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[62] The myths that comfort me

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.

[61] Hushing the room enclosed

Emma says, here, this is his table. We’re twenty minutes early, which gives us half an hour before Emil is expected. When she’s looking her best, she’s a whip. You can soften her all you want, with all the frills you can sew on – her body is all suppleness and stare mongering, and she knows it now, in ways she didn’t when we met. We sit there and I’m on my best manners here because it’s dawning on me that I’m in love. And just as powerfully, that I like her. I never thought those two went together, but we’re turning into a pair, but of what … I look at her in one of Emilie’s dresses – which she’s supposed to wear on the street after hours, as part of her contract – and I see through it, I can’t help myself. And my tablet is out, and I’m doing a careful drawing of the room, the tweeting journalists around us, the succulents dripping on us, the hissing coffee machine on the granite bar and penguin waiters under the cathedral ceiling, and Emma sitting on a tabletop with one leg cocked out and dress open and head thrown back, her centre-of-the-universe look, when Emil comes in. By that time I’m enjoying myself, and I let them get reacquainted and catch up, and I’m working away. I move to red charcoal for the last minute or so. I haven’t looked at him yet. After a while, they stop catching up and wait for me to finish.

We make eye contact. First: He’s wearing a beige linen suit, a paler brown shirt, and a burnt-yellow tie (so Emma will tell me when she’s correcting my drawing of him), and his brown homburg is on the tabletop where I’d been drawing Emma at play. Second: Snake handler, no question. They all look at me, I tell you. What is it I promise those people? Third: This one doesn’t see humans. This one, everything refers back to himself. I wait for his curdled stare at me, which comes out as soon as he speaks.

‘Paul Karsch,’ he says. ‘A pleasure to meet one of your reputation.’

I turn the drawing around for him to see, thinking that he must have seen her naked sometime. He looks and doesn’t blink at all, and I tell myself, nothing comes out of this one.

‘You’re already known for your draughting skills,’ he says. ‘I’ve seen some of your efforts, shall we call them, posted at some of our mutual cafés. We had hoped you should be more respectful to my sister than that. I’m something of a photographer, myself. It has more of a social function than your métier, which is solely aesthetic.’

If that’s the ground where he wants to draw the line that day. But I won’t stand on it with him, so I just look at him.

‘Photography will be the next century’s pre-eminent means of cultural production,’ he says, trying again. ‘Plastic arts are about to lose their social function – at best they’ll be serving themselves. They’ll exist for the people who make them, and cede their power to the realism that the new technology will allow.’

‘Try again,’ I tell him. I’ve seen him talk now. Next I want to see him hesitate. I’m wondering what it will take to make words fail him. It seems that nothing does.

‘People like you have a deep distrust of the collective voice,’ he adds. ‘You of all people should know the threat that technology poses to the imagination. Don’t you fear that material progress is about to render your inner visions superfluous? When you look at a photograph, you must see the leap that material progress is soon to make without you.’

‘I’ll tell you once,’ Paul says. ‘How about that? Photographs are always copies of something else. That’s why they’ll never be artistic expressions. Art has power because it’s never been done before and can’t be repeated, because the copy can never reflect its original entire. Photographs will never show what’s truly real because filtering reality is the only purpose they can have. Lord …’ He leans back and stares. ‘Your facts are so neat, your reasoning so pretty. You’ve been gelded by your own reason. What do you look like when you come, Emil? What’s that a repetition of, and how would you photograph that?’

‘Thought so,’ Emil says. ‘You are a friend of Gustav’s crowd. You’re meant to be a shining star in a year or three. You’re being groomed.’

‘I don’t think about that much.’

‘You don’t have to think about it,’ he says. ‘It’s all opening in front of you. Two or three café walls, some portrait commissions, a pilgrimage to Dresden and Berlin –’

‘Been there.’

‘– a group show in the Annex Room in two years, and a few months at the Art Factory learning craft-based skills. You know how it works. In five more years the most, you’ll be famous.’

‘Possibly it’s that way for me because it should be that way.’

He shrugs with his mouth. ‘You can act as if none of it matters to you. If you didn’t have all the doors open, it would matter deeply to you that they were shut.’

‘But they aren’t shut,’ I tell him. ‘So I needn’t concern myself. Do you know what success is? It’s when you can sit alone in a dark room and don’t have any questions to torment yourself. The rest is noise, like here.’

‘But this season you’re pretending to be broke. Your sister inherited all your money.’

‘Everything is a situation.’

