Red Square - Martin Cruz Smith [137]
“It’s a surprise.”
“Do you know anything about art?” Max asked Arkady as if including a child.
Irina said, “Arkady will recognize this.”
They drove in the Daimler along the Tiergarten to Kantstrasse. Irina turned around to Arkady, her eyes huge in the shell-like gloom of the sedan. “You are all right? It worried me when you called.”
Max asked, “He called?”
“I’m looking forward to this, whatever it is,” Arkady said.
Irina reached back and took his hand. “I’m glad you came,” she said. “It’s perfect.”
They parked at Savigny Platz. Walking to the gallery, Arkady became aware that he was approaching a cultural event of some size. Men so distinguished that they could have been the kaiser escorted matrons draped in beads and jewels. Academics in black marched with wives in knit coats. There were even berets. Photographers crowded around the nondescript entrance to the gallery. Arkady slipped in while Irina endured a short bath of flashes. Inside, a line had formed at a brass elevator. Max led the way to the stairs and pushed along the banister past people inching up.
On the third floor, a throaty voice called out, “Irina!” Arrivals showed invitations at a desk, but Irina was waved forward by a woman with a broad Slavic face and dark eyes that contradicted a mane of golden hair. She wore a long purple dress that looked like the vestment for a cult. Her makeup shifted when she smiled.
“And Max.” She kissed him three times, Russian style.
“You must be Margarita Benz,” Arkady said.
“I hope so, or I’m at the wrong gallery.” She let Arkady touch her hand.
He considered mentioning that they had met before, car to car, she with Rudy and he with Jaak. No, he would be a good guest, he told himself.
The doors were opened. The gallery was a loft with a high ceiling and movable partitions stationed to create an open section on one side, a theater on the other, and to lead the eye in between. Arkady was aware of Irina, Max, waitresses, the alert faces of security guards, the anxious faces of employees right and left.
On a stand in the middle of the gallery was a weathered, rectangular crate of wood. Though the corners were chipped, it was obvious that it was well constructed. Through stains, Arkady could see a blurred stamp of the eagle, wreath and swastika of the postal authority of the Third Reich.
However, his attention had gone to the painting that hung alone on the far wall. It was a small square canvas painted red. There was no portrait or landscape or “picture” in it at all. There was no other color, only red.
Polina had painted six almost like it to blow up cars in Moscow.
Arkady also recognized it as “Red Square,” one of the most famous paintings in the history of Russian art. It wasn’t large and it wasn’t a true square either, because the upper right-hand corner rose in a disorienting manner. And it wasn’t just red; as he approached, he saw that the square floated on a white background.
Kazimir Malevich, the son of a sugar maker, was perhaps the greatest Russian painter of the century, and certainly the most modern, even though he died in the thirties. He was attacked as a bourgeois idealist and his paintings were hidden in museum cellars, but with the perverse pride that Russia took in the quality of its victims, everyone knew the images of Malevich. Like every other student in Moscow, Arkady had dared to paint a red square, a black square, a white square … and produced junk. Somehow Malevich, who did it first, had created art, and now the world genuflected to him.
The gallery filled rapidly. A separate room was hung with other artists of the Russian avant-garde, the brief cultural explosion that had started with the last days of the czar, heralded the Revolution, was stifled by Stalin and was buried with Lenin. There were examples of sketches, ceramics and book jackets, though none of the gum wrappers that Feldman had mentioned. The room was almost empty because everyone was drawn to the simple red square