PANKRATOV TURNED ON THE light in his warehouse. The silvery bulb filled each crack of rotten brick with shadow.
I sat down in Fleury’s chair with its ripped stuffing and immediately pulled the old horse blanket around me. “Can’t we get a fire going in here?” I asked.
Pankratov had brought along extra lights. He bolted them to spare easels, and directed them toward the middle of the room. Then, from his satchel, he pulled a heavy book in a black binding and handed it to me.
It was a collection of the works of Cranach. The illustrations were postcards fitted into gaps in the text, just like the ones Fleury had been collecting. Pankratov had marked a page that showed a portrait of a young girl, maybe eight years old, with fine blond hair that trailed down to her waist. She was dressed in black. The background was black, too. She wore a white shirt with a tiny collar, which was tied with a thin black ribbon. Her hands, which lay in her lap, were chubby like baby hands, and her nails were clearly outlined, which made them look at first a little dirty. She looked bored in the picture, with big child’s eyes and a pointy chin and ears too big to be flattering. Her shoulders were slumped, which made her look spoiled, as if she didn’t give a damn about being painted.
I used to wonder if the space of a couple of centuries really did produce people who looked different or whether it was just the clothing and the hairstyles that made them seem so out of place. There was no way you would not have noticed this girl if she walked by in the street. You could have dressed her up in some Catholic schoolgirl’s outfit and given her a satchel and stuck a chocolate bar in her hand, and made her like ten thousand other Parisian schoolgirls on their way home after classes, but you would still have noticed the proportions of her face, the roundness of it, the paleness. You’d think she didn’t eat well, that she didn’t breathe enough fresh air. She looked like a child who didn’t get enough affection. She looked as if she knew it, too.
When I looked at the text, which was only a couple of lines, I saw it was a portrait of Magdalena Luther, the daughter of Martin Luther. She had lived from 1529 to 1542. Only thirteen years. I looked at the picture again. I changed my mind about her looking spoiled. Instead, with that resigned expression on her face, she seemed to know how short her time would be. Too short to sit still and be painted. I wondered if Cranach himself might have had some inkling of her fast-approaching death, which was perhaps why he had used so much black. I thought of other portraits I’d seen, in which people had around them the trappings of their life, the things they were proud of and by which they claimed their rank in a society—fancy clothes, jewelry, hunting dogs and castles in the background. This girl had nothing, which could be some show of Lutheran purity, but it seemed to me more likely that this little girl just hadn’t been around long enough to know what her place was in the world, and what she valued and how she wanted to be seen.
I thought about Martin Luther and his wife. They would have known about their daughter’s frailty. It must have torn them up inside. Maybe they had commissioned the painting because they knew it might soon be all they had to remember her by.
My mind always made up stories around the silence of a picture, like a ghostly second frame. I closed the book with a dusty thump, sending her back into darkness. I breathed and looked up at Pankratov. “Why a portrait?” I asked.
“You’ll see,” he said.
I stood and rubbed my hands together to drive out the chill. “Let’s get going,” I said.
Pankratov laughed. “Not so fast. We’re not copying that painting.”
“Which one are we doing then?” I was filled with nervous energy and wanted to begin.
“We’re doing the portrait of Magdalena which Martin Luther himself rejected because it made her look too frivolous for the daughter of a religious man.”
I picked up the book and opened it again and started flipping through the pages. “Well, where is it?”
“It doesn’t exist yet,” he told me.
“Oh,” I said slowly, and closed the book.
Over the next few hours, we leafed through the pictures, choosing other paintings by Cranach and selecting from them certain articles of background, a tree just coming into bloom, a pale blue sky with long, thin clouds that were flattened out on the bottom and puffy on top. A double-banded pearl necklace held close to the throat.
Pankratov went to find us some lunch. He flung open the door. The sunlight was so bright that he recoiled from it as if the whole world outside were in flames. He staggered out into the glare and closed the door.
Now that I was alone, I noticed the sound of water dripping somewhere, and the rustle of wind down the alleyway. The cold that slithered through my skin became like something alive, as if the warehouse contained memories of all the living things that had passed through it. My presence here had brought them back to life in some half-formed way, which I sensed in the dead-clamminess around me. I was glad when Pankratov returned. The ghouls slipped away on their black and wide-toed feet into the shadows where they lived.
