The Night Portrait

Edith squeezed Manfred’s forearm. She had seen little of Manfred’s life outside the museum, but she knew that he had been an organizer in a Munich group that was known for opposing nearly all of the Reich’s policies, their ideas disseminated in weightless leaflets left on park benches and empty tram seats.

“You knew what they were planning?”

Manfred nodded, tight-lipped. “The Generaldirektor has already purchased several truckloads of pictures confiscated from Jewish collectors across Bavaria. If you don’t believe me, come up to the third floor. There are so many pictures in my office that I can barely walk to my desk.”

Edith felt her jaw drop. “I can hardly imagine it. But you … Where will you go?”

“I’ll bet they keep me here to catalog whatever comes in. They need me. Plus, I am an old dog.” He shrugged and mustered a smile. “It could be worse. Out of the line of fire. But you, my dear … How will you manage? Your father …”

Edith pressed her hands to her face again. “I have no idea,” she said. “Heinrich. My fiancé. He is also being shipped out to Poland.”

“Ah!” Manfred said, his eyes growing wide. “Then you are headed to the same place at least.”

“Yes, but … Heiliger Strohsack!” she whispered loudly. “This was not what I was expecting.”

“I wish I could say the same, my dear Fräulein Konservator,” Manfred said. “You are too young to remember the beginnings of the last war. And here we are again. All the same, what can we do? When the Führer calls, we hardly have a choice. They will issue us conscription papers. Saying no is not an option unless …”

Manfred gestured toward a window at the end of the hallway, one that overlooked the square where Jewish-owned shops had been forcibly closed or even burned in recent months. At this moment, Edith knew, Jewish families were boarding trams—either by choice or by coercion—that would resettle them in another place, that would consign them to a fate beyond her understanding. The Nusbaums, a couple who lived with their two young children in Edith’s apartment building, had left weeks ago. In the ground-floor corridor, under the sharp eye of their doorman, Edith had watched Frau Nusbaum piling worn leather bags and grain sacks full of their most precious belongings into a rickety barrow.

Edith knew that Manfred was correct in saying that refusing the Führer’s call was not an option, but her mind raced, looking for a way out of the predicament. Was it too much to ask, to return to her conservation studio, to her humble apartment, to her father, to a new life with her husband?

“Well,” said Manfred, mustering a tight grin. “Poland! Perhaps there is a silver lining. You will get to see all those masterpieces you’ve studied all this time.”

Munich, Germany

September 1939

EDITH WAS STRUGGLING WITH THE LOCK ON HER APARTMENT door when she heard her father shriek.

The fine hairs on the back of her neck tingled, and a jolt like a live tram wire ran down her spine. She had never heard that wrenching sound come from his mouth before. She rattled the door with all her force.

“Papa!”

Finally, the key clicked and the door opened. Edith nearly fell into the apartment. She dropped her shoulder bag, spilling the art books and folders she had brought home from work. Bookmarks and handwritten notes fluttered and spun across the worn, wooden floor. Edith rushed down the hallway, toward the loud voice of a radio broadcaster announcing that German troops had crossed the Vistula River in southern Poland. In the front room, she found her father seated in his chair, lashing out with his lanky arms and legs toward the slight woman looming over him.

“Herr Becker!” Elke, the woman who cared for her father while Edith was at work, struggled to grasp the old man’s forearms. Her hair had come loose from its pins at the crown of her head. Her face was a contorted grimace. Edith’s father’s long legs lashed out again, stiff and uncoordinated, toward Elke’s shins.

Then the smell of urine and excrement came over Edith, and she felt her heart sink.

“He refuses to walk to the toilet!” Elke finally let go of Herr Becker’s forearms and turned toward Edith. “I cannot get him to leave that chair!”

“It’s all right,” Edith said, trying to steady her voice. “Let me talk to him.”

Elke threw up her hands in exasperation and retreated to the kitchen. Edith strode across the room and switched off the radio, silencing the ranting announcer.

“Papa.” Edith knelt on the rug before her father’s chair, just as she had when she was a little girl, hungry for another one of her father’s stories about counts and duchesses from long ago. The floral patterns on the arms of the chair had worn pale and threadbare, the cushion sagging and now surely beyond salvage. Edith did her best to ignore the stench.

