Page 97 of The Girl You Left Behind
“I don’t understand,” she says. They are both looking at her expectantly.
Silver finishes her mouthful before she speaks. “Well, if she was disgraced, doesn’t that suggest her relationship with theKommandantmight have been consensual? The thing is, if we can prove that it was, if we can suggest that she was having an extramarital affair with a German soldier, we can also claim the portrait might have been a gift. It wouldn’t be beyond the realms of possibility that someone in the throes of a love affair would give her lover a portrait of herself.”
“But Sophie wouldn’t,” Liv says.
“We don’t know that,” says Henry. “You told me that after her disappearance the family never spoke of her again. Surely if she was blameless, they would have wanted to remember her. Instead, she seems to be cloaked in some sort of shame.”
“I don’t think she could have had a consensual relationship with theKommandant.Look at this postcard.” Liv reopens her file. “‘You are my lodestar in this world of madness.’ That’s three months before she is supposed to have had this collaboration. It hardly sounds like a husband and wife who don’t love each other, does it?”
“That’s certainly a husband who loves his wife, yes,” says Henry. “But we have no idea whether she returned that love. She could have been madly in love with a German soldier at this time. She could have been lonely or misguided. Just because she loved her husband, it doesn’t mean she wasn’t capable of falling in love with someone else once he’d gone away.”
Liv pushes her hair back from her face. “It feels horrible,” she says, “like blackening her name.”
“Her name is already blackened. Her family doesn’t have a decent word to say about her.”
“I don’t want to use her nephew’s words against her,” she says. “He’s the only one who seems to care about her. I’m just—I’m just not convinced we’ve got the full story.”
“The full story is unimportant.” Angela Silver screws up her sandwich box and throws it neatly into the wastepaper bin. “Look, Mrs. Halston, if you can prove that she and theKommandanthad an affair, it will wholly improve your chances of retaining the painting. As long as the other side can suggest the painting was stolen, or obtained coercively, it weakens your case.” She wipes her hands and replaces the wig on her head. “This is hardball. And you can bet the other side is playing that way. Ultimately, it’s about this: How badly do you want to keep this painting?”
Liv sits at the table, her own sandwich untouched as the two lawyers get up to leave. She stares at the notes in front of her. She cannot tarnish Sophie’s memory. But she cannot let her painting go. More important, she cannot let Paul win. “I’ll find out what happened to her,” she says.
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I am not afraid, although it is strange to have them here, eating and talking, under our very roof. They are largely polite, solicitous almost. And I do believe Herr Kommandant will not tolerate any misdemeanors on the men’s part. So our uneasy truce has begun....
The odd thing is that Herr Kommandant is a cultured man. He knows of Matisse! Of Weber and Purrmann! Can you imagine how strange it is to discuss the finer points of your brushwork with a German?
We have eaten well tonight. Herr Kommandant came into the kitchen and instructed us to eat the leftover fish. Little Jean cried when it was finished. I pray that you have food enough, wherever you are....
Liv reads and rereads these fragments, trying to fill in the spaces between her words. It is hard to find a chronology—Sophie’s writings are on stray scraps of paper, and in places the ink has faded—but there is a definite thawing in her relationship with Friedrich Hencken. She hints at long discussions, random kindnesses, that he keeps giving them food. Surely Sophie would not have discussed art or accepted meals from someone she considered a beast.
The more she reads, the closer she feels to the author of these scraps. She reads the tale of the pig-baby, translating it twice to make sure she has read it right, and wants to cheer at its outcome. She refers back to her court copies, Madame Louvier’s sniffy descriptions of the girl’s disobedience, her courage, her good heart. Her spirit seems to leap from the page. She wishes, briefly, that she could talk to Paul about it.
She closes the folder carefully. And then she looks guiltily to the side of her desk, where she keeps the papers she did not show Henry.
The Kommandant’s eyes are intense, shrewd, and yet somehow veiled, as if designed to hide his true feelings. I was afraid that he might be able to see my own crumbling composure.
The rest of the paper is missing, ripped away, or perhaps broken off with age.
“I will dance with you, Herr Kommandant,” I said. “But only in the kitchen.”
And then there is the scrap of paper, in handwriting that is not Sophie’s. “Once it is done,” it reads, simply, “it cannot be undone.” The first time she read it, Liv’s heart had dropped somewhere to her feet.
She reads and rereads the words, pictures a woman locked in a secretive embrace with a man supposed to be her enemy. And then she closes the folder and tucks it carefully back under her pile of papers.
•••
“How many today?”
“Four,” she says, handing over the day’s haul of poison-pen letters. Henry has told her not to open anything with handwriting she does not recognize. His staff will do it, and report any that are threatening. She tries to be sanguine about this new development, but secretly she flinches every time she sees an unfamiliar letter now; the idea that all this unfocused hate is out there, just waiting for a target. She can no longer type “The Girl You Left Behind” into a search engine. There were once two historical references, but now there are Web versions of newspaper reports from across the globe, reproduced by interest groups, and Internet chat rooms discussing her and David’s apparent selfishness, their inherent disregard for what is right. The words spring out like blows: “Looted.” “Stolen.” “Robbed.” “Bitch.”
Twice someone has posted dog excrement through the letter box in the lobby.
Those are the overt signs of disapproval. There are less obvious outcomes from the ongoing court case. The neighbors no longer say a cheery hello but nod and look at their shoes as they pass. There have been no invitations through her door since the case was revealed in the newspapers. Not to dinner, a private view, or one of the architectural events that she was habitually invited to, even if she usually refused. At first she thought all of this was coincidence; now she is starting to wonder.
The newspapers report her outfit each day, describing her as “somber,” sometimes “understated,” and always “blond.” Their appetite for all aspects of the case seems endless. She does not know if anyone has tried to reach her for comment: Her telephone has been unplugged for days. Henry had fixed up for a more favorable profile to appear in one of the broadsheets, but it seems to have had little impact.
She gazes along the packed benches at the Lefèvres, their faces closed, just as they were on the first day. She wonders what they feel when they hear how Sophie was cast out from her family, alone, unloved. Do they feel differently about her now? Or do they not register her presence at the heart of this, just seeing the pound signs?
