“I’M GOING TO TELL you everything I know,” said Pankratov.
We were back in the atelier. The stools were piled into a corner. The stage looked huge and empty without Valya scowling down from it.
Pankratov had set up a painting. It was very old, without a frame, the paint spider-webbed with tiny cracks. The subject was an old man with a froth of gray beard, looking up from writing in a thick book. A quill was in his right hand. His clothes were velvety red like the curtains in my apartment and a wide-brimmed red hat hung on the wall in the right-hand corner of the picture. The man looked good-natured and intelligent, but a little sad, as if growing old had caught him by surprise.
“As much as we can,” he explained, “we’ll be using old materials. For paintings, the canvas is the most important thing. It’s the first place they’ll look. The best kind is linen. It’s easiest to work with when it comes to aging a piece. Some canvases are made from cotton or hemp, but they aren’t as good.” He picked the painting from the easel and flipped it around so that we were looking at the back. It was peppered with gray blotches. “Canvas can be spoiled by moisture, especially at the back, where it hasn’t been treated.” He scraped his fingernail across it, popping the fine threads, which sent tiny puffs of white dust into the air. “This kind of damage devalues the work, but it also serves as proof that the materials are old. When a dealer handles a painting, he looks at the way the paint has aged. The cracking, fading, darkening. He looks at the frame. All this before he has even studied the quality of the work itself. He has a checklist in his head. It’s our job to make sure he can go down that checklist without getting suspicious.”
I sat down dejectedly on the stage. It seemed too much to learn.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “That’s why I’m here.” From his satchel, he pulled out one of my sketches which Fleury had sold. He must have gotten it from Tombeau. “And this,” he said, “is why I need you.”
There was a noise on the stairs. Both of us tensed. We turned toward the rippled glass pane in the door to the atelier. Seconds went by. We didn’t move. There was no more sound.
Slowly, Pankratov put my sketch back in his satchel. He walked toward the door, trying not to creak the floorboards. He opened it and peered out onto the landing. When he saw there was no danger, he turned and walked back inside.
* * *
THE NEXT DAY, I found a note in Pankratov’s handwriting at the foot of the stairs. It said, WAIT FOR ME HERE.
“What’s this about?” I asked him when he showed up, the leathery smokiness of just-drunk Café National on his breath.
We climbed up four flights of stairs and then he put his arm in front of me to stop me going any further. He walked up two of the twelve steps of the fifth flight and then stopped. “When you get here,” he said. “I want you to count the steps. When you reach the third step, don’t tread on it.”
“Why not?” I asked.
Pankratov placed his foot on the step and pressed down gently. The step collapsed, the ends folding up around his calves. “It’ll snap your leg,” he said. Pankratov had broken the board and repaired it so that the break didn’t show. “After yesterday,” he said. “That noise on the stairs.”
“Yes,” I agreed.
“Are you afraid?” he asked.
“I guess,” I said. “Are you?”
“It used to be the damned Communists who were after me. This time it will be the damned Fascists.”
We went into the studio and locked the door behind us.
“What happened when the Communists came for you?” I asked. “All I know is what Valya told me.”
Pankratov didn’t answer. He busied himself with hanging up his coat.
“You said you’d tell me everything you knew.”
He paused. “I suppose I did.” He went across to his sacred chair and sat down. His hands closed around the armrests. “The locals had told us they were coming. There were no telephones, but news passes from village to village almost as quickly. We were just there to guard that outpost, but guard it against what I never understood. The population were mostly Laplanders, about five hundred of them. They followed the reindeer and were gone half of the year. They never gave us any trouble. When the Lapps were gone, the population of the town dropped to fewer than fifty.
“There were only two of us. I was a lieutenant because I had done one year of university. The other man was a sergeant named Rokossovsky. We had been sent to a village called Alakiemi, to act as military representatives for that region. We took over one of the little shops on the main street, which was only a hundred yards long and made of dirt. This became our headquarters. We also lived there, Rokossovsky and I. We grew our own potatoes. We had a cow and some sheep. Even before the Revolution, our wages stopped coming in, so we had to fend for ourselves. We knew there had been a revolution. We just weren’t sure who had won. We heard so many different stories in the beginning that after a while we stopped believing any of them. My uniform became so ragged that I had to throw it away. After that, the only thing to show I was a soldier of the Tsar’s army was this belt”—he tapped his finger against the plate of brass with its double-headed eagle—“and that was only for holding my trousers up.
“After two years, Rokossovsky got married to a woman from the village. Her name was Ainu. She was half Lapp, what she called Sami, and half Finnish. She wasn’t very healthy. She’d had some disease in her lungs when she was little and she wasn’t suited to the migratory life of the people in the village. Her family were glad that she could stay behind. After Rokossovsky got married, he set himself up as a blacksmith, which had been his trade before he joined the army. A while later, they had a daughter. That was Valya.”
