by Clare Clark
He calls it justice. If a man can ruin another with the stroke of a pen he cannot protest when the pen ruins him in his turn. It left me feeling that I had seen it all before and that I will not remember it for long. A line Köhler-Schultz wrote some fifteen years ago about a young Düsseldorf painter named Rachmann, a line—an artist—he forgot as soon as it was written. But Gregor Rachmann intends him to remember.
It was Matthias’s idea, he said, at first. But it grew and it grew and, when the problems started and they had to flee to The Hague, Matthias forgot their agreement, he told Gregor to be satisfied. Six paintings in respected international collections, considered by several experts to be among the finest of van Gogh’s works: what was that if not justice? They argued, violently. The game was over, Matthias said, as though all they had ever been playing for was money. As if money had anything to do with it at all.
An eye for an eye. A reason as old as the scriptures. A one-line report neatly typed and filed in a cubbyhole. Perhaps it was true once, back at the start. The seed from which their great deception grew. But what comes back to me as I write this are the words Gregor Rachmann said to me as we stood together in that narrow whitewashed room, in the golden light of his sunflowers, when he told me that he would never sell them.
‘They were his gift to me,’ he said softly. He did not understand it, perhaps it was a kind of madness, but something had moved in him and suddenly he was himself and not himself, his paintbrush dancing to a melody he had not known he knew, a melody as certain and steady in him as his own breath. The meticulous preparations he had relied on, the pencil marks and the grids and the distinctive pattern of brushstrokes he had taught himself to master fell away and the colours took him over. They leaped and licked around him like brilliant flames, he was half-blind with the dazzle of them but his heart roared, he painted with his heart. He could not say how long he painted, the colours burned up time, days drifting from him like streamers of smoke. When the paintings were finished he hardly knew who had made them. He knew only that he had been shaken to the depths of his soul.
I felt the infinite, he said simply, with a child’s simple awe. I hardly recognised him. As he fell silent, his face was a child’s face. Even the bones seemed to soften. We stood together, looking at the paintings, and I felt it too, or the ghost of it, pulling at the knots in my heart.
Then Rachmann turned and clapped me hard across the shoulders.
‘Time to get to work,’ he said, and his smile was set hard as cement.
Saturday 9 September
Monday is my last day in the office. Everything is arranged. When the morning deliveries are finished Katzke will send his boys here to pick up Rachmann’s crates. Gregor Rachmann signed the paper and, despite everything, I want to do what Matthias asked me to do. I want to be in some small way the man I once thought I was, the man Gerda still believes me to be. When the greengrocer’s boys are finished with Rachmann they will come back here and collect my boxes and cabinets of files and take them to our apartment. There are a great deal fewer of them than there used to be, after all, and it is only paper, we must be able to find a place for it somewhere.
I go upstairs to tell Böhm, he will be relieved, I know, but his office is locked. I haven’t seen him for days. As I rattle the doorknob I tell myself there is no cause for alarm, he is unwell or travelling for business or gone away on holiday. People do still take holidays, even now. I try to picture him drowsing in a deckchair, a straw hat over his nose, but all I can think of is the way the caretaker licked his pencil before he asked me what I knew of Böhm’s political affiliations, as though he was savouring the taste. Steady drops wear away stone.
I do not know what I will do if Böhm is not back on Monday. The caretaker is the only other person who holds a key.
Sunday 10 September
I cannot sleep. I rise early. Mina’s train for Hannover leaves at half past ten. As I wait for the coffee to boil I stand on our little balcony looking down on the street. Outside the apartment building opposite ours someone is sweeping the pavement. His brush swings in rhythmic strokes, like the hand of a clock. There is no one else about. Fingers of sun stretch over the roofs but there is a chill in the air. It is the last day of the summer vacation. Tomorrow school will start and the street will once again be full of children.
Last night we had dinner together, the three of us, for the last time. I wanted to buy steak, we had the money for it, but Mina said that she could have steak any time and all she wanted was Gerda’s stuffed potato dumplings. They made them together, their heads bent close together as they shaped the dough into balls, and the murmur of their voices was a stone in my throat. At dinner I opened a bottle of red wine and poured a glass for Mina.
