Eduard Márquez

Brandes's Decision

To Montse Ingla

That which is not taken, but remains, is the best of us.

GEORGES BRAQUE

BRANDES'S DECISION

“You decide,” he told me. At that point I hardly knew anything about him. All I knew was that his name was Hofer, Walter Andreas Hofer, that he went around Paris looking for art for Göring’s private collection and that, when he put his mind to it, he could be quite persuasive. “You decide.” His was a confident voice, used to setting the terms; used to wielding fear and shattering people’s ability to choose.“If you want your paintings back, all you have to do is give me the Cranach.” The Cranach. I know it like the back of my hand. I close my eyes and I see it. Without shadows. With the clarity of dreams: the three figures, the steeply sloping landscape, the threatening clouds.“You decide. But don’t think it over too long, I haven’t got all the time in the world.” Words that smother the last slits that allowed in breathable air, words that weigh like a slab of slate. Then he closed the door carefully, as if he didn’t need to employ noise to intimidate me yet. Not when his glance was enough to send chills down my spine. Even now, twenty-two years later, when I come across a photograph of Hofer, I feel his gaze wandering around my studio and piercing my eyes. Incisive. Angular as an idol sculpted by hatchet blows.

At first I didn’t understand his offer. I knew they’d emptied out my dealer’s gallery with the excuse that he was a Jew, and that they’d taken every last one of my paintings, but I never imagined that, on some crazy whim of Göring’s, they’d be willing to swap them all for my Cranach. “He owns many, but he adds to his collection whenever he gets the chance,” he added. I still have the list with the titles and sizes of my paintings, a copy made with carbon paper on the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg letterhead. All very official and seemingly aboveboard. Even the pillaging and theft. “Maybe this will help you decide,” Hofer said. Not a single word more. And he put a couple of pages on one of my easels. Through the window, I saw him get into the backseat of a car stopped at the entrance to the alley. I remember the lump in my throat, the rain-damp grass between the paving stones, the beating in my chest, neck, temples. As if all the silence of the afternoon had transformed into a heart stunned by dread. Or by rage.

I didn’t know what to do for quite some time. I just paced up and down with the list in my hand. Sixty-eight numbered paintings. Titles and measurements. I even read some of them out loud. Maybe to share my discomfiture with the mute figures of the easels: “Seated Nude, 53 x 47.5; Still Life With Dice, 46.5 x 36; Forest, 94 x 113; Red House, 98 x 76; Woman By The Water, 53.2 x 48.3.” Up and down, with the floorboards creaking under my feet and my eyes fogged by tears. I had never before felt so trapped between these four walls.

My studio hasn’t changed much. I like to remain loyal to the objects that have been my companions for so many years. But only the necessary ones, because I’m not interested in accumulating layers, just maintaining essential links to my past: Grandma Johanna’s rocking chair; Mom’s sewing box where I keep my brushes; the Giotto, Vermeer, Velázquez, Van Gogh, and Matisse reproductions pinned to the wall; the old, paint-smeared easels; the zoetrope my father gave me as a boy, where the same sheep from my childhood still jumps, tirelessly, over the same wooden fence; the books; the photographs; the illustration, taken from a medieval bestiary, of a dragon clinging to an elephant’s neck. . During the occupation, I lived here as well. It seemed like a good way, without just leaving the city, to avoid running into soldiers and swastikas everywhere and having to act like that was normal. That way I didn’t have to be out on the street as much. It probably wasn’t the bravest or most committed choice, especially when there was talk of acts of sabotage by the Resistance, but I’d always believed that my only homeland was painting, with the loyalty that entails. Until Hofer’s visit. Even though I was slow to realize the importance of his extortion. “You decide.” Just two words, but enough to transform any certainty into a nightmare. Nothing was reasonable or convincing enough to help me decide. And the curfew and the darkness, the solitude and the silence made it more difficult, especially over never-ending nights, my eyes piercing the void. Despondently.

Like now. Since death began hovering over me, exhaustion gnaws away at the few moments of peace this uneasy situation allows me. I give myself over to the passing hours, aware of the clock hands, of the murmur that still connects me to a routine I’ve moved beyond, of the traces of fragility that, day after day, are added to the furrows in my body. I often wonder about the moment that, like an arch’s keystone, gives meaning to my life. Maybe not the happiest or the most intense, but at least the one that will keep me from being bitter over everything I could have done, over all the wrong turns, over all the unspoken words. And I search through my past, I rummage through my memory to retake the path that brought me here and find that moment. Unmistakable and definitive. Luminous like the eyes on Cranach’s Madonna. Or like the green of the damp, shiny grass between the alley’s paving stones after Hofer’s visit.

My father often talked about the soul of colors, about their ability to influence our feelings. He was a chemist, but his fondness for painting compelled him to study pigments. And he could turn dry terms like lazurite, aluminum silicate, or sulfur into fascinating stories, like Marco Polo’s trip to the lapis lazuli quarries in Badakhshan at the mouth of the Amu Darya River, or magical tales, like the legend of the dragon blood that transformed into cinnabar. I heard them so many times — evening after evening over weeks, stretched out on the bed in my dusky room — that I can still remember Marco Polo’s words: “In the earth there are veins of the stones used to make this blue, and mountains with mines of silver, copper and lead. And the plain is very cold.” Other nights, thanks to my father’s skill as a storyteller, I had no trouble imagining the dragon patiently waiting up in a tree to leap on its eternal enemy; then its fierce battle with the elephant, especially when its eyes got plucked out; the agonizing dragon trapped beneath the dying elephant, and the sand dyed red. I guess I paint to recreate my childhood. Ever since I was very little, sitting in my father’s study among the illustrations by Laugel and Blanc of chromatic stars that hung on the walls, I would play with the colors while I repeated his stories to myself. And maybe it’s always been like that. In fact, one of the paintings on Hofer’s list, Blue Landscape, is inspired in the cold of the Afghan plain that Marco Polo visited. If I close my eyes and think of it, I can bring back the welcoming, almost hypnotic cadence of my father’s voice reading the Travels of Marco Polo as I drifted off to sleep: “In the earth there are veins of the stones used to make this blue, and mountains with mines of silver, copper and lead. And the plain is very cold.”

I’m cold too. Always. It’s as if the tumor absorbed my warmth and turned it into a thin layer of frost that covers the inside of my body. Sometimes, when I shiver from head to toe, I imagine that I’m Marco Polo walking through the quarries of Badakhshan and I’m consoled by the intense blue of the river, by the flying falcons, by the shrieks of the riders on shoeless horses, by the musky scent of the women dressed in silks. And I would give anything to scale the mountains that surround the frozen plain, where the air is so pure and revitalizing that it cures all illnesses. But death won’t give me that opportunity. According to the doctor, there’s nothing for me to worry about. Even though he doesn’t dare to tell me, I know I don’t have much time. His eyes, his gestures, his voice betray him. It’s odd, because people talk to the dying, just like they do kids, in a special way. As if death’s proximity can only be confronted with vague words, with words that, unintentionally, mix affection and fear, fake sincerity and sadness, commiseration and distancing.

Death. Like the light that comes through the window and plays with the dust floating in the air, its color is constantly changing. Sometimes, seated in front of the easel, when my hands can hold the brushes, I try to capture it, but fail. Perhaps because I’m incapable of deciphering my true feelings. Since Alma died, six years ago, I move restlessly between my eagerness to disappear and my refusal to accept surrender. I’ve never missed anyone so much. Maybe my father. Or my mother, although I can’t remember, because she died too soon. Just like Alma. Too soon for both of us: she left so much undone; and I didn’t have her with me long enough to be able to accept her absence now. How I wish she were here now. I’m sure she could find the right words to help me.

I met her at the theater, shortly after the war. During rehearsals for The Human Voice, by Cocteau. Even though I had read the play to make sketches for the poster they’d commissioned, I was impressed by the power of her monologue. I remember Alma’s unsettling presence, barefoot and with her hair uncombed, wearing a jacket over her slip, moving over the stage with a telephone in her hand; the inflections of her voice, adapting to the sinuous text like melted wax: from whispers to shouting, from fear to remorse; the cutting intensity of the silences, with her eyes lit up and her body tense, lying in wait for the absent words of the lover who has just left her. I returned to the theater a few times after that first evening, even though I didn’t need to for the poster. It was just to see her. Now I have to settle for a recording of the play she made right before she died. I listen to it often. I put on the record and close my eyes. For a little while, Alma’s voice lessens the cold and the dread, staves off the clawing loneliness.

It took me some time to make up my mind. One late afternoon though, I approached the stage to talk to her. “You’re not sick of listening to me yet?” she asked. On that first meeting, Alma was very taciturn. Over time, I realized that was just a protective strategy to disarm people and keep them at a distance. Yet once the obstacles were overcome, she opened up with surprising candor. Like on her first visit to my studio.“I want you to paint me,” she said.“Now.” When she saw me preparing the paper and charcoal, she laughed. “You didn’t understand what I meant. I want you to paint my body.” And she took off her clothes, in silence, without looking at me. For hours, as if I were once again magically protected by Laugel and Blanc’s chromatic stars hanging in my father’s study, I traveled over her body with my brushes and my fingers smeared in paint, I turned it into a chaos of shapes and colors. With no obstacles or limits. Painting had never given me such intense pleasure, such feverish eroticism. It wasn’t the last time. My years with Alma were the best years of my life. And since she’s no longer here, like the woman who clung to the telephone in The Human Voice, I feel as if I’m in a diving suit and someone’s cut the tube that was keeping me connected to the surface.

As it progresses, life transforms into an accumulation of absences. People, objects, landscapes, colors. . Paintings. And I paced up and down with Hofer’s list in my hand and a lump in my throat: “House On The Hill, 60 x 45; Seated Figure, 70 x 88; Green Interior, 68 x 70. .” Every title conjured up a unique story: the hills of my childhood, my mother’s distracted gaze, the clarity of the dusk sifting through the studio’s curtains. .“You decide.” The paintings or the Cranach. They say that Göring had more than seventy. He took them directly from collectors or museums or swapped them for works by banned painters: four Kirchners, seven Groszes, twelve Noldes for three Cranachs; six Kandinskys, a Picasso, five Grises and eight Schieles for two Cranachs. Hofer’s list for one Cranach. My Cranach.

My father gave it to me shortly before he died. When I asked him where he had gotten it, he gave me one of those enigmatic smiles of his. I’d always found them unsettling, ever since I was quite small, because they were unpredictable. He sometimes smiled that way before scolding me for some misdeed or while he proudly savored one of my modest successes, like a tooth pulled without a tear or a drawing prize at school. Sometimes I think that it was merely a smirk, an involuntary sign of confusion at having to express his feelings. Because my father was a man of contrasts. He could be the most affable person in the world, but he had a hard time showing his emotions. There was always a hidden, inaccessible space. After losing Alma, I realized that perhaps my mother’s death left him, too, without breathable air.

I know that they first saw each other in front of a Cranach. I can imagine the situation perfectly, because I heard him explain it many times. Father, stock still, focused, at just the right distance from the painting so he could take it all in as a whole without missing the small details. Everything at once. Balance. He always talked about the balance between the whole and the parts. And about the color, the color particularly. Not Mother. She was never still. Back and forth. To the right, to the left. From the other end of the room or with her face a few inches from the painting. As if she could only capture the essence of the work when she was in motion. Usually my father had a few choice words for anyone who disrupted his enjoyment of a painting but, on that day, he didn’t say a thing. Something about her left him speechless. “Her eyes,” he told me many years later. “Of the softest green, like malachite pigment. Like yours.” What I don’t know is what she must have thought of that stern man who watched her out of the corner of his eye until she left the room. Even though eight months passed before fate brought them together again, father said that he would occasionally visit the Cranach just to bring her to mind more vividly.

Curiously, now that my days are numbered, I feel I’ve become a haven for those who are gone; for the isolated, arbitrary, and vague memories of those who came before me. Memories that will vanish along with me, because Alma and I never had any children. We would have liked to, but it was too late. Now it would be a comfort to know that something of me would live on in someone. A physical trait, a way of smiling or moving their hands, an expression. Or memories of Alma. Or of me. Or my father’s stories. But I am the last link in a genealogy of shadows. After me, there will only be room for oblivion.

It’s raining. The color of the damp grass between the paving stones hasn’t changed. It persists with the steadfastness of the words and feelings that trigger the memories. It was also raining the day Hofer brought his list and, like today, the scent of damp earth came drifting up from the alley. That smell is inextricably linked to two highly contradictory feelings: the safety of my bed, as a child, when the aroma of the garden slipped in through the window, winning out over the terrifying wrath of the thunderclaps; and, a handful of years later, the paralyzing disquiet of indecision. Even though it didn’t match up with what I’d been told about Hofer, I spent a few days telling myself that maybe he’d end up forgetting his offer and leave me alone, that surely there was more tempting prey, that just one Cranach wasn’t worth wasting more time on. Despite that, I was constantly on guard, tensing over murmurs in the stairwell or cars stopping at the entrance to the alley. I tried to paint but every once in a while my eyes would happen to land on Hofer’s list, and I would get a knot at the top of my stomach. Then, like an unrelenting echo, his words floated among the objects in the room and obfuscated the comforting presence of the Cranach.

The painting is only 25 x 20, but I could spend hours looking at it. The whole top part is filled with gray, dense clouds, heavy with rain, over a crest of snowy mountains. Behind the Madonna, to the right, among the birch trees, there is a town beside a lake. Despite the distance, you can make out the red roofs, the ogival windows, the spire of the bell tower, the smoke from the chimneys. . Someone, sitting by the water, contemplates the reflection of the homes on its surface. Further on, atop a cliff, stands a castle. A short wall separates the three figures from the idyllic landscape in the background. My father was right when he spoke about the balance between the whole and the parts: the threatening clouds and the placidity of the town intensify the loneliness and helplessness of the fugitives fleeing toward Egypt. To the left, on one of the stones of the wall, Cranach had placed his unmistakable signature: a dragon with its wings outstretched. Later, after the death of his eldest son, he folded them as a sign of his mourning. I wish I had such a simple and eloquent image to express the weight of all the absences in my life.

What color is longing? My father and I would play at assigning feelings a color: hunger, jealousy, anger, shame, melancholy. . As we strolled along the street or watched the flames in the fireplace, one of us would say a word and the other would answer with a color. “Thirst?” “Purple.” “Boredom?” “Gray.” And when, in the evening, it got late, my father would always end the same way. “Bedtime?” I never knew how to answer. I would get into bed and fall asleep thinking about it. Not like now, when insomnia has me trapped in a wasteland, lost between day and night. What color is insomnia? Fear? Sadness?

Contemplated from its end, when the vision of the whole endows each moment with its true importance, existence transforms into a geometric figure. In my case, a six-pointed star, like Laugel’s chromatic one, in which each vertex, instead of a color — red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet — points to an irrefutable epicenter of my life story. Perhaps, I now realized, the moment that would give meaning to my life isn’t a keystone, but the point where the lines uniting the vertices of the star meet. And, as in my father’s game, I would like to die knowing the color of each one. Right now, I only know the color of Alma’s. Blue, not just any blue, but the blue of the quarries in Badakhshan. Or the skies in Rubens’s paintings. The color of breathable air.

Shapes and colors. Like always. As a boy, I could spend hours copying postcards, posters, and illustrations found in the most unlikely places. I especially loved the drawings by Grützner and Von Menzel in magazines like Universum, Gartenlaube or my favorite, Jugend, because I believed they achieved the highest aim of painting: the faithful reflection of reality. I filled up a pile of folders with family interiors, gallant scenes, and streets with carriages and couples walking arm in arm. All very stilted and tawdry. Until my father insisted I study. “If you do it, do it right” was one of his favorite sayings. On my fifteenth birthday, his gift was private drawing classes to prepare me for the entrance test to the Fine Arts Academy.“You like to draw, huh? Fine, if you do it, do it right. You can’t learn it all from copying magazines.” For weeks, I had to wrestle with a bunch of plaster figures. I was used to working from illustrations and at first I didn’t get the appeal of drawing from those dusty little statuettes but, little by little, I began to enjoy it. For the exam, which lasted a couple of days, I had to copy a bust of Seneca, and I suppose, even though I found it quite difficult, that I did a pretty good job, because they admitted me into the introductory course.

I don’t have fond memories of my three years at the Academy. The worst was Professor Müller’s class because his military severity made things very difficult. We could spend days and days doing the same still life over and over. He would walk between our easels and all he had to do was point to some detail in our drawing to leave us breathless, waiting for his verdict, which was almost never favorable.“That’s not art or anything even remotely close to it” was his way of saying “Start again.” He was an inflexible and spiteful man, for whom there was only one way of understanding art: his way. And he defended it tactlessly, with an insulting disdain for those who didn’t share his view. I wasn’t surprised that, when the Nazis came to power, he used his position as rector of the Academy to enthusiastically collaborate in the purging of teachers hostile to the regime. Sooner or later, everything fits together. The pieces of the puzzle, as if attracted by a magnet, assume their rightful places. Before Hofer’s visit, I had never faced a gaze as penetrating and evil as Professor Müller’s. Or maybe I had, but only one. The gaze of Sergeant Forkel in the trenches at the Somme.

