Chapter Four

“YOU KNOW THE WAR is coming, Monsieur Alley-fax.”

Pankratov and Valya and I were alone in the atelier. Balard and Marie-Claire had been sent out on assignments, the result of Pankratov’s pinning a giant map of Paris up on a wall and making each of us in turn throw a dart at the map at a distance of ten paces. Wherever the dart landed, the person had to go and paint that place. Since my dart missed the map entirely and stuck itself in the door, Pankratov said he would take pity on me. He decided that since I could not even throw a dart, I would mostly likely just get lost trying to find any location on the map. I would paint Valya instead.

I tried to look suitably humiliated. The truth was, I’d done it on purpose. I didn’t like painting in the street. People were always coming up to you and staring over your shoulder and making comments under their breath that they thought you couldn’t hear.

The others clattered away down the stairs, hugging their boxes of paints and their collapsible easels. Then it was just me and Pankratov and Valya.

“How do you want me to be?” Valya asked Pankratov, to show she didn’t care what I did with her body on my canvas.

Pankratov shrugged. “Ask the American. I’m not painting you.”

She turned to me. “Well?” she asked, holding out her arms.

I asked her to stand by the large window. I said she should keep her clothes on.

She obeyed without a word, as if this was what every artist asked her to do when given the chance and it was all very boring and she had done this a hundred times already.

That day, I tried to paint the cold outside. I gave the work a steely look to match the light of the late afternoon. Valya was in silhouette. I painted her as if she were shadows coming to life, the way incense rises to form shapes around the altar of a church. I painted the crumpled light that each windowpane allowed into the dark space of the atelier. I allowed it to be warm inside, but just beyond the thin veil of the glass, I made winter settle on the woman by the window.

While I painted, Pankratov sat in his camp chair, fingertips pressed together in front of his face, eyes unfocused. “The war,” he said again.

I didn’t look up. I measured out varnish and paint, then stirred them together with the narrow, rounded blade of my pallette knife.

“The war, Monsieur Halifax.”

I didn’t want to talk about it. For me, back then, all notions about the safety of France began and ended with the Maginot Line, miles and miles of tunnels built into the French-German border, underground railways, barracks, even cinemas, gunpits arranged to blast anything that tried to cross the frontier. Nothing could get through that. It was the most advanced fortification in the world. The Germans said they didn’t want France, anyway. They wanted places that had been German, or at least partly German, like Austria and Czechoslovakia.

It was already a dead topic. Talk like this had been going on for years and people were tired of it. If there was going to be a war, I told myself, I wouldn’t be able to do anything to stop it. It seemed to me most people felt that way.

“I wanted to know,” asked Pankratov, “whether you have made provisions for leaving. For leaving in a hurry, I mean.”

“No, sir,” I said. “All I’ve been thinking about lately is staying.”

Pankratov made a growling noise at the back of his throat. He rose up from his chair and walked over to the door. “I have to go out,” he said. He lifted his faded canvas coat off a brass peg nailed into the wall. The peg had been placed without alignment to anything else in the room. It lay directly in the path of his leaving the room from his chair and at the height required for him to sweep his jacket off the hook without effort. He seemed to have no real sense of order beyond the immediate practicality of things. They were placed where he needed them, without regard to color or style or the convenience of anyone else.

Pankratov shut the door and from the other side the shape of his body blurred behind the pebbled glass window. It made him look like a bear standing up on his hind legs. His footsteps clumped down a few paces and then stopped.

He must be lighting a cigarette, I thought. Unconsciously, I found myself waiting for the footsteps to continue. When, after a few seconds, they didn’t, I looked up from my work and straight into Valya’s eyes.

She was waiting, too.

Eventually, after what seemed a long time, the footsteps continued, fading down and down until there was a distant boom as he closed the front door of the building.

“Pankratov doesn’t trust us here alone,” said Valya, whispering, as if he were still listening to each breath that passed between us. She called him Pankratov, just like the rest of us.

“Seems that way,” I said.

“He’s afraid he’ll come back and find us doing it right on the platform. That would give him a shock he’d never get over.”

I looked up from my painting. “He wouldn’t be the only one in shock.”

She chose to ignore what I said. “Do you know what he’s really afraid of?”

I peered over the top of my easel. “What?” I asked.

“He thinks we’ll steal his chair and sell it.” She left her pose by the window and walked over to the chair and sat down in it. “The thing I can’t understand is why he holds on to this when it is so damned uncomfortable. This chair was once the only thing he owned, apart from that ridiculous belt buckle of his.”

