The Detour (3 page)

When I wouldn’t cross the threshold, she withdrew briefly and returned with a book in her hands—a reference guide that I
recognized from Gerhard’s desk, the second volume of di Luca’s
Sculpture of Ancient Greece and Rome
, inscribed to me personally. It was an unusual parting gift from a man who’d had insufficient time to take care of more basic details. But he’d been a wonderful mentor for this reason precisely: he never forgot his priorities. Art and beauty, beauty and art. No matter what was happening; no matter what would happen.

The first time we’d met was at a small, evening art reception with several dozen mid-level bureaucrats and military officials in attendance. I’d been hired just that week, and I was so nervous entering the floodlit gallery that even the soles of my feet were sweating. A banner on the wall over my head proclaimed: “Art is a noble and fanatical mission.” I squinted at that odd choice of words
—fanatical?
—but thank goodness I was alone and anxious and not the type to make an impromptu wisecrack. If I’d recognized who had authored that statement, which would appear again at future art exhibitions, I wouldn’t have risked any expression at all.

I’d just started heading for the main exhibit when an old man took me by the elbow, pinching it with a shaking, ring-covered hand as he whispered: “
Like it, love it, like it
, and as for the final painting, an undecided tilt of the head will suffice.”

Wrenching my arm free, I turned to study his drink-flushed face. His jowls sagged above a pale blue cravat, the same shade as his eyes; his pale forehead gleamed, only slightly less shiny than his gaudy cuff links. I resented his pompous manner, but a moment later, when my new boss and the head of
Sonderprojekt
, Herr Mueller, invited me to survey the first wall of the gallery and tell him precisely what I thought, I recited like an
obedient schoolboy what the opinionated elbow-pincher had said. From the pleased look on Mueller’s face, I could tell I’d just passed my first test with flying colors.

The next morning, meeting him again in the
Sonderprojekt
basement offices, I thanked the old man and learned his name.

“We wouldn’t want a disagreement of taste casting a pall over your first days here,” Gerhard said, his pale blue irises twitching as they did in the hours before he calmed them with his first midday tonic.

“But what about the truth?”

“The truth is something we savor—usually in private. If you are lucky, Herr Vogler, you’ll have many private pleasures in your life which shall make up for some public inconveniences, such as saying things you don’t necessarily believe, and purchasing the world’s most valuable art for fools who neither deserve nor appreciate it.”

He wasn’t the most popular man in our office. But
how
unpopular, I did not fully appreciate until that starless, inclement night in July, standing outside the domestic threshold he had not crossed in a fortnight with his poor servant girl eyeing me so desperately.

“He told me some people from his office might come by,” she said. “But no one has come. Except for you, finally.”

“I’m sorry,” I said belatedly. “Vogler. Ernst Vogler.”

That introduction seemed to give her no joy. It proved only how small her employer’s world had become. He’d mentioned me perhaps more than the others, and here at long last I stood: an unimpressive figure, young, a little thin, no hint of power or privilege in my manner or dress, one elbow pressed against my
rib cage, trying to avoid scratching that mostly-forgotten spot that itched in times of stress. I’m sure she had hoped for more.

“He said that if you came, I should give you this.”

When I hesitated, she asked in a tremulous voice, “Don’t you want it? At least he’s given you something. He didn’t give me anything—not even what he owed.”

“Yes, of course.” I fumbled for some
Reichsmarks
in my pocket and handed them to her before taking the book and sliding it under my jacket, out of the rain.

Our
Sonderprojekt
department, where I had been part of the art curatorial staff for just under two years, was located in the basement at 45 Brienner Strasse. Yes—
that
address; that’s how important art was in those days, to the people at the very top. The Third Reich’s very first architectural project was not a diplomatic building or some other temple of power but the House of German Art, a new museum completed in 1937.
Sonderprojekt
looked beyond that museum and beyond Germany to a larger vision, both artistically and geographically speaking. To what precisely, I did not yet know or need to know. My job was only to catalog the world’s obtainable art objects and to add more items to the master acquisition list—a list based not on finite resources or some scholarly criteria but only on taste, and symbolic significance, and that least definable thing: desire. Whose desire? Usually our leader’s, of course. But each of us also had objects we personally admired and longed to see or have a hand in collecting, for
reasons as difficult to explain as the deepest merits of fine art itself.

The day after visiting Gerhard’s house, I spent as much time as possible in the dark stacks and near the corner filing cabinets, pulling out and replacing one unread catalog card after another, trying to look busy while I puzzled over Gerhard’s predicament—which, in his absence, had become my predicament as well. Section B of the master art acquisition list I was researching featured only sculptures; another researcher was assigned to paintings; a third to the special problem of avoiding counterfeits. Anyone watching me closely, as I fumbled in the wrong drawers, might have guessed that I was upset. But that was no crime, to be upset.

Neither was it a crime to laugh, and Gerhard had laughed—especially whenever an unimpressive item made its way into our hands: a statuette of a ballerina no more finely crafted or interesting than a child’s music-box figurine, or a muscular male nude with a caveman’s brow, or some other example of questionable art, hastily collected. He was supposed to have expertise in these matters. He was also supposed to find a way to share that expertise without humiliating others whose taste was not as refined as his own, especially others of high rank. But that kind of prudence had never been his strength.

Back at my gunmetal-gray desk, I was surprised to see Leonie waiting with a worn and bulging paper bag in her hands—a peace offering, perhaps, to make up for her recent avoidance of me. When I sat down, she pushed it across the desk blotter.

