Free The Forger by Paul Watkins Page A

together with the narrow, rounded blade of my pallette knife.
    “The war, Monsieur Halifax.”
    I didn’t want to talk about it. For me, back then, all notions about the safety of France began and ended with the Maginot Line, miles and miles of tunnels built into the French-German border, underground railways, barracks, even cinemas, gunpits arranged to blast anything that tried to cross the frontier. Nothing could get through that. It was the most advanced fortification in the world. The Germans said they didn’t want France, anyway. They wanted places that had been German, or at least partly German, like Austria and Czechoslovakia.
    It was already a dead topic. Talk like this had been going on for years and people were tired of it. If there was going to be a war, I told myself, I wouldn’t be able to do anything to stop it. It seemed to me most people felt that way.
    “I wanted to know,” asked Pankratov, “whether you have made provisions for leaving. For leaving in a hurry, I mean.”
    “No, sir,” I said. “All I’ve been thinking about lately is staying.”
    Pankratov made a growling noise at the back of his throat. He rose up from his chair and walked over to the door. “I have to go out,” he said. He lifted his faded canvas coat off a brass peg nailed into the wall. The peg had been placed without alignment to anything else in the room. It lay directly in the path of his leaving the room from his chair and at the height required for him to sweep his jacket off the hook without effort. He seemed to have no real sense of order beyond the immediate practicality of things. They were placed where he needed them, without regard to color or style or the convenience of anyone else.
    Pankratov shut the door and from the other side the shape of his body blurred behind the pebbled glass window. It made him look like a bear standing up on his hind legs. His footsteps clumped down a few paces and then stopped.
    He must be lighting a cigarette, I thought. Unconsciously, I found myself waiting for the footsteps to continue. When, after a few seconds, they didn’t, I looked up from my work and straight into Valya’s eyes.
    She was waiting, too.
    Eventually, after what seemed a long time, the footsteps continued, fading down and down until there was a distant boom as he closed the front door of the building.
    “Pankratov doesn’t trust us here alone,” said Valya, whispering, as if he were still listening to each breath that passed between us. She called him Pankratov, just like the rest of us.
    “Seems that way,” I said.
    “He’s afraid he’ll come back and find us doing it right on the platform. That would give him a shock he’d never get over.”
    I looked up from my painting. “He wouldn’t be the only one in shock.”
    She chose to ignore what I said. “Do you know what he’s really afraid of?”
    I peered over the top of my easel. “What?” I asked.
    “He thinks we’ll steal his chair and sell it.” She left her pose by the window and walked over to the chair and sat down in it. “The thing I can’t understand is why he holds on to this when it is so damned uncomfortable. This chair was once the only thing he owned, apart from that ridiculous belt buckle of his.”
    I was only half listening. I gazed at her hips as she sat in the chair and she knew I was looking at her. She made no move to draw my eyes back to her own. Seeing her now with clothes on, knowing each crease and smoothness of her skin beneath the material, did more to me than seeing her naked. I found I could not freeze into my blood the detachment I needed to paint her properly, to be aware of each part of her and not overwhelmed by all of her at once. I had to snap out of it. I looked at the empty space she’d left behind against the wall and realized I preferred the picture without her in it. With the palette knife, I scraped away the layers of paint that had made up her brooding shape and began to paint over it.
    “What are