Yet over time I’ve realized that, although I didn’t agree with the way he expressed it, Professor Müller was right when he lectured on technique and discipline. In order to learn how to paint, or anything else, you have to be humble enough to recognize your weaknesses and persistent enough to overcome them. It would have been good to have other Professor Müllers to teach me how to forget, how to lose, how to resign myself. . And how to die. Because none of the deaths that I’ve experienced is useful now, as I try to confront my own. Other people’s deaths don’t count. Not even my father’s or Alma’s. The deaths during wartime don’t count either: the instant death from a bullet to the head; the slow, mournful death of an injured man abandoned in no-man’s-land; the death of a mutilated body eased by morphine. . Or the worst of all deaths, when you can no longer take any more: the one that ignores you and leaves you alive among corpses. Not a scratch on you and feeling guilty for the air that, whether you want it to or not, insists on entering and leaving your lungs in jagged bursts. Perhaps then I could have used Professor Müller’s severe gaze as he said “This isn’t death or anything even remotely close to it,” but, alone and lost like now, all I had to cling to was a horizon of flames.

Luckily, the artistic scene in Dresden made up for the weaknesses of the Academy. At the cultural gatherings and exhibitions we forgot the rigidity of the classes and shared, with no explanations necessary, our need to take risks. Any and every experiment was received with curiosity, and our eagerness to learn had us running from one gallery to the next. If someone asked me which were my favorite exhibitions, there were two essential ones: the Van Gogh at the Galerie Arnold and the Matisse at the Palais de Tokyo, at the 1910 Salon d’Automne. Even though I’ve never seen them displayed again, my pulse starts racing when I think of Music and Dance. The five figures. The three colors: the blue of the sky, the green of the hills and the red of the bodies. That was all. But it was enough to get me talking a blue streak about them. About their simplicity, the balance, the light, the purity. . Until my father stopped me. “Thank goodness there were only three colors. .” he said with a smile, because, deep down, he was proud of my enthusiasm. He couldn’t hide it. After all, he was the one who had nurtured that excitement. Ever since I was a very small boy, he had taken me to museums and art exhibitions all over. He could have left me with my grandparents and traveled on his own, but instead he chose to share his passion with me. And he made an effort to make it appealing to me. He would transform the characters in the paintings into stories: Orpheus’s descent into hell, the death of Beatrice, Ophelia’s madness. . And the names of the pigments, often so enigmatic, infiltrated the dimly-lit museum galleries. Even though I couldn’t understand how the urine of an Indian cow could become a “sublime yellow” or how the burned bark of a birch tree could survive, as if by the art of magic, in the shadows of a Van Dyck, I was dying to know more. I could never get enough.

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.

The first days weren’t the worst, because everything was so new and happening so fast that it was hard to find a moment to think. The first march, the first trench, the first night beneath a sky lit up by star shells, the first attack, the first dead body. . All with my mind blank. But as the weeks passed, routine crept in like a germ, and fear and uncertainty turned the attempts to survive into some sort of horrifying inanity. I didn’t enlist voluntarily. If I had, I probably would have been able to choose which branch of the armed forces I would serve, but I didn’t really care. I preferred to leave it in the hands of fate to avoid any possible error on my part, so I wouldn’t have any reason to recriminate myself for anything later. Besides, I didn’t understand the enthusiasm of those who signed up. When I heard talk of the desire for new experiences and the exalting power of war, I wanted to laugh. The only positive consequence of being forced to go to war was that I saved myself the disappointment of those who expected to find something more there, something more than death, hunger, and stink.

Trench war has a very limited repertoire of colors: the brown of the mud, the black of the smoke columns, the white of the exploding star shells, the yellow of the observation balloons, the red of the blood, the green of the gas. When it was calm enough, I spent hours painting. Max Beckmann once told me that drawing protected him from death and danger. It’s not true, because nothing protects us from death and danger, but it sounds good coming from a painter. He was right when he said that while drawing he was more aware of the essence of things. The flight of a skylark, the elderflowers and the shape of a cloud are more powerful than a rain of fire. Sheltered behind a pile of dirt or a stack of ammunition boxes, I superimposed landscapes etched into my memory onto the monotony of the battlefield. Then, attracted by the white of the paper, the skylark would land on the trench wall, the elderflowers would bloom beside a crater, clouds would hide the scrolls of smoke. When they pulled me from the front, I left my sketchbook there, but a member of my company sent it to me at the end of the war. Some of the drawings are on Hofer’s list.

Cancer is another good mechanism of weakening and destruction. It’s almost as effective as Sergeant Forkel. My stomach hasn’t given me any good news in some time. Long before vomiting up feces for the first time, I had lost my appetite. Lately I force myself to eat often and in small quantities — a spoonful of rice, half an apple, a walnut — but I think that soon I’ll give it up. Resistance is futile. I’m not in pain, but I’m getting awfully weak. Perhaps, if I could lead a more or less normal life, it would be preferable to have pain. But I won’t swear to that. In fact, I’m less and less sure of anything these days. Everything crumbles. And if that weren’t enough, the disease has altered the value of my memories. It’s turned them into simple events, volatile and dispensable, or it’s pushed them to the surface so they can shine with their own light before disappearing forever. Why do Alma’s eyes persevere longer than a disemboweled man? Why is Hofer’s voice more powerful than any other? “You decide.” No, I can’t. Memory imposes the rules of the game. Just like the tumor does. Sometimes I smell my hands to make sure that the penetrating, rancid stench of putrefaction isn’t escaping through my pores. I wouldn’t want to stink of death before my time.

The landscape through the windows turns like the sheep in my zoetrope. Day and night; rain and sun; wind and calm. Like always, but soon it will do it without me. Sitting there in my studio, I contemplate the reproductions of Music and Dance. They are what Matisse wanted: a palliative, an armchair to rest in. I don’t know if I’ve ever achieved anything even similar. Perhaps I’ll have to settle for having tried. The rest is out of my hands. “He who does what he can is not obliged to anything more,” my father used to say. Phrases. Memories crystallize into isolated words and phrases, often used as bait to attract the past. My father and I had expressions we used like some sort of secret code. Our favorite was “lose sight of the orpiment.” We used it every chance we got: “I lost sight of the orpiment and tripped” or “I was so bored that I lost sight of the orpiment.” I heard it for the first time when he told me about reencountering my mother after eight months. “When I saw her sitting in the audience, I lost sight of the orpiment.” It was during a conference on Cranach’s colors. While he was explaining that, in addition to being a painter, Cranach was an apothecary, allowing him access to pigments unknown to the other German artists of his time, he noticed Mother and got hopelessly distracted. He must have imagined their reencounter in many different settings, but never while he was describing the fine qualities of the yellow made with orpiment, how similar its tone was to gold. At the end, my mother was waiting for him at the exit. My father was embarrassed, apologized for losing his train of thought, and insisted on extolling the characteristics of natural arsenic sulfide, but she interrupted him with a direct question: “Perhaps we’ve no need to let another eight months pass without seeing each other, don’t you think?”

They were married six months later. In one of the photographs, they are posing in front of the hotel where they celebrated the reception. My mother was very pretty. It’s no surprise that my father “lost sight of the orpiment.” It’s a shame I never got the chance to confirm what he always said about the color of her eyes. “Of the softest green, like malachite pigment.” Like mine. Even if it’s not true, I like to think it is. Of all the photographs, the last one is my favorite, with all three of us, in front of the cliffs on Rügen Island. My mother and father are smiling. I’m not. I’m four months old and a bit sulky. Sometimes I think that I could already sense the heartbreak that would soon befall us. Before she died, before her health really began to decline, my mother wanted to travel to Friedrich’s landscapes, which she was ever so fond of. I had always believed that the whole final wish thing was silly. Now I see it differently. If I could make one, since I can’t paint Alma’s body one last time, I would ask to go back to my river to add a few more colored stones.

I have no photographs of Erika. When I left her, I didn’t take anything with me. I didn’t want to. Now I regret that, because I have trouble remembering her face. Over the years, our memories fill with shadows, half-erased figures. I’ve known three Erikas, with enough time in between for me to forget that she wasn’t the right match for me. The first Erika was a spoiled, contemptuous girl, with no interest in painting, but with parents who didn’t want to accept that. Shortly after arriving in Berlin, at nineteen, I began to teach private drawing lessons and, thanks to my dad who insisted on helping me despite the distance, I met the Bürckels. If all my students had been like Erika, I would have just kept coloring postcards to survive. She never let pass an opportunity to make it clear that she didn’t give a fig for anything I might be able to teach her. I suppose her father realized it, but I don’t know to what extent his friendship with my father led him to turn a blind eye. In any case, I could only stand it for a couple of months. The second Erika was twenty years old and showed up, along with her family and my father, at my first group exhibition. The Hans Goltz Gallery was teeming with people, but I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She had become a beguiling woman. “I still remember your face that day when, after you kept insisting I add a little more water to the watercolors, I threw them into the garden fountain,” she said. I also remember that I smacked her and suspended the lessons. The Erika at the Hans Goltz Gallery and the weeks following, during which she came to my workshop two or three times to chat, had nothing in common with the girl I had known, but the rift between us was equally large. I found her too imposing. Both for her beauty and her dynamism. Erika was all over the place. She could spend hours talking about projects that never materialized. Her enthusiasm had no subtleties or shadings. It was either all black or all white. Then she disappeared again for two years. The third Erika, whom I married shortly after my first solo exhibition, where we met up again, was no longer an impulsive twenty-year-old, but her drive inadvertently became the perfect counterpoint to my inertia.

I’ve always been curious about how people transform over the years. Sometimes I’ve even felt a little envious. Perhaps because I often have the feeling that I’ve settled for what I’ve been given from the start, that I’ve been unable to change. I think that, in broad strokes, I’m the same person I’ve always been: insecure, reserved, prudent. Standing motionless on the edges of the path. Only visible to those who insist on taking notice.

Hofer came back two weeks later. This time with two Luftwaffe soldiers. I don’t suppose it was hard for him to get them as backup because, after all, Göring was their commander-in-chief. A couple of extra heavies on loan to intimidate me. As if Hofer’s gaze wasn’t enough. Or his voice, considerably more imperious that time than the first. “I see you’re having trouble deciding,” he said. And, standing in front of an unfinished canvas, he grabbed a brush and made a few inept strokes.“Don’t you think that looks better?” Then all it took was a movement of his head. The two soldiers, as if it had been rehearsed, began to take everything — all my canvases, easels, stretchers, tubes of oil paint — out of my studio. I didn’t react. I was paralyzed by fear. I could barely stammer out a question: “Do you mind telling me what you’re doing?” Hofer rammed the brush into my chest. “Isn’t it obvious? Helping you out. .” All they left me was the painting Hofer had scrawled on. “Maybe if you aren’t distracted by all this crap, you’ll have more time to think over my offer.” Before he left, as the two soldiers hauled my supplies down the stairs, he went over to the Cranach and contemplated it in silence for a good long while. “It’s magnificent.” “Why don’t you just take it with you then?” I asked. Hofer turned, his face aflame. “Do you take us for simple thieves? I’m offering you a deal: the paintings from the gallery and now all this junk in exchange for the Cranach.” And with a sardonic smile, he stuck the dirty brush into my shirt pocket.“You decide, remember? See you soon.”

I spent all night weighing Hofer’s words, along with — when it rains it pours — the little bits of very discouraging news I had about the fate of some of my colleagues. The regime had been purging and purifying left and right. Oskar Schlemmer explained in one of his letters that, in order to earn a living after he was removed from his teaching post, he had to paint advertising murals and camouflage factories and military buildings. His desperation stayed with me, like a constant murmur in the background. At daybreak, compelled by a visceral conviction sprung from who knows where, I dug out a box of watercolors from the bottom of a drawer and, with the only brush they’d left me, I repainted the first painting on the list. Small, more or less the size of a postcard, so I could hide it easily. Dusk Beside The River. I only had to close my eyes and all the details came back to me. The reflections on the water, the row of trees to the right of the bridge, the three buildings on the left, the reddish façade of the Melanchton church.

Finally I had a concrete impulse, a certainty. For days, the paintings gushed out of me, ceaselessly. One after the other. I barely stopped for a bite to eat and a few hours of sleep. My only concern was that Hofer would show up again before I got to the end of the list. I was anxious, knowing he could return any moment. For the first time, my studio was no longer a refuge. Up until then, I could shut myself up there, often for weeks at a time, to work without interruptions, just as I’d done in Dresden and Berlin. Calmly enough to let each painting follow its own path. Without pressure from anyone. Even though I kept telling myself they were unlikely to catch me painting because I could keep an eye on the movements in the alley, and I had found a good hiding spot for the finished watercolors, I felt too vulnerable. The objects surrounding me were the same as always — Mother’s empty sewing box, the zoetrope, the photographs, my grandmother’s rocking chair, the illustration from the medieval bestiary, the books — but the presence of the defaced painting was so intimidating that they barely seemed to protect me from it. I could have turned it towards the wall, or even thrown it away, but, I don’t know why, I didn’t. And, gradually, almost against my will, it became a stalwart. It kept me from getting disheartened when the painting wasn’t flowing or when the weight of everything I’d lost was too much for me to bear. The hardest part wasn’t switching to watercolors at a time when, given the choice, I never would have. It wasn’t accepting that my routine was dependent on the whims of someone else. The hardest part was facing up to the rush of emotions that, brushstroke after brushstroke, the paintings on the list brought back to life. As the blank pages filled with shapes and colors, I reexperienced the streets of Dresden, the cold of a night sleeping beneath star shells, the cliffs of Rügen Island, the nude body of a model, the blue landscape described by Marco Polo. .

With the passage of time, our memories smooth over pain’s rough edges, lighten the burden of grief, smudge the edges of longing. But death’s proximity makes the memories that survive oblivion’s ambushes unusually vivid. Perhaps the imminence of the void compels them to make a last attempt to grab my attention. Which one will be my last thought? If I’m allowed to choose, I would prefer to die with an image of dusk as seen from our garden in Hauterive. Or Konrad’s eyes shortly after he was born. Very wide open. As if he wanted to decipher the mystery of the figures surrounding him. Given the option, I would choose to meet death with a gaze that pure. To fully perceive, even if just for an instant, the color I’ve spent weeks searching for. Or the lapis lazuli quarries in Badakhshan, because gathered there, under their protection, are father’s voice, Cranach’s Madonna, Alma’s gaze, and the soft murmur of my river. I earnestly hope, whatever my final image is, that fear doesn’t keep me from being clear-headed enough to enjoy it one last time.

When it wasn’t so cold and I could open up the studio windows, what I most enjoyed over the long dark nights was hearing the owls, while I waited for dawn so I could continue painting. I tried to locate them by staring into the blackness, but always failed. Then, as if his voice came to me from those days when we would collect materials to make our own colors, I imagined one of my father’s explanations, which I often found quite cryptic: “They hide so you can’t take what they know from them.” And he would scratch his chin. As if giving obvious answers to a curious kid made him itchy. As we walked, he showed me all kinds of things I never would have discovered on my own. It would be nice to always have someone beside us who helps us to see and understand the world. Particularly when confusion and terror push us into the depths of ourselves. Even though it was hard for me to comprehend that a squirrel symbolized evil or that a tulip represented the transient nature of earthly goods, I longed to hear his stories. He spoke without rushing, savoring the details, as if the evening would stop to allow us to return home in the light of day. He was the same with paintings. Sometimes, when we were visiting a museum, strangers would even stop to listen to him. A dog by Van Eyck, a tiger by Rubens, a sprig of lily of the valley by Dürer, or a strawberry by Baldung would lead him from Ovid to the Song of Songs, or from Pliny the Elder to the New Testament. I never understood how he knew so many things. I suppose paintings and books offered him what he was unable to find in life.

I doubt that I’ve done much better for myself, but I learned from living with him that a good story is a perfect remedy against loneliness or fear. Like the story of the anemone, Mother’s favorite flower. My father told it to me in front of Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks. On a hunting trip, Adonis, incestuous son of Myrrha and her father, is attacked by a wounded boar. Seeing him dead, Venus — who fell in love with him because Cupid mistakenly shot her with one of his arrows — sprinkles his blood with nectar and turns it into a red flower.

During their honeymoon, as they visited the Louvre, my mother got excited when she recognized the plant in the lower left corner of the painting.“As a little girl, they called her ‘the all-seeing eye,’” added my father, “because she never missed a thing. Like you.” I don’t know what surprised me more: that Mother had been observant like me, that Adonis was born from the myrrh-tree, or that the name of the flower he turned into described the airiness of its petals, since ánemos, in Greek, as I learned in front of Leonardo’s painting, means wind.

