[9] Capital of the world’s end

From here the city is something you descend to. Paul gave me no warning today that we were leaving. He’s no good at telling me things like that. In some ways, I knew him better the day I met him than I do now. At the start, he wasn’t one to talk about himself, but he had a reputation that meant he had no need. It’s his reputation that I’d heard about – you know the one – the one people don’t talk about now as much. The Archduke Wilhelm’s Seventh Hussars and the colonel’s horse … that one. After our morning tea, instead of vanishing into his studio, he walked down to the train station and hired a box cart with driver and two day labourers and a fiaker to come for us at two in the afternoon. Then he went into the studio to roll his canvases into separate oilcloths and packed those and all his kit into the circus trunk he uses for nothing else. Those things and Mister Frog, the temple frog he always hangs inside the door where he’s working, nose pointing east, always. A sharp-green little guy with black dots on its back and bright red eyes. Those are the only colours he allows near him while he’s working. He wraps it in black velvet and flannel and places it gently on top of everything else in the trunk. It’s the gentlest thing I ever see him do, or it was until Johnny came along. I can tell by the way he says nothing that he hates moving house. I let the silence ride. If he said something, it wouldn’t be nice and it would be something I already knew.

Yesterday grandfather dangled Johnny from his hands and said, five kilos one. Paul didn’t tell him about the move then, so he probably decided last night. That’s my guy, I know. We must send him a message from the station that we’re returning to town today. Paul wouldn’t have remembered to. Come to think, I’ll bet you he did. There are times when he’s considerate to me by being considerate to whoever’s standing next to me. And men think women are a mystery.

A cloudless day, the world waking to zephyrs, so I sit outside the door in the dazzling white snow and feel the sun on my face, in a cushioned rocking chair that Paul has moved out for me, and feed Johnny his bottle, wrapped in the black Berber robe with its hood as deep as a well. Death wears a hood like that, but I’m not afraid of that, and Johnny likes being under there with me until Paul comes back. I can tell by how he wraps his long lean body around my waist and sleeps. What does he know that I don’t? I exhale hard once, twice, three times, emptying every last bit of air from my lungs, blowing the pain away. I learned that all by myself. Inhaling hurt, so I wondered if exhaling would make it stop, and it does for a while. The first two days without the Reisler’s were the worst – I thought I’d die. Then I thought, don’t be silly, I’ve seen death and this is nothing like it. If death has to be this close, learn to laugh in its face.

The cart pulls away with the canvases and his circus trunk full of brushes and the rest. While the carriage waits, we give ourselves ten minutes to count the corners inside the cottage again, agree on the sum (parlour 12, bedroom 8, kitchen 8, makes 28). The Slav in him needs to do that. And we stand at the door and look down at what’s coming next, again – the spire of the Cathedral to Holy God, and the journey to it. We both belong to the city. It can infuriate me, how much alike we are in the things that don’t count heavily. Where it matters? Don’t start me. I’ll suck all the life I can from him, knowing it will never be enough, that my life will never be all my own now that I’m with him.

The pine trees black even in this glaring sun, smoke from the village rising in brown columns or black, wood or coal. The yellow stucco and black trim of the hospital straight below, and up through the trees, the copper dome of the Crazy Church, the copper too new to have oxidized yet. I don’t know what beauty is, except my own, and Paul couldn’t care less, except about mine – beauty is never a point he tries to make. But if it exists and brings peace, surely it’s somewhere near us here. He carries Johnny down the rope path and places him in his crib in the carriage, then walks me down in my little baby steps, ready to catch my balance for me. One hundred twelve steps is the most I’ve tried in a month, and these are hard ones. In the carriage, I exhale as long as I can and start to say, grandfather … but he raises his palm to shush me. He remembered to send him a message. Bastard. We take the lane, then take the road, and then the Great Western Pike past the Poland Station, the box cart following. We’re cabbing all the way home. Isn’t he feeling lucky? Or he’s impatient. He has his keen silent look, his hunting dog look, the one where tomorrow has already started forming in his head. This isn’t his world. The rooftop studio above the quay, the sun-heated light, the charcoal on his hands and the smell of paint on his clothes, the place always ahead of us in time, that’s the world inside him.

