The Painted Kiss (30 page)

C
arl had just been appointed Minister of Culture, a very important position. I had read about it in the papers. I never expected to see him again; it had been years. But there he was, in the vestibule of our shabby apartment.

It was a hideous place. The walls, a humorless gray, were peeling. The floors were uneven and the windows filthy. With the Wiener Werkstätte furniture we couldn’t bear to part with all jumbled together, it was embarrassingly cramped. There were tables stacked under the piano and books piled on the vitrine. Instead of being plucky and tying cords around ourselves and hanging out of the window with a bucket and a rag, or being enterprising and hanging tapestries over the walls to cover up the water stains and throwing rugs over the floors to cover up the knots, we cried for a while for our lost salon, our gray felt carpets and silk wall coverings, and then we gave up altogether the idea of living in beauty as we once had.

To make matters worse, all I had in the house was a teaspoon of coffee and some digestive biscuits that were still in the cabinet only because neither of us liked them. Helene, in a whispered conference in the doorway, said she would make scones if I could keep him talking for a few minutes. Keeping Moll talking had never been difficult.

His once blond hair was nearly white now, but he still filled the room with his size and his expansive personality. He threw open his arms as he talked as if to embrace me.

“Emilie,” he said. “It’s been too long. Old friends such as we are should not let so many years pass.”

I wondered why he had come. I had only seen him a few times in the last twenty years, the last several years before when I went to his gallery to see the paintings of a young artist I liked.

“We have a sandwich in a café nearly every night,” I said by way of an apology when Helene brought the weak coffee, no cream, no sugar. “Two old ladies with no one to look after tend to get lazy about cooking.”

“Nonsense. Your hospitality is always excellent.” He took a letter from his pocket. “I have something to read to you. From Alma.”

Alma had fled Austria to California with her third husband, a playwright who was writing screenplays now in Hollywood. Carl and I were both a bit fuzzy about what a screenplay involved, but it was clear Franz was quite successful.

“She asks about you,” he said, skimming the lines. “Here it is, she asks if you have been able to keep your business going, and whether you and your dresses are as beautiful as they once were.”

“She must be terribly homesick,” I said, “to write such nice things about me.”

“Now, now,” Moll laughed gently. “Alma adores you.”

“What does she say about California?” I said to Moll, wondering why she was writing to her stepfather. There was little love lost between them, especially now. Still, I hoped he would read more of the letter. He flipped through the pages. “The light here is extraordinary, it seems to come from everywhere at once, what a joy for a painter! Unfortunately I am not one, and neither is Franz, but we think often of our artist friends and how much they would enjoy it. We live in a yellow stucco bungalow that reminds me a little of some of the cottages in the suburbs, but of course none of the cottages had a swimming pool and a dozen orange and avocado trees.”

“Alma always was one to gloat,” I said. It was strange, how much I wanted to talk about Alma when once I would have been perfectly happy if she had fallen into some mountain crevasse and disappeared forever. But Moll put the letter away.

“Alma knows she will never return to Austria,” he said. “She is thinking of the future. She’s always been less of a romantic than you.”

“Why are you here, Carl?”

“To ask you to join in building the new Vienna. A Vienna that will be the most prosperous and beautiful of the capitals of Europe.” I laughed bitterly, the only way I seem to laugh now.

“I liked the old Vienna. I had a fashion salon.”

“You built your success on false foundations. It was no wonder it couldn’t survive. I’m asking you to begin again. Properly, this time. The government is willing to underwrite you.”

I tried to understand what he was saying. “Be the official couturier of the new government?” It sounded absurd. “But how can my clothing be used as propaganda?” He looked irritated for the first time.

“This word, propaganda. It sounds like you’ve been listening to British radio. All I’m asking is for you to reopen. Under our auspices.”

“Who would my new clients be? All my old ones are dead or in exile.”

“No one is dead, Emilie,” said Moll soothingly. “Your fickle clients have all abandoned you for Horst Gernbach, that’s all.” He patted my hand sympathetically. “We’ll help you. You can dress the wives of everyone in government.”

It was a horrifying thought. I had seen some of these men in government. Everything about them was ugly, from their eyes to the set of their lips to the way they walked. Their uniforms were drab, their insignia stark. I did not want to imagine what their wives might look like. To shut Carl up I said I would think about it. But he was not finished. There was one more thing. He was taking some of the paintings in my possession for Hitler to view. Not my paintings. The “paintings in my possession.” As if I were merely looking after them while their real owner was away. Moll was mounting a large exhibition of Germanic arts, and the Führer apparently had long been interested in Gustav’s work.

“The Führer is a great patron of the arts,” Moll said. “You know that he once thought he would be an artist himself. Fortunately for us, he took a different path, but his artistic sensibility is still strong.”