‘Cut off without a penny,’ he says. ‘Family scandal, somewhere on the Galician border. Something about a horse. When your uncle failed to hush it up, he disowned you and your sister got everything. That’s why mommy hasn’t had the police after you. She knows how much influence you can recruit if you have to.’

‘My luck,’ I tell him. ‘I use what I’ve got if I ever have to to. So far, no need.’

‘You should know that besides wanting to see Emma for myself, mommy sent me. We can get to that in a moment.’

‘Why don’t we get to it now?’

‘I’d prefer to order a coffee first,’ he says. He looks at a waiter and holds up three fingers. A pot of tea appears for him, and great brown ones for Emma and I, and a plate of madeleines. I watch while he dips one. His talk is a preconceived distraction – he doesn’t want to discuss anything with me. He’s here simply to look at me.

‘And I’ll want to speak to Emma alone,’ he says.

‘It’s only a message from mommy,’ Emma says, ‘I tell Paul everything anyway.’

‘Did you tell her to say that?’ Emil asks.

‘You should see half of what I tell her to do.’

‘That’s right,’ Emma says. ‘I pose naked for him, and then he fucks my brains out. And the next day, and the next. And I enjoy it, too – I can’t get enough of it. Emil, what can we talk about when I know you’re going to tell mommy everything I say?’

‘Let’s have our coffee,’ Emil says, sipping his tea, you rebel. ‘I’m the messenger, Emma, I’m not saying it’s what you should do. She’s probably wrong about what’s best for you, but here’s the message anyway. She wants you to move home again and stop seeing this one. Keep modelling at Emilie’s and get ready for a husband. She can think of plenty of young men for you to choose from. She would let you take some courses at the university if you like. They’re offering women degrees in law these days, German literature next year.’

‘It’s what I told you,’ she says. ‘Tonight Paul and I go home, and I’ll pose naked for him, and then he – ’

I’m about to say, ‘It isn’t quite that simple,’ but he lifts his hand, and she stops. She knows this doesn’t end it, but she’s desperate at that moment to tell herself it could. You look at Emil and you know this: he always knows what he’s meant to think. I won’t be allowed to exist outside of his calculations, and at that moment I’m the man whose mother thinks I’ve ruined his sister’s value. That’s the useful approach that’s been laid out for him. He smiles and tells her enough, which means enough for now. Perhaps there’s a side of him that cares what happens to her. I’m sure he wants me to think so. I’ve spent the past few minutes trying to look him in the eye, and once or twice he hasn’t been able to avoid it. I’m embarrassing him, but I’m also threatening him. This is someone who knows how to keep a monstrous secret. The secret is himself. He knows his life perfectly and that’s the last thing he wants people to see. And here I am, guessing accurately, because I’m pressing Emma’s hand into her lap while he talks.

‘So I’ll tell you what else mommy wants, knowing what you’ll say, but I’ll have met my obligation to her by saying it. She’s concerned about whether your recent adventures are an indication that perhaps you require some sort of help.’

‘She means medical help. Paul, we have this conversation three or four times a year.’

He purses his mouth when he hears her talk to me.

‘Perhaps talking to someone would help,’ Emil tells her.

‘Paul, she means Mister Professor again.’

‘Yes,’ her brother says, ‘that’s whom she’s thinking about.’

‘Paul knows,’ she says. ‘Paul knows everything. The hypnosis, the talking cure, the diabetic coma, the Heroic Institute. I don’t need it.’

Actually, I don’t know – it’s the first time she’s mentioned any of that. But if she wants him to think I know all about it, I’ll go along.

‘Mommy only would like to be sure you don’t need it. The professor’s reputation has grown since – ’

‘Emil, ask her who my real father is. Look at me, and then look at you and daddy, and then ask her that. And then she can call me a whore if she wants, but let’s both call her one too. If your judgment of me is the same as hers, what do we have left to say?’

Well this is interesting.

‘What good would asking her do, Emma? Where’s the use, Emma?’

‘Do you know what makes me feel better? Having a life. Learning that for once. Emil, if you don’t mind, could you tell mommy for me that I’ve had a cock inside me for six weeks now and that the cure’s beginning to take?’

When he doesn’t blush, she adds, ‘And if it’s competition she wants, you might add that I’m catching up real quick.’

That time he does blush. I cough just to get him to look at me, and the stare I get from him goes right through and tells me I don’t exist for him. Take everything human out of someone, that’s the look they have and the look you get from them. I’m someone to get rid of, on his mommy’s instructions, so the family can get back to its misery.

