by Clare Clark
Böhm came to Meierstrasse to take Frau Lang’s statement. She perched awkwardly on her chair like a schoolgirl, her knees pressed together. Böhm was gentle. Taking a cardboard file from his briefcase he opened it and handed it to her.
‘I’d like you to look at this photograph and tell me if you recognise the man in it.’
Frau Lang grimaced. She looked at the photograph and quickly away. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s him.’
Böhm took her through her testimony. As she gave her answers her neck turned red, then a deep purple. When Böhm had finished he smiled at her.
‘You’ve been a great help, thank you. Is there anything else you would like to add, anything you think we’ve forgotten?’
The housekeeper shrugged. ‘I don’t know if it’s any use, but there was a brown mark, dark brown, on his—his—’ She dug her thumb into her right thigh.
‘A birthmark? You’re sure?’
When Frau Lang nodded Böhm smiled at her and made a note on his pad. ‘Thank you, Frau Lang. You’ve been very helpful.’
‘Although now I think about it,’ she said, suddenly uncertain, ‘it might have been the other one.’
‘I think that’s everything, don’t you, Alfred?’ Julius said hurriedly. ‘Frau Lang, stay here please. I’ll see Herr Böhm out.’
In the hall he shook Böhm’s hand. ‘You won’t—that is—I’m sorry about Frau Lang’s confusion. It’s just that Herr Baeck, well, he wasn’t exactly the first.’
He did not meet Böhm’s eye. In the study Frau Lang was sitting where he had left her, a handkerchief crumpled in her hands.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘About the birthmark.’
‘It’s all right, I’ve explained things to Herr Böhm, there’s no harm done. But we do have to be careful. One man, remember? The man in the photograph. No one else.’
Frau Lang stared at her lap and said nothing.
‘You’re a good woman, Frau Lang, a Christian woman. I would never ask you to lie. Herr Baeck has signed a statement admitting his part. All we have to do is corroborate his story. The rest, well, that’s nobody’s business but ours. We have to think of Luisa’s parents, of little Konstantin. The scandal, if it got out, it would destroy them. For their sakes, if not for Luisa’s, we must find it in our hearts to be merciful.’
The day before the directions hearing a typed envelope arrived for Julius with a Munich postmark. Inside there was no letter, only a photograph of Konstantin standing by a lake. Konstantin could stand. He had shed his baby plumpness, he was all angles, and his silken hair was thick and curly. Julius stared at the boy his son had become, a stranger grown stranger still, and the loneliness opened inside him, a crack so deep and sudden that it made him dizzy. When he closed his eyes Luisa’s voice seemed to come from inside him.
You’ll open yourself up to a painting or a slab of stone, you’ll let it break your bloody heart, but a real person, a living breathing person with their fear and their weakness and their failures, then you run fucking mile, it disgusts you. When Konstantin was born the ferocity of her feelings for him shocked them both. Julius had watched her with the child and, despite everything, he felt both awe and a kind of yearning. He could not fathom what it would do to someone, to be loved like that.
He looked at the photograph for a long time. His coffee grew cold. When Frau Lang came in to clear his breakfast, he went upstairs. The Noah’s Ark was still on the table in the nursery. Julius touched the shiny paper, then, ripping at it, tore open the parcel. One side of the painted ark slid off to reveal the pairs of animals stored inside. Lowering himself to his knees, Julius tipped them out on to the floor. The carpet was thick and the animals wobbled but he set them out in a long line, smallest first, all the way from the brightly coloured birds to the elephants and the long-necked giraffes. When the animals were lined up he placed Noah and his wife side by side at the top of the gangplank. Noah smiled broadly into his beard. He did not look like a man readying himself for catastrophe. Beneath her red headscarf, Mrs Noah’s eyes were round and very blue.
Julius knelt until his feet were alive with pins and needles and he could no longer endure the soreness in his hip. Limping a little on numb legs, he picked up the torn wrapping paper and screwed it into a ball. He did not pick up the animals. He left them where they were, waiting patiently, two by two.
