The Kohls, however, were tolerated year after year, though they were not at all regular with the rent, or in their morals. They were not expected to be; they were artists. Kohl was a painter, and in pre-Hitler Germany had been famous. His wife Marta said she had been an actress and a dancer, though not famous in either capacity. They rented the two top rooms but lived in them more or less separately. One room was his—his studio; she also referred to hers as a studio, though she didn’t do anything artistic in there. She was much younger than he, and very attractive, a tiny redhead. It was unlikely that, if he had not been famous, she would ever have married someone so much older and so undistinguished in appearance. He was short and plump, and bald except for a fringe of hair at the back; he had an unattractive mustache that she called his toilet brush. He didn’t seem to care that lovers came to visit her in her room; when that happened, he shut his door and went on painting. He painted all the time, though I don’t think he sold anything during those years. I’m not sure what they lived on, probably on an allowance from some relief organization. For a time she had a job in the German section of the BBC, but she soon lost it. There were too many others far more competent and also more reliable than she, who found it impossible ever to be on time for anything.
Mann was another of our lodgers. His first name was Gustav, but no one ever called him anything except Mann. I disliked him. He was loud and boastful and took up more time in the second-floor bathroom we all had to share than anyone except Marta. Another reason I disliked him was that he was one of the men who spent time with Marta in her room, forcing Kohl to shut his door. I had no such hostile feelings toward her other male visitors but was as indifferent to them as Kohl seemed to be. He too was not indifferent to Mann. Whenever they met on the stairs, he said something insulting to him, which Mann received with great good humor. “Okay okay, my friend, take it easy,” he said and even soothingly tapped his shoulder, at which Kohl cried out, “Don’t touch me!” and jerked away from him. Once he stumbled and rolled down several steps, and Mann laughed. Mann also used to laugh whenever he passed me. I was sixteen at the time and not attractive, and he made me feel even less so by pretending that I was. “Charming,” he said, fingering the navy blue school tunic I wore and hated. I was in my last years at school—too old for it, I felt, and longing for what I thought of as the real world.
Those particular years are probably difficult for most girls, and it didn’t help that they happened to be the post-war ones in England, with drab food, drab climate, and clothes not only rationed but made of a thick standard so-called “Utility” material. But that didn’t really matter: I wasn’t so responsive to what was going on outside as to what was going on inside me. My surroundings were only a chrysalis, I felt, waiting for me to burst out and become something else. Only what? I didn’t feel that I could ever be butterfly material, and whenever Mann looked at me and said his tongue-in-cheek “Charming,” it was obvious that this was also his opinion.
It was different with Kohl. I often sat for him while he drew me. Unable to afford a model, he had already drawn most of the people in the house, including my aunt. She had looked at her portrait with round eyes and her hand before her mouth in only partly amused distress: “No—really?” she said. But it really was her, not perhaps as she was meant to be—as, in more hopeful years, she had expected to be—but how she had become, after the war, after survival, after hard unaccustomed domestic work, and the habitual shortage of money that was also unexpected. It was my aunt who had brought me to England, more or less tearing me out of my mother’s arms, promising her that she would soon be reunited with me. This never happened: after the age of two, I never again saw my mother, nor my father, nor any other relative. Only my aunt—her name was Elsa, but I called her La Plume (from my French lesson—“La Plume de ma Tante”). She was nearly fifty at the time; some nights I saw her asleep on her bed in the kitchen alcove—her heavy red swollen face, her greying hair bedraggled on a pillow, her mouth open and emitting the groans she must have suppressed during the day. It was this person whom she did not recognize in Kohl’s drawing of her.
