[4] Images of an exiled past

What! What? Who? All right, yes then … Paul did it too, once. I saw. Don’t let him tell you he didn’t. Every morning for seven years, he’s poured one finger of rhum into his morning tea (then made two or three warm-up drawings of me) before he starts in the studio. Every studio is too chilly most mornings – those high ceilings, and who can afford to heat a room that size? Makart maybe, but no one wants to be him any more, and even Gus with an income like his works in a chill. Then every evening, I’ve gone to the studio and poured him three fingers of plum brandy, peasant stuff, into the wine chalice, Czech crystal in a steel base, and he’s shot it back to buff the edges of his evening’s fading vision. Except one morning he told himself, ‘I’ll drink the chalice before breakfast to see what happens in the studio.’ Like an experience, you know? He’s always open. Mistake, that one – direct to the hands. His words for it after he came back that evening with a look of aghast on his face – direct to the hands. He couldn’t work for three days (with Paul, bad things always happen in threes), which for him is as frightening as life gets. He did what he always does when he’s scared, which is get angry. I did what I always do when he’s angry, which is act scared. Then his pride wouldn’t let him calm down for a day. Now he only gets drunk on Saturday nights, the good stuff – Count Freddie’s Élite Tokay, whatever’s left in the case from the week, one bottle or three. Then on Sunday morning while he’s hung over or still drunk, he stumbles down the cottage hill to the Church of the Insane for Eucharist. It’s supposed to be just for inmates of the nerve asylum outside the village, but he enamelled a lot of the wall tiles five years ago when they were building it, as piecework, and the priest remembers that, so they let him in as long as he doesn’t agitate the inmates. I don’t know what he does in there, but for the rest of the Sunday, he acts pretty normal.
His creed, they almost all feel guilty about everything, but a few of them feel guilty about nothing, and he’s the second type. The way he explains it, they can do anything they want as long as they tell a priest later. That’s it. No wonder Catholics are evil. The guilty type are scared my kind want to rule the world. The other type won’t tell you they already do. It’s the lack of guilt that lets them and the certainty that comes with it. Don’t ever ask a rhetorical question around Paul, I warn you, unless you really want an answer (you don’t). Guilt, he acts like, is the mark of someone else’s conscience in you, and he never notices anything wrong with his own. Why do I love him so much? I bask in his certainty. He really doesn’t know that guilt is possible. What a life that
must be – daddy, buy me that.

My cordial wore off before dark today, and down there’s Johnny tangled in the bedsheets. The wetnurse we’ve brought from the nerve asylum (they make babies there, too) comes up twice morning and twice afternoon and sits on a stool (always where I can’t miss her) and nurses him while I ask myself, ‘Where does she put those when she’s done?’ I’m used to being around Flöge models, and I’m sure my next nightmare really is going to be about waking up with a shelf like that. She burps him and places him at the foot of the sheets for when I look that direction as a hint for me to pick him up or something. How do I even know he’s mine? I wasn’t there. Because Paul says? All right …

Johnny’s half-awake too, so I get out the little woollen ball and play catch with him. It’s his favourite thing. He hasn’t caught it yet. Paul says sixteen days is too early, but he’s trying to console me again. I toss him another. His eyes flicker at it, I think, and for a moment I don’t feel as if he’s trying to scare me back to death. Who are you, Johnny? One toss sails a little over his head and I reach for it without thinking and howl with pain. Well, not howl. Only inside. You’d better get the short course on Johnny’s revenge for being born. He tried to come out backwards through the wrong hole, basically, and no one could reason with him. Now we’re wearing diapers together, and he’ll be out of them before me. And he’ll be making his own babies before I ever try again, so declared. Is that why he’s trying to smile right now? I stare back, making a stone face at his beady little eyes and pointed nose and snickering laugh. You tried to kill me, Johnny, and what do I do about that?

I can get out of bed by myself. I learned yesterday – just pretend to be a dreadnaught leaving harbour. One leg creeps to the floor, then the other. Bum seesaws to the edge of the bed. Onto my elbows, then my palms, then bend the knees (try to) and push, and choke down a scream where I can’t help bending, and there’s mother’s backstairs maid on loan getting ready to catch me in a robe.

A scarlet robe, a consolation from Gus the Painter day I left the hospital. A scarlet robe of quilted silk with golden cranes, green bamboo, tiny silver stitches. I asked to wear it for him once, when I saw it hanging in his wardrobe, the oak one in the hallway where his pose models used to wait, the closet a sunburst of kimonos, sarongs, Spanish lace. He smiled and said nothing, but someone like him, who talks with so much hesitation, you always know what his smile thinks: You don’t need it, Emma. So I stood in his studio under the skylight, just there, just so, and shrugged one shoulder at a time until the cotton smock pooled at my feet, arms and legs like this, starburst hair fluffed like this, back arched just a little. Hand under my chin, relax my belly, hold. And a few weeks later I’m the second water sprite from the top. And eight years later, he’s remembered. It came the day Johnny and I left the hospital, by a messenger blowing his little bugle from the bottom of the path. And an hour after that, a dogcartload of bringwiths from Paul’s sister Charlotte, who lives a twenty-minute gallop over the other hill, in a much darker valley than the one below our garden. From her, a crate of Count Freddie’s Élite Tokay smelling of the straw the bottles are cushioned in, a brace of pheasant shot out of season that no one knows how to cook, three freshly laundered horse blankets that even Paul struggles to lift all together, and a 100 gram tin of cocaine hydrochloride sealed and certified at the Duclos Laboratory of St-Cloud. Happy New Year to me. I hope Paul leaves me some. For me it’s got to be nothing but opiates, and a litre of something nice, until I get some strength back.

