PANKRATOV DECIDED TO MOVE.
From now on, he decreed, we would work at what he called his warehouse. In fact, this was a cramped little space, formerly a stable, in a section of an old brick viaduct. It stood between the Père Lachaise cemetery and the Rue des Pyrénées. The viaduct had once been used for a railway, but new tracks for the Chemin de fer de Ceinture had been laid down beyond it. There were dozens of these little warehouses all along the base of the viaduct. Each one had its own arched door, painted with thick coats of glossy green paint.
On Pankratov’s door, in stylish orange letters, was A Pankratov. Réparation d’Antiquités. Each word was underlaid with a shadow effect in red paint.
“It’s too risky at the atelier,” he told me, as he rummaged through his keys for one that would unlock the door. “Besides, all my supplies are here.” He swung the doors wide and a smell of dank air wafted out.
The ceiling inside was high and vaulted. Several electric bulbs hung on cords from the ceiling. When Pankratov switched them on, they threw out a sinewy glare. Piles of junk clogged the shadows, consisting mostly of ruined paintings. Proud faces glared from white-flaking canvases of old portraits, as if emerging from a snowstorm. There were also frames, jars of old nails, various pots of powder for mixing paints and bottles of dirty linseed oil, bins of rags and so many jars of brushes that they looked like strange plants that had learned to grow in the damp darkness of the warehouse.
“Where do you work exactly?” I asked. The stone space echoed with my voice.
“Eh?” said Pankratov. “Work? Well, wherever I feel like it.”
“Do you know where we are, Pankratov?” I told him. “We’re not in a warehouse. We’re inside your brain. All this junk…”
“Stop!” He raised his hand like a traffic conductor. “You can stop right there. From this junk, in a couple of weeks, I can conjure up a Caravaggio, all with a trick of the dust.”
“Poof,” I said, and waggled my fingers as if I were casting a spell.
“Forgery,” said Pankratov, “isn’t just about painting a good copy of something. In fact, it isn’t really about copying at all.”
“Then what is it about?” A train clattered past on the tracks beyond the viaduct. It was a steady, comforting sound.
Pankratov scuttled into the gloom. His shadow lumbered after him, huge and crippled against the sloping walls. He emerged a moment later with the remnants of a frame. “It’s about this!” He held the frame in front of him as if he were a talking portrait of himself. “Look at this frame. Come here and look at it.”
Obediently I went across. “It smells in here,” I said.
“It’s the smell of authenticity,” he replied.
I stood in front of him, the two of us on either side of the frame.
“Look here,” he said, nodding down at one corner, since he had no hands free. “What do you see?”
Tiny holes peppered the wood and the old gilded plaster. “Looks like wormholes,” I said.
“Exactly! Do you have any idea how long it takes to get worms to eat holes in wood?”
“To get them to?”
“Yes! It takes years and years. Which we don’t have. Do you know what inexperienced forgers sometimes do to fake wormholes? They put the frame against a tree and fire buckshot at it. It makes little holes like these. The trouble is, worms don’t make straight holes when they burrow, the way shotgun pellets do. Besides that, you have to dig the buckshot out again. And that’s the sort of thing they’ll be looking for, these experts. If you really want to fool someone, you start off with something old. You don’t get new stuff and then kick it around or pour all kinds of solvents on it. You need as much authenticity as you can get.” The frame shook in Pankratov’s hands as he laid out the laws of his obsession. “Now do you understand?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Worms are my friends.”
“They are for now,” he told me.
* * *
WHEN I WOKE UP up on the morning of May 22, I read in the paper that the Germans had reached the English Channel near Abbeville. Now they were driving north to cut off the ports of Boulogne and Calais. The city of Rotterdam was surrounded and ordered to surrender, and then bombed before the surrender deadline expired. De Gaulle’s 4th Armored Division attacked north of Laon and was repulsed by German Stuka dive-bombers. The seventy-year-old French general Gamelin was fired and replaced by the even older general Marshal Pétain. The roads to northern France were jammed with refugees.
