[54] Blood and wounds that I saw now?

The next few months. I remember a lot, but it’s a ball of time. Emma can give you dates if you must. She has a head for dates that’s a magic trick. For anything with numbers. 1812, 1683, 1759, those ones are easy. But try 17 July 1907. No problem. She’ll tell me we had a bowl of fish soup for dinner at the Miller’s Daughter and then slept on a bench in the Plant Garden after the gate was locked, in a copse of lime trees, her head on my lap, in her blue-striped house dress and with my sweater over her shoulders. Name a date and she can recite the day for you, so what happened will never be a problem – it’s there. But why it happened? I’m no good at that, because I just don’t expect time the way she does. I’m the one she found that year to make it stop.

 

[53] O hear me, master of the silver bow

Her bedroom has stone walls, a ceiling lost in shadow, two high windows without curtains. A tall, well-stuffed bookcase and one soft day bed with a lamp. A huge bed. Everything is comfortable – it just doesn’t look that way.

‘Freddie never enters,’ she says. ‘In fact, there’s never been a man in here. When I want a man badly enough, I go out for one. We’re the same size and shape – I’m touched.’ She hands me a pair of pants from a drawer, and a camisole, both the same white as I’d been wearing, until … but these are silk. ‘Never been worn,’ she says. ‘A couple of whips, aren’t we. Dresses – I’ve got nothing to suit you, so let’s not try. I know – Paul will think this is funny. Have you worn breeches? Pull these on – button to front.’

She hands me a pair of white twills, tight ones. Only after I pull them on do I realize they’re half of a fencing costume. Then she hands me the top, the same white, the same tightness, with a quilted breastplate and a high stiff neck. She comes up behind me and lifts my hair from the collar, pillows it out with light, quick fingers.

‘Look in the mirror,’ she says.

I like what I see. I’ve never looked like a man before. Even the Flöge sisters, with all their forward ways, make clothes that are mostly about attracting men. If I never cared in my life what I looked like, I’d want to look like this some of the time.

‘I do know this time what you’re thinking,’ she says. ‘Your face, your hair, your colour, it explodes out when you’re dressed like that. Clothes for women who don’t need them. That’s you, that’s me. We could be sisters, except look, grey already.’ She parts her crown. ‘I give myself grey hair. No one else knows how. It’s hard work, being me.’ Laugh, one. ‘I love to look at myself. How about you? At your age, you’re still your own favourite subject, I think.’

‘That’s something you don’t know anything about.’

‘Call me Charlotte. And tell me whatever you like, or don’t. I’ve met most of Paul’s lovers. I’m how he gets rid of them. We’ve been pimping lovers back and forth since we were children. Shocked? Haven’t you heard that word before? Lovers?’

‘He isn’t done with me yet,’ I tell her.

‘Not afraid of much, are you? You are young, aren’t you? Where did your innocence go? Innocence and fear are the same thing, when you think about it. And they both take too much energy. I hope you like a game breakfast. There will be plenty of it, but it’s all we do here. In case you’re curious …’

We stand on the minstrel’s balcony and look down at the deserted ballroom, the hut-sized fireplace with the insignia above it.

‘Listen, Paul’s fresh one … Freddie and I are morganatic, and he hates it. His family doesn’t have two groschen to tap together. They have a title a thousand years old, and land, plenty of it, and a castle per acre, but all’s mortgaged seven times. Everything you see is Karsch Steelworks, family trust. That’s what he married, not me, and I get to be the Countess Charlotte of Györ and Örmullö. So he keeps quiet and spends what I give him. There’s nothing else he can do. Oh yes, and he hasn’t spoken a word to Paul since the day they met. Thinks he’s an artist so he must be a traitor to his class, which is true enough. He isn’t going to like you at all. And he’ll be rude to me too, to be consistent. He’s a very consistent man.’

Down a spiral staircase, down a long stone hallway, which opens onto a flagstoned glasshouse, crowded around the edges with struggling orange and lemon trees. A solid oak refectory table runs down the centre, covered with pewter plates, linen napkins, and monogrammed silver: mounds of smoking meat, tureens of creamed potatoes and shallots, decanters of dark wine and steaming coffee. Footmen hover. Count Freddie is standing at the head of the table dressed in jodhpurs and black leather boots and a sky-blue tunic, surveying his bounty, and Paul is at the other end, but to one side, his plate heaped with charred boar, steaming pheasant, a breakfast chop, a lake of red wine in a crystal goblet. Some things he can’t help, so it seems. Good manners, for one. This time of day, after a hard sleep, he stands up and pulls out my chair. The Count strides forward to greet me.

‘This is Emma,’ Charlotte tells him. And when he takes my hand and bends to give it a kiss: ‘She’s a Jew.’

I feel his mustaches curl and his hand grow stiff, but he clicks his heels despite himself, from the momentum, before he strides to his end of the table.

‘Nothing’s kosher here, Emma,’ Charlotte tells me, when she sits down across from me and Paul.

‘We never kept it,’ I tell her. ‘Only my grandfather.’

‘I was just telling Freddie,’ Paul says, ‘that when we change ourselves, we change the world.’

‘Let us praise Hungarians instead,’ Charlotte says.

‘That’s easy, too,’ Paul says, and he raises his glass. ‘To a proud and ancient people.’

‘Ancient and proud,’ Charlotte agrees. ‘Both, actually, but which came first? That’s what Freddie will never tell us.’

Freddie whips his napkin open like a cannon shot. Charlotte waits out his glare at her, then shrugs defiantly.

‘That’s the mists of history, Charlotte,’ Paul says. ‘He probably wasn’t born yet. Freddie, are you sure the past has already started? Because I didn’t see it yesterday.’

‘The past is always just over,’ Charlotte tells us.

‘The past is whatever you tell yourself it is,’ I tell them.

We think for a minute, except for Freddie, who glowers at my voice and saws at a shank of wild boar.

‘That’s a good one,’ Charlotte says. ‘Paul, remind her sometimes she said that. You’ve seen the Iron Ring, Emma?’

‘I don’t care,’ I tell her. Actually, I do, but I’m not going to admit it in front of the count.

