[83] The storms, swamps, and jungles of modernity

Gus carved out his own world long ago, and no one after all his years inhabiting it is going to try to come get him or throw paint on his vision. He’s been approved. He had us over for lunch at his studio our first week back. What year was it, Emma? What year did we come back? She tells me 29 April 1909, two days before the May Day march from the Pleasure Park. Prime numbers are the easy ones to remember, she told me once. Okay. A day of no weather at all, which is the best kind. Weather is one more problem to face, and I end up drawing it, which is a handy way to avoid not looking hard enough.

We meet him in his studio for cheese and bread and apples and coffee. Then Emma goes off to locate our cottage – we’ve taken it unseen – and Gus and I walk for an hour through the Pleasure Park, gossiping as we go, down the zigzag paths, and stop at a bench between the Imperial Folly and the Neptune Fountain. I would have made that walk anyway, and he would have guessed I wanted to, to see the city from above, really see it, for the first time since our return. No talk of my own work at the time – we had that talk over lunch, about the paintings I’d sent him from Prague. Now he wants me to know the lay of things, and that conversation is easier for us with the city below us. I wish Emma was there. It isn’t that she has a good business head, though she does, but sometimes I need to remind her that I’ve got one that’s good in its own way. Who is new on the SilverDome board? Who is feuding, and what is the feuding about? Who is showing where? Who is buying, and what are they buying? How am I going to get by? It’s time I stopped going back to Roller’s shop. I will have to ask Emma whether we’re broke or not. I haven’t asked about it recently. It’s dawned on me by now that she has a practical streak she can’t escape and tries to hide. All the things I never pay attention to, someone must have, and it must have been her. The landlady in Prague never asked me where our rent money was, the barman at Gerstl never asked me to clear our tab, the art supply shop never asked me for money. Come to remember it, I never ran out of socks, and when I needed pipe tobacco or a newspaper, there were always a couple of coins in my pocket when I reached in. It must have been her.

The city at our feet, the cathedral spire through the pale greenery, clockwork ravens organizing the lawns. I can expect to hear from this person and that one, and Gus tells me how much they will pay for a portrait and no more. He mentions one or two coffeehouses where I should post drawings, and the Pukerle, across the boulevard from the plastic museum, has a gap where I can hang one of my oils if I use a Roller frame. He suggests my portrait of Emma in Prague’s winter garden. (Some people out there buy a painting if they like the frame enough.) I imagine just then the first stab of knowing that a painting I love for itself will soon vanish from my sight (all the more reason to start work on another one). And the next meeting of the board of the Art Factory is the following Thursday, and … he stutters a little. He doesn’t have it in him to start sentences with, ‘If you know what’s good for you …’ but I understand. The Art Factory makes mostly crafts, but every artist in the city puts in time there at some point, and I know without him telling me, because he mentions the place, that it’s my turn to do a year there. They’re starting a line of children’s books, and they’re going to want etchings for them, which makes it time I learned how. And there are postcards, of course, and illustrations besides. No one signs their Art Factory work, so I’ll have to design myself a maker’s mark. The SilverDome he doesn’t want to talk about yet. It’s the only prominent venue in the city for selling modern work unless you specialize in portraits. For traditional work there is the Empiricum, but neither of us wants that for me. If this sounds like a nest of thieves, that’s what we are. That’s how we run ourselves, anyway. And, oh look, he says,

‘That man over there pacing. We’re sitting on his bench.’

‘How do you know?’

Gus nods his chin at the man. He looks like a tramp, but he’s something besides that. They’re all something else besides, if you look hard enough. No one is born beaten down, everyone broken has fallen from somewhere. Most tramps don’t have enough anger left to give away on staring, but this one still has some. It’s too far away to see his face or to notice more than his silence. Only a shock of pitch-brown hair down to his neck and half-covering his face, and a long, lavender coat too thin for the day. That’s all I know. He’s pacing stiff-legged, staring at us, pacing some more, stopping to stare some more, but too far away for anyone to threaten each other. Ravens are pecking the ground around him. Him ignoring them, them ignoring him.

‘That once was a nice suit he’s wearing,’ Gus tells me. ‘It’s the same chap from two, three years ago. He was here for months every day. A pile of newspapers beside him, a little bag of lunch, all arranged so. Don’t go near him, Paul. He has the cruellest blue eyes, almost white. I looked in them once. How can blue eyes be cruel?’

The guy’s looking straight at us again. He reaches for a watch as if he still owned one. We can hear what he’s thinking: ‘How much longer must I endure you?’ The cry of the ones who’ve been humiliated but haven’t learned to love it yet. How else can you stay sane, once you’ve been broken like that? Except by hugging your pain close, or by phantasizing about dishing it out. Whichever keeps you warmer in winter.

‘He’s off, isn’t he?’ I say. ‘He’s a serious crazy. The pure wool.’

‘You don’t want to let him into your head. Eyes are meant to be windows on the soul. Imagine looking into someone’s eyes and seeing … well, nothing. That’s what I remember.’ He shivers.

When we get up so that he can have his bench back, I don’t approach, but I turn to stare back at him, to see what he’ll do. Most people back off from me, and he does a little. But then he turns to stare again and we hold each other like that to see who breaks first. I can feel him tense up from 50 metres away, a maniac trying to keep his gag – that’s what I sense from that distance. Stuffed with words he doesn’t say, with anger too chaotic to express. Have you ever listened to a tramp when he’s talking to himself? It’s all vituperation, all they wish they could tell the world but only have the nerve to tell themselves. So they just choose a memory and hate it for existing, over and over.

‘Let’s give him back his place,’ Gus says. ‘He’s come down even more since last year. What can we do except be kind?’ He leaves a ten-groschen coin on the bench, and we walk down the hill.