Paris was the culmination of our trips. I think my father knew it was the final one. Which was why he saved it for last. It was his way of bidding farewell to what we had experienced together up until that point. And he made that trip unforgettable, probably without even trying that hard. The contrast between the Louvre and the effervescence of cubism. Between the past and the future. Between his honeymoon with Mother to the same places he wanted to show me, and my life, which was already outside of her radius of action. “Mother would like knowing that, no matter where we are, we will never be completely alone.” He told me that as we watched the water flow beneath the Pont Alexandre III.
When I’ve had the choice, I’ve always opted to live in a city with a river. I prefer to daydream over the railing of a bridge than at the seaside. The sea is excessive, overwhelming. I get lost in it. Rivers are more manageable. They’re a middle point between the changing lightness of clouds and the immutable heaviness of the tide. Alma also had a weakness for bridges and, since she collected postcards, the first gift I ever gave her was a bundle of colored photographs of the bridges of Prague. For quite some time, unable to earn my bread and butter any other way, coloring postcards allowed me to live alone in my first studio. It didn’t pay as well as painting portraits or illustration work for magazines, but it was better suited to my insecurity. It was torture finishing a painting. I was never satisfied. I always had the feeling that something was missing, that they didn’t quite reveal the mystery that had given rise to them. I was helpless in the face of them, and they accumulated in a stack facing the wall for weeks or months. When I took on an assignment, the same thing happened: I never felt it was ready to deliver.“Maybe tomorrow it’ll come out better,” I would tell myself doubtfully. And few clients gave me a second chance. With the postcards, it was all simpler: I only had to add color to a work that someone else had made.
Van Gogh was like a punch in the stomach. I went to the Galerie Arnold many times to confront his paintings. I had never so clearly seen the secrets of a losing battle: behind the simplicity of the shapes and the bursts of color beat a desperate search for calm, but the brushstrokes — powerful and dense as knife slashes — reflected, when you isolated them from the whole, the failure to achieve an impossible peace. The last day, tears came to my eyes. Someone asked me if anything was wrong, but I left the gallery without answering and wandered until I reached the river. That dusk, with the waters of the Elbe ferrying downriver the fear that had held me back up until that point, I decided to leave Dresden to escape the Academy and my father’s protection, and find my own path. I don’t know if I actually ever got very far, but in Berlin I met Erika, another one of the mistakes I’ve made in my life.
We aren’t always able to foresee the consequences of our decisions. Much less of the decisions that are made around us. When I recently learned that Hofer got his foot in the door of the art world by taking advantage of his sister’s marriage to someone named Bachstitz, a wealthy Jewish dealer, it seemed like a well-played hand on fate’s part since, later, when he saw that it endangered his business with the Nazis, he had to pay for her divorce and provide his brother-in-law, who had been arrested by the Gestapo, with a safe-conduct to leave Germany in exchange for some works for Göring’s collection. Another “You decide,” I suppose. A painting by Jan Steen and two Greek statuettes, or two necklaces, I don’t remember now, is quite a reasonable price for saving your skin. Perhaps sharing Bachstitz’s relief at crossing the Swiss border would have helped me to make my decision. The paintings on the list or the Cranach. My history or my parent’s.
The days, holed up in my studio so as not to leave the Cranach alone, seemed to drag on without much of anything productive getting done. I just waited for the BBC or France Libre evening news. I didn’t go out much before Hofer’s visit either, but I did take the occasional stroll through Parc Montsouris. The ginkgo by the lake was a good shelter against loneliness. My father swore that he could recognize trees by the sound of their leaves. As a boy, when we would walk through the botanical garden in the Grosser Garten, he would close his eyes and let me lead him by the hand up to any tree. After a few seconds of attentive listening, which seemed to me to drag on forever, he would say the name and open his eyes with a satisfied laugh. I don’t know how he did it even though, later, when I wasn’t so easy to fool, I would pay closer attention to his eyes than to the place I was leading him to, I still never figured out his trick. I asked him about it shortly before he died, thinking that maybe then he would explain it to me, but he responded with another of his enigmatic smiles. I never have learned to distinguish trees by the sound of their leaves, but I like to hear them because it evokes the murmur of water. Now that I can no longer leave the house and I’m left without trees or rivers, I face up to my solitude with the same memories as ever. After all, few important things happen in life, and I suppose that one has to think about them often in order to understand them fully, if that’s even possible.
Anytime I have the heart for it, I put on the recording of Alma in The Human Voice and listen to it with my eyes closed, so I can fool myself better. I like to imagine that when she says “You are the only air I can breathe,” she is saying it to me. It makes me feel less fragile. Alma had the strength of a survivor. Her time in the Ravensbrück camp made her the least vulnerable person I’ve ever met. She didn’t talk about it much, just every once in a while, as if the weight of the memories was too much for her and she needed to release it. On another afternoon when she undressed so I could paint her body, like that first time she came to my studio, she explained that, before she became a bag of bones, one of the SS officers at the camp forced her to be his model for his painting hobby. Over the course of the sessions, to protect herself from the loathing and humiliation, to withstand the hunger and cold, but also to assuage her guilt over the privilege of working less than the other women, she imagined the colors taking flight from the officer’s palette and, like an unstoppable tide, prettifying everything they touched: her aching body; the striped clothing and clogs that lay at her feet; the barracks; the gray sky over the trees on the horizon. . And the SS officer’s scrutinizing, haughty gaze. She said that his tacit disdain for everything except the immobility of her body made her feel more alone than ever.“That’s why I like when you paint me. So I never forget.” Then she would be silent for a long while.
Without meaning to, Alma broke through my memory’s defenses. Suddenly, it all seemed too familiar. That same anxiousness to transform reality in order to make it bearable. The mud up to my ankles, the stench of half-buried bodies, the blackened, branchless trees. That same desire to flee to keep from going crazy. Be it from the Ravensbrück camp or the trenches of the Somme. Two similar mechanisms of weakening and destruction in the hands of a bunch of crackpots, often too unpolished or too expeditious. I don’t know which is worse. Right in front of me, Sergeant Forkel killed a soldier because he remained stock still with his eyes opened very wide and his hands gripping the rifle like two bluish claws, instead of attacking. “If someone wants to join him, be my guest,” he said in a voice as steely as his eyes.“Cowards are of no use to me.” Then he stepped on his dead body to climb out of the trench and run into no-man’s-land.