‘I showed it to her already,’ Paul says. ‘The thing is, you know, Freddie’s just a sweet old guy. Harmless.’

We all stare at Freddie.

‘You don’t know how harmless,’ Charlotte tells me. ‘His gang’s not into clubbing and bashing – they wouldn’t dirty their hands. Deportation – that’s the plan. Palestine isn’t the place for you – much too close. Now they’re looking for an island to send you. Madagascar’s too big, but at least it’s far away. What’s the other one, Freddie?’

The count gives Charlotte a boiling stare, the same one he gives me.

‘The Americans already own Hawaii,’ she says. ‘so that’s out. And the British own Tonga, and the French own Tahiti. Now they’re thinking that the Dutch East Indies are the place. Maybe Sumatra. The Dutch aren’t going to complain much – they’ve got too many, too, according to Freddie, and more islands than they know what to do with. So that’s a solution.’

‘You should come watch a meeting sometime,’ Paul tells me. ‘Once a month they get together in a half-circle under the insignia and stand in front of the fireplace, chanting oaths to Christ. Heavy Catholics, those guys. Men only, sorry.’

‘What do you mean?’ Charlotte says. ‘I’m there. Watching, at least, from the gallery. It isn’t the little ones you have to worry about, Emma. Not the street shufflers. It’s the ones who can buy more power than they’ve already got.’

‘We don’t hate Jews, Charlotte and me,’ Paul says. ‘But we had to learn not to. The Franciscans, you know.’

‘The Carmelites, me,’ Charlotte says. ‘What’s to hate? What’s to like? If you have to divide the world in two, men and women is the only way. Really … As if that chasm isn’t broad enough. How was Emma, by the way?’

‘What you see,’ Paul says, and he gazes me up and down. Red hair, green eyes, white uniform. That’s me. Wear something like this tonight and he’ll run me through again, and I can already tell.

This is the second day we’ve met, but it could be ten days or ten years later. As if we already have a whole life to look back on, as if the one before that one has stopped counting for as long as we stay within a stare of each other, like now.

‘My God, Paul,’ Charlotte gasps. ‘Are you in love or something? What’s that like?’

 

[52] A dream sleep has fallen over the city

That’s the first thing I know about Paul that he doesn’t have to tell me – he has an older sister. When I wrap myself in her cape and step outside, she and her husband have galloped off. Five hundred metres down a path through woods bumpy with hoof prints, I see the gates of a hunting lodge – a castle, except it’s in a valley, but the stone is the same, the surrounding flint wall the same. I learn later that Paul could have just knocked, and Charlotte would have put us up for the night, or a year. And, he’s welcome to half her money – the inheritance – though Paul’s never taken any of it. It’s a point of honour that he breaks in when he visits, that he kicks down a door like last night, or shatters a basement window. Even when he’s expected. A point of honour? No, I’m beginning even then to learn how he thinks. It’s a running joke between them. They’re always playing running jokes on each other. It’s also a way to torment her husband, Count Freddie, which they both love to do.

With the river and the forest and the entrapping hills all around, it’s always a dark and misty place. It’s always just raining at Schloss Freddie. Inside the gates I see a half-dozen minions with faces like potatoes stitched together and heads shaved with an axe three days ago, chewing their words until they dribble out. When they see us, they cross themselves in unison. A cart pulls up with two shot wild boars lashed side by side, his and hers. A tottering raven blocks our path, another soars up to a battlement and starts to laugh.

We walk through an oak side door into a box room, and Paul leads me – he knows every corner – up a flight of stone steps to a vaulted alley dark with guttered torches. The ground storey is mostly empty. In the ballroom is a fencing piste down the centre and stacked ranks of barbells, Indian clubs, medicine balls, on the walls either side of the burning hearth. They quarter themselves upstairs, in the rooms beyond the minstrel’s balcony, one wing his, the other hers.

Paul points to the wall above the hearth: ‘Don’t worry about that.’

Mounted on the wall is the Iron Ring. Do I need to tell you? Of course I know it – if you’re a Jew, you keep watch. You don’t admit you do, but we all do. This one’s a closed circle with another circle outside it, broken in four places and with a cross joining the four pieces. It’s the insignia for the Iron Brotherhood – in other words, Jew Haters of Budapest. There are a dozen societies like it in the empire, but this is the big one across the river, the one with the old money behind it. The lumpenprols, the howling shopkeepers, the parkbench mutterers, they have their own groups with their own leaders and newspapers and reading circles. This one is for the outer gentry, the ones who already have the powers. They don’t demonstrate, which is the worst news – if they did, you’d know where they are and what they’re doing and saying about you next. I remember this one from Budapest the winter before but I’ve never seen it in the Dream City.

Paul points me towards a door at one end. ‘And I go this way,’ he says, and goes through the opposite.

I climb stiff-legged four flights of stairs. I’m dribbling blood again. Do I have hypertension? He worried about it hurting, but it didn’t. I bled, but it didn’t hurt much. It was just too new to be anything but new. No other word for it but that – new. The first time was going to have to be like something, so all right, it was like this, and nice at the end, oh yes. I think I surprised him how soon it was nice. I’ve already forgotten what it felt like, and I wonder, Why is that what I do?, and I’m already yearning for him to help me remember. I feel foolish in this summer frock. A tribe of maidservants are pacing the halls in a white-piped grey smocks – lady wrestlers, most of them, and I can smell the hay in their hair. One of them points me at a door. On the other side of it, a hot bath is running. When I hang my dress on a chair and climb in, Charlotte appears through the opposite door. Two maidservants come in after and begin to scrub me with coarse red sponges.

She’s wearing a long loose dress of no style, some thin chartreuse material I don’t recognize. She’s Paul in a dress – the same long jaw and raven hair – with a loose chignon, knife slash of a mouth, eyes that are both dark and bright, steely and warm. Paul’s eyes.

‘Ha. Found love last night, did you?’ she says. ‘You’ve got the look he likes.’ She lifts my dress from the chair and stares at it front and back. ‘Emilie’s boutique – she doesn’t work on me, too bad. I’m just too dark. It will be clean and pressed before you go. Can’t go home to mommy with the tide going out like that. I can’t do much for your shoes. What did he have you walking through?’

