In the Full Light of the Sun Read online

  ‘I—I’m so sorry,’ the typist stammered. ‘We’ll—I’ll come back.’

  Her face was stricken as she fumbled for the door handle. The young man said nothing. He looked at Julius. His gaze was steady. Then, bowing his head, he stepped backwards. The door closed. Julius looked down at his blood-streaked hands, the emptiness inside them. A cold breeze blew through the broken window and stirred the pages of the books.

  Later he remembered those eyes, the extraordinary milky green of them, like sea glass.

  II

  As always, Frau Lang made the necessary arrangements. The glazier arrived promptly the next morning, before Julius had finished his breakfast. The housekeeper took him out into the garden to inspect the damage. Their voices drifted up through the dining-room window. The hoodlums these days, the glazier said, they’d smash us all to pieces in our beds. There were still fragments of glass on the flagstones. The morning sunlight caught them, making them flash.

  Julius had found the Rosso under a euonymus bush, half rolled out of sight like a lost football. Her face was undamaged. She gazed at him as he crouched to reach her, a smear of earth on one pale cheek, the faint smile still on her lips. It was only as he picked her up that he saw that the back of her head was shattered, the finely worked wax split to reveal the plaster cast inside. Julius thought of Rosso in his studio, the way his fingers seemed to summon her from air and light, and his heart shrank. To wantonly destroy a work of art, to want to destroy it: he had not imagined himself capable of such barbarism. He cradled the head in his hands, his fingers folded over her gashed skull. Then, taking an ironed handkerchief from his pocket, he wrapped her gently in it and carried her back into the house.

  In the hours since then his shame had grown hard, a stone in his throat. It made it difficult to swallow. Julius pushed away his coffee cup. In the hall Frau Lang tutted to herself as she brought his coat and hat.

  ‘The glazier’s boarding up the window now,’ she said. ‘I told him it wouldn’t do, that you couldn’t be expected to work boxed in like that, but he says there’s nothing for it. The glass is too large, it has to be ordered.’

  Julius took a taxicab to his lawyer’s office. Slow-moving handcarts obstructed the roads and the sun glared in shop windows. By the time he reached Invalidenstrasse the hatred was in his bones. He sang with it like a struck glass. Brushing aside Böhm’s pleasantries, he thrust Luisa’s letter into his hands. The lawyer read it, then frowned at Julius over his spectacles.

  ‘So the painting isn’t hers?’ he asked. ‘You didn’t give it to her?’

  ‘Of course I didn’t,’ Julius raged. ‘Why would I? She detested it.’

  Böhm soothed him. A wife could not simply appropriate her husband’s assets. A sternly worded letter to Luisa’s lawyers might be enough to ensure its safe return. And if not, legal steps could be taken.

  ‘As for a divorce, I would advise postponing a decision until the matter of the painting is resolved,’ he said. ‘Perhaps she’ll come back.’

  ‘Not if I have anything to do with it.’

  ‘All the same. There is nothing to be gained from provocation.’

  Reluctantly Julius allowed himself to be persuaded. Luisa was impulsive and unpredictable, God knows what she might do just to spite him. In the lift, as the uniformed attendant worked his levers, he leaned heavily against the brass rail. It tormented him to think of his painting propped carelessly in a corner of his father-in-law’s overheated house, discarded among the brown slabs of faux-medieval furniture, the brassy knick-knacks that crowded every surface. Behind Julius’s closed eyelids the painting was as vivid as if it were in front of him, Vincent three-quarters turned, his pose recalling the great self-portraits of Rembrandt, his palette and his brushes in his hand, his eyes burning in his exhausted face as all around his head the canvas thrummed with a frenzied cacophony of violet-blue swirls and dashes. The artist and the madman, staring into one another’s souls.

  The elevator bumped to a stop. Of all the portraits he had made of himself, Vincent had written to his brother Theo, it was this one that caught his true character. In the thirty years Julius had owned it, he had bought and sold dozens of other paintings. He abhorred the modern habit of stockpiling art as though it were pig iron or petroleum, hoarding it in warehouses against future appreciation. Julius looked at a picture until he could find nothing new in it and then he let it go. As van Gogh’s prices spiralled, he could have sold the self-portrait for ten times what he paid for it, then fifty, then a hundred and more, but he did not sell. He never wanted to stop looking. In the starkness of Vincent’s fear, in the savage honesty of his scrutiny, there was something Julius could only describe as heroism.