‘Don’t tell your father,’ I said and she smiled and sipped and made a face.
‘Wine tastes like mud,’ she said. ‘Mud and vinegar.’
‘Don’t tell your father that either. I’m pretty sure his wine tastes of neither.’
Mina smiled. Biting her lip, she looked into her glass. ‘When will I see you again?’
I should have smiled too. Soon, I should have said. We will all see each other soon. But I did not. I just shook my head. In the end it was Gerda who rose and kissed Mina gently on the cheek and asked her to help with the plates while I sat with my heart and my throat and my eyes burning, unable to summon a single word.
The coffee pot whistles. As I go to turn it off I step over a pair of Mina’s sandals abandoned in the middle of the hall. I pick them up.
‘At least when I’m gone you won’t break your neck.’ Mina is standing in her nightdress in the passage. She does not smile. Her hair is tumbled and there are creases from her pillow on her cheek. I open my arms and she steps into them and I hold her, inhaling the sleepy warm biscuit smell of her as the coffee pot shrieks, forgotten, on the stove.
Darling girl.
Gerda and I take her together to the station. We walk down the platform together to her carriage. When I kiss her Mina pulls away first, too soon for me, and I see what she has not known or perhaps has been careful to hide, that, despite everything, she is excited. She waves from the window as the train starts to pull out of the station.
‘Work hard,’ I say, walking beside her. ‘Become a famous scientist. Don’t forget to write. And take care of your brothers. Be sure to take care of your brothers.’
Mina grins. ‘I know, I know. The Berszacki law.’
The train is gaining speed. I break into a run. ‘There’s a Berszacki law?’
‘Papa says there is. Hold on to your brothers or regret it for the rest of your life.’
Monday 11 September
I walk from the station to the office. The streets are busier than they have been for weeks, men in business suits and children in uniform. My last day. I have been making this journey for nearly fifteen years, I could do it in my sleep, and yet today I somehow manage to walk past my turning without noticing and it is only when I am almost at the church that I realise I have gone too far. A tired-looking woman in a black hat glances absently in my direction as I turn back and, as our eyes meet, her face stiffens, blankness slamming down like the metal shutter of a shop. A reflex. My own face stiffens too.
There is no sign of the caretaker as I walk through the courtyard. The iron gate in front of his door is locked, the chain looped through the post. I glance up at the cherry tree. Its yellow leaves are brittle. Soon they will fall. I take the stairs two at a time, my key already in my hand, but when I reach my office the door is already open.
‘Hello?’ I say. My voice sounds thin. I cough, my breath ragged, but no one comes. I can feel my pulse knocking in my throat. I push open the door. The office is empty. It looks as it did last night, like something dead, the boxes piled up for collection, the battered desk bare and desolate. I put the key down on a filing cabinet, one hand against the wall. I close my eyes. My legs are shaking but already my fear feels foolish. My mistake. I have been distracted, my mind
elsewhere. I must have accidentally left the office open when I went home last night.
The Katzke boys will be here at two. My last day. I put the key in my pocket, move some boxes closer to the door. The solid weight of them steadies me. Mina has gone. Tonight, when this is over, Gerda and I will talk about what happens next. We will find another apartment, smaller, cheaper. There must be some kind of work I can do. Berlin is our city. We have never lived anywhere else. We speak only German. We are old, nearly, and we are tired. It must be better to endure, to put up with this kind of life than to try to start again, without money, without employment or friends, without words. In the courtyard a stray cat sleeps in a slice of sun. Germany is still our home, I say to myself. Then I go upstairs to see Böhm.
