Archive for category: Chapters

Grandfather’s room over the stable had two north windows, good for Paul. No heat, no water, but two north windows. Paul installed a brazier and punched a hole in the roof for a metal chimney for when it got really cold. We needed the city. We could live only so long inside each other’s heads. Whether you like it or not, you need something outside you to keep you aware, to remind you of your self by pressing you against what you are not. Nature has its uses but without something to bounce our own nature against, Paul would have begun to shrink within himself. I would have begun to do that.

The purple cash was going to be our flight money. It’s how I thought of it. He never brought that money home, or talked about the money he was making that way, which for him was a new attitude, but I didn’t press him. When he wasn’t painting scenery at Roller’s workshop, or doing his own work, or pushing out erotic drawings (they were as good as anything else he did – he approached them like technical exercises), he was pushing the world to release a reputation for him. A city like this, a crowd like ours, you start making your name mainly by doing portraits, and getting the commissions takes friends, and it takes tools. Portraits are your calling card, besides which, the ones who can afford the portraits you make are the ones who are going to buy or talk about your other work later. No one was going to come to an unheated loft on the Isle of Jews to sit for one, so I cleaned Paul up and picked out a suit for him to wear to Villa Mountain in the afternoons when he had a commission to work. Two that winter, three more the following spring. Nobody too important except for the cash they paid in.

While he was gone, I modelled dresses at Emilie’s, or I kept grandfather company. People can always tell when you’re not eating right – walk down any street downtown if you don’t know that. The fat ones, the curd-faced ones, are the ones without any cash. It takes money to stay slim, so I fought to keep my figure.

We hardly saw Gus together. He was someone who sent someone when he thought we needed something or that it was time we changed something. Paul saw him more than I did – he’d come home from a visit with his head full of what Gus was doing, and a portfolio stuffed with drawing paper and charcoals and chalks and the rest, because Gus was feeding him materials to keep going. In return, he only wanted Paul to work as hard as he could. When someone approached him about a commission, Paul would negotiate it, and then sit back and explain to me: ‘Well, Schmidt is a cousin of Loewe’s, whose wife commissioned Gus four years ago.’ Gus, who didn’t need to do portraits any more, had usually dropped a pebble somewhere over the horizon. Paul would take anything from him but money. This was how he was going to succeed, and the honour was in doing that at the right time with honest work, and then, still later, helping the next person. To return favours, it’s wrong – they’re too valuable. You pass them on instead, and that’s how you grow your world.

Not poor, just broke, most of our first year together. Emilie brought us in a few kroner a week, and the loft was free. I’d wake in the morning first, with Paul spooning me. He’d get up first to start the stove and boil water for tea. Frost on my breath till the stove kicked in. Paul always makes his own tea in the morning – he has to, the Hussars drilled it into him, and he’s never missed. Which means he always makes my tea. That’s why so many of the drawings he made back then are of me wrapped in a blanket, with a mug of tea somewhere. Then he pours himself one shot of rhum, and that starts the second part of his morning – he has to draw something, really work at something before the tea gets cold. If he doesn’t start that way, he worries the day might run ahead of him. He almost always draws standing up, and if there’s a ladder around, or a flight of stairs, he’ll climb up and look down. Whatever will take the perspective out, to unhook the figure from its ground so that he can apply his own. He works mostly with a hard graphite, but he’s tried everything else – ink, stoveblack, crayons. He hesitates before he tries new materials, because they turn what he does into a technical thrill, which he rarely wants to make his point, but he’ll make himself try new things as a point of honour. The floor was always covered with scraps of drawing paper, and when I couldn’t see the floor anymore, I’d bundle them up, with his name and the date pencilled in the corner.

