Chapter 18 The Counterfeit

The package reached him through the leather trade in February, wrapped in brown paper and tied with the kind of string that outlives governments, addressed to the Brno restorer with a formality that already smelled of ministries. Inside lay a dossier of photostat pages, soft-edged and several generations removed from any original, headed with the custody markings of a certain archive; beneath them sat a single letter dated a January twelve years gone, and a card bearing four words and two initials: for professional opinion, A.V. There was no threat anywhere on the paper, which was itself the threat, since men who traffic in opinions invariably own the tribunal where opinions come to be graded. He read the letter standing up, then sitting down, and needed a while before trusting himself with it again. The hand was his father's, or had done its homework in his father's school: short declarative sentences, weather reported before grievances, grievances mostly absent. The writer described prison rations with a gardener's professional interest in root vegetables, asked after nobody by name because names cost their owners dearly in such places, and closed with instructions that read like an epitaph filed in advance. Keep the hands honest though the work be crooked, the father wrote. Forgive the dead their silence, which was purchased and not chosen. Trust no document whose author cannot watch you hold it. On the second pass Viktor understood the closing line as advice aimed forward across twelve winters at this exact table, and he laid the page face down beside the lamp and looked at the back of it for a long time, as though paper could be read from behind by fathers. The handling came next, because grief makes poor laboratory conditions and he refused to grieve until the chemistry confirmed anything. Cotton gloves went on; the bench was stripped to bare wood and wiped with turpentine; the raking lamp took its position low on the left, the angle he reserved for craquelure and lies. Only when the stage stood ready did he permit himself the third reading, aloud, very quietly, the way one tests a coin against the teeth, and even then the voice that read it sounded less like a son than like an expert witness being sworn in on a Bible he intended to audit later. Authentication proper began the following evening and proceeded like surgery conducted with the patient politely awake. Paper: correct stock, correct watermark region, correct age to eye and fingernail alike. Typewriter: an elite pica whose lower-case e wore the identical broken eyebrow as the machine that had typed every sibling page in the folder's family. Folds: creased before typing, ink riding unbroken across each valley, executed by somebody who owned a bone folder and knew why. Oxidation delivered the first verdict: an even tan across the entire leaf, while its genuine neighbours had aged patchily, the way paper does when it has actually lived near windows and seasons. Then came the clincher, discovered exactly where only a tradesman bothers to look. The writer requested that a parcel of cadmium lemon, shade four, be forwarded through a supplier whose shade numbering had been invented six years after the letter bore date. Somewhere a forger had worked from a post-war catalogue with loving thoroughness and no memory whatsoever for calendars. The verdict assembled itself without waiting to be invited. Composite work: authentic pages photocopied into provenance, the letter freshly typeset, aged over heat and tea until nostalgia set properly, rephotocopied for softness, folded along plausible creases. Good enough to persuade an archivist; insolent enough to insult a craftsman; reverent in its technique, which narrowed the parentage to workshops where veneration was taught alongside typewriter maintenance. Its purposes fanned outward like the bristles of a badger brush. Accept the thing as true, and sentiment acquired a permanent handle. Denounce it skilfully, and vanity acquired a leash, since only one man in the republic could perform the denunciation and flattery would see to it he enjoyed performing it. And underneath both operations ran the third, quietest and worst of the three: to learn whether love outranked doctrine in one specific restorer, the answer to be recorded and filed against some future winter. His counter-move violated doctrine in amounts he could measure to the gram. Nothing written, nothing kept, nothing left behind except rooms arranged to say ordinary: those were the commandments, and he broke the middle one knowingly, sliding the photocopied letter into the oilcloth sleeve beside the Vermeer and the satellite photograph and lowering all three into the panel beneath the floorboards. Three falsehoods now boarded down there together, each claiming, with the same serene confidence, to be the original of something. He seated the board flush with the flat of his palm and stood listening while the old house settled around its newest lodger without comment. Sleep declined the assignment altogether. Around three he rose, relit the lamp, and re-authenticated his own verdict the way a man recounts money he is afraid of having miscounted, hunting specifically for wish dressed as evidence, bias wearing expertise's coat. The verdict stood; the calendar error stood; the uniform oxidation stood. Which left the arithmetic that abolished sleep from the other direction entirely. If the letter were false, then his father's true last words existed somewhere, catalogued in a safe that priced them by the conversation. If the letter were somehow true, then his father had forgiven him, and the forgiveness belonged to the state, retrievable, loanable, taxable. Either branch of the tree fed the same mouth. He shut off the lamp and sat in the dark practising fury in a strictly professional manner, with no legitimate object available for any of it. Morning changed nothing except the light. He answered nothing. The card went under the cast-iron weight where it could contemplate its manners, the dossier travelled back to the leather trade unaccompanied by any opinion, and the studio resumed its winter discipline of appearing magnificently dull. Whatever happened next would have to happen first, from the other side. He sharpened nothing, swept nothing ahead of schedule, and allowed the silence to perform its ancient function in his trade, which was to test whether two craftsmen could each endure the sound of the other pretending not to count. ---