I wish someone would tell me a story like that now; perhaps it would distract me from death. Maybe the tumor would briefly stop its advance, like the curious museum visitors, and give some respite to my decrepit body. I haven’t looked in the mirror in days to avoid confronting a face that I don’t recognize anymore. As a boy, when one of my arms or legs would hurt for no apparent reason, they would tell me it was because my bones were going through a growth spurt. Now, after many years at a standstill, I have the feeling that they’re growing again, trying to make their way through the skin. It is hard to accept that there is no turning back. My doctor claims we die before our time when we have no reason to live. And he says it with such certainty that I don’t dare tell him that Alma died too soon with plenty of reasons not to, but what’s the point. When he talks to me, I don’t know how much is just naiveté and how much is a lecture on how I should be handling this better. He’s a good guy, but he doesn’t realize that there’s no need to insist on understanding any of it. My father died too slowly. Alma, too fast. My father knew what was happening to him. Alma didn’t. The rest is incomprehensible.

Of all the bad news I’ve had to deliver in my life, the worst was telling my father that nothing could be done.“So I’m not going to make it?” he asked me in a shaky voice.“No, you’re not. I’m sorry,” I answered. I still remember him staring at me for a few seconds. And the silence. Long and dense, as if no words could break through it. We didn’t talk about it again, but I know that I did what I had to. And, luckily, we had enough time so he could go without leaving anything undone. Or almost anything. When I think about Alma, on the other hand, I blame myself for everything I didn’t do and say. Early one morning, I walked Alma to the station and she got on the train and waved goodbye, just the way she had so many other times. She was nervous and absorbed, as she always was when starting rehearsals for a new play, but she hid it by constantly repeating everything I had to do in her absence. “Most of all, don’t forget the plants.” “Don’t let Rufus onto the bed, he covers it in hairs.” “Don’t paint all night long, if you can help it. You know it’s not good for you.” She wasn’t very bossy, or even particularly organized, but those details kept her mind occupied. And that evening I had to identify her body. All it took was a switchman’s oversight to make this world a less hospitable place. And none of the instructions Alma gave me helped to make it any more welcoming. When I weigh what it’s meant for me to live without her, I’m pleased to think that my disappearance won’t have any lasting effect on anyone.

Rain blurs the edges of things. Resting my forehead against the windowpane, I observe the puddles in the alley. I like watching how they change shape, and finding forms in them. During the war, to relieve the tedium of the trench, I would contemplate the clouds and the camouflage tarpaulins, searching for animals, objects, flowers, faces. . When she was bored, Alma would do the same thing, except with shadows. Even though we apparently had little in common, with every coincidence we established links between those parts of our lives we hadn’t lived through together. Every “me too”—like our passion for bridges or the songs of Kurt Weill — became a way to fill in the gaps. Despite everything, there is still so much I don’t know about Alma. I often think “Alma never told me what she did after. .” or “how did she meet so and so?” or “why didn’t she ever explain how. .?” Unfortunately, now all those questions I put off have been left unanswered. Yet, really, what do we ever learn about the people we’ve loved? All I know about Alma is what she wanted to share with me. The rest has been lost forever.

Alma was born in Prague. She didn’t talk much about her childhood. When she did mention it, she would inevitably end up saying,“Thank goodness for my mother. I don’t know what I would have done without her.” Even still, she wasn’t happy as a girl. Alma’s father was a distant, inflexible man who ruled over the family’s life with a bilious severity. His outbursts were so formidable that Alma made every effort to fade into the woodwork. Before starting school, her only pleasurable moments were her daily walks with her mother. No matter what the weather, they went out to wander around the city. When we traveled to Prague together, Alma wanted to visit her favorite spots: the Belvedere, the park on Sofia Island, and the Botanical Garden, where, during a music concert, while her mother was distracted, she got too close to the lake and fell in. I had never seen her so excited. Every place was the touchstone for some memory: the cross-eyed toll collector on the Kaiser Franz Bridge, a dog with a dead squirrel in its mouth, a woman chasing a hat blown by the wind, the nightmares caused by a story about the gargoyles on the cathedral, a dress smeared with cherry strudel. Crossing the Mánes Bridge, she explained that, when she was a girl, there was only an iron footbridge and that, early one winter day, she saw footsteps that disappeared over the snow-covered railing. For a long time, she was obsessed with imagining a man jumping into the river’s freezing waters.

I’ve thought about suicide too, to save myself from my fate, but I haven’t made up my mind to take that step because it would deprive Alma and my father from living to the end. And Erika and Konrad. And Professor Müller and Sergeant Forkel. I have the feeling that it’s only the memories — mine and others’— that keep me going now. And I don’t want to give them up any sooner than I have to.

To protect herself from her father, Alma would lock herself in her room and entertain herself watching the Moldava River pass by, or reading or dressing up in costumes. She wasn’t naive enough to think she could win him over, but she did think that if she changed her appearance her father would treat her differently. But it never worked. “I guess I still act out roles, looking for allies and understanding,” she would say. Everything was simpler with her mother, who defended her as best she could and, when Alma was older, kept everything that would have infuriated her father from him. They just had to keep their stories straight, with all the lies that became increasingly necessary as Alma got involved in artistic and literary circles and lived a life that collided with her father’s severe morality.“And thank goodness my mother acted as a lightning rod,” she said more than once. Yet despite all that, there were constant confrontations.

In some of the photographs that Alma was able to hold on to, the difference is clear: her father always has the same sullen, haughty bearing; her mother, on the other hand, is the very image of bonhomie. It wasn’t that she had no objections to her daughter’s behavior, but living with her husband, instead of daunting or embittering her, had made her a more tolerant person. At least tolerant enough to steel herself when Alma decided to devote herself to the theater, even though that wasn’t at all the world she would have chosen for her daughter.“She understood that my happiness couldn’t be a source of conflict,” she told me. Her father, on the other hand, never accepted that she wasn’t interested in living up to his expectations. In spite of everything, in high school, thanks to her mother acting as “a lightning rod,” he reluctantly allowed Alma to act in the school drama club. But when her “teenage flights of fancy”—as he liked to call it — became an insurmountable obstacle on the path that he had unilaterally carved out for her, he kicked her out of the house.

That came after the only time he attended one of her performances. After the premiere of Spring Awakening at the Kammerspiele, as she waved into the whistling crowd, Alma saw her father’s eyes staring at her from one of the first few rows. The play, in which Wedekind attacks adult moral prejudices and hypocrisy, was too much for traditional conservative minds. And, for Alma’s father, the role of Wendla, the naive, idealistic girl who dies after a botched abortion, was the last straw. When she got home, after wandering around all night trying to screw up the courage to confront him, Alma found her things at the foot of the stairs. They only saw each other on two more occasions.

A few months later, taking advantage of some contacts she got from a friend in the Prague circles — I think she mentioned Paul Kornfeld, but I’m not sure — Alma went to Berlin to study at the Deutsches Theater Institute and work with Max Reinhardt. “I owe him everything,” she told me more than once. With Reinhardt, she not only learned to “do real theater” but also to be daring enough to make the most of her versatility. Alma could move easily from the classics to young contemporary playwrights, or from denser, philosophical texts to parodies and cabaret songs. Her curiosity was boundless. And, when performing expressionist drama or acting in the evenings at Reinhardt’s cabaret, Schall und Rauch, she showed her nonconformity with and rejection of an increasingly degraded social and political situation. I imagine that the years living with her father made her particularly uncompromising with moral hypocrisy and the abuse of power.

Alma knew many cabaret songs. When I spoke to her about Hofer for the first time, she sang me one whose last verse mocked Göring’s medals and paunch, calling him “the artist of Prussia.”“Is it yours?” I asked her. “No, not by a long shot, someone added that verse to a song by Waldoff,” she answered, a tinge of admiration in her voice. I guess if I had known Claire Waldoff was one of her idols, I wouldn’t have been surprised that she mentioned her as if she were “Tebaldi” or “Callas.” Despite the lightness in tone, I could tell that chatting about Göring wasn’t her cup of tea.

If “Waldoff ” had met Hofer, she probably would have dedicated one of her diatribes to him. No, not probably. Definitely. Because Hofer — a cynical, arrogant social climber — was a perfect target. He became Göring’s adviser through various machinations and, once he got the position, held onto it with evil, intimidating cunning. And, like all social climbers, he had a great skill for self-protection. When the Allies recovered part of Göring’s collection, hidden in a tunnel in the town of Berchtesgaden, Hofer offered to collaborate with them and, without the slightest scruples, pretending to be someone else, he took advantage of the media presence to act as a guide for the recovered works. In one of the photographs, published in Life magazine, he is showing — with one hand on his hip and the other on the painting, a Leda and the Swan by Leonardo that’s not actually by Leonardo, but by one of his disciples. Judging by Hofer’s supercilious pose, it seems he didn’t know that or, if he did, he hid it with his characteristic cynicism. Although it pains me to admit it, I can’t help but feel somewhat envious at seeing him so confident, because there have been many points in my life where I should have been bolder. “There’s no need for you to always have that frightened look on your face,” my father would say. “People can see it, and then you’re done for.” I suppose Hofer noticed it too.“You decide.” My paintings or the Cranach, for “the artist of Prussia.”

My character didn’t help me much at school either. Luckily there were more tempting prey in my class, like “egg face,” “skunk,” “booger-eater,” and “wanker.” Once I got used to being ignored, which was considerably more tolerable than the humiliations the class martyrs were subjected to, I could do my own thing without many obstacles. Things changed with the arrival of Marcellus Goldschmidt, my closest childhood friend, because, when he noticed me, I became visible. Maybe even too visible. Marcellus was a dunderhead, he had no interest in school, but he was clever enough to get what he could out of things. And that’s where I came in. One fine day, sitting at the back of the classroom, he offered me a “proposition,” one of his favorite words. Marcellus had taken his father’s collection of erotic postcards and, when he saw my drawings, he realized he could palm them off on our classmates in exchange for their homework.“You copy and I’ll distribute. What do you think?” he asked me. I accepted without the slightest hesitation. Not so much to save myself having to do equations and Latin translations, which I don’t mind, but mostly not to disappoint him since, actually, the only one who came out ahead was Marcellus, because it took me more time to copy the postcards than to do my homework. The “proposition” went on for less than a trimester and ended up getting us both expelled.

Even though we weren’t in class together anymore, we still saw each other. In secret at first, because our parents didn’t want us to be friends. Until I started at the Fine Arts Academy, we were inseparable. We could spend hours talking about everything and nothing. Or out on the streets, spying on the girls we liked. Or waiting to slip into the variety shows at the Wintergarten or the El Dorado. What I remember best of all is one evening at the Circus Sarrasani. We were so dazzled by one of the amazons that we were talking about her for weeks. “Can you imagine her naked?” Marcellus would ask me when we locked ourselves in his room to masturbate. No, I couldn’t imagine her naked. Perhaps because, at that point, I had only seen Marcellus’s sister in the nude, on the sly and in very dim light, and I was incapable of establishing any link between that pale, bony body and the exuberant women on his father’s postcards. Later, as often happens, I lost track of him. We only ran into each other once and, when I told him my job was coloring postcards, he laughed like a madman as he patted me on the back.“You see? Everything happens for a reason. Thanks to me you have experience in the world of postcards.” The last thing I heard about Marcellus was that he died in Auschwitz.

I had never seen my father so upset. On the way home from the meeting with the school principal, all he said was “I didn’t expect this from you. I’m so ashamed!” And he didn’t speak to me for a week. I was used to his silent phases, when the sadness that darkened his gaze contaminated everything he did, but that time was different, because I knew I was the only one responsible. And over time I’ve learned that there’s nothing worse than letting down someone you love. Or maybe there is: when someone tries to make you believe that you would’ve disappointed someone who is no longer around. “Have you even thought about what your mother would think about all this?” my father asked me a few days later. No, I hadn’t even thought about it. And I doubt it was some low blow to her memory. I like to imagine that she occupied a separate place, some sort of secret territory where the boundaries between what I’d been told about her and what I’d had to invent to fill in the gaps blended together. It’s hard to live with the idea of someone that you’ve created based on other people’s memories, because often there’s no way to make them fit with all the things you don’t know. Besides, even though it was hard for me to accept, the fact that Mother had eyes like mine, was observant, and also liked potato fritters and Friedrich’s landscapes didn’t really mean anything at all, since I don’t know if those things were true or just my father’s strategy for giving me something to cling to. Sometimes I try to imagine what it would have been like to live with her, but I can’t. Everything’s been filtered through my father’s critical lens, through his ability to tell me stories — the honeymoon, a rainy day in Moritzburg, my birth — and to evoke small details — a word, a gesture, a color. Or a shared obsession.“Your mother couldn’t stand hands with their nails all bitten down either,” he would say to me every once in a while. Who knows. . I suppose that, once again, it’s a question of balance between the whole and the parts, which is impossible to strike when you haven’t lived with someone long enough.

If you don’t learn to make it bearable, guilt can be a bottomless well. Over time I’ve managed to work it out so that, of all the guilts I drag around, only two are particularly burdensome: my mother’s death and abandoning Konrad. Father never recriminated me for anything, but a snippet of conversation overheard randomly became one of the most painful discoveries of my life. With his back to the door, not realizing that I had gotten out of bed and was listening right outside the dining room, he said: “Ilse never recovered from the birth.” It took me a long time to understand what he was talking about, because it had never occurred to me that I could be the one responsible for my mother’s absence. I remember that I went back to my bedroom with my feet frozen and didn’t fall asleep until the early morning. For the first time, an accusing finger, invisible but devastatingly effective, turned me into the key that explained a world of silences and evasive replies. Whatever the case, and even though it could seem like a lame argument, I’ve always been consoled by thinking that there was no way I could have prevented Mother’s death. With Konrad it’s different, because I could have stayed with him and, perhaps, who knows, taken him down to the basement in time, but my living situation with Erika and the siege by the National Socialists were so asphyxiating that I was overcome with a desire to be free of them, and as such unable to predict the full scope of my decision. And when I realized the mistake I’d made by fleeing Berlin it was already too late. Besides, in addition to my regret over abandoning Konrad, there is the added guilt of having survived him. I’ve asked myself the same question a handful of times,“Why him and not me?” but I still don’t have the answer. And, the way things are going, I doubt I’ll ever figure it out. All I know is that it’s not easy to outlive your son.

I suppose that things could have been different but, luckily, there’s no way of knowing if they would have turned out better or worse. And now it doesn’t matter. Although it’s hard for me to accept — especially at night, when it’s silent enough to hear the woodworms chomping on the floorboards and life seems reduced to an exhausting wait for a daybreak that never arrives — I know I have no reason to complain. After all, despite the many shadows that darken my life, the weight of the losses — as painful and impossible to forget as they are — don’t shift the overall balance. My father gave me the gift of a magical childhood, I survived the carnage of the trenches, I’ve been able to devote myself to painting. . Perhaps I didn’t do so well with women, but at least I have the mesmerizing memory of Alma.

Also, I was quite lucky during the occupation. Luckier than many other people. Once I got used to the gnaw of hunger and the blackouts, the worst was waiting for the clamor of the anti-aerial cannons and the uproar of the bombings, especially when they came from the outskirts to the heart of the 15th, just past the Montparnasse cemetery. If the planes had veered off course a little, Hofer might have had to settle for cursing in front of the remains of my studio while he tried to think how to explain to Göring that he had lost the opportunity to acquire a new Cranach for him.

The three figures in the painting rest beneath the branches of a languishing fir tree. The Madonna has the child Jesus seated on her lap. Her gaze is unfocused and her eyes are sad, but it’s a resigned sadness. A transparent veil covers the golden curls that fall over her shoulders. She wears a blue shawl over a garnet-colored tunic. Her left hand supports the holy child’s back. Her right, with the fingers half closed, holds up a cluster of grapes. Saint Joseph, with a red cape over a brown tunic, looks at the Virgin tenderly. Bearded, and with a considerably receding hairline, he holds a hat in his right hand and a cane in his left. The child Jesus, with a large head and an old man’s face, brings a grape to his mouth with his right hand and rests his left on the cluster. In the foreground, lower right, there is a columbine and, to the left, a mallow bush without a single bloom.

All of it is there for a reason, the blue wrap, the grapes, the columbine, but, despite being somewhat stereotypical, the whole is fascinating. To simplify the work for his disciples and get the most out of them, Cranach produced the models needed to make the paintings he was commissioned and developed a technique that was effective and easy to copy. With that way of approaching the work, placing professionalism and the prestige of his workshop above the pretensions of a genius creator, it’s not surprising that there are hundreds of works with his signature. It’s so different from the individualist vanity of our time, where pretty much everybody thinks they’ve invented the wheel. Well. . there’s no point in harping on that anyway. It’s just one more losing battle. Alma used to tell me: “You waste too much energy on problems that can’t be solved.” And she wasn’t wrong. I’ve always been like that. But anyway, at this point, with one foot in the grave, the only thing I can really do properly is get riled up over things.