Some days he stayed in, when he was touching up a commissioned piece or had letters to write. Some days he left early without telling me where, and I never asked where, though when he came back he usually told me, or showed me by opening his portfolio. The days he went out and I stayed in, I’d join grandfather in his shop in the downstairs front. Not much traffic down there. All he has ever sold is cabbage. Most of the cabbage on the Isle of Jews goes through his shop. Carts come in and unload it, carts come in and load it. Paul isn’t a socialist, I learned that quickly. I mean, not with his politics. The one political word I ever heard from him outside an argument was after a Saturday night at the Marzipan that ended with a bottle of Freddie’s Tokay in the stable loft. My course that night, so there was nothing to do together but share the bottle. ‘The thing,’ he told me towards dawn, looking earnestly exhausted to the point of tears by this thought. ‘Some people have more money, that’s all. Am I right about that?’

Most of the books on grandfather’s shelves – the economics, politics, social philosophy – he’s never cracked one. Art history, yes, but that’s work to him. French novels are what he reads in bed, in French. I don’t know where he learned it, and I’ve never heard him speak it. When he reads, he doesn’t want to hear our own streets in his head, and French is the lingua he’s remembered from school. Science books, yes. He’s always borrowing grandfather’s science books. Science is the modern world, and that’s the one Paul feels a need to watch, so he’ll read genetics or astronomy and trade notes with grandfather.

Once you subtract everything in the world that can be proven by measure, what’s left is the human soul, or drive, or world spirit – and that’s where he wants to situate his work. Force dynamite into the cracks of modernity and light the fuse. Compel the void to expose itself. Yes, he talks like that around people he doesn’t know well. I’ve never been sure whether he’s putting one on, but it’s always in public, around people he knows who aren’t friends though they might be useful. Sometimes Paul talks just like Emil, when Emil isn’t there. But then once he told me, with no one else there: ‘Art is the world that God never thought to make. It’s the creative will that he left for us to use.’

By then, Paul understood what it took to argue with my brother, though I always wished they’d stop. Paul is at his best when he’s silent, when he’s the sum of his actions in the moment, and he was wasting this energy for that on the only person I know who can pull an unlooked for argument from him. ‘But you simply don’t realize,’ would say Emil, ‘that art in its new, more modern forms can be truly revolutionary, the cinema being an obvious example.’ Unquote. ‘Of course we’re living in new times, you idiot. As if I can’t sense that difference … Everything I make is a reflection of what’s new. Your great error is that you conflate art with what you see when you look at it, when the visible is only the starting point.’ Unquote. And he’d go on, when Emil stopped talking again, that ‘art expresses humanity’s relationship to the world, which is the point of it. Art must breathe its own life into ours – not freeze it or dismember the world like a camera, but synthesize with the unseen world. Christ …’ Unquote.

By then, grandfather wants very much to understand that to express inner truths, you have to acknowledge external forms and then migrate inwardly. And Paul truly, by now, wants him to understand. Paul wants to rouse people from their modern-day captivity in materialism, he wants them to see the objects of their world as having meaning in relation to the self, but as meaningless in themselves.

The cabbage handlers. Enough of them pass through grandfather’s shop, the rustic field lopers and their shambling helpers, suburban peasants with rot teeth and rot clothes and cheap-wine faces, whose horses eat better. Grandfather suggested to Paul once that he stay around one day and draw them. So he waited for a cart to arrive, and watched them unload, tossing cabbages like medicine balls across the yard in a slow rhythmic line. He watched some more and then pondered grandfather’s expression, and clicked his heels the first time I ever heard –

‘I see what you mean, grandfather. But I tell you, this is for cameras.’

Meaning, poverty has hollowed them to sameness. One of them he could draw, but a crowd? They’d cancel one another out. Which tells you why he draws so many animals and women and children: they haven’t lost their souls to the world. They protect their souls in ways the world never allowed men. And then he drew the cart horse instead.

That drawing of Emma I made while we were waiting for Emil at the Griensteidl. I’d posted it on my way out, on their notice board by the business cards and theatre bills. I regretted that, because it was a specially good one, so I went back the next morning to retrieve it if I could, but no. Outside, half a block towards the Artillery School, a penguin waiter came running after me, telling me the owner wanted to see me.

