In the Full Light of the Sun

by Clare Clark

  ‘They were under oath.’

  ‘They were under pressure.’

  ‘Are you saying they lied?’

  ‘I’m saying they made bloody sure no one knew the more uncomfortable facts. Did you know your Dutch experts ran tests on Rachmann’s Sower in 1930? Of course you didn’t, because the results were never published. By the time the police finally ordered Rachmann to submit the canvas to us for tests by our people it was too late. The picture was already sold and halfway to Chicago.’

  ‘And no one thought to mention this in court?’

  ‘You never asked. And neither did the prosecution.’

  I am silent. It’s true. I never asked.

  ‘Apparently they ran the same tests on Haystacks.’ Stemler spits a bitter laugh. ‘No one’s ever seen those results either.’

  ‘But these experts were independent.’

  ‘Independent? You have to be joking. The art world is tiny, and tinier still in Holland. Who do you think these men work for? Without Hendriksen and his millionaire clients they’d be out of a job.’

  ‘Are you saying they withheld information to protect Hendriksen?’

  Stemler looks at me as though I am something on his shoe. Since we last met his arrogance has hardened into something harsher and more hateful. ‘Clovis Hendriksen made a mockery of that damn trial. You danced to his tune, the whole bloody lot of you, and you didn’t even have the wit to see it.’

  ‘With respect, Herr Stemler—’

  ‘With respect? With respect, it would have behoved the court to consider why, out of the blue, in the full and certain knowledge that the press would eat him alive, Pieter de Vries was willing to testify that five of the Rachmann paintings that he had categorically dismissed as forgeries were van Goghs after all. And which five? The Dutch ones, including Hendriksen’s Haystacks and at least two acquired by Françoise Jacob-Bakker who, with Hendriksen as curator, has amassed a collection of some one hundred and fifty van Goghs she is considering donating to the nation. The Dutch needed those paintings to be genuine, and you? You handed them the whole stinking lot on a plate.’ Stemler’s eyes are bulging, spittle blooming in the corners of his mouth. A once-eminent man of culture, reduced to spinning conspiracy theories like an embittered spider. I think of the old saying, Art holds fast when all else is lost. An adage for a different time, another Germany.

  ‘Or perhaps de Vries just changed his mind,’ I say mildly.

  ‘The night before de Vries’s testimony Hendriksen spent an hour in his hotel room. No one else, just the two of them. The next day all five paintings are back in the van Gogh oeuvre and the outcast de Vries restored to favour. Have you seen Hendriksen’s latest self-aggrandising slab of pseudo-scholarship? Introduction by de Vries, dauntless champion of Dutch van Goghs against the German unbelievers and curator of next year’s monster show in The Hague. Come back, Pieter, all is forgiven.’

  Stemler is trembling now, the loose flesh on his neck vibrating like something electrified. Anger, perhaps, or something deeper and more desperate. I remind myself that it was Hendriksen who publicly accused Stemler of blowing a quarter of a million marks on a fake van Gogh. Whatever his legacy at the Nationalgalerie, Stemler will always be remembered for that. But then I remember de Vries on the stand, his face rigid, the words like knives in his mouth.

  ‘These are very serious allegations,’ I say. ‘Without proof—’

  ‘Hendriksen threatened me too.’

  I stare at him. ‘What? How?’

  ‘He told me that if I told the court I believed Haystacks to be a forgery, he would tell the German press that Daubigny’s Garden was a fake. I told him to go fuck himself, that no amount of petty intimidation would induce me to perjure myself. Six months later he did it anyway. Nothing in it for him by then, except the pleasure of it. That jewel for his worthless piece of shit. A barely there sliver of decades-old gossip against an avalanche of greed and wilful blindness.’

  ‘But if you knew Hendriksen was perverting the course of justice, if you had evidence, why didn’t you report him to the authorities?’

  ‘Report what, exactly? His word against mine and another stinking shitpot for the press to upend over the Nationalgalerie, over Germany. I couldn’t do that. All I could do was tell the truth. Not that it counted for anything in the end. We still lost. All of us, we all lost.’