She barks something in Hungarian. The two maids unpin my hair and loosen it with their fingers, and begin pouring water with a ewer.

‘Is Paul Hungarian?’

‘Us? No – ’ That predator goddess laugh. ‘We’re Sudeten Czechs. But I know enough Hungarian to run this place, and the others. No one actually speaks Hungarian in this world. A couple of peasants, maybe. And Count Freddie, but he doesn’t have any choice if he wants to lord it. How old are you?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘That young?’ She pinches my bicep lightly and studies the gap between finger and thumb. ‘Paul, Paul, Paul, Paul …’ she sighs. ‘Ha.’

Now she’s sitting on the tub’s edge, daring me to be embarrassed, as if I haven’t been naked in front of a hundred women before this. So I brush the bath bubbles from my surfacing breasts and stare back.

‘Nice, you,’ she says. ‘It’s the hair that got him first, I’m sure. Your own? It’s warning time. Do you know what Paul is really attracted to in women? What really turns him on? What he loves in women more than anything else? Variety, Emma. A slim-hipped Ninth Quarter princess isn’t new for him. Daddy’s got money, mom’s a harpy, everything proper at home – I mean, looks proper. He likes them a little bruised. I’ve never seen him bruise one himself. No, around Paul women do that to themselves. He’s got a conscience, you see. This much of one. Just enough to spoil him for real cruelty. He’ll never be king of the world with a conscience like that. So when did you meet him?’

‘Yesterday afternoon.’

‘There is no original sin, whatever Paul would tell you,’ she says. ‘There’s only the sins people invent in the moment. Self-will like Paul’s and mine isn’t the same thing as depravity. Believe me, if you ever see depravity, the real thing, you’ll know it without having to be told, and he isn’t capable. Listen, beanpole, if you don’t know how to wash yourself out I’d better show you. Properly, you should do it right away, but Paul wouldn’t have told you how. If you don’t want any little fledglings next spring, you’d better get in the habit. The bidet’s best.’

‘I don’t have to do that.’

‘Yes you certainly will.’

‘No I don’t.’ I rub my forehead. ‘The maturing follicle prompts the release of higher amounts of estrogen. The hypothalamus responds by secreting gonadotrophin, which makes the pituitary produce luteinizing hormone. High levels of LH trigger ovulation within –’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I’m saying its all right till Thursday, then next week we’d better not, then it’s all right again for a week, then for a week he won’t want to.’

I wait for her face to move.

‘O-kay,’ she says. ‘A Flöge dress, so you must be one of Gustav’s models. Paul usually just talks them out of a coffeehouse, or they’re sisters of his friends. If you’re none of them, how did you end up in our forester’s hut?’

I tell her.

‘Paul can never think of a reason not to do something,’ she says. ‘He’s like me that way, okay. Right, so, drag a fresh one into the woods and show her what she didn’t know she wanted, and he was right, wasn’t he? Some men actually are, about us wanting that. Who knows who told them? They just aren’t very good at giving it to us.’ Laugh, one. ‘Very good, beanpole. You’d better know how to run, that’s all. Towards him, away, that’s your choice. But one or the other. Around him, it’s things that stand still that get run over. There’s a robe. Come.’

 

[51] Weeps one moment and as quickly laughs

I don’t carry a watch. There’s usually a church close enough that I can count the bell. So that first sleep ends around twenty minutes before eight. I hear the hunting dogs coming, but let her sleep another ten minutes. When I hear the hooves on the path, I tap her shoulder and tell her to dress quickly and not to fear the next. She stares at the dried blood on her thighs, strums it with her palms, then wraps herself in her dress and her dress in the blanket.

He comes bursting in. I’ve never seen this ogre before, though there’s a lot of them in this valley, I’m well aware. This one has coarse blond hair, bowl-cut, and tweed skin, and is wearing a grey serge jacket with a matching raven-feathered hat, and he smells like dogs. When he starts to yell at us it sounds as if he’s chewing a mouthful of rocks. Hungarians. Then he bellows over his shoulder and I hear boots in the front room. Just from the sound, you know they’re black and shiny, rare leather with steel straps, and that the nearest poacher is about to be kicked.

But it won’t be me, or us, because he always knows better. This second one steps inside the hut and stands at the inside door beside his gamekeeper and gives me a long scowl – he’s never addressed me for any reason. Then he slashes the door jamb with his riding crop and stomps out while the gamekeeper cocks his shotgun at us.

‘It’s okay,’ I tell Emma. But she’s taking it well, putting on a public face of universal stubbornness.

Now here’s yet another. She elbows up to the door in a black riding cape and mcintosh hood glistening with the morning mist, above a plain black shirtwaist over loose-fitting trousers – no side saddle for her. She tosses back her hood and shakes out her wavy coal-black hair, and lets out a short, hollow explosion of a laugh. Never more than one.

‘Great, Paul, how old’s this one?’

‘Find out when I’m done.’

‘Ha.’ She gives Emma a long deep stare. ‘You’d be sweeter next month, but an animal got you. Paul, breakfast’s in the lodge in an hour. Don’t you ever knock?’

‘That would give you too much pleasure,’ I tell her.

‘As if I’ll ever know your pleasure. What’s this one’s name?’

‘Emma.’

‘Did he wear you out, Emma? Of course he did. Here …’ And she tosses her cloak to her. ‘Wrap up, have a wash before breakfast. Paul should take care of you better than this. You picked a rotten one, that’s a promise.’

[50] Words have made my eyes enebriate

I hadn’t planned this; her walk decided me. How she moved, how she didn’t stop when she could, how she shed her skin with the city, and how I could tell she’d never done that before and how she wanted to.

She’s watching me kindle the stove. Your first time with a woman, you should go at it every way you can think of, twist each other into pretzels, make her give up everything she has and do the same yourself. That way, if there isn’t a next time then you’ve already had each other. So I don’t know why I’m taking my time. I don’t touch her until after midnight. I must be waiting to see if she’ll run. I would let her go, I would help her get back. I must want to be sure she won’t, because I tell you, I don’t for once want to frighten a woman. I’ve always wanted too badly to see the future, and I’ve already begun to wonder what she’d look like there. Not while we were in Gus’s garden, or crouched by the fire, but while she was walking beside me. I’m already seeing her there. When I saw her walk, I saw us doing that together.

