Archive for category: Chapters

Our second week returned, the Friday after dinner, Paul would be playing with the little guy at home, but instead we’re going out farther than the Singing Swan (where we all can be seen every two nights or three). I need to pretend everything is normal. I mean, pretend in front of more people than we’ve seen yet. So we pack up the tiny one in his sleeping robe and blankets and little scarf and little wool hat and socks, which takes half an hour, the way he rejects our advances, and I slip the Duclos tin in my coat pocket, because I’m going to break the seal tonight, and we go by fiaker to the SilverDome for Kopsky’s opening (Paul will be two more cranks), and later across the square between the minarets to the Marzipan, where the afterparty always develops. Nothing’s organized about that – it’s more that of course every insider at the Dome is going to end up there all at once tonight. When there isn’t a table free for us, the owner steers some strangers’ party out of the tarok room and brings me seven pillows for us to hold court on the long couch.

This is our first appearance since Johnny’s Big Day, and all we expected is there: a crowd of publishers (but hardly any journalists), a gang of Roller’s set painters from the Court Opera, sundry dealers from the Turkish Circus, and this room, which is a clubhouse for the Dome crowd from across the way. It’s always the same people, and how far can a single impulse extend? They clap and jeer when we enter, the way they do, to see if we still take it the right way. I don’t know why (though I can guess), but the first time Paul brought me here seven years ago, they all played together the same joke to him: a deliberate howl of mockery, a standing ovation of catcalls and whistles that Paul acknowledged with a straight face and that click bow of moneyed entitlement he’ll never scrub off or forget how to summon. This isn’t a crowd, it’s a pack – big difference. It’s a small world, not The Big One. A place like this, people come to stay in training for The Big One, to learn new tricks to play on the powers and to practise old ones on the authorities. Tonight, Paul raises Johnny over his head like a trophy and they unleash the lad one for his own so that he wakes up and howls back at them. The boldest artists attack the pillars of society, Johnny, they tremble before no enemies. Then someone gives up the long couch to us, many thanks kind sirs, it pleases us very much.

Gus rarely comes here – too far from his studio, and he prefers the Berliner in the Eighth Quarter – but Gus’s Dome friends are here. The ones he sends, you can always tell who they are by how they watch you enter and the way their whispers in ears reach across the room. Around the people here, Paul can stop being the only exotic beast, and he can talk to them in exotic beast language, about money and wall space and who’s entering the market to buy or sell.

Yellow table lanterns lick the crimson walls and soften the chairs and tables. The air is liquid with smoke and wine fumes and the fug of paint-stained clothes. The room, when I think of it, smells like Paul, like the crucible he formed his life within, and Johnny in my lap is bubbling and drooling while I watch the circles people make towards us and wait for the handful of women here to take turns wanting to hold him. People pay court to the new mommy, and the handful of wives hover to giggle and coo, but Johnny doesn’t pay any attention to them. All he wants to look at these days is me, and there’s no way for me to hide from that. What does he know? What is he telling me? I flash the Duclos tin and people clap hands and go ooooh … Paul breaks the seal for me with the claspknife he’s always got and twists the lid, and people crowd around, the waiter bringing each comer a semidemitasse spoon. I take the first turn and wait for the crowd to thin a little so that I can shiver and soar in the arctic glow of peace. When materialist beliefs are shaken, man turns his gaze inward. Art is where the spiritual revolution is first felt. There’s never any music at the Marzipan – just a roar of arguments over small things, and sometimes a shoving match. Hardly any fistfights here. Show the baby. Someone’s wife wants to hold him, and I let her go off with him a few steps. So that’s what it feels like to be un-Johnnied for a moment. I wonder if that’s the first thing I ever forgot. Johnny enjoys all of it for the first half-hour, and when it starts to wear him out, the owner’s wife hands me the key to kitchen pantry, which is soon full of people following Duclos and his brain sugar.

I sit in a soft chair they bring in for me surrounded by stove and body warmth and baking smells with a glass of medium-red in my hand and take visitors two or three at a time. When Paul comes in to visit me, he’s broken his rule about not drinking during the week – good for him, rule breaking is the point here, and I’ve reminded him well – and that means one bottle of red. Not Count Freddie’s Élite Tokay, but a near miss to hand. Paul doesn’t let himself get drunk during his colour days – direct to the hands – but he lets it relax him when the night calls for it, and relaxing releases him from his working energy and changes how he looks at people. They stop being animated things and he can talk to them without always having to plunder them. One bottle of anything is always enough for him. Paul never has to play himself at the Marzipan – he is himself. He watches me get powdered and smiles at his shared memories of our madder days. The stuff lifts the world off your shoulders, I know well enough, and simplifies it in a good way. Johnny, over there in the corner in a waitress’s arms, cackles to me as if he and I know something the rest don’t, but what is it?

