第4章 The Photo

The photograph itself arrived nine days after the materials list, and it did not come through Tomas. It came to the lane below the bakery, delivered by a man Viktor had never seen before or since, a grey person in a grey coat who stood at the street door at seven in the evening and rang the bell exactly once. On the intercom he said nothing at all, which was itself a kind of credentials, and when Viktor buzzed him through, he climbed the stairs, set a flat parcel on the workbench, and left without removing his coat or meeting anyone's eyes. The whole visit lasted eleven seconds. Later, when Viktor tried to describe the man to himself, he could recall only the wet prints of his shoes, which were small for a man and pointed slightly outward, like the feet of someone who had spent his life standing at attention. The parcel held a photographic print, twenty-four by thirty centimeters, sealed in a black plastic sleeve that had no markings of any laboratory. Viktor slit the sleeve with a palette knife and laid the print under the daylight lamp, and the first thing he felt, before curiosity, before craft, was cold. It showed a stretch of masonry running horizontally across the frame, crenellated along its top edge, broken near the center by a tower rising out of frame, photographed from almost directly above and very far away at night. He knew the wall. Every educated child of his city knew that wall, the red brick of the Moscow fortress with its swallow-tail merlons, and this was a section of it perhaps forty meters long, printed so large and so sharp that the image seemed less a picture than a piece of the place itself peeled off the earth and carried through the sky. He put a ten-power loupe to the corner and stopped breathing for a moment. Individual bricks resolved under the glass, each with its own tone, its own worn arris, its own hairline flaw. Mortar joints could be measured. A diagonal splice of newer brick, pale as a scar, crossed the lower course where some repair decades old had settled, and along one stretch the lime wash had scaled away in a pattern of islands like an archipelago seen from a liner. In the shadow of the tower, windows in an attached building glowed with the soft bloom of interior light, two bright, one dimmed by what looked like a curtain, one dark. At the foot of the wall lay stacked scaffolding poles, their shadows thrown long and clean by lamps he could not see, arranged with a neatness that struck him as almost ceremonial. Viktor had worked from aerial photographs before. Forgers of his generation all had, because churches and chanceries commissioned copies of rooftops and riverfronts for anniversary albums, and such pictures came from Cessnas and cartographic balloons and were blurry in the familiar way of things seen while moving. Nothing civilian produced an image like this one. The geometry had been corrected as if the camera had hovered, patient as a portraitist, and the tonal range held information in shadows that should have been empty black. Whatever had taken this picture flew higher than weather and saw heat as well as light, and it belonged to a government, and not the government that governed the ground beneath the wall. A second sheet lay folded under the print, typed on paper that felt like currency. The instructions ran to five numbered lines. Reproduce the depicted masonry section at full architectural scale on the enclosed specification of linen, matching stone dimensions, mortar profiles, repair patterns, lighting values, and the position of every object within the frame, including the scaffolding. No interpretation. No signature. Completion in ninety days. Payment upon inspection. The fifth line stated the fee, and Viktor read it three times because the figure could have bought the bakery, the lane, and the landlord's discretion for a decade. His first professional instinct was insult, oddly enough, arriving even ahead of fear. They were paying a master's ransom for transcription, for obedience, for the removal of everything that made a painter worth anything. Any competent scene painter could grid a photograph and render bricks; the fee bought something else entirely, though what eluded him. Craft answered the insult quickly enough, the way craft always does, whispering that the wall was beautiful in its ruined arithmetic, that matching the scar-splice and the lime-scallop islands would demand everything he knew about accident, about how time signs its own name on stone. Part of him wanted to paint it for the difficulty alone, and he noted that appetite with distaste, recognizing how easily it could be aimed. He spent that night with the print pinned above the bench and the Louvre of his training spread out around him: handbooks of Muscovite brickwork, a survey album of Kremlin restorations from the prewar years, photographs of the wall taken openly by tourists from the Alexander Gardens. Comparison told him the image was genuine. The splice matched a documented repair. The merlon profile belonged to a specific reach between two specific towers, and once he had fixed the location, another unease arrived, quieter than the first. This was not a famous facade. It was a service stretch of fortification, chosen not for glory but for function, and function, in that fortress, meant rooms with doors that opened onto corridors of power. Tomas confirmed nothing and advised everything, in the oblique grammar the old fence used when a subject had grown too hot to hold directly. When Viktor mentioned the fee, over plum brandy in the shop's back room among the smell of size and sawdust, Tomas turned his gold tooth away as if the number might see it gleam. A price like that, the old man said, is never paid for a painting, only for what a painting can carry across a border that has no customs house. Then he said he wanted no part of the materials, none of the linen, none of the money passing through his till, and for the first time in their acquaintance he asked Viktor to leave by the courtyard door rather than the shop. Refusal presented itself, was examined honestly, and was set aside, and Viktor understood the mechanics of his own surrender well enough to be ashamed of its smoothness. If he declined, the photograph remained in his possession like a splinter working toward the heart; men who owned such images could retrieve them, and men who retrieved them did not knock. If he accepted, he would be paid an impossible sum to perform a task his hands ached to attempt anyway. Between those two doors stood only pride, and pride, he reminded himself with his father's voice in the memory, was a luxury the Orlovs had never again been able to afford after a certain winter. He accepted in the manner instructed, placing a card in the mouth of the stone lion on the Malostranská embankment, face inward. Three evenings later the grey man returned, counted out nothing, left nothing except a receipt written in invisible confidence, and from that hour the commission owned him. He built the stretcher himself, eight hundred by two hundred centimeters in sections, because no door in Prague would pass a single canvas of that width. He sized the linen twice and grounds it four times, rubbing each layer down until the surface took light like vellum. The photograph he hid between the backing boards of a framed print of a Vermeer lady reading a letter at her table, where any searcher would find only innocence and genre, and where Viktor himself passed it daily, learning by degrees the exact weight of the thing he had agreed to carry. ---