So much was happening that by the time I read about these events, new battles had already broken out. I could keep up with the general flow of information, but my ability to imagine the magnitude of suffering was becoming exhausted. I could no longer picture the dead, civilians abandoning their homes, towns that had been burned. They were now simply facts. I used to feel guilty about my lack of emotion. Then even the guilt went away. There was nothing to do but wait and see what happened when the war at last reached Paris, which by now we knew it would. I think it was like that for most people, who waited in dread for the moment when the war would come to them and they would know its full brutality firsthand, no longer suffering in the abstract.
I set down the paper and walked to the open window. The sun was gentle and warm, and the air filled with pollen from trees in the Tuileries.
Down in the street, I saw cars ride past with suitcases piled up on their roofs, fleeing the city.
The man with the Dragoon mustache from the Postillon company was carrying out boxes. He stacked six of them, one on top the other, and then took off the tops. They were filled with documents. He brought out two bottles of what looked like brandy and poured them on top of the papers. After that, he selected a match from a little wooden box that he took out of his pocket, struck it and then flicked it at the pile.
He wasn’t prepared for the force of the flames, which jumped into the air with a thumping boom. He backed away, arms in front of his eyes, swearing. Frantically, he patted his fingers against his mustache, in case it had been singed.
Soon the street was filled with smoke. Half-burned papers flicked up into the air.
Out across the rooftops was the smoke of other fires.
The Dragoon brought out a large broom and swept stray papers back toward the fire. The bristles of his broom were smoldering.
The fire burned away to ashes, leaving a large black stain on the pavement. The Dragoon swept the ashes into a large dustpan. Then he washed down the pavement with buckets of water, but some of the black stain remained. When it was all done, he leaned the broom against the wall and sat down in the sun to smoke a cigarette. After a few puffs, he stubbed it out on the sole of his shoe. Then he locked up the warehouse and pedaled away on his bicycle.
* * *
BY JUNE 9, THE British Expeditionary Force had evacuated over a hundred thousand troops out of Dunkirk, leaving forty thousand French troops to be captured. After this, the bulk of the French army was in full retreat, slowed down by thousands of refugees clogging the roads. German Panzer columns had advanced to the east and west of Paris.
Italy declared war on France.
On June 11, Paris was declared an open city. Billboards went up overnight, stating that there was to be no resistance offered when the Germans reached the city. These posters covered up the posters from a few months before, summoning all soldiers and reservists to their barracks. Cars with loudspeakers strapped to their roofs, like corsages of giant metal tulips, trundled through the streets advising everyone to stay inside.
Thick black tornadoes of smoke rose from burning oil storage tanks on the outskirts of the city.
That night, there was the sound of breaking glass as looters ransacked shops whose owners had left the city.
I heard a story that hospitals were injecting Prussic acid into the hearts of patients who could not be evacuated.
I also heard that three million of the five million people who lived in Paris had gone. There was a constant line of traffic along the Boulevard St. Michel, where I saw everything from cars to bicycles to farm tractors hauling people away.
The newspapers stopped coming out.
Factories shut down.
Trains shut down.
There were no taxis.
Food markets shut down.
The bars and cafés, on the other hand, stayed open twenty-four hours a day. People drank themselves stupid. Some places were giving their stock away.
At first, it seemed as if everybody who stayed behind had a different reason for doing so. Some were too proud, others too poor. By now, reasons no longer mattered. The city had been divided between those who fled and those who didn’t.
* * *
“BALARD IS DEAD,” SAID Pankratov, when Fleury and I arrived at his warehouse the next morning. Pankratov made no attempt to soften the news with any words of consolation. He blurted it out and then began to tidy up the place.
“When?” I asked.