“Gustav’s art isn’t political,” I said. “You of all people should know that.”

“All art is political. You of all people should know that.”

“Gustav’s work belongs with me.”

“Aren’t you being a little selfish, Emilie? Of course I understand why, understand perfectly….” He paused as Helene came in with the scones. She hadn’t sifted the flour and there was just the tiniest bit of jam in the bottom of the jar, but Moll didn’t seem to notice these inadequacies. He put four scones on his plate and dug out all the jam he could with his coffee spoon.

“But people deserve to see Gustav’s work.”

“What about the museums? Borrow from them.”

He leaned forward in his chair and his curatorial greed began to show. “But to have privately owned, little-seen works! How much more significant, how much more interesting.”

Though Moll knew he didn’t have to ask my permission to take the paintings, and he knew that I knew, he was still trying to persuade me. Hadn’t we sat in cafés and dreamed up the Secession together?

“Gustav would want you to give them to me for the exhibition, Emilie,” Moll said. “It’s important for his artistic reputation that the paintings be seen in this show. You don’t want him to be forgotten.”

“Gustav will not be forgotten,” I said. “I will never allow it to happen.”

“It’s not up to you,” he said. “If I want to I can seize all of his work and have it destroyed.”

There it was. We sat silently and he watched my face as this information sank in. “If I remember Gustav correctly, and not through a haze of sentiment, he was an artist and he wanted his work to be seen. He didn’t care where, or why.”

Moll was powerful. I was no one. I had not known until that moment how precarious my position was. Anyone who had something they wanted was in danger. I just hadn’t counted on being someone who did.

Then, suddenly, I had a strong desire to laugh, and wished Gustav was there to share the joke. In his lifetime his work had been condemned as ugly and dangerous, and now it was to be celebrated as a great achievement of his nation.

At first I hadn’t hung any artwork in the apartment. Somehow it seemed insulting to the work. I kept it all wrapped and stored in closets and some big paintings were leaning up against the walls in my bedroom. But then I had relented and hung one landscape painting opposite the bed, where I could look at it often. It was of a poppy field at Attersee and spoke to me of sunny afternoons and giddy walks in the country. I led Moll to it and watched him appraising it. I pulled everything out of the closet and sat on the bed while he unwrapped each item and wrote the titles down in a leather notebook. There were four more paintings of the countryside near Attersee. There was the portrait of my niece when she was a little girl. The pastel of me when I was twelve. The paintings called
Hope I
and
Hope II
. Cartoons for the Stoclet frieze. Cartoons for the University ceiling panels.

“Someone will be by tomorrow to pick them up,” he said when he was finished.

“Will I ever see any of it again?” I asked.

“You can come to the show,” he said.

“Then what?”

“We’ll see.”

I discussed this with Helene. We tried to think of anyone we still knew in the government to whom we could appeal. But everyone had left.

“What has happened to Moll?” Helene wondered. “When he first opened the gallery he tried to show controversial work and he hardly charged anything so that everyone could see it.”

“Everyone will be able to see this show,” I said. “It’s just that the meaning of everyone has changed.”

The soldiers came as Moll promised, and took everything away. How could I have let them? They had guns, but they wouldn’t have killed me. I let them do it. Some great curator, defender. For a week I stared out of the window. Then one day I saw a military truck pull up and Moll got out.

“He’s changed his mind about the exhibition,” he said from the doorway, as soldiers brought the paintings back into the apartment. They carried them carelessly, knocking things over, and dropped them to the floor like sacks of grain. “Or, not the exhibition, but he no longer wants to include Klimt’s work.” He made it sound as if Gustav were someone from an art history text, like Dürer or David, someone dead a long time, not someone he had known.

I stared at him. “We…ah…collected some Klimts from some other people,” he said. “There were a lot of portraits. He of course wanted to know who the people in the portraits were.”

Then I understood. Amalie Zuckerkandl. Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein. Serena Lederer, Adele Bloch-Bauer, Hermine Gallia.

“Even though your paintings weren’t…controversial, he didn’t want them. For a moment I thought he was going to order me to burn them all.”

“What happened to the other paintings?”

“Don’t worry about them, worry about yourself. You’re now being investigated. All of your financial papers from the salon are liable to be seized.”

“For what? What are the charges?”

“You could be arrested at any time. It doesn’t matter what I say. If you have you taken any steps toward emigration I would push them forward.” He was trying to be kind. But I was not grateful.

“Vienna is my home.”

“Not if you want to stay out of jail.”

The only question was where to go. Helene wanted Paris, but to live abroad as an exile, to never see Austria again, to leave Gustav behind, it was unthinkable to me. Then I thought of Attersee. The area is rural and sparsely populated. But was it far enough away? We wrote some letters to our neighbors and they let us know that the town was quiet.