Pankratov found me studying the postcards with a magnifying glass. “These aren’t good enough to let me gauge the texture,” I said.
“Wait ten minutes,” he said. He set down two baguettes which he had tucked under his arm like rolled-up newspapers. Then from one pocket he pulled a wedge of cheese wrapped in white grease paper and from the other a bottle of hard cider with a homemade label made from cheesecloth glued to the glass and the word CIDRE written on it in pencil. “This is all they had at the shop down the road,” he said. He held the bottle up to one of the electric lights. “I hope we don’t go blind drinking it.”
“What’s going to happen in ten minutes?” I asked.
Pankratov didn’t have a chance to reply.
A black car with chrome fenders pulled up outside the open warehouse door. It was driven by a chauffeur with a gray cap. A woman sat in the back.
“Here she is,” said Pankratov. He walked out into the light.
The woman opened her car door. It was Emilia Pontier. She stepped out—tall and willowy.
“Madame Pontier,” said Pankratov.
“I’ve got what you asked for,” she said. Then she turned to me. “Mr. Halifax.”
“Hello,” I said quietly.
Pankratov and the chauffeur were fetching something out of the trunk. They seemed to know each other and there was the softness of laughter in the quiet words that passed between them.
“I’ll be back in two days to collect what I’ve lent you. You won’t see it again, so spend your time well.” She looked up and down the row of warehouse doors, at the crumbled brick up on the train tracks and at the gravel of the road beneath her feet. She shook her head, then got back in the car.
Pankratov and I watched the limousine pull away down the alley, dust already settling. When the car was gone, Pankratov turned to me. “I once heard it said about Emilia Pontier that she has no respect for people, only for their history.”
It was only now that I noticed the painting in Pankratov’s arms. It was wrapped in white sheeting and bound with hemp string. “Is that what I think it is?” I asked.
Back inside the warehouse, Pankratov removed the covering. It was the original painting of Magdalena Luther. The piece was small, a foot by a foot and a half. It was done on a wood panel that had traces of wormholes on the back. The panel was beveled like a mirror. Pankratov set up the easel. The strong lights encased it in a marmalade glow.
“Where have they been hiding it?” I asked.
Pankratov shrugged, chewing nervously on a thumbnail. “Could have been in a bank vault. Could have been halfway across the country in a wine cellar. I don’t know. But we have it for two days. Let’s just hope that’s long enough.”
We began by studying the back of the painting. We tried to match the type of wood with something from Pankratov’s collection of wood panels. After rooting around for a few minutes, Pankratov did find a painted oak slab. It was slightly larger than the Cranach. There were two marks on the back of Pankratov’s oak panel. One was an oval with a crown on the top and a J in the middle. The other was a lion’s head with a zigzag line underneath. These were the stamps of private collectors, to show that they had owned the works. Pankratov looked them up in a book. The lion was the mark of an eighteenth-century collector named Antonio Leonid, who lived in Milan around 1790. Pankratov said we should leave the stamps there, at least until Fleury told us to get rid of them.
The painting on the front was of two young girls, both in matching white dresses. They were holding hands and looked vaguely lost, as if they had stayed still for the artist because they were afraid to move. Fear showed in the blankness on their faces and in the worried pouting of their lips. The background was a curtain and a chair, drab and green. It looked like the kind some artists used to paint in advance, adding their subjects later in order to speed up the process. The girls didn’t seem to belong with the rest of the painting. There was no equation between the shadows of the draping curtain and the presence of the two sad girls, whose lives had been and gone before the lives of my great-great-grandparents had even begun.
Painted in a scroll fashion across the top were the Latin words Sanctum in Memoriam.
“Sacred to the memory,” I translated.
“Whoever kept those women as a sacred memory,” said Pankratov, “has long since been reunited with them.” He poured some acetone into a small white dish.
I felt wretched as their faces smeared and vanished with the dabs of turpentine. At last the bony whiteness of the undercoat glimmered through. It left us with a blank space on which we could begin our work.
