“That’s when I saw that painting, behind his head. All blues and yellows and reddish-brown, as translucent as lacquer. It had to be a Dutch master. Just then a private found a little kid covered with tablecloths behind some dishes in a sideboard cabinet. We’d almost missed him. My aide glared at me, full of accusation that I could slip like that and be distracted. With any excuse, the painting, for example, or my reprimand, he might even have reported it.”
What always rang in his mind with the crash of dishes, Cornelius would never now be sure was memory or his own swollen imagination: “So I shoved my boot up the Jew-boy’s dirty ass. But I took care to note the house number.”
What had happened next wasn’t difficult to piece together. As soon as they delivered their quota, at 1:00 or 2:00 a.m., while other Jews still lay frozen in their hiding places and when the streets were dead quiet, his father went back. The painting was still there, hanging in spite of Decree 58/42, reported in several histories: All Jewish art collections had to be deposited with Lippmann and Rosenthal, a holding company. But this was not a collection, only a single painting, blatantly displayed, or ignorantly. What could his father have thought? That therefore it deserved to be taken? And then would come his father’s voice resounding somehow through the years, “By the time I got there, the tea set was already gone.”
Going over the same visions he thought his father had, hoped his father had, kept Cornelius awake at night, filled his dreams with the orgy of plunder, mothers not chosen lining up to die, pain not linked to sin, smoke drifting across fences and coating windows of Christian homes, children’s teeth like burnt pearls. Driven by imagination, he read like a zealot on two subjects: Dutch art and the German occupation of the Netherlands. Only one gave him pleasure. Only one might dissolve the image of his father’s hat and boots and Luger.
Compelled by his need to know, Cornelius traveled to Amsterdam one summer. He avoided Van Scheltema Square, went straight to the Rijksmuseum, examined breathlessly Vermeer’s works, and in one delicious afternoon, convinced himself of the authenticity of his family’s prize by seeing layers of thin paint applied in grooved brush strokes creating light and shadow on the blue sleeve of a lady reading a letter, just like those on the sleeve of his sewing girl. A few days later he went to The Hague. At the Royal Cabinet of Paintings in the Mauritshuis, he saw points of brilliant pink-white light at the corners of the opened mouth and in the eyes of Vermeer’s girl in a red feathered hat, the same as on his sewing girl. In the musty municipal archives of Delft, Amsterdam, Leiden and Groningen he pored over old documents and accounts of estate sales. He found only possibilities, no undeniable evidence. Still, the evidence was in the museums—the similarities were undeniable. He flew home, hoarding conviction like a stolen jewel.
“It is. It is,” he told his father.
Then came the slow smile that cracked his father’s face. “I knew it had to be.”
Together they went over every square inch of the painting, seduced anew by its charms, yet the rapture was insufficient to drown out the truth Cornelius could no longer deny: If the painting were real, so was the atrocity of his father’s looting. He’d had no other way to obtain it. Now with Friederich and his mother gone, only two in the whole world knew, and that, together with the twin images in their dreams, bound them willingly or not into a double kinship.
He started to tell someone else once, his onetime wife who had laughed when he said it was a Vermeer. Laughed, and asked how his father got it, and he couldn’t say, and her laughter jangled in his ears long afterward. She claimed he turned cold to her after that, and within a year she left, saying he loved things rather than people. The possible truth of the accusation haunted him with all the rest.
After his father’s stroke, when the money from such a painting would set him up finely in a rest home, Cornelius agonized. Even an inquiry to a dealer might bring Israeli agents to his father’s door with guns and extradition papers efficiently negotiated by the internationally operating Jewish Documentation Center, and a one-way plane ticket to Jerusalem, courtesy of the Mossad. More than a thousand had been hunted down so far, and not just Reichskommissars or SS Commandants either, so Cornelius moved back home to care for him.
Finally, when there would be no more afternoons of wheeling him, freshly bathed and shaven, out to the sun of the garden, when pain clutched through the drugs, his father murmured fragments, in German, the language he’d left behind. In a room soured by the smell of dying, a smell Cornelius knew his father could recognize, Otto whispered, “Bring the painting in.”