I was always ready to sit for my portrait. Once I was home from school, I had nowhere else to go. I didn’t share many of the interests of my classmates nor was I involved in then intense relationships, which were mostly with each other. When invited to their homes, I found them smaller than mine, more cramped in every way. They lived in semi-detached or terraced houses, with a rectangular stretch of garden at the back where their fathers dug and grew vegetables on their days off from their jobs as postmen or bus conductors. Only one family lived in each house whereas ours swarmed with people, each one carrying a distinct history (the load of their ruined past). The unruly lives of our lodgers were reflected in the state of our back garden. It was wildly overgrown, for no one knew how to mow the grass, even if we had had anything to mow it with; buried within its rough tangle lay the pieces of a broken statue, which had been there ever since we moved in. Ours was one of the few tall old houses left that had not been pulled down in the reconstruction of the neighborhood in the 1930s, or bombed during the war. Its pinnacle was Kohl’s studio on the top floor, and when I sat for him, I felt myself to be detached from and floating above the tiled roofs of the little English villas among which our boarding house had come to anchor.
Kohl worked through the night, painting huge canvases in oil that one only saw in glimpses, for he either covered them with a cloth or turned them face to the wall. These paintings were not interesting to me—in fact, I thought they were awful: great slashing wounds of color, completely meaningless like someone else’s nightmare or the deepest depths of a subconscious mind. But when he drew me, it was always by day. He perched close to me, knee to knee, holding a pad on his lap and drawing on it in pencil or charcoal. While he was working, Kohl was always happy. He and his hand were effortlessly united in one fluid action over the paper on to which he was transferring me. He smiled, he hummed, he whispered a little to himself, and when his eyes darted toward me, that blissful smile remained. “Ah, sweet,” he breathed, now at his drawing, now at me. I too felt blissful; no one had ever looked at me or murmured over me in such a way; and although I had of course no sentiment for him—this small paunchy middleaged man—at such moments I did feel a bond with him, not so much as between two persons as in something else coming alive between us. With so many people living in it, there was always movement in the house, noise: doors, voices, footsteps. But there at the top, we felt entirely alone and bound to each other by his art.
The one person ever to disturb us was his wife Marta—and she was not only a disturbance but a disruption, an eruption into our silence. Although they lived separately in their separate rooms, she entered his as of right, its rightful mistress. Without a glance at me, she went straight to look over his shoulder at the drawing: she stood there, taking it in. I felt the instrument in his hand stumble in its effortless motion. There was a change of mood in everything except her who stood behind him, looking, judging, one little hand on her hip which was slightly thrust forward in a challenging way. Her glinting green eyes darted from the drawing to me and took me in, not as the subject of his drawing but as an object of her appraisal. After a pause, she returned to the drawing and pointed to something with her forefinger extended. “Don’t touch,” he hissed, but she only brought her finger closer to show what she judged to be wrong. He pushed her hand aside roughly, which made her laugh. “You never could stand criticism,” she said and walked away from him, sauntering around the room; if she found something tasty left on a plate, she ate it. He pretended to go on working, but I could feel his attention was more on her, as was mine. She took her time before leaving, and even when she was half out of the door, she turned again and told me, “Don’t let him keep you sitting too long: once he starts, he doesn’t know when to stop.” It took a long time for Kohl to recover his concentration; sometimes he couldn’t manage it at all and we had to stop for the day.
Once, when this happened, he asked me to go for a walk with him. I had noticed that he always took an afternoon walk and usually to the same place. This was a little park we had in the neighborhood—an artificial little park, with small trees and a wooden bridge built over a little stream which rippled over white stones. The place seemed dull to me—I was reading the Romantic poets for my Higher Secondary, and my taste was for wild landscapes and numinous presences. Now I saw that this park, which I despised, represented something delightful to him. It was a spring day the first time I accompanied him, and I had never seen anyone so relish the smell of the first violets and their touch—he bent down to feel them—and the sound of starlings that had joyfully survived the winter. He made me take his arm, a gallant gesture that embarrassed me, and we paraded up and down the winding paths and under the trees that were not big enough to hide the sky. He said he loved everything that was young and fresh—here he slightly pressed my arm, tucked under his; when a blossom floated down and landed in my hair, he picked it out and said, “Ah sweet,” the way he did when drawing. We sat on a bench together, romantically placed by the rippling stream, and there he recited poetry to me: far from being young and fresh, the lines seemed quite decadent—something about a poet’s black mistress or a rotting corpse. According to Kohl, this had been a favourite poet of his in his younger days, when he had lived in Paris and sat in the same cafés as Braque and Derain.