Alma’s favorite color was blue. I would have liked her to hear my father’s explanations of the fortuitous origins of Prussian blue and the use of indigo to protect from snakebites. It’s a shame they never met. Every once in a while, it would have been nice to share father’s company with Alma. And vice versa. Sometimes, when I am missing them, I imagine them sitting in the Hauterive garden talking about the best way to graft, or how to prune the magnolia. I’m sure they would’ve understood each other, because Alma was as curious as father, if not more so. When she wanted to know something, she wouldn’t stop until she found it out. And they both had the rare ability to get me talking. It was impossible to hide anything from them. And they were both great listeners, better than anyone else I’ve ever met. They could turn a shared silence into the finest of comforts. Erika, on the other hand, was very different from my father. Even though she was the daughter of one of his closest friends, he never understood my marrying her. “She’s not right for you,” he once told me. Only once. Then he always behaved as if he had never said or even thought that. He was too scrupulous to reveal his opinions about people. Or criticize them. Even when my relationship with Erika started to fall apart, he refrained from reminding me that he had never thought it was a good idea.

The blue was simple, but choosing which color should go on each of the other vertices is much harder for me. And I suppose that someone as learned as Auguste Laugel would tell me to go to hell if he saw me using his chromatic star for such a trifle. Every time I’ve tried to read his book on optics and the arts, which I found in my father’s library, I could never get past the first few pages. Maybe because, deep down, instead of his physiological meditations, I’m more fascinated that two hundred grams of dried saffron stigmas can color a hundred thousand times their volume of water. Or that, according to some medieval recipes, men’s urine works better than women’s when preparing the violet that the illuminators extracted from the orchil. What I find most disconcerting though is that I remember my father’s stories so well but I don’t know so many other things, like why he kept Laugel’s star hanging on the wall of his study. When people disappear, all we’re left with is a territory covered in signs that are impossible to interpret. Isolated indications. Enigmas. Sometimes I try to imagine what the person who will have to empty out my studio will think about the indecipherable remains of my life: the zoetrope, a postcard of the Pont Alexandre III, my mother’s sewing box, Hofer’s list, a poster for the Schall und Rauch. .

The rain falls with an unhealthy insistence. As a boy, I liked it because it left behind a trail of puddles to splash in. And, despite my father not allowing it, I couldn’t wait to slip out onto the street and shatter those mirrors that reflected the sky and the houses’ façades. Afterwards I had to hide my drenched clothes. Now I prefer the warmth of the sun. It helps me stave off the cold. With my eyes closed, motionless as a lizard, I can spend hours on the terrace in my deck chair. Soon, though, the autumn will start to do its thing. And then comes the long winter. I don’t know if I’ll have the strength to hold out until the days began to glimmer like they are now. I fear that, soon, I won’t know how to face up to the darkness. Perhaps if I could paint as a release. . But I’m too worn out to do anything that’d be any good.

I’ve often been asked why I paint. And I’ve never known how to respond. For me, painting is like breathing. Or speaking. There’s no reason to complicate things unnecessarily. I also paint to save myself the feeling of helpless vulnerability I get when I don’t. Besides, painting has allowed me to live in a way that’s worked for me. From a certain distance, as if there were no need to jump in with both feet. Out of fear, I suppose, because I’ve never been sure enough of myself. Even during my years at the Academy, I envied the drive of some of my classmates, their determination as they sought out their own path.

Of all of them, George Grosz was not only the most steadfast but also the most assertive. Even though we were very different, because George was as extroverted and fearless as I was reserved and prudent, we ended up becoming friends. And aesthetically we had nothing in common either. His truculent urban scenes, his risqué eroticism, and his aggressive political drawings were light years from my aspirations of balance and purity. But we got on incredibly well and I usually found his advice very useful. Besides, we had a great time together. Especially when we were living in Berlin. Our partying would go on all through the night, and the wee hours would often find us at his studio on Lichterfelder Strasse looking at his new paintings.

When I think about those years before the war, I realize that the urge that drives me to paint has always been basically the same. I’ve changed the way I confront it and express it, but the essence remains unchanged. Like Matisse says: making the colors sing. I’ve never aspired to anything more, from my first landscapes to the pebbles in Hauterive.

What most surprises me about my work in the Dresden period is the contradiction between the rigid academicism of my drawing and my bold use of colors that, despite some of my teachers not understanding it, progressively moved away from merely imitating reality and became increasingly more intense and strident. In the process of freeing myself from rules and prohibitions, color progressed faster than line, until I moved to Berlin. As if it were a variant of my father’s game where we asked each other what color certain feelings were, when I stood in front of a landscape to paint it, I didn’t just rely on my vision. I also listened, smelled, tasted. . Then a bell tower could have the color that the sound of its ringing evoked in me. Or a tree the tonality that the taste of its fruit inspired. It seemed a good way to express my emotions with the utmost faithfulness and conviction. And I still feel that way, because it continues to be a technique that works for me.

Berlin gave me distance from the Academy and from my father, and it brought me back in touch with George, who had moved there a year earlier and was instrumental in getting one of his professors at the School of Arts and Trades, Emil Orlik, to agree to give me lessons. Up until that point, no one had ever helped me to formulate the questions that would lead to useful answers. Emil Orlik urged me to draw without so many hang-ups and to let go of my fear of the immediacy of the results.“A drawing isn’t necessarily better because you spend two days working on it,” he would tell me. Making five-minute sketches helped me loosen up my wrist and achieve a more spontaneous, incisive line. Which was more coherent with the vibrant colors and chromatic contrasts of my previous works. So, almost instinctively, my work began to fill with more vigorous figures and objects.

Emil Orlik. . Who would have thought that he would become another link to the Alma I never met. The first day I went to her house, she enthusiastically showed me the poster from the opening of the Schall und Rauch. “I bought it at the Saint-Ouen flea market. It’s by Emil Orlik.” And she explained that, one night, after an evening at Max Reinhardt’s cabaret, Emil Orlik gave her a portrait he’d made of her while she was on stage. “And he captured me, in just the time it took to deliver my monologue,” she added. “It was amazing.” But when she got back from Ravensbrück, she found that they’d looted her apartment and the drawing had disappeared. They’d taken everything. She was barely able to recover a few photographs and books. So when she’d seen the poster, she couldn’t resist buying it. She saw it as a good way of closing a circle that had been left broken so many years prior.“And, Emil Orlik was from Prague too,” she said finally.

The years in Berlin were very intense. And productive. Possibly the most productive years of my life, since all I had to worry about was painting. But the war ruined all that. Like a furious hand, it crushed my few, hard-earned certainties about myself and about the world and the people around me. Nothing particularly extraordinary, but they had been useful enough to keep me going.

After a week of quartering in Combles, where we survived as best we could in the basement of a big, destroyed house, arriving at our positions in Guillemont was like entering Bruegel’s The Triumph of Death. All that was missing was the skeleton with the scythe riding through no-man’s-land. I had gotten a sense of what awaited me over my trip through the communication trench, but it wasn’t of much use to me. I’d seen trees reduced to splinter, craters filled with water, horses with their legs in the air and their innards smoking, blackened carcasses of abandoned vehicles but the front was nothing like that. No. Nothing at all. The front line was infinitely worse. A wasteland extended before us, of earth dug up by grenades, without a single blade of grass, where the dead on either side lay mixed together with rusty weapons and scraps of uniforms. The stench was nauseating. Legs and arms emerged from the parapet that protected us from the English; they were as rigid as the stakes prepared for stringing up barbed wire. We often had to step on corpses just to move around what remained of the trench. That was the worst, worse than the fear and the cold, worse than the uncertainty and the taste of gunpowder in our mouths. I never did get used to walking on soft chunks of rotting flesh.

On the third night, one of the soldiers in my company ran his bayonet through his hand so they would take him off the front. When Sergeant Forkel realized what he was playing at, he forced him out into no-man’s-land and toward the enemy trench. “Let’s see if you’re lucky and you can walk out of here through the big door. Like a true hero. Not like a cheat,” he said to him without blinking.“No, please, no. Please, no,” repeated the soldier over and over as he showed his bleeding hand. I have never seen anyone so vulnerable. Soon after, a flare lightened the sky with a ghostly glow and a shot silenced his voice. No one did anything to stop it. When I think about him, it turns my stomach, but then, afraid of Sergeant Forkel’s reaction, I didn’t lift a finger.“One more down!” shouted someone from the trench in front of us.

I began the sketches for the Variation on a Theme by Bruegel that very night. Huddled in a hole carved out of the clay, I drew with a ferocity I hadn’t known I was capable of feeling. For Robert’s torn-off legs, for Thomas’s charred body, for the blood spurting from Klaus’s ears, for the eyes bugging out of Günter’s head after it was shot open. . “One more down!” one after the other. With names I no longer remember and lives that could have been my own.

Every time someone died by my side, I asked myself the same question I asked when I lost Konrad many years later: “Why him and not me?” Then, unable to accept that my continued breathing was just a matter of luck, that, no matter what I did, it was impossible for me to alter the course of events, I grasped at any explanation to try to make the arbitrariness of my existence bearable and overcome the distress I felt over my survival. “He took too many risks,” I would tell myself. Or “He wasn’t crafty enough.” Or “He didn’t clean his rifle well enough.” The idea that it could all have a palpable cause helped me with the devastating routine of the trench. It’s different with Alma and Konrad though. Hard as I try, I can’t find anything that consoles me.

Of all the possible ways to die, gas was what terrified me most. Every time the rattle sounded to warn us a toxic cloud was on its way, the idea of putting on my gas mask was so distressing that I would wait till the last minute, when the burning in my eyes and throat was unbearable. I couldn’t stand the lack of pure air, the veins in my temples about to explode, the fogged glass. . Many years have passed, but all the nerves in my body still tense up when I hear a child playing with a rattle. I can’t help it.

After putting the front behind me, I struggled for a long time to convince myself that there was any point to starting over, going back to the place where I’d left behind my previous life and resume it, to keep going forward. After five months in the sanatorium at Görden, unable to go it alone, I had to move back in with my father. For almost a year, my life was hampered by insomnia and anxiety attacks. My father, more affectionate than he’d ever been before, really tried to lighten up the situation, but I only had to observe him when he lowered his guard to realize that a listless son filled with nervous tics wasn’t exactly the outcome he’d been hoping for from my war experience.

To cheer me up, he would buy drawing materials and take me to the Gebergrund valley or around Meissen, two of his favorite hiking spots, in search of landscapes to paint. Time and again he came up against my helplessness in front of a blank canvas, but he did manage to make me feel like a kid again, captivated by his stories.“What a contradiction, don’t you think?” he asked me one day, as we sat in front of a hillock covered in vines, with the sun’s rays illuminating many nuances amid the leaves.“It’s impossible to make any of these greens from the plants around us. .” I didn’t say anything, but I remember that, while my father kept talking about the vintage angels of the apocalypse, I thought that it was even more incongruous that the gas that could have charred my lungs was the same color as the chlorophyll that allows us to breathe.

Despite my father’s good intentions, I was unable to climb out of the well until a member of my company sent me my drawings from the front. Recovering the sketchbook I’d given up for lost gave me a good jolt, but it pushed me to start painting again. Little by little, as if my only possibility of moving on to the next chapter depended on it, the project of Variation on a Theme by Bruegel became my obsession. I sensed that, if I were able to see it through, able to distance myself enough from what I’d experienced to capture it in a painting, I would be back to my old self, without nightmares and trembling hands. I worked on it for two years. The canvas, 2.50 x 4 meters, is the largest I’ve ever painted. Like in some sort of macabre dance, a throng of skeletons lay waste to a battlefield. The soldiers, transformed into a grotesque swarm of horrified faces and blood-covered bodies, try to cling to life, but can’t resist death’s assault. The landscape that envelops them is a chaos of cadavers, pit craters and wrecked trenches, of star shells, tethered hot-air balloons in flames, charred trees and dead animals. In one of the corners, a skeleton drags a soldier by his feet. One of the soldier’s hands has been run through with a bayonet.

Shortly before finishing it, and despite my father’s objections — who, without telling me anything, had asked the Bürckels to discreetly keep an eye on me — I returned to Berlin. Living alone again and resuming a routine of work in the studio, gatherings at the cafés, and evenings in my friends’ studios helped me recover. Not entirely, but enough that I didn’t live in fear of the more awkward symptoms of my illness showing up at any moment.

I exhibited the painting, along with some pages from my war sketchbook, in a group show at the Hans Goltz Gallery. When Erika saw it, after reminding me of the day she threw the watercolors into the garden fountain, she made a confused face. “Being that this is your first exhibition,” she said,“you could have chosen a different piece. People will think you don’t know how to paint.” It was more or less what the critics who visited the gallery pronounced: “Outlandish figures,” “strident, poorly-combined colors,” “preposterous composition,” “unpatriotic aberration. .” Plus all the comments my father hid from me, which I found in a folder filled with clippings in one of his desk drawers after his death. I have to admit that bad reviews are hard to accept, especially at first, when you are too reliant on other people’s opinions, but over time I’ve learned that you can get something useful even out of their biases and incomprehension.

Of all the paintings on Hofer’s list, the Variation was the most arduous and painful to reproduce. Not only because of the size of the original and its particularly intense and bright colors, which are difficult to get with watercolors, but because of the memories, which plagued me so virulently that, at moments, I feared my hands would start trembling again and I would have to desist. But, even though there were times when I had to paint with my heart in my throat, I managed to finish it by thinking about how disappointed Hofer and “the artist from Prussia” would be if I pulled off what I was planning.

Yesterday Georges Braque died. It’s hard for me to explain, but today I feel I’m a bit more alone. I felt that same way about Matisse and Kurt Weill. Even though I never met them, their disappearance felt like an abandonment. Almost like a low blow. And now Georges Braque. . Despite the difference in our ages and career paths, I’ve never felt as close to any other painter. I would never have dared to tell him, I’d have been too embarrassed and afraid to seem pretentious, but I always saw him as a kindred spirit. Solitary and discreet, reserved, apprehensive about showing his work, patient and tirelessly hardworking. . I visited him for the first time at his Varengeville studio. On our strolls, I realized that his words were like his paintings. Austere and precise. Like the black flint that streaked the white chalk cliffs we had to skirt to reach the beach, where he began gathering stones, starfish, and shells. Even a bit of blue fishing net.“Working to perfect the soul. That’s all that counts. The rest is just fool’s gold,” he told me. Separating what counts from the trappings. . I don’t know if I’ve achieved that. I often have the feeling I spent too much time groping around in the dark. I should have been shrewder about how I used my time, and focused on what I now know was the most important thing.

During the occupation, when he became some sort of symbol of silent resistance to the Germans, we saw each other a few times. The most unsettling was the day we ran into each other in front of Le Petit Saint-Benoît, the only restaurant I could afford. I was there celebrating my birthday, all alone. I invited him to join me for lunch and we spent hours talking. About painting, colors, billiards, music. . And about Cranach. Mostly about Cranach. Because he had one too. I think it was a portrait of a girl. I remember he asked me a lot of questions about my parents and that, as the sun set, after telling me a handful of anecdotes about his childhood in Le Havre, his work as an apprentice in his father’s workshop and his flute lessons with the brother of Raoul Dufy, whom he later exhibited with alongside Matisse, he said goodbye with a “See you soon. And don’t lose sight of the orpiment.” I have never seen him so effusive.“Childhood. .” he said,“If only we could hold onto that curiosity and purity.”

The 1943 Salon d’Automne devoted a room to him. Of the twenty-odd paintings exhibited, I found myself standing in front of La Patience. As I observed it, I had the impression that the woman playing cards was my mother. Her curly hair, her long neck, her absent gaze in some photographs, particularly the last ones. .“It was one of her favorite pastimes,” my father had once told me. And it is one of mine as well. Now more than ever. Because playing solitaire helps me pass the time. As does listening to the radio, but only to music. The rest no longer interests me. I don’t need to be current on anything; I have no need to understand events and circumstances that won’t affect what’s left of my life. It’s just not necessary anymore. My father never played solitaire. “It seems stupid to me,” he would say.“Time is too valuable to waste on such trifles.”

Rereading the book that Braque gave me the last time I visited him, I feel my proximity to his thinking. It’s as if an invisible thread linked the essence of our obsessions. I’ve never felt that with anyone else. With Alma, perhaps, but in matters that had nothing to do with painting. Before writing the dedication, he paged through the book for some time and marked one of the aphorisms with an X: “That which is not taken, but remains, is the best of us.” “The rest is just fool’s gold,” he could have added. And it doesn’t take much rumination to realize that he wasn’t wrong. Not in the slightest.