‘Why have you brought me here?’ she asks.

I look up to give a sight to the words. She’s brave within her fear.

‘For your hair in that light,’ I tell her. And I open the stove door to let the woodfire’s light flood out, bathing her face from the side. ‘That’s the best light there is for drawing. It moves.’

‘I’ve never seen.’

‘Here,’ I tell her, and hand her a pocket mirror. I’ve always got one.

‘Really?’

A year in the hussars teaches you how to forage. I mound the hot coals over the potatoes wrapped in corn husks, I roast the maize in the flames. I draw water from the well and heat it in a paper sack I’ve scarfed from my drawing case – you can do that, boil water in a paper sack. That was the first thing I taught her, when I think about it, the thing she watched me do before anything else. When I look up she’s still staring at herself by the firelight, looking entitled and self-absorbed, which I learn soon is her happy look. I take the maize from the fire and we eat two cobs each. I build a bed of pine boughs and hang a blanket behind us to keep in the warmth from the hearth. I don’t speak to her. There are ways to learn people, and here’s one – say nothing, then watch what they do. When she looks like she’s about to tell me something, I just put a finger to my lips and shook my head. Then I wrap her in a blanket. I go out to find better-seasoned firewood – the pile inside has gone too soft – and when I come back she’s still there, hasn’t moved, blanket around her shoulders. I get out my drawing tablet and sharpen a graphite, polish the edge to a point with my fingertips. When I look up, she’s opened her blanket, and there is her body again, dress gone tucked away somewhere, her lines leaning forward and legs tucked under. Her hair has flowed in crinkled waves down her neck almost to her waist. When you want a woman, it’s the first thing you ask yourself – what do her nipples do? I stare into her eyes and wait to see, and feel her shiver and her face’s edges go soft. And when I look down, I see them standing out, coral, pyramided, hard against her soft skin.

I turn the tablet to show her and get a smile from her. I make four more drawings.

‘Skin to skin,’ I tell her. ‘We’ll be warmer tonight.’

I touch her then. I wrap her up, my arms around her back and her elbows against my chest, and we sleep for a while. When I wake her knee is locked between my legs, I can feel it in the dark, and the fire has gone out. That makes her feel even warmer. A damp kind of warmth that smells like the sea but richer. Rich like silver.

‘Reach down for me,’ I told her.

‘What time is it?’

‘The time?’ I looked out at the moon. ‘It’s about two o’clock.’

‘I know what it’s supposed to be like,’ she says. And she at least knows where it is. ‘I’ve never touched one, but I know.’

‘It gets hard when you touch it.’

‘Silly …’ she calls me. And soon it does. She squeezes it until I go yipe. ‘What now?’

‘I’ll get on top. This way. It’s your first time.’

‘My first time with somebody else there.’

She moves her hips around until I take her knees and held them open and still and show her, there, there.

‘It’s going to hurt,’ I tell her. ‘You might bleed.’

‘I don’t care,’ she says, but her hand is trembling while she holds me. ‘Like there?’

I gasp. But she’s wet inside, and warmer the closer. She doesn’t know where to put her hands and keeps looking for the place.

‘You’re deep,’ I tell her. ‘You’ll drown me.’

And then I kiss her. She’s never been kissed before either. And we kiss each other everywhere our lips can reach from that place, until her body stops shaking and she can hold her palms still on my shoulders.

‘What do I do?’

‘This time, hold still and … I go in and out. Don’t let me hurt you.’

‘It already hurts. When does it feel good?’

‘The third or fourth time.’

‘Hurry. No, slowly …’

I feel her hands teasing my chest. Then she draws my face down to hers and I lick her tears from her cheeks.

We fall asleep. I wake up hard again, and she wakes when she senses that and begins to twist under me, as if she’s trying to escape, but when I rise up too high she pulls me back down and springs her legs out and open till I’ve groaned myself still and she lets them fall to the ground. She’s crying again, but instead of turning her face away, she’s rubbing hers against mine until I can taste her tears. Until her tears stop.

‘Was that the second time?’

‘Yes it was.’

‘So next one’s the third? Really?’

‘Wait …’ I fumble for my pants.

‘They’re folded under your boots,’ she says in the dark. ‘Why do you need them?’

I find them where she says, fumble for matches, strike one. Under the blanket, we’re sharing, her face has lost its paleness, her eyes are staring up at the light in my own, her lips are open and sighing into mine. I lift up slightly and feel her hips rising, her legs seeking a grip.

‘I don’t need four,’ she whispers. ‘I don’t want to move, my hips are just right like this. What else can you do?’ I scrape her nipples gently with my fingertips. ‘Ohhhhh …’ Lean back and press, sip at her nipple between lips and tongue. ‘Three …’ she sobs. ‘Do that again.’ And she tries to shake me off, and cries and cries, and something liquid flows from her into me and keeps us from trembling apart. She cries out, and reaches for something to grab, and keeps missing me, and lets her hands fall like weights to the ground.

‘I thought I knew,’ she says, wiping her face against my chest. We wrap ourselves around each other with my soldier against her belly and sleep. Except we’re not – we’re both pretending to. I see embers in her hair, dancing ghosts on the walls. It always feels like surgery, being a woman’s first. Once was enough, I’d decided long ago after the first few times. One virgin was enough to know what they’re like. Except I don’t know why, this time, I’ve ended up trying to remember when I was one.

 

[49] They eddy before the gate of the barons

After lunch, which doesn’t last long because Gus is a slave to his work though he never looks like he’s working, Paul asks me if I have the afternoon. That’s the only question he’ll ask all day. I tell him I do, though I don’t. Then he tells me to follow him. I should have gone back to Emilie’s, do you have to ask why not? He’s a stranger who just saw me naked, what else was I going to do? He looks at me with mesmerizing certainty, and I want to know what he’s so sure he sees. We walk away from the city. Beyond Gus’s studio the city crouches and spreads and the hills begin to pour down to it. The street turns into a broadway and then a road through one village, another, the vine country. This is picnicking country, every child knows it but no one I know has left the road. A half-hour later, he takes me down a path. My shoes are pinching, my dress is too thin for this wilder breeze. After an hour, we’re walking in the fir tree shade up the side of a steep valley, rocks poking into the path. I sit down on a boulder.