Pankratov’s head popped up from behind a pile of broken frames. “A week ago. His parents called to tell me. They found out from a man from Balard’s unit who was sent home wounded and stopped by to tell them the news. Otherwise, they probably wouldn’t have found out for months.”
“Where did he die?” asked Fleury.
“Somewhere near the Meuse River,” Pankratov said. “That’s all they told me.” There was silence after that, except for Pankratov’s clumsy rearranging of his junk into different but no less chaotic piles of junk.
I hadn’t known Balard well enough to feel the kind of sadness I wished I could have felt. I regretted that we had argued. Somehow, the fact that he had been dead for two weeks made it seem like the very distant past. It seemed so strange that, even though I hadn’t thought about him much, Balard had still taken up some space inside my head. And in this space he had continued to breathe, half-remembered but alive, until this moment when the space suddenly contracted into nothing and vanished.
Soon Balard’s face and the memory of his voice became blurred and distant. As time went by, fragmented images of him would return unexpectedly, but only for a second, and then they would be gone again.
* * *
THE ONLY THING THAT stopped me from going crazy in those last days before the German occupation was my work with Pankratov. We still hadn’t received instructions on what to paint, so all we could do was prepare.
A chill crept around me every time I walked into the warehouse. It drilled through each layer of my clothing, coiled around my bones and threaded through my joints. It clung there all day. I could never get warm in that place.
Fleury was in his own frenzy of activity. For reasons he at first declined to spell out, he had set himself the task of buying as many old art books as he could find. Many came from the bouquinistes who sold secondhand books from green metal display cases balanced on top of the walls that overlooked the Seine. The old art books didn’t have illustrations printed directly onto the pages. Instead, color postcards were glued beside descriptions of the works. Fleury explained that he would have postcards made of our own versions of the various paintings or drawings. Then he would remove the original postcards and replace them with his own. That way he could fake the provenance of a work.
After a week, Fleury decided he had enough books and that there were no more jobs to be done. This left him at a loose end. Rather than stay at home alone, he came to the warehouse and sat in an old chair with half its stuffing gone. He wrapped himself in a red and gray striped horse blanket, reading books by the light of a candle jammed into a wine bottle and starting up conversations whenever he got bored.
We tried to remain optimistic. Each of us fed off the other’s fabricated nonchalance, until we had built up a kind of lie between ourselves as a barricade against the panic that might otherwise overwhelm us. The only thing I could compare it to was in the autumn of 1938, when I had gone up to Narragansett to help my brother and mother board up the house before the arrival of a hurricane. We had finished the work and were sitting in the basement of the house, listening to radio broadcasts which tracked the path of the nor’easter. It was going to be a bad storm. My mother’s house stood four blocks back from the sea, which had always put it clear of any storm damage, but this time we were beginning to wonder if we should have evacuated inland, along with half the neighborhood. But my mother had been stubborn about it, and by the time I arrived on the train from New York, my brother had already started laying in supplies—bottled water, cans of food, lanterns, blankets, and a pistol in case looters came by after the storm.
With several hours still to go before the hurricane was due to hit us, we had nothing left to do but sit in the basement on old lawn furniture and listen to the wind pick up. We heard the monotonous radio broadcasters, advising everyone along the coast to leave their homes, and then the station went dead. We opened up the storm door to the basement and looked up at the sky through the thrashing leaves of the oak tree in our garden. Obscenely muscled clouds bunched grayish-yellow in the north. When the storm finally arrived, it made darkness out of daylight, smashed the waterfront to pieces, threw sailboats up onto the road, hit Point Judith so hard that the place was almost removed from the map, flooded the city of Providence and tore off half my mother’s roof. It was the most powerful hurricane anyone could recall, but still the worst of it was the waiting. That was exactly how it felt now.