We walked back, and he pointed me upstairs to an office and I walked in.

‘Pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr …’

I tell him.

‘I don’t see you in here very often.’

‘I’ve been in here once.’

‘More’s the pity, Mr Karsch. Karsch is a famous name.’

‘If you’re a steelworker.’

‘Or own a steel mill. Would you be any relation, perhaps?’

I sit there and say nothing and wait for him to keep coming at me. A contented-looking man. Eating all your meals from your own pastry table will do that to you.

‘Such as may be,’ he says. ‘You left us a small gift yesterday. A sketch of our interior, one could say, or one could also say a sketch of a beautiful young woman enjoying herself at our table.’

‘That’s why I returned today. I want it back.’

‘That makes me wonder why you left it with us, what your motives might be if you entertained others. Would you perhaps settle for this?’ He opens his desk drawer a crack, reaches down, and drops a taped bundle of bank notes in front of me.

‘A rare talent, I assure you,’ he says to break my stare. ‘One client of my brother’s offered 200 for it, the next offered 250. There’s something about the public nature of her abandonment that … Who can ever know what will inspire men of the world? Well, I thought to ask you first, assuming you’d come back. We prefer to be gentlemen about such things.’

‘Or perhaps I want the drawing back.’

‘Perhaps you do, Mr Karsch. I don’t pretend to understand artists, but my brother has a friend who knows when a gifted man crosses his path. Would you settle for 300? Beyond that price, my brother’s friend would have to forgo his own pleasure at having found it. He’s willing to give you back this specific drawing. Not that he has to, since you abandoned it here unsigned. But he would want to ask: Do you have any similar? Such as open-minded men would find pleasure in holding?’

‘I perceive a benefit from meeting his needs,’ I say.

‘Oh, yes. But can you offer my brother that woman specifically? Something about her … but I’m sure you know just what I mean.’

I think first. ‘Her body,’ I tell him. ‘Not her face.’

‘Really, it’s the physical … culture … of her that appeals. A woman still young, barely formed, yet with a heightened sense of self-awareness and from whom shame has recently relaxed its grip. Understand that friends of my brother will be quite specific about what they want, but mainly, they want to see women who have no regard for the old restrictions. They want proud, modern women of the new century. And they’re wealthy enough to be generous.’

‘And you can get such photographs of women on any street corner, in your own coffeehouse, I’m certain.’

‘Photographs,’ he shrugs. ‘Of prostitutes with sagging breasts and pimpled faces, who have welcomed half the world through their gates. Women who look too much like …’

I stop him before he says wives.

‘So what your friends want,’ I say, ‘is proud young women of the world, of a better class, who are eager to express their modernity.’

‘Exactly! Who was this one, Mr Karsch?’ He takes yesterday’s sketch from his desk, and doesn’t let go till I pull it from him.

‘Someone I know.’

‘And what’s that like?’

I only stare at him until he sighs.

‘What age do your brother’s friends want these girls be?’ I ask him.

‘What is age anyway? They need a mouse to play with, that’s all.’

‘Do you need me to sign them?’

‘My brother’s friends, when they look at them, they don’t like to think about a man who was there before.’

‘Name a price.’

‘That size and detail, three or four colours, pencil and charcoal – ’

‘Watercolour,’ I say. ‘And I’ll want an advance.’

‘Watercolour would be best of all. But it takes so much skill.’

‘I can get you watercolour.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes. I don’t use much of it. Only for highlights.’

‘Yes! Highlights! Exactly!’ He mops his face again. ‘Three thousand kroner for twelve acceptable, an advance of five hundred. Acceptable may be difficult. Your artistry must not get in the way of the woman’s … forthrightnes. It isn’t completely a question of drawing skill, but – ’

‘The first one,’ I say. ‘What do you want her doing?’

‘Bent over a bed,’ he says. ‘Red stockings, looking back between her legs. Do you know what I see, Mr Karsch? A man who knows what women really want. Who knows what love means to the person receiving it. So let’s not fail each other. And let’s not fail them.’

