The Drowning People (21 page)

CHAPTER 16

T
HE FOLLOWING DAY CHAOS REIGNED
on the top floor of the Sherkansky Palace. A large burly Czech with hair cut short at the front and sides and left long at the back was directing operations. He nodded to us on arrival, but was soon too busy barking orders at his minions to pay us much attention. Men were running up and down the palace stairs, rolling back carpets, screwing doors off hinges; folding; packing; lifting. The grand piano, dismantled, was the first piece of furniture to go, and it was carried down the stairs like a sedated elephant. The other pieces in the apartment followed it: a large dresser that had stood in the kitchen, its china carefully wrapped and packed into boxes; the heavy bed on which I had slept; a prettily carved bookcase; two occasional tables; an armoire; lamps; Madame Mocsáry’s dilapidated collection of French novels.

The paintings were moved last, when everything else had been carried down to the waiting removals van; and with agonizing, painstaking slowness they were taken from the walls they had graced together and wrapped in great sheets of thick plastic which dimmed their colors and hid their outlines. As each was lifted off its hook a square of wall, garish and red, unbleached by the sun, was exposed where the painting had preserved it; and ranged together these gashes looked to me like wounds, like flesh that has been stripped of its skin; but I did not say so. Eric and I watched the removals men in dejected silence, as if they were dismantling the house we had been born in— and in some respects that apartment had witnessed something of a rebirth—but our reserve passed unnoticed by the voluble Mr. Tomin.

“There are several foreign collectors who are showing an interest in this sale,” he told us proudly. “A friend of mine at Christie’s in New York has spread the word. And I myself was in London last week and told some people. I think you are selling at a very good time.” And he trotted excitedly around the apartment, talking to the chief of the removals men, supervising the packing and transportation of the paintings, poking and peering and prodding, meddling delightedly in everything and all the time keeping up a patter of conversation with us in English, punctuated by the odd hoarse order in Czech.

Surrounded by dust and activity and sharply barked orders Eric and I stood, ignored, by the Picture Room windows. He tugged at my sleeve.

“This is no place for us anymore,” he said; and he led the way abruptly out of the apartment, past the line of workers on the staircase and the removals van blocking the street outside. He did not stop walking until we had reached Florian’s, where we spent the rest of the day morosely drinking hot chocolate and talking occasionally to two American poets, the sole other occupants of the café, who sat surrounded by torn sheets of densely covered note paper, smoking joints fixedly and staring into space. They were not enlivening company.

“There is not even our friend with the nose here to amuse us,” whispered Eric as we ordered second cups of chocolate from Jean.

“No, not even her.”

And because the café was unusually quiet and we needed diversion, we longed for the crowd of debaters with their long words and lank hair; we missed the sound of their passionate, short-lived conflicts; we listened vainly for their championship of ideas which we—and I daresay they—only dimly understood. In the smoky gloom of their habitual haunt their voices rang out to us, ghostly in the silence.

“The most important thing about Kafka was that he was a Jew….”

“Was that he was a Nationalist at heart….”

“Was that he lived in inspirational times….”

“In beautiful surroundings….”

“In a changing world….”

“The most important thing about Havel is that he is a thinker….”

“A philosopher….”

“A playwright….”

“Who’s written nothing since the revolution, incidentally….”

“A president.”

“Marginalized.”

“A focal point.”

“Obscured by Klaus.”

We missed the rhythm of their arguments, the regularity of their disputes, the violence of their reconciliations. And we realized how much we would always miss them.

But regardless of our despondency, the day of the sale moved inexorably nearer. Originally set for a fortnight after the removal of the paintings and furniture, it was brought forward—on the advice of a member of the Musée d’Orsay’s purchasing committee—so that it should fall before the passing of an imminent bill expected to restrict French spending on foreign artworks. “It is not something one usually does, of course,” said Mr. Tomin, “but in this case I think it would be wise to make an exception. The French museums are highly interested in Madame Mocsáry’s work. And their involvement might spur on the Czech museums. This country is in need of a cultural icon.”