I was only half listening. I gazed at her hips as she sat in the chair and she knew I was looking at her. She made no move to draw my eyes back to her own. Seeing her now with clothes on, knowing each crease and smoothness of her skin beneath the material, did more to me than seeing her naked. I found I could not freeze into my blood the detachment I needed to paint her properly, to be aware of each part of her and not overwhelmed by all of her at once. I had to snap out of it. I looked at the empty space she’d left behind against the wall and realized I preferred the picture without her in it. With the palette knife, I scraped away the layers of paint that had made up her brooding shape and began to paint over it.

“What are you doing?” she asked. Without waiting for me to reply, she got up and walked over to my easel. “You just erased me!”

“It’s not about you,” I told her. “Not any more. It started out being about you but now it’s only about the painting.”

“Why get me to stand there at all?”

“If you hadn’t moved, I wouldn’t have known it was better this way. It’s nothing personal,” I said.

“It seems personal to me.” She couldn’t decide whether to be amused or indignant. “I only wanted to sit down for a minute. I didn’t realize there would be a penalty.”

Now I smiled at her. “I didn’t know you had a sense of humor.”

“One of several things you don’t know, Alley-Fax. And now that you know something about me, let me ask you something about yourself.”

I glanced up. Here we go, I thought.

Valya smiled, knowing that we understood each other probably better than we wanted to. “Why have you ditched all your friends? You used to be such a social butterfly. Now you just hole up and paint as if you’re possessed or something.”

I sighed and set down the brush, which was what she had wanted me to do from the start. I considered giving her some sarcastic answer that would allow us to change the subject, but I decided I would speak plainly instead, to find the honest words as much for myself as for her. “It’s how I make sense of the world.” I took up the brush again. “I don’t always paint because I like it. Sometimes I don’t like it. Sometimes it’s too hard to like what I’m doing.”

“So why do it at all?”

“Because it isn’t on a balance of liking and not liking. I am driven to do it. I need to do this. And when I am done with it, and I stand back and see what has been made, then I understand why I paint.”

“If it’s any good, that is.”

“No. Good or not. When I stand back from the work, I see what pushes me on.”

“A fat lot of good that does your friends,” she said, and shook her head pityingly in my direction.

Just then, I pitied her too. As far as she was concerned, I spent my life being hounded by demons from one frenzy of work to another. But in my mind, I felt as if I were constantly trying to unravel some kind of puzzle that was greater than myself. No one painting would do this. Perhaps even all of the paintings put together would not be able to reveal it. But sometimes, in the midst of the work, I felt myself brush up against the source of some great mystery. Once you have felt that, I wanted to tell her, then you feel sorry for anyone who does not know what they are built to do, and who is not driven on to do it. I wanted to explain this to Valya, but I could tell her mind was closed now, so instead I asked her, “Why sit in his chair if it’s so uncomfortable?”

This got her all worked up again. “Because he’s so damned precious about it! He thinks more of it than you or me or anyone else. This stupid thing of wood and canvas. When he came to Paris, it was all he brought with him.”

I tried to keep my thoughts far away in the wintry light of the painting, in the thick liquid sweep of the brush across the canvas and the hypnotic reek of linseed oil and varnish.

“Do you know the difference between a White Russian and a Red Russian?” Valya wanted to talk. “The Reds are the Communists,” she explained.

“Yes, I know,” I said.

“And the Whites were against the Communist Revolution. You know. Fighting for the Tsar. Well, Pankratov was a White Russian. That’s what his belt buckle stands for. The royal crest of the Romanovs. It’s the only thing left of his old uniform and he’s too cheap to go out and buy himself a proper belt.”

“Pankratov doesn’t strike me as an aristocrat.”

She shrugged. “He’s not. He just had the bad luck to have been drafted before the Revolution and got sent to some outpost by the side of a lake on the Finnish border. Up in the Arctic. Some place where the sun never set in the summer months. At midnight it used to bounce off the horizon like a ball of cantaloupe melon and then start to climb again. The Revolution was half over before anyone even told them about it. And then, because they had no idea who was winning, they decided to stay with the Tsar, even though the Tsar was dead by then, although they didn’t know it. It was the winter of 1921 before a detachment of Red Guards came hunting them down. He tries to talk about it but every time he goes into a kind of trance. Something about horses underwater. Something about meteors. I don’t know. Maybe you can get him to tell you and you’ll understand.” She flipped her hand. “Anyway, when he fled from the Communists, he brought that chair with him. You see, you can collapse it into a kind of bundle. He took it with him all the way through Finland, into Sweden, and when he ended up in Paris five years later, he still had it. He has spent more time with that chair than he has with any other thing.” She had been walking around the pedestal as she spoke, as if seeing for the first time how exposed she was when she stood up there alone in front of us.

