“Some pieces went to a few of the big state-run hotels. But the bulk went to individuals. Party functionaries. Ministry bigwigs. It was the moral equivalent, I suppose, of a millionaire collector hiding pieces in his closet. But it was the best way to display them at all while still ensuring we’d keep them in the country. So once outsiders started asking if they might please have these items back, we could honestly say, ‘Oh, dear me, these pieces are no longer in our museums, and to track them down would take ages, and, well, we’ll certainly get on the job but it can’t possibly be a priority, you see.’ Only we knew all along where everything was.”
“Because it was all recorded in the transfer files.”
“Yes. And I was their lord and master. Even as my duties here at the museum began to broaden, I held on to this role. Partly because I knew more about it than anyone else, but partly because I felt an emotional attachment. I’d rescued them and brought them back.
“But then a funny thing happened. All the Party officials and ministry chieftains who were beneficiaries of our scheme found that they quite liked to have nice artworks in their homes. And of course, their underlings were all jealous. They wanted art for their houses, too. As the bureaucracy grew, so did the demand. And of course we had nothing left to give them then but our own museum pieces.”
“And did you?”
“But of course. Just because they weren’t ministers didn’t mean they couldn’t make your life miserable if you crossed them. So we complied, and the transfer files began to grow. Museum art began moving, piece by piece.”
He chuckled again.
“I even ended up with a piece, one of the original transfer items, in fact.”
He pointed across the room to the oil painting that had so impressed Vlado when he’d first entered. It was a verdant field of lilies in the light of later afternoon, an impressionist masterpiece.
“It’s nineteenth century. Chances are it belonged in a small museum in Stuttgart. ‘Tut mir leid, ’ as the Germans say.”
“Aren’t you worried it will be damaged?”
“At first I was. When the war started I put it in the building’s cellar in its own locked cabinet. But after a while I couldn’t stand the thought of it down there with the mice and the rusting bicycles and the grubby street urchins, with the huddled families too scared to move every time the shelling started. So I went down one night to get it, and a good thing I did. The cellar was ankle deep in water from pipes that had burst in the shelling. The water was only a few inches from destroying it altogether. It was strange. It was exactly how they’d found a lot of the old German sites in cellars and mine shafts. In standing water or encrusted with salt. Blighted with mildew. Some things ruined or half ruined. Others caked in dust or nibbled by mice, or buried alive by cave-ins. They’d shoved paintings between mattresses, draped them with lingerie, blankets, and lace curtains. Amazing what they’d done with some of it. And there was my own precious old canvas, slowly dying as the waters rose. So I brought it up here. If the shells get it, if some sniper puts a hole in it, well, better a quick death than slow torture by moisture and mildew. At least this way I can enjoy it until either it or me is finished. Anyhow, where was I?”
Vlado checked his notebook. “Art was moving out of the museums, you said, trickling away a piece at a time.”
“Yes, and strictly by the book. Certainly not just anyone could come in and ask to ‘borrow’ a painting for the rest of their lives. You had to have some connections, or some weight with the party. Some asked but were turned down. I got to help decide who was worthy, which of course meant certain advantages for me. Bartering points. This carpet you see. That chair you’re sitting on. One could do quite well in my position while still assuring that the art was safe, catalogued, and insured and carefully accounted for.
“After awhile we even discovered a nice side effect of the practice, apart from our own enrichment of course. We found we were creating room for our own new artists. Most museums will send items off into storage to do that. We, on the other hand, were able to keep our patrons happy by putting art in their homes while also giving our brighter young artists someplace to hang their work. The irony is that as some of them became popular, a few pieces of their work ended up being ‘loaned out’ as well. So, you see, art begets art as it moves and shifts.”
“It sounds like a lot of volume you’re talking about.”
“By the late eighties, close to a thousand pieces, I’d say. And as each piece moved somewhere it became a part of my domain. We’d take the card out of the central file, place a red circle in the upper corner of its inventory card, next to my signature, and place it in the transfer file. And even though I was still based here, Belgrade never did get control of it. I think partly because no one really wanted to fool with it once it became too big and unwieldy. Once Pencic died I was the last one left who could really trace the whole thing back to its beginnings. So, I was curator of the world’s most scattered collection. The shepherd, if you will, of all our country’s wandering lambs.”
“Didn’t anyone ever get a little concerned about all this? Having so many pieces-what, more than a thousand, you said? – all over the place like that.”
“What was there to be concerned about? A thousand is a drop in the bucket compared to the national inventory. And it had all happened too gradually to alarm anyone. And let’s face it, Mr. Petric, how many people except for a few bent old eccentrics really know enough about a museum’s inventory to notice if a piece here and there has been removed. So, anyhow, everything progressed smoothly, my empire growing all the while.
“Then the war began brewing. A vague sort of edginess crept in. I slowed down the movement, put a halt to it, in fact. Because if anything we wanted to start putting some of our better museum pieces in more secure locations. Bank vaults, that sort of place. So we shifted our energies. And it was at about this time that I got a visit-here, not at the office-from a most unusual patron, more so even than you or Mr. Vitas.”
“And when was this?”
“March of ninety-two. Just before everything went to hell. It was a general, a brigadier in the Yugoslav People’s Army. A General Markovic. He is now somewhere up in the hills near here, I am told. His men shell us every day”
“A Serb, then.”
“Yes, a Serb. And he had suddenly become very interested in the world of art, and in my scattered little collection in particular. In an official capacity, of course. He said he was representing ‘government interests.’ I must say that he wasn’t at all the sort of man you would ever bump into in the galleries of the National Museum.”
“What did he want to know?”
“Everything. He’d had a look at the transfer file already, either that or someone had told him about it, and he knew damn well what the red circles meant. He wanted a rundown of every transfer item in the city, a summary on location-how scattered, how easy to find, how resistant owners might be to ‘protective removal,’ what our recordkeeping was like, what the insurance companies knew. And values, he wanted to know what sort of stuff had the best value. Or, as he put it so disingenuously, which items needed immediate attention if we were to save them from the war, if a war indeed began. Did he ask about technique, about the merits of different schools, the value of a landscape as opposed to, say, some abstraction that might signify something larger, something visionary, some totem or talisman? Hell no. It is like I told you, this man was a businessman.”
“Did he ever bother to explain his interest, other than saying he represented the government?”
“Oh, his motives were all very patriotic, of course. He said that he and his superiors feared war would begin soon, so they wanted to get a handle on this very vulnerable portion of our national artistic heritage-the whereabouts, the values, the scope of it all-so that once things got rough he could make sure it was all protected. He said that people at the very highest levels had expressed their concern and put him in charge of protection.”