After we moved into grandfather’s stable loft, for twelve days I couldn’t bear for her to be out of my sight. Then on day thirteen, I woke up beside her thinking, ‘There – that’s the longest I ever stayed with any woman.’ The first summer weeks didn’t count, you know? Those weeks were just the two of us and nothing else. But suddenly this was me and someone else together in the world. I wasn’t used to that kind of threesomes, I couldn’t imagine how they worked.
Any secrets Emma has had till now, they’re ones from before she met me, and she keeps those from everyone. Sometimes I trip over the mute signs when she doesn’t think I can see them. For example, she had a nightmare once, I can tell. I know because it’s the last thing I know about that she won’t tell me about. She’s told the rest, I’m sure of it – the torture cures, and the water hose, the madhouse lockdowns, the talking cure, which must have been more painful then than it would be to her now. But she’s never told me the nightmare. That’s the last of her secrets, and maybe, if I knew there were other secrets and it wasn’t the last of them, I’d have tried to learn what it was. But the last one? No, you don’t take someone’s last secret, because the last one is the story they tell themselves and it needs to stay their own. Except now that one is threatening to vanish too, because of that guy she ran into at the Rosemeyrs’. A lumpen like him was part of it, and the last secret she keeps from me is all about how that could be.
Emma asked me once how it is that I never paint shadows. Why I draw so many of them but never paint them. I told her: it’s too easy somehow, to paint something that people can’t see. I don’t want people to look at a painting and see something they can fill in their own way. I don’t want them to escape what I’m showing them. I don’t want a place for them to hide like that. The shadows I draw? Those are the stories I heard while I was drawing the light. They’re my own notion of time.
When I most want the world to hold still, there’s whatever studio I’m keeping. Peace of mind is most possible there, so I’m glad Emma’s spending more time here with the lad, where I can share what I have with them. I’m not used to being happy at work, but this winter … okay. I’ve been doing this so long that my work’s almost become part of time, joined that stream, and I never expected that. But then downstairs I look at my portfolio cabinets – I don’t open them much, I just look at the cabinets – I think about what’s in them, what I’ve done up until now, and I almost get scared, because suddenly I can start to look back, which makes me look forward. And I think of the people I’ve sold work to, and the rooms where my paintings are already in show, and the frames they’re in, and suddenly the world and my work are connected, and none of that was ever part of my thinking until recently.
I’m going to be ready for the SilverDome. I long ago stopped getting aggravated when Emma was right sometimes. Okay, I work more quickly now. But I tell her, you know, that you still have to know why you’re working. Freehand, experiment, plunging, they’ve all got their uses, but at some point you have to be able to look at your process and be able to answer why. You have to make time in your mind sometimes to do that. At some point, every brushstroke needs a chapter and verse you could call out if you had to, to yourself if to no one else. There’s a limit to what more you can tell me about it, Emma. And if she tries to talk me beyond it, I find something to say to back her down.
Out of the house, out of the house. I know why she insists even though I’m tired. Days like these hollow me out, and I can never fill myself in here. It was easier before Johnny, but it’s just as important now. When I’m really, really tired at night, while she’s pouring my three fingers, that’s when it’s especially important, because I tell you, sleep never did much for me. Sleep never caught me up much. As long as the hands are steady in the morning, I’ve had enough of it. I just never learned anything from sleeping.
Paul needs to get out sometimes, not that I can ever put it to him that way. He must know it too, or he wouldn’t let me make us go out. Before Johnny’s Big Day, which is, before we moved into this apartment, when he was between series (I call them that, because he does most of his paintings in bunches, but really, they aren’t connected except by the techniques he’s developed for them at the time) – when he’s between series he can’t bear to be inside much. When he starts drawing too often at home, when he should be paying attention to me, I find ways to pry him out after dark. When we lived with grandfather, the Singing Swan was halfway to the opera workshop and Emilie’s both, so we both used to pass it almost every day long before we started living six storeys above it. So we started meeting there, and then meeting other people there, and then stopping there a couple of hours half the evenings. And when I went out towards the Inner World, I’d stop there myself, because Josette was my older sister by then, or would have been if I’d had a buxom-haired one with raven’s eyes and a throaty laugh.
One afternoon in March that first winter, just after the ball season, Mistress Charlotte was waiting there for me. A world like this, you understand – she showed up as herself, which in her world was a disguise. Her kind take their coffee at the Viceroy beside the Mighty Palace, or at the Marshal Peter on the Royal Oblong, or they stay in their palaces to make sure no one can see them at all. That’s how the really big guys express their authority, by hiding it so that we can only imagine what they’re doing in there. But there she was, at the power table on the dais near the back where she could see everyone come in, in a slim-hipped black dress and hair like a thatched roof and no make-up. People in Charlotte’s world, it’s supposed to be a scandal when they come out looking like that.