“That woman …” her father said, his eyes wide with uncharacteristic rage, cloudy orbs rimmed in yellow. From the kitchen, Edith heard water running, followed by the loud clang of pots.

Coarse white hairs protruded from his chin. Edith imagined that Elke had been struggling with her father for hours. It was becoming a daily occurrence, Herr Becker’s refusal to partake in the simplest tasks, from putting on a clean shirt to shaving. Getting him in the bath was close to impossible; in recent weeks he had developed an inexplicable fear of water. Edith felt pity for Elke, at the same time that she was frustrated that no one in the ever-changing group of caregivers that Edith had hired understood how to coax her father to cooperate. It required a high level of patience with a dose of trickery, Edith had to admit.

From the crease between the cushion and the frame of the chair, Edith excavated Max, the ragged, stuffed dog that had belonged to Edith as a child. Now, Max was her father’s constant companion, its white fur matted and stained irreparably.

“It’s all right, Papa,” Edith said, putting her palm securely on his forearm, with its thin, lined skin marked with darkened spots. With his other hand, her father grasped the ragged animal tightly to his side. Behind them, the Swiss clock ticked loudly. Messy stacks of art books lined the walls, slips of paper haphazardly sticking out of each volume. Dusty, yellowed pages of scholarly catalogs and journals her father had once devoured now stood abandoned.

“Shall we get you cleaned up? I have a feeling that you might have a visitor.”

Her father’s eyes lit up as he digested her white lie, and Edith felt a pang of guilt slide across her gut. None of her father’s friends were coming to visit. When her father no longer recognized their faces and could not recall their names, one by one, they dwindled away. Edith had watched wordlessly, powerless to stop it.

Her father no longer tracked time, but Edith knew that months had passed since their last visitor, with the exception of Edith’s fiancé, Heinrich. And even that was about to stop. Heinrich would soon be boarding a train for Poland, assigned to a newly formed infantry division of the Wehrmacht. As soon as the invasion of Poland had been broadcast across the radio and newspapers less than two weeks ago, Edith had held her breath and begun to pray, but Heinrich’s official orders had come anyway.

But Edith didn’t want to think about that now.

In the bathroom, Edith ran her hand under the tap until the water warmed. She would never have dreamed that the barrier of modesty between father and daughter would have fallen away so completely. What else was she to do? When the caregivers she hired inevitably gave up trying to wrangle her stubborn father, who else but his only daughter would care enough to loosen his trousers, to blot a damp cloth across his shoulders, to carefully run a razor across his jaw? Edith’s mother had been gone nearly five years now, and in moments like these, she missed her more than ever.

“Guten abend!”

Edith poked her head out of the bathroom doorway long enough to see Heinrich enter the apartment, greeting Elke as the stout nurse departed in a blur of blue raincoat and hat.

As much as her heart surged to see her fiancé, it also sank at Elke’s abrupt departure. Tomorrow there would be a visit to the agency and another search for a nurse so that Edith could continue her work at the museum and put food on their table.

Heinrich pecked a brief kiss on Edith’s lips. “What happened in here? It smells like a farm.”

Edith pressed her face into Heinrich’s neck and drank in his scent for a long moment. “I’m going to get him cleaned up now. I’m sorry. I don’t know whether Elke ever got to preparing dinner. Have a look in the kitchen.”

The voice of his daughter’s fiancé in the hallway had lured Herr Becker from the front room. Now, the old man braced himself against the doorjamb, his trousers sagging, a sideways grin on his face.

“Greetings, soldier!” Heinrich smiled at his future father-in-law and rushed to steady him. Edith watched her father endeavor to give Heinrich a firm handshake. “Looks like you’re in for a good shave from this lovely lady. Lucky man!” With gratitude and relief, Edith watched Heinrich steer her father successfully to the bathroom door.

Edith did her best to clean up Herr Becker, showing him as much patience and compassion as she could muster. When they emerged from the bathroom, her father dressed in clean pajamas, Edith saw that Heinrich had moved the soiled chair to air out by an open window and had brought a bowl of fruit and bread from the kitchen to the dining table. He was picking up the papers and books that she had spilled by the apartment door.

For a moment, she watched Heinrich kneeling over her satchel in the dim light of the entryway, a calm beacon in the storm. He was wearing the gray cotton collared shirt that brought out the sky gray of his eyes. She could hardly bear the thought of standing on a station platform, watching him wave to her from a small train window in a newly pressed field tunic.

“I’m sorry there is no dinner,” she said, kneeling beside him to pick up the last sheets of paper from the floor.

“We have bread. We have fruit. We have muesli, reheated from this morning, but healthy all the same. More than many people have, surely.”

Edith helped her father sit in his usual chair at the dining table and put a piece of bread in front of him. Finally, she took a deep breath and relaxed. She sat at the table and began peeling an apple with a worn knife.

“What’s all this paper?” Heinrich asked.

“Research,” she said. “They’ve asked me to compile a dossier of old master paintings in Polish collections. You remember I was telling you about all the library visits I’ve made in the past weeks? I had to give a presentation today to the director.”

“Herr Professor Dokter Buchner?” Heinrich raised his eyebrows.

“Yes.” Edith felt her stomach constrict as she thought about the room full of men, the Führer’s museum, the news that she had no idea how to break to Heinrich and her father.

“I thought they kept you locked up in the back storerooms with a paintbrush and chemicals,” Heinrich said.

She nodded. “Yes. It’s not my usual place, but Herr Kurator Schmidt asked me to do it. He said I have special knowledge of Italian Renaissance paintings. You know I am happy to stay hidden away in my little scientific department, not standing before an audience.”

Heinrich leaned back in his chair and thumbed through one of the large illustrated volumes that Edith had brought home from the museum library. Edith watched him nervously, wondering how to find the words to tell Heinrich and her father. How on earth would she break the news? When Heinrich reached a bookmarked, full-page color facsimile of a woman holding a small white creature, he stopped.

“Leonardo da Vinci,” Heinrich read the caption. “Portrait of a Lady with an Ermine.” He looked up at Edith. “What’s an ermine?”

Edith shrugged. “Ladies in the Italian Renaissance kept a variety of exotic pets. An ermine is something like a ferret.”

“No,” her father interjected, raising a crooked finger. “There is a difference. Ferrets are domesticated. Ermines are wild. Their fur turns white in the winter.”

Heinrich and Edith looked at each other, then laughed aloud at Herr Becker’s assessment. Edith’s heart surged whenever a spark of clarity flickered in the fog, when her real father came back to her, if only for a fleeting moment.

“Bravo, Papa. I had no idea,” Edith said, but the flicker was gone, and her father had returned to spooning watery muesli into his mouth. “That’s one of my favorite pictures,” Edith said. “Da Vinci painted it when he was still a young man, before he became well known.”

“A strange creature,” Heinrich said, tapping the picture with his finger, “but a beautiful girl.”

This was what she would miss most, Edith thought, sitting with her father and Heinrich, talking of art. She wanted to hear her father’s lessons again, random shards of information he pulled from the dusty corners of his brain, left over from years of teaching art history at the university, volumes of historical facts that he had transmitted to his daughter along with a passion for art. Was it too much to ask? She just wanted a laugh with her father and to eat a meal with the man she loved. She did not want to have to cobble together yet another caregiver to help her nearly helpless papa. And above all, she did not want to count the days left until Heinrich boarded a train. She pushed it to the back of her mind, stood, and began to clear the table.

Heinrich moved another armchair near the window and settled Herr Becker so that he could watch the lights begin to flicker from the apartment windows lining the edge of the park. He retrieved Max from the floor and pressed the old, ragged stuffed dog into Herr Becker’s lap. Then Edith heard Heinrich talking softly to her father, telling him about something funny that had happened at his father’s grocery market, just off the Kaufingerstrasse. She knew her father wouldn’t remember any of it after a few minutes, but no matter. The next time Heinrich visited, his kind, familiar face would be enough to lure her father from his chair.

Not long ago, Edith would have sat with her father after dinner, listening to his impassioned opinions of current events, his critique of the greed and corruption of government officials. Edith wondered if her father had any inkling of what was happening beyond the walls of their apartment now. Continued reports of corruption. The dismantling of synagogues. The confiscation of businesses and apartments belonging to Jewish neighbors. The heightened surveillance by their apartment block leaders, who seemed to record her every move. The swift, unexplained departure of two staff members from the museum. Non-German books pulled from libraries and burned in the streets. New laws that would punish anyone who listened to a foreign radio broadcast.

Most of all, she worried about the disappearance of the little boy at the bottom of the stairway. Edith used to look for the Nusbaums’ son every morning as she left for work. She’d find him sitting in the hallway with his pens and paper. She would stop to greet him and he would show Edith what he’d drawn that day. She would compliment him and tell him to keep drawing. But one day, he was gone, along with his innocent face and his fastidious drawings. The rest of his family were gone, too, simply walking away with the coats on their backs and a wobbly, wheeled cart.

While she did her best to stay focused on the details of her work and home life, Edith felt deeply troubled about how Munich had changed in recent months. More than that, she missed her father’s commentary on current events, which might have provided her with a compass to help navigate her way through the disturbing events that swirled around them.

“Edith?”

She turned to see her father’s wide, shiny eyes set on her, as if he had just recognized her face after not having seen her for a long time.

“Yes, Papa!” she said, laughing.

He held out Max the dog. “I believe this is yours.”

Edith stared down at the button eyes that her mother had sewn and resewn many times over the years. Max had occupied her bed as a child, then was cast aside as Edith grew into a young woman. When her father had rediscovered Max one day, shortly after her mother died and he began to decline, he had latched on to it like a beloved pet.

“Max,” she said, stroking the stuffed animal’s matted fur. “But I wouldn’t want to lose him.” She pressed him back into her father’s hands. “Will you take care of him for me?”

Her father settled the ragged stuffed dog back in his lap. “All right,” he said, deflated.

“I love you so much, Papa,” Edith said, squeezing her father’s hands. She tried hard not to let her voice crack.

When her father began to doze off in his chair, Edith joined Heinrich in the kitchen. He dried the dishes with a frayed rag and stacked them on the wooden shelves above the sink. “She’s not coming back, is she? The woman in the raincoat?”

Edith sighed. “I’m afraid not. I have to call the agency first thing in the morning. The problem is that he has become so stubborn! They are supposed to be professional nurses, but they don’t know how to coerce him into doing the most basic things! I don’t know what to do.”

Edith felt Heinrich’s hand on her back. She stopped and bowed her head, pressing her forehead to Heinrich’s chest. She felt his hands go to her hips and rest there. For a few long moments, they stood there, holding each other.

“I have no right to burden you with this when you have bigger things to worry about,” she said. “I’m sorry.” Edith pressed her face into his cotton shirt and felt his lean, hard chest under her forehead. She inhaled his clean, male scent as she listened to the clock tick loudly in the hallway. How would she break the news that he was not the only one with official orders?

“Edith …” he began softly. “They have given me a date. I have to report to Hauptbahnhof Station in two weeks.” He must have felt her body freeze under his grasp; he paused. “I just want you to know that, whatever happens …”

“Shh,” she said, pressing a finger to his lips and shaking her head, her light brown curls hitting her cheeks. “Not yet. Can we just make this last for a bit longer?”

Milan, Italy

December 1489

“THERE IS A LIVE ONE. I CAN FEEL IT CRAWLING.”

“Where?”

“Just there. Behind my ear.”

Cecilia Gallerani felt her mother’s thick, calloused fingertips slide through her dark strands, unraveling the twists. Her mother pinched her frayed fingernails along the length of one hair, yanking so hard that Cecilia bit her lip. She heard her mother swish her hand through the small bowl at her side, a mixture of water and vinegar with small, white nits floating dead on the surface.

“Did you get it?”

An exasperated cluck. “It was too fast. Will you sit still?”

A slow ache was working its way across Cecilia’s forehead. How many hours had they been sitting by the light of the window? Through its frame, Cecilia’s almond-shaped eyes scanned the layer of cold fog that had settled in the inner courtyard. She watched a dove flutter from the bare branches to a high windowsill overlooking the empty, symmetrical footpaths below. Such a strange place, this hard, wintry stone palace, with its fortified towers and armsmen pacing the upper galleries. So far away from the blindingly sun-filled squares and raucous, bustling streets of home.

As their carriage had rolled through the streets of Milan the afternoon before, Cecilia had watched the flat, vapid landscape suddenly turn to a jumble of fine buildings and crowded streets. The slow crawl through the crowds afforded momentary views of the spiky white spires of Milan’s cathedral under construction. She had caught fleeting glimpses of the city’s women, their long braids wrapped in silk and transparent layers of veil, men with fur-lined leather boots reaching to the knees and their breath sending vapors into the cold air. Cecilia had marveled at their odd Milanese tongue, a dialect that sounded clipped and harsh, at the same time that it flowed from their lips like a song. She grasped a few familiar words, but they spoke too quickly for her to understand the meaning.

At long last, they had reached the Castello Sforzesco on the outskirts of the city. Guards armed with spears and crossbows had lowered the bridge over the moat, and their horses’ hooves had echoed through the tunneled gatehouse into the fortified inner courtyard.

“Aya! I feel it moving again.”

Another tsk of exasperation. Her mother ran the comb roughly through a tangle. “Honestly, Cecilia, I hardly see the point. All this hair will be shorn within a few days.”

“That is not decided.” Cecilia felt the familiar squeeze of discontent across her stomach.

It made perfect sense. Of course it did. Her eldest brother, Fazio, their mother’s greatest pride, as well as their father’s namesake and successor, had laid it out in clear, logical terms. He had already made arrangements with the Benedictine sisters at San Maurizio al Monastero Maggiore. Cecilia should consider herself fortunate to have such an opportunity, they told her. It was only through her brother’s position as a Tuscan diplomat to the court of Milan, a position that their father was never able to reach even after years of service as a petitioner at the ducal court, that the possibility was open to Cecilia at all. It’s what had brought them to this wintry palace in the first place.

“Soon enough,” said her mother, half under her breath. Cecilia caught sight of her mother’s brown hand and forearm, as thick as one of the piglets in their courtyard back home in Siena. Cecilia felt a veil of shame and embarrassment cover the two of them sitting at the window. It was laughable, her stout, sunspeckled mother sitting here among the pale, elegant ladies of the ducal palace. What place did the two of them have here? In Siena, they held their heads high, the wife and daughter of a petitioner at the court of Milan. But here, in this northern palace, the seat of His Lordship’s domain, Cecilia and her mother passed for little more than peasants. She felt certain that she could see the women in their silk gowns snickering at them behind their gloves and fans.

How quickly her fate had turned.

Only a season ago, her future had looked entirely different. She and Giovanni Stefano Visconti were set to wed, an arrangement that had been in place since she was barely old enough to take her first steps. It was a perfect solution, her father had said, to marry their youngest, the only girl, to the Visconti, a Milanese family with a noble legacy and ties to the Sforza ducal family. Giovanni himself was nothing so remarkable, little more than a lopsided grin of a boy not yet turned to man. A dusting of freckles spread across his nose, and the wide shoulders of his father’s overcoat hung from his lanky frame, but Cecilia had been at peace with the safety and security of marrying into a respected family. The two had already had a ring ceremony to commemorate the commitment, as perfunctory and devoid of emotion as it was legally binding. But Cecilia felt secure, content even, with the arrangement. She was accustomed to being in the company of boys and men, anyway. She had grown up in the chaotic tussle of a house with six brothers. Spending the rest of her days inside a cathouse of a convent sounded like the dullest possible fate.

But only months after her father was in the ground, the magnitude of her brothers’ foolishness had come to light. There was no more hiding it. Together, her brothers had frittered away Cecilia’s dowry, squandering it on ill-advised investments, dice games, and drink. Once things were out in the open, Giovanni Visconti’s father had burned the marriage contract in front of her brothers’ own eyes at the gates to their farm.