When they both knew the end was close, Cornelius heard, faintly, “I only joined because of the opportunity to make lifelong friendships with people on the rise.”
Cornelius sniggered, then spooned crushed ice between his father’s parched lips.
“I only saw the trains. That’s all I knew.”
He wiped with a tissue a dribble inching down his father’s chin, and waited for his father’s breath, suspended in indecision, to come again.
“No more than forwarding agents. Sending them from one address to another. What happened at the other end was none of my business.”
Right. Of course. This way for the trains, please. Careful, madam. Watch your step. Coolly Cornelius watched a pain worm across his father’s forehead. How had he deserved to live so long?
“The thought of opposing or evading orders never entered my head.”
Precisely.
Like a moulting snake, Cornelius thought, his father made pathetic efforts to shed the skin of sin in order to get down to the marrow of his innocence in time. But on the last morning, with opaque gray snow fog closing in, came the truth of his grief: “I never reached a high rank.”
That allowed Cornelius to bury him inexpensively. Without notice. It wasn’t a cruel thing, he told himself. Call it a memorial act, aimed at cheating the world of its triumph by ignominy, but by its very privacy, it failed. He did his best, that is, while his father was still living, did what he could, what he could pry out of himself. Nobody could say he didn’t. Alone in this same study, sitting in his father’s leather chair that struck him now as being the color of a bruise, he’d read the will. He’d forced his eyes to register each line and not scan down the page to see what he knew he’d see, that “a painting of a young girl sewing at a window” was his.
Now, for good or ill, there it hung. He felt its presence whenever he came into the room.
On this silent Sunday afternoon, years after his father’s quiet burial, and the day after Merrill’s, Cornelius sat in the same study, his now, reading Eichmann’s trial records and drinking rum and coffee. Outside his window snow was flattening what had been his father’s garden, and across the city it was pressing down on the new grave of Dean Merrill and the small boy’s wooden sacrifice. Inside, he looked up, saw the life in the girl’s eyes, and wished—no, longed for someone, Richard, anyone to enjoy the painting with him. No, not just anyone. Richard was safe. He knew art but not art dealers. That old wild need rumbled up from some molten place within, that need to say, “Look at this stupendous achievement. Look at this Vermeer. Pay attention on your knees to greatness.”
At least he’d had that with his father. Once, years earlier, his father had called him long distance when he discovered what he thought was a brush hair left in a mullion of the window. That hair, from Vermeer’s own brush, ah! He should have shown it to Richard. To dissolve his doubt. Once he believed, Richard would have the passion to enjoy it like his father had.
His eyes fell to the page and stuck on a line said by Eichmann’s judge: “The process of extermination was a single, all embracing operation, and cannot be divided into individual deeds.” No. He didn’t agree. He thought of the nameless, graveless little boy kicked out the door who may have played with a wooden toy his last free morning in the world.
Did the toy windmill get appropriated too? A souvenir from some hapless Jewish home taken at an advantageous moment in spite of its m
issing hinge? He imagined his father encased in a glass booth, being interrogated: “And did you not remove this windmill from the house at 72 Rijnstraat after breaking in on the night of 3 September, 1942?” His own third birthday.
Willed or not, the painting didn’t belong to him.
It would be doing penance for his father if he himself wouldn’t enjoy it more. He tore newspaper into strips, fanned them out and crumpled them over the grate. Then the kindling, crosswise, then the quartered logs. The fireplace opening was barely wide enough. He was grateful it wasn’t a large painting; it would be a shame to do it injury with a razor.
He stood up to lift the painting off the wall. This one last afternoon, he would allow himself a luxury he’d never permitted himself before: He touched her cheek. A quiver ran through his body as the age cracks passed beneath the pads of his fingertips. He stroked her neck and was surprised he could not grasp the tie string hanging from her cap. And then her shoulder, and he was astonished he could not feel its roundness. She hardly had breasts. He moistened his lips suddenly gone dry, and touched there too, more delicately, two fingers only, and felt himself give in to a great wave of embarrassed and awkward pity, as when one glances in a hospital doorway at a person partially naked.