[60] Evil wonder

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.

[59] Beyond the reach of the senses

That first month, I’m always almost telling her, ‘Emma, there was a time …’ But I never do. Better neither of us. Our first summer, she’s always asking me about day-to-day things, soaking them in, but about before we met, she has only ever asked me one question: What was I doing the hour before I saw her the first time? It’s one of those questions that how you answer matters more than what. I’m glad it was a simple one, actually: it’s an hour’s walk from the scenery workshop to Gus’s studio, which means I spent the hour walking from there to Gus’s studio. No mysteries there, sorry, little one. (‘Little one’ – she isn’t … she’s almost as tall as me. But I made her smile the first time I called her that, grimly but still …) She was planning to stay, and her asking was her way of signalling me that – she wanted to be sure what the first line of the rest of her life was supposed to say. Sharp one, her. No fear of me at all I could see. Or she was terrified but had learned to defend herself from fear. After we met, the people who knew her from before used to treat her as if she was out of control, but I’m telling you, I never saw it, until I started to hear bits of her story from other people. That’s when I knew that she was only at peace around people she’d met the year we ourselves met.

Her grandfather helped us a little, with a cabbage or a bunch of carrots, a bowl of soup, a roof out of the rain. You’re hungry and wet, he loves her, you take it. A month or so after we met, I began to understand that whatever strength she had when we met, it flowed from one place, only one. From the one part of her world that she was glad of the way it is. How do people learn to love? One day I’ll have to ask him. Strange, though, she didn’t meet him until a few weeks before she met me, and that must say something about her.

It grew cold outside. A gardener’s shed behind a hunting lodge wouldn’t do any more. So we walked back down to the city, and I took a bath in her grandfather’s zinc horse trough and went to see Roller. The next day I was painting backdrops for Don Carlo. There were always people to help me as long as I kept producing – that was unspoken. And while I was starting with Roller again, Emma stopped at the Flöges’ shop. When I met her in front of the Marzipan that evening, Emilie had cleaned her up and untangled her hair, and she had afternoon work modelling dresses again. Not many women were thin enough to wear the sisters’ clothes, or had the colours for them, but Emma was, and she had, well, she knew how to walk in them. Nothing spoken. She might not have had much nerve, but she always knew how to lead with what she had. We’d stepped back onto the world. That’s what I do. I can’t speak for anyone else. Sometimes you vanish so that you can reappear again. You have to burn yourself up and shape something from the ashes.

Gus hadn’t returned from the salt lakes. While I waited, I spent the mornings painting scenery, the afternoons drawing, and evenings at some coffeehouse, catching up with people, showing Emma around corners of the Inner World she didn’t know. I’d never seen her in the city before, and I was flattered, I’ll tell you. I liked the looks she got on the street, her beauty and the way she carried it. Meanwhile, the room we were borrowing from her grandfather for the winter was in the loft above his stable. There was a note under the door a week later, addressed to Emma. We were supposed to meet her brother Emil the next morning at ten, at his café, the Griensteidl.

[58] A seven-headed beast from the sea

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.’

[57] Carious teeth that cannot spit

Art is a description without a place. I can handle a portrait easily enough, because the subject has to hold still, and I can sense what he would do if he moved, and that shows if I’ve painted him well. And I can handle an allegory, but that’s as close as I can get to a story. The problem, I just can’t get a grip on time any other way but with a graphite in my hand. The minute I start becoming aware of myself in time, it stops. Maybe that’s why it’s so important to me for my paintings to move somehow, so you can tell something was moving, visible, invisible, neither matters. I can’t see time, I can only imagine it. Time – what is it like, anyone? I can only tell it was there when it vanishes and leaves these traces.

A frame – it’s a prison where I get to scream all day. I don’t mind adding one later, but I’m likely to trust other people to choose them.

I’m smoking too much these days. In the studio when things are going well, I can almost forget I’ve got a pipe between my teeth. In the evening, when we take Johnny for a walk along the quay in any weather, I’m always stopping at a park bench, saying, ‘Let’s sit for a few minutes.’ She never objects. I don’t want to tell her, but she’s losing her jump the past two weeks. We have to talk about that soon. I’m telling myself, ‘Next time she throws a tantrum,’ because after one is the best time for talks like that. But when we’re holding hands, and Johnny’s gurgling bubbles in her lap or mine … I’m ashamed, but I need those moments more than a discussion about something we both want to still wait.