Erika didn’t like Georges Braque. In fact she didn’t like any of what she called the “scribble and blotch” painters. Her taste was quite conservative, and she inconsiderately affirmed that, after the Impressionists, there was barely anything worth the effort. We never understood each other about artistic matters, but she let me do my own thing. Only every once in a while, when she wanted to provoke me, would she come up with some nonsense like “Why don’t you try painting things the way they are?” or “Why, when you can paint so well, do you insist on doing it so badly?” It would have been flattering to have more than just her moral support, maybe even a little understanding, but, given the choice, I preferred her frankness to most people’s hypocritical snobbery. In any case, there were plenty of reasons to live with her. At least in the beginning.

Erika was the Bürckel family’s youngest daughter. Her father was a powerful steel manufacturer, and a lifelong friend of my father. They had gone to school together. Being the baby of five siblings, or the only girl, or both, turned her into the spoiled girl I met shortly after arriving in Berlin. When she was older she was impulsive and reckless enough that her parents, to distance her from a feckless boy she’d fallen for head over heels and threatened to run off with, sent her on a trip to the United States with her grandmother and an unmarried aunt. Even though over the first few weeks, as she liked to tell it, she managed to make their lives impossible, gradually she realized the opportunity she had to see the world and get some good out of it. As fate would have it, a neighbor of the family, to whom her father had read one of her letters, offered her the chance to be the “social and fashion correspondent” for his magazine. At first they had to edit her chronicles quite a bit but, with the energy she put into new projects, she soon began to do an elegant job of it. I remember that, on one occasion, quite embarrassed, she showed me some of those early articles. It wasn’t anything special, but I was surprised by the liveliness of her descriptions and her ability to capture the small details. Her stay in New York, after her grandmother and aunt went home, extended for a couple of years, during which she made something of a name for herself as a society reporter.

Shortly after her return to Berlin, we met up again at my first solo exhibition at Alfred Flechtheim’s gallery and got involved. I had never felt anything so visceral. When I wasn’t with her I found myself in such a tizzy that I couldn’t get anything done. Opposites attract, I suppose. With the distance I now have, though, I can’t understand how we were so deluded that we believed the tentative possibility of vicariously living through each other could compensate for the devastating effects of the vast rift that separated us. Love is blind, they say. And absurdly pretentious.

Göring didn’t like modern art either. Even though he liked to play the Renaissance man, it seems he didn’t have the corresponding curiosity or open-mindedness. So it’s not surprising that one of Hofer’s jobs was to exchange “scribbles and blotches” for works that were more fitting to his supposedly exquisite and exacting taste. It was a great business, since the “scribbles and blotches” came from confiscated collections. And there were few obstacles, because the prospect of ending up in jail for not cooperating wasn’t terribly alluring.

Hofer’s appearance was as repulsive as his job. Not just because of the intimidating, rigid way he talked and moved, but because of the haughtiness that oozed from his features. His pointy chin, his thin lips, his big nose with a marked crease on either side, his small, dissecting eyes, his wide forehead run through with grooves. . It all added to the fear you felt in his presence. In this case, unlike what my father always said, I believe appearances were not deceiving.

“Maybe it’s not what it appears to be, don’t you think?” With that question, father tried to dissuade me from rushing to judgment of people or their behavior. Even though I understand him better now than I did then, as a kid his inclination to relativize everything drove me nuts, especially when I came home with a black eye after a fight with some classmate who’d poked fun at my too-big ears or my too-hairy legs and all he would say was some comment like “Are you sure you didn’t misinterpret it?” instead of rushing out to compensate for the insult. I have no idea how he would have reacted with Hofer. Maybe he would have invited him to have a seat in front of the fireplace to chat and then insisted on finding some reason to forgive him. It’s hard for me to admit, but I found my father exasperating when he got on a conciliatory jag. And, if I complained about it, he silenced me with a “What do you get out of being so evil-minded?” I never knew how to respond to that.

Not even when we went out to “survey nature” as he liked to say, was I free from his reflections about appearances. One day, on a walk, he pointed out a plant with yellowish flowers. “What color do you think the pigment extracted from that plant is?” he asked. I thought about yellow, but it was too obvious, and I was already used to his traps. In moments like that, I knew I just had to wait a little to find out the answer.“Red,” he said after a few moments of silence. “Yes, red. Even though it’s hard to believe.” And he explained that the pigment contained in the madder’s roots is so powerful that it can dye the milk and bones of animals that eat it. “You see? We can’t just dismiss what can’t be seen in a simple glance,” he added. And he kept on walking.

Like my father, Alma also had a weakness for plants. “It’s the only good thing I got out of Ravensbrück: learning how to take care of them,” she once told me. Sitting in the Hauterive garden, she occasionally talked about her job in the gardening kommando. Even though, every once in a while, they would give them a harder task, like scattering sand beneath the new barrack huts, their work assignment was one of the most tolerable. It allowed them to move about the camp with relative freedom and even go outside to care for the gardens at the SS officers’ homes, where they could get a glimpse, with anger and envy, of snippets of the normal life they had been excluded from: a child on a swing, the sound of a piano, someone getting ready for a tennis match. . But Alma’s favorite spot of all was the garden that surrounded the crematorium, where she grew pansies and sage bushes, two of the plants that, despite the bad memories they evoked, also filled the parterres at Hauterive. She liked them so much that she had to include them. She especially liked the velvety touch of the sage leaves. And its taste, ever since she discovered that rubbing it on her gums relieved the inflammation from scurvy. “And, as if that weren’t enough, they’re perfectly harmless,” she told me once as she was watering them.“Unlike dogs.” She never got over her fear of the German shepherds that accompanied the guards, which she’d often seen attack defenseless prisoners. That was why at Hauterive we only had a cat.

According to Alma, the hardest thing about life at Ravensbrück wasn’t getting used to the cold or the hunger, or the exhaustion, or the turnip soup filled with lice, or the inevitable threat of dysentery and scarlet fever, or the incessant shouting from the SS and the shrill sinister shrieks of the crows. It was finding a way to face up to the arbitrary routine without going insane and without lowering your guard. “What was white one day was black the next. It all depended on absurd, contradictory rules. You never knew how to behave to keep from getting beaten,” she told me on more than one occasion. Exhausting. . I imagine it was exhausting. Somehow finding strength when there’s none to be found, the strength to keep from giving up, to maintain your dignity, to fight against the filth and the slovenliness, to not fall into the daydreaming trance that makes you lose your sense of reality. It was the same in the trench, but without the constant underlying danger of the disciplinary bunker or being sent to the gas chamber. Although there was Sergeant Forkel.

There is one or more Sergeant Forkel in every life. Alma’s was named Dorothea Binz or “The Binz” as the prisoners called her. From the photographs I’ve seen, she confirmed my father’s firm belief that appearances are deceiving, because it’s hard to associate the childlike face of The Binz in her early twenties with the merciless cruelty she wielded as the head guard. Accompanied by a dog and playing with a switch, she was able to turn the endless recounting of the prisoners into a macabre form of torture.“When she looked at you, you had the feeling you were worth less than the lumps of sugar she gave her dog as a reward for biting prisoners,” said Alma. She normally went after the weakest, most vulnerable women, but also the ones she didn’t like, for whatever reason. Because of their face or their bearing. Or an accent that wasn’t very German. It was impossible to predict what would set her off. In the last image Alma has of her, her face was blackened by soot. Shortly before joining one of the last evacuation marches out of Ravensbrück, she saw the commandant and The Binz hauling off bundles of papers and burning them in a big bonfire. Catching her like that, so close to defeat, running all around destroying incriminating documents, was somewhat of a mitigation of everything she’d had to go through.“In the end, that showed me she was as fragile as we were. Or more,” said Alma.

Sooner or later everything ends. But first, Alma had to suffer The Binz’s terrible temper. Some prisoners used their scant free time to secretly set up cultural activities, such as lectures, literature or history classes, and poetry recitals, to keep from being pummeled by the routine and to keep the despair and moral confusion at bay. Continuing the idea of the oral newspapers, in which a group of prisoners would read political messages, information about the camp, rumors, and jokes, Alma and some of her fellow prisoners created a pretend radio with news, sketches, and monologues. Actually it was very similar to the satirical and engaged spirit of the cabaret that had turned her into an outlaw. For the first “broadcast,” Alma wrote lyrics about The Binz and adapted it to the music of the Habanera from the opera Carmen. From what she told me, it was a huge hit.

But the day after the first “broadcast,” during the morning recount, The Binz stopped in front of Alma and, her gaze running straight through her, said nonchalantly, “I hear you like opera.” And a few hours later, while she was working in the garden by the crematorium, they asked her to show up at the bunker and, after waiting for a while in the basement hallway, they had her enter a room. In it were the commandant, the doctor, The Binz, and a prisoner with a rod in her hand. “Sing,” The Binz simply ordered. Alma said she didn’t understand. Then The Binz came over and struck her face with the switch. “Sing,” she repeated. Alma, in a trembling voice, intoned the Habanera from Carmen with the original lyrics, but The Binz interrupted her with another whiplash. “No, with your words,” she insisted. “I hear they’re hilarious.” Screwing up her courage, Alma sang her radio version. When she’d finished, The Binz shrugged and said she didn’t see the humor in it. Alma only had a vague image of what happened next, once she was tied to the rack, with her dress rolled up and her panties at her ankles. She remembered that, after the first blows, The Binz snatched the rod from the prisoner’s hands — she wasn’t hitting hard enough — and took her place. Alma counted out loud as she had been ordered to, but could only get to eleven. After that, everything blurred together. She had a vague notion that The Binz had continued to twenty-five, then someone had taken her pulse, and she had come to in the barrack’s bunk bed with her butt cheeks skinless and raw.

Alma never found out who had told on her. Nor did she know who was behind her arrest shortly after arriving in Prague to visit her dying father. They had only seen each other once since she’d left home at seventeen. That was at her mother’s burial. She had tried, but reconciling with him was impossible because he refused to listen to her.“It’s your fault your mother is dead. She couldn’t take all the bad shocks. .” he told her. That was all. Alma knew that it wasn’t true, because she and her mother had met up in secret, and she’d never blamed her for anything, but her father’s accusation hurt her more than she could have ever imagined. But when a family friend warned her that he didn’t have long to live, she didn’t think twice and headed to Prague. Deep down, she felt bad that she had never been able to overcome the rift between them. And, even though without her mother as the “lightning rod” it was more of an uphill climb, she didn’t want to miss that last opportunity.

When her father saw her enter the room, he turned his eyes to the wall. Alma sat by his side and took his hand. They remained like that for quite some time. Without speaking. Confronting the severity of their feelings. Until her father looked at her with tears in his eyes. “Was it really necessary?” he asked. Alma didn’t know what to say. The truth? A lie? In fact, she was no longer sure why she had gone there to see him. She didn’t say anything. Neither did her father. The next day, before facing up to him again, she brought some flowers to her mother’s grave. She spent half of the morning at the cemetery, delving into her emotions to find the appropriate answer. Or a way to forgive. If that was even possible, after all that had happened. When she went back to the house, two plainclothes officers were waiting for her on the street. They shoved her into a car and took her straight to the Petschek Palace, the Gestapo headquarters. On the way there, flummoxed, there was only one question in her mind: who? Over and over again. Who? Curiously, she never believed that her father would have been capable of betraying her. Alma said that it’s one thing to write someone off and quite another to push them into the wolf ’s jaws. I don’t know. After a few months in the Pankrác Prison, with occasional interrogations in the Petschek Palace, they took her to the station and jammed her into a train with a crowd of women. Without any explanation.

When I think of the journey from Prague to Ravensbrück, it’s hard for me to accept that, after surviving a six-day voyage without water or food in a cattle car, in almost complete darkness, without enough space to sit and with dead bodies piled up in one corner, Alma ended up dying among the scrap iron of a wrecked train because of a drunk switchman. I suppose that, as difficult as it is for me to get my brain around, it’s just one more of fate’s unfathomable paradoxes.

My worst train trip was the one that took me from the rearguard to the military hospital in Gera. I couldn’t say how long it was, because I had a nasty fever. Which may be why I remember — with the vividness of a dream — the pain in my shoulder, the moaning of my bunkmates, the deafening drone of the wheels, the nurses’ words, intended to be comforting but incapable of mitigating a pang that had too much history behind it, of long months in the trench, plagued by lice and rain, plagued by the stench of the cadavers and the living who had no change of clothes, plagued by fear and the annihilating emptiness brought on by the lack of expectations.

They wounded me during a night patrol. Lead by a lieutenant, we entered no-man’s-land at midnight and crawled to the English trench to spy on the movements of their troops. Every once in a while, flares lit up the sky and bursts of machine gun fire were heard. Shortly before their line, we ran into a detachment of soldiers who were repairing the barbed wire. When they saw us, they retreated to their position and, not long after we started running back to our trench, a star shell turned the night into day and the shots began. A second later, although it could have been many hours, because each step seemed like an eternity, I felt something hit my shoulder. I fell, but somehow — probably compelled by a visceral fear of transforming into another of the rotting corpses that surrounded me — I managed to get up and make my way, pushing and rolling, to our trench.

I woke up in the campaign hospital. The bullet had entered at the height of my scapula and come out the front. I was almost always half drowsing those days before leaving for Gera, but I vaguely remember the smell of the room, a mix of phenol, pus, and sweat, and the shrieks from the guy to my right. A grenade had exploded his belly and there was nothing they could do for him. Just wait for him to surrender. Every once in a while, someone would shout at him to quiet down. And for a while he did, but then he would resume his litany. He lasted for three days. Then one morning, a soldier with both legs amputated was lying in his bed.

After a month in the hospital at Gera, my father came to pick me up and take me home. I was only there for fourteen days, but I savored every moment as if I had been given a second chance at life. I remember that when someone was surprised at my enthusiasm over every little thing, like sleeping in a bed or a warm meal, I could have easily started in on a long list of grievances about conditions on the front, but I didn’t want to talk about it — the idea that I would have to go back was weighing heavily on me— and I wasn’t interested in anyone’s compassion. The best part was seeing Lisa, one of my first models, again. We only spent one night together, after really tying one on, but when I evoke the sensation I felt caressing her body that I’d painted so many times, I can’t forgive myself for falling asleep so fast.

I saw Lisa again on Hofer’s list and, when I repainted Nude On A Persian Rug, I felt the same emotion I had at seeing her for the first time, because she was the model who forced me to forget all the portrait theories I’d been force-fed at the Academy. Lisa was different. She gave off an energy that compelled me to abandon mere likeness in order to transmit the mood she triggered.“But that’s not me,” she told me the first time she saw one of the portraits I’d made of her.“Maybe not, but that’s what I feel when I look at you,” I replied. I don’t know if she ever understood my long-winded spiel about the difficulties of finding a model who stimulated my imagination, but she didn’t seem too interested either.

Where must she be now? Maybe she was able to save up enough money to leave Dresden and live far away from her family, the way she’d wanted. Or maybe she didn’t and ended up dying in the 1945 bombings. It’s a shame that so many people have come in and out of my life and left only a scattered trail of memories. Just the way I must have done in their lives, I guess. If Lisa is still alive, what place do I hold in her memory? I often wonder what must have happened to some person or another. Perhaps it’s just a last flicker of nostalgic curiosity before disappearing. . Obviously I’ll have to settle for the little I know. The rest, it’s as if it never existed.

Returning to the trench after being at my father’s house on leave was much harder than I had imagined it would be. Naively, I had believed that, knowing what to expect, I would have an easier time getting used to it again. But actually the opposite was true. After recovering, for a few days, the life I never should have abandoned, adapting to the void again made me terribly anxious for the first few weeks. And since one of the ideas that most tormented me was that I might not have another opportunity to return home, I was constantly scolding myself for everything I hadn’t done.

I only took part in two attacks before falling apart. The first was a fairly straightforward skirmish to regain control of an elevation that we’d lost the evening before. But the second was a bloodbath. Our company got trapped in the crossfire at the Vaux forest. We held up for three days, during which the hopeless regularity of the enemy artillery fire was driving us so crazy that, despite the angst it provoked in me, I was happy when a cloud of gas forced us to run off as fast as we could. But as we retreated to our positions like rabbits, dodging the pit craters and the uprooted tree trunks, the machine guns did the rest.

A week later, when I received the order to leave the trench to begin a new offense, I burst into tears like a baby. They told me that later, because I don’t remember it. And they also told me that I was shaking like a leaf from head to toe, and raving. And that I shat myself. What a spectacle. Luckily Sergeant Forkel was no longer there, because if he had been, I probably wouldn’t be here now.