Down and down into the city, with the wind sighing through the carriage woodwork. A breeze like this will be a gale tonight, an eastern horde turning the loose snow to bullets, the air to solid glass, and everything else to stone. And we’ll be warm, with our five porcelain stoves, one in each room, and the city glassed out and the horizon from our parlour window gigantic in its breadth, the light overcoming night’s portents, the sun baking us through the windows of his studio, because this kind of wind means a cloudless sun for a week. Come home with us, Johnny. The three of us and our apartment above the vanquished clouds, under high white ceilings eight storeys above a black canal, on the edge of the city, people of the Inner World, of the Royal and Imperial magnificence but on the edge of that too. Together perhaps we’ll make sense of what we see. We will demand together that the powers expose themselves and explain their authority. Now the city begins to suck the empire into itself, swell with its own importance, the buildings taller and taller, falser and falser. Those kyriatids that run along their roof fronts? Those heroes marching like regiments along all the gutters? Don’t be fooled – they aren’t marble like you’re supposed to think. They’re poured concrete, mixed with Tisza River sand, the cheap stuff (too much mica). Won’t last more than fourteen years in this climate. I saw. Past the Pleasure Palace to the top of Hail Mary Street, not the usual way. He tells me we need to stop at Rosemeyr’s, the cabinetmakers’ workshop where he gets his stretchers made and canvases souped. Does he just want to show the baby? No, he’s got that out of his system, though Mr Rosemeyr will be delighted to see us and sent us a sweet card, he and his wife, when they heard Johnny’s news. There are a lot of moments I don’t want to even look at Johnny, I’m still too terrified about the hand we’ll have to play together, but I’m trying really hard to keep that my secret. Then I look out the little carriage window, and tuck my feet close to the warming brick, and bare Johnny’s face to his first sight of it – the world, Johnny. The rush, energy, velocity of the times. Are you nervous yet? The world isn’t all about you, and that’s the first thing it will want to tell you. People walking, children running, horses prancing away their carts, and look, there’s a motor car – one of those. Johnny wakes to the sound of it and begins to cry. Watch the city dance, Johnny. Soon the next day will rise in the east, and the music will stop and it will die. It’s dancing itself to death, night after day, faster and faster than the sun. Everyone knows, nobody says. Everyone is terrified, and no one knows why, but Paul has to know. Paul will insist on being told one day, and then he’ll tell me without having to promise. The icebox will need milk and bread, and we can order in tonight’s supper from the Singing Swan below us at street level, and how about the Marzipan tomorrow tonight? Aren’t we optimistic. I haven’t seen this since Johnny was born. This is as normal as it gets. What will Paul do to smash that? Because he always does, and somehow I always end up grateful again. Experience has been a wonderful thing. It’s just that when you’re me, experience is always the next thing Paul does to me.

Our cab stops on the curb, the cart waits behind, we step down onto the bruised-looking pavement, the street sounds a harsh music on our first day returning. People avoid me in this cloak, a leaning and tottering memory of the dark, casting no premonition of the doubled life beneath. Paul heaves open the shop door against the gale, which is humming through our clothes, and I hear the warm tinkle of the bell, and then nothing as the door closes behind us and the stove warmth engulphs us. Paul greets the clerks we know, who point us down the hall towards the office. We enter through the counting room door and I pull my hood back and smile at Mr Rosemeyr, a good friend to Paul and a kind man. And I think, while I’m collapsing, was that the end – my last smile? How can you smile through a scream? Because sitting in front of the desk, there’s the other one, and the cloak he would wear is the one I’m wearing now. And there are his eyes again, forcing hooks through my soul to drag me down into his world. He remembers me too, and … do you see what I do? He’s just found me again.

[[ chapter 10 on 7 February ]]