In the Full Light of the Sun

by Clare Clark

  3

  There was something reassuring about drawing for money, and not just because she was good at it. Everyone in the illustration department at Zuerst magazine was an artist-in-waiting, just as all the writers in the room next door were poets and novelists and playwrights, whether they had written something or not. It was not just a matter of paying the rent. It was the way the world worked nowadays. They talked all the time about Grosz, now a world-famous artist who had drawn for magazines before the war, about Brecht who had had a hit play and still wrote advertising copy and the cover notes for gramophone records, and they curved their lips, their smiles camera-ready, because someone was always getting famous and next time it might just be them.

  Emmeline drew for the advertisement pages. The advertisements were commissioned by companies who paid the magazine to promote their products and the magazine had a strict system for how this was done. On her first day Emmeline was given a manual that ran to nearly twenty pages. Every product, from clothes to face powder, was modelled by the same stylised female figure.

  They called her the Zuerst girl. The Zuerst girl changed her hairstyle and her outfits—sports clothes mostly, the readers of Zuerst were young and energetic—but the girl herself never changed. She stood always in precisely the same pose, one leg slightly in front of the other, her head turned and her right hand raised, her features so simply realised it was as though she hardly had a face at all. Sometimes there were six of her on the same page, sometimes only two, but week after week Emmeline drew her, again and again and again, her little finger curling away from her raised hand always at precisely the same angle, distinguished only by her PrimaDonna brassiere or her Völkl ski suit or her chic silk pyjamas from the new line at the KaDeWe department store on Tauentzienstrasse.

  Page after page, dozens of her, knees bent like a chorus line, ready to kick.

  Emmeline was fumbling in her handbag for her door key when she heard voices coming from one of the upper floors. A door banged. Footsteps clattered in the stairwell behind her. She did not turn round. It had been a long day and no one expected neighbourliness in a building like this. Her hands were so cold she could not feel her fingers. She groped again in the bottom of her bag, sifting through used tram tickets and jumbled change, but the light was out again on the landing, she could not see anything. With a growl of irritation, she squatted and upended the bag on the concrete floor. Her compact skittered to the wall. No key.

  ‘Is everything all right?’

  Emmeline turned, scrabbling her things back into her bag. The girl on the stairs was her age, maybe younger. She wore a man’s overcoat and a battered felt hat pulled down over her ears. ‘It’s just, if it’s your key, you might want to look inside the lining? Mine slips in there sometimes, the seams wear through and if there’s a hole . . .’ The girl shrugged, twisting her body so that her weight was all on one leg, and suddenly Emmeline remembered. The girl at Matthias’s party. She lived in one of the upstairs flats. Sometimes Emmeline saw her crossing the road on her way to the tram in the mornings.

  ‘You,’ she said. ‘Of course.’ The cherry-red shoes, that was what had thrown her. Why would someone with shoes like that live somewhere like this?

  The girl blinked at her, confused. ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘It was you, at the party the other night, the Rachmann Gallery opening. I saw you there.’

  ‘Did you? I didn’t see you.’

  ‘There were a lot of people.’

  ‘Quite something, wasn’t it? The paper gave it a whole page, they never do that.’

  Emmeline had seen the newspapers. They had declared the exhibition a landmark show and Rachmann’s gallery a salon of the first rank. ‘You write about art?’

  ‘I wish. I work on the social column. For now.’

  ‘Sex and intrigue.’

  ‘Absolutely never. Look, I’m sorry, I have to go. I hope you find your key.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘I’m Dora, by the way.’

  ‘Emmeline.’

  ‘Glad to meet you, Emmeline.’ She flashed a grin over her shoulder as she clattered away down the stairs. Emmeline hesitated. Then, sliding her hand inside her bag, she felt along the seams of the lining until she touched a hard, flat shape. Her key.

  ‘Thank you,’ she murmured and downstairs the front door banged, as though in answer.

  Emmeline waited for something to happen, but nothing did. There was no word from Irina, no word either from Gregor Rachmann. She was not sure if she wanted him to find her, but it irked her that he might not even try. She went to work and came home again. She ate boiled eggs and sometimes sausage she bought from the stand near the office. At night the Zuerst girls bent their knees and stared blankly into the darkness, replicating themselves inside Emmeline’s head like cut-out paper dolls.