That night Matthias called in unannounced. Julius half considered sending him away, he was in no mood for company, but, to his surprise, he found himself grateful for the distraction. They did not talk about the divorce. Julius had not mentioned the hearing to Matthias. He did not want Matthias asking questions he did not want to answer. He was glad when the young man asked him about the paintings recently acquired by the Wallraf-Richartz museum in Cologne. It was well known that their new director of modern art had been on a buying spree; the man was a master of self-promotion and knew precisely how to stoke the interest of the newspapers. One painting in particular, he told reporters, was certain to cause a sensation, though they would have to wait for the grand unveiling before Germany’s great and good to find out which. It was rumoured that he had beaten London’s National Gallery to van Gogh’s Sunflowers.
Matthias had seen one of the Sunflowers paintings in Munich after the war. He did not know that van Gogh had intended the paintings as part of a triptych, two sunflower canvases, one with a yellow ground, the other turquoise, flanking a portrait of Augustine Roulin, the wife of his friend the postman, rocking a cradle. It was Mme Roulin who took care of him when he was ill.
‘He saw the sunflowers as lamps,’ Julius said. ‘Candelabra illuminating his secular madonna. It was extraordinary, in those few weeks in Arles it was as if a kind of magic took hold of him, his brush only had to touch the canvas and it sprang to life. Two complete triptychs in a matter of weeks, maybe more. Imagine it, the blaze of those paintings against the whitewashed walls of the Yellow House.’
Matthias smiled. ‘The sunflowers are mine. Isn’t that what he wrote to Theo?’
‘And they were, they are and always will be, whatever that slippery bastard Gauguin might try and claim to the contrary. You don’t know that story? Gauguin wrote later that Vincent only made the paintings because Gauguin told him to, that it was Gauguin’s idea to paint “sunflowers on sunflowers in the full light of the sun”. By then, of course, Gauguin was destitute and dying and terrified no one would remember him. Better to take credit for someone else’s masterpieces than not to be credited at all.’
‘Vincent made many, many weak paintings but his great works, they unman you,’ Julius said later. By then he was drunk, the words soft-edged and heavy in his mouth. ‘Yes, there is agony in them, but somehow no disillusion, no bitterness. Just the brush dipped again and again in his beating broken heart.’
‘What do you mean, weak paintings?’ Matthias asked.
‘Vincent was self-taught, impatient, in thrall to the wrong artists. Many of his early works are clumsy. But even then he painted completely, with every part of himself.’
And later still, in his study with a bottle of cognac, ‘The van Gogh that used to hang there, my wife stole it. She took it with her, when she left me.’
‘She loved it that much?’
‘She detested it but she took it anyway. A hostage. She wanted to make sure I would be generous.’
‘She didn’t need to take a painting to know that.’
Julius thought of Harald Baeck’s face in the crowded station, the colour draining from his skin. ‘How can you say that?’ he said bitterly. ‘You don’t know what cruelties I am capable of.’
‘I know that you are a good man.’
‘Except that I’m not. I’m not a good man.’ The way Matthias looked at Julius then made Julius want to weep. ‘I have a son but it’s the painting I can’t live without. What kind of a man chooses a painting over his own son?’
‘But you haven’t chosen. Not yet.’
‘Not out loud maybe. But whatever I say, whateve
r my lawyer claims for me in a courtroom, I know differently. I’ve chosen.’
Matthias shook his head. ‘You’re wrong. We don’t choose the deepest desires of our hearts. Our only choice is whether to act on them. Whether the hurt we cause . . .’
He broke off unhappily, but Julius had drunk too much to feel anyone’s pain but his own. ‘You think that helps?’ he demanded. ‘You think knowing you can never change, that the rottenness is too deep-rooted in you, that it’s part of who you are, you think that makes anything better, that it stops the guilt, the shame?’
‘No, I don’t think that.’
‘How can you know anything about it, a man like you, a man who wants nothing from life but its beauty?’
‘You think I don’t have secrets, that I’m never ashamed of who I am?’
Julius laughed bleakly. ‘You’re young. Everyone wants to have secrets when they’re young.’
‘It’s not like that, not for me.’
‘Isn’t it? Then tell me. Go on, tell me your shameful little secrets.’
Matthias’s jaw hardened, his hands clenched as though he was steeling himself to say something. Then abruptly he stood and walked out of the room.
‘Wait, where are you going?’ Julius protested. ‘For Christ’s sake, Matthias, come back.’ Staggering to his feet, clumsy with drink, he knocked his glass to the floor. A puddle of cognac spread across the parquet.
