The Thief of Auschwitz (25 page)

Night has come and the only light in the hospital block is a faint pulsing glow from the little coal stove. He sits in darkness listening to the man in the next bed struggling for breath—he’s a crooked little gray man of indeterminate age and he’s dying of something, perhaps of everything, breathing now with a sad and heroic effort as if life is a physical thing that he’s chasing across a vast empty space—and against his better judgment he pictures his mother at work in the
sturmbannführer’s
apartment. He imagines the terror with which she must approach each visit, the fear that surely lies behind every brushstroke, the anxiety that no doubt threatens to subvert her God-given talent at every turn. And he hates himself. He hates himself for his broken leg and his unwitting need, and he hates himself because she can’t know that she’s going through all this on his account. And because she would do it anyway, if she knew.

He wonders if he’ll be sent straight back to work on the water project, of if some other work has materialized in the meantime. Anything will be better than staying here, out in the open ward with that skeletal officer arriving to size him up every second day. It’s like being fitted for a coffin, if these people hadn’t give up on coffins a long time ago.

*

Chaim has made some inquiries, put out some feelers, tugged on a few slender silken threads. People owe him favors. People actually
want
to owe him favors. And so there are men both inside and outside the camp, men of the highest rank and men of the lowest rank and men of no particular rank whatsoever, who have been keeping their eyes open for any sign of that lost painting.

Counterfeits have actually begun to appear, counterfeits and rumors of counterfeits. Childish drawings on rough paper and lithographs purloined from living room walls and images torn straight out of magazines, folded or rolled up or elaborately framed beneath window glass. Stuff found and stuff stolen and stuff made to order, and every scrap of it worthless. It’s all that Chaim can do to keep up. It’s all that Jacob can do to continue hearing stories that begin with such hope and end with such disappointment. He curses the Nazis for inventing Auschwitz. He curses God for permitting his family to be brought here. He curses himself for allowing the picture of Lydia to kindle in his heart some sense of hope and continuity in a world where such things are willfully murdered every day. As each week passes and Friday morning comes again and they meet in the kitchen where Chaim shrugs and frowns like a stage comedian miming disappointment, his heart sinks further, until at last there’s no lower point to which it can go. The girl is gone. The picture is gone. The love with which her mother created it has been brought low and repudiated and crushed dead under the boot-heel of time and history.

But today Chaim isn’t frowning. On the contrary. He’s bouncing. Checking the stacked towels and adjusting the flame underneath the kettle and bouncing.

“I’ve got a lead,” he says.

“A lead.” Jacob grips the back of the makeshift barber chair.

“Two leads, really.”

Jacob’s shakes his head. “Perfect. A matched set of false trails. The usual dead ends, then.”

“No,” says the boy. “These are anything but. They point to the same thing.” He has no patience with Jacob’s despair. It might be infectious, and at his age he can’t afford to be contaminated. He unfolds the white drape and spreads it over the back of a chair and comes around to look Jacob in the eye. “Two different sources tell me it’s back in the antique shop.”

“Who?”

“It doesn’t matter who.”

“The antique shop.”

“Correct. Right where Frau Vollmer got it in the first place. Do you remember?”

“Of course I remember. So your sources have seen it there?”

“Not exactly. But people hear things. People tell people things. Word gets around.”

Jacob lifts the drape and snaps it. “You’ll forgive me for not getting my hopes up,” he says. “People tell people lies.”

“Not this time.”

“People tell people what they want to hear.”

“No. It’s in the shop. Trust me.”

“Then how do we get it?”

“Get it?”
says Chaim. “You never said anything about getting it.”

A distant door swings open and the clamor of pots and pans in the kitchen hushes at the entry of the first officer of the day.

“There’s no getting it,” says Chaim.

“Use your imagination,” says Jacob, his words the only sound in the kitchen other than the whistling of steam and the officer’s footsteps approaching across the tile floor. “You’re the one with the ideas, with the connections. Prove to me that the world isn’t the terrible place I think it is. That there’s one small spot of light left within it.”

Chaim bows his head. He has the look of an individual who’s been attempting to do just that. He brightens though, eagerly and reflexively, altogether pathetic in his instant enthusiasm, when the SS officer steps into their little corner for his haircut.

*

Eidel has stretched and prepared the canvas and begun to apply paint. She works roughly at first, laying down great deep pools of color, a churning blue-black mass from which it seems nothing particular could ever possibly emerge. It’s the fierce dead darkness at the edge of the universe.

After a while Karl and Luzi break away from their parents and come to see what she’s been doing. The looks on their faces give away their consternation. The boy squints. The girl picks up a page from the sketchbook and turns it this way and that, trying to reconcile the outlines drawn upon it with what she sees on the easel.

“Oh-ho,” says their father, rising up and straightening the crease in his pantlegs and coming near. “Unless I miss my guess, the two of you are in for an art lesson.” He hasn’t been smiling before, perhaps because Eidel is a long way from painting his face and perhaps because he plans not to let the least bit of kindness soften his image for all eternity, but he’s definitely smiling now, at the children and at their befuddlement. “This is called
underpainting,”
he tells them. “It’s all about building up the oils in layers. They’ll ultimately take on great depth and mystery—just like real life. Things behind other things. Hints of the invisible.”