Art must destabilize vision so that people are compelled to imagine alternatives. Okay, Emma loves to watch me move. The way she looks at me now, with that hopeful heat in her eyes, I don’t mind that she loves it. Big bones – that’s what she likes. She still loves to trace them on my skin some nights, from head to toe. Sometimes she used to mimic the way I walk, to crack up visitors. She’d take these long, heavy strides, chin strutting, arms akimbo, legs bowed a little, feet slapping flat on the ground. Will she ever do that again? My hands – she plays with those, too, like she is tonight. She can never get over their size. All right, so big you think he won’t know what to do with them, but then he picks up something, or touches me, and the energy pours through out his fingertips, every ounce of it, and his soul after that. Same with his eyes – when he can relax from the studio, he makes himself see into things, into you, with this deliberate gentle power. Okay, I’m happy tonight, and you can see the relief on her face, that it’s what she wanted to see in me. Of course I can be happy with you, Emma – your worry? Wasn’t reminding yourself the point tonight? I collapse beside her on the upstairs sofa so that she almost sails through the air. Over there, the waitress has passed the little guy to one of the cooks, who wants to offer him a spoonlet of jam and looks our way for permission. I point to Emma – her call. She looks up. Johnny spreads his arms and legs towards her like a flying squirrel just as Emma is prying open the Duclos tin again. Just then she looks up and glares for a moment, then drops the tin and howls –

‘Release … that … CHILD!!!’

The room crashes silent except for Johnny, who’s gurgling at the spoon, trying to pry it from the cook’s hand with the fingers of his right, his left hand tucked into his sweater.

‘Here, here, HERE! Bring him to me! Oh, Johnny,’ she gasps when she’s holding him again. ‘You really do love me, don’t you? And so soon! You! That spoon, bring it now!’

The room has fallen silent to stare. The cook tiptoes up and hands the spoon to me, and me to Emma. With one hand, she holds Johnny sitting up in her lap. With the other, she dangles the spoon in front of him. Johnny stares entranced for a moment, leans his head to the left while she holds her breath, then leans his body towards the spoon, pressing his left hand to his sweater and reaching with the other.

‘Oh Johnny … Your momma teach you that? Here, have some.’ And she releases the spoon to him. He’s blowing bubbles with his dinner, and kicking her thigh with his little sock feet, and smearing the jam on his forehead with the spoon clutched tight in his walnut-sized right fist.

‘Oh, Johnny, that’s right. Look at momma. Who taught you that, little Johnny? Was it your mother, hmnh?’

The first few mornings back, Paul doesn’t blink or stare when I bring Johnny to the studio. We’re there till lunch. He doesn’t notice us much unless Johnny starts to cry, and then he flips a drool cloth over his shoulder and carries him, bounce bounce, clicking his tongue and pulling faces with him, until Johnny starts to belly-laugh and he stops and hands him back to me. He used to carry me like that, around the bedroom, around the kitchen, down the hall, bounce bounce … Otherwise … The window sun in my hair, a thread of winter breeze on my left shoulder, and a shawl around me and Johnny so that we both can look out. Paul would tell us if we were hardening his work. From my soft chair, under Mister Frog, the next canvas is facing away so that I can watch his face while he moves around in front of it, and only Johnny could turn him from what he sees when we leave him alone. I make sure Johnny’s watching him instead of me. There are moments that he, I can tell, forgets I’m there and I feel like myself again. But when Paul’s there, I’d better be holding him; he looks sad when I’m not. Yes, Paul, seek to collapse the past and future into an eternal present. Inject the world with dreams of unseen truths. But at this stage, when the canvas is at its whitest, he’s in how mode, not his what or why mode. There are a dozen drawings of Charlotte on his desk, from yesterday and months past, but he doesn’t study them yet – the act of drawing them will have been enough for today. He has a knack for keeping things out of his head when he needs to, please dear God never me. Because that would be a nightmare look.

There are things he never does twice, and there are things he almost always does. No joke, he’d paint with tinted water on white glass if he could find a way. You’d think he had one pot of each colour to last him the rest of his life, the way he thins it. (In The Prague Years, where we still were three years ago, he’d paint horizontally, on his desktop, because it was the only way he could control the weight of his paint on the hard surface he always prepared for it. They were the first paintings he sold, and they were special, but … enough, he knew he’d go mad working like that too often.) One day perhaps that ‘light’-ness will stop being his signature, but for now, no one’s else’s work looks like his. For that, and for the shiny snow-white undercoat he always starts with, which hides from the start all traces of the weave and makes what he does an exercise in achieving a third dimension in a multitude of hard ways. Most of his Marzipan buddies soup their canvases a lot darker than this so that whatever they paint on top pops out. But Paul doesn’t want people to notice the paint or see brushstrokes when they look at him. And then he draws in the figures with a graphite so lightly that only he can see them, and then he moves to charcoal, black or red or in combination, with as much care as with his paints, because he means for you to see those lines through the colours. He always cared more about line than colour, but tell that to the subjects who sit for him. Really, most of his sitters want something that will look impressive in the dining room, and it’s his glowing colours that do that. He’s always scanning his surface for build-up, and when he sees any he’ll buff it down with a chamois. He works with a cloth-wrapped fingertip as often as with a brush. And when he wants dark, he doesn’t darken the paint, he adds another layer, then another, of the colour he first thinned, using a flat or curved edge to bring out the veins between each. It’s maddening to watch. He works faster than he used to, but only because he’s practised so long. You think he’d have found shortcuts by now but it’s as if he’s never looked for them. This is how slowly he has to work to be sure he’s getting the effect he wants. And after that, as many layers of varnish as he needs to make sure the painting glows. When the light is right, you can look at one of his paintings once it’s hardened and see your reflexion on it. He isn’t trying to express his technique, but there’s always this subtext by the time he’s finished: not, ‘This is who I am’ or ‘This is why I am’ – no, he’s saying ‘This is how I act.’ If you want to know his reasons, get a sense of his whys, you need to hear him argue with our painter friends, because that’s when they come out. Not that he would ever declare them, but you can piece them together from listening to him when he’s got a few in him and he’s rejoinding someone else. That’s what I tell myself when I’m not watching him. When I am, I only see him working. I see his competence, how he works as hard as he must at something he knows how to do, and I see that he has reasons though I don’t know what they are.