‘Ha.’ And she smiled with all her bright teeth and beckoned with eight fingers, come come come … And when I’d sat down cater-corner to her. ‘So, beanpole, you do remember me. Good. You like me without the disguise?’ She lifted a handful of hair with her fist so that I could see the grey streaks. ‘Mine today. Forgive me for not finding you before this. I was waiting to see if you and Paul would really latch. I had a premonition. It’s the first time for him, Emma.’
‘How did you know I come here?’
‘I’ve got people who learn these things for me. Mister Waiter, two of what Emma usually has. And that chestnut strudel, if you baked it this morning. Actually … I sat here yesterday morning for two hours, but you didn’t show, never mind. Freddie’s in Budapest this week.’ She raises a finger to silence me, and looks me up and down slowly. ‘Paul never threw you to me. That’s how he gets rid of most of them, you know. And then I turn them my way, or I don’t. But here it is, eight months for heaven’s sake, and he hasn’t sent you in silk and a sandalwood box, so here I am to see why not. You’re living on the Isle, then? Above a cabbage shop? Lord … How did you end up there?’
‘It’s my grandfather’s shop. He gave us a room for the winter.’
‘A cabbage shop,’ she sighs. ‘Oh, Paul. Did you ever imagine that? What is he trying to tell the world today? Remember, you, that no matter what he becomes, he was always born the way he was. Here …’ She lifts a leather sack out of the bag she’s carrying, raises it to shoulder height, and drops it in front of me on the table with a teafening kchnkk. ‘Stationary wealth rots the soul. Don’t you just love that sound? Seventy-three Asturian thalers, minted in Toledo in 1738 and never been circulated. Why not be a wealthy Jew, Emma?’
‘Of course I want them, but not that way. Give them to Paul, not me. We’re scraping by.’
‘Materialism’s still an evil and useless game, okay. So instead of taking those, he sells watercolours of naked women. I’ve got my hands on a few. Aren’t they wonderful, some of them? Be proud while you can, Emma. He always changes your face, but I’ve seen you naked once already, don’t forget. The things people won’t do for fun.’
‘For love,’ I tell her.
‘And what’s that like?’ She lifts the cup of coffee when it comes, high enough to read the maker’s mark on the bottom, and shudders. ‘He could have half my money if he wanted it. It’s uncle who cut him off, not me. These days, he’d be around six million four hundred twenty thousand kroner a year, the interest on his half. Imagine that. But he’ll never take it. Listen to me. We’re mad for each other, him and me always have been. Two against the world always. But then after the horse, he went his own way. He’s fighting against the machinery that forged him, that’s how I understand him. It’s what he chose, okay. And part of that means he won’t take anything from me, and when he visits, he never tells me first, and he always breaks in somehow. Kicks in a door or breaks a window, or climbs over a garden wall. One of those childhood stunts we still play on each other. Listen, beanpole, will you tell him we met? Will you promise me that?’
‘Where’s the promise in that? I don’t keep other people’s secrets from him.’
‘Only your own, in other words. Ha. He’s got some of his own up his sleeve. Of course, the only secrets that can ever hurt you will be the ones he kept since he met you. We see what we know, Emma, so, what does he let you know? It will never be as much as I know, sorry.’ She stares at me for a long moment and lets out a sigh that teases my hair back. ‘You’ve still got that virgin’s blush to you. Every moment with him still a first one. Too bad for me. Listen, visit me tomorrow. We have this little palace on Teresa Lane. It isn’t much but it’s nice quiet place for making noise. Well … never mind. Come for an early dinner, say around two. Tell him, heavensake do. He won’t come, but I want to know if he’ll be happy I’ve invited you.’
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.
Swig again. Then in heels and one red stocking and red lipstick, foot on our high bed, I bend over again and look under my shoulder. ‘I don’t mind,’ I tell him again. ‘Get me drunk first, all right.’
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.’
[63] Fright and horror might overcome
After we met Emil … Sometimes we’re both too proud, okay, but we didn’t know that at the time. I can plead youth, a little, possibly – I wasn’t so young any more – but even so, it made me want to blush that I hadn’t seen everything because I hadn’t seen all of Emma. We’d been going so well by then. (Ninety-three days, Emma had told me the day before. Or was it eighty-three she said? Never mind.) Blame her family, I tell you. Sooner or later I was going to have to live with her history because she carried it inside her every minute and it weighed so much to her. You love a woman, you have to listen to her story no matter how inaccurate she is when she’s telling it, no matter how it comes out. As soon as we got back to her grandfather’s from the Griensteidl and she started screaming at me, I had remind myself that this wasn’t about me, that I hadn’t been around long enough for her to loathe me as much as she was suddenly telling me she did. But she had to stop before I could try to tell her that, which meant that first she had to want to stop. When a man gets angry, it’s anger, sure, the real thing, and it stops when the target crumbles. When a woman gets angry, it’s mostly fear, and you just have to wait for her to expel it all.
