by Clare Clark
The beach was very crowded, a jostle of parasols and deckchairs and picnic rugs spread possessively over the sand, their corners fortified with baskets and discarded shoes. The lake was crowded too. Children squatted in the brown shallows, solemnly emptying buckets into holes. Further out, gaggles of girls shrieked and splashed, and men showed off their strokes, kicking up water in glittering wings. Vendors picked their way through the crush with baskets of strawberries and sugary Pfannkuchen.
Dora and Emmeline walked along the water’s edge, tiny waves licking their feet. The sand was a collage of bottle tops and sweet wrappers and cigarette stubs and dark ribbons of washed-up weed, and the sun was very hot. Dora wore a pair of Emmeline’s sunglasses, black and pointed like cats’ eyes. Beneath her faded black bathing dress her legs were long and milky-white.
Near the fence that marked the boundary of the beach the crowd thinned. There were no deckchairs this far along, no parasols. Couples sat close together on towels spread out on the sand. In the water two men hit a rubber ball back and forth with wooden bats. Dora and Emmeline walked up the splintered wooden walkway towards a patch of pine woods where the shade was deep and dark. The woods behind the main beach had already been hacked down. A vast new restaurant was being built there, complete with swimming pool and open-air theatre. On the churned-up earth huge steam-diggers drowsed in the sun.
At the end of the walkway a group of young men in bathing trunks lounged on the sand, cigarettes pinched in their palms, drinking from a bottle they passed from hand to hand. Their shoulders were burned red from the sun. As the girls approached one of them drained the bottle, then hurled it towards the woods. There was a muffled smash. The youths laughed.
‘Maybe we should go back,’ Dora murmured but Emmeline only tucked her arm through Dora’s.
‘We’ll go round,’ she said. The sand was sharp with shrivelled pine needles. As they passed, one of the youths reached out and ran a hand down Dora’s thigh. Dora yelped.
‘What?’ he said. ‘Nice pussies like to be stroked.’ The other youths sniggered. Flustered, Dora pulled off her sunglasses and turned, trying to steer Emmeline back the way they had come, but Emmeline took a step closer to the blond man, raising the middle finger of her right hand.
‘Fuck you,’ she said in Russian. ‘And fuck your mother.’
‘Em, please,’ Dora pleaded, tugging at her arm, but it was too late, the blond man was already on his feet, two of his friends dropping their cigarettes to circle behind him, boxing them in. Emmeline could smell the shrivel of the sun on them, the sharp reek of their sweat.
‘Get out of our fucking way,’ she said coldly, this time in German, but the blond man only stepped closer, so close she could see the sharp yellow points of the pimples that pressed up through his skin. His eyes were raw-looking, the irises bluish-white like skimmed milk.
‘Filthy-mouthed little whore, aren’t you?’ he said.
‘Foreign, sounds like,’ one of the other men said and the blond man nodded.
‘A dirty little Jewess,’ he agreed.
‘Please,’ Dora said in a strangled voice. ‘She didn’t mean it.’
‘Oh, but I did,’ Emmeline said. ‘And if you don’t step aside this instant I’ll scream blue buggering murder. Have you ever heard a dirty little Jewess scream?’
‘Scream all you like, bitch,’ the blond man hissed. ‘No one listens to your kind,’ and, lurching at her, he pushed her hard with both hands. Caught off guard, Emmeline staggered backwards. The blond man watched her as she righted herself, a smile curving the edges of his mouth. Emmeline looked at him. Then, opening her mouth, she screamed.
Immediately the two men in the water stopped their game. Couples on their towels looked round. A man carrying deckchairs put them down. Emmeline went on screaming, her arms raised in front of her face like a shield. The men splashed out of the water and started up the beach. The blond man hesitated, rigid with hate, then jerked his head at his friends. Snatching up their bags, they headed for the woods, the blond man behind them. As he pushed past Emmeline he grabbed her hand, pressing it against his groin. His cock was semi-hard, a fat bulge in his bathing trunks.