Pankratov scanned the Cranach with a magnifying glass. He stood still in front of it for a long time, as if Magdalena Luther were in fact alive beneath the minute spiderweb of cracks across the paint and it was only a question of waiting to see when she would flinch. “Here,” he said, waving me over. “Look.”
We brought our faces close to the painting. Our breath clouded the paint and disappeared and clouded up again. This was the kind of closeness that would have a museum guard running across a gallery and shouting at us to get back.
“You see how it’s built up?” he asked. “Here. Around her face. Around her neck. And here, the way her hands are resting.” He waved the magnifying glass over the chair and oval mirror in the background. Their images loomed up large and shrank back down again when the magnifying glass had moved on. “With the rest of it, he was confident. But here he kept shifting her around.”
I looked at the girl’s face and tried to read Cranach’s frustration in the soft, pale angles of her cheekbones.
“We will do a version,” said Pankratov, turning the magnifying glass slowly by its handle, like the crystal of a miniature lighthouse. “It will be good, but not so good that someone could not understand why Luther might have wanted something different. Do you see?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Good. Now paint.”
And suddenly, set free from the seemingly endless training, I knew I could do it. The complexity was all there in my head, too much to grasp in any single thought, but all there, bunched up and tangled, and the only way to untangle it was simply to work and not think about working, but just work.
As I began, Pankratov settled into his sacred chair. He touched his fingertips together.
When I glanced at him a moment later, he seemed to have gone into a trance.
I worked through the night, not feeling fatigue. As I blinked sweat from my eyes, the image of the girl would shimmer and dissolve. My hips hurt from standing and I rocked on the balls of my feet to keep the blood flowing. At one point, I looked over at the fire and saw that it had died down. Pankratov was asleep, curled in a blanket with his coat folded up as a pillow. I left the canvas and walked over to him. I squatted down in front of the fire, reaching my hands out to the embers and feeling the heat work its way into my bones. Then I took a few more lumps of coal from the pile and stoked up the fire again. Thick clots of smoke gave way to the salt-burn blue of flames.
Cranach had painted the face with several different brushes in a very small area. I kept three brushes in my hand at the same time, each one locked between my fingers.
I made her face pale but had added a little color, the faintest glimmer of warm blood deep beneath the wintry opaqueness of skin. I kept in her expression the tiredness of a child not wanting to sit still in one place for a long time. I kept the same angle of her head and hands and the thin reediness of her hair. I made it clear that she was still a sickly child.
Using details from other Cranach paintings, I gave her a medium blue dress and painted her outside under a cold but cheerful sky, like a day at the end of winter when the spring is coming but not yet there and the fields are still muddy and the country lanes still pocked with brown-water puddles. I painted the bony branches of a tree reaching into the frame and I put those same flattened clouds in the sky.
I liked painting on the wood. The solidity of it. The way it did not give, as canvas did, against the pressure of the brush.
Over the course of the next few hours, I redid her hands a little to be less spidery. I gave her a plain silver ring. I was careful to paint over the work I changed, to build up the layers of paint as Cranach had done in the original.
Pankratov woke up around six. He looked around as if he had no idea where he was. Then the daze of sleep left his eyes. “How is it?” he croaked at me.
“Come and see,” I told him.
He shuffled in front of the painting and I stepped aside to let him look. After a moment of silence, Pankratov started laughing very quietly. “That old sourpuss Martin Luther saw this and gave Cranach some line about how it was undignified, but the truth was he didn’t want people thinking he or anybody close to him had any thoughts on their minds but the heavy piousness of hard-core preachers like himself. I see it. I see Luther as a stingy old man. Stingy about pleasure even in the simple things.”
“That might not be the truth,” I said. “That might be a long way from it.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Pankratov stated flatly. “What matters is that there is a story going on between these two pictures that makes sense.”
“Will it work?” I asked nervously.
“By the time I’ve done my part,” replied Pankratov, “it certainly will.”
Only then did I feel tired. And suddenly I was exhausted. I walked over to the fire, spread out a blanket, lay down on it and fell asleep.
