[73] Let us meet the gods on another star

Maybe it’s good that I’m going to see Mister Professor again next week. Maybe it’s time I told someone the nightmare. Maybe, maybe, I’m running out of time to do it. All those sessions from eight years ago, and all those mind tricks I played on him, were about me never telling him the real memory. I never did. But I’m telling myself it’s time I told someone, as practice for telling Paul some day, now that I know I must, now that he can’t stop wondering when he looks at me.

Paul says he’s never dreamed, but he told me something once that he must have dreamed. The night we leave for The Prague Years six ago, we’re standing on the platform at the Paris Station in the steam and the echoes and the human hive. Train journeys do terrible things to Paul’s mood, and this is the first time I’ve seen it. They subdue him, and Paul chained is a bleak sight. Trains are a story he can’t give up – I know his parents died in a locomotive wreck before he could have remembered them, but that’s public property, public legend, not something he told me. We have an unspoken pact by now: we can hide our thoughts but never our feelings. If we have to be alone, we’re going to be that together. His silence had grown darker while we packed that afternoon, and he had said goodbye to grandfather as if he was leaving for a battlefield, but it was the train station that he dreaded and the journey he was willing himself to take. Now we’re just standing there on the platform, primly holding hands, and whenever he hears a train leave or depart or a steam cloud escape, he squeezes mine till I wince. Machines are at war with the abstract spirit and thereby attempt to extinguish evolution. The wheels on the track – every turn they make for the next twelve hours he’s going to hear his name. It’s stamped on every length of track in the Empire: Karschkarschkarschkarsch … We’re just standing there, and I’m watching all the anonymous commotion and weather life and crouching shadows, and thinking about how we must both look so still in the middle of it all. And instead of just seeing him as he is, seeing us in the moment, I’m clawing the air for a clue to what he’s thinking. I don’t know better yet, and I’m afraid he’s angry with me –

‘A platform in the dark,’ he says before I can ask him anything. ‘A town I’ve never been. Everyone’s so hollow. When will I know where I saw that?’ And he squeezes me close with a strength he’d forgotten, his right hand on my shoulder, not as if he wanted to, not as if I needed him to, but as if he needed me to hold that still and that close for him. I’ve waited since for him to paint a scene like that, so that he could see his mind outside himself, but he never has.

In Prague the next morning, I start telling people I’m nineteen. (Prime numbers are the most believable, I’ve learned.) When we arrive there in the morning to find a furnished flat by the afternoon, he’s donned his suit on the train – I picked his clothes for this day – and he’s wearing a high acetate collar and a homberg, and I’m in a cotton frock with a lace collar and wool shawl and my hair piled up, and I giggle and coo while he holds my hand ever so respectfully. Afterwards we go looking for a coffeehouse, and the beat copper tips his hat to us and the grocer already calls me Mrs Karsch.

The first night, Paul and I sit in our new kitchen with the potato sack on the table between us. While I sweep and polish, he’s been staring at it all afternoon with a haunted and heartbroken look on his face. It’s the lightest bag we have, but he didn’t let me carry it last night. This is how he looks when he’s tormenting himself, which almost never happens. I can see him wanting to say, ‘Emma, just do something about …’ but his pride isn’t going to let him. So I take the leap –

‘Paul, look for a pub while I clean house.’ And I take three coins from my reticule for him to get drunk with. Once the door slams, I upend the bag and shake out a stormcloud. Then I sit in front of the fluttering pile and fan myself for five minutes. It’s the purple money, I’ve no idea where he’s been hiding it, only that its smells of coal oil and that some of the bills at the bottom are soaked into a stew. Then I spend two hours flattening and drying and counting. By the time I’m done, the table is covered in pinned stacks of two thousand. I pack them tight into my valise and shove it into the broom cupboard, where he’ll never look, and press the door shut. The next day I send grandfather a telegram: ‘Who in Prague can I trust to hold money for us?’ And he sends back a name and an address in the Josefov Quarter: ‘A good man.’ Paul refuses to have a bank account, and of course I can’t open one. Paul grew up swimming in the stuff, drowning in it, surrounded by everything it could buy, but without ever seeing or touching any. So he can’t bear the sight and touch of it now.

He won’t have to hold a job for a while, but he needs to feel people on his skin every day. Our first autumn and winter here, we both want to be where only new people can see us. Roller at the Court Opera has already tipped his friend Kubicek at the Prague house, so Paul spends his mornings touching up backdrops for Don Giovanni. And from that he finds his lunch pub near the Charles Bridge, where he can start to see what others are doing and get a grip on the life here. I play the housewife. Except for the unmarried and underage part, there’s nothing we need to hide. Mommy and daddy will find us sooner or later, and send Emil to track us down. Until they do, we can think about ourselves instead of anyone else.

