[48] The fire must sting me first

I’d rather have the east wind. So would Paul. The east wind means sunlight for him, and then the west one moves in for a few days and the sky goes crash. A city like this, you can almost touch the sky on days like that, and it’s lead-coloured and ocean-thick, which is no good for anything. Then twice every winter the south wind comes up and melts everything and people go mad and sad. Not me any more – I’m immune now. There’s a promise for you – the south wind will never find me again.

So the east wind is better – a whole continent out that way. You can hear voices in it sometimes, though you can never tell whose. You just know they yearn to make themselves visible one day and that you’ll be helpless, tossed and pinwheeled, for the rest of your life when they get here. So you’d better grab hold of something before they come and before anyone else.

Stories … Paul’s no good at telling them, he cares too deeply about the moment at hand, and I wonder what that’s like. Lucky guy, and to be with him I have to find ways to be within his moment. We try to make them visible and accessible, so that … control. You want to control time, don’t you? Stories are us trying to pretend we can control time. We want to think that we can do that, as if we can make sense of our lives that way. No wonder Paul can’t tolerate them. The stories the world actually tells turn back on themselves, yet they never repeat themselves … they’re too contingent for that. It’s people’s minds that try to fix them and make them run permanently straight, and what’s the point? We end up turning the world into stories that don’t exist. The impulse for that kind of certainty is something humans invented, which is what makes them dangerous.

Eight years together, each year a lifetime, the way we go through them, and we’d tell you different memories of each day of them. I’m old enough now that time doesn’t feel stopped. Paul doesn’t look back much, so he’s never going to tell you how we met. This is the last hour of my life before we do that, and I’ve just heard his name spoken for the first time. Fate slips silently, fate runs us over. I’ve heard about fate but I’ve never seen it before. While we’re waiting for him in the studio garden, Gus is sketching my face, my sun hat, my bare shoulders. The Flöge sisters have lent me to Gus before the after-lunch ladies arrive, and I’m wearing one of their sun dresses, tiny ebony buttons down the front, ivory with crimson squares and florets of his own design. Pear tree branches are bucking in the wind above us, the grass is fluttering at our feet. I keep having to pin down the skirt. Between us is a small table, a bowl of apples, and an empty chair. Gus turns his drawing board to let me see. He has also drawn the empty chair beside me, and my dress is trying to fly off with the wind.

He’s spent the hour before lunch making studies of me for one of his mythologies. Now, at the table, he’s slicing an apple for me with a knife that could skin an elephant and he’s telling me about a protégé of his who needs models though he won’t be able to pay.

‘You want to pose for him,’ he’s telling me. ‘He needs your look – he doesn’t study enough beautiful things. You’re beautiful but something else that he’ll want from you.’

‘What’s his name again?’

‘Paul Karsch.’

‘Karsch like the steelworks?’

‘He is the steelworks, his family.’

‘Guns, cannon, railway tracks, them?’

‘That family, yes.’

‘Then I’ve heard of him. Is it true about the horse?’

A look-away grin is all I get. ‘His parents died when he was a lad, and his uncle disowned him later, so now he’s fabulously poor. He did a year in the hussars and then a year at the Dresden Academy. Now he paints scenery for Roller at the opera house. A Catholic, but don’t let him go on about it. He visits me once a week for graphites and chalks.’

I know nothing about men. The only ones I’ve ever met, outside my family, are my grandfather and Gus, and I’ve hardly begun to start trusting my judgment. I know what the world is, but that’s inspired generalities – don’t ask me for particulars. I’ve only heard about the world – don’t ask me for experience. I’ve only just begun to understand that some people act happy – for example, not like me – and I wonder what it’s like to pretend. I’m used to learning about happiness from books, like the end of those long English novels where the heroine walks off the last page with some guy and she’s happy to do it. Is happiness always the end of something? I know what pleasure is, but pleasure’s more about forgetting something worse. Pleasure is mostly about intensely personal forwardness. I’m not old enough to know that I’m cynical. Most boys my age … wrong. How can I know? The ones my age, they’re like Emil, breaking their backs at school, dressing and acting to pass for old men, while I’m living in a boarding house with grilled windows for rich people’s daughters whose mommies can’t tolerate them any more, though mine drops by the Flöge shop twice a week to make sure I haven’t fled, except into the models’ dressing room. So when Paul opens the gate and walks up the path to us, I’m ready to see the world through someone’s eyes but my own. Grandfather has shown me it’s possible to do that. He’s the first one to treat me as if I’m my own person, which is the same as telling me that so is everyone else. Around grandfather, my world can’t be all about me, and I’m still getting used to that and calculating the benefits.