  The rage leaves him so suddenly you can almost see him shrivel. He doesn’t look up as I walk out of his office. He sits like a monk at prayer, his hands folded and his head bowed. If one didn’t know better, one might mistake it for humility.

  The ceiling of the library presses down on me and the dusty books swallow up all the air. My head spinning. I tell Mina I’ll wait for her outside.

  Friday 11 August

  They have come for Urschel. I arrive to find his office smashed up, the window broken and drawers pulled out and upended, files all over the floor.

  I go upstairs to see Böhm. His face is white. He locks the door behind us. There were three of them, he whispers. I have to strain to hear him. He saw the caretaker take them upstairs and let them in with his key. Afterwards Böhm went to the police station but Urschel was not there, he’d been taken to Oranienburg, so Böhm went to his house. The landlady was crying. She told him they had come before dawn and taken him. They hadn’t allowed him to get dressed. When they put him in their van there was blood all over his pyjamas.

  But why? I ask and Böhm shakes harder and puts a hand over his mouth. He says Urschel was one of the lawyers who advised Hirschfeld during his campaign for homosexual emancipation. When they smashed up Hirschfeld’s Institute they burned the library, but not before they’d taken all the files. They’ve been working their way through them. Two months to get to U.

  I go back to Urschel’s office. I slide the drawers back into their slots, pick up the files and the bits of broken glass. Nobody talks about Oranienburg but everyone knows what happens there. They have smashed his ink bottle, ripped his books from their spines. A wanton ecstasy of destruction. I set his chair back on its feet and suddenly I am seized with a boiling fury towards Urschel, who knew what he had done and did not tell me, who let me move into his office and never said a word. I think of Gerda, sleep-creased, waking to the crash of a broken-down door, of Mina rigid with fear. I think of Anke, my darling girl whose sobs I still hear sometimes in the dead hours of the night, and I hate Urschel with a hatred so poisonous that it shrivels my scalp, because I cannot keep them safe and I never could and none of it, none of it, is his fault.

  Tuesday 15 August

  I tell Gerda I have a headache, that I will go late to the office. When she and Mina go to the shops I take a chisel and prise up a floorboard in our bedroom. I wrap the chisel in a cloth, I don’t want the blade to mark the varnish. There is a space under there, between the pipes, big enough for White Fang and Emil and the Detectives and this diary. I should stop writing, I should burn them all, but I can’t. There is nothing I can do to stop what is happening, but I can write it down. I pull the rag rug back over the floorboard, it creaks a little when you step on it but then all the floors creak in this flat. I haven’t told Gerda. If anyone should come it’s better that she doesn’t know.

  I haven’t told her about Urschel either. What good would it do? She never met him, he is a name to her, no more, and the list is long enough already. At night I hold her as we wait for sleep and I do not want to let go, when she murmurs and shifts away from me the emptiness in my arms is a fresh grief. Do not go mad before the madness ends, Urschel said to me, but I am, I can feel myself unravelling. When I close my eyes the darkness spins me in circles.

  I am afraid for Böhm. Afraid of him too. Yesterday he showed me a letter he had written to the camp commander at Oranienburg, pleading Urschel’s case. He wanted my opinion on some points of law. I asked him if he had lost his mind and then I burned it, but I’m afraid he’ll try again. Urschel was his oldest friend. Was he more? There was a kind of abandon in the wa
y Böhm looked at me, as though pain was the only thing left in the world worth anything at all.

  Oh Anke, my darling, darling girl. It was you I saw in Böhm’s eyes. He wants to know where it all ends, just like you did. And I want to tell him, not here, not yet, not while there is a sliver of hope. Isn’t it a blessing really, an end to all the pain and the suffering? Stefan’s words hot tar in the wound of my heart. Because, think about it, Frank, what kind of life was she really going to have?

  Our life, together.