And so we came. There is firewood stacked shoulder high in the shed, and down comforters by the dozen in the closets. We have a well and tinned food and a very generous neighbor. We could bunker here forever.

When I was in Vienna in my dim and ugly apartment, I used to stare at the painting of the poppy field, memorizing each crimson daub, remembering how happy I had been when Gustav painted it. Sometimes I would nearly cry of homesickness for him and for Attersee. Ironically, now that I am here, so close that I can walk not fifteen minutes and stand in the spot where Gustav stood, those times are further away than ever. The field is wet and beaten down. It is not the time of year for poppies.

Y
esterday the Russians captured Baden.

I heard the planes in the night, buzzing like malignant insects. I wrapped my quilt around me and went to the window. It was a clear night and the moon lit them. Intermittently they would appear, very low, so low I could make out the Cyrillic letters on the sides. Of course I couldn’t read them. I went down the hall to wake Helene. She was lying on her back with her eyes wide open.

“Let’s go to the potato cellar,” I said, pulling at her arm. She said that if they meant to bomb us no potato cellar would do any good, and if they didn’t, we might as well stay in bed and be warm. Still, she allowed me to drag her from the bed, trailing her blanket across the floor like a bride.

The planes were deafening when right overhead, but they were not meant for us. They were flying east. In a few minutes they were gone, and we returned to our beds and what was left of a sleepless night.

In the morning we turned on the radio, but could get no reception, so we read on the terrace, or pretended to, waiting. It was chilly in the shade and we were both wrapped in afghans, cocoon-like.

One of Heitzmann’s boys has been bringing our letters from town, the youngest, Peter is his name I think, a gangly freckled child of eight or nine, always with some straw or leaf in his hair and crumbs at the corners of his mouth. Ordinarily the boy would stand quietly on the steps until we looked up before he announced himself, but this time we heard his shouting before he appeared from between the trees. He was running in his coltish way and his hands were pumping at his sides, empty. He shouted, almost triumphantly, that Vienna was on fire.

He’s never been there, of course. He’s not seeing familiar faces, familiar streets. He’s thinking of the planes, and the explosions, and maybe the chance of seeing a Russian soldier. Maybe one parachuting out of a crashing plane. He and his brothers play at battle in and around the barns, and don’t understand why their mother punishes them when she finds them at it.

He’d heard about the bombing on his shortwave radio, from a station in Switzerland. There are whole neighborhoods in flames, but he couldn’t remember which ones, no matter how eagerly we prodded him, afghans flung aside, veiny hands grasping for his collar. He backed away from us, a little frightened. The eastern ones, maybe, he said, trying to appease us, or the ones to the south. The opera house, though, he knew was rubble. At that Helene fell back into her chair. And the Danube. The Danube is burning, he said.

I imagined a glowing skin of airplane fuel over the water. It must be beautiful, this liquid fire. I wished I were there to see it.

Helene gave the boy his usual wage, though she forgot to give him his gingerbread cookie, made with the last of our sugar. When he had gone we went inside and huddled by our own radio, but the station from Vienna had been knocked out, apparently, and no one else seemed to know any more than we did. We left it on anyway, and waited. It sounded bad for us, the opera house was so close to our apartment, not more than half a mile. We talked about Herta and the apartment and I thought about the paintings. I wondered about the art museum—was it awash in flames, were the frescoes Gustav had painted early in his career turned to ash? I thought that Gustav’s studio would be all right, it was so far out of the way, but what about Casa Piccola, so close to the city center? Though the salon was long-gone I couldn’t bear to see the building destroyed. But then I felt that I couldn’t stand to see any part of Vienna damaged, and my feelings wouldn’t make one bit of difference. The bombs would fall anyway.

It is several days before a letter comes. There is a long story to tell about how it managed to find us, with the postal system suspended and the city in chaos, but I stand there next to the vegetable garden while Heitzmann’s boy tells me about the man who walked and rode a horse and was almost run over by a battalion of soldiers going in the other direction and all I can think about is what information the envelope might contain.

The paper inside the envelope is warped by rain and the ink has run. Herta’s handwriting is shaky even at the best of times, but I can make out what I need to know.

The apartment is gone. The building was hit directly by a bomb, she says. The bombing was fierce and the firefighting crews were not able to enter the area in time to keep it from burning to the ground. She went there the morning after, when the rubble was still hot, and burned her hands looking for things of ours, but all she managed to find was some flatware and the shards of one of our lamps. She does not mention the paintings.

