, rather than wait for the result, she pretends to study the fresh points of her pencils.

  *

  The portrait of Lydia is missing, of course, when they go into the dining room. The wall above the fireplace is bare except for the empty nail and a tiny crack that runs down from it, ramifying like a vein until it disappears at last. The fire is dead in the grate on this sunny day and the wind whistles ghostly somewhere above the top of the chimney and no one in the deputy’s family seems to think that Eidel should feel anything at all regarding what they’ve done. They don’t even look her way. Instead the boy pulls the girl’s pigtails and their mother separates them bodily and their father enters through the rear door on a hot gust of bad temper. Only Luzi, situated at length on her father’s lap, finally notices Eidel’s frozen stance before the empty spot. She points to her with a chubby finger and says, “Father said we have plenty of Jews around. That’s why he got rid of it.” And when Eidel doesn’t respond—when Eidel doesn’t even move unless you count the shuddering of her breath and the tightening of her grip on the fistful of pencils—she takes a kind of childish pity on her and adds, “It was a good painting. We just have too many Jews.”

  At length she composes herself. She takes a seat on the wobbly chair and props the sketchbook in her lap and directs the family into the most pleasing composition possible. Her instinct would be to catch them as they are, that was always her method and it comes back to her now, but the business of portraiture for hire is something different. She has the boy stand behind his seated mother with a hand placed gently on her shoulder, a nice compositional curve starting at Vollmer’s face and dipping down to his wife’s and then up again just a touch to Karl’s. But the woman doesn’t want Karl hidden back there with his expensive new trousers, so she insists that she and her husband separate and place the boy in the middle. Eidel copes, adjusting her vision and trying again, leaning forward in that hard chair with her back to the groaning fireplace. Doing her best to deny the absence behind her.

  Max

  Remember this: Sentiment is the enemy of the work.

  That was old Uncle Andy’s mistake from the outset.

  Fine, all right, maybe not from the outset—I’ve never claimed to be any kind of an expert on the complete Wyeth oeuvre; it could be that he was more interested in formal matters in the early days, before he got started stamping out those windy fields and farmhouses like so many Christmas cookies; it could be that he took a wrong turn somewhere, started letting himself be distracted by the money or the adulation or whatever, surrendered to certain cheapening influences—but in the end, no question about it, his downfall was an excess of sentiment.

  To be perfectly clear, I suppose I ought to say sentimentality. It’s difficult to communicate these things properly. If you could get them right by just talking about them, you wouldn’t waste your time painting.

  People are forever telling one another how this or that work of art makes them feel, as if that were the point of it. As if the artist had set out with no higher goal than to affect them personally, to touch them, as they say, for Christ’s sake. The painter as masseur. It gives me the willies.

  It’s no business of mine how you might feel about something. It’s no business of mine whether or not you feel anything at all. The minute a person starts worrying about that, he’s doomed. He’s no better than Andrew Wyeth, backed into a corner by his own hunger for approval, rendering up that same old reliable pathos again and again. Revved-up old sterile Uncle Andy with just one uncompromised and unmediated urge left to him at the end of his life, one pure God-granted spark, up there worshipping his naked Helga in Frolic Weymouth’s back bedroom, dying to let the world in on his faithless little secret because he just can’t help himself anymore. He’s got to make it all public. He’s got to make them feel what he’s been feeling. Give them that little massage that they’ve come to count on.

  And not just his audience, but himself too.

  That’s the difference, you see. It’s mutual, this feeling business. It goes in both directions, and it breaks down the integrity of the work by breaking down the integrity of the workman. By weakening him and making him needy.

  Think of my mother. She could have been one of the greats, had she lived long enough. Had times been different. You’ll have to take my word for that, as I believe I may have said, but it’s true. My word should be sufficient. I think I’ve earned that. She could have been one of the greats, and even though her work was utterly and completely informed by a love for certain things and certain people—not to mention a love for beauty as if beauty were a thing itself, and a love for certain paintings and ways of painting and even ways of seeing that had gone before—although her work always sprang from love, as I was saying, it never,
ever insisted that you must love it in return, or love her subjects in return, or love the artist herself in return, God forbid.