The front door banged. Julius stood unsteadily in the doorway of the study. He hardly knew what had happened. He rubbed his forehead, his fingers pressing into his temples, but the cognac made it hard to think and neither his hands nor his face felt like they belonged to him. He pressed harder, pushing his fingers through his hair, and let his head drop back against the jamb. In the firelight of the study the empty wall glared at him, triumphantly blank.
Frau Lang found him the next morning, sitting in the armchair in the nursery. She eyed his dishevelled dinner suit, the animals scattered around the Noah’s Ark, no longer two by two, and brought him strong coffee with two aspirin on the saucer. Downstairs someone had cleaned up the broken glass in his study. There was a vase of snowdrops on the table, the first flowers of spring, and the room smelled of beeswax and lavender. He asked Fräulein Grüber to arrange for the Noah’s Ark to be sent to Konstantin in Munich.
‘I want it sent today,’ he said. Scrawling a line on a piece of paper, he slid it into an envelope. ‘This needs to go with it.’ A single line, Thinking of you always, your loving Pappi. Any more and he would never be able to stop. He told the typist to arrange for a taxicab. He had an urgent appointment in town.
‘And have Frau Lang bring up Herr Rachmann’s coat and hat for me, would you?’ he added. ‘I’ll drop them at his gallery on my way.’
He waited for the taxi in his study, his hands in his pockets, staring out into the garden. Mrs Noah fitted neatly into his palm. He took her out, turning her over in his fingers. She stared at him beadily with her round blue eyes. Then, opening his desk drawer, he dropped her in and went out.
The street was narrow, cobbled in the old style, the brick buildings leaning conspiratorially towards one another to block out the sky. Most housed small shops, an ironmonger’s, a barber’s shop, a tobacconist, its narrow window stained yellow with cellophane. Their signs were weathered, the paint peeling. Several were boarded up. Halfway down the street a coalman unloaded sacks from his cart into an open cellar. His horse eyed Julius impassively as he passed. Raising its tail, it expelled a slow, sloppy stream of manure.
At 98 THE OLD & NEW ART COMPANY LTD was written on a card tacked to the bell second from the top. The card was warped and smudged with rain. Julius felt inexplicably nervous. He took a breath, smoothing Matthias’s coat over his arm, then pressed the bell.
No one came. Three floors was a long way to come down when one was not expecting anyone. He rang again, keeping his finger on the bell. He could hear the muffled rasp as it rang inside the building. Still no one came. Julius stepped away from the door. Perhaps Matthias was out. Or perhaps, he thought uneasily, he had heard the bell and did not want to see him. Perhaps he was still angry, upset. Perhaps he was waiting for Julius to go away. As he stood looking up towards the third-floor windows, it occurred to Julius that, for all his excitement about the new enterprise, Matthias had never once suggested that Julius visit him in Moltkestrasse. The thought was like a shadow passing over him; he felt the shiver of it. When he heard the clatter of footsteps from inside the building he wanted to run. Instead he forced his mouth into a smile.
The door opened. A tall, thickset man scowled at Julius. He wore a shirt without a collar, none too clean, its sleeves rolled up to reveal strong forearms furred with dark hair. Julius supposed he was Matthias’s brother, though they looked nothing alike. He had imagined a salesman, smooth manners and a suit, but this man looked like a hoodlum. He smelled of cigarettes and turpentine.
‘What?’ the man demanded.
Julius looked down at the coat and hat in his arms. ‘I was—I was hoping to see Herr Rachmann. I have some things of his. Are you his brother?’
The man’s scowl deepened. ‘Who’s asking?’
Julius stiffened. Perhaps they were brothers. He had Matthias’s way of puckering his mouth as though he were sucking on the insides of his cheeks, only where Matthias seemed always to be biting back laughter, his brother looked ready to throw a punch. There was a denseness to him that seemed to suck what light there was from the grey afternoon.
‘My name is Köhler-Schultz,’ Julius said coldly. ‘I am an associate of Matthias’s. A friend.’
Something changed in the man’s expression. He leaned forward, his lip curling in mockery and contempt. ‘His friend? Fuck, you really are an arrogant fucking prick.’ Sneering, he hawked up a bubbled gob of spit on to the pavement by Julius’s foot. Then, stepping back, he slammed the door.