‘Tell me if you’re giving up.’ His first words for an hour.

He’s waiting to hear me ask, ‘Where are you taking me?’ But he’s not going to make me say it. How do people catch you like this? A moment has come, a turning of something. If this walk takes me to night, I’ll see stars up there. I’ll see how they’re aligned, maybe. I’ve wanted something to happen, without knowing what the next unknown will look like, and it’s taken this shape – me walking into a forest with a man I don’t know, going deeper into somewhere without wondering where. To a place where my life will be different. That’s all I’m waiting for from him.

I can tell he knows where he is. The sun is beginning to set on countryside I’ve never seen. The forest isn’t tame any more. We’re walking along an ancient stone wall, cut from the same pale limestone as the river valley, along a path broken with horses’ hooves. He grips my long, pale hand in his painted one and begins to pull me up a hill over broken ground, the tree branches brushing our faces. His painted hand almost burns – I’d lost track I was this cold. No seasons this high in the hills. Sometimes there’s snow and sometimes not, but the air, I’ll soon learn, will always taste the same – cool and dry, with the breath of dark trees and their shadows. An ancient place, where you can forget time for as long as you want. But this is the first time I’ve felt nature on my skin like this.

We come to a ridge top and I see a hut at the base of the farther slope. We zigzag down an iron-hard path that no one has followed for years toward a long-abandoned hut. He doesn’t try to open the door – just kicks it with his left boot until the lock gives way and the latch with it. Inside is an empty room, beyond it another with a stack of fungus-covered cordwood beside a woodstove and a pile of old blankets.

He hands me three blankets. ‘Shake these out.’

He gets a fire going in the stove. While I’m snapping the blankets outside the door, he comes out and tries a well pump behind the hut. Water begins to cough from the spigot. He turns and nods goodbye.

‘Where are you going?’

‘I’ll be back when it’s darker, actually,’ he says.

The way he says that last word – that drawl, the taste of the four syllables in his mouth, his offhand look in my eye when he says them – I can hear the entitlement in it, the moneyed past he’ll never wash from his skin. Just the sound of it that first time and I know that word’s going to be irritating me for years, the way he pronounces it. What it says about what he runs from and what he hides, about the memories he won’t deny himself and the choices he’s made since.

Let’s get on with it, Emma. Fate? Is this all there is to it?

It must be an hour by the time he returns with the fading light, with four ears of maize and four potatoes with dirt clinging to them. The moon’s up, the stars out. I see no other lights, only the sparks flying out of the stove while we stare.

[48] The fire must sting me first

I’d rather have the east wind. So would Paul. The east wind means sunlight for him, and then the west one moves in for a few days and the sky goes crash. A city like this, you can almost touch the sky on days like that, and it’s lead-coloured and ocean-thick, which is no good for anything. Then twice every winter the south wind comes up and melts everything and people go mad and sad. Not me any more – I’m immune now. There’s a promise for you – the south wind will never find me again.

So the east wind is better – a whole continent out that way. You can hear voices in it sometimes, though you can never tell whose. You just know they yearn to make themselves visible one day and that you’ll be helpless, tossed and pinwheeled, for the rest of your life when they get here. So you’d better grab hold of something before they come and before anyone else.

Stories … Paul’s no good at telling them, he cares too deeply about the moment at hand, and I wonder what that’s like. Lucky guy, and to be with him I have to find ways to be within his moment. We try to make them visible and accessible, so that … control. You want to control time, don’t you? Stories are us trying to pretend we can control time. We want to think that we can do that, as if we can make sense of our lives that way. No wonder Paul can’t tolerate them. The stories the world actually tells turn back on themselves, yet they never repeat themselves … they’re too contingent for that. It’s people’s minds that try to fix them and make them run permanently straight, and what’s the point? We end up turning the world into stories that don’t exist. The impulse for that kind of certainty is something humans invented, which is what makes them dangerous.

Eight years together, each year a lifetime, the way we go through them, and we’d tell you different memories of each day of them. I’m old enough now that time doesn’t feel stopped. Paul doesn’t look back much, so he’s never going to tell you how we met. This is the last hour of my life before we do that, and I’ve just heard his name spoken for the first time. Fate slips silently, fate runs us over. I’ve heard about fate but I’ve never seen it before. While we’re waiting for him in the studio garden, Gus is sketching my face, my sun hat, my bare shoulders. The Flöge sisters have lent me to Gus before the after-lunch ladies arrive, and I’m wearing one of their sun dresses, tiny ebony buttons down the front, ivory with crimson squares and florets of his own design. Pear tree branches are bucking in the wind above us, the grass is fluttering at our feet. I keep having to pin down the skirt. Between us is a small table, a bowl of apples, and an empty chair. Gus turns his drawing board to let me see. He has also drawn the empty chair beside me, and my dress is trying to fly off with the wind.

He’s spent the hour before lunch making studies of me for one of his mythologies. Now, at the table, he’s slicing an apple for me with a knife that could skin an elephant and he’s telling me about a protégé of his who needs models though he won’t be able to pay.

‘You want to pose for him,’ he’s telling me. ‘He needs your look – he doesn’t study enough beautiful things. You’re beautiful but something else that he’ll want from you.’

‘What’s his name again?’

‘Paul Karsch.’

‘Karsch like the steelworks?’

‘He is the steelworks, his family.’

‘Guns, cannon, railway tracks, them?’

‘That family, yes.’

‘Then I’ve heard of him. Is it true about the horse?’

A look-away grin is all I get. ‘His parents died when he was a lad, and his uncle disowned him later, so now he’s fabulously poor. He did a year in the hussars and then a year at the Dresden Academy. Now he paints scenery for Roller at the opera house. A Catholic, but don’t let him go on about it. He visits me once a week for graphites and chalks.’