“What did you do?” I asked, seeing that Pankratov had wandered away so far into his head that soon words would fail him.
Pankratov shrugged. “I moved across the road. Had a one-room place. Not so bad. Made my own furniture out of spruce.”
“What did you do for a job?”
“I painted,” said Pankratov. “I painted the inside of the Alakiemi church. Top to bottom. Saints and angels and God knows what else. People came from all over to look at it. That was where I learned to paint, you know. That church was my first big project. When I finished that, I painted a mural on the wall of the headquarters. I did paintings for people in the town. I painted Valya. Each time I sent off for materials, it took two seasons to arrive. Two seasons. You couldn’t even measure it in months. I used to make my own paints and my own canvases, too. I couldn’t just sit around waiting. The winters. Jesus, the winters,” he said. Then he stopped talking.
“The Communists,” I reminded him.
He breathed in suddenly, as if his heart had stopped and restarted. “We knew about a week in advance that they were coming. We knew there was only one way they would approach us. They would circle around the town and strike at us from the back, across a frozen lake. It was the only way that made sense. The only direction in which they wouldn’t risk an ambush. It was the middle of January when they came, the darkest and the coldest part of winter.
“It was a company of horsemen. They had a platoon of infantry as escort, but the foot soldiers had been left behind about three towns back. Half the men had frostbite. They had been told there were fifty of us holding out in Alakiemi. But as they got closer, they found it was only the two of us, and that we weren’t holding out. The authorities had just forgotten about us. By the time they remembered, we had become the enemy.”
“When they came for you,” I said, reminding him gently.
“They rode across the lake. Just as we thought. Some were carrying torches and the rest were waving sabers above their heads. All shouting at the tops of their lungs. This was their big moment, after all. Six weeks out of Leningrad and all for this. All for just two of us and a woman and a little girl, but they were still going to put on a show. Seeing them come across the frozen ground, they looked like meteors bouncing along on the ice.
“What they didn’t know, and what the locals didn’t tell them, was that we’d had enough time to dig a trench out of the ice in the middle of the lake. We let it freeze over again, but not enough to hold any weight. The horses ran across the ice until they reached the trench and then they all fell into the water. The horses coming behind had no chance to stop. Some reared up and fell and crushed their riders. Other riders skidded on their backs, on their bellies, howling as they slid into the water in their heavy greatcoats, weighed down with swords and rifles and bandoliers of ammunition. They went under as well. Seventeen men and horses went into the lake. The torches went out one after the other. The horses and the men were screaming. The sound of those horses was the worst thing I had ever heard. I could see the heads of the horses in the water as they tried to stay afloat. In ten minutes, it had gone back to being one of those dead still winter nights when everything is frozen so solid that there is nothing for the wind to move when it comes except little whirlwinds of snow across the ice.
“Rokossovsky and I ran out onto the ice. We ran toward the place where we had dug the trench. Even at that distance, I could smell the sweat of the horses. And I could smell Makhorka tobacco, the rough kind that Russian soldiers smoke. The stench of it gets in your clothes and your hair and your skin, no matter how often you wash. It tattoos itself into your lungs. It was hanging in the air. Rokossovsky and I breathed it in.
“We went back to the shore and waited until morning before going out onto the lake again. We found the men frozen completely solid, some of them on their hands and knees, as if they were waiting to give some child a piggyback ride. Even those few men who were able to climb back onto the solid ice froze to death in their waterlogged clothes before they reached the edge of the lake. And out in the middle, where the trench had been, we looked down and saw men and horses staring up at us. They hadn’t sunk to the bottom. They got stuck between the layers of broken ice and were trapped there like specimens between two microscopic slides. Some of them had their mouths open as if they were trying to talk to us. That’s why I don’t sit facing the window. The way this old glass twists the light reminds me of looking down into the ice.” He ran his fingers through his hair and sighed.
“We knew that it would take the infantry several days before they found out what had happened and several more days before they got to Alakiemi, if they made the trip at all. At first, Rokossovsky and I decided we would have to go. But then he backed out. He believed it was only a matter of time before the Reds caught up with us, so he and his wife made up their minds not to run. Ainu was too ill to survive a future of always moving on. I still decided to leave. On the night before I was due to depart, I brought most of my homemade furniture out into the street and gave it away. Rokossovsky and his wife came to me with Valya. They asked me to take her. They knew what would be left of this place by the time the Reds were through with it, and what their own chances were. Even though Rokossovsky and Ainu were prepared to take those chances, they wanted to make sure their daughter stayed safe. I offered to take her away and bring her back in a couple of months, if I could. But Rokossovsky shook his head and said that our old way of life was over now, and that I should just take her and start again someplace. Ainu agreed. What could I say? What kind of person would I have been If I’d refused? I brought her with me. Valya was almost two years old then. I packed up a few things of my own. I had a horse for me and Valya and another to carry my belongings. I even took my paints. And the chair of course. It comes apart. You can roll it up in a bundle.”