  One evening she met Anton for a drink at a new bar that had just opened on the Kurfürstendamm. The bar was crowded: young men with slicked-back hair, sharp-faced girls in see-through dresses. Anton brought his latest boyfriend, Kurt, who designed the window displays for KaDeWe. Kurt told Emmeline that shop windows were the modern equivalent of frescos in Renaissance churches and that KaDeWe was the Sistine Chapel of department stores. Emmeline bit back her laughter and tried to catch Anton’s eye but he only gazed at Kurt, idiotic with admiration, so she left early and went to Zanzibar, where she drank gin and kissed a girl in a backless dress made of embroidered Chinese silk. She did not ask her name. She knew as soon as the girl held out her hand for a cigarette, her manicured fingers parted just so, that she was the Zuerst girl, impeccably attired for a future that would never come.

  On Sunday morning she bumped into Dora lugging groceries up the concrete stairs. She looked tired. She told Emmeline her grandmother had been ill.

  ‘She lives in Berlin, your grandmother?’

  Dora looked surprised. ‘She lives here in this building. We live together.’

  She asked Emmeline up for a cup of coffee, but Emmeline said she had to go out. She had no intention of wasting her precious day off on an ailing old lady.

  ‘Of course,’ Dora said. ‘Another time.’

  Emmeline went back into her flat. It was very cold. In the tiny kitchen she lit the gas ring, leaning back as it burst into a sudden blue chrysanthemum of flame. She held her hands over it and then her face, savouring the scorch of it against her skin. Her grandmothers had both died when she was small. She remembered them only from photographs, her father’s mother little and sweet-faced, her mother’s stiff as a waxwork in black bombazine. When she died Elvira had a lock of her mother’s hair made up into a brooch, its intricate weave edged with little pearls. Emmeline had liked the shuddering feeling it gave her to touch it, the jolt of fascination and disgust.

  Filling the kettle, she set it on the ring. It was nearly two years since she had seen her mother, her last year at the Academy. Elvira and Jacob had come to Berlin and, because it was Emmeline’s birthday and there was a ten o’clock curfew at her boarding house, they took a second room at the Adlon for her.

  At dinner Emmeline drank too much. It was the only way she could endure it. Naturally she and her mother argued. They were very good at it by then, the themes refined: the unsuitability of the artistic life, the degeneracy of Berlin, Emmeline’s rapidly increasing age and declining marriageability. Ingratitude and lack of respect. Afterwards, when Emmeline said she was going to bed, Elvira followed her up to her room, her face stretched tight with fury, demanding to know what was wrong with her, a girl who had been given every privilege and never wanted for anything. The clichés were counted out: she was a mortification, a disgrace, she had embarrassed Jacob, humiliated Elvira, degraded herself. Elvira was ashamed she was her daughter.

  Emmeline waited until Elvira had finished. Then she went back downstairs.

  He was twice her age, and handsome in a much-handled way. He said he was in Berlin on business. She said her name was Käthe. They danced a little and drank a good deal. It was
bad luck that, unable to sleep, Elvira took an early-morning walk, returning to her room at precisely the moment he stumbled out of Emmeline’s. The hefty bill from the Palm Bar did nothing to improve matters. Elvira and Jacob went back to Munich. The next day a letter arrived from her mother. It was plain, Elvira wrote, that Emmeline had not the scantest respect for her or for Jacob. She could only assume that she had no need of their money either. Emmeline would receive her allowance for the rest of the month. After that she would have to fend for herself.

  Through the grimy slice of window Emmeline could see the fat woman who lived on the other side of the courtyard pegging out laundry on her tiny balcony. Her hands were very small, a child’s hands, plump and red. When she had hung up all the wet clothes she stood staring into the distance, her heavy arms clasped against her stomach, while beside her the wind fattened the cups of her enormous brassiere, lifting it on its thick elastic straps, and her grey-pink girdle danced.

