Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

It is doubtful that Baranov was rash enough to contemplate showing the painting publicly. (Whatever necessity drove him to re-creating his masterpiece was adequately served by its completion and his memories of the damage he had suffered in Moscow must have been too fresh to allow him to court disaster in Berlin by unveiling his work.) But the matter was taken out of his hands, by the Gestapo, who, in their routine weekly search of the homes and offices of all people who read foreign newspapers (a habit to which Baranov was foolishly addicted) came upon the green nude on the very day Baranov had finished it. The two detectives were simple fellows, but they were well-enough imbued with National Socialist culture to sense defection and heresy here. Arranging for reinforcements and throwing a cordon around the building, they called the chief of the bureau which dealt in these matters. One hour later, Baranov was under arrest and Anna had been removed from her post and sent to work as an assistant dietician in a home for unwed mothers near the Polish border. As was the case in Moscow, no one, not even a fire-eating Colonel in an SS Armored division with whom Anna had quite an intimate relationship, ever dared point out to Anna that her husband had not gone out of his home for his model.

Baranov was questioned by the Gestapo for one month. The questioning, more or less routine, during the course of which Baranov lost three teeth and was twice condemned to death, was aimed largely at getting Baranov to deliver over his lists of accomplices and fellow-conspirators and to confess to certain acts of sabotage in nearby airplane factories which had been committed in the past several months. While he was in the hands of the Gestapo, Baranov’s painting was put on public view in a large exhibition arranged by the Propaganda Ministry to acquaint the population with the newest trends in decadent and un-German art. The exhibition was enormously successful and was attended by a hundred thousand more people than had ever witnessed a showing of paintings in Berlin until that time.

On the day that Baranov was released from jail, considerably stooped and doomed to eat soft foods for some months to come, the leading critic of the Berlin Tageblatt came out with the official judgment on the painting. Baranov bought a paper and read, “This is Judaeo-Anarchism at its most insolent peak. Egged on by Rome (there was a new addition in the background of the ruins of a village church), with the connivance of Wall Street and Hollywood, under orders from Moscow, this barbaric worm of a Baranov, né Goldfarb, has insinuated himself into the heartland of German culture in an attempt to bring discredit on our German health and our German institutions of justice. It is a pacifistic attack on our Army, Navy and Air Force, a vile Oriental slander of our glorious German women, a celebration of the lecherous so-called psychology of the Viennese ghetto, a noxious fume from the Paris sewers of the French degenerates, a sly argument from the British Foreign office for their bloodthirsty Imperialism. With our usual reticent dignity, we Germans of the German art world, we monitors of the proud and holy German soul, must band together and demand, in respectful, firm, reserved tones, that this gangrenous excrescence on our national life be expunged. Heil Hitler!”

That night, in bed with Anna, who had luckily managed to get a three-day leave to welcome her husband home, listening to what was now a standard twelve-hour lecture on his wife’s part, Baranov looked back with something like fondness on the comparatively delicate phrasing of the Tageblatt critic.

The next morning he saw Suvarnin. Suvarnin noted that despite the physical ravages of the past month, his friend seemed to have regained some secure inner peace, some great lessening of the weight of an impalpable but soul-destroying burden. Also, despite the night of oratory he had just passed through and the thirty days of police handling, he seemed rested, as if he had been sleeping well recently.

“You shouldn’t have done it,” Suvarnin said with mild reproach.

“I know,” said Baranov. “But I couldn’t help it. It just came out.”

“Do you want some advice?”

“Yes.”

“Leave the country,” Suvarnin said. “Fast.”

But Anna, who liked Germany and was convinced that she could win her way up the ladder once more, refused. And it was inconceivable to Baranov that he go without her. But in the next three months, he was twice beaten up severely on the street by SA gangs and a man who lived three blocks away who resembled him slightly was kicked to death by five young men by mistake; all his paintings were collected and officially burned; he was accused by his janitor of homosexuality and was given a suspended sentence after a trial of four days; he was arrested and questioned for twenty-four hours when he was caught carrying a camera past the Chancellery on the way to a pawnshop and the camera was confiscated. All this would not have shaken Anna in her determination to remain in Germany, but when proceedings were put under way to have Baranov sterilized as a threat to the German bloodstream, she crossed the border with him into Switzerland in the middle of a snowstorm.

It took the Baranovs more than a year to get to America, but as Sergei walked down 57th Street in New York City, staring at the windows of the art galleries, in which the most extreme styles of painting, from lurid surrealism to sugary naturalism were peacefully on display, he felt that all his trials and troubles had been worthwhile because they had eventually brought him to this harbor. Gratefully and emotionally he made application within the first week for citizenship for Anna and himself. As further demonstration of his new-born allegiance he even took to watching the Giants play at the Polo Grounds, although it never became quite clear to him what, exactly, the players were doing around second base, and he patriotically developed a taste for Manhattan cocktails, which he rightly assumed to be the native drink.

The next few years were the happiest of the Baranovs’ lives. Critics and patrons alike found that the soft-voiced Russian brought a mysterious European flavor, melancholy and classic, to homely American tomatoes and cucumbers, and his shows almost invariably sold out at good prices. A large wine company used Baranov grapes on all their labels and advertising and a large Baranov still life of a basket of oranges was bought by a California packing company and blown up into twenty-four sheets and plastered on billboards from one end of the country to the other. Baranov bought a small house in Jersey, not far from New York, and when Suvarnin turned up, having left Germany with a price on his head because he had been overheard, in his cups, saying that the German Army could not reach Moscow in three weeks, Baranov gladly invited the critic to live with them.

Heady with his new sense of freedom, Baranov even went so far as to paint a nude, very pink and firm-fleshed, from memory. But Anna, who by this time was attached to a nationally circulated news magazine as an authority on Communism and Fascism, was very firm in her handling of the situation. She ripped the painting to shreds with a breadknife and dismissed the robust, apple-cheeked Czech girl who did their cooking, although the girl went to the rather extreme length of having a reputable physician testify to her virginity in an attempt to retain her position.

Anna’s success in America, where men have long been conditioned to listen to women, and where her particular brand of crisp, loquacious efficiency was regarded with stunned fascination by her male colleagues, was even more dazzling than any she had enjoyed in Europe. By the end of the war the magazine for which she worked had put her in charge of the departments of Political Interpretation, Medicine for Women, Fashion, Books, and, of course, Child Care. She even got a job for Suvarnin on the magazine, reviewing motion-pictures, a job he held until the autumn of ’47, when he lost his eyesight.