| Chapter 9 |
Three Months Later
58 Rue de le Boetie was barely visible from the truck. The nearest street lamp was at least fifty yards to the left, and the driver was not sure that he had stopped in front of the right building. But then one of the soldiers jumped from the rear of the truck and jogged up to the glass door, and he confirmed that they were indeed at the gallery owned by Monsieur Josse Hessel.
The soldier waved the others out of the truck, eight of them in all, and they gathered there quietly in the dark. The rest of Rue de la Boetie was deserted at this late hour. The soldiers waited until three more trucks glided in behind theirs, and then they waited again, until someone in the last truck gave them a signal. Then they broke through the front door glass with something resembling a large pickaxe. They entered the gallery, one by one, with their powerful flashlights illuminating the way.
Hessel and his family lived on the second floor. The old man awoke at once to the sound of shattering glass and rushed downstairs in his nightclothes, screaming. His body began to twist in periodic spasms, so that he looked like a marionette being jerked from side to side on wires, moving almost without purpose through the eerie beams of the soldiers' flashlights.
Despite Hessel's desperate contortions, the soldiers went about their work, wrapping up marble and bronze statues into small and beautifully colored oriental rugs that were strewn across the immaculate wooden floors of the gallery.
Rodin's magnificent Seductress disappeared first, into a blue Iranian silk. Then an ancient Roman bust with half a nose was rolled up into an orange Kerman, then a Greek bust of Haescepulos, and next, a highly polished Degas ballerina, and so on, until all of the pieces were properly encased in the softness and safety of Hessel's beautiful car-pets. And then, with the efficiency of assembly-line workers, the soldiers passed each carpet out to the trucks, over the cries of Hessel, who tore his night shirt into small strips and bared his chest to the God that was allowing this to happen.
By now, Hessel's wife was downstairs too, also in her nightgown, and barefoot, and she turned on all the lights so that everyone outside could see what the Nazis were do-ing to them. She was shouting just as loud as Hessel was, only she was directing her anger, not toward some unwatchful God, but to the soldiers who were looting their gal-lery. She called the Germans names that they did not understand but that they imagined were not complimentary. And when she finally came close to one of the soldiers, and laid her hands on his arms, he put down his carpet and slapped her face so hard that she nearly flew off her feet into the wall behind her. Then she sat upright, dazed, and reached up to her crown, coming away with a handful of red.
"Animals! Pigs! Animals!" she cried, the blood flowing freely from her nostrils, mixing with her tears, her face blistered with the red imprint of the soldier's hand. She looked over at Josse, who was prostrate on the floor, and she reached out to him with her bloodied fingers but he was too paralyzed to respond.
The soldiers began stripping the paintings from the walls, working their way methodi-cally from front to back, pulling the frames down from the small metal hooks that held them fixed to the dark blue linen.
A beautiful Pieta by Petrus Christus, two pastel portraits of Gabrielle Diot by Degas, a Hals, a Rembrandt, two Ruysdaels, a Flemish landscape, two Matisse oils, a still life with fruits and vegetables. The frames and oils, the drawings and sketches that Hessel and his father and his father's father had collected, were all removed. Works with Dutch names, Spanish names, German names, Italian names, English names, and many French names too, like Manet and Toulouse-Lautrec, passed over the broken glass, out through the remnant of a front door, and were hauled up onto the large military trans-ports outside.
And then a piercing scream came from upstairs.
One of the soldiers dropped the painting he was carrying and it fell against a Bedermeir table in the center of the gallery. The corner of the table ripped through the canvas and tore a large hole in it.
When she heard the screams from upstairs, Hessel's wife held her head and shouted, "My God! My baby! No! No!" and Josse Hessel started to race upstairs but one of the soldiers threw him back down to the floor and bashed his mouth with the butt of a rifle, hurling his dentures clear across the floor. Hessel's nose looked instantly out of whack. After he was struck, Hessel sat stupefied on the bare wood floor, supporting himself at the sides with his thin, brittle arms. His wife was still screaming for their daughter, but the cries from upstairs had become more muffled, and then they stopped altogether.
Outside, on the third truck, Bruno Lohse was counting the paintings. He was writing down the titles and the artists' names, since most of the canvases sported wooden plaques with the information already there for him. He was amazed and delighted at the quality of the work, seventy-three paintings in all, and twelve important sculptures, which he figured was not bad for less than an hour's work. The paintings were being stored into two tiers of racks that had been manufactured specifically for this purpose, with a padded guardrail in front of them so that the frames would not incur damage during transport.
"Very good," Bruno would tell each soldier as he made a deposit, "Very nice," or "Now there's something special," to give the men encouragement, and keep them mov-ing. Up to now, though, Bruno had not been inside Hessel's gallery.
But when the last item had been hoisted onto the trucks, he jumped down from the rear and made his way into the building, wading through the broken glass with his black leather shoes.
Once inside, Bruno took off his glasses and wiped them down with a cotton handker-chief that he kept in his back pocket. The soldiers were standing in the middle of what was now an empty room, save for two brown leather armchairs that were there for the customers to sit on.
Hessel and his wife did not see Bruno enter. They sat in the middle of the gallery, beaten and confused, in clotting pools of their own blood. Their clothing was nearly torn away from their bodies, and they were too tired and broken-hearted to cry. Only an oc-casional whimper came from one or the other of them.
Two soldiers came down from upstairs, adjusting and buttoning up their uniforms, fix-ing down their sweaty hair with their wet fingers. One of them appeared to have bite marks on his face, and his lips were swollen and bloody, but they were both of them smiling.
After looking around at this horror, at Hessel and his wife, at the empty walls, at the two soldiers, Bruno finally shouted, "Damn you! Look what you have done!" He ran over and crouched down next to Hessel's wife, and he picked up the painting that had been dropped and torn.
"This is a Corot! Jesus Christ! A Corot!" he screamed. He tried to piece it together but he knew that the damage was irreparable. "Damn! You have to be more careful. The Fuhrer will hear about it if something like this happens again. I promise you."
He got up from the floor and stepped over Hessel's wife and stormed back out to the trucks. The soldiers followed him, one of them spitting onto Hessel's limp body, and an-other giving Hessel and his wife one good last kick.
For a long time after the trucks had gone, when there was silence again, Hessel and his wife did not move. They prayed that they would die there, together, on the cold wooden floor of their gallery. They could not bring themselves to see, through their bruised and swollen eyelids, what had just happened to them, and yet they knew exactly what had happened. In the short span of an hour, all of their priceless possessions had been stolen, and with them, the innocence of their beautiful sixteen year-old daughter, Shafa Hessel.
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