training to look at these pictures. I can’t tell the people apart.”
“Yes, you can. Just look. You have to look.”
She heard a note of slight reprimand in her voice. She went to the far wall to look at the painting of one of the jail cells, with tall bookshelves covering nearly half the canvas and a dark shape, wraithlike, that may have been a coat on a hanger.
“You’re a grad student. Or you teach art,” he said. “I’m frankly here to pass the time. That’s what I do between job interviews.”
She didn’t want to tell him that she’d been here three straight days. She moved to the adjacent wall, a little closer to his position on the bench. Then she told him.
“Major money,” he said. “Unless you’re a member.”
“I’m not a member.”
“Then you teach art.”
“I don’t teach art.”
“You want me to shut up. Shut up, Bob. Only my name’s not Bob.”
In the painting of the coffins being carried through a large crowd, she didn’t know they were coffins at first. It took her a long moment to see the crowd itself. There was the crowd, mostly an ashy blur with a few figures in the center-right foreground discernible as individuals standing with their backs to the viewer, and then there was a break near the top of the canvas, a pale strip of earth or roadway, and then another mass of people or trees, and it took some time to understand that the three whitish objects near the center of the picture were coffins being carried through the crowd or simply propped on biers.
Here were the bodies of Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and a man whose name she could not recall. He had been shot in his cell. Baader had also been shot. Gudrun had been hanged.
She knew that this had happened about a year and a half after Ulrike. Ulrike dead in May, she knew, of 1976.
Two men entered the gallery, followed by a woman with a cane. All three stood before the display of explanatory material, reading.
The painting of the coffins had something else that wasn’t easy to find. She hadn’t found it until the second day, yesterday, and it was striking once she’d found it, and inescapable now—an object at the top of the painting, just left of center, a tree perhaps, in the rough shape of a cross.
She went closer to the painting, hearing the woman with the cane move toward the opposite wall.
She knew that these paintings were based on photographs but she hadn’t seen them and didn’t know whether there was a bare tree, a dead tree beyond the cemetery, in one of the photos, that consisted of a spindly trunk with a single branch remaining, or two branches forming a transverse piece near the top of the trunk.
He was standing next to her now, the man she’d been talking to.
“Tell me what you see. Honestly, I want to know.”
A group entered, led by a guide, and she turned for a moment, watching them collect at the first painting in the cycle, the portrait of Ulrike as a much younger woman, a girl, really, distant and wistful, her hand and face half floating in the somber dark around her.
“I realize now that the first day I was only barely looking. I thought I was looking but I was only getting a bare inkling of what’s in these paintings. I’m only just starting to look.”
They stood looking, together, at the coffins and trees and crowd. The tour guide began speaking to her group.
“And what do you feel when you look?” he said.
“I don’t know. It’s complicated.”
“Because I don’t feel anything.”
“I think I feel helpless. These paintings make me feel how helpless a person can be.”
“Is that why you’re here three straight days? To feel helpless?” he said.
“I’m here because I love the paintings. More and more. At first I was confused, and still am, a little. But I know I love the paintings now.”
It was a cross. She saw it as a cross and it made her feel, right or wrong, that there was an element of forgiveness in the picture, that the two men and the woman, terrorists, and Ulrike before them, terrorist, were not beyond forgiveness.
But she didn’t point out the cross to the man standing next to her. That was not what she wanted, a discussion on the subject. She didn’t think she was imagining a cross, seeing a cross in some free strokes of paint, but she didn’t want to hear