“The paints I understand,” I said. “But why the chair? And why do you still wear that old belt?”
Pankratov shrugged, as if he wasn’t sure. “We all need things to remind us of who we were. Besides, so many of my memories were wound around it and around that chair, like invisible vines. Each night, when I was on the run and heading out through Finland into Sweden, I would set up my tent in the forest or out on the tundra. Then I would build a fire and I would assemble the chair and Valya and I would just sit there, she on my lap and bundled in my coat, looking out into the dark. I had no books. It was too cold to paint.”
I imagined him sitting by the fire, his arms around the sleeping girl, the vastness of the night sky fanning out above him. I pictured him staring up at it, breath frozen white on his eyebrows, like some Norse god carved from the ice of his kingdom.
“I reached Paris almost two years later,” said Pankratov. “I started painting again.”
“I don’t understand why Valya…”
“Why she is so bitter.” He finished my sentence. “It’s one thing to know where you come from, and to know that you were cast adrift, the way I was. But to know that your own father handed you to his friend, rather than stay with you, no matter what the risk. Well, she thinks she was abandoned.”
“But it saved her life.”
“It doesn’t make any difference,” he said.
“Then she should be angry with her father, not with you.”
“It makes no difference,” Pankratov said again. He brought out a box of cigarettes and a yellow box of matches. He broke a cigarette in half, put one piece in his mouth and offered me the other.
We sat in silence, the smoke from our cigarettes curling without a shudder toward the dusty rafters.
* * *
IN THE WEEKS THAT followed, Pankratov put me on a schedule that obliterated my already meager social life and had me studying with him every waking hour. But he had no complaints from me. Not under these circumstances. As the days went by, I began to refine my skills. I grew more hopeful and more confident, but never far from my thoughts was the frustration that my own work had been put on hold indefinitely.
Pankratov’s teaching methods were erratic, but his lessons broke down into three basic categories. First, we studied the work of a particular artist. In the beginning, we focused entirely on the work of Lucas Cranach the Elder. This was no random choice. Cranach had been selected by Tombeau’s superiors, whom we still had not met, as an artist whose work would be in demand once the Germans arrived. The next category was study of materials—everything from brushes to paint to wood panels and canvas. Finally, Pankratov instructed me in the art of aging the work.
We dodged from topic to topic according to whichever one obsessed him at the time. He was particularly manic about the mixing of paints. He showed me how to measure out the powder on a small ceramic dish. He did this with a spoon that was made of horn. The scoop was wide and shallow and the horn was almost transparent, run through with smoky veins of black and brown. It was the same kind of spoon I had seen used for eating caviar.
I loved to watch him mixing paints. I loved his precision and the way the dull brightness of the powder turned glossy when he turned it into an emulsion, as if it gave out its own light.
He liked to quiz me about what pigments had been invented when.
“Ultramarine. First used in what century?”
“Twelfth century.” I focused on the workbench behind him, where the brilliant red, blue and white powders and copper pans and spirit lamps were laid out from the lesson.
“Wrong. Thirteenth century. Prussian blue?”
“Eighteenth century.”
“Right! Would you see Prussian blue in a painting by Goya?”
“You could.”
“Right again. Good. Cobalt blue?”
“1802.” I knew that because I had made a rhyme of it. “Cobalt blue in 1802.”
“Titanium white?”
“1830.”
“Wrong!” He clapped his hands. “1930! Do you realize what will happen if you put titanium white in a painting by Delacroix?” When he spoke this way, he would never say “a forgery of” or “a painting in the style of.” He would say “a painting by,” as if somewhere in his warlock’s book of recipes was hidden the secret by which we would become the artists of our imitation. We summoned their flaked bones back into flesh and marrow and teeth and hair and eyes, then stepped into the framework of these men and wore their spirits like cloaks of thickened blood.
“All right,” he said. “Start again. Cadmium yellow?”
“1850.”
“1851. Close enough.”
There were times when we both became so exhausted that we would sleep for an hour or two on the floor of the atelier, our coats bundled under our heads as pillows, the quiet of the room broken only by the rattle of windowpanes, loose in their lead frames in the glass mosaic of the great window. It was always night by the time I reached home again. Sometimes I had such skull-cracking headaches from paint fumes that it felt as if smooth river stones had lodged themselves beneath the skin of my neck.
Fleury, meanwhile, had thrown himself into his work. Now that things were out in the open, he made no attempt to keep secret from us the fact that he had been selling forgeries for years. Sometimes it seemed to me that the gods had played some kind of trick on him, to make his brilliance a crime.
