The Art Lover Read online

  The Art Lover

  Andromeda Romano-Lax worked as a freelance journalist and travel writer before becoming a novelist. Her debut, The Spanish Bow, was translated into eleven languages and was a New York Times Editor’s Choice title. Born in Chicago, Andromeda now lives with her husband and children in Anchorage, Alaska. The Art Lover is her second novel.

  To Tziporah, Aryeh, and Brian:

  fellow travelers along old Roman roads, with love and gratitude for our time together in Italy and Munich

  “We are becoming more Greek, from day to day.”

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  “The day of individual happiness has passed.”

  Adolf Hitler

  CONTENTS

  COVER

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  TITLE

  DEDICATION

  AUTHOR PAGE

  PROLOGUE

  PART I

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  PART II

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  PART III

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  COPYRIGHT

  PROLOGUE

  1948

  PIEDMONT, NORTHERN ITALY

  The russet bloom on the vineyards ahead, the yellow-leafed oaks, a hint of truffles fattening in moldy obscurity underfoot—none of it is truly familiar, because I first came here not only in a different season, but as a different man. Yet the smell of autumn anywhere is for me the smell of memory, and I am preoccupied as my feet guide me through the woods and fields up toward the old Piedmontese villa.

  When a salt-and-pepper blur charges out of the grass and stops just in front of me, growling, I stand my ground. I resist retreating; I reach out a hand. Foam drips from the dog’s black gums onto the damp earth. I am in no hurry, and neither is she.

  The sprint seems to have cost the dog most of her remaining energy, though. Her thin ribs heave as she alternately whines and threatens.

  “Tartufa?”

  The teeth retract and the quivering nose comes forward. Her speckled, shorthaired sides move in and out like a bellows.

  “Old hound, is it really you?”

  She sniffs my hand, backs away for one more growl, then surrenders her affection. These have been ten long and lonely years. Take a scratch where you can get it.

  She guides me, as if I have forgotten, up to the old barn. Through a dirty window, I glimpse the iron bed frame, one dresser. But other items I’d once known by look and touch—the red lantern, the phonograph, any trace of woman’s clothing—are gone. A dark stain mars the stone floor, but perhaps it’s only moisture or fungus. In the corner, wedged into the frame of an oval mirror, is an old postcard of the Colosseum. I know what is written on the other side. I wrote it.

  I consider walking up the hill to the villa’s family burial ground to check for any recent additions—but no, even after coming this far, I’m still not ready for that. Tartufa trots ahead toward the side of the main house, toward the figure seated alone at the wooden table, a spiral of blue smoke rising from his thick-knuckled fingers. The door from the terrace into the kitchen hangs crookedly. Everything about the house seems more worn, sloping like the old man’s shoulders.

  He calls out first. “Buongiorno.”

  “Adamo?” I try.

  Now he sits up straighter, squinting as I approach.

  “Zio Adamo?”

  It takes a minute for him to recognize me.

  “The Bavarian? Grüss Gott,” he cackles, using the only German phrase he knows. But still, he doesn’t seem to believe. “You’re coming from the North?”

  “No, from Rome. I took the train most of the way. Then a ride, a bit of a walk . . .”

  “You are living there?”

  “Just visiting museums.”

  “Holiday?”

  “Repatriation of antiquities.” And I explain what that means as he nods slowly, taking in the names of new agencies, international agreements, the effort of my own homeland to undo what was done—a history already begging to be forgotten. Wonder of wonders, the old man replies, how the world changes and stays the same. Except for some things.

  After he pours me a glass of cloudy plum liqueur, I take a seat at the old oak table and ask him about his sister-in-law, Mamma Digiloramo. He gestures with his chin up to the hill.

  “And Gianni and his wife?”

  They occupy the main house with their four children, Zio Adamo explains. He lives with them, and though this villa has been in the Digiloramo family for three generations and Gianni is not even a blood relative, it doesn’t matter—Adamo himself feels like a houseguest now. Fine, it’s less of a headache for him. Fewer worries about the crops, which haven’t done so well in the last few years. Surely I noticed the shriveled black grapes on the west side of the road, approaching the main house.

  When I empty my glass of liqueur and decline a second, he says, “You haven’t asked about everyone,” with an emphasis on the last word.

  When I don’t reply he volunteers, “She moved to town. During the war, everything here went to pieces. Now she works in a café. She lives with her son.”

  Stunned, I repeat his last word back to him: “Figlio?”

  I must appear tongue-tied because he laughs, clapping me on the shoulder. “That’s about how her mother looked way back when, discovering the happy news. Not a virgin birth, but close. We celebrated without any questions.”

  “È quasi un miracolo.”

  “Your Italian is much better than last time.”

  “I’ve been practicing.”

  “Why?”

  “No particular reason. It’s a beautiful language.”

  He runs his tongue over his teeth, unconvinced. “If you wait, I can find someone to take you into town—if that is where you are going.”

  “Grazie. I’ll walk.”