Where her skirt gathered, he felt the grooves left by Jan’s brush. Jan. Johannes. No. Jan. The familiar name the only appropriate one for a moment like this. Jan’s brush. He thought perhaps his fingers were too rough to feel Jan’s mastery. He went to the bathroom, shaved with a new razor, dried his face carefully, and, back in his study leaning toward the wall, he placed his cheek next to her dress. The shock of its coldness knifed though him.
He had no right to this.
He laid the painting on the carpet and lit the fire. Kneeling, waiting for the flames to catch, he imagined them creeping toward the pale blue pearl of her eye. The quiet intensity of her longing stilled his hand a moment more.
If he turned the painting over, maybe he could do it.
Such an act of selfishness, he thought, to destroy for personal peace what rightly belonged to the world at large, a piece of the mosaic of the world’s fine art. That would be an act equally cruel as any of his father’s.
No. Nothing would be. Not just his father’s looting—the safe job of thievery behind the battle lines—not just his father’s routing them out, but the whole connected web. In Eichmann’s trial record, he’d read, “The legal responsibility of those who deliver the victim to his death is, in our eyes, no less than that of those who kill the victim,” and he’d agreed.
Now, waiting for the fullness of the flame, it occurred to him, if the painting wasn’t authentically a Vermeer—after all, he had no solid proof—he could do it, couldn’t he? He could burn the thing, put the whole sorry business to rest so as not to keep his nerves raw.
Yet if it weren’t genuine, the enormity of the crime shrank. Why not enjoy the painting? It was still exquisite. He looked again at her honey-colored profile, as yet unmarked by cruelty or wisdom. The throat moist with warmth from sunlight pouring into the room. The waxen idleness of her hand. So exquisite it had to be a Vermeer. He’d staked his solitude on it. He felt the injustice, looking at the girl, that she would never be known as a creation of Vermeer. He had to get Richard to admit that it was a Vermeer, and then he’d do it another day. A promise.
In spite of his paintings, Vermeer was among the dead. And his father, and the boy. Cornelius’s life, like theirs, like Merrill’s, was measured. He wouldn’t live forever. He had to know that his years of narrow, lonely anxiety had been required. He had put himself together so carefully: allowing himself no close friends with whom it would be natural to invite to his house; teaching math, which he liked less, rather than history because of what he’d be forced to discuss; taking care to behave identically to people of all races and religions; suppressing anything in himself that might be construed as cruel or rigid or German—and now this boiling need threatening to crack the eggshell of his scrupulously constructed self. The one thing he craved, to be believed, struck at odds with the thing he most feared, to be linked by blood with his century’s supreme cruelty. He’d have to risk exposure for the pure pleasure of delighting with another, now that his father was gone, in the luminescence of her eye. To delight for a day, and then to free himself. A promise.
But Richard still did not believe. He had left the night before saying, “Whether it’s an authentic Vermeer or not, it is a marvelous painting.” Marvelous painting, marvelous painting. That was not enough. There were hundreds of marvelous paintings in this city. This was a Vermeer. Nothing less from Richard would satisfy. He had to find some authentic reason for living as he had. The possibility of illegitimacy of what he’d suffered for was like a voice that had the power to waken him from a dream, but the dream gripped hard, as it does to an awakened, crying child, and he would not give it up.
Richard had admired the work. He was, perhaps, only a brush hair’s breadth away from believing. The relief from sharing with one person who did not laugh was intoxicating. Why he didn’t do it years ago, he couldn’t say. He’d wasted years in a miser’s clutch, protecting a father who had protected no one. He wanted more. For the first time, he imagined himself telling it all, the history and his father’s part of it, so Richard would believe, telling it with burning eyes right there in front of the painting and he would not die. He would not die from shame.
He kept repeating it—I will not die—while the flames burnt down to coals.