“You hate it here, don’t you?” I asked.

“What?” she snapped.

“You don’t seem very happy.”

“What business is it of yours if I’m happy? You have the right to paint me, but not to look inside my head.” She went over to the window, where she had left her handbag. She picked it up and slung its strap across her shoulder. “Are you finished with me here? Because if I’m not in your painting anymore, I can go, can’t I?”

“Why do you come here every day if you don’t want to be here?”

“Why are you so nosy? Are all Americans like you?”

“A lot of them. Look,” I said, “you wanted to talk. If you want to talk about nothing, then go ahead and leave. I bet I can draw you from memory. I’ve been staring at you every day since I got to Paris, sketching you this way and that way every time Pankratov claps his hands. I probably know your body about as well as you do.”

“That’s outrageous,” she said, but she made no move to leave.

I realized that, in those weeks of living in her own world up on the pedestal, we who hid behind our easels had stopped being real to her. Perhaps, I thought, it’s the only way she can stand to be up there, with each wrinkle of her self exposed.

It grew very quiet in the room.

“Why did you come to Paris?” she asked.

“To paint,” I said.

“You could have stayed home and painted.”

“All right,” I said. “I came to paint in Paris.” I was beginning to get a headache from the turpentine fumes. Some days they got to me that way. The bitter, slippery vapors drilled through my head like the vise clamp of a hangover—the kind that has you wishing you were dead only to stop the pain from cracking your face like a smashed pottery bowl.

“You should leave while you still can,” she said.

“Are we going to talk about the war again?” I asked.

“No,” she replied. “This has nothing to do with the war. Take a good look at Pankratov.” She gestured at the chair, as if he were sitting in it, invisible and listening, touching the tips of his fingers as if they formed some kind of radio antenna, transmitting to him signals that no one else could hear. “That’s how you’ll be, if you stay in Paris.”

Finally I set down my brush. “I think he’s got things pretty well figured out.” I didn’t mind Pankratov’s eccentricities. He knew who he was, after all.

“Is that why you all worship him so much?”

“What makes you think we do?”

She clapped her hands together, the sharp sound vanishing into the cork-plated walls. “It’s the one thing I can tell from where I sit. I can’t see how bad your drawings are, or even if you’re drawing me at all.” She flipped her hand at the place where she had lived in my painting until a few moments before. “But I see how you all bow to him. If you really knew him, you would never have such respect.”

She was missing the point. Of course, we wouldn’t hold him up so high if we knew all his faults. We didn’t want to know them. We wanted him to be larger than life, so that we could work toward the ideal of who he seemed to be, not who he really was. That was what we needed from him, and he knew it, which was why he kept his distance from us. That much I had figured out.

“He is degenerate,” said Valya, “just like this whole country.”

“And this from a woman who stands around naked all day,” I blurted without thinking.

Her voice grew viciously calm. “There are changes coming. You’ll see. One good kick and this entire rotten, decadent society will collapse. And you, Mr. American, should make sure you are not around when it happens.”

“The war again,” I said.

“Yes,” she told me. “And for once Pankratov is right. It is coming.”

“I think I’ll stick around and take my chances,” I said.

She shrugged. “Pankratov is talking about closing down, so it might not be worth sticking around after all. I watch you all come and go. One group of students after another. And each time, I think this will be the last class. That Pankratov will not do this anymore. That he will go back to his own painting again. But each time there are more of you.”

“Where are his paintings, anyway?” I asked, since she had brought it up.

“Don’t you know?”

I shook my head. “Nobody’s told me anything.”

“They’re all gone. Destroyed. He kept his own studio on the Avenue Beauregard. He was a great star in the late twenties. He had shows all over the place. He was really quite famous. Everyone was jealous of this man who had walked out of the snow and arrived in Paris with nothing but a chair and then in a couple of years became one of the most promising artists of his generation. He used to have photos on the wall of himself with Picasso, Giacometti and writers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald and one with Cole Porter, too, I think. I don’t know who else. But then there was a fire in the building where he kept his studio. It was in 1929. His paintings were there, even the work which had sold and which he had borrowed back to be placed in a show—all of it, you understand—burned to nothing. The whole art world of Paris was in shock. In the weeks that followed, they gave Pankratov the one thing he had never received in his life before and the last thing on earth that he wanted. They gave him pity. There were maybe even some who knew what pity would do to him, who wanted him out of the way. They showed him the most pity of all. His reputation as a painter grew far greater after the fire than it had been before. They treated him the way they treat famous people who have died. Forget the faults. Remember only the good. It was as if Pankratov had passed away, too. He hasn’t painted since. He is afraid that if he did, people would think he doesn’t deserve the reputation he has.”