If the prisoner standing six inches away from him with the loaded brush in her hand has anything to add, she doesn’t say. He goes on at length, boring the children and the painter alike, now and then begging her to
go on, proceed, don’t let me stop you
even though the quality of the light in the corner where the family had arranged themselves has changed utterly without his presence and the children’s. Now it’s just Madame Vollmer and a thick blue-green curtain the color of an angry sea, along with a bright gilded chair only one arm of which will appear in the final portrait. Eidel can’t go on. She can’t conjure a real world out of an imagined one, but she smiles and nods and pushes some paint around as if she can.

A strong wind kicks up outside and rattles the shutters and Madame Vollmer moves the curtain aside to look out. As she does so a burst of light streams in through the window, and all is lost. Eidel would beg her to please let go of the curtain, but it’s already too late. The woman has spoiled everything. They’ve all spoiled everything. Even after the
sturmbannführer
and his children have returned to their places, Eidel can still see that burst of unbidden light, can still imagine it boiling behind the thick folds of the sea-green curtain, a thing unseen behind things seen. Something in her mind wants to scrape the canvas raw, take it back down to nothing, and begin again with this other knowledge, with the intrusion of the bright white day behind the blue-green shadow, but she can’t do that either. The brightness behind everything is gone. It’s just an illusion. Worse. It’s the memory of an illusion. And her fate is to move forward in the world as it is.

She resolves to rough in the shapes of her four subjects, but it’s difficult. Referring to the sketchpad doesn’t help. It’s as if she can’t quite see these people, even though they’re seated only ten feet away. The harder she tries the harder it is, and she wonders if something has gone wrong in her brain, if this is a sign of some failure of the optic nerve brought about by malnutrition or overwork or exhaustion. She shakes her head and rubs her eyes with the back of her hand, but that doesn’t help. So she stalls, turning away and mixing paint. And then she loads her brush with a thick greenish black and chooses a fold in the curtain above Vollmer’s head and paints the smooth subtle drape of it in a single sinuous stroke that has about it the power of conjury. Reality on the canvas. So it’s not her vision after all, and it’s not her brain. It’s something else.

All she can do is fall back on technique, trusting that the details will emerge from the process if not from the intent. And so she proceeds, choosing colors mechanically, ignoring the treacherous light that pulses behind the curtain and ignoring her own inability to see Vollmer and his wife and their children with any kind of clarity. Just working.

The wind is still pounding on the house when she’s done all she can for the morning, and after she’s packed away her things and made her way to the entry hall Madame Vollmer approaches. She opens a closet door and pushes aside more coats than a family of four could possibly wear in a lifetime and emerges with a short jacket of light gray wool. “Why don’t you take this old thing?” she says.

“Oh, Madame Vollmer,” says Eidel. “You’re far too kind.”

The woman holds up the jacket. It’s of an elegant cut and barely worn, and although there was a time when it would have fit Eidel perfectly—she can see now that she and the lady of the house are similarly built—at this point it will wrap around her twice. That, she decides, will make it warmer.

Max

Failure to expand your horizons is a terrible thing, in an artist or in anybody. It’s the closest thing there is to death, I think. It might even be worse than death. It’s death in life.

And if anybody knows something about death in life, it’s me.

I say listen to Ezra Pound:
Make it new.
Don’t worry. I’m not going to start talking about poetry. I’ve got enough to keep me busy in my own back yard. Too much, if I want to stay on track. You want an example? All right, here you go:
Don’t get me started on Jackson Pollock.
Just don’t get me started. Honestly. When a man can put on his workbooks and walk all over a wet canvas and then convince people that that’s art, there’s something wrong with him and there’s something bigger wrong with the people who buy what he’s selling. That doesn’t even need to be said.

People disagree as to whether I’ve always followed my own advice. As to whether I’ve always worked at making things new. Isn’t that a kick in the head? People are out there judging the things you’ve done by the standards you’ve set and they can’t even agree on the outcome. These are the same people who paid big money for Jackson Pollock’s footprints, remember. The very same people. So don’t take them too seriously.

That tattooed girl from the National Gallery, though? Her head’s screwed on pretty straight in that particular department. I gave her a little test one time. I showed her some of my pictures on cards—all mixed up and out of order, some of them from when I’d just gotten to the states and nobody knew who I was and some of them from the last six months and some of them from in between—and she surprised me. She put them pretty much in order, no sweat, even a few that almost nobody’d ever seen.

In other words, I must have been keeping it new all these years. I must have been going through some kind of traceable evolution.

I wonder one thing, though. I wonder where she’d have slotted the paintings I keep down in the locker.

Fifteen

Eidel reports back to work, wearing that light woolen jacket. Saturday is a day like any other here in the kitchen—she marks the Sabbath only by her visit to Vollmer’s apartment—and the women are working like coal miners over the little bit of food that they’ve been given to prepare. Making it go around, even to the poor extent that it does, is heroic work. Beans and ashy flour and an onion or two will stretch only so far. Passing through the door as she does on these occasions, when the air is warmed by the heat of the stoves and the counters have been scoured clean of every trace of breakfast and the work of preparing the next meal is well under way, the place seems to her more like a factory than a kitchen. She could swear in these moments that the food coming from it isn’t merely prepared by these broken individuals but actually created by them, created out of nothing, out of the sheer power of their will, out their very sacrificed bodies.

Rolak is standing inside the door, leaning on her poker, picking her teeth with a long sliver of wood. “You’re late,” she says.