Someone has broken down the door. What is left of it lolls on its hinges, splintered and raw. I want to back away, to run, but I make myself go in. I can hardly step across the threshold. Böhm’s desk is on its side, the drawers of his plan chest pulled out and upended around the room. There are files and papers strewn across the floor. Straw too. They have jemmied open Rachmann’s crates and emptied them out. I pick up one of his canvases, a man in a nightcap holding a candle. Someone has put a boot through it, or a fist: there is a hole where his jaw should be. Beneath the window I see the painted wooden case with its riotous garden of flowers. A jagged spur of wood juts from one side of it like a broken bone.
A noise on the landing makes me turn. The caretaker smirks and lifts his arm in a salute. ‘Heil Hitler. You got business in here, Berszacki?’
Panic surges through me. I know how it looks, what he could make of this. I shake my head as I put down the painting, raising my arm halfway like a tentative schoolboy. ‘Heil Hitler,’ I mumble. My abjectness sickens me.
‘They arrested your pal this morning, did you hear?’ the caretaker says. ‘Dragged him from his bed, the traitorous bastard. Turns out he was a commie agitator. And you said you didn’t know a thing.’
I think of the smash in the darkness as the front door gives, the thunder of boots in the hall, and my throat aches. ‘I didn’t. I don’t. He’s not my pal.’
‘Come on, you and him and that other Jew, Urschel, in and out of each other’s offices, you were thick as thieves. You expect me to believe you didn’t know what he was up to, defending Commies openly in court?’
‘If he did he was only doing his job,’ I say weakly. ‘He’s a lawyer.’
‘He’s an enemy of the state,’ the caretaker barks, his eyes bulging, and I realise suddenly that it is not just a matter of the petty powers, the backhanders. He truly believes. There are block wardens in every office block these days, every apartment building. They know everything.
I look down at the painted case with its flowers and trees, the case Rachmann kept to remind himself that customers couldn’t be trusted, and I see what I have somehow managed not to see until now, that it is over, that however impossible it is for Gerda and me to leave Germany, it is more impossible to stay. You can salute and keep silent, you can close your mouth and your ears and your eyes and your heart. You can become someone who kisses his wife only in the dark when she cannot see the truth of him and it will change nothing. They will make enemies of us all.
Close up the trees and flowers are just splodges, dabs and dots and strokes of different-coloured paint. The caretaker picks up the canvas of the man with the candle and throws it out on to the landing.
‘Wait,’ I say. ‘These paintings, they’re not Böhm’s. Their owner was sending someone to collect them today. Gregor Rachmann, he’s a Party member, you can check.’
He frowns. ‘I thought you said you didn’t know nothing.’
‘I know that the state prosecutor signed an assurance that they would be returned. A man’s possessions are still his, aren’t they, under the law?’
The caretaker looks at the jemmied-open crates and something twitches in his cheek. Perhaps there are still people in Germany, ordinary people, who are not afraid.
‘I can keep them in my office till they come,’ I add. ‘You’ll need to sign the dockets. Proof of damage. You don’t want any trouble.’
The caretaker’s frown deepens. He rubs a hand over his head, tugs on his neck. Then he shrugs. ‘Go on then.’
A small victory. It should make me feel better, only I am no longer sure why it matters or what I have won. I carry the canvases one by one to my office. The painted case is awkward and heavier than it looks. I put it on top of the pile of boxes by the door, then I sit at my desk, waiting for Katzke’s boys. Perhaps this is how a snake feels when it is ready to shed its skin. When I turn to look out of the window, a bonfire is burning by the dustbins. The caretaker has a sack, he feeds fistfuls of papers to the flames. Black plumes of smoke smudge the sky.
And suddenly I cannot bear the waiting any longer. I throw open my window and, ripping open the boxes, I snatch up files and hurl them out. They burst open in mid-flight, scattering paper like white birds. The caretaker turns and looks up. I hurl another file and another. Paper fills the air, swoops of white against the grey. The tree is there, and the walls, but the shapes are gone, I see only the colours. The bonfire is a dazzle of orange. I am not weeping but the tears blind me, they fall and fall. Blindly I turn for another box but it is the painted garden that I see, the trailing willow and the lake and the flowers, that midsummer song of praise to mistrust and disillusion, and the implacability of it breaks something deep inside me and I grab hold of it, I lift it high with both hands, and I hurl it with all my strength against the wall. I want it to smash, to explode into fragments, but instead the wood cracks politely, softly, like someone clearing his throat. Sliding to the floor, I cover my face with my hands.