I know nothing about men. The only ones I’ve ever met, outside my family, are my grandfather and Gus, and I’ve hardly begun to start trusting my judgment. I know what the world is, but that’s inspired generalities – don’t ask me for particulars. I’ve only heard about the world – don’t ask me for experience. I’ve only just begun to understand that some people act happy – for example, not like me – and I wonder what it’s like to pretend. I’m used to learning about happiness from books, like the end of those long English novels where the heroine walks off the last page with some guy and she’s happy to do it. Is happiness always the end of something? I know what pleasure is, but pleasure’s more about forgetting something worse. Pleasure is mostly about intensely personal forwardness. I’m not old enough to know that I’m cynical. Most boys my age … wrong. How can I know? The ones my age, they’re like Emil, breaking their backs at school, dressing and acting to pass for old men, while I’m living in a boarding house with grilled windows for rich people’s daughters whose mommies can’t tolerate them any more, though mine drops by the Flöge shop twice a week to make sure I haven’t fled, except into the models’ dressing room. So when Paul opens the gate and walks up the path to us, I’m ready to see the world through someone’s eyes but my own. Grandfather has shown me it’s possible to do that. He’s the first one to treat me as if I’m my own person, which is the same as telling me that so is everyone else. Around grandfather, my world can’t be all about me, and I’m still getting used to that and calculating the benefits.

Since leaving home, I’ve made stranger observation down to a system. I ask the same two questions about everyone: What will they want? And what will they do? This guy, when he walks up Gus’s long walk, is older, but everyone is. Twenty-three, twenty-four? I can’t wait to be older, which makes him lucky from the start, show me how, daddy. He’s dressed in mahogany brown: a thin wool sweater to tame the wind, faded work trousers, leather half-boots. Slightly bowlegged, so he rides. Hair cropped short and standing straight up, military-style. He walks like a whip, arms and legs slowly coiling and uncoiling. This one never has to run. A long, pale face with nothing extra to it except thick, straight eyebrows and a coarse two-day beard. And molten grey eyes that he might have stolen from his uncle’s factory. He smiles quickly at Gus and says hello to him and then gives me a look that says look back, now. I feel like a piece of meat. His eyes won’t let go. Finally they travel up to my straw boater, which matches the dress, and down once slowly through every curve I’ve got to my bare feet.

‘Nice feet,’ he says. ‘Don’t step on anything sharp.’

I blush and tuck them under me.

‘Who’s the carrot-top, Gus?’

‘This is Emma,’ he says.

‘Fresh-looking. I kiss the hand,’ he tells me with a slower glance this time. ‘Water Sprites II, isn’t she? The second from the top. But her hair’s more gold in that one.’

Then he’s staring again, as if he breathes through his eyes. Through my dress, he takes in my shoulders, breasts, waist, legs, calves, until I feel his eyes licking through the cotton, and he says, ‘Stand up and do this.’ And holds his arms off to the sides, palms down, fingers dangling. It’s the line of my outspread arms he wants to see, I can tell. I see red and blue paint caked to the backs of his own hands, simple colours. My hands are clean, his make me feel naked. He throws me a leer, to see how I’ll react. I’m not going anywhere.

‘Turn,’ he says. ‘Any way you like.’ The wind catches the hem as I stand, and I stumble when I do a quick spin to wrap the skirt around me. He’s taken out his drawing tablet and sharpens a graphite with an oversized claspknife until his eyes tell me hold still. He exhales, and graphite touches paper for a count of three, suddenly as that. He passes his sketchbook to Gus, who nods his head and turns it to show me. One line, that’s all. But in one line, he has the wind and the buckling trees and the ground at my feet, and has made the day a moment.

‘Again,’ he says. And I turn for him. And with the next line he has caught my dress and hat and they’re all of a piece with the rest.

‘Open the dress,’ he says. ‘Hold it like a sail against the wind.’

‘Do you like what you see?’

‘It’s a start. Tilt your hat to make a halo. The pants go, sorry.’

I step out of them tuck then under my chair cushion so that they won’t blow away, and open my dress, shoulders down and back, one hip cocked to the side. I know what he sees, I like it even if he doesn’t. I’m not supposed to like mirrors but I do. Small high breasts, shaped like lemons, with a strange density to them. Slim hips and smooth tummy. Skinny little mouse the same colour as my head, thin lips tucked in. The wind kicks at the branches while he stands with his sketching book pinned between fingers and elbow. He stares at my face, looking for an expression of fear, worry, degradation. He’s not going to see any. I just stare back hard, willing him to look at my eyes instead. He raises his left hand, graphite held like a Japanese brush, nods for me to hold the pose, and lets his hand dart. Within thirty seconds, he is finished.

‘That’s all I want,’ he says, and turns the book to show me. I’m standing as solid as the tree, lightly but rooted, my arms holding my dress like the ends of a cape, the wind catching both them and the branches. The world is in motion, me and the tree trunk the only still things. Somehow, he has found a silent place in me, a place I’ve sought for years, in the middle of a gale that will never cease blowing after this moment.

‘Keep that one,’ he says. ‘The first one the model keeps.’

‘You should sign it, then,’ I tell him. ‘Or it’s worth nothing.’

He blinks at me. ‘Ha.’

[47] I learned that those who undergo

The wind, the Eternal Third. A whisper beyond the horizon, a mysterious dialogue of the air. From the window, I watch them say goodbye. When Paul comes back upstairs, I’ve poured myself a last half-glass of Tokay. I’m watching the lamplight glow through it. I crack his bones with my eyes and suck out his marrow. I’m already just drunk enough. He doesn’t get a word from me. I’m an angel in red tonight. Words bounce off me at moments like this, and he knows when not to trouble with them.