 

Johnny doesn’t need a big world yet. In the studio, I fold two painted blankets in the circus trunk and wrap his fist around a piece of chalk to colour his face, and Mister Frog is bobbing where he can watch, and it’s enough for the little man. Truth, he only visits me this week when I’m working on his likeness. That’s difficult, because he has no past and no one can know what his dreams are like. People can’t dream when there’s nothing for a mind to jumble. (You must have to be saturated with your past to dream as much as Emma does.) I have to wait for him to sleep – it’s the only time he shows something I can draw. So I’ve placed his box under the windowlight, just there, and work on some background or something till he stops snickering and drooling and nods off.

All right – this drawing reminds me of Gus’s ceiling frescos, like the one the theatre powers refused to install a few years ago. That’s my problem with it – Paul’s gone back too far, to things that Gus was doing years ago. It’s too early for him to paint Johnny’s portrait, but with so much new life in our own life, he must need to try one baby this winter. But there isn’t enough inside Johnny yet, so the content, no matter what Paul can do, has to be about what’s going on around him. In other words, it’s an allegory. Most of Paul’s people just hover, but this time you can see what Johnny’s floating down through – everyone else’s dreams. The dreams Paul would tell me about if he ever remembered one. (He does dream, never mind what he says – I watch him sleep at night sometimes, so I know. I see how his eyes dart back and forth under his lids. Then he forgets them instantly, lucky guy.) I stare at the colours, the energy, the violence of the world around him, until I’ve figured it out, I think – Johnny’s sleeping in the centre of a distant star. That’s the new theory these days, that we were all born in the centre of the same exploding star. And that perfect circle just behind him is the universe he knows, and what’s outside the circle, that’s what he is not but what he’s travelling towards without knowing it, expanding as he goes. He still has time to live in his own nature, but you can see the world he’ll find, the one we’ll all find, when the star bursts and the circle breaks.

Paul’s silence companions me. I’m out shopping or pushing Johnny’s pram down the quay, and I picture him working, or sitting there staring past his pipe and his three-fingered shooter in his parlour chair, or dandling Johnny in the air, or walking the streets of the city around us. I never hear him when I’m imagining him. Even when I picture him on his own with Gus’s crowd, or with his artist allies, or with the tobacconist on the corner, I see him but never hear him. When he isn’t talking, he’s taken himself out of the time that words use, and we’re both in the present, which is a place I never imagined living. His silence, whether we’re together or not, is where my other senses erupt and where my feelings can come out and play in safety.

Words are what Emil does. When we were children our rooms were across the hall from each other at the far end of the apartment from mommy and daddy’s rooms. His was full of books, and he taught me to read when I was three, without telling anybody. He would write me stories about my doll, or I’d make them up and he’d write them down for me. He was a gentle little man even then, always picked on at school for it. I’ve seen him cry – twenty years ago – and I’ve seen him laugh at something funny. When you see him now, you see him formed and hardened. He wasn’t either when I was little, so don’t tell me or anyone, or let anyone tell you, that I don’t know him. I know him differently, even if I’m the only one who does. He’s plenty of things by now that I’m glad I’m not. For example, he obeys mommy still, and I loathe her and have stopped feeling guilty for wanting to murder her. But I don’t want to forget – and I still need to remember – that I knew him before he became what he is.

A city like this, the way the Inner World rotates, he’s one of the easiest people to find. The year I meet Paul, he’s a brilliant young journalist. Three days a week on page three of the New Socialist Man, you’ll know what he thinks of the latest play at the state theatre, or about Kraus’s new polemic against motor cars. Then two days a week they print one of his photographs instead – he was the first journalist in the city to pick up a photograph camera. He’s one of those people whom you always know what he’s going to think, what his mood will be, which way he’ll be looking, and that’s a large reason why I don’t fear him. He can’t change, he’ll never know how. Some people don’t. They’ve let the world swallow them. Some people get battered by it (like me), some punch it back (like Paul), and some let it disappear them (like him). Whether a gift or a punishment, to always know up from down, is something I don’t know. If people actually want stasis, Emil has found it; all I know is that even if most people do, I hated when people tried forcing it on me.