* * *
“GO AWAY,” SAID PANKRATOV. He stood in the arched doorway of the workshop. Spiky gray stubble fanned across his unshaven face as if he were part porcupine.
I stood in the alley, still groggy after a few hours’ rest. “You ought to come outside for a bit and stop breathing those fumes.”
“I like them,” said Pankratov.
“I could pretend to be surprised,” I replied, “but I won’t.”
“Tell Fleury he can have it in a week.” He closed the door behind him.
* * *
RAIN FELL SOFTLY ON the city as I made my way to the Galerie Fleury, darkening the sidewalks and making the rooftops glimmer like polished nickel. The Rue des Archives was filled with people carrying umbrellas.
I climbed a narrow, iron-banistered staircase to Fleury’s office on the fourth floor. Along the way, I looked into his show spaces. They were lit by large skylights and had leather couches set back-to-back in the middle of the open, airy rooms. Oriental rugs padded the floors. The walls were a dull beige brown. Fleury had told me that this was to highlight the paintings, of which there were many. At first glance, the arrangement seemed haphazard—a painting of the Rialto Bridge alongside a pen and ink drawing of the rooftops at Arles. Fleury had explained that he didn’t like to group works by era, school or subject. Instead, he found some subtle theme that linked the pieces. This theme might not be immediately apparent, but the buyer would sense a certain harmony. Fleury said that the best buyers bought on instinct, rather than by following the latest market trends. It was the dealer’s job to draw out these unexplained but positive feelings for a work, which often had as much to do with the painting’s surroundings as with the painting itself. To the untrained eye, Fleury’s gallery embraced a kind of chaos. But Fleury left nothing to chance. Calculations lay behind every gesture he made and every detail of his business. Even his location on the Rue des Archives, away from the main drag of galleries on the Avenue Matignon, showed that he considered himself apart from other Parisian dealers, and did not need a choice location in order to draw in his clients.
Fleury’s tiny office was crammed with loose documents. The walls were scaled with receipts held up by small steel pins. Most of these bore his elaborate, many-looped signature.
The only window looked out over a series of gray-slated rooftops. The window was open and rain slipped in molten bars from the edge. Fleury’s coat was hanging from a peg and his hat was on top, making it seem as if there were another person in the room.
“It’s going perfectly,” said Fleury. “Behr has called several times. He’s a sweet boy, really. Anxious to please his masters. But he has absolutely no business sense. Every time he calls”—Fleury jerked his thumbs at the ceiling—“the price goes up.”
“How long can you hold him off?” I asked.
“How long do you need?” replied Fleury, thin eyebrows ribboning his forehead with the question.
“Pankratov needs another week,” I told him.
“A week,” said Fleury, “but no longer.”
* * *
THAT NIGHT, I HEARD car brakes squeak to a stop down the street. Before the war, a sound like that would never have woken me, even if it was three in the morning. But now, with the curfew, the sound of any vehicle at night was rare, especially on the Rue Descalzi.
I opened my eyes and just lay there, breathing very lightly, waiting to see what happened next. I wasn’t afraid. If the car had stopped outside my building, I might have thought a little more about it. I assumed it belonged to someone who was working for the Germans and had permission to be out after curfew.
I heard two doors clunk shut and then nothing for a while. I was almost falling back asleep when I heard a window being dragged open and the sound of men shouting. I heard a dog bark and then another sound. It was exactly the same as if I had taken a head of cabbage and thrown it down hard on the ground. After that came the noise of running, of men speaking harshly in German, the doors of the car closing and the rising, clunking rumble of a car moving swiftly through its gears as it sped away.
I went to the window, which was open. Up and down the street, windows were being raised, French doors swung quietly open. I saw people standing on their little balconies, like ghosts in their pale nightshirts. Urgent whispers passed between them.
There was nothing in the street, and nobody left their buildings to investigate.
One after the other, people vanished back inside their apartments, drawing the curtains, closing the windows again.
The next morning, as I stepped into the street on my way to the Métro stop, I saw a crowd of people gathered outside the apartment building where the car had pulled up. It was Madame Coty’s place. As curious as everybody else, I made my way over. I saw a large spray of blood on the cobblestones.