After three afternoons prowling he has a studio assembled in the larger bedroom. It’s his first black-and-white studio: white walls, but everything else black. He’s papered the windows neatly with long rolls of onionskin to block the view and soften the light. I think he’s already good, but he’s telling himself he knows better. He’s got by on a gift until now, on draughting skills, and problems like perspective, lighting, and composition are things you can solve from a book or just by talking with other artists about them. Now he’s working at his weaknesses. He doesn’t want to be seen doing this at home, do you know? He’ll teach himself the way he always does, but he needs seed knowledge to teach himself with and he’s foraged all he can from the people he’s used to being near. It torments him that he’s weak with colours – that he doesn’t understand them well enough and only goes through the motions with them – so he’s come to a black-and-white city and planted himself in a black-and-white room to learn what he can’t be taught. He isn’t very happy for the first few months here, but I know that isn’t about me. By now he’s not the only one with experience, though most of mine is still mostly of him.

I feel like a woman now. I feel, for once, like an age I’m supposed to be and as if I have a life I’m supposed to have. As long as I keep the place tidy and look pretty at Gerstl’s down the street, and as long as I leave him alone while he’s working, he doesn’t care much what I do. That’s something new – not disturbing him while he’s working. He wants silence nowadays. I’ve been used to him working in public, drawing from life, on the streets and in the coffeehouses and pubs, wherever we go together. And then he comes home and makes something of what he’s caught on the run. I don’t know what he’s doing in there now. He arrives back from a morning at the opera house with sandwiches from Gerstl for us and walks straight into the studio. I leave for the afternoon, exploring the city and visiting the friends I’m making while I do errands, and when I come home I hear him in there, urging himself under his breath, a little enraged all the time, until he comes out ten minutes before dark. Then I can go in, not that I can see much in the falling dark.

But when he’s gone in the morning I do. He’s covering canvases with little squares, big squares, circles, learning the colours as if they’re letters of the alphabet, one hue at a time. He’s brought home a box of children’s toys, building blocks in three or four simple colours, toy carts and trains, and that’s all he’s painting now. The colours are simple enough – you just buy the right pot. What’s driving him mad is that colours change. He says they do. They move, he tells me – he tells me afterwards – and it’s making him mad. Stare at it for a minute, Emma. It moves! Over the time we’re there, he starts thinning his oils to almost water and building them up a dozen layers at a time. He hates the word experiment, but that’s what it is. He’ll talk later about how these were wasted months, though that’s his pride talking – I know they weren’t. At his worst, he wonders what chose him to do this, why this is the language he’s been saddled with. Why, if this was what he has to do, he doesn’t know instinctively how to do it. I know by now what to say, because it’s what he told me not long before: ‘One choice is still a choice, Paul.’ But it’s from watching him for months like that that I realize what he meant. There can be no end to this tunnel but perhaps there will be light.

I understand it finally: it isn’t colours he’s making himself learn – it’s how light plays on them. He’s trying to harness light. So he isn’t as much fun to be around, the first five or six months. Now he’s trying out different undercoats, worrying over the texture as much as the hue. He’ll paint his canvas white, varnish the entire field, and then paint on top of the varnish. He brings me in one Sunday when he can’t take his mind from it and points at a green building block. Look, he says. And we both wait. How do you paint the sun crossing that? The moon descending from it? How do you capture the light through a moving cloud? He’s trying to make colours do what he can already makes lines do. He’s never going to figure it out, but I tell myself he’s going to learn something and make it part of himself. He’s looking for a way to express himself without knowing what the end will be, and his intuition pummels him for hours every day, jumping harder and harder on every lie before he can delude himself into expressing it. In some of his work later on, the streetscapes from our window that he does before we return to the Dream City, I see the struggle and it’s mesmerizing, but he’s painting his own struggle with the colours, and the struggle has become the subject more than it should be. Not that I’ll ever tell him that. Whenever he sets aside his paints and varnishes and goes back to drawing for a few days, it’s made a difference. He knows it has. And when he returns to the Dream City and tries painting again, it will make a difference again.

Is life a pilgrimage towards the self? Paul doesn’t want to think so. It’s me who’d tell him that – that your life may be a point, but the point is always part of a line. For him, life is a series of moments that all have to be treated the same. You can’t be one person now, another person the next moment. You have to face the world authentically and you can only do that by releasing yourself from what the past and future can do to you.