The hours I spent with Pankratov were so consuming that I had no sense of what was going on beyond the walls of the atelier. On those few nights when Pankratov grew so tired that even he thought he wasn’t making any sense, he might let me go a few hours early. Then I’d go find Fleury and the two of us would head over to the Polidor. The menu was skimpy these days, and the prices much higher than before, but it was still the Polidor. Fleury became my only contact with the world outside. He told me about Finland’s surrender to Russia in the second week of March 1940, and the battles for Norway in April.
We swapped stories of this strange new life. I would find myself both disgusted and amused by the depth of Fleury’s schemes for dealing with the Germans if they ever arrived, while Pankratov’s recipes for paint paraded in front of my eyes like mathematical equations come to life. The war was a loud but distant prospect. It still seemed possible, even likely, that the Germans would never attack France, and that all this work would be for nothing.
By the end of March, Madame La Roche had turned the roof of her building into a garden, where she grew tomatoes, carrots, beans and cabbages. She also kept rabbits in a large chicken-wire cage. The rabbits were always escaping. We’d find them hopping around the hallway, or riding the elevator up and down. Fleury liked it when they came to visit. He left his door open and baited them in with scraps of turnip. The rabbits hopped around Fleury’s apartment, while he sat in his armchair reading art history books. Every evening, Madame La Roche would round up the bunnies. They were very tame. She scooted them down the corridor with a broom, then carried them by the scruffs of their necks back to the roof.
I was still broke half the time. That much stayed the same. I had not painted anything of my own since the arrest, so no money was coming in from that. I relied instead on rations and a small weekly stipend grudgingly paid to me by Tombeau.
One day, along with the stipend, Tombeau dropped off my new French passport. It was the same size as my American one, but red instead of blue and had République Française in gold-leaf writing on the front. The picture from my old passport had been removed and placed in the new one, along with several travel stamps, one from London, another from Irun on the Spanish border.
I showed it to Fleury, who flipped through the pages, noticing the stamps.
“Looks like you’ve been doing some traveling,” he remarked.
“I wonder if I enjoyed myself.” I tried to make a joke of it, but couldn’t hide a feeling of emptiness that spread inside me when I saw my picture in that unfamiliar little book.
* * *
PANKRATOV CAME TO MY door at five in the morning. It was May 9.
I stood there in my flannel nightshirt, sleep like cobwebs in each wrinkle of my brain.
He strode into the room. “The Germans are advancing through Belgium. They’re going through the Ardennes Forest. Bypassing the Maginot! That whole ridiculous parade of guns and tunnels will be completely useless.”
“I thought the Maginot Line went up into Belgium,” I said.
“They haven’t finished it. They didn’t want to offend the Belgians.”
“The French army,” I told him. “They’ll drive the Germans back.”
Pankratov ordered me to get dressed.
My heart was clattering behind my ribs as I pulled on my clothes and then sat down on the bed to lace up my boots. My breathing came shallow and fast. It was the same feeling I used to get when I was going out onto the football field to play a team I knew was going to beat us. I just wanted it to get started. When things were in motion, I had no sense of fear. Only before and afterwards.
We both went down to get Fleury and I stood in Fleury’s apartment while Pankratov gave him the news.
Fleury was lurid in red smoking jacket, which apparently doubled as a dressing gown. He didn’t have his glasses on, and his bright blue eyes looked small and useless. “The French army will stop them,” he said confidently. “And there’s still the British Expeditionary Force. They’re in Belgium.”
“The French and British armies,” said Pankratov, “are falling back toward the sea.”
“I don’t believe you,” said Fleury. He turned to me. “You mustn’t believe what he’s saying.”
But I did believe it. If the Maginot Line had not stopped the Germans, nothing would. I had held on to the flimsy faith that the Maginot would simply prevent them from starting. I imagined that people all over France, all over the world, were encased in that same numbed helplessness that I felt at this moment. We had believed it wouldn’t happen. Now we would stand by in our helplessness while it did.
I had no real image of the Germans as an enemy. They had remained a vague menace. But slowly they were taking shape, a rolling thunder in the dense pine forests of the Ardennes. A human flood. Unstoppable. “What are we going to do?” I asked Pankratov.
“I need your help,” he said. “We are going to move some paintings to a safe place.”
“All right,” I said. “When?”
“Now. Immediately.” Pankratov glared at Fleury. “You, too. If you have some food, bring it along.”
Fleury shuffled off to get dressed, then laid out some food on the kitchen table—bread and apricot jam and some apples and chocolate and some cervelas sausage and a bottle of wine. We stuffed as much as we could into an old canvas satchel. I slung it over my shoulder, feeling the wine bottle dig into my hip.
A little white Citroën van stood parked outside the building. On its side was the logo of a bakery: GALLIMARD ET FILS. BOULANGER. PROVISANT DE PATISSERIES DE MAISON.
