第54章 The False First Wall

The answer arrived in public, which was how Viktor should have known to expect it. A loan exhibition opened in Brno that autumn — COLD WAR CANVAS: SECRET IMAGES OF THE FRONTIER — a respectable provincial show with respectable provincial lenders, and hanging in the second room, catalogued as a recently discovered variant of the celebrated first wall, loaned by a private European collection that wished, the catalogue said with perfect blandness, to remain anonymous, there was another first wall. Viktor stood before it for eleven minutes without speaking, hands clasped behind his back like any elderly visitor sheltering from the rain outside, and during those eleven minutes he read the painting the way other men read a confession. It was good. That was the first thing, and he made himself say it honestly to himself before anything else, because flattery corrupts analysis faster than any solvent. The composition was right — brick courses, the shadow crossing the second embrasure at the correct angle for a February morning, the nine lighter bricks set into their sentence with the spacing his grandfather had used, the whole surface carrying a plausible, even loving, understanding of what the original was and why it mattered. The craquelure had been laid in by hand, stroke by patient stroke, in a fine sable, following the natural fault lines of drying oil rather than fighting them. Someone had even understood that the original's secret lay less in its symbols than in its hesitations — those places where Anton Vlasak had lifted the brush, thought, and set it down again a hair's width off his first intention — and the forger had manufactured hesitations of his own, thoughtful little stumbles, placed where a reader would look for doubt. And it was false, all of it, and the falseness spoke to Viktor with such clarity that he had to fold his hands tighter behind his back to keep from touching the frame. The linen gave it away first, because linen always does. Under the raking lamp he borrowed from the gallery attendant — one flash of charm, one story about writing an article — he tilted the light until the weave stood up in shadow, and there it was: the thread pitch ran machine-even across the entire width, every centimetre identical, whereas canvas of 1947, woven on the looms that were all his grandfather could scavenge in that hungry year, drifted, tightened, slurred; you could have played its irregularities as music. The ground layer told the same lie in a different voice: under ultraviolet, the preparation fluoresced the cold flat blue-violet of titanium-extended modern gesso, not the warm amber ghost of old lead. And the blue itself — the shadow blue, the colour his grandfather had mixed from smalt and bone black on a night when cobalt cost a month's ration cards — the shadow blue in this painting contained, in its darkest passage, just enough phthalocyanine to glow under the lamp like ice in a road: a pigment perfected in a laboratory in the nineteen-thirties and common in trade paint only after the war, invisible to any eye but one trained by fifteen years of manufacturing exactly this kind of mistake. He is younger than me, Viktor thought, stepping back, letting the attendant reclaim her lamp. And he studied under someone who studied under the Line. Because only two schools on earth taught craquelure laid stroke by stroke in sable rather than rolled or stamped: Weiss's studio in Vienna, where Viktor himself had learned to write age like handwriting — and the Line, whose painters had needed surfaces to survive border inspections that included ultraviolet lamps by 1960. "He has signed it," Hana said beside him, so quietly that only Viktor heard. "Where?" "Where you would." Viktor went back to the painting one last time, and in the lower right corner, inside the painted shadow of the embrasure where the original carried nothing but darkness, he found them: three words in the private script, the family script, the script meant for one reader only, small enough to require the loupe, fresh enough to have dried within the month: YOU ARE NOT THE ONLY READER. The gallery hummed around him. Schoolchildren moved past in a crocodile, and a guard coughed, and outside the tall windows the Moravian rain came down as if the sky were rinsing something. Viktor read the line twice, then covered it with his thumb and stood very still. A message in that script meant one thing only: the writer knew the alphabet. Not guessed it, not reconstructed it from published photographs of the margins — the exhibitions had shown the code's existence, but never its grammar; Viktor had seen to that, releasing the messages while sealing their key inside the family. Whoever had painted this wall had been taught, hand to hand, the way the Line taught everything: by a painter who let an apprentice grind pigment, then mix it, then, one evening without ceremony, paint a sky. "Otto," Nikolai said that evening in the car back to Prague, saying aloud the name all four of them had been circling since Brno. The old frame-maker who had cut stretchers too deep, who had sold Viktor once already because someone held his granddaughter two streets away. "Hartmann is Viennese. Meridian administers from Vienna. Otto's shop is Vienna. The chain fits." "It fits because fear makes chains out of anything," Hana said from the back seat. "Otto sold a painting once, under threat. That is a different animal from building a factory of lies." "Then we will ask him," Viktor said, watching the motorway lamps come at the car and pass through it, steady as a film strip. "Gently. As family." But the plan dissolved before Vienna was in sight, because the call came that night to the bakery's dead-letter number, the number that existed for exactly this kind of weather, and the voice on the line was Otto's, seventy years of sawdust in it, pitched low and fast. "Painter. Listen once, I have no time to be sorry twice. They came to me fourteen months ago. Not Hartmann — above him. They brought photographs of my granddaughter at a bus stop, and they brought work: stretchers, panels, grounds, aging, the carpentry and the dirt, none of the pictures. I told myself I built boxes, not lies. I am done telling myself things. There is an atelier in Vienna — Bruckner, on the canal side — where the paintings themselves are made, and the man who paints them is called, when anyone calls him anything, the Teacher. Your Meridian woman was there on Tuesday. And painter — " the old man's breath went ragged, then level, deliberately level, " — they asked me last week for one more stretcher. Sixty-one by eighty-six centimetres. Museum grade. The same size as your grandfather's wall. It ships to Prague on Friday."