The Girl You Left Behind

do this for me, and I’ll get you in there
     tomorrow, Toots. I promise.’
    ‘I bet you say that to all the girls,’ I said. But, for once, he
     didn’t even crack a smile.
    I sat there for two hours, watching through the office window. It was a warm
     day, the sun bouncing off the stone sidewalks, but there was a strange feel to
     it that seemed to drop the temperature. Military vehicles whined up and down the
     main street, packed with soldiers. German soldiers, their hands on their heads,
     were marched in the opposite direction. Small huddles of German women and
     children stood stock still on street corners, apparently wondering what was to
     become of them. (Later I heard they were called in to help bury the dead.) And
     all the while, in the distance, the shrill siren of ambulances told of unseen
     horrors. Horrors I was missing.
    I don’t know why Danes was so worried: nobody seemed to give this building
     a second look. I began a piece, screwed up the paper, drank two cups of coffee
     and smoked half a pack of cigarettes, and my mood grew darker and darker. I
     began to wonder if this wasn’t all a ruse just to keep me away from the
     action.
    ‘Come on then, Krabowski,’ I said, finally. ‘Show me around
     this joint.’
    ‘Ma’am, I don’t know if we –’ he began.
    ‘You heard the lieutenant colonel, Krabowski. The lady’s in charge
     today. And she’s telling you to show her around.’
    He gave me the kind of look my dog used to give me when hethought I was going to kick him up the you-know-what. But he exchanged a word
     with Rogerson and off we went.
    It didn’t look like much at first. Just rows and rows of wooden stacking
     systems, a load of grey, military-issue blankets slung over the contents. But
     then I went closer and pulled a painting out of one of the racks: a modern piece
     of a horse against an abstract landscape, in a heavily gilded frame. Its
     colours, even in the dim light of the vast room, glowed like treasure. I turned
     it over in my hands. It was a Braque. I stared at it for a moment, then placed
     it carefully back in its rack and kept walking. I began to pull things out at
     random: medieval icons, Impressionist works, huge Renaissance canvases, the
     frames delicate, in some cases supported by specially built crates. I ran my
     fingers over a Picasso, astonished at my own freedom to physically touch art I
     had previously seen only in magazines or on the walls of galleries.
    ‘Oh, my God, Krabowski. You seen this?’
    He looked at it. ‘Um … yes, ma’am.’
    ‘You know what it is? It’s a Picasso.’
    He was completely blank.
    ‘A Picasso? The famous artist?’
    ‘I don’t really know much about art, ma’am.’
    ‘And you reckon your kid sister could have done better, right?’
    He shot me a relieved smile. ‘Yes, ma’am.’
    I put it back, and pulled out another. It was a portrait of a little girl, her
     hands folded neatly in her skirts. On the back, it read: ‘Kira,
     1922’.
    ‘Are all the rooms here like this?’
    ‘There are two rooms upstairs with statues and models and stuff instead of
     paintings. But, basically, yes. Thirteen rooms of paintings, ma’am. This
     is one of the smallest.’
    ‘Oh, my good Lord.’ I gazed around me at the dusty shelves,stacked in neat lines back into the distance, and then down
     at the portrait in my hands. The little girl stared solemnly back at me. You
     know, it only really hit me then that every one of these paintings had belonged
     to someone. Every one had hung on someone’s wall, been admired by someone.
     A real live person had sat for it, or saved money for it, or painted it, or
     hoped to hand it down to their children. Then I thought of what Danes had said
     about disposing of the bodies a few miles away. I thought of his haunted, craggy
     face, and I shuddered.
    I placed the picture of the little girl carefully back on the rack, and covered
     it with a blanket. ‘Come on, Krabowski, let’s go back downstairs.
     You can find me a decent cup of coffee.’
    The morning stretched across
     lunch and then into the afternoon. The temperature rose, and the air around the
     warehouse grew still. I wrote a feature for the
Register
on the
     warehouse, and I interviewed Krabowski and Rogerson for a little
     W
oman’s Home Companion
piece on young soldiers’ hopes for their
     return home. Then I stepped outside to stretch my legs and smoke a cigarette. I
     climbed up on the bonnet of the army