Madame La Roche was there. She already had the whole story from her friend Madame Coty. “It was a man, Lebel. He ran the…”
“Cabaret,” I said, remembering that he was the one who had bought my sketches off Fleury.
“Yes, the Metropole Cabaret,” said Madame La Roche. “You know, my friend Madame Coty was once a dancer there. In the old days. The very old days. It was very nice. Very racy. At least it used to be. Last month, the Germans decided to shut it down. They said it was too shocking. The costumes, the music. The whole thing. I don’t know. But the next week, they turned the place into a rest home for German soldiers. That was the real reason. Everybody knows. They just wanted the building and wanted an excuse to get him out of there. As if they even needed one. They take whatever they want, these people. But Lebel must not have known that. He was making trouble. Protesting, demanding to be paid. He should have shut up and then he might still be alive. But he was very full of himself, this man Lebel. He thought he was an expert on everything. Only he wasn’t an expert on knowing what the Germans would do, because they came for him last night. They always come in the dark. Once they show up at your door, it doesn’t matter what you’ve done or not done. You might as well just shoot yourself. Except Lebel didn’t have a gun. So he jumped out the window. Headfirst. And took his dog with him.”
We were outside our building now, Madame La Roche still talking. I had a feeling she would have gone on all day if I hadn’t excused myself and dashed to catch the Métro. I had to run back up the street, past the crowd, which had thinned out. Madame Coty was down on her hands and knees, scrubbing the blood from the cobblestones. She had on a pair of black rubber boots and a brown kerchief tied around her hair. She dipped the brush in a tin bucket of soapy water and scratched away the blackened mess. The suds turned pink. Rosy bubbles rested on the cobblestones, refracting the gleam of the sun, then vanished and joined the silky froth as it made its way down to the gutter. Madame Coty’s face was grim with the effort of scrubbing. She looked more resentful than appalled, as if she had done this before and was cursing her bad luck that this had all happened on her doorstep, so she had to be the one to clean it up.
A week later, a sign appeared on the front door of Madame Coty’s building, advertising an apartment for rent. It was snatched up straightaway and the sign was taken down.
There had been no public outcry against Lebel’s death. Not even much said in private. Instead, there seemed to be a kind of quiet resignation. The rules of the old days were gone. The new rules were clear enough, as were the penalties for making trouble.
Seeing that blood on the pavement brought about a change in me. Now I was afraid all the time. I had been fending it off, with sarcasm and indignation and the quiet simmering of anger meshed like barbed-wire entanglements inside my brain. The sight of the blood washed them away. From then on, there was never a moment when I felt safe. I learned to live with the fear, the way a person might learn to live with the pain of an illness. My body and my mind became a kind of house in which the fear had taken residence. Fear became like a white noise, a rushing static that filled my ears so constantly that it even began to feel normal. It stopped me from thinking about the future. From then on I did my best to live purely in the present, taking pleasure in the smallest things to stop this fear from driving me mad.
* * *
IT WAS EARLY SUNDAY morning.
Pankratov arrived at my apartment. “What are all these rabbits doing in the hallway?” he asked, nudging one away with his toe after it had begun to nibble on his bootlaces.
“They belong to the landlady,” I explained.
“They’d make good sandwiches,” he said.
I waited for him to explain why he had come.
“Get dressed,” ordered Pankratov. “We’re going to church.”
I was too tired to ask why, and knew how little good it would do for me to argue. I hauled on my one set of good clothes and walked with Pankratov to the 7:00 A.M. service at Notre-Dame. Pankratov waited until we all knelt to pray, then took out a small penknife and began inspecting the pew. From the underside of the bench, he scraped the grime and waxy residue of wood polish into his palm. Carefully he emptied it into his pocket.
“What are you doing?” I whispered.
An old lady was watching us. She frowned and looked away.
“Dust,” he explained.
Then he set to work raking the blade of the penknife across the kneeling cushion until he had another palmful of gray. He kept at this through much of the service, kneeling long after the rest of us had gone back to sitting. “Right,” he said. “Let’s go.”
“You can’t leave now,” I hissed. “We’re in the middle of the service!”
Pankratov looked around, frowning with annoyance.