‘Filthy Jewish dyke whore,’ he spat and stalked away.
They were quiet on the train on the way home, caught up in their thoughts. It was early, too early for the day-trippers, the sun still hot as metal through the dirty windows. They had the carriage to themselves.
‘I’m sorry,’ Emmeline said at last.
‘What for?’
‘For spoiling things. It was my fault, I should have walked away.’
‘You’re right. How dare you be a pretty Jewish girl on a public beach?’
Dora had caught the sun. Beneath the wide straps of her sundress her shoulders were the soft pink of strawberry ice. Emmeline looked out at the high embankment, the dry bleached stands of grass. ‘I’m Catholic, actually.’
‘Then why did you let them—’
‘They were morons. There’s no point in arguing with morons.’ Dora laughed softly. Or perhaps it was a sigh. ‘I’m the one who should be apologising. I—I froze.’
‘No, you didn’t.’
‘I thought I was brave but I’m not. I’m a coward.’
‘Not poking sticks in wasps’ nests isn’t cowardice, it’s common sense.’
‘You think common sense is worth anything?’ Dora demanded. ‘I’m twenty-four and I still live with my grandmother. I’m stuck in a job I despise, with no money and no prospects. I’ve never been anywhere or done anything of the slightest importance and I never will.’
‘That’s not true. You’re a brilliant writer. You haven’t been lucky yet, that’s all.’
‘And what if I never am? What if I spend the rest of my life staying away from wasps’ nests and nothing ever changes? It’s not just work, it’s everything. I’m halfway to being an old woman, Em, and I’ve barely lived. I’ve never left Germany. I’ve never danced all night or drunk champagne from my shoe or had a wild, impossible love affair. I’ve never even been kissed!’
‘Then kiss someone.’
‘It isn’t that easy.’
‘Of course it is. You’re not Sleeping Beauty waiting for her prince to come and wake her. This is a republic and we have alarm clocks. If you want to kiss someone you should just kiss them.’ The words prickled on Emmeline’s tongue. She looked at Dora, at her disconsolate frown and her strawberry-ice shoulders and her cat’s-eye sunglasses pushed up into her hair, and suddenly she could not hold it any more. Half-rising from her seat, she kissed her. Dora’s lips parted, the tips of their tongues touched, and for a moment there was nothing else, nothing but her mouth and Dora’s and the streaking flash of blood like light through her veins and her heart so huge in her chest it closed her throat.
‘Tickets, all tickets please.’ With a sharp little mew Dora twisted away, fumbling her rucksack on to her lap. Dazed, Emmeline leaned back in her seat.
‘Nice day out, ladies?’ the ticket inspector asked cheerily and Dora flushed, not meeting Emmeline’s eye. He punched their tickets with a wink. ‘Be sure to let me know next time, I’ll come with you.’
As he slid the carriage door closed behind him Dora stared fixedly out of the window, her knuckles against her mouth. They were nearing Berlin. The buildings chopped the sunlight into slices that flashed across her face like strokes of paint.
‘Dora, look at me,’ Emmeline said softly. She kissed me back, she thought, and her heart swelled, throbbing like a bruise. Leaning forward, she stroked Dora’s sun-pinked shoulder, tracing the angle her pencil knew by heart.
‘Don’t,’ Dora snapped, jerking away. ‘You win, all right? You’ve made your point.’
‘My point? I don’t understand.’
‘Don’t you? Just kiss someone, Dora, see how easy it is.’
‘You think that was easy?’
‘Wasn’t it?’
Emmeline exhaled, a high choked laugh. ‘Do you have any idea how long I�
�ve been waiting to kiss you, how I’ve thought about it and thought about it, only every time I just couldn’t, I didn’t dare, because I was so afraid I was wrong, that you weren’t like me, that you wouldn’t want—that somehow I’d manage to fuck everything up?’
There was a silence.
‘Well, then, I’m sorry,’ Dora said at last.
‘Sorry for what?’
‘That I can’t—that you were right. I’m not like that. I’m just not.’