  Sunday 20 August

  It’s hotter than ever today. The apartment is stifling. My thoughts jostle around me, pushing and jeering: Urschel with his split mouth plum-purple, the caretaker on the landing, Stefan and Böhm and the brownshirts in the streets and money, money, money. Eighty marks in the bank and no hope now of Urschel’s loan. I am like Stemler brooding in his underground prison, I have to get out. Out of the city, into the woods and the meadows where you can hear the birds sing and the grass grow and the air smells of more than brick dust and dirty bodies. But when I suggest it to Gerda she shakes her head.

  ‘Next time,’ she says, and she smiles at Mina, a secret smile that tucks itself into her cheek. ‘Today Mina has plans for you.’

  Something has changed between them. Yesterday I came home to find Gerda sitting on Anke’s bed, Anke’s collage in her lap and Mina cross-legged beside her.

  ‘I was just telling Aunt Gerda how we used to play at film stars and Anke was always Clara Bow,’ Mina said and I waited for Gerda to get up, to say something brisk about dinner, but instead she went on looking at the collage, her hands clasping the frame as though she was afraid of falling in. Later Gerda told me that Mina writes every week to her friend Margarethe in Hannover but Margarethe never answers. Mina thinks her letters must have been opened or lost in the post.

  ‘The Berszacki optimism,’ Gerda said and her eyes were furious with pity.

  Mina and I walk together along Friedrichstrasse. The hot sun hacks between the high buildings, jack-knifing off windscreens and shop windows. Mina carries a satchel on her back and a hand-drawn map. She won’t tell me where we’re going. There are brownshirts everywhere. They look at Mina and then at me and my toes curl in my shoes but they let us pass. There is to be another parade today, another spontaneous demonstration at the Lustgarten to celebrate some victory or other against enemies of the state. Victory, as though we are fighting a grand war. As though any war is grand. I wish we had gone to the country.

  Some way north of Wedding station Mina stops, turning her map upside down. I take out my handkerchief and mop my face. A year ago there were violent clashes here between the reds and the police, the streets ran with blood, but today swastikas hang from the windows of the rundown buildings like rugs put out to air. On the other side of the street two gossiping young women fan themselves with their hands, their cotton dresses already limp from the heat, and I think of the damp-winged butterflies I watched as a boy, nosing out of their chrysalises. They are barely older than Mina and suddenly quite grown up.

  I follow her down a cobbled street. The shops are shabby. A few are boarded up. Some boys are throwing stones at a row of tin cans on a wall. There is a summer stink of canal. I am hot and thirsty and about to lose my patience when Mina points towards a small shop on the corner. The sign has been painted over but shadowy letters push up from underneath the white: SCHILLER CAFÉ.

  ‘This is it,’ she says. I follow her inside. A man, a boy really, sits reading at the back of the empty room. He nods as we come in but he does not get up. The white walls are hung with pictures. Some are splashy, abstract splodges of colour, but most are lithographs, black and white. Mina gestures at one. Two heads very close together, an old woman and a young one. The old woman has her eyes closed. The young woman gazes into space, her chin on her hand, the back of her fingers brushing the old woman’s cheek. The picture is austere and fiercely tender.

  ‘Do you recognise her?’ Mina asks.

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Not the women in the picture, silly, the artist.’ She looks at me eagerly, her bottom lip caught between her teeth, and when I shake my head she grins. ‘This is her. The sketchbook woman. That’s my surprise.’

  I am so startled that I laugh out loud. ‘I don’t believe it. How did you find her?’

  Her grin widens, creasing her eyes into half-moons. ‘We worked it out, me and the librarian at the Nationalgalerie. You know how you said you wished you could know who’d done the drawings, how you thought it might have something to do with your Rachmann trial? Well, I said to Aunt Gerda that you should ask when we went to the library, only she said you could be stubborn about things like that and wouldn’t it make a better surprise if I did it myself, so I showed the book to the librarian and at first he said he couldn’t help but then I showed him the little pattern hidden away in some of the drawings, the one like a tiny fourpronged comb broken in the middle, and just like that he said, oh, so EE are her initials, which of course it was, though I didn’t see that till he said it. So he looked up all the EE artists in this big book and there were three but only one woman, because I’d remembered you saying it was all you knew, that she was a woman artist, so the librarian found this catalogue with some of her pictures in it and one of them was the woman with short hair who’s in the sketchbook so we knew right then it was her and then when we found out her work was in this show right here in Berlin—are you pleased?’

