Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Three

Kristina

Nice, August 1943

If Kristina needed more motivation to go along with Max’s plan, it came the following week when she was heading towards Moira’s café to deliver a bag of walnuts. They had been given to her by a farmer and were worth their weight in gold. But before she reached the café, a man stepped from a doorway and grabbed her affectionately by the shoulders.

‘Good morning, Lydia,’ he said, kissing her on both cheeks. ‘I was beginning to worry you had already come and I’d missed you.’

She had never seen the man in her life. She wondered if he was drunk when he linked his arm with hers and escorted her to the opposite side of the street. ‘I’m afraid that café is closed at the moment,’ he said, ‘but there is another one further on. The coffee is roasted acorn, but you wouldn’t know it from the careful way they brew it.’

Then she caught on to what was happening when he nodded towards Moira’s café. The windows were broken. There was a black Citro?n waiting outside with two men in it, no doubt watching the café to see who would arrive. When Kristina and the stranger reached the other café, he chose a table right in the middle of Nice’s best-known collaborators, as if seating themselves in the midst of their enemy was the safest place to be.

‘It’s a good idea that you have your relatives stay with you,’ he said, signalling the waitress and continuing to speak in code. ‘It’s times like this that families need to stick together. Nobody would want to be travelling under the present circumstances.’

The people at the table closest to them got up and left, and he was able to speak more freely. ‘The biggest Nazi monster, Alois Brunner, is here,’ he said, while pointing to items on the menu. ‘He’s set up his headquarters at the H?tel Excelsior. It’s become a processing office for Jews who have been discovered. Already twenty-seven train cars have left for the camps. They are killing children with injections of strychnine, then sterilising their mothers and sending them to brothels in the east.’

‘What happened to our friend?’ she asked, referring to Moira.

The man shook his head and Kristina’s heart sank. She understood Moira had been arrested and the fate that awaited her was grim. A German soldier sat down next to them and she had to rapidly blink away her tears. Moira’s laughter and the conversations they’d had in her kitchen were some of the few comforts she had known in recent times. She was a good woman and a brave soul.

When Kristina and the stranger parted, she took a different route home to avoid walking past the café again. She was in too much shock to express her grief over Moira, but one thing she knew was that she was not going to let her daughters grow up in this kind of world. In honour of Moira she would fight the Nazis tooth and nail. Or in her case, with a paintbrush.

*

At first Kristina thought she wouldn’t be able to do it. She stared at one of the Foulds’ Rembrandts on the easel in front of her and her hand trembled. It was a different style of art from her own, so dark and gloomy. Yet the more she studied Rembrandt’s work, the more she came to appreciate it. He lived in a world without streetlights and electricity. Rooms were illuminated by candles and firelight. His clients were sombre Dutch protestants. Hence the browns and blacks he used. As she slowly imitated his brushstrokes, she began to appreciate his attention to detail and the emotional intensity captured in his portraits. As she painted on, she imagined her work hanging in the homes of Nazis – or even better, their museums! The thought of making fools out of them while stealing their money filled her with a sense of pride.

‘For Moira,’ she said, as she laboured over her work.

‘That’s good!’ Serge said when she showed him the finished portrait. He studied it from every angle. ‘So good it would get past half the dealers in Paris.’

‘Only half?’ asked Kristina.

‘There are minor flaws in the face. But so minor I am sure they will disappear with practice. Let’s see if you can copy the portrait Rembrandt did of his wife, Saskia.’

‘But where will we get smalt?’ she asked, naming the grittier blue Rembrandt used and which turned brown and translucent over time.

‘Let Max and I worry about the paint compositions,’ said Serge. ‘It’s how we first cut our teeth in the art world. You focus on the technique.’

The idea of selling forgeries of old masters to the Nazis seemed to energise Max too. Despite the severely rationed food, he was making a speedy recovery. After a week he was able to walk slowly down the stairs to the cellar, where he and Serge were experimenting like a couple of mad scientists to produce paints that matched or substituted those used by Rembrandt. Kristina and Nadia were sent out to search the markets and junk shops for old paintings whose canvases and stretchers could pass off as authentic for the forgeries. Then using soap, pumice stones and coarse brushes, Serge and Max removed the layers of paint except for the priming layer. It was painstaking work, especially as the canvases were already fragile with age, but Kristina often caught them grinning at each other like two mischievous schoolboys.