  “It will take you two, three hours.”

  “Va bene. I could use the time with my thoughts.”

  “I don’t recommend it.”

  “Walking?”

  “No, remembering.” He doesn’t smile.

  Gesturing for me to wait, he pushes to his feet slowly, reaching for the cane leaning against the table’s corner, then escorts me back down the path, past the barn, to the track that leads to the dusty road lined with hazelnut bushes. Something is bothering him. At the end, he straightens his back, lifts his whiskered chin, and brushes his dry lips against my cheek. “That’s as far as I go, or I won’t make it back.”

  The dog has followed us, grateful for her master’s unhurried pace. I reach down to pat her side and mumble a few final endearments, whispering her name a final time.

  “That isn’t the original Tartufa, you know,” Zio Adamo says, looking a little embarrassed to be correcting me. “It’s her pup—the last one.”

  “This, a pup?”

  “A very old one.”

  “They look the same,” I say, squatting down to scratch her ears again, patting her ribs, puzzling over the pattern of her coat.

  He leans on the cane, face lowered to mine. “Certainly, you remember what happened to Tartufa . . .”

  “Yes,” I say, standing up to brush my hands on my trousers. “That’s right.”

  “It makes me feel better that I’m not the only one who makes mistakes.” Zio Adamo smiles. “I’m sorry for not recognizing you right away. Even after you sat down, it was hard to believe.”

  “No need for apol
ogies—”

  “It’s not just your Italian.”

  “I couldn’t put two words together back then.”

  “No,” he insists, with sudden vehemence, enough to make me wish I’d accepted that second, courage-bolstering drink. “You were different in other ways.”

  “Weren’t we all?”

  But of course, I know what he means.

  There is a temptation to say that the long-ago past is a fog, that it is nearly impossible to recall the mindset of an earlier time. But that is a lie. The truth is that more recent events, such as the days leading up to the surrender, are a fog. In and out of the army, where they sent me again once it was clear I had made a mess of things on what might have been a relatively simple professional assignment—all that is a fog. I passed through it in a half-numb state, registering few sensations beyond the taste of watery potato soup and the unsticking of dirty, wet wool from frozen, bleeding feet.

  A year or two, or eight, can elapse that way, mercifully, while a fundamental childhood incident or an essential, youthful journey can remain polished by obsessive and dutiful reminiscence. It can remain like marble in one’s mind: five days in Italy—harder, brighter, more fixed and more true than anything that has happened before or since.

  Except I’d forgotten about the dog, and only now that I am reminded can I hear in my mind the stranger’s fatal Luger shot and recall how we all stopped, stunned, watching—and clearly forgetting, wanting to forget—even as the sound rang out across the farm, the first shot of several that morning, my last morning in Italy, ten years ago. Of course.

  And if I have confused that one detail, have I confused anything else? Am I remembering my final moments at the villa inaccurately—not only the bitter, but also the sweet? Am I imagining a tenderness and a sense of possibility that never were?

  But that’s too much to ask without time to absorb and reflect on what Adamo has said, what the quiet of this villa and the padlock on the barn suggest. I cannot truly remember her, cannot truly remember then, until I can remember the person I was that long decade ago—a difficult portrait of an even more difficult time.

  On this afternoon, with acorns crunching beneath my feet, I have several hours and nothing else to do as I walk, inhaling the soft musk of the season, realizing with each footfall that I have little to lose given how much has been forfeited already. Is there also something, perhaps, to gain? No telling. Only the brittle sound of cracking shells, the memory of a different breeze on my face, the recollection of a less pleasant stroll, and all that followed.

  PART I

  JULY 1938

  MUNICH, GERMANY

  CHAPTER 1

  A light evening rain had started to fall, but it brought no freshness, only the wafting odor of brewhouse mash settling like a brown shroud over the wet cobblestones. There was no question of the month—July—or the date—the eighth. I know this because I’d been counting the days since I’d last seen Gerhard, counting them with a mounting unease. On that damp and suffocating night, I took the longest possible route to my mentor’s house, through Shirker’s Alley, where I passed a man who had clearly gone out of his way to avoid the required salute at the SS-guarded Feldherrnhalle monument. And yet as we drew near, we each looked away at unnatural angles, and I told myself I had been stupid and would never take this route again.

  For two weeks, Gerhard hadn’t appeared at work or answered any of the letters I’d sent to his home. In the absence of formal explanations, no colleague dared make a comment, not even Leonie, one of our department’s three secretaries, who—though fond of me—had avoided my every glance for several days, even going so far as to type without a sheet of paper in the roller the last time I’d passed her desk.

  Standing now outside Gerhard’s darkened door, rapping without expectation, I tried to pretend that he was out at a beer hall, even knowing that wasn’t his sort of place. I was turning to go when a tuft of dirty-blonde, sleep-mussed hair appeared in the opening gap. The hired girl looked so anxious and eager that I immediately regretted having come.