Like my return to the trenches after my shoulder wound, knowing what to expect should simplify things but it doesn't. Ever since they told me that this will all be over soon, I’ve been tormented by the things I won’t ever get to do again. That didn’t happen to me before. Maybe when you can’t see the end, it’s easier to trust in time’s benevolence.“There are more days than sausages,” people say. No, there aren’t more days than sausages. Not even close. Time flies by carelessly and leaves us adrift. Weaker and more alone. And it’s difficult to resign yourself. Maybe if I only had to worry about dying it would be simpler, but having to cope with my body’s progressive surrender is exhausting. Battling with half a bowl of soup, washing up every time I shit my pants, dressing myself with nowhere to go. . As the days slip by, I find it harder to maintain the serenity I need to keep myself from just giving up. I know that Alma wouldn’t allow it, but she’s not here. And there’s no one else left who’s convincing enough that I would pay them any mind.

A while back, the possibility of dying alone would have kept me up at night. Now that I have so little time, it doesn’t seem so bad. When you take a closer look, it’s not such a big deal. Maybe it’s that, once again, my father was right. I’ve always tended to imagine everything more convoluted than it really is.“You make a mountain out of every molehill. Why not cross that bridge when you come to it?” he would say when I got worked up too soon about things. Despite everything, if I could choose, I’d like death to come while I’m sleeping. It seems less disturbing. Like just another evening, I’d play a game of solitaire, get into bed to listen to music and just not ever wake up. . As simple as that. But I’m afraid that, unless something changes, my wishes are completely beside the point.

My mother didn’t die alone. My father told me on several occasions that, even though it was one of the most painful moments of his life, he was glad to have shared it with her. Together until the final breath. Mother, in bed; he, sitting by her side, doing his best to keep her from suffering any more than was strictly necessary. What made him saddest of all was that, shortly before the end, he took me to her bedroom so she could say goodbye to me and when she squeezed me in her arms I started to wail like a lost soul. My mother’s eyes filled with tears, but she didn’t complain. She gave me a kiss on the forehead and handed me back to my father.“Luckily he won’t remember me looking like this,” she said, forcing a smile.

Little more than two years passed from the day my parents first saw each other in front of the Cranach to the day she died.“It wasn’t much time, but we made the most of it,” my father assured me. And it must have been true because, even though his family and friends insisted, he never remarried. He was convinced that no one could give him more than he’d gotten from my mother. That probably wasn’t true but if that was how he felt, there was nothing more to be said about it. Besides, he seemed happy. Even though he had trouble expressing his emotions and occasionally seemed quite absent, I never had the feeling that I was growing up with someone sad or bitter. And my father was convinced that I would do fine without a mother. In his own way, and surely not always how he would have wanted it, because he often had to be in too many places at the same time, he managed to ensure that I never lacked for anything.

Luckily we had memories. But unfortunately he lived such a short time with my mother that there weren’t many to choose from. He more or less always talked about the same ones. The confrontation between their respective families when they decided to marry just two months after the lecture about orpiment; the honeymoon in Paris, with a memorable stroll through the Luxembourg Gardens covered in snow; my birth, which, going against the custom of the time, my mother didn’t want him to miss; the stays in Moritzburg and on Rügen Island; the first Christmas meal, which burned right before the guests arrived because “Eros decided to intrude,” which was the circumlocution he employed to avoid having to explicitly admit — in his prudishness — that they were left without the meal because of a roll in the hay; or the only time they’d argued, about a lost photograph. That was about it.

He would also tell me what Mother had told him about her childhood. And curiously, her favorite memory was a dream. Grandpa Klaus, the only of my four grandparents whom I never met, was a concierge at the Gemäldegalerie in Dresden, which meant my mother spent a lot of time there. She liked to walk through the rooms and lose herself in contemplation of the paintings. My father said that she’d spent so much time looking at them that she could describe them in minute detail, except for the works that scared her, like the ones by Ribera and Giordano, filled with skulls and saints with their ribs showing. And since she couldn’t understand many of the scenes depicted, she would make up adventures for the characters she didn’t know, like the love story for one of her favorite paintings, Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window by Vermeer. One day she explained to my father how she had dreamed about it many times. The thread was pretty much always the same. My mother walks through one of the museum’s galleries, filled with visitors, and she slowly approaches the Vermeer and observes the girl with the letter. Since the girl can’t read in peace with so many people watching her, she draws the curtain to keep them from bothering her. A little while later, when the visitors have already left, she goes back in secret and, curious, pulls back the curtain to find out what the letter says, but the girl is no longer there.“Incredible, isn’t it?” my father would ask me, his eyes wide as saucers. And here he would take the opportunity to explain one of his favorite anecdotes, the one about the painting duel between Zeuxis and Parrhasius that he had learned about in Pliny the Elder’s The Natural History. To show that he was the superior artist, Zeuxis offered up some grapes that looked so real they even attracted birds. However, Parrhasius displayed a curtain that was so skillfully painted that Zeuxis impatiently asked him to draw it aside so he could see the painting he thought was behind it. Later I remember him telling me the second part of the story, when Zeuxis painted a boy with a bunch of grapes and the birds also flew over to it. Yet this time he wasn’t satisfied because, as he naively admitted, if he had painted the boy successfully, the birds would have been too afraid to approach the grapes. It’s not surprising that my father marked those two episodes in his copy of The Natural History. I find them fascinating as well because, even though I’ve never been seduced by the quest for absolute fidelity, I can completely understand Zeuxis and Parrhasius’s longing for perfection.

Life is a web of coincidences. Even though my mother never knew it, Göring was intent on adding a Vermeer to his collection. But I would have liked to see his face when he realized that, despite Hofer acting as a consultant, they were duped, and he paid a fortune for a forgery. The only hitch in the perfect irony is that, as usual, the money must have been stolen too.

As she wandered around the museum, my mother would watch the copyists as they worked. She would sit beside them and search for the differences between the original and the copy. She could spend hours, playing at being “the all-seeing eye,” even though more than once they’d boxed her ears for coming home late. When she was older one of the copyists even became her first romantic disappointment, since she couldn’t get him to give her the attention she desired. But once she had gotten over her frustration and was no longer expecting anything more, they ended up becoming quite good friends, at least enough for my father to feel a bit jealous over it at one point. He admitted that, sometimes, especially during her last few months, my mother would talk about him so often that he had trouble taking it in stride. I don’t remember his name, or maybe I’ve never known it, because when my father mentioned him, he called him “the famous copyist, you know the one I mean.” But it never really caused a fight between them. It seems it was hard to argue with Mother, not because she avoided confrontation but because she had the rare ability of turning things on their head so they came out in her favor.

All I know about Grandpa Klaus was that he was a big fan of wordplay and managed to turn my mother into an expert at it. Not only could she recite tongue twisters with fiendish speed, but she was thrilled to discover words that were palindromes or talk without one of the vowels. Her list of passions also included anemones, potato fritters, the color yellow, and solitaire. Or that was what my father told me. Actually, it’s a shame that someone’s life can be reduced to such an arbitrary collection of isolated and imprecise details. Without any balance between the whole and the parts.

It’s not exactly the same thing with Erika because, even though I lived with her for almost twelve years, I often feel I never knew her very well. No matter how much I turn it over and over in my mind, I can’t understand why I decided to marry her. Or how I could allow the friction between us to go so far. My father only told me once that she wasn’t for me. And he was right. But I fell for her hard and I jumped in without thinking twice. On the face of it, Erika was everything I wasn’t. She gave off a contagious vitality. She was daring, and it seemed nothing could stand in her way. Over time though, I realized that she never followed through on anything and her enthusiasm was just a façade to hide her disappointment over her lack of discipline and talent. I don’t know. And the most disconcerting thing is that the anxiety ruling her life never turned into exasperation or dejection, but instead into a renewed need to search and move, which would eventually cool off and cause a new restlessness that pushed her to try her luck in another direction. Time and time again. And she always had her father’s money and unlimited encouragement to buttress her. And then came the excuses. . Erika was a virtuoso of frustrated impulses and excuses to justify her failures. I never did understand the real reason behind her dissatisfaction. I only suffered the consequences.

It would be perfect if life were as easy to correct as a drawing. Perhaps we’d miss out on valuable lessons if we made fewer errors, but it would be a good way to save ourselves headaches. Despite everything, I’d like to remember Erika without reproaching myself for all the things I didn’t say or do when I should have, and without being angry with her for the pain she caused me. Perhaps then I could recover the good moments without tarnishing them with hatred. But it’s too difficult for me. Especially when I think about Konrad. I imagine that without him everything would have been simpler. We would have just been two people at odds, unable to understand each other, and we could have resolved it fairly easily, but shortly after Konrad was born, looking into his eyes for the first time, I discovered that the ties that bound me to him were too strong and inexorable.

Everyone said that he looked like me. My father was even convinced that he had a resemblance to my mother. I never saw it, but I didn’t argue with him. As a boy, Konrad was curiosity incarnate. He rummaged through everything. He would open up drawers and empty them. Or pull books off their shelves. Even still, I enjoyed bringing him to my studio. Sometimes he would stare at the paintings with a serious expression, as if he were a critic about to give his assessment. But his favorite form of entertainment was the zoetrope. Watching it spin, he would shriek and laugh like crazy. “More ‘tozotope,’ more ‘tozotope,’” he would say over and over as he imitated the sheep jumping over the wooden fence. He also loved to muck up in the paints, especially if he could mix them with the sand from the courtyard and dirty himself up to the elbows. And he adored dogs, but Erika never let him have one. She was afraid of them, even though she wouldn’t admit it. At night, after reading him one of his favorite stories, like The Wolf and the Seven Young Kids or The Elves and the Shoemaker, or when I came home late and he was already sound asleep, I would sit on his bed and just look at him. Hearing his breathing, free from worries and suspicions, calmed me.

I so wish he were here. Not only would I not have to die alone, but maybe he would be curious about my stories, and I could tell him about my memories of his grandparents, and Alma, or Sergeant Forkel and Professor Müller and, that way, my life wouldn’t completely slip through the cracks into oblivion. It’s a consolation like any other. I often try to imagine what he would look like if he hadn’t died, but the passage of time doesn’t make that easy for me. It’s become harder and harder to conjure up his image. But that’s how memory works. It’s a mystery. I can’t understand why it clings to memories that, given the choice, I would forget in the blink of an eye and yet doesn’t allow me to retain others, ones I would give anything to keep close.

Of course, Hofer didn’t forget about me. On his next visit, he left the soldiers downstairs and came up on his own. Since I saw his car entering the alley, I had enough time to hide the watercolor I was working on. Without a word, Hofer planted himself in front of the Cranach again.“So, have you made your decision yet?” he asked. “No,” I replied. “Not yet. It’s that. .” “Well, Göring is tired of waiting,” he interrupted. “And so am I.” Then he turned slowly to pierce me with his gaze.“I don’t suppose you’re thinking about trying to trick me, right?” I wanted to say yes, and that I was fed up too, of all of it, but sometimes, as my father would have said,“what’s kept quiet is worth more than what’s said.” I shook my head. Hofer smiled with satisfaction. “That’s a good boy.” Then he came over and gave me a couple of pats on the arm.“Since you are having such a hard time deciding, I’ll do it for you. Tomorrow I’ll come for the Cranach and I’ll give you back all your junk. How does that sound?” he added. Without waiting for a reply, he backed up towards the door he had left open.“Until tomorrow.” Also two words. Like “You decide,” but more forceful, with the weight of his threat spreading through the studio like a cloud of poison gas.

Even though I was nearly done, knowing that I had to finish that night was upsetting, because I never could stand being rushed. But, at the same time, I was calmed by the idea that I was only a few hours from the end. Like so many other times, the first light of day found me working, my back aching and my eyes red, but feeling the pleasant weariness that comes with finishing a job. If I had been living in Hauterive at that time, it would have been the moment to take a good long walk to shake off the stiffness and whet my appetite for wolfing down one of Alma’s lavish breakfasts. That’s why it was my favorite place to work. Because there is nothing like a landscape in the early dawn, with all its colors just about to burst forth again, to recover from a night of work. And it was the only workspace I tailored to my needs. When I happened upon that mill on the outskirts of town, I didn’t think twice. I had been searching high and low, and I’d almost given up on finding the perfect place. Isolated, but close enough to Paris to be able to go there whenever I wanted. With lots of trees. And a river. And enough space to build a studio away from the house, taking advantage of a clearing in the forest. Paul Nelson, whom I met thanks to Braque, took on the project, a mix of greenhouse and woodcutter’s cabin. Alma was taken with the place from her first stay there, shortly after we met. She was happy taking long walks and caring for the garden. She could spend hours there. I liked to watch her work, focused on her tinkering like a scientist puttering over test tubes.

Alma wasn’t particularly pretty. She had very hard, sharp features, with sunken eyes and a slightly large mouth, but her beauty came, when least expected, from the small details. From the way she pushed her hair out of her face; from the subtle shift — as if she weren’t entirely convinced — from smile to laugh; from the way she wrinkled her nose in distaste; from her voice with its many registers and tones; from the movement of her hands, which she used to reach those places she couldn’t reach with words. I think she would have made a good model, but she never let me try. She didn’t want me to paint her portrait. She couldn’t bear the thought. All I have left are some photographs. And that recording of The Human Voice where, at one point, she complains about the distance that separates her from her absent lover. When I hear it, I have to struggle not to think about the years without her, maybe not entirely extraneous years but definitely ones lived without much conviction.

Alma occupies the blue vertex of the chromatic star because that’s the color of breathable air, but I still don’t know how to distribute the other colors. Maybe there’s no need. I suppose that green is for the trenches. And yellow for my parents, but I’m not sure about that, because maybe it would only be my mother’s color.

If I had to choose one moment with Alma to place in her vertex, I would opt for a dusk we spent together at Hauterive. Sitting in the garden, in silence. Alma watering. The sun low. The murmuring of the river. The gleam of the leaves. The aroma of the damp earth. For a few moments I had the sensation — as potent as it was naive — that nothing could separate us. That I had lost my parents and Konrad but that, finally, after a long wait, someone had come to fill that void. Alma must have noticed that I was looking at her, because she turned. And smiled. That’s all. Then she continued watering. I never felt so close to anyone as I did to her then.

My father said more or less the same about my mother. Although sometimes, when he divulged one of his rare confessions, I was flustered. For a while the fact that he had loved her so much even made me feel a little jealous. But later, when I realized that what he felt for my mother was no threat to me, I was more surprised that such a serious, circumspect man had ever behaved — as he occasionally described it—“like an impetuous lovesick boy.”“I would have done anything for her,” he told me more than once. Now I know that those two behaviors aren’t mutually exclusive. And, in fact, he was the same way about his work. The rational, methodical scientist coexisted with the juggler of stories. When he got excited, he was unpredictable. He could jump from reagents or the chemical structure of any element to the rooster eggs hatched by toads to create basilisks, whose ashes, when mixed with red copper, the blood of a redhead, and vinegar, made what’s called Spanish gold. Or that’s what a Benedictine monk he once told me about had said. At an age when I barely understood how children were born, I was as surprised to hear that roosters could lay eggs as I was by the lethal gaze of the basilisks, and I drove him crazy asking for the only animal that could protect me from it. “How can we have a weasel in the house?” he would ask me when at night, drawn by my shrieks, he lay down in my bed to calm me.“I don’t know,” I would answer,“but I’m really scared.” Finally I was so annoying about it that, instead of a weasel, he gave me a little hand mirror and, after repeating ad infinitum that, if necessary, it would work to kill the basilisk with the reflection of his own gaze, he managed to get me to sleep soundly without nightmares. For a long time I carried it in my pocket at all times and, before getting into bed, I had to check several times to make sure it was under my pillow.

I’ve always been pretty obsessive. Having to confirm a bunch of times that I’ve closed a door properly or that I haven’t left any light on in the house is a drag, but there’s nothing I can do about it. During the first months of my illness, I went through the same thing with my medication times. Now I don’t even worry about it. I couldn’t care less. Since I don’t have any hope that it’ll do anything, I don’t worry if I’ve forgotten my dose. The doctor doesn’t understand it, but I think he’s given up. At least he no longer insists. He must think I’m a lost cause. But nothing happens, and that’s what I’ve tried to make him see, because I have the impression that he feels a little guilty for his inability to spur me on to continue to play the game out to its end.

As a little kid, I was as terrified — or more — of getting sick as I was of running into the basilisk. That’s why I did everything I could to keep from complaining when I was feeling poorly. Until I couldn’t stand it anymore or until the symptoms were so obvious that my father noticed. Then, as always, he called for Doctor Zomer. They were friends, and he trusted him so deeply that he didn’t care that I panicked over his resemblance to Doctor Moreau from the Wells’s novel that Marcellus Goldschmidt had loaned me and I’d read, stiff with fear. With his white hair, his narrow forehead, his thick lips with drooping corners, those small black eyes topped by thick brows. . Or that was what I thought when I saw him come into my room with his kit under his arm. I was convinced that Doctor Zomer had read Wells’s book and was secretly continuing Doctor Moreau’s experiments, except instead of turning animals into men, he was doing it the other way around. That was why he looked at my throat, eyes, and ears with such avid interest. And squeezed my belly and made me cough. To find out which beast would be best suited for my body. And I feared that, when my father was distracted, he would try to turn me into a dog. Or a hyena. Or a monkey. I’m not surprised that, sometimes, between one thing and another, it was so hard to get my fevers down. Like now. But the doctor says it’s normal. Because of the tumor and I don’t remember what else. Maybe, if I tell him a little bit about Doctor Zomer’s visits, he’d understand it might also be because of my apprehension.