Pankratov and I were in the process of stripping the paint off an old canvas, which we would then re-cover with a painting of our own. The original work was an early nineteenth-century portrait of an overweight, middle-aged man. The painting had no frame and was on a stretcher that had one spar cracked, so that the man’s face sagged down, making him look simple and deformed. The man was sitting in an ornate chair with a greyhound lying at his feet. His hands, which dangled off the arms of the chair, were fat and pink like uncooked sausages.
The canvas was very dirty, but rather than just see this as the cause of the painting’s ruin, I had grown to appreciate the finer points of dirt. I was now able to tell the difference between a painting that had hung in a room where there had been smoke fires, which veiled the painting in a hard, old-iron grayness, and one that had been exposed to sunlight, which lightened the colors, or still another that might have been stored away for a hundred years, whose colors would be dark and sinister.
Pankratov worked with acetone soaked in a little sea sponge. He mopped away the colors. The sausage-fingered man slowly disappeared, perhaps the only image left of him in the world. Eventually, Pankratov reached the white undercoat, drawing the faintest white smudge from the canvas. At this point, he would grunt and I immediately applied a sponge soaked in turpentine, which stopped the action of the acetone. Over the past few days we had “cleared,” as Pankratov called it, more than a dozen paintings in this manner, and had hung them up to dry. It was an odd sight, these blind white rectangles hugging the warehouse walls.
The fumes made us dizzy. Often we had to stagger out into the alleyway and sit there in the sun, breathing deeply while the parachutes of dandelion seeds drifted down from the old railroad tracks above.
For the first few days, I didn’t use rubber gloves, because I couldn’t work as well in them. But now, after exposure to the chemicals, my fingers were so creased with deep and painful cracks that I had trouble doing up my shoelaces. I also had tiny black spots appearing like freckles. The sight of these frightened me into buying gloves, which I wore now whether they made me clumsy or not.
“What I don’t understand,” I said, giving voice to a conversation that had been going on in my head all morning, “is if the picture is beautiful and we enjoy it, who cares who painted it? Why should one work that was done by a famous artist be worth so many hundreds of times more than another picture which is just as beautiful?”
“Who’s to judge what’s beautiful?” asked Pankratov.
“What I mean is,” I said, “if someone buys a painting because they like the look of it, then that should be their only judgment. You can call it an appreciation of beauty. You can call it an appreciation of skill. Call it whatever you like. I’m sure it has a hundred names…”
“So does the devil,” said Pankratov.
“And then suddenly,” I continued, “they find out that this painting isn’t by Van Gogh, after all. And immediately, they can’t stand the sight of it.”
“What they can’t stand,” said Pankratov, “is being reminded how much they paid for it.”
“But that’s my point!” I told him. “My point exactly. Do they value it because of how much money they paid for it or because they are drawn to it?”
Now Fleury joined in. “They are drawn to it,” he said, “because of the thought that Van Gogh touched that canvas, because his muscles worked the spatulas that laid on the paint so thickly. That it was his madness making him do it. They want to touch something that has been touched by someone whose name is immortal. Because it was there when he was there. That’s what they pay for. And if they find out it’s a forgery, the spell is broken.”
Now Pankratov joined in. “But the whole business of forgery is not as clear-cut as they’d like to think. Some paintings were only done in a certain style, like a Van Gogh style, or a Klimt style, or whatever. They get sold, then someone else comes along and mistakes it for an original. Or someone fakes it up a bit and then deliberately misleads the buyer.”
Fleury shifted in his chair.
Pankratov continued. “And then there are paintings that were done in a certain school of painting. Rembrandt, for example. Say Rembrandt gets a commission to paint a portrait of some wealthy aristocrat. One of his students might do all of the work except the hands and face and would leave those to Rembrandt himself. This lets Rembrandt get on with his other work. But does it mean that the portrait of the aristocrat is a fake Rembrandt? What’s the difference between a painting that was done only by Rembrandt and one that was done partly by him?”