“Where’d you get that?” I asked.
Pankratov didn’t answer. “Just get in,” he said.
It was cramped with the three of us in the van. There were old chocolate bar wrappers balled up on the dashboard. The seats were torn and shined with use, the grain of the leather worn off. The floor showed the marks of someone with large feet who had rested his heels on the same spot many times.
Pankratov crashed the gears, jolting us forward. Then he crashed them again, swearing in Russian. He clung to the steering wheel as if it were a snake with its tail in its mouth that would slither away out the window if he didn’t keep his grip.
“Would you like me to drive?” I asked.
“Of course not!” he snapped. “Don’t be ridiculous. Stop asking questions!”
Fleury glanced at me and rolled his eyes.
Five blocks later, Pankratov had chewed up the gears a few more times. The grating, zipping sound of crunched metal made us all wince. Pankratov swore in several languages within the same sentence. Eventually, he pulled over, got out of the van and walked around to the other side. As he did this, he pounded his fist on the hood, as if it was all the van’s fault. When he reached the passenger side, he hauled open the door. “God damn all machines!” he shouted.
I drove us the rest of the way. The light was grayish-purple, the way it is before dawn on a cloudy day.
Pankratov gave me directions to the Jeu de Paume museum. It was a long, rectangular building made of pale khaki stone. It stood at the far northeast corner of the Tuileries Gardens, right where the Rue de Rivoli intersects with the Place de la Concorde. It had been built by Napoleon as some kind of indoor tennis court and was then converted into an art museum. The front had two large letter N’s engraved on it. It was an ugly building, compared to the grandness of Concorde and the tall houses along the Rue de Rivoli.
We joined a line of other trucks in the Place de la Concorde, at the base of a short flight of stone stairs. The trucks were all different types. Some were mail vans. Others were delivery trucks, with company names painted ornately on their sides. They kept their engines running. I saw a wisp of tobacco smoke seeping from the cracked-open window of the truck in front. A hand held out a cigarette, flicked ash from its tip, then retreated from the cold air.
The main doors of the Jeu de Paume were wide open. Through a screen of trees that grew between the road and the museum, I could see a table set up on the gravel outside. On the table was a storm lantern. A man with round glasses sat at the table, encased in the light of the lantern, alternately writing and then handing out sheets of paper to the drivers of the trucks, who jogged back down the steps to their vehicles. Others were carrying paintings wrapped in white sheets and stacking them in the trucks. A few men in civilian clothes stood guard at the top of the steps, shotguns slung over their shoulders. They wore heavy sweaters and the cuffs of their trousers were rolled up around their boots.
The only noise I could hear was the puttering of engines and wind shuffling through the trees of the Tuileries.
One after the other, the trucks were loaded up. They gunned their engines and left in different directions.
“Where are they going?” I asked Pankratov, forgetting that I was not to ask questions.
“No idea.” He was hunched down in his seat, arms folded across his chest.
“Well, where are we going?” asked Fleury. “Do you know that, at least?”
“You’ll know soon enough,” he said. “There’s the signal. Drive up. Come on. Drive up.”
I pulled the truck up to the base of the stairs, riding onto the curb, directed by hand signals from one of the shotgun men, who showed me his palms when it was time to stop.
Pankratov jumped out.
Fleury and I followed.
We went up the steps to the table, footsteps crunching on the yellowy gravel. There were two men ahead of us.
In the foyer of the Jeu de Paume, I saw men and women removing paintings from frames and stacking the empty frames to one side. They sized sheets against the paintings and tied them up with balls of string. The white balls unraveled across the floor. They worked quickly, without talking. The sheets were then marked with numbers in black laundry pen. The paintings were carried past us and down the steps to our van.
The man at the table glanced up at us when it came our turn. On his desk was a list of names of paintings and next to each name was a code number, the same numbers that were being written on the sheets. In another column was a letter. The paintings which had been sent down to our truck were all marked “Q.” The man took off his glasses and wiped his forehead on the sleeve of his shirt. His jacket was hung over the back of his chair. Next to his left hand was a hammered brass ashtray that was filled with cigarette butts. Tiny bugs weaved around the lantern’s light. He took an envelope from a box. The envelope had the letter Q marked on the front and nothing else. He tore a sheet off his notepad, on which the paintings were listed by code number only. Then he handed the envelope and the sheet to Pankratov. “Head around the Place de la Concorde and get on the Champs-Elysées. Head for the Boulevard de la Grande Armée. That will get you on the main road out of Paris to the west. Once you are out of the city, open your instructions and follow them. When you get to your destination, check the paintings against the numbers. Make sure they all get delivered. When you get back to the city, return the list to me. All clear?”
“Clear,” said Pankratov.
A woman walked out of the Jeu de Paume and right over to us. She was the woman from the gallery opening. The one with the crowd gathered round her.