‘But you kissed me back.’
‘No. I’m sorry.’ She stared out of the window, hugging her rucksack against her. ‘Let’s forget it ever happened, all right?’
They walked in silence through the station, one behind the other. The tobacconist’s kiosk by the ticket office had an advertisement pasted on the side, Rembrandt at his easel, his head tipped back, blissfully exhaling, an open packet of Wahr cigarettes on the palette in his hand. Whoever had pasted it had been slapdash. The poster was askew and there were bubbles of air beneath the paper. It looked as though Rembrandt had a tumour on his jaw.
Another train must have come in because suddenly a flood of harried passengers streamed through the station. Humping bags, chivvying children, they hustled across the hall, around Emmeline and the tobacconist’s kiosk and out through the arch that led out of the station. Nobody looked at the poster.
I’ve been wrong about everything, Emmeline thought numbly, and she let the tide carry her out into the glass-and-metal dazzle of the street.
10
Dora refused to talk about what had happened on the train. Emmeline still went upstairs for supper, but Dora was different, shut up inside a glassy shell she could not penetrate. Everything was too loud, the clatter of the plates, her remarks to her grandmother, the way she laughed at her own jokes. When the old woman patted the arms of her chair, summoning them to sit with her, Dora crossed her arms tight around herself, folding her legs emphatically against the wall so that there was no possibility she might brush against Emmeline accidentally.
One evening they ran into one another in the street outside their building.
‘We need to talk,’ Emmeline said but Dora shook her head.
‘There’s nothing to say.’ She sounded angry. ‘Look, I know you can’t help how you are, it must be very hard, always going against the world like that, and I’m sorry, I hope you find a way to be happy, but you can’t expect me to be like you because I can’t help how I am either and I’m just an ordinary girl. And that’s that.’
Emmeline did not go up to Dora’s flat that night. She went for a walk. She walked for a long time. The next day she met Anton at their usual place outside KaDeWe. She had not seen him for weeks. He was preoccupied, in a hurry, he only had time for one drink, but when she asked him about studio space he agreed to ask around.
The place he found was part of an old warehouse tucked behind a railway line in the north of the city, a large room shared by several artists. It was cold and noisy but the light was good and it was very cheap. Sometimes one of them sat for the others but mostly they worked alone. Emmeline searched back through her sketchbooks, looking for ideas. There was both pain and comfort in it, like picking a scab. Sometimes, late in the evening, walking home, she stopped to draw something that caught her eye. She did not show the drawings to anyone. She tucked them into the books that lay scattered around her flat, pressing them between the pages like flowers.
It was early September when, crossing the river to Museum Island, she bumped into Julius and his wife. She smiled briskly and tried to walk on but it was too late, Julius was already introducing Amelia and then, before Emmeline could make her excuses, Amelia had started on a story about the tour of America from which they had just returned.
‘Julius suffered horribly at the hands of overfriendly natives,’ she said, laughing. ‘They worshipped him, hung on his every word, but they did insist on calling him always by his first name. Poor darling, you could see him bristling from the other side of the room.’
The tour, she said, had been exhausting, a ceaseless round of lectures and dinners and exhibitions in Julius’s honour. ‘Though it was only me that was exhausted, of course, Julius loved every minute of it, but then Julius is the master of the whirlwind courtship. Look at us, ten weeks from the day of our first meeting to marriage. I should have realised. I couldn’t keep up with him then either.’ She smiled fondly up at Julius, then abruptly tapped his arm. ‘Wait a minute, that girl who wrote to you about Matthias Rachmann, wasn’t she a friend of Fräulein Eberhardt’s?’
Julius’s face snapped shut. ‘I don’t remember, darling. You know, we really do have to be going.’
‘Julius thought he might have known her father,’ Amelia went on, undeterred. ‘Flora someone. What was her last name, darling, the girl? It began with a K.’
‘Dora,’ Emmeline said dumbly. ‘Dora Keyserling.’