Since leaving home, I’ve made stranger observation down to a system. I ask the same two questions about everyone: What will they want? And what will they do? This guy, when he walks up Gus’s long walk, is older, but everyone is. Twenty-three, twenty-four? I can’t wait to be older, which makes him lucky from the start, show me how, daddy. He’s dressed in mahogany brown: a thin wool sweater to tame the wind, faded work trousers, leather half-boots. Slightly bowlegged, so he rides. Hair cropped short and standing straight up, military-style. He walks like a whip, arms and legs slowly coiling and uncoiling. This one never has to run. A long, pale face with nothing extra to it except thick, straight eyebrows and a coarse two-day beard. And molten grey eyes that he might have stolen from his uncle’s factory. He smiles quickly at Gus and says hello to him and then gives me a look that says look back, now. I feel like a piece of meat. His eyes won’t let go. Finally they travel up to my straw boater, which matches the dress, and down once slowly through every curve I’ve got to my bare feet.

‘Nice feet,’ he says. ‘Don’t step on anything sharp.’

I blush and tuck them under me.

‘Who’s the carrot-top, Gus?’

‘This is Emma,’ he says.

‘Fresh-looking. I kiss the hand,’ he tells me with a slower glance this time. ‘Water Sprites II, isn’t she? The second from the top. But her hair’s more gold in that one.’

Then he’s staring again, as if he breathes through his eyes. Through my dress, he takes in my shoulders, breasts, waist, legs, calves, until I feel his eyes licking through the cotton, and he says, ‘Stand up and do this.’ And holds his arms off to the sides, palms down, fingers dangling. It’s the line of my outspread arms he wants to see, I can tell. I see red and blue paint caked to the backs of his own hands, simple colours. My hands are clean, his make me feel naked. He throws me a leer, to see how I’ll react. I’m not going anywhere.

‘Turn,’ he says. ‘Any way you like.’ The wind catches the hem as I stand, and I stumble when I do a quick spin to wrap the skirt around me. He’s taken out his drawing tablet and sharpens a graphite with an oversized claspknife until his eyes tell me hold still. He exhales, and graphite touches paper for a count of three, suddenly as that. He passes his sketchbook to Gus, who nods his head and turns it to show me. One line, that’s all. But in one line, he has the wind and the buckling trees and the ground at my feet, and has made the day a moment.

‘Again,’ he says. And I turn for him. And with the next line he has caught my dress and hat and they’re all of a piece with the rest.

‘Open the dress,’ he says. ‘Hold it like a sail against the wind.’

‘Do you like what you see?’

‘It’s a start. Tilt your hat to make a halo. The pants go, sorry.’

I step out of them tuck then under my chair cushion so that they won’t blow away, and open my dress, shoulders down and back, one hip cocked to the side. I know what he sees, I like it even if he doesn’t. I’m not supposed to like mirrors but I do. Small high breasts, shaped like lemons, with a strange density to them. Slim hips and smooth tummy. Skinny little mouse the same colour as my head, thin lips tucked in. The wind kicks at the branches while he stands with his sketching book pinned between fingers and elbow. He stares at my face, looking for an expression of fear, worry, degradation. He’s not going to see any. I just stare back hard, willing him to look at my eyes instead. He raises his left hand, graphite held like a Japanese brush, nods for me to hold the pose, and lets his hand dart. Within thirty seconds, he is finished.

‘That’s all I want,’ he says, and turns the book to show me. I’m standing as solid as the tree, lightly but rooted, my arms holding my dress like the ends of a cape, the wind catching both them and the branches. The world is in motion, me and the tree trunk the only still things. Somehow, he has found a silent place in me, a place I’ve sought for years, in the middle of a gale that will never cease blowing after this moment.

‘Keep that one,’ he says. ‘The first one the model keeps.’

‘You should sign it, then,’ I tell him. ‘Or it’s worth nothing.’

He blinks at me. ‘Ha.’