I look through the window, out at the world, down the hill through the frozen sunlight, the black pines. And there’s my grandfather, and his horse and cart, and Paul with him. Paul and horses – I knew about it when I married him, I was ready for it, I told myself I’d forgive no matter what, but on days like these new ones, with me feeling so horribly vulnerable, it isn’t easy. Watch Paul running his fingers through her golden mane, patting her strong, ivory flanks, staring deep into her mouth while she snorts, feeding her a carrot. I can’t deny this is happening or stop racking myself for ways to live with it. Her name’s Ostara, can you believe that? That’s the Aryan Goddess of Spring, you heard. Times like this, a city like ours, a world like the one we’ve got, she might as well have been named ‘Jew Basher,’ which would have been more on point.

‘Why don’t you change her name, grandfather?’

‘I suppose I could,’ he told me. This was two years ago, after he brought her home from the cabbage farmer in Krems who sold her. ‘But I’d rather not contribute to this world’s bitterness by taking sides that way. I’ll take good care of her, and she’ll take good care of me, and together we’ll come to understand what we add to each other’s world. Horses and people go back thousands of years, Emma, and neither has destroyed the other. Doesn’t that prove that the present days are the real aberration? Surely we can get along if our people’s desire for peace can express itself through open acts of goodwill.’ And I think, All right … Who would not want to believe it? So I try again.

Just then, a twisted, one-toothed face pops up to the window and shrieks at my face, then waits for the result with a giggle of expectation. Hi you again, my stare tells her, sorry but not today. My nerves are getting stronger – I don’t lean back or gasp this time at this one. Fourth since I woke, I count without trying to stop myself. They all know me and Paul; this was their hill long before ours. There’s a footpath alongside the cottage, from the asylum to the next village, and the good behavers, the ones who aren’t on lockdown or crazy watch, get to wander the hills between porridge and cocoa. The cacklers and droolers and handflappers, the Napoleons and Caesars, they wander the hills. That’s what crazy ones do to comfort themselves if you let them. They wander the hills, sigh. Mostly it’s the manic depressives who climb this high, who brave the rope path up and down. The hysterics would rather stay in their rooms and mope, and the dementics are too heavily dosed. You think they’d seep into Paul’s work up here, but no. He draws them sometimes as a technical thrill, but he doesn’t subject them to paint. I know why, after seven years with: these people are trapped in their own worlds, and he gravitates more towards the one we face together down below, the Dream City, the one full of people with choices and no excuses. With all the free will that frightens them so badly. Each of these ones is lost in a world too unique for others to join or rescue them, hears the world speak with a language no one else knows so that they have to think thoughts no one else can. It’s madness itself to think they fall outside the human – you don’t want to know how much like us they are in ways we don’t want to know. So, now you know how we got the cottage for so near to nothing – no one wants to live this close to the nerve asylum, especially the path to us almost a cliff. (How did he get me up here last week?) Truth, we’re usually only here summers now, but this winter we’ve found that with both stoves lit it’s warmer than our apartment on the canal quay, and that the silence, especially at night, is doing me good.

I’m teaching myself little things, like how to walk without falling like a tree, how to fill the kettle without bending at the waist, how to step into shoes with no hands. I’m walking on my sixteenth day, so take that, Johnny. The night wind in the chimney sounds like a flute. Lying there, with Paul breathing beside me and Johnny snoring in his cage at the foot of the bed, I’m warm enough. Baby makes three – three is the number we’ll always be. It’s the first thing the doctors told Paul, and then he told me. And then they cut me again to make sure of it. Neat little stitches this time, dozens of them, not the kind they use to sew corpses. They even left me my sailor. I’d expected them to cut it out to take my mind off it.

Johnny smells like walrus milk (you’d have to see her) and feels like a raw dumpling when I pick him up. Yes, it hurts. But after you live through ten years of cycles and five of heroic medicine, what’s a little of that? What’s a lot of that? It hurts but so what? I’ve tried to be tough as Paul, and practising that is helping me get through this. We look at each other these nights when he comes in from out there, and it’s as if we’re telling each other that our life together had better not dare start hurting.

I get to sleep all I want up here and to avoid people I don’t want to see. The visitors we want, the ones with something to say to us, always come in the evening. Paul has so much work to finish, with his show at the SilverDome in May and eleven canvases to prepare by then. He needs every minute of daylight this winter.

Live. To live? What a word. I thought it was a word. I really didn’t yearn to come back from the dead, not the first new sensation of it, not while I was sort of up there watching myself on the night of Johnny’s Big Day. Different, you know? I saw the clock on the clinic wall, and it had stopped. Paul was moving around, but the clock? Did you ever imagine that? When every clock has stopped, time is telling you something. And the wind through the window that Paul cracked open, I knew it was cold but I didn’t feel the cold, it gripped me but I didn’t feel it grip. I was in pain but the pain, like I said, was down there, in that corporeal place that was no longer me. After you die, there’s no more experience, not in heaven. No, heaven, the corner I listened to from the cloudy gates, sounds a little like a party with lots of bland party food and tinkly music and people you’re supposed to like because they’re dead too, and they’re all laughing to themselves at the same small joke you arrived just too late to hear. And that’s it – everything. I could have tolerated heaven, but I don’t know how long. I would have got bored soon, which was always a bad idea for me. If there’s anything I’ve craved all my life, it’s experience, for change to have its chance at me, for me to let those chances their try. If I have to die to see those clouds again, I’m still too young to crave it.

But that’s now, that’s what I see behind me from sixteen days. Then, while I was waiting for what happened next, this … well, breath sort of floated me back this way and suddenly, snap, my body and I were one thing again and my body was letting me know it. Up there’s powers and authorities had made a choice before I had any say, and for once, with Paul to hold me, I rode with them.