This morning, when Johnny and I left the studio he was roughing a three-quarter portrait of Charlotte in her loosened ball gown, spread across a dark leather couch with a blazing fire in the hearth at her feet, swept hair dangling back, one hand spread casually on her tummy where a corset should be, long slim fingers splayed out, the other hand cupping a half-consumed pomegranate. That’s Charlotte, right – eating a pomegranate in an ivory silk gown, and getting away with it. That’s what a predator goddess would do, with the money she was born to and the time she’s got on her hands. I can’t read her face yet, but those hands? I can see where they’re going unless they were just there. Paul used to tell me that the saddest sound, the only sad sound, he ever heard, is the wail of his sister when she’s coming. He can’t know, really. A dark place, hers – heaven’s supposed to be brighter than that. You want to shake her back to earth and tell her cheer up, girl, life can’t be as bad as that. Do you want to talk about it? Look at those hands he’s drawn and then picture her when she rises to it, and listen – a shaking apart of the infernal damned, a cacaphonic damburst of Charlotteness, pummelling darkness with howling white crests, the lash of a superheated wind expulsing a final contortion. In other words, it’s sure to be something like what Paul sounds like but he’s usually looking down, not up. Now, in that pose, her liquid mirror has shattered, her body slid down, the moons in her eyes are about to reassemble themselves. I know those moons, the same exactly. When he fills out her face – and will he know this? – she’s going to be asking me, ‘Do you catch the signal, Emma?’ No secret between us three – she’s wanted me to touch her like that and send her there since the day we met and has been waiting and waiting for me to want it too. No, not for me to want it – for Paul to want it, good luck you, girl. There’s one piece of him you won’t score from us.

Paul has a deep distrust of the collective voice, the voice you can’t see, I realize that now: he trusts everyone to have a truth in him that he would want to hear. That’s the problem with truth, that everyone has their own. So people reject one another’s, and in the end people have to lie en masse to get themselves believed. He despairs that it’s only lies that people can ever agree on, can accept as a societal whole. So his work is about – I’ll say it for him – telling his own truth in ways that people will believe. He trusts people (or doesn’t) one on one, and he trusts himself the same way. But the crowd? He knows he’ll survive in it but it tires him out, thinking of everyone at once and sorting out the confrontations among people he’d never otherwise have to heed, maintaining the barrier that will still let him see clearly. He doesn’t think much of the world generally, but he loves whom and what he does and swims through the rest. The rest is what fuels him when he needs to be fuelled. He’s sociable, his manners perfect (they’re the first thing rich people buy their children) and his interest passing but genuine, once he’s pared the world down to the person in front of him.

And things he needs to be good at, I help him do, like bat my eyes at the commissioners and keep his schedule clear, or not. I get him out of the house or into the sack enough when he’s working hard, so that he doesn’t live too much inside himself. He’ll have to live mostly there, for the next three months, but it isn’t his natural state. I know he’s going to have to stay in there for weeks at a time until after the SilverDome opens for him, so it’s up to me to pull him out sometimes, even when he says don’t.

I function just fine, thank you, for a reformed lunatic. I’ve learned to live in the present even if I haven’t let myself forget the past. That guy, that guy in Rosemeyr’s shop … just as I was finding my footing after Johnny’s Big Day, and preparing myself to look at the world over Johnny’s head, that bastard shouldered me back into the pit. I don’t have it in me to murder anyone, but whoever he is, I yearn to hear that he’s dead.

I surprised Paul last night. He asked me why I didn’t get a maid, and I told him I didn’t want to and that I wanted to get by on my own if I possibly could. It was a difficult conversation, for a minute. How well is Emma going to be again? We’re both asking ourselves that, and acting as if we’re not, and waiting to see what we see through the settling dust before we begin discussing what may never be there again. Mostly, I worry that if we hired a maid, I’d turn into someone who has a maid. I grew up in an apartment with seven of them, eight in the winter, so not having one is another way to avoid turning into someone who lives in that past. I don’t want to have nightmares about that. I want to see how much I can do without one before I think about it. I haven’t given up on feeling normal yet, I still want to hope and have the energy to hope. I don’t know what normal will be from now on, that definition isn’t clear yet, and until it is, I want to give myself every chance to find out.

All right, so it happened, the fifth afternoon of our return from our hill. Paul left for his studio after a quick lunch, I was alone in the parlour with Johnny. This whole eye contact thing, I wasn’t ready for it, so as soon as he tried I totter-marched into the bedroom until I figured out what to do next. At least in there there was only one of me. One of me I can still manage, though I always end up thinking about Paul instead. And wondering how he succeeds to live without looking back. Because it’s when you look back that the world gains ground on you.