“Is it a sandwich?”

She laughed nervously. “No, silly. Candles—twelve of them. For you.”

“I nearly forgot,” I said, taking the bag gratefully. “I suppose they’re sold out everywhere.”

The natural blush on her cheeks showed, even from behind the stain of applied rouge. “I thought ahead and bought extras a month ago.”

That night marked the start of the second annual German Day of Art, celebrating new displays of all-German art that turned away from modernism and harked back to the greater clarity and tradition of the past: images of peasants and working folk, landscapes, cows and horses (but only very strong ones), and the ideal and healthy human form. The art of the post-degenerate era. This focus was the cornerstone of our entire national cultural policy. It meant so much to our leader that he had funded many artistic activities from the profits of his
Mein Kampf
sales. His “struggle” had become the direct sponsor of art in Germany—the two things inextricably intertwined.

On this weekend-long “day of art” there was an exhibition of German works for sale, overseen by the Führer himself, who not only had rejected at the last minute eighty already-approved works but would go on to purchase over two hundred works that did please him. These purchases were separate from the more ambitious and distinctly more international
Sonderprojekt
collection that we basement experts were cataloging and beginning to acquire. The Führer’s insatiable appetite for art objects was the reason we called him (always discreetly, for though it was not an insult, it still suggested
an inappropriate familiarity)
Der Kunstsammler
—“The Collector.” If we were not aware in 1938, we would soon become aware that
Der Kunstsammler
had the power to collect just about anything—or anyone—of interest to him. And the power to dispose of the same. How could it have been otherwise? But that isn’t the voice of the twenty-four-year-old still learning his place in a new office, in a new profession. That is only middle-aged hindsight, which can be just as dishonest as the blinkered presentism of youth.

During the opening procession of the German Day of Art activities, all residents were required to display three candles in every one of our apartment windows. If anyone was expected to remember and comply, we members of
Sonderprojekt
were. There were dozens of ways to reveal your incompetence or disloyalty, and new ways were being invented all the time.

“Thank you, Leonie,” I said, opening the bag of candles, realizing even as I said it that she had not only anticipated my faltering memory, but had remembered how many windows my lonely apartment had, despite having peered through them only a few times. She might have assumed, over the awkward winter months following our final date, that she had shown me too much, given too much away for free as the saying goes, and that’s why I’d lost interest. But in truth, she hadn’t shown enough. I didn’t need a girlfriend who would change clothes only in the water closet and make love only in the dark, who would pretend not to notice the alarming changes in our departmental staffing just as she pretended not to notice the pink scar on my rib cage.

Still, one doesn’t like to appear ungrateful.

“Leonie,” I started to say, but she could see the question coming and looked down quickly so that I could see only the impenetrably thick spikes of her painted lashes. “At least look at me, Leonie. Please?”

But she would not. Someday, I would no longer be in that basement office, but she would be there still, typing without a sheet of paper in the roller, cradling the heavy phone to her soft cheek even after the lines had been cut—not because she lacked competence or intelligence, but because she knew walking away was no answer either. Perhaps she was smarter than all of us.

“It’s a lucky day,” she said quickly. “I think Herr Mueller is planning to call you into his office.”

“Lucky? I doubt it.” I tried one last time, my voice lower yet. “Leonie, I know you have a good heart. I know you liked Gerhard well enough …”

She whispered, “I know he was opinionated.”

“But isn’t that our job here? How can one curate art without having opinions?”

When she didn’t answer, I pleaded, “You see the correspondence that comes through. You must have an idea …” But she was still looking down, studying her shoes. “Never mind. When I see Herr Mueller, I’ll ask him.”

Mueller was in an effusive mood on that Friday afternoon with a weekend of festivities ahead, including at least one event where he would spend time with topmost officials of the Reich, including
Der Kunstsammler
himself. (The rest of our small staff avoided such anxiety-producing “opportunities” whenever possible, coming and going by our own entrance, often forgotten in our subterranean lair.) Mueller asked me to
sit but couldn’t contain his own nervous energy and proceeded to pace in the windowless room. There was small talk about my family, cut short when I reminded him that my own parents had passed away—my father just the previous winter. The awkwardness didn’t seem to bother him.

I was preparing to ask my question—to make a principled stand by asking
the
question—when Mueller sat down and slapped a file onto the desk and opened it, showing me the photograph clipped to the inside corner of the folder. “You know this statue, of course?”

I paused, tongue sticky against the ridged roof of my mouth, admiring the recognizable figure of Myron’s ancient Athenian
Discus Thrower
: an image of the perfect male specimen, captured in a sporting posture of dynamic tension. “Yes, of course.”

Mueller turned the file around, looked at the photo again. “
He
wants it. And he will have it, no matter the considerable expense.”

I didn’t say anything at first—not because I was too junior a staff member, or too inexperienced in this particular area to comment. On the contrary, I knew this statue well, better than anyone in the department. Gerhard’s taste had favored the Italian Renaissance, especially Bernini. My taste, my self-education, my training, my fixations favored this: controlled, classical, iconic excellence.

I fell into a momentary trance, staring at the photo and imagining all that the photo itself could not capture. I loved this object as one always loves the most perfect example of an artistic period, the most realized projection of a cultural virtue. But “love” does not explain the feeling entirely. For what I felt most about the
Discus Thrower
was a driving curiosity: a certainty, guided or misguided, that beholding this ancient statue in person, at close range, would answer an obsessive question and a personal need that had led me into the study of classical art in the first place.