She told me she didn’t want a maid, then she hired one. No problem. The more people play with Johnny, the happier he looks. Around the Aaronson house, maids do whatever Mrs Aaronson says. That’s the kind Emma must have expected. She’s starting to learn that most maids aren’t like that. Most maids operate you, like ours does her. And having one that speaks Czech is like having two of them. When I talk to myself in the studio, it used to be in German, but now that the maid is down there, I’m beginning to do that in Czech. I’m starting to hum folksongs to myself.

Emma’s never told me her story, do you know? Not the complete one. The same way that I haven’t told her mine. But we both leave a trail of these pieces behind us, the loose ones, and over the years, there’s enough of them that we’ve learned most of each other’s just from picking them up, a blue piece of mine here would be somewhere in 1901, but that bit of green leaves, that must be from her 1904. No one can see them all. Stories – they’re all straight lines, and the lines only run one way, through time. But the ones in your head, they’re outside of time. That’s why you kill stories by telling them – they turn into fragments of truths at best, the minute you drop them into the stream.

I’m saying that I know about the dream that almost killed her (that nutter Wolfie is somewhere in it), but not really, the same way she knows about the horse, but not really. If we knew each other’s stories, if we pulled them out of each other’s head, they’d look like what we see on our faces anyway, because faces are the stories people have lived.

[56] History is in thrall to repetition

It’s happened once or twice a year since I met Paul – Emil approaches me wearing his deputation face some afternoon when Paul isn’t there and makes a prepared speech about how mommy wants me to get help for something. Which is how she relays to me that she thinks I’m unredeemably troubled (though we hardly ever see each other) and that it isn’t her fault. I don’t know why I said yes this time, to seeing Mister Professor again. Yes I do. I’m not afraid of what I might tell a nerve doctor, in fact, I’m proud of all I could tell. And even if I wasn’t proud, too much else is happening in my life to ponder what he could think or say. Without any inner doubts to betray, and with Paul and Johnny to keep me outside my own head, my mind is safe from other people.

Actually, mommy doesn’t think I’m crazy (I can read her mind better than she can read mine these days). Now she’s the frightened one. I don’t know why parents can be so afraid to let their children go – it isn’t as if she ever liked me – and Johnny is what that permanent abandonment will look like to her. When he’s sixteen, I hope he forgets he has a mother. Better that than him thinking he has to keep listening to me. He’s going to escape the pain, cruelty, and lies I grew up with. All the love I can give, I want him to go out and spread it around – I want him to know how to do that. I want him to know every minute how he actually feels, good or bad, so that he doesn’t have to waste a precious life guessing, or feeling nothing at all. When I think of my own luck, I don’t want him to have to be as lucky. Grandfather took this pin eight years ago and pricked a hole in my shell, and another one at the other end, and blew gently, and I came out, all floppy and ungainly but in one piece and wondering how I survived so long without air.

Truth, it isn’t my psyche that needs help. I don’t want to tell Paul, though if anyone else already knows, he’s the one. I need all the good moments we can have together more than a hard discussion. After his SilverDome show, when the weather’s better, when we’re sitting on a quay bench or in the Singing Swan on a quiet afternoon, I’ll tell him, about this sense of weakening, the pain in places I didn’t used to think about, the energy I have to gather for an hour to spend in five minutes. I’ve stopped getting better. I’m not afraid of it. Sad, yes, but I’m only afraid for the people who’ll have to watch if I start to show it. But does it mean I’m getting worse again? That’s the one I still can’t ask myself.

If nothing else, I’ll get to nap on Mister Professor’s couch again. I won’t mind another hour of that. I always enjoyed hearing him talk – that smooth clear baritone, like chained thunder. Poor man, I was mean to him. I used to act out a lot of things on him, just to get him to react, but he never did. Then I got tired of it and told him one day that I was going to refuse to come back. I’d meant that to be my ultimate insult to him, but he must have been relieved, though he didn’t show it.

 

[55] Not all our strange mother lost

That summer, Paul and I pull a bubble over ourselves, so that we can see out if we have to, but I don’t want to. We have a magnetic field in place, I can feel it by holding his hand, my life heightened by his touch. I don’t go back to Emilie’s for the rest of the summer, and Paul stops painting scenery for Roller. He’s broke, and I’ve never had my own money. Grandfather would help me out, and Emilie would take me back, the same way that Paul can go back to the opera shop, and one of Gus’s friends would buy one of his drawings. We aren’t doing those things. For the first few weeks we stay in the same hut as that night. Sundays we come down to the city – grandfather by then needs to know how I am, and Paul goes to mass while I visit – but otherwise, we’re the first few weeks alone, shedding skins.