Right now, this afternoon, Johnny’s sleeping, which is when we both seem happiest, so I close the bedroom door behind him and lie down on my side. Love sticks are out, these days and forever, which is really too bad, because I’ve got a nice collection of them. Paul used to carve me one from cherrywood every day-we-met anniversary, just like I’d buy him a new pipe from the smith he goes to who knows what he needs (fossil brier, rusticated oxblood, 6-centimetre bowl, long shank with a seventy-degree lacquer mouthpiece. He has to be able to hold it comfortably between his teeth while he’s working.) On my tummy is no good any more, because I can’t bend that way, and on my back is too much of a strain – we don’t have enough pillows. So I lie on my side and think about Paul spooning me, the way we always fall asleep, and this rich, earthen smell that always throbs from him – all of the sight of him mixed up in it, like paint and old wool and fresh burley and sweat and heavy red wine. I cup myself and breathe the blankets and summon the moon and the wind to rule me. And I lay there afterwards and rest, licking the rain from my face and thinking, ‘I’m a water sprite.’ I block my ears and imagine Paul watching me, our eyes almost touching, one great and unsubdued heart. Johnny is still sleeping – I could have taken more time – and I begin to hope he never wakes up. I don’t mean that cruel. Sleep is the most beautiful thing in the world. Why haven’t people learned to sleep forever? It must be because people also dream, and you have to wake up to escape those

Mornings – I’ve told you. They’re when people pull down their masks so that all you can know is what their motions tell you, everyone spin-dancing down the pavement, alone. Fear masks, trouble masks, masks of time-sodden rage, and their clothes are like chinked armour against a world that’s marching them by the neck. The dream surrounding them but forgotten. The world turns into one howling machine fuelled by wordless and inchoate fear. Morning in the city, it’s about crowds and the solitude that deafens them to you. When you’re in a crowd like that, it’s a fight to hold still. I yearn to be climbing a hill somewhere, standing in the wind, which is more beautiful than music to me. When you listen right, you can hear voices in it from far outside the moment, all the world’s at once. Mornings here inside the world, they’re mostly about the time in your face, which this year is the saddest music in the world.

Paul went yesterday afternoon to ask Rosemeyr who the guy was, whose name I don’t know. There was no point telling him not to. He had a reason to walk that way, and after cracking his head open the night before, I owed him some tolerance.

I’m not looking forward to the next while, because I know how this will play out: Paul goes back to the Rosemeyrs’, who ask about me, and he finds out I fainted because the other guy who was there frightened me almost to death. I’d turned my back on Death a few weeks ago, and there He was in front of me again. Paul’s not going to let it go – he’s going to look for the other one. It would be better if he didn’t so that I could manage my own mind, which I’m already doing. But he won’t – it isn’t how he’s made.

I haven’t been alone in five weeks. I almost forgot – there’s Johnny. He’s learned to suck his thumb, but left or right doesn’t matter to him yet. He hasn’t tried to kill me today, and I think that’s a good sign. Something tells me he already knows Paul wouldn’t like it, the way those two get along. Sometimes I take my eyes off him for ten minutes at a time, and nothing bad happens when I do.

If he isn’t careful, Paul is going to fall behind. It will depress him if it happens, but he has his own internal clock for his work. I know it, though that’s intuitive observation on my part – he’s never shown it to me. All right, I tell myself that his own clock has always saved him. There are three canvases still blank entire – the ones he returned with from Mister Rosemeyr’s last night – he’s trained one or two of the carpenters there to undercoat them to his instructions, more later – which means at least two more drawing trips for him to make, and him about to descend into himself while he thrashes for how to fill them. He almost never brings models to his studio – he goes to them and then works from his drawings. I’m the exception, of course. He draws and paints me all the time. The months before May Day will be all about him – he needs that – so it’s up to me to show him he can have them.

After six weeks away from our neighbourhood, my body is going to let me go out for an hour. I can’t stride and I can barely handle steps and I can’t sit down without a stack of cushions, but I can walk. In the hall beside the candleman’s desk, there’s our new perambulator that we haven’t used yet, and our luck – this building has a lift. I will bow to this vision of the days to come – I’m going to need reasons for every thought I have for myself. Johnny, you can’t know how terrifying.

Our second morning back, there was a note from Emil an hour after Paul left for his rooftop studio, asking me to meet him at the Singing Swan for coffee and dessert in the afternoon. I don’t know how he learns things – for example, how he knew we’ve just returned to the city – but he always does. The weeks we were in the cottage, he came to visit once. He struggled up the rope walk in a chocolate-brown overcoat over a dove-grey two-piece suit with a pale-blue shirt and striped grey-blue tie, his bespoke brown leather shoes slipping on the ice, one hand raised to the wind and pinning down his bowler, and knocked on the door with an embarrassed look on his old man’s face. He’s here because mommy sent him, but still. Why an old man, I don’t know. He’s barely thirty, he’s a month younger than Paul. But he’s always been an old man, as if he saw his whole life in one flash when he was seven and has been blinded by it since. Like most very short people, he dreads looking foolish. Paul says he’s another of mother’s spies. Of course he is, but I don’t see why it matters. We don’t tell her anything about us, but we don’t care what she hears, either. Any case, he’s the one person in my family I’ve been able to hold a conversation with that doesn’t leave me feeling overinvested. (Grandfather too, but I never knew I had a grandfather until after mommy moved me into a home for hopeless girls. She didn’t want me to have grandparents – Jews, you know.) Most of what Paul says about Emil is true, but Paul doesn’t adjust well to how complicated it is between Emil and me. I knew him before he became himself, from the same height for a while (imagine that, will you), so I see things in him, with him, that no one else ever will. If Paul wants to disrespect him, I know there are good reasons why. But I’m the one who watched him climb the path to visit that day, in his polished leather shoes, and I can wish that he wanted to be doing it.