“A hell of a lot of money,” replied Fleury. “Somewhere out there, in one of the great museums of the world, some little old man is standing in front of a painting—one of the great paintings—one people travel across continents to see and they weep over it and say how brilliant Caravaggio was, or Goya or Velázquez or whoever. And they lean forward and try to catch a breath of the sweat and breath of genius. But it isn’t Goya’s breath or the breath of Velázquez. It’s the breath of that little old man. He made that painting, and now that all the so-called experts have pronounced it to be original, even if he confessed that he’d done the work, no one would believe him. But he won’t confess. We’ll never know his name and he doesn’t want us to know his name, because his anonymity is an expression of his art. And that man is a master forger.”
“That’s what we’re doing,” I said. “With us, there is no doubt.”
“No,” Pankratov mumbled. “There is no doubt. We are forgers. And between the three of us, given time, I imagine we could forge almost anything.”
“Almost,” said Fleury, drawing out the word. “And where do you draw your line, Monsieur Pankratov?”
“At the Mona Lisa’s smile,” he replied. “It can never be duplicated. There is something unearthly about it.”
Pankratov tossed his sponge into the little ceramic bowl, which was filled with dirty, gray-brown acetone. He set the bowl on the table and walked over to the door. He flung it open and afternoon light blasted in. For a moment, his silhouette stood huge and blurred in the doorway, then it was gone. He sat down heavily against the wall outside and pulled out his cigarettes. He dug his brass lighter out of his pocket and lit himself a smoke. Then he settled back against the sun-warmed brick, smoke streaming out of his mouth.
“You’ve been studying the techniques,” Fleury told me, “but I’ve been studying you. And I say you’re a pair of sorcerers.”
Maybe it was true. Pankratov and I were dabbling with spells, drawing across from a dimension just beyond our own the phantoms whose help we required.
That evening, as Fleury and I rode the elevator up to our apartments, I clung to the bars. I pressed the black iron against my cheekbones and watched the wall file past me, only a few inches away. I noticed that someone had drawn a pencil line all the way from the ground to the top floor. It had stopped when the pencil lead broke and then been continued at another time. There were many breaks and starts, and I could see how the person had become more proficient in joining up the lines as time went by. I wondered how long it had taken. I thought about this small obsession that must have filled the person’s mind, watching the lead burn down as the elevator climbed from floor to floor, then starting all over again. Much of my own time painting had been spent in that same cage of fixation.
It ought to be enough, I thought, for me to risk insanity by looking inside myself. But now I would be taking on the madness of people whose madness was what made them great. If I couldn’t grasp the obsessions that had propelled their creativity, I would never succeed. If I failed, there was someone even now, out there in the country built for war, who knew his own obsessions, and the pain he would inflict to see them through. That pain will be ours, I thought, if I do not get it right.
* * *
THE FOLLOWING NIGHT, WHEN it came time to head home, I told Pankratov and Fleury that I needed to go for a walk. I had too much nervous energy swirling around in my head. We arranged to meet up later at the Dimitri, if it was still open.
The Germans were expected any day now. The streets were mostly deserted. Shop windows were boarded up or crisscrossed with white tape. Some places even had sandbags piled up against them. Scattered amongst the closed businesses, a few stubborn cafés stayed open. Their menus grew smaller by the day, inky lines slicing through the Croque Monsieurs and Entrecôtes. The only thing that never seemed to run out was the wine. It made me wonder how many millions of bottles must be stored beneath the streets, as if the whole city were precariously balanced on pyramids of glass.
An hour later, I reached the Pont Royal. It was sunset. I stood looking down at the river, which slid fast and milky green around the pillars of the bridge. I breathed and breathed until sparks weaved in front of my eyes and the numbing oiliness of turpentine fumes no longer tinted my lungs.