Emil isn’t a likable man – he was too much of a martinet to be a likable boy – and as for his inversive tendency, I don’t care. All else do, I don’t. I just told myself, after I guessed right (he’ll never tell, I’ll never ask), it was none of my business. He needed someone in his life who didn’t care, and I decided it would be me. And of course Paul guessed more or less right away. Even before they met he had guessed. Something in my face? In my description of him? If Emil’s too embarrassed to tell anybody, there’s nothing I can do. He must have decided it was easier to live with internalized hatred than with society’s. When I look at him now, I see what I’d be like if guilt had ruined my life along with his. That kind of destruction leaves you standing but hollowed out. He must have a few instincts left, but I never see them and I don’t know anyone who has.

If he ever discussed it with me, I’d tell him, ‘Emil, I know.’ He must have read Weininger’s book by now, everyone did last year. It was a sensation: yes, at last, someone’s explained women to us. Shall I quote for you? The woman as sexual and nothing more. The embodiment of instinct, passive but predatory. The woman as dangerous but inferior, idolized and voracious. Placed on this planet solely to weaken and destroy men. Does that remind you of anything, Emil? The stares of dread you receive, the loathing you hear in every silent look, women have been noticing it for years, but its all wrapped in what we call civilization. Society is men’s way of hiding their fear of women, and it hates inverts for their women’s tendencies, for betraying men. And if you’re Jewish besides all that, well, die inside if you think you must, Emil, learn to pass. Oh yes, you’ve done that well enough, joining the shell people in a shell world that rewards you an emotional pittance for the monolithic self-denial you’ve always practised. The world is full of choices you’ll never make because you’ve always made the best ones too hard for yourself.

The Griensteidl is a journalists’ café, right beside the Mighty Palace. I used to meet him there, I knew his table, surrounded by a circle of ferns, under the highest part of the ceiling below the grand skylight. The voices around us sounded like twittering birds. I didn’t have much experience by then of Paul around other people except me. Now we sat at my brother’s place waiting for him while he drew me sitting on the table in one of Emilie’s summer frocks. I looked older those days. The summer had smoothed me down, added mental weight to me if not physical. I was starting to feel as tall as I looked. When I saw myself in the mirror at Emilie’s after coming back, I’d never imagined myself like this – stronger, cleaner lines, sharper around the eyes. I was starting to look as old as I felt, and I wanted more.

Paul is always full aware of the crowd he’s in. I’ve never seen him in a place like this – in a coffeehouse that draws this kind of privileged crowd (journalists, professionals, bureaucrats from the Mighty Palace across the street). I’ve only seen him in the places he’s chosen, never in ones that the circumstances choose for him. Like he always does, he looks exactly like himself – that is, he looks unbowed by the people around him, sure of his own nature, which is no one else’s but his own. If anything, a place like this is something he remembers as at one time beneath him. When he chooses to, he remembers he was born to the plutocracy. He can always return to that mode in himself, to those memories of entitlement, and summon that steady downward stare – which is something I’ll realize one day though I haven’t yet.

