Chapter 16 Portrait of a Spy

The summons for the new year arrived not as a motorcar this time but as a card, carried through the leather trade inside a roll of skiver hides and addressed with the society's compliments. The society, it appeared, wished to add the attaché's portrait to its hall of friendship, executed by a hand already known to its members, and the attaché had expressed a preference, in the small careful script that had once signed a train manifest, for the restorer lately arrived from Brno. Three afternoons at the society's library were proposed, materials declared the artist's own affair, and the fee set at nearly double the going rate and stated in the tone of a man reading out a verdict that admits no appeal. Refusal remained possible. The card made that clear the way an ice floe makes swimming possible, technically, and for a short distance only. His handler's opinion arrived by signs across a bench of frame stock and occupied less time than the reading of one auction label. Accept, because refusal was a question and questions invited audits. Sit nowhere near the studio; the library would serve, libraries belonging to everyone and therefore recording nothing personal about anybody. Bring own canvas, own colours, own mediums mixed at home, and carry every rag home again, because institutions employed charwomen who sold dust by the envelope to whoever asked politely. And paint nothing into the picture that the sitter had not carried into the room himself, a doctrine so fundamental that it required no accompanying gesture, though the handler gave one anyway, tapping the bench twice, which in their private grammar meant either believe me or remember Liboc, depending on the weather that week. Volkov sat better than most professionals, which constituted intelligence in itself. He held his head as requested without holding it like a favour, poured tea from the library's service in the manner of a man who had served worse people from better porcelain, and talked about attribution with genuine appetite, following a dispute over a half-length in Dresden the way other men follow football leagues, with tables and grievances. Twice he built questions shaped like courtesies: whether a copyist could work truthfully from photographs alone or needed the anchor of standing before the original site; whether likeness lived in proportion or in the small deliberate wrongnesses a face wore only for its friends. Viktor answered in the technicalities of drapery and ground colour, conceding nothing that a stranger could carry away in an evidence case, and watched each answer being filed, patiently and without visible disappointment, in whatever drawer the attaché kept behind his courtesy. The second afternoon opened with condolences. Herr Volkov had heard, he truly regretted, of a fire at a framing shop in Liboc, a tragedy for the whole trade, and hoped that no friend of the house had been standing too near the wiring when it declared itself. The timing was exact, the sympathy weighted to the gram, and Viktor ground his madder steadily straight through it, observing aloud that old shops collected old faults the way old soldiers collected opinions, and that wiring, unlike opinions, could be replaced. A second probe followed, softer, concerning the high regard in which certain Brno circles held a certain colleague lately passed through their hands, and then the afternoon's true cargo was announced: page seventeen of a certain brown folder, the attaché mentioned, looking somewhere over Viktor's shoulder, contained handwriting that a son might find interesting, available for the price of a conversation rather than money. Viktor rinsed his brush, changed colours, and remarked that handwriting was a country whose citizenship he had formally renounced. The attaché studied the ceiling for a moment and agreed that renunciations, in his long experience of archives, were invariably the first documents any state bothered to preserve. The portrait itself he painted honestly, which demanded far more discipline than flattery ever has. Clerks of power present a problem the powerful never do: their faces arrive unfinished, waiting for rank to complete them, and a painter who supplies the completion lies even when he soothes. Viktor declined to soothe. He rendered the patience, the small careful hands, the attention that took inventory while pretending to take tea, and underneath them, because honesty insisted on its tax, a particular loneliness, the sort that institutions manufacture in men they trust absolutely and love not at all. At the third sitting's end Volkov examined the result for a long minute, longer than politeness runs, and then pronounced it exact and directed that it hang in the society's hall rather than travel to any private office. A public hanging, both men understood without consulting each other, functioned as a signature on a claim ticket. Between sittings the fee arrived in an envelope carried by a boy too well dressed to be anyone's actual son, and Viktor performed the small theatre expected of him, counting the notes, initialling a receipt, complaining mildly about the exchange rate as tradesmen are licensed to do. Money from that quarter could be neither banked nor refused, so he spent it visibly and boringly: pigments above his usual grade, a secondhand chair for the models' corner, coal that kept no ledger of who warmed beside it. What unsettled him was not the money but the residue of the sittings themselves. For three afternoons he had shared a room with a man whose profession was noticing, and had been noticed noticing back; somewhere forever there would hang a record of two professionals studying each other across a tea service, and one of them, he understood with a craftsman's queasiness, was also among the subject matter. On the tram home he scrubbed the library's varnish smell out of his brush cleaner and told himself the arrangement had bought something real and hard. Armour assembled from another man's property rusts slowly, he conceded to the window, but it does keep off the rain for as long as it lasts. The accounting came afterward, over packing crates in the rear of the leather trade, conducted in taps, tilts, and the flat of a hand. A portrait in a hall meant colleagues could study Viktor's face at leisure for years, learning it the way customs officers learn a profitable route. It meant the attaché had invested publicly and would eventually collect, investments of that size anticipating returns the way rivers anticipate downhill. It also meant, the handler conceded with a shrug that visibly cost him something, that for some months ahead the cheapest armour Viktor could wear was the attaché's own property, hanging ten paces from where officials drank their coffee and thought about him. At midnight Viktor scraped the palette alone, madder into umber into a grey fit for rain, and concluded that he had painted a true thing and posted it into service as a useful lie, which was, his father might have said with whatever voice the archives had left him, the family trade after all. ---