The painting bound me to Cornelius with a curious tie, compelling but misbegotten, so that when I saw him mornings at the faculty mail room, the thought of that strange, secretive evening and his perverse insistence troubled me still. I felt I’d been plucked by the sleeve and commanded to follow him into a dangerous sea of judgment that could rise up against me as well.
We kept a coded language. One day I asked, not to goad him, but strictly as an aesthetics issue, “Would you enjoy it any less if you were to learn it wasn’t authentic?”
“But it is.”
“Yes, but just supposing it weren’t?”
“I don’t have to think about that. I know.”
His bloated sureness irritated me.
I had the distinct impression that he was not at home in the world, and I knew it had to do with that painting. I did a bit of reading, talked to my art historian friend, and one Friday afternoon in the parking lot at school I asked him, “Did you know that a Dutch painter named Van Meergeren forged some Vermeers in the 1930’s?” He froze there by his car. “So real he had the art critics and curators believing him?”
“Yes, I was aware of that.” Cornelius straightened up stiffly.
“And you know how they found out? He sold a few to that Nazi, Goering, and the Dutch government arrested him for treason—collaborating with the enemy, letting Dutch masters leak out of Holland into the hands of the Reichstag. And so he confessed.”
Cornelius’s eyes darted back to his car where his hand trembled trying to find the keyhole. In that quiver I knew I had inadvertently stumbled onto something. Maybe he knew it was only a Van Meegeren all along, and was trying to make a dupe of me, or sell it to me for an exorbitant price. A friend might let it pass, but we were only colleagues, committed, both of us, the mathematician and the artist, to truth. “I’d like to see it again, if you wouldn’t mind,” I said.
“Whenever you’d like,” he said, all cordiality, and made a move to get into his car.
“How about now?”
He stood still a moment, gathering himself, it seemed to me. “No time like the present.”
In the daylight the painting was even more magnificent than I remembered it. I sank into the chair in a trance. The luster of the glass of milk shining like the surface of a pearl made me believe—this was no copyist’s art—but Cornelius’s puffed-up manner the weeks before made me obstinate.
Yet now he had none of that smugness. There was only the intense pleasure of the painting. Lovingly
he pored over its surface with an intimacy I hadn’t noticed before in his flood of facts. If ever a man loved a work of art, it was Cornelius. His face shone with the adoration of a pilgrim for the icon of his God.
“I’d like to believe. It’s not that I want to kill your own belief. But there’s still one huge question.”
“Which is?”
“Cornelius, you and I are teachers. Our fathers weren’t millionaires. Unless you tell me how he obtained it, I don’t see how—”
The radiance drained from his face.
I let the suggestion lie there and took a sip of the beer he’d brought me. He finished his in one long, thoughtful draft, and held on to the bottle after he’d set it down, as if to anchor himself. I waited.
“I grew up in Duisburg, near the Dutch border…,” he began, keeping his gaze riveted to the young girl while he spoke of his childhood, as though ingesting strength from her calm.
“And here, after sweating through a high school history class, I asked in spite of Mother’s solemn warning never to ask, ‘What did you do in the war, Dad?’ ‘Worked in Amsterdam,’ was all he said. Just like it was a job. ‘Yes, but what did you do?’ I asked. ‘I have a right to know.’ His body stopped all motion even out to his fingertips, as if he were feeling the first tremors of an earthquake. ‘Took them to the trains,’ he said.”
Cornelius turned to me then.
“He took me to Yankee Stadium. Kept my hand warm in his own pocket. Planted daffodils for my mother. If I could have wept, if he had not trained it out of me… after that, he never was the same to me.”
Cornelius’s eyes, when he told me of the boy in the cabinet, became glazed like melted glass, and there was a hardness to his voice when he told of the missing tea set. When he said he’d tried to burn the painting, his whole body shook, and he slumped down at his desk, spent.
Worse, a hundred times worse than I’d thought. That he had tried to destroy it, I could hardly believe. That he thought such an act might atone sickened me. I did not, I was sorry to learn, find in myself any generosity or charitableness for this man in spite of his suffering.