I couldn’t remember her name.
“Alexander,” she said to Pankratov, raising her chin slightly as she pronounced his name.
Then she glanced at Fleury. “Monsieur Fleury,” she said. “Under the circumstances, I suppose I should be glad to see you here.”
Fleury smiled weakly.
“But now that I have a better understanding of your methods,” she continued, “these are the only circumstances under which I would welcome your company.”
“The honor is to serve,” said Fleury grandly, returning her insult with one more subtle than her own.
“Madame Pontier,” said Pankratov. “This is David Halifax. He is one of the painters we will be using.”
“Ah,” said the woman. “You are the American.”
“Not any more,” I said, and shook her hand, which was strong and bony.
“We have high hopes for you,” she said, and turned and walked back into the building.
“Who was that?” I asked Pankratov.
“That woman owns you right now.” Pankratov’s voice was a hoarse whisper. “So think nice thoughts about her.”
“Well, I know what I’ll be thinking about her, anyway,” said Fleury.
When we reached the street, the last of the paintings was being loaded into our van. In the back were mountings where the bread bins had been. By the thin light of a bulb in the compartment I could see traces of flour in the gridded metal floor. I wondered what the owner of the truck would do without it.
I climbed behind the wheel and pulled out into the Place de la Concorde. The buildings that we passed loomed dark and empty. The trees along the Champs-Elysées were leafy and still. I saw no people in the streets.
It was cold in the truck, even with the three of us squashed in.
“That woman on the ramp,” said Pankratov, “is Emilia Pontier, curator of the Duarte Museum. She’s been put in charge of removing works from all the major galleries. She’s probably the only one who knows the locations of all the paintings. She made up the lists and code numbers, found locations, and contacted people who would hide the paintings. Right now, she’s probably the most important person in the French art world.”
Pankratov tore open the directions. He took out a sheet of paper and a stack of fuel ration coupons. He let the envelope fall to the floor. “Normandy,” he told us.
Again, I thought about that day in the streetcar. So much had happened since then, it was as if I’d robbed the memory from someone else’s life.
“Where in Normandy?” asked Fleury.
“To the Ardennes Abbey,” he said. “The ancestral home of the Count and Countess de Boinville.”
“De Boinville?” I asked.
“That’s right.” Pankratov nodded. “They offered to let us store some paintings there.”
“I didn’t know Marie-Claire was a countess!” said Fleury. “Why didn’t you tell us before?”
“She asked me not to. What difference would it have made, anyway?”
“It might have made a difference to Balard,” I said. I wondered where Balard was now, still alive or dead up in some muddy field in Belgium.
We drove out through the flat farmlands west of Paris, the long straight roads lined with hedges and crop fields neat and geometric. After the city, it was strange to have the horizon broad and open again and to see thick groves of trees. I saw a dull red tractor plowing a field. Mist clogged in the muddy furrows. A jumble of magpies and seagulls followed behind the hunched-down driver. A pipe jutted from his mouth.
There was no sign of war. No soldiers, tanks or guns.
Pankratov stared out the window, steaming up the glass with his breath and then wiping away the condensation again. He unbuttoned one of his pockets, pulled out an apple and munched at it.
“Where is this abbey?” asked Fleury.
“Near Caen,” said Pankratov.
“What are we going to do?” I asked. “Just hang them on the wall?”
“Actually,” explained Pankratov, “we’re going to put them in the wall. If France falls, some German magistrate is going to be living in the abbey and the last thing he’ll want is for his new house to be damaged. The paintings will be behind a few feet of plaster and paint and he’ll never know they’re there.”
By afternoon, we were approaching Normandy. The roads became sunken and narrow. Sometimes, all we could see was a tunnel of thick bushes closing over us. Pankratov said this was bocage country. The roads were below the level of the fields because they were hundreds of years old. Over the centuries, the level of the fields had risen with each successive crop, while the road level stayed the same. I beeped the horn every time we came to a bend in the road, in case there was a car coming the other way, but after a while, I gave up slowing down. Once in a while, over the sound of our own roaring engine, we heard the gooselike honking of another horn and I jammed on the brakes. The only vehicles we passed were two milk trucks and a tractor. Once we had to stop to let a herd of black and white cows cross the road, pestered on by a boy who slapped their muddy flanks with a stick.
We had long since run out of conversation. Now we lived alone in our thoughts.
A fine rain was falling as we passed through Caen. The wipers jolted drunkenly across the windshield. In the distance I could see the thin spike of a cathedral spire, jutting from a cloak of fog. We tanked up for the third time in a place called St. Germain-la-Blanche-Herbe, using the fuel ration coupons. By then, we were only a few miles away. I had been driving for over ten hours. At the gas station, I could smell fuel around the pumps and the reek of grease and rubber from the repair shop. Next to the gas station was a bar café run by the same man who pumped our gas. His once blue overalls were bleached the color of cigar smoke.