‘Why do you do that?’ Nadia asked them one day. ‘Why not just paint over them?’

‘Because of the possibility that someone will insist on getting the painting X-rayed before they buy it.’

‘I feel sorry for the artist whose work you are destroying,’ she said.

Serge put down the pumice stone and wiped the dust off his fingers. ‘Well, it’s a lesson to not produce second-rate paintings.’

Kristina cringed. Picasso was still painting masterpieces in his Paris studio despite the war, while she – in between forging great artworks – was producing ubiquitous flower paintings to sell to the mistresses of German soldiers in an attempt to keep food on the table.

Max sensed her dismay and guessed the cause of it. ‘After the war, you will be painting again,’ he told her. ‘And your work will be greater than ever because you will have so much to convey.’

*

‘What is that smell!’ Kristina asked, coming down the stairs to investigate the unpleasant chemical odour. ‘I can’t concentrate with it wafting up the stairs.’

She had been aware of banging and hammering sounds emanating from the cellar, where there was an old-fashioned Russian stove that hadn’t been used for many years. The door to the cellar opened and Max and Serge burst out, coughing and laughing at the same time. She warned them that the noxious smells probably travelled all the way to their neighbours’ houses, but they were too excited to consider it.

‘We’ve done it!’ Max cried. ‘We have perfected the hardening process!’

He plunged himself into the smoky dungeon again and returned with the first Rembrandt portrait Kristina had painted. Oil paint took three days to become touch-dry, but decades to truly harden. That meant that recent forgeries could be detected with a simple alcohol test that would lift the unsettled paint. Max and Serge had been experimenting with ways to dry the paint faster, but so far the results had been disastrous – singed canvases, blistered paint and blanched colours. But the Rembrandt had lost none of its intensity.

Max and Serge slapped each other on the back with pride. But Kristina’s stomach turned, as the reality of what would come next bore down on her. She would be the one taking the paintings to dealers and negotiating the prices. She wasn’t a natural saleswoman and found it difficult enough to hawk her flower paintings at the markets. Now she would be in direct contact with Nazis, and if something went wrong, what then?

‘You must worry less, Kristina,’ Max told her with a twinkle in his eyes. ‘If we had any doubt about these paintings passing as authentic works, we would not be sending you out into the world with them.’

Serge also did his best to reassure her. ‘The best museums around the world, including the Louvre, are full of forgeries,’ he said. ‘Museum directors and specialists make errors of judgement all the time. And if a painting that has had pride of place in a gallery proves later to be a forgery, what museum director is going to destroy his reputation to admit it?’

Max nodded his agreement. ‘Your painting is the very best of forgeries, but you must believe in it for this to work.’

Kristina saw his point but she had other qualms too. ‘I don’t mind cheating Nazis,’ she said. ‘But what does it say about me as an artist to copy others?’

‘Kristina!’ Serge said. ‘You are following in the path of all the great men of art! Michelangelo used to forge old masters when he was young, and age them with smoke and dirt to pass them off as original.’

‘Then you must have bought forgeries too at some stage,’ said Nadia, coming down the stairs.

Kristina smiled at her daughter’s astuteness, then looked back to Max and Serge. ‘Have you?’

‘Of course not,’ said Serge.

Max shook his head. ‘Serge and I worked our way up to our position. We know all the tricks and deflections. We’ve always bought paintings for their beauty and uniqueness. We wouldn’t have bought an artwork we didn’t like, regardless of the artist. Dealers like Martin La Farge see the artist’s signature first and that makes him more liable to be taken advantage of.’

*

When Kristina returned to her studio, she sat for a long time looking at the Rembrandt before her. He had been a brilliant painter but had also suffered as a human being. He was plagued by mental illness all his life, his moods swinging from exuberance to periods of dark depression. She wanted to pay homage to him rather than simply copy his work. While she accepted she needed to ‘borrow’ his style to save lives, she didn’t want her work to hang in place of his own. Great works were sold and resold so many times it was impossible to tell where her forgeries might end up after the war. What if they went to Allied countries like Britain, America or Australia, that had sacrificed men and women to save France?

It was then that she decided she would give each forgery a ‘time bomb’. She would make a tiny mark – a personal signature of her own – on all the forgeries so they could be identified as fake after the war. The idea pleased her, and she went to the open window to breathe in some fresh air, turning over in her mind what that mark would be. Then a smile broke out on her face. She knew exactly what she would create and marvelled at her own brilliance.