The old lady glared at him, her twig-bony hands folded in prayer.
Pankratov heaved himself onto the bench and sat back with a noisy sigh.
Afterwards, we filed out into the quiet streets. Eventually, we came to the corner of Rue du Rambuteau and Rue du Temple. A large pillar had been set up, with thick white arrows pointing off in different directions. They were coded with the locations of German headquarters and with long words like HEERESBEKLEIDUNGSLAGER-PARIS, FRONTTEILSTELLE, FELDGENDARMERIEKASERNE and STAATLICHEKRIMINALPOLIZEIBEAMTE.
“What now?” I asked.
“Now,” said Pankratov, “you are going to learn something.”
We took the Métro out to Gambetta, the stop nearest his warehouse, and walked the rest of the way. As we strolled down the alleyway, several of the warehouse doors were open. The weekends were the only time we ever ran into people out here. Inside the warehouses were cars which had been set up on blocks for the duration of the war. The owners were tinkering with engines or polishing chrome with large chamois rags. Others had workshops as ramshackle as Pankratov’s. One space seemed to be entirely filled with electric fans, and a man in blue overalls, taking them apart one by one. Pankratov nodded hello and waved and smiled, like a country squire greeting his tenants.
“It’s not finished yet,” Pankratov explained as he unlocked his warehouse door. “You mustn’t expect too much.” He didn’t turn on the lights until he had the door closed behind him. For a second, we stood in the darkness, blind, smelling the damp.
When the bulbs popped on, I saw our Cranach held in a glow as if suspended by the light. I barely recognized it. The original brightness of its colors had been replaced by a dark, yellowy light, which seemed to come from deep beneath the surface of the paint. The young girl had receded into the shadows of centuries that Pankratov had laid across the wood.
“How did you do it?” I asked, walking closer.
“With this,” he explained. He held out a white dish in which lay a grayish sludge. “This is time,” he said. “This is the essence of it.”
“What’s it made of?” I asked.
Pankratov shrugged. “It varies, depending on where you want the work to come from. This piece, I decided, might have been in a church for a while, maybe later in a dining room. So I used some wood ash and a few grains of incense. I cooked some bacon fat and while it was burning, I held a silver spoon in the smoke until it was blackened and used it to stir the mix. I thought it needed more dust. That’s why we went to Notre-Dame.”
“But couldn’t you get dust from anywhere?”
“I could have, but you never know how it will come out. What you want,” he explained, “is for whoever is buying it to have held in his or her hands a piece that has hung in a church, and for them to have committed to memory, perhaps even without knowing it, the smell and the exact way in which the dust has settled on the painting. Then, when they look at this, they’ll get the same feeling. It’s just a sensation that everything is right. It happens in the first few seconds of holding the work, or it doesn’t happen at all. Then a different process begins. Suspicions take over. Some people, if they decide they really want the piece, can persuade themselves to overlook their instincts. But others, the real professionals, will put it down and walk away, no matter how badly they want it, if their instincts warn them at all.”
There was that word again. “Instinct.” I was beginning to see that Pankratov and Fleury’s work had the same task, to put the buyers at ease without letting them know exactly why.
Pankratov spread a clean handkerchief on his worktable and emptied out the dust from Notre-Dame. He lifted some of the gray flecks with the tip of his knife and carefully worked them into cracks on the side of the painting. When each crack was filled, he tipped his little finger into the gray sludge and dabbed it over the crack, sealing in the dust.
“I can’t wait to show this to Fleury,” I said.
Pankratov picked up the painting and held it out at arm’s length, studying his work. “Tomorrow, we’ll give it to Fleury. Then he can sell it to Abetz.”
“I’d buy it myself if I didn’t know any better. It’s perfect.”
“There’s no such thing as perfect,” said Pankratov. “The best it can be is persuasive.” Whenever someone paid Pankratov a compliment, he would find some way to deflect it.
I sighed and looked around. “Who’d have guessed we’d end up doing this?”
“The mission always changes,” said Pankratov.
“And what does that mean?” I asked.
Pankratov made no reply. He was lost some place inside his head, long in the past, out on the frozen lake, in the darkness of the arctic winter night.