  He went directly from Invalidenstrasse to the Hotel Adlon. In Pariser Platz people strolled in the sunshine. Foreigners of course, a plague of tourist-speculators. With the mark sinking ever further on the exchange markets, they swarmed over the city like locusts. Above the columns of the Brandenburger Tor, winged Victory whipped up her horses, celadon green against the bright blue sky. There was nothing Julius wanted less this morning than to see Salazin’s young man, but he knew it had to be done. He had seen the expression on the dealer’s face when Fräulein Grüber opened the door, the shock that was at least half fascination, the gleam in his eyes that might have been calculation but could just as easily have been glee. Dealers these days would do anything to get ahead. Young Rachmann was Salazin’s man. He would not have either of them thinking they held the advantage.

  He could have invited Rachmann back to Meierstrasse, there were enough rooms with unbroken windows, but Julius had no intention of allowing the young man back under the skin of him, of inciting him to remember. The music room at the Adlon was the preserve of favoured customers of the hotel. With its Bechstein grand piano and painted stucco ceiling, it was the embodiment of restrained luxury. In the music room Julius could be his public self, Germany’s pre-eminent art critic, composed, cultured and authoritative, a man garlanded with the privileges of lifelong success. A man above violent outbursts of emotion, as incapable of screams and smashed windows as a would-be dealer from the provinces was of paying the Adlon’s astronomical bills.

  Julius slid a note into the waiter’s palm and asked him to bring coffee. ‘When my guest arrives, please ask him to wait. I’ll see him at midday.’

  The meeting was scheduled for half past eleven. Julius settled himself at the table, spreading books and papers around him. He drank coffee, first from one cup and then from the other. A little after noon, the waiter showed Rachmann in. Frowning up from over his spectacles, Julius raised a finger and continued to write. He wrote for several minutes. When at last he capped his fountain pen, Rachmann put down the painting he carried. He pressed his hands to his heart, then extended them to Julius, the fingers uncurling in apology and appeal. There was a delicacy to the gesture, a grace even, that made Julius think of Degas.

  ‘I’ve kept you waiting,’ the young man said. ‘I’m so sorry.’ He spoke in a light, low voice, his consonants coarsened by a faint but unmistakable Düsseldorf accent. Julius glanced at the ormolu clock on the mantel.

  ‘Well,’ he said coolly. ‘You’re here now.’

  ‘I was here then, but they wouldn’t let me see you. I don’t think they believed me when I said you were expecting me. But then I’m not sure I would have believed me either.’ His smile was warm and unfeigned. ‘I’ve admired you for a long time, sir. It’s a great privilege to meet you.’

  Over the years Julius had grown accustomed to the obsequies that accompanied these encounters—his endorsement could add several zeroes to the value of a painting—but there was something different about this boy, he thought, less sycophantic calculation than a kind of unguarded candour. He would have to toughen up if he was to survive as a dealer. A man without wiles would not last long in Berlin.

  ‘Coffee?’ he offered. ‘We’ll have them bring another cup.’

  ‘Thank you. And thank you for s
eeing me. I’m so grateful. Truly. Overawed, really. When Herr Salazin suggested—I’m talking too much. I do that when I’m nervous. I’m sorry. And I’m still talking. Please tell me to shut up.’

  Julius smiled. He rang for the waiter. ‘Why don’t you show me what you’ve brought,’ he said. ‘Who knows, perhaps I’ll be grateful too.’

  The painting was an impressionistic still life of flowers and apples, and unmistakably a Schuch, the muted palette applied with the artist’s characteristically square brushstrokes. Pretty enough, if, like many of Schuch’s canvases, a little overworked. When Julius confirmed his attribution to Rachmann, the young man smiled to himself, a small, fierce smile that creased his eyes, and touched a corner of the canvas with the tip of one finger. He had a pianist’s hands, Julius thought, or a poet’s. Most painters had hands like peasants.

  ‘Is it true that, like van Gogh, Schuch sold only one painting in his lifetime?’ Rachmann asked as Julius wrote out his certificate of authentication.