When I would explain all that to Alma, she couldn’t believe I was so impressionable. “You’re almost as lily-livered as me,” she would say when I listed my childhood fears.“But with a lot more imagination. Just my father was enough to make me shit my pants.”

I could talk to Alma so easily. Much easier than anyone else. And even though sometimes it was hard for her to get started, she was no slouch either. But you had to know when it wasn’t the right moment. Either because she wasn’t in the mood or because she was studying for a role. Then it was best not to bother her. Occasionally though, she would let me help her. When she died, she was on her way to the first rehearsal of The Stronger, by Strindberg, in a production by the Théâtre de l’Atelier. For two or three weeks she prepared for it in Hauterive and asked me to play the part of Miss Y. Since the role of Miss Y is always silent, all I could do was nod my head, make a disdainful expression, laugh loudly, or observe Mrs. X curiously. Even though it was completely different from The Human Voice, Alma’s monologue was equally affecting. When she compared Miss Y with an empty vessel or when she rebuked her for her inability to love, her voice really stung. Sometimes, when we were rehearsing, I thought how I was lucky she hadn’t ever had to use it against me. I don’t even know if I could have endured one of those harsh, arrogant stares. Even though I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised — after all, it was her job to play roles — it upset me to see that Alma could bring up such rage from inside her. One day, after rehearsing, I got up the courage to tell her that. Alma didn’t answer for a long time. And, when she did, I regretted having opened my mouth because every one of her words sounded like a reprimand to herself. “It’s just that, sometimes, I don’t know what to do with all the hatred I feel,” she finally said.

Alma could be very hard on herself. Not only when things didn’t come out the way she felt they should — she was demanding — but also when she was in one of her “black moods,” as she called them. Then, overwhelmed by the despair she felt over not having found a way to forgive or a way to digest her guilt, she would disappear for hours. “I have no right to complain,” she told me more than once,“but being a survivor, without even knowing how or why, isn’t as easy as it seems.” Having randomly been one of those who made it out of Ravensbrück and having abandoned her mother to get away from her father and devote her life to the theater were burdens that weighed too heavily on her. Telling her that I understood, that her Ravensbrück was my trench and that her mother was my Konrad, wouldn’t have been of any use. I never knew how to help her. Over time, I’ve come to the conclusion that, when you understand someone else’s suffering too well, you aren’t the right person to console them.

Forgiving is toughest of all, because it’s hard to find the midpoint between clemency and resentment. Alma was convinced that, depending on who you were trying to forgive, it wasn’t worth the effort. In fact, she never forgave The Binz. And she didn’t feel bad about it at all. I’m not surprised. When I think of the fear that Sergeant Forkel put me through and everything I haven’t been able to share with Alma because of the drunk switchman, I tend to agree with her. I haven’t forgiven Hofer either. Even though I hesitate there, since without Hofer I never would’ve been able to put my foot down. But I often wonder if that’s enough to overlook the bitterness I feel towards him.

It wouldn’t be bad if, at this point, when what I should be doing is not worrying about things, the water streaming down the panes would wash away all the uncertainties. Maybe then I could sit beneath the ginkgo by the lake and listen to the murmur of its leaves. Or even better: clearly remember my father’s voice, standing beneath the ginkgo in the Luxembourg Gardens as shelter from the rain, talking to me about a family dispute that I didn’t really understand, over a silver candelabra with arms in the shape of ginkgo leaves that led Grandma Johanna and one of her sisters — the famous “rich aunt, but you know where it came from” as everyone called her — to not speak for years; or Alma’s misty eyes as she looked up at the façade, decorated with ginkgo branches and leaves, of Prague’s Hotel Central, where she had seen her mother for the last time and where we stayed during our trip to recapture the landscapes of her childhood; or my mother’s dreamy pose in one of the studio photographs in her album, with a fabric backdrop embroidered with ginkgo leaves. A bunch of coincidences like any other yet, even though I know it has no special significance, I like to think it helps keep my memories from completely slipping away.

It seems my mother assembled her photo album for the same reason. According to my father, she spent many hours during her last months working on it for me. I’ve never seen anything like it: one photograph per page, glossed in her spiky handwriting. There was a bit of everything. Portraits of her parents and siblings; wedding pictures; postcards from their Paris honeymoon and some other trips. .“Here’s the little Buddha with a cranky face,” it says beneath one of my portraits. Bald, chubby-cheeked, serious. Father told me more than once that he’d have given anything to make me understand that I wouldn’t have a mother for very long, since, maybe that way, I would be less peevish. The conclusion one can draw from looking at the album is that, for Mother, everything happened very fast. Childhood, youth, love, marriage, birth, and death. But was she happy? I believe so. As you turn the pages, it’s inevitable that you wonder what’s better: a short but intense life or a long, tedious one.

The photograph with the ginkgo leaves eventually became one of the paintings on Hofer’s list, but I depicted my mother’s face not as a twenty-something year old, but rather how I imagined it would have looked with the passage of the years she didn’t live to see. Sitting beside the sewing box, she looked at me with a smile on her lips, as she might have done someday if I’d had the chance to explain to her that I’d “lost sight of the orpiment” when I saw Erika again at the Hans Goltz Gallery. Or when meeting Konrad. Or seeing the Cranach for the first time. My father didn’t like the painting. He said it didn’t look like her, but I suppose that, since it was Mother, nothing would have been good enough for him. That was the last piece on the list that I painted. Day had already broken. With a lump in my throat and fear gripping my bones.

What will happen to Mother’s album when I’m no longer here? I’ve considered destroying it, but I don’t have it in me. It would be a betrayal of my mother’s effort to transmit a part of her history to me. Perhaps someone will pick it up off the dusty ground of some flea market and, after turning a few pages, buy it to read all her comments, and that curiosity would give us the opportunity to escape oblivion.

The hours slip by maddeningly slowly. There are times when I don’t know how to fill them and I would give anything to be able to speed up time. Especially at night. During the occupation, I had the same feeling. There were days that I wished would end from the very moment they began. Under normal circumstances I’ve always taken advantage of moments like that, when holing up in my studio would have been a waste of time, instead taking long walks, visiting a museum, or seeing a friend. Anything but struggle in vain with my lack of motivation or ideas. Now, when I can barely keep my spirits up at all, it’s harder to overcome those periods of despondence. Listening to music or playing solitaire helps, but sometimes I get tired of that too. When the city was occupied it wasn’t easy either, because it really frustrated me to take part — as if nothing had changed — in the seeming normalcy imposed by the German authorities, but I could always go see an exhibition. Especially when they set up the Resistance galleries like Jeanne Bucher and L’Esquisse, where I remember seeing work by Miró, Léger, and Kandinsky. Contemplating such art was the perfect cure for all that ailed me since, at least for a while, I would forget about the worries that had forced me out of my studio.

As a young man, when things didn’t go the way I wanted them to, I would lose my head, convinced that I hadn’t learned anything, that I was a failure, that I would never achieve what I’d longed for since I was a child. Over the years I’ve discovered that, if I don’t paint today, I’ll paint tomorrow, or the day after, or the day after that. And that everything is useful for filling up the sack from which, sooner or later, the paintings will emerge: a poem, a melody, a landscape, a conversation. . With effort, of course. Learning, not giving up, laying in wait for the right moment. Professor Müller told me long ago: “Everything has its price.” Even though we sensed there was truth in it, we never missed a chance to say it in a mocking version of his voice. Until one day he caught me repeating it blithely to a classmate who asked to borrow some cash to go out on the town. After a few seconds of silence — during which I wanted to vanish — he merely said, in the same tone he used when harshly critiquing our drawing exercises: “Laugh, laugh now, you’ll have plenty of time to cry once you realize the true scope of your mediocrity.” I was shocked.

The Cranach was also a distraction for me. I loved to observe its details and find new ones: a figure on its way to the castle, a bird on a branch, a columbine flower about to open. It’s perplexing that, often, we can take so long to notice minutiae and yet once we’ve found them, they’re so obvious that they even seem larger than they truly are. And that doesn’t only happen with paintings. Every once in a while, my father and I would compare our memories. We almost never coincided on the details. It was relatively easy to agree on where we were, but not on the clothes we were wearing, the color of a waitress’ eyes or the hotel room bedspread. “Remember? It had horrible flowers. .” one of us would say.“What? They weren’t flowers,” the other would answer. I suppose it’s inevitable, because sometimes our memories depend on barren seeds. The only thing I can remember about certain people is that one always had sweaty hands, or that another’s mouth smelled of rotten eggs. There are places I only remember as a tree or a door half-buried in snow. Nothing more. Like dead wells or paths that lead nowhere.

Alma, on the other hand, recalled everything. Names, dates, places. . I don’t know how she did it. I asked her many times to write it all down, but she never took the suggestion seriously.“There’s no need,” she’d say. “It’s not important.” And now all that’s left is what I’ve been able to retain. Not necessarily what she would have held onto, but just what, for some reason or another, has survived in one of the nooks of my memory.

After working with Max Reinhardt at the Deutsches Theater, where she performed works by the young Expressionists she was so fond of and took part in the Schall und Rauch evenings, Alma’s political engagement took a more radical turn, especially when Hitler came to power. “I can’t find any compelling reason to hide my head under my wing,” she would say. And, instead of fleeing to save herself problems, like so many of her colleagues did, she decided to stay in Berlin to confront the situation the only way she knew how: by acting. She joined the Die Katakombe cabaret company and started to play cat and mouse with Goebbels’s officers because, although it had to be done very carefully, they risked satirizing Hitler and the abuses of the regime. She would be rolling on the floor with laughter when she told the anecdote about the greeting. Once they had located the couple of spies sitting in the back of the room, the owner of the cabaret would come out on stage with his arm held high to greet the audience with a “Heil, Hitler! And good evening to the other ninety-eight percent.”“You should’ve seen their faces,” added Alma. Another evening, while they were performing a sketch against the anti-Semitic measures, someone in the crowd shouted out, “Fucking Jews!” Alma faced up to them and, without losing her cool, responded, “Actually we’re not, but I’m sure it’s our obvious intelligence that led to the confusion.” She said that for a few seconds the silence was so thick you could have cut it with a knife.

The authorities shut down the cabaret and arrested some members of the company. Alma was sent to the Columbia-Haus camp, but was released a few weeks later thanks to Göring. When she told me that, I made her repeat it a couple of times. And then, all of a sudden, I understood her strange reaction the day she sang me the mocking song about the paunch and medals of “the artist of Prussia”: Hofer worked for the man who had saved her skin.“See? The ironies of fate: my benefactor is your thief,” she added finally. It seems someone knew what buttons to push to get Göring, who he never missed the chance to badger Goebbels, to revoke her arrest order. Alma was aware that her “benefactor’s” motives weren’t selfless, but she didn’t much care. “Without him, I don’t know what would have happened to me,” she said.

Once she’d been freed, Alma didn’t think twice about leaving Germany. “There was no point in tempting fate again, was there?” she asked me. And, stubborn as ever, she continued her particular battle in the Viennese cabarets. First at Literatur am Naschmarkt and, when they shut it down as a result of the annexation, at Wiener Werkel. Besides performing, what she most enjoyed was writing lyrics for the songs and adapting them to melodies the audience was familiar with. Her biggest hits were a parody of Hitler’s speeches with the opening music to Tannhäuser and a spoof of the Nazi military parades set to the final tune from the first act of The Marriage of Figaro. More than once she told me that it wasn’t an easy period, but not having to bite her tongue made up for all the risks. “It’s better to face up to things than to turn your back,” she often repeated. It didn’t last very long though, because the trip to Prague to see her sick father put an end to it.

Despite the time she spent in Ravensbrück, Alma never regretted having ridiculed the vile people who locked her up there. In fact, she was proud of it. She said that, when there was nothing more she could do, at least she never lost her convictions. Come to think of it, that seems like a good center for her chromatic star. That is if her figure is a star, of course.

I don’t know if, in my case, I can say the same thing. Ida Bienert, the first collector to buy one of my paintings, once told me that she liked my work “because it was honest,” but I don’t know if that has any relationship to “facing up to things.” I’ve always tried to be honest, that’s true. And engaged as well, but with my work. I’m just a painter in love with my work, which, after all, is where I had to end up finding my recompense. In fact, the only one that counts. I think I’ve achieved that. In the words of Braque,“the rest is just fool’s gold.” Before him, Herbert Kegel, one of the few teachers from the Academy whom I remember fondly, said: “If you work hard, without rushing or shortcuts, if you have enough patience, everything will come in due time.” Taking his classes was a privilege, because he wasn’t as inflexible or overbearing as the others and, in addition, he made us understand that a good teacher is just a trampoline and that, sooner or later, we had to jump on our own. Without fear of crashing. Professor Kegel didn’t lecture us when we made mistakes or didn’t follow his instructions to the letter. And when he saw that we were discouraged because the direction we’d chosen had led us to a dead end, his response was always the same: “Don’t complain. You know more than when you started: where you shouldn’t go.” And he smiled with satisfaction. He was quite a character. Squat, with very thick eyeglasses, a fluty voice and his shirt cuffs stained with paint. Enough to turn him into the butt of our jokes, as happened to other teachers who were actually much less tempting, but instead he won our respect by treating us as equals. I don’t know what happened to him. The last I heard was that Professor Müller, who had been promoted to rector of the Academy, had fired him because he was a Jew.

Yet being useful is a horse of a different color. Alma said that, acting in the cabarets, she had felt useful. I can understand that. I suppose that painting can also be a way to be useful, but that wasn’t my intent. It’s much simpler than that. For me, it’s not about understanding the world or embellishing it. It’s not about capturing the meaning of my existence or beating death. I’ve only ever wanted to be happy doing what I love. If, in doing so, I’ve given someone else a moment of comfort or if, as Matisse longed for, a painting of mine has become an armchair to provide relaxation from fatigue, that’s fine with me. I feel the same way about life. I’ve never had grand pretensions. And I don’t regret this now that it’s nearing its end but, if I were looking for weak points, maybe I wish I’d been a bit more involved. I’ve too often been just a slack-jawed onlooker.

One morning while I was drawing, a European goldfinch approached a thistle that had somehow survived just past the trench’s parapet. After a week of rain, the intensity of its colors amid the mud was like an offering. The red of its face, the yellow patch on its wings, the white of its chest and legs, the black of its tail. . They were so vivid that it seemed someone had cut it out, as if it were a collage, to paste onto the brown of no-man’s-land. When I saw it, I remembered my father, in front of Raphael’s Madonna of the Goldfinch, telling me that Grandma Johanna had one and that sometimes she would take it out of its cage and let it take food from her lips. “Yeah, I knew that already. And she would talk to it,” I added. My father’s jaw dropped. Then I confessed that, one day, spying on her, I’d caught her explaining to the bird how she’d just gotten mad at me because, as usual, I didn’t want to take a bath.“As I live and breathe,” she complained. “That boy is so stubborn.” When she stopped talking, the goldfinch warbled. I had followed my grandmother to find out if she was very cross, and I went over and asked her, naively, what the bird had answered.“That, if you don’t bathe more often, you will get all scabby and turn into a scarecrow.” But when she saw my horrified expression, she started to laugh and gave me a hug. “Aren’t you a gullible one!” she said while I pressed myself up hard against her chest and breathed in the scent of camphor that came through her clothes. While the goldfinch pecked at the thistle seeds, I thought that it wasn’t that hard to turn into a scarecrow. You just had to live in a trench with water up to your knees. The only difference was that the itchiness from the lice made it impossible to stay still. I drew a couple of sketches of the bird with my colored pencils and, for a few moments, it seemed that the smell of Grandma Johanna drowned out the disgusting stench coming off of me and the mud filled with dead bodies. But the calm didn’t last long. A shot broke the silence and turned the goldfinch into a clump of bloody feathers. I remember that the seconds it took the thistle stalk to stop moving seemed like an eternity.

How do you paint the stillness of a dead bird? It took me a long time to answer that question and, when I think about it, I realize I wouldn’t have been able to, not before I shifted direction after Variation on a Theme by Bruegel. That painting represented the end of a period, since it was the culmination of my research into the figurative reproduction of reality. I no longer needed to go any further. Almost without realizing it, and thanks to Kandinsky’s influence, I veered toward abstraction. Reading Concerning the Spiritual in Art, with its allusions to the inner life of the creator and renouncing figuration, was a jolt. No other book has ever opened so many doors for me.

