Pictures at an Exhibition by Sara Houghteling

passed into Father's office, with the vault beneath the false floor, where we had hidden the last ninety-seven paintings in the hours before we fled Paris for the South. We had hauled sacks of lime, each as big as a boxer's punching bag, into the corners of the storage room to protect the paintings from the damp for the months we expected to be away. Another 250 paintings—awaiting Father's next exhibitions or sale at a later year—were already in the depository of the Chase Bank.
    We descended into the vault on steps that sprang out automatically when the floor slid back, with a mechanism like a cuckoo clock. There were no paintings, only exploded sacks of lime, sodden and gummy, and a cigarette stub on the stairs. Father rested with his hand against the wall. We stayed there only a moment—there was nothing to look at or for. I helped him up the stairs, out of the vault, my hand at his elbow. We were stricken and silent. There were no barriers between this moment (Father, moaning softly) and another one that I could not quite grasp, in which I also wandered around that second gallery room and wept and there was the smell of something burned, and the paintings on the walls were covered with black, and an identical great loneliness reached up a paw and knocked me aside so that I felt askew and utterly at a loss.
    Father and I gathered papers from the floor. Communist propaganda, pamphlets with mangled spelling, copies of a Fascist newspaper that had been, it appeared, published in our house before the liberation, denunciation letters from neighbors I knew. In one, a veteran from the Great War demanded the government issue him a new pair of shoes since his cobbler had, much to the veteran's irritation, disappeared. We were archaeologists in our own tomb.
    I looked toward my father and watched him grow pale. I thought, My father has begun to die.
    Yet when I reached to take his hand, he snatched it back as if I had bitten him.
    “This is no time for the sentimental,” Father said, and instantly I felt ashamed. “Someone's here.”
    “I feel it, too.”
    “Not that. There is a noise in the hallway.”
    The voices belonged to two figures, one in a stockinged cap sewn with a red star. He opened his palm to show us his brass knuckles and then swiped his fist through the air. The other had a pistol and said, “Don't make me use this.” We ran.
    Outside, Father stumbled over the doorstep, hurtled forward, and fell to the ground. His hands went to his mouth. For a moment, I thought he was uninjured. Then he parted his lips and blood burbled forth with specks of broken teeth in its stream.
    At the hospital, while Father waited to be fitted with a bridge for his gums that would make all his food taste like tin, we listened as a nurse admitted a man who had shot himself while celebrating in the streets. Our victory had already become stupid.

Chapter Eight
    I T WAS THEN THAT WE LEARNED. FATHER SAW TWO skeletal men at the Hôpital de la Charité. The Soviets liberated a camp named Majdanek, which sounded like a bone stuck in my throat. We staggered into and out of a newsreel in which we saw the horror of the Jews in the extermination centers of the East. There was open weeping in the theater, and also a few who called out “prop aganda,” “lies,” and “unbelievable.” Then, posted on a wall near the Métro, printed on broadsheets of newspaper, were pictures of bulldozers pushing heaps of bodies. Soon these photographs were replaced by pictures of everyday German citizens led through the camps, in fur coats, with their handkerchiefs pressed to their mouths. Father went to the Red Cross agency with a list of friends we had not heard from, but they turned us back, saying it was too soon.
    Father grew weak and listless. Distracted by this unfamiliar version of my once—gleaming father, thinking only of him, I went on a walk and was struck by a blowsy old man piloting a bicycle too small for his fat. A crowd knotted around,