  Reaching for a pencil, Emmeline began to draw. When the kettle shrieked, jolting her out of herself, she looked at the paper. She had wanted to capture the woman’s tenacity, the ancient, pagan heaviness of her, but all she had made was pastiche, modern misery in the classical style. Not pathos but satire, a cheap cartoon. Ripping out the page impatiently, she balled it up and threw it at the wall. The sketchbook fell to the floor, scattering its stuffed-in cargo of postcards and cuttings and loose sketches.

  A folded envelope caught her eye. Van Gogh’s peasant woman in her hood. Without her allowance Elvira had presumed she would be forced to return to Munich, her tail between her legs. And she would have, had she not received a letter from Jacob in which he offered to continue to support her on two conditions.

  One, that you never tell your mother of our arrangement, he wrote, and two, that you take responsibility for your talent and your own unhappiness. Your anger is powerful, Emmeline, but it is not a strength. The damage it inflicts is mostly to yourself. There are few lonelier places than in the embrace of a stranger.

  Emmeline had no qualms about taking his money—a difficult stepdaughter in Berlin was preferable to a difficult stepdaughter under Jacob’s own roof—but when she moved out of the boarding house she did not give him her new address. Jacob was a politician, manipulation was his business, and she did not want him springing any surprises on her. If he wanted to reach her, she told him, he should use the poste restante at the Berlin Post Office. Occasionally he did. His letters were surprisingly amusing, filled with affectionate anecdotes about her mother. She knew what he was trying to do but she still read them. There was something both familiar and strange about his version of Elvira, like the reflections in a house of mirrors.

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ Emmeline muttered in Russian to the peasant woman on the envelope. Then, snatching up her sketchbook, she went out.

  A bitter November wind whipped through the streets. She walked fast, her head down, letting the scraps of her thoughts blow away behind her. She walked for a long time. By the time she reached Viktoriastrasse it was starting to rain. Light spilled out from the shop windows and the bare trees gleamed with silver lanterns. Emmeline tried the door to the Rachmann Gallery, but it was locked. A small silver-framed sign in the window read Weekdays 10–6, Sundays 12–4. It was a little after one in the afternoon. Twisting her hair into a hasty knot, she tucked it inside her collar and pressed the bell. A young man opened the door.

  ‘Is Matthias here?’ she asked, summoning Elvira’s impatient imperiousness. ‘Never mind, I’ll wait.’

  The galleries were half empty, people murmuring together quietly as they looked. Emmeline hardly noticed them. There was only the drawing on the wall and her hand on the paper, her eyes and her pencil and the eyes and the pencil of a tormented virtuoso nearly forty years dead. As the work he had made passed through her into her fingers, she knew what it was like to be someone else completely.

  She was in a wheat field in the midday sun when Matthias touched her shoulder, making her jump. He gestured at the sketchbook.

  ‘May I look?’ he asked and reluctantly she handed it to him, watching as he leafed through the pages. ‘My assistant is under the impression you have an appointment.’

  ‘Does he? With whom?’

  Matthias’s lips twitched. ‘Has anyone ever said no to you, Emmeline Eberhardt?’

  ‘Only always.’

  ‘I struggle to believe that. However, I am going to have to ask you to leave now.’

  ‘But why? Your brother told me I was welcome to come whenever I wanted.’

  ‘Welcome to look. Not to copy. Our clients do not wish to fall over art students and all their paraphernalia.’

  ‘But these are van Goghs. Van Gogh copied everyone all the time.’

  ‘Perhaps so. But it’s a question of priorities.’

  ‘And money always comes first?’

  She expected Matthias to protest. Instead he frowned, tapping his fingers on the cover of her sketchbook.

  ‘Wait here a moment,’ he said. His assistant was talking to a sleek couple by the door. Matthias greeted the couple, then, taking the assistant to one side, murmured something in his ear. The assistant nodded, glancing at Emmeline, and followed Matthias out of the room.

  A few moments later Matthias returned with the exhibition catalogue.

  ‘Perhaps this might help,’ he said, holding it out to her. The frontispiece showed a self-portrait of van Gogh at his easel, a painting, not a drawing, quite unlike any of the self-portraits Emmeline had seen before. Van Gogh looked thin and ill, his faded red hair cropped close to his skull, the yellow-grey background the same queasy colour as his skin. He eyed his canvas uneasily, as though afraid of what he might summon there.