Mommy will be sending out Emil to find me, so we never go where he can be predicted to look or see people he might see. We stay in the hills. A Ninth Quarter girl like me, the forest has always been a place to spend an hour on Sunday afternoon, or travel through by train. It’s a place you read about and hear about but don’t belong. Until that summer – what are those sounds? How can trees sound like anything? That crash, what is it? I get used to it – they are only the sounds of the earth, and safe because Paul can always tell me what they were. (‘You thought you heard a noise, little one?’) Until my first few nights in it, I’d never thought of nature as a language we can hear.

The countryside isn’t something Paul loves, it’s just something he knows. He isn’t the forest. I realize now: he has a knack for grasping things that aren’t him, that are outside him, by remembering the difference between him and not-him. But he doesn’t know it’s a knack; I’m the one who knows, because I don’t have it, I can only see his.

He forages for potatoes, carrots. He sells graphite portraits to English tourists in the wine gardens, with me eye-batting them into his sights, and that’s our day’s coin, but mostly he fills sheets, both sides, with one drawing, another. Tiny ones, to save paper. He wakes up drawing and goes while the light works. He draws me over and over again.

We expect to stay up there until the cold drives us down. Most days start with me rolling off him to see what’s in my pockets for breakfast. I always keep a coin back for two salt rolls from the baker’s. There’s always a village baker somewhere within a walk. (I’m already holding the money.) He knows places in the hills west of the city where no one can ever find us. We wash in a stream, clean our teeth with a finger. I open my dress and we take each other behind a wall, or deep in a valley, far from any path – it’s a deep forest out there, and him the one not lost in it. He lets me see his solitude – the only time he ever will, because he isn’t a solitary man. Wrong – he is, self-contained, but it’s in a crowd that he remembers best who he is and in a crowd that he’s best at showing it. Then afterwards he takes out his drawing paper and fixes me on it. He can draw a cartoon in a few seconds, a house or a face in a few more. Those graphite portraits he sells back then, twenty minutes. But the real thing, no, he doesn’t dash off. You need to see his face when he’s really working – it shuts out the world except for the part he’s staring at. ‘Lost in thought’ doesn’t say enough: he isn’t lost, and he isn’t thinking. He’s wrapped himself in whatever he’s stopped with his stare. He becomes the line between his hand and the object. All the time he works on a drawing, I’m studying him as closely as he does me. It makes me insanely horny, watching him looking straight into me like that, from this sense that he has left me for his own resources and that I need to bring him back, but how? He takes himself while he works to places where only controlled intuition can guide him. At first I pose whichever way he tells, my hands anywhere, my limbs twisted and face contorted. I don’t understand why until he shows me the result, and I’d think not that’s me but that’s it. Always something new to me that he has only channelled through me. I’m a block of marble for him to carve with his mind’s hand. After a while I start to know what he’s going to want and he lets me choose. Animals live together without talking, and now I know how. He could be a God, he could be a monster, I don’t care. He can be anything he is, and I let him do what he likes. I want whatever he really is, without knowing entire yet who that will be.

Remember, you must, this about Paul – he was a horrible mistake, in the beginning. It’s that I was ready to make one. I’m no good at explaining myself, no one had ever taught me how, I’d only been told I was expected to. I tell myself now that I’m lucky I don’t know how. Otherwise, I’d spend half my life explaining myself like the rest of you, when it’s possible to live without bothering to. This would never have happened in the city, in the winter, or at any other moment. It would never have happened in any way but the way it did. He was the vision of the sum of the choices I’d never been allowed to make, that I didn’t know I had the authority to make. You must have wanted that for yourself – to know what would be left of you if your old life, by miracle, disappeared. Most people don’t have the nerve or the chance to find out. I would never be the same again, but also knew I didn’t want to be. Love had nothing to do with it, not yet. I didn’t have the courage to run from anything, but I had Paul’s. The world was cruel, but at least Paul stood still in it. He was this pool of stillness where I could see my reflection. If you wonder how I fell in love with him, it started with him just standing there, and then it was about learning to stand beside him. Just that – to stand beside him. He didn’t invite me, but I tried it once, and nothing terrible happened, and then I felt him edge a little closer, and that’s all it took – we leaned together. We had both of us always been alien beings, but suddenly – no, slowly – we weren’t that to each other.

 

[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?’