So the worst has come to pass. There is a certain relief in it. There is no sense in worrying anymore; I can focus on realities instead of contingencies. I can realign myself to exist in a world without certain works of art. I try to imagine tiny Herta picking through smoking rubble trying to rescue our spoons. I don’t want the boy, still waiting patiently for his coins, to see me sobbing like a child. I hand the paper to Helene without speaking. I can’t say the words out loud.

“It’s a miracle she wasn’t killed,” says Helene, finally. Her voice has a catch in it but she pulls herself up and reads me the part that describes the fate of our neighbors. Professor Weigel and his wife, next door, were killed. Frau Schatz escaped by jumping from a fourth-floor window and has a broken pelvis and leg.

The Casa Piccola was not hit. The Great Hall of the University is completely destroyed, and the back half of the Secession building is blown off. The dome is still there, though.

“The great head of cabbage!” says Helene. Now she is crying. I reach into my pocket and hand the boy the first thing I pull out, a ten-shilling note. He runs, thinking I’m going to realize my mistake and call him back. They are just names to him.

The Great Hall. Where
Medicine
and
Philosophy
and
Jurisprudence
were to hang.

“What else?” I say to Helene.

“Carl Moll came to the apartment two weeks ago and removed all of the paintings to an underground storage facility.”

We walk back to the house and sit on the porch, where we can look at the lake and not talk. In the western corner, up in the eaves, a pair of sparrows are building a nest. They travel fearlessly from the birch trees to the house and back again, paying no attention to us at all.

I look in the other direction, toward Vienna. Of course all you can see from my vantage point is mountains and atmospheric haze. It is a jarringly warm day for April. The air smells of hay, and the idea of a war raging a hundred miles away seems absurd. There are sheep walking in the road.

Maybe Herta’s reports are not true. Maybe she got them secondhand. Haven’t the police cordoned off large areas of the city and instituted a strict curfew? Maybe it’s only a rumor about the Great Hall, and the opera house.

I pull the letter out of my pocket and read it again, but she does not say she heard that the opera house was destroyed, as I had hoped. She does not say that someone told her the Great Hall is rubble.

If I was there, I could protect it, I think, though I know that’s absurd. It was cowardly to leave the city at the last moment, leaving it at its most vulnerable moment, just before the onslaught, and I’m not a coward. I would risk being shot or strafed or starved.

I could go back. I could row the little boat all the way back and tie up in a canal. I could catch a ride on an army truck carrying a bunch of farm boys to prisoner of war camps.

But I am a coward. I am not ready for the accounting, not yet, the tally of buildings lost and buildings saved, paintings burned and paintings not. In my mind Vienna is still whole, I can see it. When I am stronger I can go back and face the losses. When the war ends I will go back.

Until then I need rest.

I’m dreaming: I’m making a painting of Gustav. My canvas is life-size and unwieldy. It dwarfs the room. Once I lose my balance and fall into the canvas and knock it over.

I’ve drawn him in red conté crayon, in the middle of the canvas and full-face, like a child’s line drawing. It could be the work of a mental patient. Yet the eyes are well done; they belong on a different drawing, the crosshatchings somehow imbuing life. The eyes look down and left, into the picture instead of out toward the world. Beside Gustav I’ve drawn a caricature of him as a goat, his head supported by a round body consisting of two sacs. The background is covered with filthy words written in calligraphic script.

I don’t remember writing those words, but there it is in front of me. Gustav must have done it, I think. It must be covered up. I begin painting over everything with bright, thick strokes of black and yellow. All the time I know that this is naïve, that artists build up their canvases layer by layer, starting with thin washes and working their way to the vivid colors, to the flecks of white and silver. You don’t just swathe a blank canvas with bright paint. I’m going to ruin it. I’ll have to start over. Still, the urge to hide what’s underneath is too strong.

Gustav’s figure is distorted, his hands too large, his forehead two-thirds of his face and exaggeratedly furrowed, his whole face wavering like the surface of water. He’s wearing a sack suit covered with peacocks and his feet are tied with a woman’s yellow hair. In the background are stars and spots and poppies and samurai warriors and, inexplicably, the face of the Virgin from a painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. I’ve painted another woman in as well, tiny and almost invisible in the carnival pattern. It is myself, of course. All this frenetic work is very tiring, and when the canvas is saturated and nothing of the under layer is showing, it’s a great relief.

Then the man in the portrait turns his head and looks at me. “Let me out,” he says. I find this unsurprising. I slash the hair binding his feet and cut him away from the background with a palette knife and he steps into the room dripping paint all over the floor. He sits down on the arm of the sofa and soaks it with paint, which begins to seep onto the tables and chairs and is soon climbing the walls like crimson and purple vines. Soon I can’t see anything amid all the violent color except my own hands, but I can still hear Gustav’s voice.

“Emilie,” he says.