I’m taking chances outside, the wind stronger than I expected, polishing the crooked pavement ice. I push the pram the 10 metres down the pavement. The Singing Swan is two doors down the quay from our building, a cellar coffeehouse with a half-barrel door five steps down. In the evening it will be full of people we know well, but this time of day there’s only Josette, who pops out to help me with the pram. Show the baby. She clucks his chin until he drools on her finger, then wafts him to the kitchen for warming and to show the baby for me to the cook and the dishwasher. Josette lets us open the place, and her husband in the kitchen pokes his head out when we do. She looks mirthful and jolly, and Johnny giggles at her breasts when she buries him between them, then gasps when he comes up for air. She returns with a mothering smile for us both along with a tall espresso, a tin of Turkish cigarettes, and four pillows. She brings them to our table on the dais near the back, our power spot, where we can scan people as they come in and cull out the friends from the people who aren’t. Above the bar is the last cartoon Paul left, two months ago – the two of us as Ferdinand and Sophie in a limousine, him in full military regalia, me in a feathered hat and bustled daytime dress, except that I’m sitting on his lap and our eyes are popping out. Just as I light a third one, and blow a smoke ring at Johnny’s right shoulder, Emil comes through the door, wearing a black woollen overcoat, a grey Tyrolian with a green feather, and a green silk scarf. He’s here often, though it isn’t his coffeehouse. It’s our coffeehouse, so by logic it can never be his. Everyone we know has their own coffeehouse, and Emil and Paul are never going to have the same one.

I know what he’s here to say, and while he gets to it, I put a leash on my feelings. He’s more comfortable when I do, and I try not to be cruel to him just so he’ll understand that cruelty isn’t inevitable. Somehow I think he’s never known that unconditional acceptance is possible, so the best I can do is wait him out. Out in the world, he’s the perfect surface: clothes, manners, and career (cultural essayist for the New Socialist Man, page three Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays). He’s also a vicious careerist, not that there’s anything wrong with that. So is Paul, and they’re equally underhanded when it will do them any good. The difference is, Paul would always draw the line at hurting his friends or anyone he respects, and Emil has no friends and respects no one. Besides, artists can flash their talent at the world in a way that writers never can. No, there’s no one Emil lets see all of him. I do see through him most of the time, but it isn’t as if he chooses to let me. I try to imagine what he’s like when he isn’t promoting himself, when he isn’t out there, and if anyone can do that, it should be me, but even I can’t. I know this: if you placed him alone in a darkened room, he’d suffocate, while Paul could live in a room like that forever until you dragged him out. Paul wouldn’t need anything to fill himself – he could do it in his head, while Emil would suffocate without his society to breathe from. But what Emil is to everyone else, he can’t be around me. I knew him before he became himself, so he stays close to me, acts nice to me, looks out for me, and even champions Paul (whom he loathes) to make sure I don’t tell tales about his inverted desires. I’m not blackmailing him, but he can’t stop assuming otherwise, his logic being that anyone who knows must automatically be doing that. And … I can’t let my family go yet. It still seems too drastic. Maybe now I’ve got one of my own, that will change. But until then, he’s the one I can see and talk to and think about without the undertoad grabbing me, without the sharks starting to rip.

I watch him sit down and hear him say hello. I’d like one day to see him do those two things at once, but he always turns it into a two-step process.

‘And how are mommy and daddy?’ I ask.

‘Why, they’re both very well, thank you. I’ll tell them you asked.’

‘Do tell them they needn’t feel guilty about not visiting. The maid was so much help to us.’ Now the truth: ‘I didn’t want them near the cottage. I hope Johnny never knows them.’

‘I know that. It’s sad, Emma, that’s all. You could at least put a show on once in a while. It isn’t a lie to withhold the truth sometimes.’

‘That’s all they’ve ever done. Then it’s a lie.’

‘Did you get plenty of other visitors?’

‘There was grandfather every two or three days, and there was Paul’s sister every three or four.’

‘How did those two get along?’

‘Wonderfully. They always have. Everyone else was there at least once. The Marzipan gang, nine of them came up together last Saturday night.’

‘So Gustav has been – ’

‘Gus, no. He dreads visiting people and writing letters. So he sends people. That’s what he does – he sends. People, things.’

Josette takes his order. He always says for coffee and dessert in his messages to me, but he always asks for tea and never orders a dessert. That’s as rebellious as Emil ever becomes. Paul told him once, when he was visiting us during The Prague Years and we dragged him to a beer cellar down our street for some real-world excitement: ‘What you really need, Emil, what would fix you, is a public display of insanity. Rip off your clothes and do a lap around the block. Sing some Puccini while you’re at it. Let the police chase you for a while. When they let you out, you’ll be human.’

‘I’ve never seen that cap before,’ Emil tells me.

He means the red silk one I’m wearing, with the yellow stitching. ‘Gus sent it last week.’

‘Did he tell you the provenance? It’s a Central Asian skullcap. For, you know, Jews from Tashkent and so on.’

‘I know. It’s my perfect colour. Sometimes a cap is just a cap, Emil.’

He’s always a little embarrassed around me. For all he dreads it that I know too many of his secrets, part of him is relieved to know that it’s me who does. Trust is at least possible that way.