We went into the café, where the owner served us our Café National in heavy cream-colored mugs with a green stripe around the top. He refused to take our money. “If you don’t drink it, the Germans will, and I’ll throw it away before I give it to them. Besides, they probably have real coffee, anyway.” Then he went on to tell us that he had killed a bunch of Germans in the Great War. “And now they’re coming back for more,” he said. “I must have let a few of them get away last time.”
Pankratov sipped at his coffee. “Better hope they don’t remember your face.” Then he walked outside to stretch his legs.
The morning papers arrived while Fleury and I were sitting there. Large black headlines in La Nation announced the invasion of Belgium and attacks on French airfields up north. The Germans had used dive-bombers to break French strongholds along the Meuse River. The French Seventh Army, under General Giraud, was withdrawing toward the Dutch coast.
The café man stood looking out the window, as if he expected the German tanks to come rolling down the road at any minute. “We’ll stop them,” he said. “They’ll hit the main French lines tomorrow and then we’ll stop them.”
The Germans were already through the main French lines. That much was clear from the newspaper, but I didn’t have the heart to tell him.
The first turn to the right out of St. Germain took us on a small and arcing road out to the converted abbey, a small fortress of buildings with high walls around it and a huge wooden gate at the entrance. The entrance was set back into the abbey itself, and we had to drive down a narrow alley flanked by high stone walls. The stone was pale and sandy and looked rough, as if it would take the skin from my palms if I ran my hand across it.
There was a small door set into the gate, which opened when I pulled the car up to it. A short man in a heavy wool coat stood in the doorway.
Pankratov got out.
The two men talked for a while.
Fleury and I sat in the truck.
“For a while,” said Fleury, “I actually believed none of this would ever happen.”
Before I could tell him that he hadn’t been the only one, the gates were opened and Pankratov waved us in.
I pulled the van into a large courtyard, which had a fountain in the middle and plants growing in stone pots set against the walls. The courtyard was paved in loose stone, which crackled under the van’s tires. The windows of the abbey were tall and arched. There was a great silence to the place.
The man in the heavy coat had been joined by another. Both men were stocky, with broad foreheads and slightly flattened noses. They looked to be related. They wore waistcoats and had no collars on their shirts. Their thick hair was gray with dust. One had a mustache, which was so caked in grime that it looked as if it had been carved out of chalk and glued to his face. The men shook our hands but didn’t smile. They looked very tired. The man with the mustache introduced himself as Tessel and the other man, who wore the heavy coat, as Cristot.
I knew those weren’t their real names. They were small towns further along the road to Bayeux. I’d seen them on the map.
On Tessel’s orders, I backed the truck up to the main entranceway and we all began to unload the paintings, stacking them against the side of the truck and up against the side of the house.
I counted forty paintings, the largest of which was about two feet by three feet and the smallest maybe only one foot by eight inches.
“Where are the de Boinvilles?” asked Fleury.
“The Count and Countess,” said Tessel, clearly irritated by Fleury’s familiar tone concerning their local nobility, “have gone off to Caen for a few days. They said they didn’t want to know exactly what it was we were hiding. The less they know, the better.”
We moved the paintings inside. In the front hallway was a stained-glass window. It bled watery greens and blues across white sheets that covered the canvases. We carried the paintings up a staircase made of reddish-amber mahogany.
I tried to imagine Marie-Claire in this place, drifting down the stairs in some long gown, but I couldn’t do it. To me, she belonged and would always belong in the smoky air of the Dimitri, or bundled in a coat and sketching the hostile face of Valya.
There were tapestries on the walls, showing knights on horseback, stags and hounds. The place smelled of old fires and polish. We set the paintings down in the dining room, in the center of which was a huge table of the same wood as the stairs. It must have been built in the room, because it would never have fitted through the door. The silver candlesticks and the salt dish had been placed on the sideboard. Overshadowing all the beauty in the room was a large and ragged hole that had been dug into the wall, through the paint and mortar and stones, exposing a narrow area in between.
A housepainter’s cloth had been set on the floor to catch falling debris. Two sledgehammers lay crossed on top of the stones that had been removed. Cracks radiated out from the hole all across the wall, and I wondered how these two men who had made the hole would ever be able to repair it in a way that no one would notice. Even with the cloth set out, there was dust everywhere in the room.
Cristot climbed over the pile of rubble and stood in the gap between the walls. “We figure there’s enough room in here for all of them. You can grab a screwdriver or whatever you want and start taking the paintings off those frames.” He gestured to the table, where a canvas bag sagged open, loaded with tools. “Then we can roll them up and stash them. It shouldn’t take too long.”
“Wait a minute,” said Pankratov.
“What’s the matter?” asked Tessel. He pulled a red handkerchief out of his pocket and began smoothing the dust from his mustache.