When the Katzke boys come the caretaker is with them. He is red with fury. He shouts at me and I close my eyes and say nothing. The Katzke boys hoist a crate between them and manoeuvre it out on to the landing. The caretaker follows them, growling at them to mind the walls. I open my eyes. The painted case is broken but the garden inside it is still bright with sunlight. I push it with my foot, turning it away from me, and that’s when I see it, the narrow cavity between the back board and the case itself, except the cavity is not empty. There is something hidden inside, a flat parcel wrapped in brown paper. I yank at the back board with my hand to try to get it out but the case is too solidly built, it does not give, so I fumble in my drawer for the metal ruler and slide it into the split, prising the case open. The wood sighs, then gives. I prise again, working my way down until the back comes open and I can take out the parcel.
It is tied with string. I undo the knots, pull away the paper. Another layer underneath, like a child’s game, this time soft cloth. I open the folds and he is there in front of me. Vincent van Gogh in a cobalt blue shirt, his hair flame-orange against a background of blue. The paint glistens, thick slabs of colour. The van Gogh in the photograph seized from Rachmann’s studio, the van Gogh owned by Julius Köhler-Schultz. He gazes past me with a bleak calm as though this is exactly where he expected to find himself, as though no amount of joy or horror in the world could ever surprise him.
The Katzke boys are coming back upstairs. Hurriedly I slip the painting behind a pile of boxes and come to meet them at the door. They take the last of Rachmann’s canvases. One of them whistles as they clatter down towards the lobby. I wait for the bang of the door before I take the painting out again. The frame has been removed, you can see the shadow of it, faint indentations in the paint, and I wonder where it is and then I realise that I already know. Gregor Rachmann told me. He told me everything. You’ll admit to him confidentially that you’ve been shocked by what has been found under frames and stretchers. The drawing of the girl was just the lure. This is the hook.
The van Gogh that Köhler-Schultz took with him to France, the painting his wife told me was the only painting in the world he could not bear to live without, is not a van Gogh at all. It is Gregor Rachmann’s copy.
The Katzke boys and I l
oad my boxes of papers into the cart alongside Rachmann’s paintings. There are not so many. We put most of the papers we gathered up in the courtyard on to the bonfire. I cannot remember now why I thought it necessary to keep hold of them for so long. I look back at the building as the taller Katzke whips up the horse. I will not come back here. The caretaker is standing on the pavement. He does not salute. He watches us, expressionless, as we rattle away, his arms crossed over his chest.
I tell the boys there is a change of plan. We go to the apartment first. I carry the heaviest box myself, the boys protest but I insist on it. I ask Gerda to wrap some bread and sausage up for them, I ask them to take it downstairs, to wait with the cart. There is something I have to do.
The painting is wrapped in its cloth, concealed under layers of paper. I take it out. Gerda folds her hands and looks at it.
‘This is blackmail,’ I say. ‘I will be a blackmailer.’
Gerda puts her arms around me. She holds me very tight, her fingers pressing hard into my back. ‘Oh, Frank,’ she says. I can feel the thump of her heart, the shudder of her breath, in and out. Her chin is sharp against my chest. Then she pulls away from me a little. She looks up at me, her hands sliding up to cup my face, and in her newly old face her eyes are soft and very young. For twenty years, I think, I have looked into those eyes and found myself. ‘Thank you,’ she says and she gasps, a choked sob of a laugh that stretches her mouth. ‘Thank God.’
I give the Katzke boys instructions and send them on to Gregor Rachmann’s without me. I give them the court paperwork, I tell them when they hand over the paintings to be sure to get a signature. I need to know that they have been delivered safely. I also give them a sealed letter. If they are quick, I say, I will make sure to give them a little extra. They are good boys and I am grateful.