‘Even so.’

‘Jew in the house,’ I say. ‘Only one, if mommy asks. Grandfather tells me he was a Caesarean, so laws of descent don’t automatically apply.’

‘Perhaps during the Babylonian Exile,’ he says, ‘twenty-five centuries ago. If you’re a Jew, so is he. Have you listened to our mayor lately? These days, the world gets to tell us who a Jew is.’

‘I know. I’ll have to be able to tell Johnny something, won’t I. It didn’t matter that I knew nothing about it when it was just me. Now on, I don’t have any choice. People are going to tell him he’s one, so I’m going to have to explain him something. And you, you’re a Jew your own way – you can’t stop being one any more than I can.’

‘If the world calls us Jews, we’re Jews, and it does. The question then is what to do about it. No one has answered that one yet. Oh, there are plenty of answers to be had, but none of them are useful.’

‘I just know I’m tired of passing as a Christian when I don’t have to. And I don’t want Johnny to grow up thinking he has to pass. Look how we’re talking about it, Emil. Do you see how they win? By defining us.’

‘We all convert. I’ve begun to surmise that as the only solution.’

‘They’d distrust us even more. “Which of us are the hypocrites?” That’s what they’d ask themselves.’

‘And have you ever asked yourself what Paul really thinks of Jews? A celebrant Catholic like him?’

Even for Emil, that’s cold. It isn’t in him to understand Paul and me together. Better to pity him than get angry. So I count backwards from ten and remember the luck I’ve known that mommy and daddy have never been able to change since I met him.

‘Even for you, that’s low, Emil. Ask him one day what he thinks about us. It’s all you’d have to do instead of surmising it from a distance, and then he’d tell you what he believes without you having to guess. For your sake, I wish you did know what Paul and I have. Right now, whether you know it or not, you’re getting even for the last time the two of you met.’

‘I don’t have to get even,’ he says. ‘It’s enough that I’ll have an answer for his views the next time we meet. Paul really hasn’t the least notion about politics. He’s a child that way.’

‘He wasn’t making a political statement. You have the idea that all statements are political.’

‘Precisely,’ he says, warming up. ‘All statements are political, and he doesn’t know it. When he told me that history is nothing more than –’

I’m rubbing my forehead. ‘Stop,’ I announce. I know how to punch that word. And when he does: ‘What Paul said was, “If history has any purpose at all, it’s to reveal the Kingdom of God to us all, which means that if people have a purpose it’s to transform social institutions so they’re compatible with the Kingdom of God.” End quote. That’s not incompatible with your socialism, but you never like him dragging his God into it.’

‘Emma, in all your years knowing him, I’ve only heard him make one honest political statement.’

‘Paul not honest?’

‘Paul deludes himself.’

‘He understands your arguments, Emil – it’s just that they aren’t important to him. He can’t be bothered contesting them unless you goad him into it, which you do, unless I make you both stop. I don’t know how you bring it out in him, this need to confront you on your own terms. He doesn’t have to, when his own terms have just as much validity. But you still do that to him. As if he’s protecting me from you.’

‘My point was that the next century won’t have any need for aesthetic arguments. When he tells me that –’

I rub my forehead. ‘Stop.’ He stops again. ‘You’d just told him, “You refuse to acknowledge that art is a product belonging to the long period in human history in which the truth lay veiled, and that period will soon be overcome with the dawn of socialism.” Unquote. And he told you back: “Art is idealism – in fact, it’s the purest form of social idealism, and in the future it’s going to have the same effects on society as turning a lathe or growing wheat.” Unquote. And after that, you both sank to definitions, makes you both scoundrels. I wish sometimes you’d stop meeting. I dread that for him as much as I dread mommy for me. The aggravation he has to face for no purpose when you’re standing there.’

Josette brings Johnny a warmed bottle, and a brauner and a slice of poppyseed strudel for me. Emil looks away while I feed Johnny the nipple. If Emil and I stood up, I would tower over him. Sieglinde and Alberich. No one in the family looks like me. It’s an open secret that daddy isn’t my real daddy – he’s been registered, that’s all. Who it really is, mother herself probably can’t say. Really, in this city, it’s only middle-class housewives who don’t get much variety. Everyone else? As long as you hide it, sex is pretty wide open until the moonmaidens pox you. Any time Paul encounters mother, he finds a way to slip ‘Norway’ into the conversation, as a private joke for her to hear. I should tell him to stop, though I don’t. He needs to know by now that mommy’s incapable of embarrassment.

‘If you’re wearing that cap to upset mommy – ’

‘Not at all, Emil. My life isn’t about her. Less and less. Upsetting her isn’t a factor any more, unless it’s to defend myself against her upsetting me. I’m always glad to see you, Emil, but you’re always going to need to tell me why. It’s always mommy’s reason.’

I’m more exhausted than I expected to be. He sees that and falls silent. I know, I know, a woman who looks like me isn’t supposed to sound the way I can. I’ve got a cruel streak, which I’ve learned to keep under control, and being beautiful just adds to people’s shock when they see it. Paul and me – harnessed, when we choose out here, our force field can stun at two hundred paces. Someone like Emil, with his aberrant sexual condition, in a world like this one, can never show more than half himself to anyone, not even to me. I don’t often feel much pity, but for a minute I almost tell him about my fainting attack, just in the hope he can share back something human, something frightening. But I bite my tongue.