One day, she may tell me how. The first night we spent together should have signalled me her nature – not the way she followed me into the forest without a word or look, not her first moment of swoon, or the firelight on her hair, or the way she sat so still there when the Hungarians found us – I was registering those while we lived them. Remembering how other women had acted like that, and other ways. No, it was later, in the stove darkness, that she cut her own self out of the flock, while I was fumbling for my trousers between bouts number two and three – in the middle of that – and she told me where they were: not they’re under your boots but they’re FOLDED under your boots. I don’t know, in the mood we’d put each other in by then, how she did that when I wasn’t looking, and they still had a crease three days later, in the woods. She was already controlling the madness between us. She was as controlling as she was mad, the calibration as exact as it had to be, always. She’s always been her madness and its keeper both. Once a week ever since, I’m telling you then, I go into the studio and all my week’s drawings are stacked on the edge of the desk in the order I made them, and the stack that was there before is – I know – wafted away downstairs while I wasn’t looking. I go into my paper files ever since, the ones in the parlour cabinet that holds nothing else, the cabinet with all my thousands of past drawings in it, and she’ll be watching me the way she does, making sure I don’t try to put anything back once I’ve looked, because I’d ruin her system. And each sheet I look at has the day/month/year of when she filed it written in her fly-speck code that hasn’t changed in eight years, below a neatly dotted line in the lower right corner. I tell her sometimes, ‘the cottage that night after the thunder, the men in the lokal after lightning struck the village steeple,’ and she’ll reach in with one eye and one hand and yank, there’s the folder, fourth sheet from the bottom, big guy, and God help if I move to put it back when I’m finished with it.

We’ve moved into the canal flat, the first rainy night since the housewarming and her red dress. The way the lights are when I come back from the walk, and the table lit by candles just so, and my three-finger chalice on the low table by my chair, and from the dress she’s wearing, I tell myself she’s planning a sailing expedition for two, but that isn’t quite it. Not quite it yet. Since that bout of swoon the night of the party, we’re holding our breath when we look at each other, waiting for signs that what we know is also true. Over a roast chicken and potato cakes, her only menu, and a bottle of French Bordeaux, she opens the file of 1906 drawings, the first ones I made of her. You love a woman, you smile and tell yourself sure, okay, at the things you know how much she wants to do. There’s the first drawing I made of her in Gus’s garden, and there are the ones I made of her by firelight that night, and I smile at the memories that show on her. And the ones from that summer, when I was so short of tools for it that I pared down my strokes and worked as small as I could, and there … the Great Wheel. I can tell from her look that these are the ones she wanted to see, which tells me how much she wants grandfather to know that we’re likely to be three by next Christmas. This was the drawing I made before I knew him, when he’d seen me but before we’d been introduced. I only had a minute to watch the two of them without me, and there they are, Emma in her simple, sun-fading dress, and grandfather with a thunderous look that was the first he threw me. They’re sitting side by side turned to each other at whispering distance, as different as any two people could possibly be but bound together by a look, and the Great Wheel behind them, spinning slowly just behind their awareness. The faces are simple, I’ve focused just as much on the wheel and how it has almost framed them together. I can tell you: I’ve never told a visual lie. One day we’re going to show grandfather this one and he’ll remember that day as well as Emma does, before all that came from it.

And here’s the first drawing that I made of him after we spoke the first time, when he was waiting for me to prove something, to prove the first thing I knew I was going to have to. You could tell what he was waiting to know. First of all, that I wasn’t an axe murderer or wanted for embezzlement in Bremenhaven. Him looking direct at me, waiting for me to finish with him, and I see his doubts and fears and his protectiveness when I look up, but when I look down at the sheet all I sense is the look they gave each other when she walked up to him, the love and the worry, but the love is an old one newly attached to her, and the worry is older than the two of us. When I turn the sheet around to show him, he’s sitting with Emma, just her shoulder in the drawing, and the Great Wheel behind him, and his weathered face looks proud with age and also younger from her presence. And when he looks up from that, his stare tells me I’ll smile at you later, if only it’s possible. He isn’t going to stop being doubtful about this for a long time yet.

She’s always visited him on Sunday mornings, never missed once. Those are the only times we’ve been apart that summer. The only moments of herself that she hides where I can’t get my hands on them. It’s the animal in her that always comes back to me, and it’s something else that visits her grandfather. She needs to let him know where she is, and I’m leaving her alone about that, until she tells me one morning, ‘I want you to meet someone.’ I shrug and think, ‘That’s cute.’ I don’t know what difference first impressions make. People who live on first impressions aren’t feeding very well. I already love her, though I wouldn’t know how to tell her and it won’t be the point of us for a long time yet. She’s just there, which makes me glad beyond reason, and she’s still there each morning, which is becoming a huge relief when I think about it, which I’m starting to do. I don’t know what my days that summer would be like without her, and I have to tell myself sometimes, when I wonder why she’s still there, that I don’t have to know. And anyway, I make her laugh, which is something I didn’t know I could do, and something I can tell she isn’t used to doing. It sounds more like a cough, and her face contorts a little with surprise. Her most flattering look back then is this composed inward stare, those brief seconds she isn’t thinking about me at all.