  ‘One of yours?’ she asked.

  ‘Not any more. It’s going to Amsterdam.’

  ‘Pity.’

  ‘There are others.’

  ‘Not in Berlin. No van Goghs in a public collection, not one.’

  Matthias smiled. ‘I’m doing my best. The Cornelius Gallery has six of our paintings in their retrospective next month, some of which may even be for sale. We must hope that this time the Nationalgalerie will not be able to resist.’

  Emmeline turned the page. Edited by Julius Köhler-Schultz, the title page read, with an introduction by Pieter de Vries.

  ‘I was wondering,’ she said. ‘What happened to Julius’s baby?’

  The question took Matthias aback. He frowned at her, confused, then shook his head. ‘Tragically she—they lost it. She broke off the engagement shortly afterwards. Julius was devastated.’

  ‘So Amelia wasn’t the secret fiancée?’

  ‘Absolutely not. And you’re never to mention it to her either, do you understand? Amelia has no idea Julius was engaged before, let alone about the baby. As for Julius, if he ever found out that I’d told you—’

  ‘Relax, Jesus, why would I say anything to anyone? It’s ancient history.’

  Matthias nodded, his lips pressed into a line, and gestured to the catalogue. ‘Can you manage with that, do you think? It’s been in the office so it’s a little battered, but still good enough to copy from, I hope.’

  ‘I can borrow it?’

  ‘You can keep it. A reward for keeping your side of the bargain.’

  Emmeline grinned. ‘Well, all right then. Thank you.’

  ‘My pleasure. Now get out before one of my real customers complains.’

  Emmeline hurried to the tram stop, the catalogue clutched against her chest. The night was overcast, there was no moon, but Potsdamer Platz was ablaze with light. It streamed from the streetlamps and the advertising columns and the huge illuminated clocks and the yellow windows of the bars and cafés and the headlights of the automobiles, spilling and sluicing across the rain-slicked pavements. Twenty feet up, the traffic lights on their tower turned green, then amber and red, and green again while, above the square, huge electric billboards proclaimed the names of Kodak and Lux soap and Coca-Cola in scarlet and gold and
blue and the Wrigley’s Spearmen with their pointed hats turned somersaults along the buildings, trailing their green banner, THE FLAVOUR LASTS.

  As the tram rattled north into the darkness Emmeline remembered that Matthias still had her sketchbook.

  4

  The ZUERST girl was not only disgustingly peppy, always about to go riding or cycling or ice skating or out for a drive, she was also a stickler for accuracy. Every piece she wore had to be copied with mathematical precision: the exact position of a dart or pocket, the angle of a collar. Like artefacts in a museum the clothes were numbered, item by item, and carefully checked in and out. When a drawing was complete, the details of the illustration were checked against the original, the appropriate form signed and the clothes carefully boxed for return. If a mistake had been made the whole thing had to be done all over again.

  The very existence of the Zuerst girl would have baffled Emmeline’s professors at the Berlin Academy of Art but they would have had to admit that their pupil had learned their lessons well. Emmeline had learned to look, to see. She drew the Zuerst girl over and over until she hated the sight of her, hated her vapid face and her raised hand and every stitch of every article she ever wore, but she made very few mistakes.

  Emmeline’s predecessor had not been so meticulous. Rummaging listlessly through her desk one dismal afternoon in January, Emmeline discovered a cache of unfinished drawings. They could not have been more than a year old, Zuerst was hardly older than that, but already the clothes were out of date, the heels too high, the hemlines too low. Several of them were scribbled on or torn.

  In one the Zuerst girl was drawn only from the waist up. She held out her hand, compliant as always as she leaned forward in half a brassiere, her other breast as blank as her undrawn face. Idly Emmeline sketched in her missing underwear. It seemed only proper to cover the girl up. She added a short tight skirt and the glossy high-heeled riding boots that were the particular uniform of the girls who touted for business in clusters along the stretch of Tauentzienstrasse near the zoo. In her outstretched hand Emmeline placed a vicious-looking whip.