  ‘It’s true except that, unlike van Gogh, Schuch chose not to sell. He despised the circus of it, he said, and besides he came from money. He could afford a little disdain.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Rachmann said. ‘Perhaps it was Schuch’s disdain that muddied his colours. Perhaps, like Fou-feu, he’d have been better off with poverty and passion.’

  Startled, Julius glanced up at the young man. Fou-feu, Crazy Fire, was the sobriquet Julius had imagined for van Gogh among the whores of Arles. The book’s sniffier critics had derided such flourishes as mendacious, figments of Julius’s overheated imagination, but what then were Vincent’s purple fields, his yellow skies? What I do may be a kind of lie, Vincent had written to Theo, but only because it tells the truth more plainly.

  Rachmann smiled awkwardly. ‘“The storm in his breast and the fierce sun in his heart.” Your book, I—it changed everything for me. The way you wrote about van Gogh’s life, his pictures. All my life I had looked at paintings, but when I tried to read about them there was nothing there of what I saw, what I felt. I thought it was because they were not something you could explain out loud. And then I read your book and it was as though you had thrown open all the windows and suddenly the air and the light and the music came flooding in and it was not just Vincent who was alive. His paintings danced. Your words made them dance.’

  There was a silence. Julius had never imagined Vincent would become a bestseller. When he wrote it, he had sought only to write as van Gogh painted, discarding the old rules and instead setting down the truth as he felt it, intensely and in a fever of colour. Naturally the art establishment had derided the book as trivial and unscholarly, as ‘vulgar melodrama’. They favoured academic monographs, dry-as-dust texts that stifled their subjects as assuredly as if they had pressed a pillow over their faces, but Julius was not writing for them. He wrote for the Rachmanns, as van Gogh painted for the ordinary working men, to open their eyes and their hearts. To make the paintings dance.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said simply and, as he scrawled his signature, something in him softened.

  Julius thought of the young man often in the weeks that followed. One evening, leaving the Philharmonie, he was sure he saw him standing on the corner of Potsdamer Strasse. The smile was already on his lips when the young man turned and Julius saw that he was not a man at all, but a bob-haired girl in a man’s suit, her stiff-collared shirt unbuttoned to the breastbone, her mouth a bright slash of scarlet. As he hurried away she put two fingers in her mouth and whistled. The harsh noise seemed to tear the night in two.

  Berlin was changing. For all their mordant brashness, Berliners were notoriously hard-working, measuring out their days in marks, but as money slipped its moorings a kind of hysteria gripped the city. It had always had its private clubs and smoky basements, hidden places promising forbidden pleasures, but now the bars and the dance halls spilled their lights across the streets and the pavements teemed with people. Suddenly, it seemed, everyone was for sale: skinny boys in sailor trousers, their cheeks lurid with rouge; girls, breasts barely covered, in negligees, in hitched-up gymslips, in high leather boots. Couples kissing hungrily, brazenly, under streetlamps. As though, with no certainty of tomorrow, there was nothing to be done but to give oneself up to today.

  At home Frau Lang let Julius in sleepily, swallowing a yawn. A single soft lamp lit the hall. No one played music at top volume or shrieked on the stairs or spilled champagne over the balustrade of the gallery. Luisa and her friends had strewn themselves through the house like dolls leaking stuffing, their trails marked by discarded furs and empty glasses and flimsy shoes tipped drunkenly on their sides. Without her, without her screeching cronies, the villa was returned to itself, hushed and immaculate.

  Frau Lang had lighted a fire in the study. She did not need to be asked, she knew his habits. In the light of the flames the wall danced, orange-tinted, and the empty nail grinned at Julius, a gargoyle sticking out its tongue. Then he switched on the lamp and it shrivelled, shrinking back into the wall. Böhm had written to Luisa’s lawyer as he had promised, requiring the immediate return of the van Gogh, and had received a bland evasion in reply. Since then several more letters had been exchanged. One of them, dictated by Julius, included meticulous instructions for the painting’s care, the necessity of keeping it in appropriate conditions, away from direct light and protected from extremes of heat or cold, of dryness or humidity, that might cause harm to the delicate surface of the paint.