They meet on Sunday noons near the eastern gate to the Great Wheel, always at the same bench in a cordon of bushes near the duck splash. She stops me and asks me to wait, and goes to find him, and then comes back and beckons. A solid-looking old guy in a fisherman’s cap and a grey wool sweater, parked on a bench with a raised newspaper in his fists while I approach. He stands up and in front of her when he sees me and says across his shoulder to her while I’m still walking up—

‘Emma, what have you done?’

She remembers his words as sad, I remember them as angry. She’s told me nothing about him yet, and she’s told him nothing about me, not even that I exist, until this moment.

‘This man is why you’ve looked so tattered the past month,’ he says. ‘Where do you take her, you?’

I tell him about the hut in my brother-in-law’s deer park. This is no moment for reasons or explanations. He’ll get those when he asks for them; for now he only wants my facts and I’m telling him no more.

‘Your name?’

‘Paul Karsch.’

‘You both look exhausted. So, now I know why her tan’s been so deep. Karsch is a name in this empire. Do you have anything to do with that family? The Karsches of L.–––?’

‘Josef and Friedemann, my father and uncle.’

‘How on earth …’ he gasps. ‘Emma, what have you done. So, you, is it true about the horse?’

‘I’m the only one who knows what happened.’

‘Yes, by all means, say as little as possible. And keep looking at me that way. That’s all you can do until I’ve stopped staring a hole in you.’

While he does that, families go by on the path. Shopkeepers out for the day – silent for the moment – clockwork children sucking penny sweets, bench dwellers in tattered blankets, bullied awake and into movement by the pleasure crowds.

‘Do you love her?’ he asks.

‘I don’t know what love is.’

‘Do you want to know? Do you hope for love? Because I tell you, if you do, then everything’s forgivable, no matter how it looks, or ends, but if you don’t …’

He’s put on a stone face, and I can tell it’s a labour for him – that he’d rather be angry about this but that he’s holding it back for Emma’s sake in the faint hope he shouldn’t be.

‘I’ve never asked the question that way,’ I tell him. “It’s something I’m finding out lately.’

‘Be gentle to her,’ he tells me. ‘Start there. What are you two doing? Oh, we still have our Sunday mornings. But until this one she’s told me nothing about a man in her life, though of course I’ve been guessing. And now you. Sit with me there.’ And Emma sits on his other side.

‘The Weekly Truth,’ he tells me, and he shows me the paper he’s reading. ‘I never miss it. It makes me feel powerful. Yes, it’s good to be reminded that we own all the banks and railways, that we control the government through bond issues, that the next war is going to be started by a cabal of Jewish cannon founders. Quite a future my people have. Do you know any Jews?’

‘Like they were friends or something? No. It doesn’t make any difference to me that Emma’s a Jew.’

‘But it makes a difference to her, and to me, that you’re not one. When I leave my little island, I’m every Jew – that’s what Christians see. That’s what you’d see if you saw me on Procession Street. But here, on this bench on a Sunday, I can read my paper and tell myself I’m a Jew alone. No one but me can tell me what I am.’

I’ve seen The Truth handed out on street corners, though I’ve never read it. It’s a hate sheet for Catholic shopkeepers.

‘I didn’t know that paper was trying to move up,’ I tell him. ‘Usually it’s about Jewish prostitutes and the diseases you get.’

‘There’s still plenty about that, too. Karsch … that’s an old name. It sounds like a boulder does when you drop it on someone’s head. Which is what you just did to me. If there’s an angel inside you, tell him to come out now. You’re a Catholic.’