  I laugh again. I don’t know how she does it, all those words without a single breath between them, but I am learning to like it.

  ‘Pleased? Mina, I’m in awe,’ I say and I put an arm around her shoulder, kissing her clumsily on the side of her head before it occurs to me how sweaty I am, my face damp with perspiration, my shirt sticking to my back, if it was me I’d pull away in disgust. Hurriedly, awkwardly, I let her go. ‘So who is she, what’s her name?’

  ‘She’s called Emmeline Eberhardt. She was born in 1907 in Frankfurt and she studied at the Berlin Art Academy.’

  It comes out of the blue but somehow it isn’t a shock. When I think of Fräulein Eberhardt in Böhm’s office, the ink stains on her fingers, the only real surprise is how I could have missed it. How stupid of me, I almost blurt, and then I look at Mina, her eyes shining and her spine pulled tall with pride, and instead I punch her gently on the shoulder.

  ‘You, Wilhelmina Ursula Berszacki,’ I say, ‘are a bona fide genius. Those scientists are going to have to look to their laurels.’

  Mina shrugs, affecting nonchalance, but it doesn’t work, her grin is too wide. ‘And you know what else? She lives here in Berlin. In Kreuzberg. She’s on the telephone. The operator looked her up for me in the directory.’

  ‘What can I say?’ I shake my head admiringly and take the piece of paper she holds out to me. ‘You’ve thought of everything.’

  ‘You could say thank you.’

  I laugh. ‘You’re right. Thank you. Thank you squared. Cubed. To the power of n.’

  ‘That makes no sense. But you’re still welcome. I liked it, it was interesting.’

  We drift slowly around the room, looking at the pictures. The abstracts are by someone else. His work is showier and more expensive but the Eberhardts are the ones you can’t stop looking at. Is it possible that she was Gregor Rachmann’s lover? There’s something both intimate and opaque about her portraits, a closeness of gaze that, for all its tender intensity, cannot pierce the essential otherness of her subjects. They belong to themselves, and, sometimes, like the women with their heads together, to each other, but not to her. The young man looks up from his book as I pass his desk. She’s finally starting to attract the recognition she deserves, he says, nodding towards some newspaper clippings pinned to the wall. The reviews are short, no more than a paragraph each, but someone has underlined selected phrases in ink: a raw quiet power, one says, and another, simply and strikingly her own.

  ‘I’d be interested in seeing more of her work—does she have a stu
dio?’ I ask and the young man nods and offers to make an appointment for Tuesday week. I give my name as Frank, Herr Frank. I tell myself it hardly counts as a lie.

  Mina has returned to the picture we saw when we came in. I cross back and stand beside her. We stand there for a long time, in silence, just looking.

  ‘Apparently when I was a little girl I told my mother that when I grew up I wanted to marry my grandma,’ she says. Her face is pinched. When I put my arm through hers she stiffens, I’m afraid she’ll pull away, but she leans closer, her hand finding mine, and we stand together, our fingers twined, looking at the young woman and the old, at everything that once was and will never be again, and it is as though all the love and the faith that we’ve lost is there in the faces of two people who never knew us at all.

  Monday 21 August

  I should stop reading the newspaper but I can’t quite bring myself to do it. It is still possible, away from the news reports, to catch glimpses of the old world, shadows moving between the lines like fish under ice. Not today. Today there is a long editorial supporting the establishment of a Reich Chamber of Culture. The Chamber would supervise and regulate all facets of German culture, from filmmaking and theatre to literature and the visual arts, under the presidency of Joseph Goebbels, Reich Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Once it passes into law, only those artists officially approved by the Chamber will be permitted to work in their field, to have their work exhibited or published or performed. The Reich Minister will not only decide which books are burned but which are written. He will control every painting, every poem, every symphony, every film, each and every line uttered on a German stage.

  Who was it who said ‘Art is a line around your thoughts’? When this law is passed, it will be Herr Goebbels who wields the pen.