[66] No chambers of stone, no palace or dwelling

Grandfather’s room over the stable had two north windows, good for Paul. No heat, no water, but two north windows. Paul installed a brazier and punched a hole in the roof for a metal chimney for when it got really cold. We needed the city. We could live only so long inside each other’s heads. Whether you like it or not, you need something outside you to keep you aware, to remind you of your self by pressing you against what you are not. Nature has its uses but without something to bounce our own nature against, Paul would have begun to shrink within himself. I would have begun to do that.

The purple cash was going to be our flight money. It’s how I thought of it. He never brought that money home, or talked about the money he was making that way, which for him was a new attitude, but I didn’t press him. When he wasn’t painting scenery at Roller’s workshop, or doing his own work, or pushing out erotic drawings (they were as good as anything else he did – he approached them like technical exercises), he was pushing the world to release a reputation for him. A city like this, a crowd like ours, you start making your name mainly by doing portraits, and getting the commissions takes friends, and it takes tools. Portraits are your calling card, besides which, the ones who can afford the portraits you make are the ones who are going to buy or talk about your other work later. No one was going to come to an unheated loft on the Isle of Jews to sit for one, so I cleaned Paul up and picked out a suit for him to wear to Villa Mountain in the afternoons when he had a commission to work. Two that winter, three more the following spring. Nobody too important except for the cash they paid in.

While he was gone, I modelled dresses at Emilie’s, or I kept grandfather company. People can always tell when you’re not eating right – walk down any street downtown if you don’t know that. The fat ones, the curd-faced ones, are the ones without any cash. It takes money to stay slim, so I fought to keep my figure.

We hardly saw Gus together. He was someone who sent someone when he thought we needed something or that it was time we changed something. Paul saw him more than I did – he’d come home from a visit with his head full of what Gus was doing, and a portfolio stuffed with drawing paper and charcoals and chalks and the rest, because Gus was feeding him materials to keep going. In return, he only wanted Paul to work as hard as he could. When someone approached him about a commission, Paul would negotiate it, and then sit back and explain to me: ‘Well, Schmidt is a cousin of Loewe’s, whose wife commissioned Gus four years ago.’ Gus, who didn’t need to do portraits any more, had usually dropped a pebble somewhere over the horizon. Paul would take anything from him but money. This was how he was going to succeed, and the honour was in doing that at the right time with honest work, and then, still later, helping the next person. To return favours, it’s wrong – they’re too valuable. You pass them on instead, and that’s how you grow your world.

Not poor, just broke, most of our first year together. Emilie brought us in a few kroner a week, and the loft was free. I’d wake in the morning first, with Paul spooning me. He’d get up first to start the stove and boil water for tea. Frost on my breath till the stove kicked in. Paul always makes his own tea in the morning – he has to, the Hussars drilled it into him, and he’s never missed. Which means he always makes my tea. That’s why so many of the drawings he made back then are of me wrapped in a blanket, with a mug of tea somewhere. Then he pours himself one shot of rhum, and that starts the second part of his morning – he has to draw something, really work at something before the tea gets cold. If he doesn’t start that way, he worries the day might run ahead of him. He almost always draws standing up, and if there’s a ladder around, or a flight of stairs, he’ll climb up and look down. Whatever will take the perspective out, to unhook the figure from its ground so that he can apply his own. He works mostly with a hard graphite, but he’s tried everything else – ink, stoveblack, crayons. He hesitates before he tries new materials, because they turn what he does into a technical thrill, which he rarely wants to make his point, but he’ll make himself try new things as a point of honour. The floor was always covered with scraps of drawing paper, and when I couldn’t see the floor anymore, I’d bundle them up, with his name and the date pencilled in the corner.

Some days he stayed in, when he was touching up a commissioned piece or had letters to write. Some days he left early without telling me where, and I never asked where, though when he came back he usually told me, or showed me by opening his portfolio. The days he went out and I stayed in, I’d join grandfather in his shop in the downstairs front. Not much traffic down there. All he has ever sold is cabbage. Most of the cabbage on the Isle of Jews goes through his shop. Carts come in and unload it, carts come in and load it. Paul isn’t a socialist, I learned that quickly. I mean, not with his politics. The one political word I ever heard from him outside an argument was after a Saturday night at the Marzipan that ended with a bottle of Freddie’s Tokay in the stable loft. My course that night, so there was nothing to do together but share the bottle. ‘The thing,’ he told me towards dawn, looking earnestly exhausted to the point of tears by this thought. ‘Some people have more money, that’s all. Am I right about that?’

Most of the books on grandfather’s shelves – the economics, politics, social philosophy – he’s never cracked one. Art history, yes, but that’s work to him. French novels are what he reads in bed, in French. I don’t know where he learned it, and I’ve never heard him speak it. When he reads, he doesn’t want to hear our own streets in his head, and French is the lingua he’s remembered from school. Science books, yes. He’s always borrowing grandfather’s science books. Science is the modern world, and that’s the one Paul feels a need to watch, so he’ll read genetics or astronomy and trade notes with grandfather.

Once you subtract everything in the world that can be proven by measure, what’s left is the human soul, or drive, or world spirit – and that’s where he wants to situate his work. Force dynamite into the cracks of modernity and light the fuse. Compel the void to expose itself. Yes, he talks like that around people he doesn’t know well. I’ve never been sure whether he’s putting one on, but it’s always in public, around people he knows who aren’t friends though they might be useful. Sometimes Paul talks just like Emil, when Emil isn’t there. But then once he told me, with no one else there: ‘Art is the world that God never thought to make. It’s the creative will that he left for us to use.’

By then, Paul understood what it took to argue with my brother, though I always wished they’d stop. Paul is at his best when he’s silent, when he’s the sum of his actions in the moment, and he was wasting this energy for that on the only person I know who can pull an unlooked for argument from him. ‘But you simply don’t realize,’ would say Emil, ‘that art in its new, more modern forms can be truly revolutionary, the cinema being an obvious example.’ Unquote. ‘Of course we’re living in new times, you idiot. As if I can’t sense that difference … Everything I make is a reflection of what’s new. Your great error is that you conflate art with what you see when you look at it, when the visible is only the starting point.’ Unquote. And he’d go on, when Emil stopped talking again, that ‘art expresses humanity’s relationship to the world, which is the point of it. Art must breathe its own life into ours – not freeze it or dismember the world like a camera, but synthesize with the unseen world. Christ …’ Unquote.

By then, grandfather wants very much to understand that to express inner truths, you have to acknowledge external forms and then migrate inwardly. And Paul truly, by now, wants him to understand. Paul wants to rouse people from their modern-day captivity in materialism, he wants them to see the objects of their world as having meaning in relation to the self, but as meaningless in themselves.

The cabbage handlers. Enough of them pass through grandfather’s shop, the rustic field lopers and their shambling helpers, suburban peasants with rot teeth and rot clothes and cheap-wine faces, whose horses eat better. Grandfather suggested to Paul once that he stay around one day and draw them. So he waited for a cart to arrive, and watched them unload, tossing cabbages like medicine balls across the yard in a slow rhythmic line. He watched some more and then pondered grandfather’s expression, and clicked his heels the first time I ever heard –

‘I see what you mean, grandfather. But I tell you, this is for cameras.’

Meaning, poverty has hollowed them to sameness. One of them he could draw, but a crowd? They’d cancel one another out. Which tells you why he draws so many animals and women and children: they haven’t lost their souls to the world. They protect their souls in ways the world never allowed men. And then he drew the cart horse instead.