‘Yes. I came here from early mass.’

‘So you believe in your God truly?’

‘Faith means not having to know the truth. I still have to know.’

‘Faith is not having a desire for the truth. That’s what I think when I look at people who don’t want to know us. And you’re an artist. Do you paint church art? People like me have an interest in knowing.’

‘I’ve enamelled some wall tiles for a new church outside the city.’

‘The asylum church?’

‘That one. Flowers, mostly. That was last year.’

‘But none of the apostles or that such? It’s alien to me, the way churches fill themselves with pictures and statues. One isn’t supposed to see the One you turn to. When people despise us, it’s not because we’re Christ killers. No, that’s too easy, and perhaps the more ignorant followers fall that line. No, when your authorities hate us, it’s because you’re so sure you’ll see Him one day, and we insist it isn’t necessary. So tell me, which of our houses signifies the regression?’

‘When I attend mass, it’s because I hope there’s a reason for it. When I just go inside a church, on my own, it isn’t to look. It’s for the quiet.’

‘An aural equivalent of not seeing Him? Well … You showed her your cross, and knowing where you must wear it … When I see a cross, all I can tell myself is “I won’t be next.”’

I lift the chain from my collar and show him. Charlotte and I were given the same one the same day – tiny, carbon steel, as if was the family jewel. It’s the steel not the shape we were meant to feel against our skin.

‘All the Christian talk of faith,’ he says, ‘as if that is all you need to go to Heaven. Christians value salvation over virtue. That’s what’s so frightening to people who’d rather put their hope in virtue. They end up at the mercy of people who make everything about blind belief.’

‘I know,’ Paul says. ‘Salvation isn’t up there, it’s down here. Salvation is only possible on earth. That’s what virtue means to me – looking for salvation in the moment. Christ was put on earth to die. That’s why the discussion about who to blame for his death doesn’t make sense to me. Even if Jews killed him, how could anyone blame Emma for what God intended? Or the rest of you? It’s silly. I remember what the priests told us in school. So maybe later on you have to challenge the doctrines in your mind. Maybe most people I’d want to know have already done that. You’re a grandfather looking out for his granddaughter, okay. But if you’re making this a religious question, there are other ones.’

‘What a luxury. For a Jew in this world, all questions end up being tribal. We can try another. What are you doing to my granddaughter?’

His look demands I look back. But he hopes he can like me, I can tell. He hopes he can do that, and I can tell that this first few moments, he’s hopes he can trust me with her. He hoped for that almost as soon as he saw me. In fact, he was thinking about liking me the minute he saw Emma after she met me, before he knew I existed. This won’t be the first time he knows something before we do.

I take a breath and volunteer the first thing he hadn’t asked me. ‘When I looked at her the first time, I didn’t think anything. Then I got to know her for an hour and told myself, “Whatever she saw before me, it was always worse than me.”’

‘In Galicia – I was born there – a young cavalry officer is every Jewish parent’s nightmare. You were cavalry, correct?’

‘I was a cadet in the Seventh Hussars for fourteen months, the Chernovohrad barracks. I won’t make any excuses.’

‘You haven’t met her parents.’

‘I don’t know anything about them. Emma hasn’t talked about them.’

‘You’ve been too busy? None of that, thank you. I’m telling myself that perhaps you’ll be kind to her and tolerate her foibles and treat her with respectful decency. On the other hand, looking at you two, it’s too late. Emma, I can’t believe you’re looking for happiness this way. You, have you heard the proverb “Trust but make sure”?’

‘It’s the Russians who say that,’ I tell him.

‘You could be in horrible trouble if you’re treating her badly,’ he says. ‘So could Emma. Paul, when you love a woman, you have to love her more every day. That’s the only way you can make your love real. If I said, “Over for dinner next Sunday, and the Sunday after that, and after that.” What would you say?’

‘I’d say yes.’

‘Then start tonight,’ he says. ‘And next Sunday, and the next. But for now, sit with me and show yourself.’