I set out for the Dimitri, crossing the Place de le Concorde. The obelisk of Luxor stretched its shadow down the Rue Royale. A few cars rounded the fountain, tires pop-popping on the cobblestones. Then it grew completely quiet, except for water shushing from the mouths of the bronze fish, held in the arms of half-human sea creatures which stood in the fountain’s thigh-deep water. I wondered who had thought to keep them running. Before the war, at this time of day the Concorde would be a zoo of bicycles and motor scooters and taxis, caped policemen whirling as they steered the honking traffic.
I was shuffling along with my hands in my pockets when I heard a mechanical whine over the rooftops. As I raised my head, a small and flimsy-looking aeroplane appeared from the direction of the Champs-Elysées. It was German, black crosses outlined in white on the undersides of its wings, with large struts attaching the wings to the body of the plane. The plane had fixed wheels with fat little tires at the ends. The canopy was large and made of many segments, and as the plane passed slowly overhead, less than a hundred feet above me, I saw the pilot staring down.
The Place de la Concorde was empty.
I stopped and stared.
The plane circled and appeared to fly off. Then it banked low over the Arc de Triomphe and leveled out, heading toward me. The machine flew right along the Champs-Elysées, losing altitude. Its engine burbled in a lower pitch, coming in to land between the rows of trees that grew on either side of the road. The plane bounced once, then settled. It came to a stop right where the Champs-Elysées joins the Place de la Concorde, between two statues, each of which showed a man trying to control a wild horse.
The canopy opened, folding back on itself like the wings of an insect. Then a man climbed out. He wore high black boots, whose hobnails crunched on the stones. He had on gray riding breeches and a green-gray jacket buttoned up to the throat. There was a small pistol holster on his leather belt, which he wore over his jacket. He wore brown leather gloves and was carrying a peaked cap with a short black visor, which he immediately fitted onto his head.
Another man stayed in the plane and kept the engine running. His eyes were hidden behind small, dark goggles.
I stayed absolutely still, like a deer terrified by the glare of a car’s headlights.
The man walked around the plane, looking at the statues and the buildings. He turned to look back down the Champs-Elysées at the Arc de Triomphe. He stared down the Rue Royale at the columned temple of the Madeleine. His hands opened and closed. He seemed to be in shock, as if he had always dreamed of landing a reconnaissance plane in the Place de la Concorde and now couldn’t believe he had actually done it. Then he caught sight of me and stopped.
I did nothing. I just kept staring. I was too stunned to feel frightened or angry.
It seemed to me the German was also lost in amazement. He raised his hand to one of the large pockets on his tunic and pulled out a cigarette case. He opened it and held it out to me.
I didn’t move. I could see the white sticks of the cigarettes.
The man nodded. He held the case out further.
We were like two men hallucinating each other, and the gulf of twenty paces was the distance between waking and sleep.
Slowly and hesitantly, I raised my hands, showing the whiteness of my palms, as if any rapid movement would cause this vision to separate and disappear into the sky like a flock of frightened birds.
He picked a cigarette from the case, fumbling for a moment in his leather gloves. He set it down on a stone ridge at the base of one of the rearing horse statues. Then he looked at me, to make sure I had seen.
My hands were still raised.
The German officer returned to his plane, his footsteps sharp on the stones. He climbed inside and pulled the hatch shut after him. The plane’s engine revved up and the machine turned until it was facing back down the Champs-Elysées. The engine’s roar grew louder. At last the plane lurched forward. Its gawky landing gear trailed like a heron’s legs in the moment that it left the ground. It climbed steeply and was gone over the rooftops.
Still in a state of shock, I walked over to the statue, where the cigarette was lying on the stone. The man had even left me a match, one match. I left then where they were. No one else came by. The city was quieter than I’d ever heard it before. In the deepest part of night, there had always been the rumbling like distant thunder, but now even this had gone silent. The light faded out and the purple sky turned navy blue. The stones grew slick with dew and there was the musty smell of rain.
I had to get clear in my head the meaning of this small gesture that I could not match against the idea of an enemy. I wondered how long it might take before our first reaction would be to shoot each other dead.