  Never that. Not Mama.

  An artist who makes that demand isn’t an artist anymore, no matter what he accomplishes with paint or stone. He’s a masseuse. And all he really wants is for you to rub his back in return.

  Fourteen

  It isn’t possible that Max has lost track. There can’t be a selection this morning—the SS and the guards have been coming every second day, steady as a drumbeat, and they came again yesterday, he’s certain—but the trucks are pulling up outside and the men are climbing out and the hospital door is bursting open and there they are. Everybody shrinks or runs as usual, everybody except Max and the French doctor, but something is different this time.

  “Delousing,” says the first of them through the door, that old skeleton of an officer. He stations himself beside the coal stove and waits grinning as his men go about their duties, some chasing prisoners who’ve run off into the latrine or vanished into a crawl space beneath the building, others stumbling in weighed down by machine guns, pressure tanks, and lengths of red rubber hose, gas masks dangling from leather straps around their necks. “Everyone up,” says the officer, with a look toward Max that says he is excused from this as from everything else. The look also indicates that he would rip off the boy’s forearm and impale him with it if he could, right through the heart, but that there will be no opportunity for such joys today. “Everyone up and out.”

  The door is wide open, and at a certain tilt of the officer’s head his men throw open the windows as well, letting the weather pour in with a vengeance. The temperature was already perilously low, but in a heartbeat it drops another twenty or thirty degrees. “Lose your uniforms,” says the skeleton, and the prisoners obey. “Blankets, everything. Mattresses. Pile it all by the door.” His face bears testimony to his impatience and disgust. If only most of these men didn’t have to be killed every other day, perhaps they could master the routine.

  Two of them carry everything to a waiting wagon while the rest line up shivering along the walls. One or two collapse from the cold, hugging themselves with arms of bone, and one or two more are collapsed already, entirely unable to stand. These the officer directs to the waiting van, these and a handful more, chosen for reasons that no one—perhaps not even the officer himself—will ever know. They all pass through the door into the blowing weather, naked as they came into this world. They climb into the van and the van pulls away for the gas and the wagon pulls away for the laundry and the rest of the prisoners are chased outside and herded to the baths, the real baths, with real ice water instead of Zyklon-B, where they will spend the rest of the day waiting for the return of their deloused clothing. Some will die of exposure and some will simply die, and by evening the hospital will have been freshly supplied with openings for new patients, who will continue to arrive without ceasing.

  Only Max stays behind as the van disappears and the guards chase the ambulatory few across the frozen ground, only Max and the French doctor, to wait outside the hospital walls while a team of men in gas masks go to work with their tanks and hoses.

  *

  It’s like the old days, but neither Jacob nor Eidel knows. It’s like the old days in Zakopane, when from time to time they would discover that a single thought had somehow settled upon both of their minds at once. It was as if they possessed only one mind between them, and one mind was enough. The thought could have been anything at all. A line of music. A desire for some favorite pastry from the cukiernia. A notion to bundle the children into their beds early and spend the evening together, just the two of them, either by the firelit hearth under a snowfall of blankets or out in the moonlit garden under a high canopy of stars, cradled all around, in either case, by a familiar ring of invisible mountains.

  The thought that has invaded their minds now, and that links them across the gulf of time and distance and barbed wire that has come between them, is the unanswered question of Lydia’s portrait. What on earth has become of it? Where in the world has it gone, if it’s gone anywhere besides up the chimney? For one must of course consider the fireplace, after all. The fireplace is the first thing that a certain kind of person would think of for disposing of such an object, and they’ve endured exactly that kind of person for an eternity now.

  Jacob tells himself that the remains of the painting weren’t in the fireplace on Friday noon, but he can’t be sure. Almost a week had gone by since Eidel had made whatever confession she’d made. Anything may have happened. A dozen fires had burned in the grate, the weather has been so blustery and bitter. Perhaps twice that many.

  Such a quantity of ashes. So much smoke gone up the chimney. Each day, at work outdoors in Canada, he studies the gray skies as if he has missed the flight of the last bird.

  Chaim has different ideas, though, and more practical ones. “She paid good money for that picture,” he says. “They wouldn’t have burned it.”