“Does he deserve it?”

She shrugged. “Pankratov is a genius. And if I, who am always calling him a shit to his face, say he is that good, then you know you can trust what I say. He is greater than all the people who claim to be great who are still breathing in the world. You could see the relief on their faces when he quit. And the fact that he quit when he did is another act of genius, if you think about it.”

“So why do you hate him?” I asked, “and then show up every day to work here?”

“I don’t hate him. Whatever you see going on between us, it’s not hate. Pankratov is one of those people who at first seem so rude you will forgive them nothing. But once you know who they are, you will forgive them anything. Like paying me, for example.”

“He doesn’t pay you?”

She shrugged. “Well, he’s supposed to, but he has no money. Most people would starve on what he makes. His principal form of nourishment is Bouillon Zip and that one date he eats so carefully each day at the Dimitri.”

Bouillon Zip was what people had in Paris when they were down to their last few centimes. It came in little paper packets which contained a tablespoon of gray-brown powder. I bought Zip regularly when I first got here and used it for adding flavor to soups, but since I’d heard about the associations, I’d stopped using it. The jokes I heard made about Bouillon Zip were a little too close to the bone.

“So how do you survive?” I asked her.

Her face was lost in the fading light. “I survive because Pankratov is not the only person in whom I forgive everything.”

Valya was gone by the time Pankratov came back. He returned smelling of cigarettes and coffee. He had been down at Café Dimitri. “Where did she go?” he asked.

I explained how I had painted her out.

“About time someone did that.” He showed no trace of amusement. “So,” he said, unbuttoning his coat and settling himself in the sacred chair. “In America. You have had some success?”

“Some,” I told him. I waited for him to ask who had been sitting in his chair. I had a feeling he could tell.

“You should”—he hesitated—“you should try to get a show together here. Get someone to represent your work.”

That would have been the time to tell Pankratov about Fleury’s offer, but I knew how much he disliked Fleury. So I said nothing.

“Unless Fleury is doing that for you,” mumbled Pankratov, staring off to the other end of the room.

“Oh,” I said. I should have guessed he would already know.

Now Pankratov was grinning.

“What do you have against him?” I asked. “He seems nice enough.”

Pankratov coughed out a sarcastic laugh. “It’s his job to be nice, when he thinks he can make a profit. You know who makes the money around here? It’s the dealers! Not the artists. Do you know how much of a percentage the Parisian art dealers make off what they sell?”

“Well,” I said, “back home it’s twenty-five percent.”

“In Paris, it’s forty percent. That’s what I have against him. And all the other damned dealers in the city. This boy Fleury. I tell you. He’s the slyest of the lot.”

“Fleury?” I asked, my voice rising with disbelief.

“Oh yes!” Pankratov fitted a cigarette into his mouth. He broke it in half and fitted the spare piece back into the packet. “Fleury might look like an incompetent fop, but believe me, he knows what he’s doing.”

Shadows filled the studio. Out across the rooftops, sun was still shining on the city.

“I heard about the fire,” I said to Pankratov.

“Congratulations. Valya talks too much.” The ragged-tipped cigarette wobbled between his lips. There was the tiny roar of his match flaring. He lit the cigarette and his cheeks bowed in with the smoke.

“I wish I could have seen your paintings,” I told him.

“So do a lot of people, I think. For various reasons.” Pankratov turned to me and fluttered his hands jokingly around his head, as if to wrap himself in some rippling, magical light. “Are the rumors true? Was I as good as they say? Now we’ll never know.”

“We’d know if you started painting again.”

Pankratov dropped his hands. “Those days aren’t coming back,” he said.

“It gives you more pleasure to spend your days running this atelier?”

“Believe it or not, I do enjoy your company—Balard, Marie-Claire, you, the ones who came before. You remind me of myself. Each of you in one way or another.”

“So what am I to think? That I’ll end up not painting anything?”

“I don’t paint,” Pankratov said slowly, measuring in his head whether to say the words that were gathering in his throat, “because I discovered I am better at something else.”