After Variation, color became the primary focus of my research. After many years, everything started to come together: my father’s stories, my rejection of the academy, the lessons of Matisse, my fascination with chromatic color harmony. . The large canvases — stretched out on the studio floor so I could work on them from the inside — became bursts of color, in seemingly chaotic compositions of splotches and forms with no link to reality, but which aspired to convey everything that was bubbling up from my viscera. They weren’t very popular, but the support of a small group of collectors and galleries allowed me to keep working. I don’t know what I would have done without the enthusiasm of people like Hans Goltz, Alfred Flechtheim, Ida Bienert, and Eugen Kirchhoff, who, one day, when I thanked him for buying a painting, answered: “Without painters like you, the world would be more gray and desolate.” I had never been told anything so lovely.

But I didn’t find my definitive path until Alma came into my life. Without meaning to, when she recalled her modeling sessions with the SS in Ravensbrück while I painted her body, she gave me the solution. Finally, everything fit. Her wish for the colors of the SS officer’s palette to embellish her pained body, the sordidness of the barracks, and the arrogant gaze of the officer coincided with my desire to transform the reality of the trench in order to bear the stench of the half-buried bodies, and putrefying no-man’s-land. Soon after, taking advantage of increasingly longer stays in Hauterive, I began to work directly on the landscape, painting tree trunks and branches, fern leaves, rocks in the forest, and snow in the garden. I had never worked on such a vast canvas. Endless. And I was able to close the circle my father had opened when we went on walks to gather the elements we needed to make our own paints. I was returning to nature the pigments it had given me.

The work I am most pleased with is the river that skirts the studio and leads into the forest. One day, seated on the bank, I was inspired to begin painting its pebbles. I’ve been doing it ever since. Stretch by stretch, yard by yard, I have turned the riverbed into a canvas of unpredictable stone, because the water, the iridescence of the colors, shadows, and reflections make every moment unique and surprising. It was also Alma’s favorite project. That was why she asked me, if she died before I did, to mix her ashes in with the pigments and paint the pebbles of her beloved spot, beneath the poplar where she liked to sit and read, or look out at the landscape.

I’m sure Erika would have found it ludicrous. Particularly once her typical bursts of enthusiasm had begun to lead her down into the catacombs. It started with isolated, abstract references to “the new birth of the fatherland” and the “renewal of lost hope.” Rhetoric that, gradually, became more concrete in the “great events that await us” beneath the protection of the “glorious leader” and the need to “cleanse society of undesirable elements.” As undesirable as Konrad’s Jewish friends, whom she wouldn’t allow into the house. It turns my stomach when I think of it.“Why won’t you let me play with Heini?” Konrad would ask her, confused.“Because it’s what’s best for you,” Erika would respond. And she considered the matter settled.

Her family wasn’t much help. When Erika’s father got wind of the profits involved, he didn’t hesitate to put the family factory to work for the war machine, disguising his eagerness to increase his personal fortune with an unbearable charade. It left my father very disenchanted; he never understood how his lifelong friend could be so unscrupulous.“We can never truly know people,” he declared. Then he shook his head, his disappointment written on his face.“Who would have thought it,” he added. “Bürckel sucking up to those scoundrels.” He died without ever comprehending it. And without forgiving him.

And there I was, in a fine fix. Living with Erika, protecting Konrad, painting against the grain, trying to detach myself from the fanatical crowd, keep myself on the margins of all that senselessness. . I still don’t know how I was able to stand it for so long. The hardest part was living with Erika when we no longer shared anything. We barely even shared responsibility for Konrad, because each of us, firmly convinced of our own ideas, went our own way. Poor Konrad. I remember as if it were yesterday the first time I secretly brought him to my studio so he could play with his friend Heini. I’d never seen him so confused. “What about Mom. . What’s Mom going to say?” he asked me. “Nothing. Because she doesn’t have to know about it, right?” I answered him. But not everything was that simple. At school, the marching lines of little Hitler admirers, the uniforms, his classmates, his lessons. . Everything was reason enough to get into an argument with Erika. It is hard to accept that someone you’ve loved madly can become a stranger. Or worse than a stranger: an enemy.

My father said that he had only argued with my mother once. It was over the photograph of the three of us on Rügen. It seems it vanished shortly after the photographer they’d met on the island’s cliffs sent them the copy he’d promised. Convinced that it was my mother’s fault, since she’d been spending all day rummaging through drawers and folders to put together my album, he goaded her so much that they ended up fighting. He admitted that he should have held his tongue, but he was so agitated that it fogged his judgment. “It’s so hard to meet the challenges of each situation,” he told me.“Your mother was dying and I got mad over something so inconsequential.” Actually I have a hard time believing that was their only disagreement. And that my mother, as he claimed, was the only love of his life, because it doesn’t tally with the contents of a bundle of letters, written by someone named Birgit, that I found when emptying out my father’s study after his death. But memory is like that. It tends to deform our recollections to adapt them to the image we’ve created or want to give of ourselves, or of the people we’ve loved.

I don’t know how many times Alma fell in love before she met me. It wasn’t exactly one of her favorite topics of conversation. She only mentioned Jakob Reger, whom she described as “my own private vaudeville” the first time she told me about him. She met him shortly after arriving in Vienna, during the first rehearsals at the Literatur am Naschmarkt, and, from what she said, it was like nothing she had ever experienced before. The minute she saw him she felt she could have done anything for him.“As stupid but marvelous as that,” she added with the ironic tone she used when she wanted to protect herself from the sadness some memories evoked in her. Jakob had what she most admired: convictions and enough imagination and courage to turn them into furious attacks against everything he found reprehensible, but he was a hothead and a womanizer. They lived together for a few weeks in Alma’s attic with views of the Danube where, as she told me, they “fucked as if there was no tomorrow,” but he dumped her callously for another actress in the cabaret. Horribly jealous, Alma humiliated herself to get him back, to such an extent that she remembered it with a mix of rage and shame. She followed him around, threatened him, screamed at him. I find it hard to believe when I think of the Alma I met a few years later, so distant and even-keeled but, as she would often say,“it’s frightening how love can dredge up the worst in us.”

When she got out of Ravensbrück, Alma went back to Vienna to look for Jakob and apologize for her behavior, but all she was able to find out was that he’d been arrested trying to cross the border. No one knew anything more about his fate. With no reason to stay in the city, and no reason to move back to Berlin or Prague, Alma decided to start from scratch far from those places where she hadn’t been able to live in peace. With the few things the looters had left in her home, some photographs and books that a neighbor had saved for her in a box, she took off for Paris.“See? Stealing just a few years of my life wasn’t enough for them,” Alma said to me on several occasions.

I understand her exasperation perfectly because, even though I’ve never gotten caught up in collecting for collecting’s sake, I like to live among the indispensable objects from my past, so I have clues to help me travel back. Laugel’s star and my father’s zoetrope, my mother’s album and sewing box, Alma’s poster from the Schall und Rauch, one of Marcellus Goldschmidt’s erotic postcards, Braque’s book, Grandma Johanna’s rocking chair, a drawing that Konrad made. .

I also retain something from Sergeant Forkel: his eyes wide with fear. It was during our retreat from theVaux forest. Fleeing the gas, I tripped and fell into a crater, where I found him sprawled amid the grime and wreckage. He had a bullet wound in his back and a broken leg. The bone was coming through his pants.“You’re so useless you can’t even run away,” he told me in his usual arrogant tone.“But it’s lucky for me, because now you can help me out of this hole.” Between my itchy neck and my heart about to burst out of my chest, I couldn’t even respond. Also, for a few seconds, I was thrown off by his helplessness, as if he weren’t the same man I’d seen act so cruelly. But only until he insisted with a “Because I figure you don’t have the balls to leave me here, right?” The first kick caught him by surprise. All I remember about the rest was a confused jumble of blows and moans. And Sergeant Forkel’s mumbling as I dragged myself out of the crater: “I hope they blow your brains out.” It’s hard to believe that such a feeble voice could hurt so much. I ran like a man possessed as I kept constantly repeating “Another ‘one more down.’ Another ‘one more down.’ Another ‘one more down.’”When I got to the trench, my fellow soldiers received me as if I’d come back from the dead. I didn’t tell them anything about Sergeant Forkel. I imagine they would have understood it but, as my father used to say, “what’s kept quiet is worth more than what’s said.” Though I didn’t sleep a wink for days.

I don’t regret what I did, but I’m not proud of it either. Every time I’ve had to deal with remorse, I’ve gotten past it by reminding myself that Sergeant Forkel wouldn’t have had any mercy a week later, when I broke down as we were about to begin an attack. I’m convinced that, like on so many other occasions, he’d have been cold-blooded. But perhaps that’s just a cowardly excuse to shrug off the voice of my conscience. Since I’ve fallen ill, I think about him fairly often and I wonder what must have gone through his head. Alone. Abandoned in a hole filled with stinking mud. With the terror that clings to those last agonizing moments like a leech.

Well, it seems it won’t be long before I know what it’s like. My decrepitude doesn’t rest. It advances like the tide. Firm, obstinate. And I no longer even have Doctor Zomer as an excuse for putting up a brave front. He died before my father did. Well, actually, he killed himself. And that was another thing my father could never understand. “How can someone who’s devoted himself to saving other people’s lives end up taking his own?” he would ask. And when he was ailing, he kept saying,“If only Doctor Zomer were here, at least.” Or “What a shame that Doctor Zomer’s not here. He had a clinical eye. .” My current doctor is nothing like Doctor Zomer. He’s young and energetic, and a bit inexperienced, but that doesn’t matter. It doesn’t take much skill to realize that trying to nurse me back to health is a wasted effort and that, as my father used to say, “each day I’m more there than here.” Maybe I should leave everything to the doctor. He has mentioned that he likes art. “Art,” not “my art,” but that doesn’t mean anything. Who knows, if he looks at it long enough, he might eventually find something he likes in it. Maybe, sitting in the garden in Hauterive or strolling along the banks of the river filled with color, he can amuse his friends or impress his girlfriend with the story of the Cranach.

If only I could do what my father did. He explained the story to me the evening before he died but, without Alma or Konrad, I don’t have anyone close enough to save it from oblivion. My father held out the key to one of the closets in his study and asked me to bring him a wooden box. “Here, now it’s yours,” he told me. When I opened it and saw the three figures in the painting, I knew right away. “That’s us!” I exclaimed. My father just nodded.“Where did this come from?” I asked him. First he gave me one of his enigmatic smiles, but he soon answered. When she knew she was dying, my mother gave the photo from Rügen Island to the “famous copyist, you know the one I mean” so he would paint her a Cranach.“She wanted it to be her last gift,” he told me.“So that everything would end where it had begun: with Cranach and orpiment.” For a while, as my father observed me in silence, I ran my eyes over the contours of the clouds, the landscape in the background, the withered fir tree, the cluster of grapes, the mallow bush without a single bloom. And the three figures. Mother, with the same distracted pose as in the photograph taken on Rügen Island. The helpless tenderness in my father’s eyes. My old man face. The painting arrived, along with the photograph and a note from the copyist, when my mother had already died. Over the years it became a secret that he only shared with me once there was no other option, and the Cranach was, as he admitted to me, “the least painful of consolations.”

During my father’s last few weeks, we switched the roles we’d had in my childhood. I could spend hours reading his favorite books to him or repeating the stories he’d explained to me so many times. When I think about those days, I remember two desires mixing together, one more selfless than the other: taking care of him so he didn’t want for anything, and gathering sensations for when he was no longer here. What he most asked me to read to him was Marco Polo. He knew it so well that he would ask me directly for his favorite episodes, like the description of the Green Mount at the Cathay Palace, where the Great Khan collected the most beautiful trees in the world; his stay in the Kingdom of Maabar, where the fish-charmers protected the pearl fishermen; and the story of King Caidu’s daughter, who made a pact with her father that she would only marry the man who could vanquish her in every trial. And, our favorite chapter of them all: the trip to the lapis lazuli quarries in Badakhshan. When he listened to the part that spoke of the river’s blueness, about the flight of the falcons and the musky scent of the women dressed in silks, he would close his eyes and smile as if he were the one riding over the frozen plain on a shoeless horse.

My father died reminding me of my mother’s last wish. He had repeated it to me many, many times, but hearing it then, with his death rattle filling the increasingly longer silences that he made between words, brought tears to my eyes. “Don’t forget to be happy.”

I would have liked to say goodbye to Alma in a different way. Not on the station platform talking about the plants in the garden and Rufus’s hairs. But that is another of the disadvantages of living subject to fate. I left Erika without saying a word. I suppose words were no longer necessary. After so many fights, the last straw — to say it without all the resentment I feel when I recall it — was the exhibition of degenerate art in Munich, which Erika had to write an article about for one of the propaganda magazines she was a contributor to. It would have been more prudent not to go with her, but my desire to lay eyes on — perhaps for the last time — so many works that had been removed from the museums was stronger than my good sense. During the visit through the small, poorly-lit halls of the Archeological Institute, with the paintings crowded together on top of a sackcloth backdrop, Erika kept making insulting comments about what she was seeing. The colors, the figures, the perspective, the motifs. . Nothing escaped her scorn. When, tired of listening to her, I told her that maybe she was taking it too far, all she said was “If they don’t know how to paint, to hell with them.” Perhaps because, deep down, I had trusted that someday she would eventually understand that the ideas she was defending were a dead-end street, I was more disappointed than ever that she could be present at the start of a tabula rasa like that one without flinching. I only noticed a flash of confusion when, in one of the rooms, beneath an inscription that read “Nature seen by sick minds,” she found one of my paintings surrounded by landscapes by Kirchner, Schmidt-Rottluff, and Nagel. Town by the River was the title. Erika looked at me and, without saying a word, continued walking. I didn’t follow her. I had had enough. I turned around and walked back towards the street with my heart in my throat. I waited for her at the Hofgarten for more than an hour. There are few times in my life when I’ve felt so alone. Sitting on a bench in the square, my only company the crows watching me from the branches of the lindens, I realized, as Alma did some years later, that I only had one way out.

That same day, I went back to Berlin to say goodbye to Konrad, gather up the few things I could fit into my car, and leave Germany. That was no longer my home. And I’ve never seen Erika or Konrad again. I don’t know what would have happened if they hadn’t died in the 1945 bombings. Perhaps, without the atmosphere of fanaticism that ended up pushing us apart, we could have started over. I don’t know. What I still haven’t processed is not taking Konrad with me. I suppose that Erika, with her contacts, wouldn’t have let me get very far. Nevertheless, I should have made the attempt.

But that’s the problem with decisions. It’s difficult to go over them and not have any regrets. Of all my decisions, at least those that’ve had some lasting effect, the only one I have no qualms about is not giving in to Hofer’s extortion. That morning, once the last watercolor was dry, I took down the Cranach and filled the wall with the sixty-eight paintings on the list. There were three rows of them. I don’t know if that moment is more potent than the rest, but reliving it helps me to calm the guilt I feel over everything I could have done, all the wrong turns, all the unsaid words.

When I think back on it, I’m still surprised that, after everything that happened, what best represents the moment that gives meaning to my life, the center where all the lines of the star’s vertices come together, is a sound. Not a color, not a word, not a person. A sound. That of the studio door closing behind me, with the Cranach, wrapped in newspaper, under my arm. Yes, in the end, that’s the answer.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many thanks to all the people who, in one way or another, made this book possible:

Quim Armengol, Silvia Bastos, Maru Boquet, Eugènia Broggi, Lula Bullich,Àngel Burgas, Pau Centellas, Javier Cisneros, Xavier Cortés, José Antonio de Juan, Eduard Márquez, Jordi Márquez, Ramón Minguillón, Bernat Puigtobella, Mercè Pujadas, Andreu Rossinyol and Ramon Solsona, for their comments and suggestions.

Silvia Schmid, for answering so many questions.

Ángel Seral, for Brandes’ artistic trajectory.

Isabel Balaguer, for an afternoon of watercolors.

Gabriele Saure, for the trees in the Hofgarten.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Eduard Márquezlives in Barcelona. He published two books of poetry in Spanish before writingZugzwang, his first work in Catalan. He has continued writing in Catalan, publishing another collection of short fiction, fifteen children’s books, and four novels. His work has been translated into German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Turkish.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

Mara Faye Lethem is a writer and literary translator from the Catalan and the Spanish.Authors she has translated include Jaume Cabré, David Trueba,Albert Sánchez Piñol, Javier Calvo,Toni Sala, Patricio Pron, Juan Marsé, Rodrigo Fresán and Pola Oloixarac. Her translations have appeared in publications such as Granta, The Paris Review and McSweeney’s.

Content

Eduard Márquez
Brandes's Decision

BRANDES'S DECISION

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR