A Shadow of Myself. Mike Phillips
‘We spoke. On the telephone,’ George said.
The dealer nodded again, then came from behind the counter, squeezed past George and locked the door.
‘You have something to show me?’
Valentin was carrying the painting wrapped in a copy of the Tagespiegel, and he tore the pages away carefully before propping it up on the counter. The dealer studied it without expression. After half a minute he touched the signature with his finger, grunted softly, and went back to looking at the painting. Valentin raised his eyebrows at George, who ignored him. The shop seemed to be holding its breath.
‘Wieviel?’ Valentin said suddenly, losing patience.
The dealer didn’t answer, and he didn’t move.
‘How much? How much?’ Valentin repeated.
The dealer looked at him, smiling.
‘Russian?’
Valentin stared back at him, unsettled by the question. In this city the Russians had no friends, and it must have been obvious what he was.
‘I am Russian,’ he said irritably. ‘The painting is Russian. How much?’
The dealer smiled again.
‘Five thousand marks.’
‘That is shit,’ George told him. ‘This is by Levitan, a great painting of the nineteenth century.’ He had determined to refuse the first offer in any case, but he also guessed that if the painting was genuine, this was a derisory sum. The dealer shrugged.
‘A minor work, probably very early, or a fake. His best work is in Moscow or the museum at Plyos. But he was a great painter. You are right. So take it to a gallery, then. Go to Dahlem.’
He laughed, and for a moment George felt like hitting him in the middle of the tuft on his chin. Dahlem was where the big galleries were, but a black man who showed up trying to sell a painting which had no documentation would be looking for trouble. As the thought crossed his mind, it struck him that the dealer was needling them, subtly and deliberately. After all this was only the start of what might turn out to be an extended negotiation. Losing his temper would simply hand the initiative to the other man. The realisation was like a dash of cold water, and he forced himself to smile.
‘It’s genuine,’ he repeated.
Half an hour later they had struck the bargain. Gunther upped his offer by another two thousand marks, and as if to sweeten the deal he told them, as he counted out the money, that he would take as many of the paintings as George could deliver. If they had a regular pipeline and once the market had been locked up he could pay five, maybe ten times as much. Valentin voiced no objections but, once outside the shop, he looked at George and made a face of alarm. It would be, he said, a difficult business to locate the other paintings and bring them out.
‘I should have guessed,’ George said. ‘You’re full of shit.’
At this point they were walking side by side up the Dresdenstrasse towards the bustle of the Oranienstrasse. Valentin stopped abruptly, and when George looked back he was standing in the middle of the pavement, glaring, his face crimson under the yellow hair which, in the last few days had begun to sprout in a peak over his forehead. George gestured, on the verge of apologising, but his cousin, instead of responding, spat out one word – ‘mershavets’. George had a dim memory of having heard the word before, but he wasn’t sure what it meant and while he was working out that his cousin had called him a bastard Valentin turned his back and walked the other way.
It was another fortnight before George laid eyes on him again. During that time he had to withstand Katya’s anxious enquiries about what had happened to Valentin, why he hadn’t been to visit. Under pressure he went to the room in East Kreuzberg half a dozen times without catching sight of his cousin. None of the other tenants knew anything or would even admit to having seen him, and eventually George gave up. Perhaps, he told Katya, ignoring the hurt look in her eyes, her dear nephew had seen enough of Berlin and had gone back to Moscow.
It was shortly after this that Valentin turned up. It was like a replay of the first time, Katya hovering by the dining room table, while the Russian sat grinning and stuffing his face. He greeted George like a long lost brother, making no reference to their last meeting, and while he ate and drank and smacked his lips, he found time to tell George that the business which prompted his trip back to Russia had been successful.
They left the apartment together, Katya clucking like a mother hen and pretending to scold Valentin for disappearing without a word. In the street he told George that he had returned with a deal which would make them rich men. It was simple: cars for pictures. Germany was full of cars for which there were Russian buyers. Instead of money they would receive a stream of pictures which were worth many times the price of the average luxury car.
‘I’ve heard about these good deals before,’ George told him. ‘You can’t lose. Next thing you know you’re wearing handcuffs like they were a new fashion accessory.’
Valentin laughed, seemingly unworried by the prospect. He threw his arm around George’s shoulders. ‘You’ll change your mind when I tell you.’
George listened, sceptical at first, then seized by a mounting excitement as his cousin told him the story.
Valentin had been offered the first picture from a former comrade in his regiment of paratroopers, with instructions to sell it in the West. He assumed it had been stolen, but when he returned with a fistful of foreign currency, his friend Victor revealed that he was sitting on a bonanza which would make them rich men. Its source, he said, went back several years to the crumbling of the Union at the beginning of the decade.
At the time Victor’s company had been led by a distant relative of Colonel General Rodionov, commander of the TransCaucasus military region. Throughout the late eighties and early nineties, Rodionov had been engaged in brushfire operations in places like Armenia and Azerbaijan, not to mention the running sore of Abhazian attempts to secede from Georgia. Whenever there was trouble he sent for the paratroopers from Moscow to beef up the local speznatz. Victor had found himself in quick succession serving in all of these places, cracking heads, carrying sandbags to shore up riverbanks, distributing food and medical supplies. It had started after the Armenian earthquake in ’88. Victor was in the ruins of Spitak, running after the sniffer dogs as they scrabbled in the rubble, pulling aside blocks of masonry with his bare hands, his throat dry and aching, his head ringing with the cries of children. Some time in the afternoon he looked up and saw Gorbachev walking towards him. At first he thought it was some kind of hallucination, then he saw the Colonel General, whom he recognised from parades, followed by an entourage of photographers, snapping the party of dignitaries. As they came abreast of him, Gorbachev paused, took off his hat, pulled out a snow-white handkerchief and wiped the tears from his eyes.
Victor was nineteen years old and something changed at that moment. Up to that time the scene which surrounded him, the agonising sight of crushed and broken limbs, the squelching mud, the smell of rotting bodies, all this had been part of the daily fare which as a soldier he was proud to withstand. Suddenly, like the flickering shade cast by a passing cloud, a kind of sorrow touched his soul.
When the unit pulled out from Yerevan the boys took everything they could lay their hands on, but one of the trucks was loaded by Victor and a couple of comrades, supervised by the company commander himself. It contained pictures and sculptures which the commander had been collecting from museums and houses which had been flattened by the earthquake. Most of the time there was no one left alive to claim these objects and the soldiers had simply picked them up and walked off without interference. After the journey back Victor drove the truck west along the Moskva to a dacha young Rodionov had bought at the far end of a village on the banks of the Setun. He made the trip a few more times during the next four years, content with the assurance that when the time came he would receive a fair share of the profits. Sometimes he got to keep some of the loot – gold bangles and rings or silverware which couldn’t be traced. During that period a small group within the