  “Then they’ve put it away,” says Jacob. “They’ve stored it somewhere.”

  “I doubt that. I doubt that very much.”

  “In a crawlspace. In a cabinet in the basement. Somewhere.”

  “A painting of a Jew? It’s bad enough that they’re about to own a painting whose artist is a Jew, but they’ve gotten over that for the sake of their pride.”

  “Then they must have burned it,” says Jacob. “They burn Jews. They certainly wouldn’t flinch at burning a picture of one.”

  Chaim shakes his head, an old scholar with infinite wisdom to impart. “They don’t burn us while we still have value,” he says.

  “Value.” Jacob laughs out loud, right there in the open, by the side of the broad main street of the village of Auschwitz, shaven head and shivering frame and burlap uniform and all. People pause to stare. This one has finally gone mad, their looks say. For months now we’ve permitted him to walk our streets, and in the end he’s proven to be just another defective.

  Chaim lifts a quieting finger to his lips and urges Jacob along. “Value,” he says. “Yes. You work, you live. That’s the bargain.”

  *

  Eidel closes the kitchen door behind her and wraps her arms around herself and hurries toward the gate, planning a second morning with the pencil and the sketch pad. She’s not ready for anything further. She couldn’t seem to get the composition right last week, and she’ll have to try again. She’s forgotten so much. She fears that she can’t trust her own hands the way she once did. They’ve gone stiff and clumsy, thick with calluses and burned in places and incompletely healed where they’ve healed at all. To say nothing of the pressure that comes with this particular project. The only thing that ever depended on any of her old paintings, the paintings to which she had devoted so many hours of the life that she had before this one, was the capturing of a single moment in an endless river of moments: a window gathering light, a child at play, a sunrise. If she failed, another moment would come along soon enough.

  It’s no longer the case. Just one more lesson of the camp. Nothing endures.

  The day is gray but slowly clearing and sleet has fallen overnight and the walks have been cleared but not perfectly. Her shoes are broken down, the heels in particular, and she must shuffle to keep from stepping out of them. She skitters rapidly but carefully across a thin scrim of ice, keeping her wits about her. Against the gray morning the windows of the shops are yellow with light that spills out thick as buttermilk, spreading across the walks but giving no warmth to an outsider.

  The housekeeper greets her with a cautious enthusiasm. On the table in the entry hall is a new pencil sharpener in a box packed in wood shavings that it might have generated of its own will; perhaps this replacement has cost the housekeeper something and perhaps it hasn’t, but either way she’s learned that Eidel possesses some value in this equation.

  She whispers that the family is already gathered in the dining room. She says they’re quite eager to see what progress
she might make today, giving her words a dark edge. Eidel scrapes her collapsed shoes on the mat one last time and goes in. There can be no delay. No slipping out of a coat, for she has no coat. No checking herself in the mirror, for her gray head is rimed with stubble and her poor slack face simply will not bear study.

  The dining room still smells of breakfast. Grilled sausages, omelettes stuffed with cheese and peppers and onions, hot yeasty breads with butter. Each scent in the densely charged air stands out, like a pin stuck into the map of Eidel’s deprivation. Even the dregs in the coffee cup that the sturmbannführer has just set down reach out to her. She dips her head and sits in the wobbly chair and takes up her sketch pad, daring at last to look at them. They’ve settled into a different arrangement this time, a tableau of their own invention that they no doubt believe suits them better, and she decides that the time has come to stop interfering and let them have their way. She might be hearing the familiar voice of desperation, but on the other the hand it might be the impulse of her old art, making itself known through the acts of these willful monsters. Saying leave well enough alone. Saying paint what there is and nothing more. Saying make of the world only what you can.

  The pencils have been freshly sharpened, every one of them, although by exactly whom she can’t say. Perhaps it was another burden laid upon the housekeeper. More penance if there was any penance to be done. It doesn’t matter. Her hands are frozen and her touch is all wrong and the first point snaps the moment she touches it to the paper. A pistol shot couldn’t have startled her more. She looks up at the family with a fragile crystalline smile and sets the pencil down, rubbing her hands together and blowing into the crevice between them.