He comes out of his studio grey-faced just before dark, his energy melted by his own heat. He strips off his painting sweater (the darker the better) and drops it just inside the studio door and watches me measure out his three-fingered shooter and stares up at the world from his end of the couch, without a word. Thirty or ninety minutes later – he always does – he gets up and helps me on with my coat and we walk down the block to Gerstl, to show ourselves to the world that now knows us. I’m learning a second eight hundred words of Czech, which Paul grew up speaking. It takes getting used to, hearing his natural sound, the unfiltered Paul, the one without an accent and who can speak without thinking. The language he does dream in. He was a child nearby, though he’s never lived in this city before now, so he knows the local mores better than I do. I can’t stop feeling like a city cousin here. Gerstl is a barrel-vaulted cellar – really, three cellars end on end – with plank tables and deal chairs, or benches along the blank walls. Nothing like we’re used to much, as if we would want this city to be the same as what we’ve left, and the yellow light from the coal oil lanterns hardly dents the smoke. People here drink mostly beer, not wine. They’re square faced, flat faced, with cheekbones like tick marks. Funny hats, dark clothes as if the clouds have leeched in, the rain permanently dampening them. I’m used to the women around me having to work at being beautiful. To these, it comes naturally, and though I fit in, I’m jealous. Relative to them, I’m a porcelain doll. All there is to look at is the faces of the people we know there, and that’s everyone – the set painters from the opera and the people they bring, photographers, architects, frame makers, chorus singers. Nobody has any money except us, not that we flash it – it’s meant to last us for a long time. Paul likes the light here, yet he never brings his drawing paper with him, as if he’s training himself to look unobstructed. He’s trying to wean himself from drawing all the time. He’s trying to turn himself into a real painter, not a job painter.

The world always makes sense. It already always did. The point is to understand how; it’s up to the individual to find the sense, which is never simple. Paul trusts that there is sense to be found even when he can’t see it, that there are patterns in art, history, society, that art can discern and that no other project can.

We’re fighting a lot these days, but nothing dangerous. It would be easier not to, but only for a while. I’m not weak – he wouldn’t allow it. If he doesn’t have the words at hand, he doesn’t try to find them. Not him, no – he just sits there and glowers at things, no matter how long, until the words give themselves up to him. I don’t understand that – I can always fill the air until I know what the point is I need to make. Both of us, in the end, say what we truly need to say, and that’s the boundary – we have to truly need to say it. Any words beyond that would be cruel, so we just … don’t. All the yearning, all the desire, all the need to be loved – people can never get past being strangers in a new town, and being thrown together here has brought those needs out of us both. If we’re going to last, we’re going to have to learn from our arguments or at least learn to yell ourselves out. When we stop, sometimes I think, ‘That was fun,’ and even he smiles while he’s turning away. He’s not going anywhere, and neither am I. He knows it, and I know it. I’m in a safe place no matter what he says or does. He’ll never hit me – you have to be me, you have to look him in the eye the way I can, to know he’ll never do that. He’ll never threaten to, he’ll never say anything to make me think he would. And I know how I could wound him right back if I wanted to, but he knows I’ll never do it.

Art and science are mild pleasures, compared to the drive to satisfy crude impulses. Charlotte will tell me, once, ‘Crude impulses are always more fun. You expect them to be easier to satisfy, but no – you have to identify them first. That’s the hard part about crude impulses.’ When she tells me that, I’ll know just what she means. I don’t have to try hard to please Paul, so when we do it, it’s always me I concentrate on. Pleasures are supposed to be selfish. We’re both pretty aggressive that way, so that took working out – deciding who jumps whom. Then some nights we don’t have sex, which is the strangest thing of all. Why on earth not? I stop worrying soon enough. After a couple of days, I’ll sweeten myself up while his back is turned and make him crazy these ways I’ve found. Pleasure is something I let myself have in front of him. I know what I like, and I get him to do it and whatever he likes is all right with me, fair’s fair. I’m excited by his strength as much as anything else. I like being picked up and riding his hips around the room. I like leaning back from the lean muscles in his arms, and knowing what he could do with them but doesn’t. Not all the time, only for the split moment when he’s stuffed me full and I collapse into the core he’s melted in me. Almost hurts, never quite, and the edge he carries me to is warm and slippery, washes me back and forth. He throws me over it. A bath in the universe, a tide of liquid stars, the moon on molten silver waves on my skin. Like diving into a liquid mirror, your body’s face shatters. Is there one word for shouting and weeping? There ought to be. He asks me sometimes, Where do you go? But I don’t know that myself, and all I can do is let him watch.