Sometimes, all right, you can feel what people are going to think even before they’re thinking it. I can plead youth, a little, maybe – but even so, it was terrifying to remember that I needed someone so much who still knew nothing about me. And he was going to have to know me, and then it would be over. Why didn’t I keep my mouth shut about myself when he met Emil? He was going to ask about the talking cure, the heroic medicine, the shock treatments, all of it. I could see it – he was going to rush back to our room with his head full of listed questions and make me start answering them: ‘So, this thing you called the talking cure – what does that mean, Emma?’ No, I wasn’t going to let him. So far I’d been able to show him what I wanted him to see, and now I was asking myself, ‘The bastard, wasn’t that enough?’ So I shut myself up until we got back to our room above the stable, and then I exploded in his face.
I was used to, okay, telling myself I’d never start to understand them till I lost count of them. You don’t know how wrong that is. No, Paul, I’m telling myself, if you want to start to understand women, stay faithful to the same one for a month or six, or five years or thirty. Long enough for that one to cycle through all her moods.
All right, so I’d been playing myself for a fool, telling myself I was safe from myself around him. This was the first moment since we met that I didn’t feel safe. He wants to talk about cycles? This was the old one that he’d helped me almost forget that summer. You feel bad, then you feel bad for feeling bad, then you feel worse for feeling worse, and you crumble as you descend, and the deeper into your own dust you tumble, the darker the bottom gets and the less significant you are. So I wasn’t very nice that day.
I can tell you what he didn’t do. He didn’t try to talk me into silence. He didn’t plead or console. He made a couple of honest tries at logic and when I screamed at him even louder, his face just fell into itself.
This wasn’t about me, okay. Logic isn’t my strong point (and doesn’t help much with her, anyway – only Emma’s logic helps Emma), but it was obvious, don’t you think? We go three months without ever arguing, and then she sees her brother, and right away, this. So I held on to my chair and kept telling myself that.
So he sat just in our chair in grandfather’s loft – we only had one chair – and listened while I called him names, and a beast, and an animal, and a disgusting and hateful man, and told him how much he sickened me – and he said nothing. Nothing. And I hated him even more. I made myself as ugly as he was. I accused and declared and named him. And then I had a good loud cry so he could watch, so he could see what he’d done to me, and then I waited for him to console me so that I could throw his words back in his face. When he didn’t try that, I threw back the words I could tell he was thinking. He just looked away.
‘You bastard! You monster! Look what you’ve done to me! You’ve ruined me forever!’
Run to grandfather now. Yes, he’ll understand, and I’ll have a good cry and tell him all about it. He would have heard it all from across the yard, so he’ll know what everything is about. I slam the door shut on my way out and take the stairs two at a time, and burst into his shop. And there, in another chair, at another table, he’s been waiting for me to come in, his face looking up at me, exposing his eyes, and the tears that are flowing. And I know from his look that this is my pain he’s feeling, and that he’s shedding the tears I wish I could stop. That he knew where they came from even if I still didn’t know.
He points to a chair beside him. When I sit he takes my hand. ‘Take a breath, Emma. Enough words.’ And squeezes my hand to the table until I stop struggling against it. And when I do, he says, ‘A nice mug of tea for us both, sure?’
When I go back upstairs, Paul hasn’t left his chair.
‘About the horse,’ he says. And he tells me everything – about the frolic, the scandal, the blackmail, the drunken night, the stockade, more scandal again, and the penury. He tells me everything he needs to, in a quiet, weary voice as if it’s the last story he’ll ever be forced to tell. This is for YOU, Emma.
‘Since then,’ he says, ‘it’s been over for me, according to them. I’ll be what I make, never more, and so far … so far, okay. People can do that when there’s no other way, and the world calls it punishment because it doesn’t know what a blessing it can be.
‘People make choices, and their choices change them, and that’s how they change the world for themselves and other people. That’s why you can’t let people take your choices from you. Don’t you let them, Emma. One choice is still always a choice. When you hear only one, the silent one is always, “Never make another.” When people refuse to make the choices when they’re due, they hand themselves over to the powers. I want to be what I know I can choose to be. I just don’t want to be alone. How about you? Do you want to be alone?’
Bastard, I think. How did he learn to talk like that? I wipe my tears, hide my face for the rest of the day, and wonder if I’ll ever look beautiful to him again. The word – we haven’t said it yet. It’s terrifying to love someone else. No wonder we haven’t said it. A guy with so much force in him, why isn’t he aiming it at me? Oh my, he’s the one, admit it, whether I like it or not. He’s the one who’s going love me, and my love for him is all he hopes in return.
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.
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.
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.