The Orpheus Clock by Simon Goodman

Author:Simon Goodman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-11-29T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

SEARCHING FOR DEGAS

From the old negative taken by Rose Valland and found in Bernard’s boxes.

My father wasn’t able to leave my brother or me much, or so it seemed. There was no great inheritance. When those musty boxes arrived, I wasn’t sure if they were a gift or a burden.

My brother and I didn’t know where to begin. So Nick cleared the biggest table he had, and we started to make delicate piles based on any common reference we could detect. Neither of us had any clue where this real-life puzzle might lead. Pa had to have had a reason to keep all this so carefully, decade after decade, country after country, and home after home. Whatever our motivation—filial duty, tender respect—we were determined to find out the answers.

What emerged before us was a rare glimpse into the withdrawn world of our departed father. From the time we were children, we had always assumed those endless trips to Europe were for his career in the travel business. Only now did we realize that our father’s unspectacular career had a hidden, ulterior purpose.

We had always taken for granted that what had been lost during the war years had somehow all been accounted for. With each letter, it became more and more clear that little had truly been settled. Our father had never given up his silent struggle to recover his parents’ lost art treasures, right up to the moment of his sudden death.

Nick and I were beginning to grasp, with a sense of both foreboding and exhilaration, that hidden among these brittle pages were the secrets that Pa had never been able to articulate. Reaching across time, our past, perhaps mercifully out of reach up till this point, was about to become tangible.

Suddenly, I was grateful for all the times my father had dragged me through those musty museums as a little boy. It was all coming back to me—the familiar names, the familiar artists. Thanks to this gift that had lain dormant for so many years, I felt strangely confident about the task that was unfolding in front of me.

• • •

Waves of forgotten memories swept over me while reading names and addresses from a distant childhood, comforted by my father’s headed notepaper, still real after so many years. Brittle stamps, barely hanging on with ancient glue, recalled boyhood heroes such as Churchill and De Gaulle, alongside the likes of Hitler and Mussolini. One pattern quickly became clear. Almost every one of my father’s yellowing letters had the same theme—paintings and art once cherished and then swallowed up in the Nazi whirlwind.

In particular, Pa had focused most of his attention on the paintings that had been sent to the Paul Graupe gallery in the place Vendôme. In the spring of 1939 and with war imminent, Fritz had sent around twenty-five major paintings from Bosbeek to Paris for safekeeping, along with several sculptures and some very valuable furniture.

Almost all the Paris documents and inventories that we found in our father’s

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