Michael Gruber - The Forgery of Venus

I said I did, and was this part of my therapy?

“Of course,” he said genially. “Everything is part of therapy. But I think the best thing will be if you have your family around you. I have been in contact with your ex-wife and she has agreed to visit. I am truly looking forward to meeting your children.”

At which point I started to cry.

I sat in that car, slumped in a corner with my temple against the cool glass, watching the sweat and tears flow down the window, thinking, Oh, yeah, I bet he was looking forward to meeting my kids, then he’d have total control over me, the master manipulator. Who did I think he was-right, the question Jesus asked his disciples, but in my case no answer came. Rolling through the possibilities in my mind, logic a comfort, a sign that the brain’s still functioning. No, actually, maniacs are flawlessly logical, it’s their premises that are false. Dredging up memories, my Cartesian theater lit up and roaring, all the crap jobs I’d done, the details of the paintings, my loft, the meals I’d eaten, cubic yards of Chinese food and pizza, the children in the loft, the move to Brooklyn, the furniture of our house, my life with Lotte, the agony of our divorce…Yeah, it was there in my head, solid, reliable, visuals, audio, even smells, twenty years of life.

And then I recalled my life as Velázquez and it was the same: grinding pigments; laying on the paint; my wife, Juana; talking with my teacher and father-in-law, Pacheco; walking with the king in the gardens of Buen Retiro, painting him, his ugly, gentle face, all just as real. Besides that, I have the same vivid memories of a whole year that never happened to me, and no memories at all of three months that did, apparently. And I knew it couldn’t be real, so what good was memory? It was no good at all, and without that existential confidence, I was nothing, I was in there with the Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, deep brain malfunction, like those people who think their wives are robots sent from the CIA.

Other explanations? A gigantic conspiracy? Terrific, that’s not just schizophrenia, that’s paranoid schizophrenia. Paranoia’s related to memory, that’s clear, Alzheimer’s patients attacking their kids, becoming suspicious, who are all these strangers pretending to love me? Happening to me too, inevitable. And Shelly Zubkoff-did that really happen at all, or was that a fantasy too, an excuse to retreat from reality, like the CIA rays that make necessary the wearing of tinfoil helmets?

Why would Krebs do such a thing? If he’s Krebs the criminal, why am I still with him? He’s got the painting. A handshake and good-bye for Wilmot would be more to the point, or a knock on the head-thinking of Eric Hebborn, greatest faker of the last century, besides me, had his head cracked open in Rome, murder never solved. How would someone like Krebs handle forgers who’ve outlived their usefulness? He’s planning to kill me in his secret mountain laboratory? No, Franco saved me, and Franco works for Krebs. Unless Franco pushed me and then pretended to save me, so that I’d be scared, so that I’d stick with Krebs, a docile tool, and get my family into his clutches. Again, if true, why? And then, why rig up this dark legion of background heavies, that interview, maybe it was a setup entirely, a show with actors, so that I’d see Krebs as my protector instead of my persecutor-but why go through all that trouble, like I wouldn’t do what he wants out of simple fear? I would, I admit it, I’m a total chicken.

But all this is just what a paranoid maniac would think, the desperate attempt of a mind unhinged to seek some rational explanation that doesn’t involve the One Big Fact: that everything I remember about the last few decades of my life is false. That I’m Someone Else. So my thoughts go around and around, Krebs sitting next to me; I’m a silk-wrapped fly in his web. I can’t look at him.

Meanwhile, underneath all these thoughts, like a suppurating ulcer you can’t stand to look at, was what happened in New York, those paintings. That was real all right, and an insinuating voice in my head was saying, Oh, Chaz, come back, come back to your real and only life.

Right, shit, it’s easy to sit here and recount or try to recount what went through my head on that fucking car ride, but it’s a lot harder to recapture the feelings, the hamster in a wire wheel spinning, the car on black ice out of control. What I did eventually was breathe slow and deep and contemplate the glories of nature. Not all that glorious on the autobahn, mainly a blur, but we turned off onto a secondary road south of Ingolstadt and drove on west into the sun. The day had begun cloudy but cleared up later in the afternoon, a spring day in the ancient heart of Europe, forests of dark spruce and beech just coming into leaf, that ravishing pale green hard to get with paint, too easy to make it acid, chloriney, tube colors no good, you have to use a very pale gray undercoat and work it in with greens you make out of ultramarine and chrome yellow, thin washes over the off-white, marvelous against the almost blacky green of the spruces, and there were fields of intense violent yellow rapeseed, and other fields just greening up with grain, and the shadows of the clouds flying over them a different light show every minute.

Every so often we slid through a town, old squares lined by half-timbered houses with overhanging roofs, and the churches of the local stone with their clocked steeples mosaicked with stones of different colors, some wonderful anonymous artists of the baroque, and it made me feel good to see that. Later the towns came more infrequently and the land rose a thousand feet or so; the forest closed in on the road, and we turned in to the forest itself, dark with shafts of light shooting down through the trees, reddening as the sun got lower, the kind of effect that was transcendent in the baroque and kitsch in the late nineteenth century, acres of Teutonic landscapes stuffing third-rate museums. Then down an allée of beeches entwined overhead, and at last the house.

I suppose I had imagined a Dracula castle, black sweating stone with Gothic turrets and gargoyles, but this was just a large, three-story Bavarian house, with the usual sharply peaked, hipped roof and half-timbering. I wanted it to exude an air of menace, but it just sat there, clumsy and plain as pumpernickel. It might have originally been the manor house of a substantial estate. There were some outbuildings in a more modern style clustered around it; one was a garage. Franco stopped the car in front of it and we all got out.

Just like on Masterpiece Theater, I was glad to see, the staff gathered at the front door to greet the returning master. Two middle-aged people, Herr and Frau Bieneke, she the housekeeper, he the majordomo, butler, whatever you call it, plain and competent looking; a couple of young housemaids, Liesl and Gerda, goggling at me shyly; the cook, Frau Bonner, in apron, red and damp faced; and two men, Revich and Macek, Slavic in appearance, whose duties were not defined but who were obviously the muscle. Krebs made the intros with seigneurial graciousness; the staff nodded, smiled; I nodded, smiled. Everyone had very good teeth. We went inside, and Krebs left me in the hands of Herr Bieneke to show me my rooms and the layout.

We went through the entrance foyer into what seemed to be the main hall, and here my imagination was at last satisfied: flagged floors with scattered Oriental rugs, heavy black furnishings with studded red leather upholstery, a stone fireplace, deer antlers up and down the walls with a couple of boars’ heads mounted among them, a full suit of armor standing in one corner, and over the fireplace a vast trophy, a shield with a coat of arms on it and a dozen or so swords and pole-arms. A bearskin with snarling head lay in front of the fireplace to complete the Teutonic splendorama.