“What?” I asked.

He stood up and buttoned his coat, the roughness of his fingers on the dull gray zinc of the buttons. He narrowed his eyes. He was getting ready to close up like an oyster.

“Tell me,” I asked.

“All right,” he said, after a moment, “but remember you asked. Let’s go. We’ll have to move quickly.”

Pankratov walked me across town. There was still some light in the streets that ran east-west. We didn’t talk. He didn’t say where he was taking me. It was only when we reached the Tuileries Gardens that I realized we were heading toward the Louvre. Evening glimmered off the powdery yellow stone walkway that led to the huge building. Pankratov brought us to a door beside the main gates.

There was a guard just inside the little door, which was propped open with a chair to let in the breeze, despite the chill. He sat at a desk, reading a paper. He was a short man with a scrubby black mustache. In a hammered brass ashtray on his desk was a pile of crooked cigarette stubs. The paper of the cigarettes was brown, what the French call papier mais. His blue uniform was rumpled and his cap rested on his foot, which he had up on the desk. When we blocked the light in the entranceway, he took his feet off the desk and crammed his cap back on his head. He squinted at our silhouettes.

“On your feet, Monsieur Sevier!” said Pankratov.

Sevier launched himself upright. Then, recognizing Pankratov, he slapped down his paper. “I wish you wouldn’t do that. Now I have to get comfortable again.”

“That shouldn’t take long.” Pankratov signed his name in a book on the desk.

“On the contrary,” said Sevier, “it is an art form in itself.”

“You see,” Pankratov told me, “in Paris, everyone is an artist in one thing or another.”

Sevier wore an unsteady grin, not quite getting Pankratov’s joke.

At the end of the gloomy corridor was another door, which Pankratov opened. We found ourselves in a gallery with huge paintings bracketed in ornate gold frames. My first impression was not the artwork, but how much these paintings must have weighed. Pankratov closed the door behind me.

When I turned, I saw that the door had no handle from this side. It disappeared into the paneling.

Pankratov led me over to one of the great wall-length paintings. It was the Raft of the Medusa by Géricault. The canvas was about ten feet high and about fifteen feet wide. It showed a group of people on a raft waving to a ship in the distance. Most of the castaways on the raft were dead or dying. Their skin was gray and their faces contorted like a dozen variations of Christ on the Cross. Their clothes had rotted from their bodies. They had been at sea a long time. If this boat did not stop to pick them up, they were finished. Huge, glassy waves rose up jagged between them and the distant ship, its sails full and making speed. I knew a little bit about the story of the Medusa. It went down off the coast of Africa and no one stopped to pick up the survivors because the people on board were poor immigrants. It caused a scandal that almost brought down the French government. In places, the paint on the canvas was bubbly and black, the way creosote gets on old railroad ties.

I had barely noticed the grandeur of the room in which the painting hung, alongside several other massive canvases. The walls were painted flat hunter green and gilded where they met the ceiling.

The last visitors were being herded out by a guard who walked with his arms spread, making slow swishing motions with his hands, like a scarecrow come to life. One person stopped to make a note in a tiny book. It was a woman. I was admiring the braiding of her hair, and wondering how one braided hair so exactly, when she turned and I saw that it was Valya.

She hadn’t seen me, and it caught me so much by surprise to find her here that I didn’t call out her name.

People were shuffling past.

“Il est temps, mesdames et messieurs,” said the guard in a droning voice. “Messieurs, -dames. Il est temps.” It is time. It is time.

Valya moved on out of sight, flowing with the crowd.

I turned to Pankratov, to see whether he had noticed Valya, but his eyes were fixed upon the painting of the Medusa. He was lost in it. “This,” said Pankratov, “is my art.”

When he said that, I forgot about Valya.

His art, he had called it. I ran the words around in my head a few times. My teeth slowly clamped together as I hesitated to believe what now seemed obvious—that Pankratov was crazy after all, past the line of eccentricity and the twilight world of genius, having lost track of the boundary between the world of dreams and the less satisfying world that surrounds it. The fact seemed unavoidable. It was as if one of the Louvre guards was walking through my head, swishing his hands, shooing the last reservations from my own mind. Il est fou, messieurs, -dames. Il est fou.

I glanced uneasily at the painting and then at Pankratov.

Pankratov still had his hands raised toward the Géricault, his mouth set hard with pride.

“It’s by Géricault,” I said quietly.

“Of course it is.” He dropped his hands. “Come with me,” he ordered.

We returned to the space in the wall where the door had vanished. He pressed against it and the door clicked open. We returned to the dim passageway that led out to the street.

“Sevier,” said Pankratov, calling to the guard as he strode down the hall, “I want to see the Géricault pictures.”

“Very good.” Sevier had taken his shoes off and was now massaging his feet. He unclipped a set of keys from his belt and handed them to Pankratov. “You know where they are.”

Pankratov opened a small door beside the desk. A smell of paper billowed out, musty and faintly sweet. A smell of patience and quiet. Inside, the room was stacked with boxes of documents, which lay on shelves that divided the space.

“Go on.” Pankratov waved me in. “Go on.”

I obeyed.

He walked straight over to a box, hauled it down and let it thump onto the floor.

Coppery light filtered in through the blinds. The air in the room was still and warm. I felt around me the great solidity of the building. The permanence of it. As if it knew somehow that even though it had been built by man to glorify man, it was greater now than the people who had built it. It glorified only itself. I felt that about a lot of the great buildings in Paris. I sensed that they knew what they were.

We crouched down over the box of photos.

“Here.” Pankratov held one out to me.

It was a glossy black-and-white of the Géricault. The entire center of the painting was gone. It had been replaced by tatters of canvas and the wall behind it, which stood pitted and white beneath its dried blood–colored paint. For a few seconds, my eyes drifted around the outside of the picture, where the painting was still whole and recognizable, my mind not wanting to admit what it was seeing.

“Last year,” said Pankratov, “a man named Alphonse Gradovich walked into the building, right down that hallway there.” He gestured to where Sevier was sitting, back at his perch, massaging his feet with tiny groans of pleasure. “He was carrying a double-barreled shotgun. Nearly blew Sevier’s head off. Sevier!” Pankratov shouted past me. “Show this man the shotgun marks!”

Obediently, as if he had rehearsed the movements, Sevier stopped rubbing his feet and aimed his finger at various scrapes along the wall where the pellets had ricocheted. The places had been painted over, but they were clear to see now that Sevier had pointed them out. “This close! With both barrels!” he said and pinched the air in front of him. “And if I hadn’t been so quick—” With a broad cutting sweep, he slapped one palm across the other.

“He was asleep,” whispered Pankratov, “and when Gradovich walked in, Sevier woke up and fell backwards off his chair.”

“If I hadn’t been so quick—” Sevier said again.

“You’d be only slightly less active than you are at the moment,” Pankratov finished his sentence.

Sevier waved him away. “Brother, you wait until you have been shot at.”

Pankratov straightened up. “I have been shot at.” He took the picture back from me and looked at it himself. “Gradovich walked into the room with the Géricault. He went right up to it, reloaded his gun and emptied both barrels into the painting. He blew out the whole center, as you can see. The guards caught up with him before he made it out to the street.”

“And I can tell you,” said Sevier, “that Gradovich may be the only man in history to have his head beaten against the Nike of Samothrace.”

“It took me every night for eight months to repair the damage to the Géricault,” said Pankratov.

“You restored it?” I asked. “But there isn’t a mark on it now! I want to see it again.”

“You don’t need to,” he said. “You are right. There is no trace.”

“Wait a minute,” I said slowly. “I never heard about any of this. It would have been news all over the world.”

“No,” he said, “you didn’t hear about any of it. The whole thing was kept quiet. The curators here didn’t want that painting to become famous for the damage that was done to it. They just wanted it to go on being famous for itself.”

“What happened to the man with the gun?”

“He’s in an asylum. He escaped from one to begin with. Now he’s back inside and no one believes a word he says, which no one did before.”

“Why did he do it?”

“Ah.” Pankratov nodded, expecting the question. “Gradovich claimed to be the descendant of someone who died aboard the Medusa. He said he hadn’t known there was a painting about the shipwreck until he came to Paris and went to the Louvre. Once he’d set eyes on the painting, he couldn’t stop thinking about it. It was driving him more mad than he already was. Gradovich said he had to destroy it. I used to think about that when I was working on the Géricault. I believe I understand what he was going through. So you see”—Pankratov flicked the photograph with his fingernails—“this is what I do best. When there’s a call for it. Not every piece is as important as this one. Not every one must be secret. But many of them are. It requires a negation of everything I used to live for. Not to seek fame. Not to require attention.”

“How did you find out you were good at it?”

“Not just good,” Sevier corrected me. “Pankratov is the best.”

“I discovered it by accident,” explained Pankratov. “There was some work belonging to another painter which got damaged in the fire at my old studio. My own paintings were too far gone, but in trying to mend this other piece, I suddenly understood that I could do it. I thought I was a painter,” he said, twisting his hand in on itself, as if tracing the path of a wisp of smoke, “but this is what I really am.”

“You were a painter. A great one, from all I hear.”

“All right,” he said, “maybe I was good. But I exhausted myself. I got so tired in here.” He bounced the heel of his palm off his forehead. “Some days, I would set up the canvas and stare at it for an hour and then be so exhausted I’d have to go back to bed. But with restoration, it’s different.” He drew his fingers close together, like a man learning to pray. “It’s about the creation of the paint itself. Using only those materials available at the time. Then the lacquer. Then the aging process. The precision of it. The cheating of time! Do you know that my finest work in that Géricault is the part Géricault got wrong.”

“Got wrong? What do you mean?”

“He was experimenting with different pigments and mediums. Not all of it worked. Did you see those patches on the canvas that look like tar?”

I nodded.

“The pigment corroded after a couple of decades. It is actually eating away through the primer and into the canvas. Or it was, anyway. My job was to re-create the exact look of the experimental pigment, but to make it in such a way that it no longer damaged the canvas underneath it. Now that was difficult!”

“People should know about this,” I said. “About what you have done.”

“No,” said Pankratov, “they should not. I am not doing this for people. Not even for Géricault. Not even if he came back from the grave to ask me to do it himself. I am doing it for me. Don’t you see? If people knew, if they all came to admire the work the way they came to admire my paintings before they were burned, then it would no longer be my art. Then I would be doing it for someone else. There is only one real sacrifice an artist can make, and that is to accept the possibility of being forgotten. Once you have done that, then it is possible no longer to care.”

“He has explained it to me,” said Sevier, rustling the newspaper in front of his face, “and I still don’t get it.”

“But you do,” Pankratov told me. He stood, knees crackling as if his legs were filled not with flesh and bone but with tiny pebbles that rearranged themselves each time he moved.

Suddenly I understood why he had brought me here. Because even in his world of anonymous brilliance, he still needed someone to understand what he was doing. The only thing I didn’t see was why he had chosen me. Perhaps, I thought, it’s because I’m a stranger here. Someone just passing through. He needs someone to grasp the enormity of his work. The sacrifice of it. Pankratov needs to see in someone’s face the proof he isn’t mad, because he is no longer sure himself.

We walked out past Sevier, who had gone back to massaging his feet and was saying, as if someone else were doing it for him, “There. Oh, there. Magnificent.”

The purple twilight wrapped around us as we headed home along the sidewalks, past the late-working people with their thousand-yard stares of fatigue, trying to switch off the blind-rushing energy of the day so they could sleep that night.

“If it weren’t for the fire,” I told him, “you might never have known.”

He considered this. “If the Germans take over Europe, it won’t matter whether there was a fire or not. I was officially disapproved of by the National Socialist Party,” he said. “My paintings were declared entartete Kunst.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“Art whose existence degrades all other art,” he said with a sigh. “Something like that. Along with Van Gogh, Monet, Manet, Munch, Braque and a few dozen others. Many of them were publicly burned in Berlin last year by the Nazis as a protest, just as many in the Louvre will be, or the Jeu de Paume, if the Germans reach Paris.”

“I saw Valya back there,” I said.

“Back where?”

“At the museum. She was in the next room over. She was looking at some paintings. She was taking notes.”

“No,” said Pankratov. “That couldn’t have been her. She’s not interested in any kind of art.”

“It was her.”

“Valya would rather spend her afternoons sitting up on the platform at the atelier than wandering around the Louvre, and she doesn’t much care for that platform, as you well know. Believe me, I may not know my own daughter as well as I should, but I know that much about her.”

I felt as if I had been punched in the stomach. “Your daughter?”

“Yes,” he said. “She’s my daughter.”

“I had no idea! Neither does anyone else!” I was practically shouting in his ear.

“She’s not actually my daughter,” said Pankratov, “but I raised her.”

“I thought you came out of Finland!” I shook my head. “Just you and that chair of yours!”

He waved the flat of his hand toward the ground to make me lower my voice. “Me, the chair and Valya. She always leaves herself out of that story.”

“Well, Jesus,” I sighed. I tried to imagine the look on Fleury’s face when I told him about this.

“She doesn’t like people to know,” said Pankratov.

“Why not?”