‘I really must get back,’ Julius interrupted. ‘Why don’t you give Amelia your telephone number, Emmeline? Perhaps you could come to tea one afternoon.’
‘I’m not on the telephone,’ Emmeline said. Dora, Dora, Dora. Her mouth was dry.
‘Your address, then,’ he said. ‘It’s been so long, I’d like to be able to tell your mother we’d seen you.’ He took a notebook from his inside pocket and handed it to her. Reluctantly Emmeline scribbled her address.
It was only after they had turned to leave that Emmeline called after them. ‘You never did write back to her, did you, to Dora?’ she demanded. She did not know why it mattered, not now, but she knew that if Dora had been there she would not have had to ask and that that, somehow, was Julius’s fault.
Julius stopped. ‘And why would I have done that?’ he asked coldly.
‘Because she wanted to help Matthias and Matthias is your friend.’
‘Help him how, exactly? By printing malicious gossip masquerading as news?’
‘By giving him a chance to tell his side of the story first.’
‘My dear girl, are you really so naïve? When did the newspapers tell anyone’s side of the story but their own?’
‘She won’t give up, you know. If Matthias has been swindled—’
‘No one has been swindled, least of all Matthias. Your would-be journalist friend can abandon her little investigations because there is nothing to investigate. The paintings are genuine. There is nothing else to say.’
The next morning, very early, Julius came to the tenement building. It was raining, a persistent low drizzle, and in the courtyard the damp gleamed black-green against the stained grey concrete. He must have spoken to the caretaker because she sent one of her boys up to bang on Emmeline’s door.
The boy was the youngest, red-headed and sharp-chinned. He could not tell her who the man was or why he had come, only that he was old and very rich. When she hesitated the boy shook the coins in his fist and told her to get a move on. In the street a black car was idling at the kerb. As soon as she came out of the building the passenger door swung open and Julius gestured her inside.
He did not say where he was taking her. As the car drove towards Alexanderplatz, he closed the glass screen that separated them from the driver. Then he handed her a pen and a cheap cardboard notebook from the briefcase on his lap.
‘A source close to de Vries,’ he said. ‘If she names me I shall deny everything,’
Beyond the window people hurried along the wet pavements, their heads lowered and the collars of their coats turned up. Julius told Emmeline to tell Dora Keyserling that Pieter de Vries planned to publish a supplement to his catalogue raisonné. Having included all of Rachmann’s van Goghs in his original list, he had now inexplicably changed his mind. All thirty-two of the works that had passed through Rachmann’s gallery would be excised from the catalogue.
Emmeline stared at him. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘The pre-eminent Dutch expert no longer considers Matthias’s paintings to be genuine. No doubt he believes that by saying so publicly he is acting
in good faith. But I would ask your friend this: what manner of expert asserts one day that more than thirty paintings are indisputably the work of van Gogh and the next that they are categorically fakes? The paintings have not altered. All that has altered is de Vries’s personal opinion. Surely, then, it is not the veracity of the work that this volte-face of his calls into question but the man’s professional competency, the soundness of his so-called judgement. Write that down.’
‘You don’t agree with him?’
‘I consider his views beyond the pale.’
‘And Dora can quote you on that?’
‘Categorically not.’ Reaching again into his briefcase he took out an envelope. ‘This is my statement. Everything else is off the record.’ Emmeline took the envelope. It was addressed to Dora at the Merkur. She frowned. ‘Why Dora? Why not one of your high-up editor friends?’
Julius did not answer. He looked out at the street, his fingers drumming his leg. ‘Tell your friend to speak to Clovis Hendriksen in The Hague. The man’s a self-aggrandising windbag but he knows van Gogh.’
‘And if she has questions? Should she telephone you? Write?’
‘I have never met or spoken to Fräulein Keyserling. I issued a statement in response to a written press enquiry. I have no further comment to make.’
‘And if de Vries is right and the paintings are fakes, what then?’
‘I’ve said all I have to say.’ Leaning across her, he turned the handle, pushing the door open. ‘Good day, Emmeline.’