‘Are you feeling well, Emma? Do you want help getting back to –’

‘Paul’s in his studio.’ Which means, you’d better not. But we’ve both backed away.

‘I’ll leave him alone, then.’

‘Do you want to hold your nephew, Emil?’

His eyes tell me, but I can’t. He doesn’t know how to show feelings, but I can see just then that he does have them still.

‘I’m scared of him too,’ I tell him. ‘Terrified what I might make him become. For heaven’s sake, Emil, look at him – can you do that? A little baby just like you came from.’

‘Emma, I can’t … stop. Why do you want to embarrass me?’

‘How could Johnny do that? You can lie to anyone about anything, but Johnny? No one can dissemble to a baby. That’s his power. When he’s sitting with us listening, I know why you say what you do.’

In that instant I know what it’s like to be a stranger to Emil. Could I live with that forever? Johnny blows a bubble, and I break it with my fingertip just as he slaps his hands together.

‘So,’ he says, ‘mommy wants to know about your birthday.’

Emma’s Big Day is in two weeks, the double-two. Paul and I always go for my birthday dinner, the last thread linking me to their apartments.

‘You’re the reason I met Paul,’ I remind him. ‘I came back from Budapest and was living at the school for hopeless girls, and the Flöge sisters wanted me to model for them, remember? You talked mommy into letting me. I think you were hoping to meet the sisters. The Flöges introduced me to Gus, who introduced me to Paul, and I ran away with him.’

‘I don’t remember … well, I do. But I don’t think about it like that.’

‘You thought about it once. Once was all it took. “If I hadn’t interceded with mommy for Emma …” And so on. You must have told yourself what doing something nice for me got you. It turned out in a way that horrifies her, so you’d do anything to undo it, just to please her, because you know she’s going to be thinking about it half the time when she’s making you do things. But still, you did, so I owe you three wishes, which is what I don’t like to remember. So I’m going to forgive you for saying what you did about Paul just then. That’s one. We’re talking about my Big Day.’

‘It isn’t only about her. It would mean something to daddy, too.’

‘She doesn’t like babies. She doesn’t have to put on the show. She can stop if she wants.’

‘We all want to cast oil on troubled waters. Even her, Emma.’

I wonder for a silence whether to tell him. ‘Emil, you don’t cast oil on troubled waters. It just turns into globules – interstitial tension, you know? – which don’t calm anything. That’s why you pour it instead.’

‘Be that as it may.’

‘You don’t cast anchors either. They’re too heavy. You have to drop them instead. If you don’t believe me, try casting one sometime – I bet you drop it first.’

‘You’re still angry that you didn’t go to university.’

This time I’ve hurt him without meaning to. All right, it’s possible – just checking, Emil. He’s thirty this year. Did he ever dream? I somehow don’t think so. Not everyone dreams in this world, any more than everyone hopes. Some people are just built without qualities, they aren’t designed to reach out, the world will never be more to them than the surfaces they see without ever touching them. Years ago, Paul called him an evil dwarf and we got into a shouting match over it. In my heart, I can’t forget that Paul is right. I could trust the part of him that isn’t under mommy’s heel – there must be one. But where?

And there’s the other half of it: Emil despises Paul right back, which makes every meeting between them a choice for me, which is always Paul. I always remember the look on Emil’s face once, almost the first time they met. It was in a coffeehouse across the canal, in one of the factory quarters, the Eighteenth. Paul was never a working man – howl with laughter you now, Paul Karsch? – but those days he’d been savagely disowned and didn’t have any money either. I was sitting on his knee while he and Emil sank into a long argument about the Munich Secession. Paul kept saying that art can be evil, Emil insisted that morality has no place in art. Von Stuck is an evil artist, Paul told him. Von Stuck is an admirable artist, Emil said. That was like poking Paul with a sharp stick, to use the word ‘admirable’ in front of him. He detests that word, because it rings the same to him as mediocre. He heard it as if Emil had aimed it at him. Then instead of talking about ideas, or aesthetics, or about some subject with meat on its bones, they started arguing terms, so of course it got pettier and pettier. And it got to the point where it wasn’t an exercise any more, they were playing for blood. For once even Emil was acting as if the debate mattered to him. (Emil and words … of course.) And just as it was ending, with no side ahead, well, Paul wasn’t going to have that. So he said, ‘Oh, say, Emil,’ and looked him in the eye and threw him a wink and a big wet air kiss and squeezed my breasts at the same time so that I laughed and blushed. I was too horny back then, all the time and right now, to care who saw how good it felt, even if it was Emil. But I remembered later, after Emil had left, what the look in his eye was meant to tell Paul: ‘You shouldn’t have done that.’ As if Paul had gleaned exactly where his pride was hidden and how to wound it at whim. I look at Emil now, when we’re discussing anything to do with Paul, and it’s still there lurking like some cloud of undead rage. Okay, his look had said, I hoped for a moment you would count in my life. Okay, you don’t. Things are never going to be good between them. I’ve known it since then. To give Emil the ethical high ground? An actual reason to get even? Who would have thought it possible? And how cold will his revenge be, seven years later?

‘I used to be angrier than this,’ I tell him, ‘but I found something better to want that I could have one day.’

‘It’s a cruel world, Emma. I know that. Both of us are capable of cruelty – we have to be. I just don’t think I’m really the one you want to hurt.’