‘Who the hell do you think you are?’ Julius shouted, and he pressed the bell again and again until the rasp of it rang in his teeth but this time no one came.
He took Matthias’s coat and hat back to Meierstrasse. Matthias could collect them the next time he came. When the telephone jangled he jumped, hurrying out to the morning room. Fräulein Grüber looked up, startled, and handed him the receiver but, instead of Matthias, it was Böhm’s voice that greeted him. He sounded sombre. There had been an unexpected hitch. Not only had Luisa’s lawyer denied the claims in Julius’s petition, he had applied to the court to issue a counter-petition, citing Julius as respondent.
‘But that’s impossible,’ Julius said furiously. ‘Dishonourable conduct, for God’s sake? What does that even mean?’
‘We won’t know until we see their petition. Of course, there’s always a chance they’re playing games, delaying the process to force a negotiation. I’m sorry to have to ask this, but is there a possibility that she might have something, anything at all?’
Julius pushed away the thought of Harald Baeck and let a bitter anger run into the space it made. ‘You know what she has. She has my child and my painting.’
Matthias did not come to Meierstrasse that evening. Julius took the slim bundle of Luisa’s letters he had never quite been able to throw away and dropped them one by one into the fire, but it was not enough. In the flames he saw Matthias, his stricken expression as he stumbled out of the study. The brother’s words echoed in his skull, savage with contempt. You really are an arrogant fucking prick. Dishonourable conduct, he thought, and his stomach churned, a curdle of discomfiture, fury and guilt.
IX
It was Geisheim at the TRIBÜNE who insisted Julius go to Cologne. The Köhler-Schultz name was synonymous with van Gogh, he said, ignoring Julius’s protestations. If the Wallraf-Richartz had scooped the Sunflowers, and all the Tribüne’s sources suggested that they had, Geisheim wanted Julius breaking the news.
‘Call in your copy from Cologne,’ he instructed, already halfway down the corridor to his next meeting. ‘It’s not often art makes
headlines. We need to be first.’
Outside the newspaper offices the grey sky closed over the city like a lid. It was bitterly cold. The Berlin winter, provoked by the first stirrings of spring, had struck back. Julius had meant to go home. Instead, shoulders hunched, he walked eastwards along Leipziger Strasse. On the Jungfern bridge he stopped, staring down at the dark shape of himself on the inky water, then past the boarded-up restaurant on the corner towards Moltkestrasse. The thought of bumping into Matthias was at least as uncomfortable as it was irresistible, and still he lingered on the bridge, hoping and not hoping for a glimpse of him. The icy pavement leaked its chill through the soles of his shoes.
A sharp wind sliced between the buildings, cutting through his coat. Julius put his gloved hands to his mouth, feeling the heat of his breath through the leather. He thought of Konstantin in Munich, opening his Noah’s Ark. He wished he had been there to see it. The wind made his eyes water and his nose stream. As he fumbled a handkerchief from the pocket of his coat, a folded square of paper fell to the ground.
Stiffly he bent to pick it up. It was a drawing in pen and ink, the paper jagged along one side where it had been torn from a sketchbook. Like a picture in a dream it was at the same time utterly familiar and disconcertingly wrong, van Gogh’s Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear, only the face was not Vincent’s. Instead a young woman stared out from beneath Vincent’s fur-trimmed cap, her lips pursed. She reminded Julius of someone, although for a moment he could not place her. He frowned at the drawing, sifting his memory.
And then it came back to him: Fräulein Eberhardt, the daughter of the Schiller widow, the troublemaker with the tattered nails. He thought of her pale face in the gathering darkness outside the house at Würmsee, the curve of her breasts beneath her black sweater. Beneath the drawing, in capitals: A MOMENT OF MADNESS. It had been made in haste but somehow it captured the spirit of van Gogh’s original, not just his style but his emotional desolation, his bleak acceptance of blame. On the wall behind her head, where in his portrait van Gogh had placed a print of Mount Fuji like a lost paradise, Fräulein Eberhardt had drawn tropical foliage around a small stone fountain, a sweep of snowcapped mountains in the background: Otto Metz’s winter garden.