  Luisa’s lawyer’s reply was brief. You may rest assured, he wrote, that my client fully appreciates the value of her asset.

  The glazier had finally replaced the study window. The lamp’s reflection gleamed in the black glass, a van Gogh swirl of yellow-gold. Julius stared at the blank white wall and the rage that filled him was a kind of company.

  It was late April when Rachmann wrote to ask if Julius might be willing to meet with him again. On Meierstrasse the cherry trees were in blossom, clouds of pink and white, and a three-mark loaf of bread could not be found for less than fifteen hundred. Beneath his careful politeness the dealer sounded shaken. A bookseller friend of his father’s in Düsseldorf had taken his own life, his widow had no choice but to sell his stock. Among the piles of books Rachmann had discovered a sheaf of drawings. He wondered if Julius might be willing to look at them. He had promised the family he would help them if he could.

  Please excuse my presumption, he wrote, but perhaps tomorrow afternoon, if you can spare the time?

  Julius’s diary was already unpleasantly full, a meeting of the prize jury he chaired, followed by another with Geisheim, editor of the Tribüne, for whom he wrote a regular arts column, but he told Fräulein Grüber to reschedule the latter for the following day. Newspaper editors were accustomed to the vagaries of circumstance. He would meet with Rachmann at five.

  ‘At the Adlon?’ the typist asked but Julius shook his head. Since the Japanese had joined the frenzy of foreign acquisition, the Adlon had grown unbearable.

  ‘Here,’ he said and the thought of it lifted his spirits.

  Rachmann was already waiting when he arrived home from his meeting.

  ‘Half an hour early,’ Frau Lang said disapprovingly. ‘I put him to wait in the morning room. I only hope he hasn’t been distracting Fräulein Grüber from her work.’

  She brought him to the study. Julius watched as the young man looked around him, taking in the Pissarro with its shimmer of silver birches, the Munch drawings in their black frames, the little Claudel he had brought down from his bedroom to replace the Rosso on the mantelpiece.

  ‘Such beautiful things,’ Rachmann said.

  Isn’t that why you wanted me, another exhibit for your fucking museum? Luisa’s voice was so sharp in Julius’s ears it was as though a crack had opened in time. Discomfited, he gestured to the young man to bring his drawings to the desk, but Rachmann had turned away towards the blank wall and did not see him.

  ‘Tell me you still see it,’ Rachmann murmured an
d the shock of it was like stepping into space, nothingness where there should have been solidity. He stared at the young man, who smiled, as though it were ordinary to lift a man’s skull and look inside. ‘Tell me that you never forget to look, that this room still moves you every single day.’

  Julius shrugged. He should have realised the young man meant only the works that were there, the ones he could see. He felt both foolish and obscurely disappointed. ‘I still look,’ he protested and Rachmann nodded, an amused scepticism pulling at his mouth. Again Julius had the unsettling sense that the young man could read his thoughts precisely. ‘Though perhaps not as often I should,’ he conceded.

  Rachmann’s smile softened. ‘Actually, I’m glad you stop looking sometimes. If you didn’t, you would never be able to write.’

  Julius had Rachmann spread the drawings on the desk. Most were insignificant. One, an unsigned sketch in red chalk, caused his heart to leap. A male nude in the classical style, his weight in his right haunch, the curve of his muscled stomach mirroring the jut of his right buttock, the quintessence of careless virility. Julius could no more have mistaken it than his own reflection.

  ‘Marées,’ he said, unable to conceal his pleasure. ‘Without question. A study for the Hesperides. Flawed, a little—there is an overworking here, do you see? He seems unsure of the angle. But otherwise very fine, very fine indeed.’

  Rachmann let out a breath, pressing his knuckles to his lips. ‘Thank God.’

  ‘You suspected?’

  ‘I hoped. Frau Schmidt has endured so much.’

  Julius looked at the drawing, the exquisite economy of the marks on the paper, and he thought of the widow in Düsseldorf, her husband, their business, everything wiped out in a single stroke. The inflation had made a mockery of Germany’s stolidly prudent middle classes, magicking lifetimes of painstaking pension payments into handfuls of dust. In Berlin, it was said, a man killed himself every single day.