Again, I almost tell him about that guy, the one who scared me, the one from two days ago and twelve years ago. About crippling terror and what it’s like to be able to feel it. It must be wonderful to have a sibling you can talk to, the way Paul can tell Charlotte anything, any time, no matter what. Emil might even remember the guy, too – he was there that night. I wish I could, but I can’t, for Paul’s sake. Because if I tell the wrong side of Emil, mommy will find a way to get Emil to use me to hurt Paul. That’s how it is in the family I’ve got.

‘Do you know what the choice always is, Emil? To be kind. It’s kindness that’s deliberate. These days, this world, it’s cruelty that’s everyone’s fallback. Emil, I’ll go to my birthday.’ If I choose to try once more, it isn’t about mommy and daddy, it’s about him.

‘It’s the best thing, Emma.’

‘If grandfather can come too.’

‘Oh.’

‘I knew you’d talk about this, so I’ve already asked, and he says he will. So tell me what mommy says about it.’

‘You’re going to insist, aren’t you?’

‘It’s Paul’s courage, you’re thinking. As if I can’t find my own. I don’t borrow his courage, he gives it to me. Grandfather’s my real family. If he can come, we’ll be there. I don’t want any more once a year playing at being a family. If I go, I want to see my real family. I don’t want to expose Johnny to the old one I’ve got.’

‘That’s not the reasoning I’ll offer her. But let me try to find a way.’

[ chapter 19 on 11 April ]

In the afternoon I look for a way to fit an armchair into the studio. In the end, I dismantle it into three, carry the pieces up the stairs, and screw it back together. Then I carry up the five canvased stretchers I’ve brought down from the cottage. Then I attach railings to the staircases so that Emma won’t have to fall. Then I try to move a crib up there, but for that one, no means.

In the afternoon, she’s joined me in the studio, under a sunbeam in the chair I’ve moved, watching the sky with Johnny in her lap while I empty the circus trunk and line it with canvas and a multicoloured quilt. Before Johnny, she would come up twice a day to call me for something and to inspect the way she does. Now she’s looking around herself as if she’ll be here a lot. She’s wearing a dress I haven’t seen in a year, a winter frock with a cashmere shawl. Her hair today is two loose braids down her shoulders.

She doesn’t look at me just then. Actually, she does, but only when my back is turned. Women have their pride, and you have to let them keep it. You think because they don’t lead with it as much, they have less. Wrong – they’re saving it up to aim at people they know, while men are out wasting theirs on strangers. (She told me this, which is how I can tell you.) When her pride is wounded, I don’t look at her or say anything. I know what I want to ask: ‘Are you going to tell me what frightened you yesterday?’ She knows I want to ask it. So while I’m preparing the studio, we’re doing this dance we know, where I’m not here to her, or she to me, and we look at Johnny together but not at each other. A moment will come when we blink at the same time.

I’ve swept the floor and washed the windows and walls. I’ve touched up the plaster with a pot of plain white. I’ve stacked some of my papers on the desk for her to file downstairs when she’s looked at them, and mopped the oak floor until it shines, and placed four easels around the room just so. The useful things on my desktop are lined up, which of them I’ve kept. I’ve cleaned off the surfaces of things and polished them with an oiled chamois. When I start tomorrow, I’ll make a terrible mess again. But I don’t want any of it on my mind when I start, so I always give two hours to this. Now the last thing …

‘Where will Johnny’s trunk go?’ I ask her.

‘There.’ From her chair that I’ve assembled, she aims a hyperextended finger at a spot a metre from the corner under the morning sunbeam. So I unfold my ladder and with a tack hammer and heavy thread hang the temple frog where Johnny will be able to watch him.

‘Mister Frog,’ she tells Johnny. We watch them bob their noses and tilt their arms hello. There. The moment has come for us to look at each other again.

‘Are you going to tell me about it one day?,’ I ask.

‘Yes.’ But it’s her wavering yes that means not sure.

I want to tell her: You feel bad. Then you feel bad about feeling bad. Then you feel worse about feeling worse. Then you explode, and when the smoke clears you’re back together again. Emma, you’re not the mystery you think you are, never completely. But I’m not going to tell her that, and I wonder how much her fractured body will have changed her. I don’t know, she doesn’t know, how much strength she’s going to get back, or when her face will fill out again, or her stride lengthen and her breath come deeper, so let’s talk about what we can today, Emma.

‘Take him,’ she says, and I lift Johnny from her arms and watch her raise herself from her chair and totter to the supply cabinet, where she checks tubes and boxes, row on row.

‘Ochres,’ she tells me. ‘Cerulean blue.’

‘Chinese red.’

‘Why?’

‘You’ll see.’

‘Thinner.’ She stares some more. ‘Scrap cloths for your brushes. There’s plenty downstairs.’ With her toe, she taps on the bottom shelf, where I keep the sulphuric. ‘Paul, if you’re not going to do any etching, if the sulphuric’s still there … really. Get rid of it, please, or lock it up.’

‘Okay,’ I say.

‘Do you want me to order the rest?’

‘I can buy it all this afternoon.’

‘You’re going out again?’

‘I want it all here tomorrow. I don’t want to start out knowing it isn’t here.’

‘To Langeweische’s shop,’ she says. She doesn’t add, you’ll be passing the Rosemeyrs’. ‘I’ll write a list for you, then.’

[[ chapter 17 on March 28 ]]