He was right. Madame Mocsáry’s death had come at the best possible moment for the preservation of her reputation for posterity, and national interest in the sale of her work ran high. After the first flush of revolutionary fervor, Czech cultural officialdom was casting its eye about for evidence of a new Golden Age, a suitable parallel to the flowering of arts and letters which the First Republic had witnessed. And the fact that Madame Mocsáry had been French by birth and had done most of her work under the Communist regime did not deter it, or the wider nation, from honoring her as one of the most significant artists of her generation. “Mocsáry,” said the
Prague Post,
an English-language daily which Eric and I read, “revivifies the long tradition of Czech cultural excellence, and lights the flame of national creativity in our time. Her work is a moving testament to the power of the human spirit in adversity, and her later paintings are full of the frantic optimism of our new age.” When we were asked for comment Eric and I forbore to say that her later paintings were probably less frantically optimistic than rushed. We were not about to tell the world what we had discovered from Blanca, namely that Madame Mocsáry had only finished the Picture Room in the final weeks before her removal to a nursing home. It seemed somehow disloyal to her memory to do anything to endanger the formulation or the acceptance of her myth; and we were grateful for all she had done for us, even in death.

Mr. Tomin, who scanned the papers too and whose self-satisfaction and excitement increased with each passing day, talked frequently to us of the preparations. “We have had an expert from Vienna to hang the paintings,” he told us, “and the lighting at the auction house has been especially redesigned. I also have great hopes for the furniture now. With all this excitement it may develop an historical value which outweighs its intrinsic one.”

Mr. Kierczinsky, whom we occasionally saw too, also grew noticeably more dapper as press interest in the sale increased; and one morning he showed us a newspaper photograph of him standing on the steps of his law firm’s office. “I said that I could not comment … of course. But it is a good likeness, is it not? Do you think you can see the name of the firm clearly? I am not sure you can see it clearly.”

We told him you could see it clearly.

“Ah that is good. Very good.” And he went off chuckling to himself to draw up the last of the requisite papers. Madame Mocsáry’s will had been highly specific in the assignation of trinkets; but, written years before her fame and never updated, it had largely ignored the possibility of her having any money to bequeath after her death. She had left her paintings to her sister Laure, little suspecting the international attention which she and they would later receive. And as Laure in the event had predeceased her sister by three years, the paintings had gone to Eric’s mother. Though this seemed quite simple to us, the probable success of the sale seemed to cause a variety of “urgent … paperwork matters” to spring up which required Mr. Kierczinsky’s detailed and expensive attention.

The showrooms of First Auctioneers, Ltd., which occupied a good half block of Wenceslas Square, were done over especially for the sale just as Mr. Tomin had promised. Teams of painters and polishers brought to their walls a pristine shine unknown in Czech auction houses and hired crates of Bohemian crystal—vodka and champagne glasses mostly—were delivered daily. The details of the sale and the run-up to it were complicated and extravagant. There was to be a reception for important potential buyers on the night before the Mocsáry effects went under the gavel, and the sale itself was to take place a week after the paintings went on show for the first time.

That week was perhaps the only time that the collection was ever seen in its entirety by the public. And each day, for the price of the catalog, a long line of people—Czech and foreign alike—trooped over the pale wooden floors of the viewing rooms, pointing, admiring, discussing. Each day, too, Mr. Tomin came to show us another illustrious name in the auction house’s visitors’ book.

In the busy days that succeeded the arrival of Camilla Boardman’s letter I had no time to reply to it and I was unwilling to write to Ella. I waited instead to hear from her, for I was mindful of my promise not to write until she had told me that her freedom was secured; and having kept my word for so long I had no intention of breaking it now. Each day I scanned my letter box and each day I was disappointed as no envelope from her arrived, something which might have worried me had I been less certain of her. As it was, I felt secure enough to wait and I managed to avoid the temptation to write myself. If Ella did not think the time yet ripe for contact then I would trust to her judgment.