All things are in movement, perpetually changing. Nature itself is a struggle between its own contradictions, and how will we survive that next? That night, that next hour, I tell myself I know what the world has brought us to. Paul looks at the place where Gus’s drawing was, then goes looking for where I’ve placed it. He finds it in our new bedroom, on our dresser, covering the mirror so that when our eyes look for ourselves tonight, that’s what we’ll see together. I’ll be floating in streams of water, sea grass dripping from me and tickling my legs as I pass with the current. Paul once tried to describe the ocean for me, the smell of it. I’ve never been to the seaside. Does the ocean feel like I do tonight? Like a place to flee where memories will never find you? I told a doctor once, ‘There’s only one way I know to forget everything.’ Paul likes to hook me up while I’m still wearing something, so tonight while he’s looking out our bedroom window I tiptoe up behind him and wrap him from behind in my open dress and bite his ear. This is Johnny’s Launch Date, don’t ask me how we both know. Perhaps the hiding stars are telling us, one of them him, promising to twinkle hello as soon as he can. We can’t see him but I know he’s there. Perhaps we both feel the tide in me. Starting out with him doing me gently from behind, which I don’t mind. I come quickest that way, so why would I? Just I come biggest when I’m riding down on him, my dress a tent for us both, his thumb on my sailor and my legs way open so he can watch himself splitting me. But then I think, we’d better get a bit more normal or something, just to make sure, and he climbs on top with me holding my toes together in my hands. He can’t get any deeper than that. He can slide his whole self right in, I try to let him. The, whole, thing, damn, it, and I tell myself I’m not going to spill a drop. Not tonight. No snail tracks tonight if I have to stand on my head till dawn. I’m your cock, I hiss like a water snake, which always makes him gasp. He says he always remembers what it feels like for him. He says I’m the one who always acts like I’ve forgotten till next time.

Then a morning a few days later – this soon? – I’m up before him, puking in the toilet and trying not to remember what I had for dinner, and thinking, I’m a woman – is this the point of me? When I come out, he lights me a cigarette. He doesn’t use them, he just lights them for me. He’d seen the same star, I know that, and there’s something wondering in his look that I don’t know how to answer. I lie down and he spoons me. We don’t know how to talk about this yet, though we’ll work it out soon enough. So much is ending this year, I can feel it, yet I also feel the beginning.

‘Johnny,’ he says. Life will be hard enough without adding a troublesome name to the mix. We don’t know that it’s bad luck to name a kid too soon. We should wait for him to show.

‘All right,’ I tell him. ‘Jenny.’

‘Okay.’ We don’t know any Jennys. This one’s going to be one of a kind, all ours. The world will never have seen the like.

[46] Johnny’s Long Night

Stories – there are a few I can describe for you, the ones that Emma carries close enough that I always see her wearing them. About the night we mixed Johnny … I know that one from watching her face when I can tell she’s remembering it. If her calendar had a ritual day, that’s one of the few that would be circled. We hadn’t taken any precautions for years, thinking that we’d be glad whenever it happened. With some women, you know from one glance there are kids in them. You can even tell how many. With Emma, I always knew – one for certain, but only one. One is what she was going to have. A boy or a girl didn’t matter to her, but I wanted a son.

It was our second night above the canal, she would tell you, when we were still unpacking. Grandfather had helped us move, with his neighbour’s hay wagon. We didn’t have much, and most of it was on our hill, where we spent most of our time. You wouldn’t think so, but I dread disorder, I can’t live clearly in it. When there’s disorder around me, I retreat into my own mind, which isn’t a useful place for my work to be. So once all our chattels were upstairs, I left Emma to open boxes, and set up the new studio till she was done.

It was already a studio. I took it over from Mravec when he moved back to Prague. You learn quickly not to listen to people who say, ‘I like your work.’ Most people don’t know what they looking at. Most people are trying to get a free drawing from you, or a wave into the billiard room at the Marzipan. I’ll say things I don’t mean for the sake of selling my work, for the sake of showing it, but that has to stop somewhere. You have to know where it stops and remember that better than anything else. I’m saying that I liked Mravec’s work and he noticed I never told him. I just treated him like I did, and besides, it was relief to us both to be able to argue with someone in Czech sometimes. Which is how he made a point of telling me his studio would be coming open. He never made it much big – he drank too much, and he discovered powder, direct to the hands. But when I moved in here, I was glad he was here before me. I liked knowing that someone I respected had already worked hard here. So I gave myself a day and a night to knock down the cobwebs and to paint and to set up my desk and storage cupboards just so. Then I washed the windows so that there wasn’t a streak left no matter how hard I looked. Windows all four sides, the canal that way, the cathedral that way, the south wall false, with racks and shelves behind it. The windows were six-pane, but the light from three sides would wash out the lead shadows well enough.

No one climbs upstairs that night, not even Emma – I won’t let them. I haven’t hung Mister Frog yet. It will go over the door, attached to a string just so, so that it looks … east, I hope. That’s where the light comes from. When it doesn’t rock or spin on its thread, I’ll be having a good day. When I’m having a bad one, I’ll stare at it till it stops moving.

I come back downstairs from a few hours of seeing no one and find a party: a kitchen and parlour, both half unpacked, full of people from the Swan with their own bottles, and a handful from the SilverDome, and their wives and a couple of kids playing bowls in the hallway with wine bottles and oranges. Emma’s looking over their heads at me with a shrug and a smile. She hardly has to do anything to drop jaws the first time you see her. She knows how to carry clothes – not just choose them, but move in them. Offer her a few yards of printed silk, or strip of sack cloth and two lengths of package twine, and she’ll know. She’s wearing a flowing cotton frock that night, cut like a kimono, just on the shoulders, tight at the waist, white silk cami peeking out. Under the hem, emerald slippers are blinking. From the way she’s staring at me, I know what she’s wearing under it: come-try-it stockings and silk pants loose in the right places, tied with a little silk bow. After her third glass, like tonight just then, she smiles like a hawk, slack-jawed, and tuned so that I’m the only one who sees it. A look like do you think this is hungry? Jump me, but not yet. And something else behind it that night. Perfect love, and something else that she herself won’t name yet, for me or even to herself.

I fill a tumbler with wine, but I don’t want to drink more than two that night. With a good Tokay, you don’t have to. Truth is, I’m wishing within an hour that these people would go. Some moments, you know that you’re leaving one place for somewhere else. The air tastes different, and you want that taste. You’d rather get drunk on air than anything else. You’d rather hear wind than voices.