Pankratov rolled his shoulders, wincing slowly. “Here in Paris, she is a refugee, the same as I am,” he said. “But she is also an orphan. That is too much for her. When you are displaced, you always think about where you come from. It’s a question that people who are not displaced never have to ask. You, for example, you know where you come from.”

“Narragansett,” I said. As I spoke the word, some distillate of memory splashed suddenly into my eyes. I went blind from the fast-returning images of the spray off breaking waves across grayish-khaki sand the consistency of granulated sugar.

“But if you don’t know,” Pankratov continued, “your life becomes about not knowing. Some people can stand it. Some people can even profit from the lack of knowing. But she’s not one of those. To create a balance in her life, she has made for herself a world of ideals that neither she nor anyone else can maintain. So nobody gets to belong. That is the hard ground on which she lives.”

“But you still work together,” I said, trying to be optimistic.

“She is too idealistic to stay employed anywhere else.”

“If it weren’t for you, she’d probably be dead.”

“That’s true.” He tilted his head sharply in agreement. “But it wasn’t her choice to live or die. She doesn’t owe me for that.”

Now I understood why she hated him. And she did hate him. Part of him anyway. And it didn’t matter if she loved him as well, because that didn’t reduce any of the hate. The two extremes existed side by side in her image of Pankratov. What she hated most was that he didn’t love her best. What he loved, more than her or any other living thing, was his work. That was why he stayed alone now.

I wondered if it was inevitable. Maybe you could not be devoted to the work without letting everything else suffer. It was not about how much time you had in each day. It was about the expenditure of passion.

The night crowds were gathering. People walked more slowly, some with broad and careful footsteps, as if they were measuring the number of paces between one place and another. Eventually, we reached the place where Pankratov would leave to go to his home and I would turn down the Rue Descalzi. The city hummed and roared around us, the gears of its great engine winding down.

I was no longer thinking about Valya. I was thinking about what Pankratov had said. About being forgotten and accepting it. I thought how hard Pankratov’s knowledge was to come by, and harder still to live it out. The way Pankratov explained things, he had merely adapted to a series of coincidences. But I knew there must be more to it than that. Pankratov was not a man to be swept along by circumstance.

I felt an idea taking shape inside me. It was there, but I couldn’t see it clearly. I became afraid it would slip away. I squinted into the murkiness of my own mind and gradually it began to appear. It was as if Pankratov had held out a handful of dust on the flat of his palm and had blown it in my face, and now the dust had settled. “You set the fire,” I said. “You burned your own paintings. Is it true?”

He didn’t answer.

“But how did you do it?” I demanded. “Did you pile them all up and cover them in turpentine? What did you do?”

“Much simpler than that,” he said. He took the cigarette from his mouth and almost without thinking he flicked it away. It bounced in the street and glowed and then blew out.

Now I knew why he spat into his ashtray at the Café Dimitri. “But what about the ones that had been sold?”

“I got them back. They were all being gathered for a retrospective.”

“Are there no paintings left?” I asked. “Not one?”

He shook his head. “The only one I didn’t get my hands on was in a German collection and it was burned by the Nazis in that fire I told you about.” He spoke in a low voice that matched the thrum of the city and vanished into it, indecipherable, except in the close space between us.

“Why did you take me to see the Géricault?” I asked. “Why tell me the secret?”

He smiled. “You wanted to know who I am. It’s why you spied on me at the café. You needed me to earn your trust, so that’s what I’m doing now. I’m earning it by telling you the truth. Do you see?”

“Yes,” I said quietly.

He held out his hand.

For the first time, we shook hands, as if this was our first meeting, and everything that had gone before was just some long illusion.

That night, I dreamed of Pankratov setting fire to his paintings. I saw them vanish into an upward-flowing stream of multicolored flame as the different paints ignited, the blaze contained for a moment in the wood of the frames, dripping fire, each thread of canvas crumpling brittle into black dust, then the frames collapsing in on themselves, even the nails curling over like fingers drawn into a fist. I saw the tubes of paint exploding and shimmering gargoyles emerging from the floor where old turpentine had soaked into the wood and now ignited. Glass melting out of the windows. The guttural furnace roar of the fire eating through Pankratov’s life. It was as if I stood there in the center of that blazing room, and felt the heat and saw, through the smoke and poppy red of flames, each object that burned and disintegrated. I felt that if I opened my mouth, smoke might pour from my lungs, gathering behind my eyes like cataracts and boiling the blood in my skull. The sound of it was deafening.

Through all this, the pigeons dreamed on my window ledge. The city grew quiet but not still. The sky that night was filled with meteors, cartwheeling above the chimneypots.