  “He hasn’t paid me in a fortnight. I can’t stay if he isn’t returning.”

  “Returning from where?”

  “Bitte, come in.”

  I stepped back. “Did he pack a suitcase?”

  “I started to pack one for him, but he told me not to bother.” She said this defensively, as if I might question her competence and fidelity, when that was the furthest thing from my mind. “And they agreed when he said it.”

  “They?”

  “Two of them.” She looked down at her bare, cold-reddened toes curling over the threshold. The building’s heat had been turned down or off. There was no smell of cooking or any food at all coming from the hallway, only the dank, mineral smell of the tomb.

  “Perhaps they weren’t taking him far?”

  This jogged a memory. “Not far—a town twenty or so kilometers from here, they were telling him. He recognized the name.” She pronounced the two syllables, which seemed to mean little to her but plenty to me and to any other Munich resident who read the newspapers. Dachau. Just a quaint village, but one that had found a profitable new industry: imprisoning behind growing walls the unmentionable domestic elements—everyday criminals and political enemies, initially—that our government had determined must be contained. Gerhard was not a criminal, nor even politically active, I would have argued at the time, not understanding then what I finally know now: that everything is political—even a simple lack of discretion, or an opinion about art or aesthetics. Especially that.

  The rain had started to fall harder, plastering my hair to my forehead, while I held my hat in my hands like someone delivering bad news rather than receiving it.

  “But what does it matter, near or far?” the hired girl added, put off by my alarmed expression, standing straighter with her arms wrapped around her thin chest. “Either way he’d be wanting a change of clothes in all that time. And his medicine—his bag of pills—he can’t go more than a few days without them, but they didn’t let him take anything at all. Here, please. You’re getting soaked.”

  But she wasn’t offering me true shelter. She had nothing to give, only much to take away, just as I had much to take away from her, by explaining the things she might not wish to understand. We were all alone in this, and all of us waiting.

  When I wouldn’t cross the threshold, she withdrew briefly and returned with a book in her hands—a reference guide that I recognized from Gerhard’s desk, the second volume of di Luca’s Sculpture of Ancient Greece and Rome inscribed to me personally. It was an unusual parting gift from a man who’d had insufficient time to take care of more basic details. But he’d been a wonderful mentor for this reason precisely: he never forgot his priorities. Art and beauty, beauty and art. No matter what was happening; no matter what would happen.

  The first time we’d met was at a small, evening art reception with several dozen mid-level bureaucrats and military officials in attendance. I’d been hired just that week, and I was so nervous entering the floodlit gallery that even the soles of my feet were sweating. A banner on the wall over my head proclaimed: “Art is a noble and fanatical mission.” I squinted at that odd choice of words—fanatical?—but thank goodness I was alone and anxious and not the type to make an impromptu wisecrack. If I’d recognized who had authored that statement, which would appear again at future art exhibitions, I wouldn’t have risked any expression at all.

  I’d just started heading for the main exhibit when an old man took me by the elbow, pinching it with a shaking, ring-covered hand as he whispered: “Like it, love it, like it, and as for the final painting, an undecided tilt of the head will suffice.” ­

  Wrenching my arm free, I turned to study his drink-flushed face. His jowls sagged above a pale blue cravat, the same shade as his eyes; his pale forehead gleamed, only slightly less shiny than his gaudy cuff links. I resented his pompous manner, but a moment later, when my new boss and the head of Sonderprojekt, Herr Mu
eller, invited me to survey the first wall of the gallery and tell him precisely what I thought, I recited like an obedient schoolboy what the opinionated elbow-pincher had said. From the pleased look on Mueller’s face, I could tell I’d just passed my first test with flying colors.

  The next morning, meeting him again in the Sonderprojekt basement offices, I thanked the old man and learned his name.

  “We wouldn’t want a disagreement of taste casting a pall over your first days here,” Gerhard said, his pale blue irises twitching as they did in the hours before he calmed them with his first midday tonic.

  “But what about the truth?”

  “The truth is something we savor—usually in private. If you are lucky, Herr Vogler, you’ll have many private pleasures in your life which shall make up for some public inconveniences, such as saying things you don’t necessarily believe, and purchasing the world’s most valuable art for fools who neither deserve nor appreciate it.”

  He wasn’t the most popular man in our office. But how unpopular, I did not fully appreciate until that starless, inclement night in July, standing outside the domestic threshold he had not crossed in a fortnight with his poor servant girl eyeing me so desperately.

  “He told me some people from his office might come by,” she said. “But no one has come. Except for you, finally.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said belatedly. “Vogler. Ernst Vogler.”

  That introduction seemed to give her no joy. It proved only how small her employer’s world had become. He’d mentioned me perhaps more than the others, and here at long last I stood: an unimpressive figure, young, a little thin, no hint of power or privilege in my manner or dress, one elbow pressed against my rib cage, trying to avoid scratching that mostly-forgotten spot that itched in times of stress. I’m sure she had hoped for more.