Towards the end, Gus knocks. He still lives with his mother and his sisters. No one I know has been where he sleeps. When you think about Gus, he’s in his studio, or he’s in his breakfast coffeehouse but thinking about his studio. Coffee and a plate or two of pastries at the Tivoli, a fiaker through the Summer Park to his laneway studio with the long, narrow garden, where he works from ten till eight, dinner enough for six at a restaurant that knows his appetite. That has been Gus and always will be. Never mind what I’ve learned from him, he’s shown me how to work hard, how to work time hard without cheating. He arrives tonight with a package under his arm and does his paying court, because by then he has that aura. He’s the empire’s most famous painter by now, the ring you hope he’ll let you press your lips to. He’s generous to everyone with money or time, but not with his blessings – he guards those to keep their value up. He’s the oldest one there except for grandfather, and those two get along at the kitchen table until the others pour themselves downstairs into the March night. Grandfather pulls down his peaked cap and the two of us walk him into the night, and watch him cross the bridge on sprung legs like a bouncing ball.

While Emma’s cleaning the kitchen, I show him the studio. ‘Where is Mister Frog?’ he asks. ‘I climbed all these steps to meet him.’ I take him out of his flannel nest and slot his wings on, and Gus dusts the top of it with his sleeve and gives it a little kiss on its nose. Together we fuss with an eyelet screw and a string, and I climb the ladder and get him to dangle from his hook. We watch to see which way he’ll point.

‘He’s almost right,’ he says. ‘Just left of his nose – that’s where the morning light will enter first. You’re still a skylark?’

‘I wake up the skylarks.’

‘There’s more room for you here,’ he tells me. ‘You want to feel the whole world possible around you. Room for everything you could see. Goodbye, Mister Frog.’ And he tips his imaginary hat and we descend to the apartment.

Emma has wound up the Victrola. She can’t bear pure music, but she can tolerate singing, and Emil brought it over that morning as a gift from her parents, so … once, you know? Once only. In the pile of waxed tubes it came with, she’s found an aria from Il trovatore. No volume control, so she’s shoved the machine into the pantry and shut the door.

‘Open, please do,’ Gus says, and gives his package an embarrassed look. Emma borrows my pocketknife and cuts the strings at the knot. Only Gus wraps things this carefully: razor-creased folds of butcher paper, one layer, two. Another layer of Japanese paper, crimson, and a layer of white batt under the crimson. And under all of that, in a Workshop frame, a colour detail from Water Sprites, the one everyone knows from near the end of his gold-leaf days. I watched him use that study when he was preparing the canvas, and I know that face from before we met – Emma, sleeping, her eyes closed to the dream that surrounds her, burnished hair flowing in an unseen current floating her safely through the core of a perfect dream. Her face at peace with the night, her mind emptied of a lifetime’s pain.

‘I’m returning it,’ he tells Emma. ‘Dream like that tonight, you both.’

I walk him downstairs to the quay and wait with him for a cab to come along. All the quay benches have been borrowed by tramps. The human race is descending, but Emma and I, up there through that window, will hover for as long as time will let us. A warm south wind is blowing tonight over the mountains. It drives some people mad, but not us. Every work of art is a child of its age and mother of our emotions. An age of impending madness is hovering just out there, holding itself still in the wind. No one knows what is going to happen next, but tonight we have stopped needing to know.

Gus points up there. ‘The wind is strong tonight, but the clouds aren’t moving. Is that a new law of physics? It’s something you’ll have to paint when I’m gone. What a century we’re in now. If I stay in the last one, will people remember me?’

[45] Spontaneity’s funereal rites

About being Jewish, according to her grandfather, it’s hardly a religion any more, even for most Jews. From what I’ve seen, in this city it’s more like a club that people who don’t belong won’t let Emma quit. You grow up hearing from the Dominicans or somebody what Jews are really like, until you finally talk to a few, and they aren’t like that. You grow up listening to the Franciscans’ side of everything, and you get told the doctrine, and you get told the superstitions, but no one tells you the difference, and the priests are infallible anyway. That’s the first thing they tell you in school: ‘We’re always right.’ Then you get away from that, and if you have a mind left you try to sort out the difference between what they told you and what you see, but there’s no one to help you with that.

When Johnny was a bump, we worked it out – if it was a little girl, then her choice, but if it was a little man, the soldier was going to keep his helmet, and that took care of the other questions. That was before Johnny almost killed her. First it was the mahogany tubes on the doorposts – okay, that was an anti-mommy ploy. Then I came down from the studio on a Saturday night after dark, the week we moved back to the quay, and she’d lit two candles on the windowsill.

‘On a Saturday?’ her grandfather grinned, when I told him. ‘It doesn’t really mean anything on a Saturday. These days, I doubt if God cares about much except what a person hopes for others. She doesn’t want to deny she’s a Jew, which doesn’t mean she’s found religion. Sundays are supposed to be fun, Paul. There’s no purpose keeping all the rules if you break the Golden one.’

‘Which one do you people mean?’

‘Stand on one foot till it comes to you. Just keep the Golden one, you two.’

‘At dinner last Sunday, she put two salt rolls on a plate and covered them with a cloth. And she wouldn’t let me touch them right away.’

‘On a Sunday?’

‘What am I supposed to know about that one?’

‘Possibly she’s timing these things so you can share a day of rest together. It doesn’t have to mean anything, Paul. And even if it did, well … did you love each other on the Sunday? Did you share each other’s lives? Did the two of you play with the lad?’

I wonder sometimes whether her grandfather still gets any. It’s hard to imagine old people doing it, but you can tell he used to – he has that worldbeater look under that gentle smile, that seen-this-too way of measuring people. When he looks at me, I know he sees some of himself. There are moments when you can tell how many memories he’s kept, good and bad. There are moments he sees my own memories in me. The Saturday night with the candles, I turned to our bed from the window after kissing Johnny good night and she was lying there in her golden robe lifted by all the pillows we have, with a candle burning on the night table and her hair billowed out, with this queen-bee look and her lips slightly parted, and her knees cocked up as far as she can get them these days and the dresser mirror tilted just so. Okay, so we did it the practice way, but her heart still beats for it. And her face still burns for it, and her tears still sting as hot when we’re done. How, then, can I be missing anything? We count the same stars afterwards, we still sleep with the lions.