“You can’t roll these up,” Pankratov told them.
“We’ll be careful,” said Cristot. “Now come on.” He snapped his fingers and held his hands out for the first painting.
“First of all”—Pankratov dug his hand into the canvas bag and hauled out a paint-spattered iron file—“you can’t just gouge a canvas off its stretcher with one of these. And secondly, if you want to take an old painting off its stretcher, you need to place it on a wooden roller, which you turn only six inches a month. This is a job for specialists. Nobody’s taking these paintings off their stretchers.”
It seemed to grow very hot and quiet in the room. The floating dust was clogging up my lungs.
Tessel turned to Cristot. “I told you we never should have gotten involved.”
“You’re the one who talked me into it,” said Cristot.
“I have two children and a wife at home…”
“And I’m their godfather, for Christ’s sake!” Cristot interrupted. “Don’t you lecture me, Jean-Paul.”
“Oh, and there you go using my real name!”
“It was only your first name.”
“Well, thanks a lot, anyway. And here I am risking my life with you of all people for a bunch of paintings that I’ve never seen and don’t care about.” His voice rose with indignation as he turned his attention to Pankratov. “I don’t care about your damned museums and…”
He was going on like this when Pankratov lifted up one of the paintings, set it on the table, and with one flip of his hand, undid the bow that held the string in place. He swept away the white sheet wrapping. The painting came into view.
It was a Vermeer. I knew that at once. The Lacemaker—La dentellière. It was a small painting, made on canvas laid over wood. It showed a young woman, maybe nineteen or twenty years old, in a yellow dress with a broad white collar. The woman’s hair was braided at the back and curls hung down by her ears. She was hunched over her work, and it was hard to make out what she was doing. Something with pins and tiny spools of thread. Red and white silk spilled out, almost like liquid, from a soft case beside her. She looked tired and busy and the faint cheerfulness on her face seemed strained. Every time I had gone to the Louvre, I had sought out this painting just to look once more at the smile on that woman’s face. Each time I saw it, the smile seemed less and less sincere, as if she were stuck in some purgatory of a job that she knew would make her blind, as many lacemakers went blind. By now, I felt I knew her from some place beyond the confines of that canvas.
To see the painting there in front of us, robbed of its beautiful pale wood frame, beyond the safety of the Louvre, shocked us into silence. We just stared at it.
A long time passed before Cristot sighed noisily. “Oh,” he said, the way all Frenchmen say “oh,” deep-voiced and long.
“Are they all like that?” asked Tessel. The red handkerchief dangled from his hand.
“Just give me the paintings,” said Cristot. “We’ll find a way to get them in.”
We began handing them across the pile. Cristot took each one and shuffled away out of sight, sidestepping down the gap. We heard the rustling of his movements, like a giant rat living in the space between.
It took an hour for the gap to be filled up, by which time it was dark outside.
We sat down for a break. Fleury brought in his satchel and passed out the food and wine. Pankratov went downstairs to the kitchen and brought back cold ham and bread, some Camembert, and three bottles without labels filled with what looked like muddy water.
Tessel took out a small, hook-bladed knife and carved the wax top off the bottle. Then he drew out the cork with a corkscrew attached to the other end of the knife. He ran the bottle under his nose, sniffed once and then took a short sip. He swished it around in his mouth and then swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing.
I saw on his face the first smile I’d noticed all day. “Calvados,” he said. “Premier distillation.” He curled his lips around the words, as if they tasted of the drink itself.
We ate the ham and bread and the chalky-rinded cheese and drank the hard Calvados cider, passing the bottle around.
A plane droned overhead. We all stopped until the sound had faded away, as if the machine might sense our breathing while it scudded through the clouds.
Tessel picked up a piece of bread and laid a slab of ham on top. He chewed at it thoughtfully. “It could be years before anyone comes back for these paintings,” he said. “We might all be long gone by then.”
It was night when we finally pulled out of the abbey, leaving the two men to plaster up the wall, repaint it and remount the tapestry which had hung over the space.
We drove back to Paris, through towns whose street lights had been switched off as a precaution against air raids.
I tried to imagine the paintings staying hidden, not just for years but for centuries, and what it would be like for those who found them far into the future, whether the people who found them would even know what they were, or how much the world had valued them. I wondered what precious objects in the past had been hidden by people whose civilizations were being overwhelmed. Perhaps they felt the way I felt now as they hurried their treasures into hiding, too tired to think straight, too frightened for their own lives to envision the death of whole nations. I thought of the great tribes that had vanished—the Minoans, the Etruscans, the Vandals and the Easter Islanders—becoming first legends, then rumors, then finally nothing at all, while somewhere deep inside caves in the shuddering earth lay the relics of their sacred lives and the bones of those whose stories had died with them.