It was on the Wednesday of “Showing Week,” as Mr. Tomin liked to call it, that I discovered that the Harcourts were in Prague; and I discovered it completely by chance. My attention was being drawn to the fact that Princess Amelia von Thurn und Taxis had come the previous afternoon when, two lines below her flowery signature, I saw another entry in the book and read “Lord and Lady Alexander Harcourt, Grand Hotel Europa,” written in confident ballpoint in a hand I did not recognize. Ignoring Mr. Tomin’s excited description of the princess’s kind words to him I asked him if he remembered anything about an English milord and his wife.

He paused, thinking slowly, but his eyes were trained to miss nothing. “Yes. Good-looking. Lady Harcourt spoke with the accent of Boston,” he said as my blood began to race. “They were quiet, though; they seemed worried. They talked so that I could not hear them.”

I could barely contain my excitement as it occurred to me that Ella, even now, might be in the city; that Ella, even now, might be asking for my whereabouts at the Conservatory or at Sokolska 21. After weeks without her I saw suddenly how self-controlled I had been; how successfully I had devoted myself to the delights of Prague and to the challenges of my violin; how conscientiously I had not written. Now I could be self-controlled no longer.

“The princess said she would come in person to the sale.” Mr. Tomin looked at me, glowing with pride.

“That’s wonderful. But I wonder if you could tell me anything more about the Harcourts.”

He looked at me, surprised by my evident curiosity, and began to shake his head.

“I ask only because they’re very important British collectors,” I said; and I waited for my bait to be taken. Occasionally Mr. Tomin had to be galvanized into recollection.

“You know them?” he asked shrewdly.

“Yes.”

“And you think they have the … resources to make an impact on the sale?”

“I know they do.”

My confidence revived Mr. Tomin’s powers of recollection at once. He went on to describe to me a couple who could only be Ella’s father and stepmother.

“He has blond hair, thinning on top, and walks very straight. Her hair is red and very … big.”

“Did they have anyone with them? A daughter perhaps?” I endured a knowing look from the auctioneer.

“I don’t know,” he said slowly, teasing me. “No, I don’t think so.” But seeing my disappointment he took pity. “Wait, though. Let me see. Now that I come to think of it, they
did
have someone with them.”

“A woman with short blond hair?”

“I think so. Yes. But she left before them.”

I snatched up the visitors’ book and looked again at the Harcourts’ Prague address. The hotel which they had listed was perhaps a minute’s walk from where I stood; and I made an effort to control my excitement as it occurred to me that Ella might, at that very moment, be in one of the rooms under the gables which I could see from the large windows of the auction house. Excusing myself hurriedly from Mr. Tomin, I dodged through the lines of people staring at the paintings and vaulted down the gallery steps into the crush of the square, crossing four lanes of traffic without a sidewards glance, arriving breathless but quickly in the foyer of their hotel.

Youth demands such instant gratification of its desires. It has not learned patience.

Certainly I found it difficult to be patient as a polite receptionist informed me that the Harcourts were out and I settled down to an hour’s long and fruitless wait. Gradually my excitement gave way to frustration. But I waited. And finally I was rewarded by the sight of Pamela’s severe form and sculpted hair entering on Alexander’s arm. Husband and wife were talking anxiously together.

“Excuse me,” I said, planting myself on the carpet in front of them. “I wonder if you remember me. James Farrell. I’m a friend of your daughter’s.”

Their minds had so obviously been elsewhere that it took a moment for them to register the unexpected presence of a former guest and for the machinery of polite greeting to slide into motion. Alexander took my proffered hand.

“Hello,” he said, shaking it. “Whatever are you doing here?”

The words were jovial enough but their lightness was forced. Without knowing why this was I explained briefly the reasons for my presence in Prague and accepted their congratulations on the showing of the Mocsáry collection with a smile.

“I don’t deserve any of the credit,” I said, “but I’m glad you like the way it’s been done. Will you be coming to the sale?”

They nodded politely—perhaps Pamela said “Of course”—and made as if to move on. I detained them a moment.