After that first walk, he often asked me to go with him, but I usually refused. It embarrassed me to be seen arm in arm with someone older than my father or my uncle—had I had one. He never tried to change my mind, but when I saw him walking by himself, he looked so sad and lonely that I went with him more often than I wanted to. It was a strange and entirely new sensation for me to see another person happy in my company when I myself had no such feeling at all. He was undoubtedly happy in that pathetic little park, listening to birds and smelling flowers, walking up and down with me, aged sixteen, on his arm. But when we sat on the bench by the stream and he recited Baudelaire in French, I became wistful. I realized that the situation was, or should have been, romantic—if only he had been other than he was, an old man in a homburg hat with an ugly mustache.
He began to invite me on other outings, such as his Sunday afternoon visits to galleries and museums. I did go with him a few times but did not enjoy it—starting from the long tube ride where we sat side by side and I wanted people to think we were not together. Looking back now, all these years later, I see that it should have been regarded as a great privilege for me to see great paintings with an artist such as Kohl who had once been famous (and became so again). He kept me close beside him, standing in front of the paintings he had come to view—usually only two or three. He made no attempt to explain anything to me, only pointed at certain details that I wouldn’t have thought extraordinary—light falling on an apple or a virgin’s knee—and saying, “Ah ah ah,” with the same ecstasy as when he was working. Afterwards he would treat me to a cup of coffee. At that time there were only certain standard eating places in London that he could afford: dingy rooms with unfriendly elderly waitresses, especially depressing if it was raining outside, as it often was, and we had to remain uncomfortable in our wet coats and shoes. But he seemed to enjoy these occasions, even the bad coffee, and continued to sit there after the waitress had slapped down the bill in front of him. At last I had to tell him that my aunt would be worried if I came home too late. Then he regretfully got up; and it was only at that last moment, when he was picking up the bill, that his hand brushed against mine very delicately, very shyly, and he smiled at me in the same way, delicate and shy.
The only times I really liked to be with him were in his studio when he was drawing me. All I saw out of his window was a patch of sky with some chimneys rearing up into it. When it got dark and he turned on the light, even that disappeared. There remained only the room itself, with its iron bed, often unmade, a wooden table full of drawings, and the canvases that he painted at night, piled face downward one against another on every available inch of wall. The floor was bare and had paint splashed all over it. There was a one-burner gas-ring, on which I don’t think he ever cooked; all I saw him eat was a herring or a fried egg sandwich bought at a corner shop. He seemed always to be working, deeply immersed in it and immersing me with him. This was what I responded to—it was the first time I had been in the presence of an artist practicing his art, and later, when I began to write, I often thought of it, and it inspired me.
Our occupation with each other was entirely innocent, but it went on too long and perhaps too often, so that others began to take notice. My aunt, La Plume, would call up, “Don’t you have any homework?” or make excuses to send me on unnecessary errands. When I came down, she would look at me in a shrewd way. Once she said, “You know, artists are not like the rest of us.” When I didn’t understand, or pretended not to, she went on, “They don’t have the same morals.” To illustrate her point, she told me some anecdote about herself and my mother, who had both been crazy about opera and hung about the stage door in the hope of meeting the artists. Here she began to smile and, forgetting about artists in general, began to speak of a particular tenor. He had taken a liking to my mother who, with her shingled hair and very short skirt showing a lot of silk stocking, looked more forward than she was. He had invited the two girls to his flat—“His wife was there, and another woman we thought may have been another wife for him, you know, a mistress.” Her smile became a laugh, more pleasure than outrage, as she remembered the atmosphere, which was so different from that of their own home that they had an unspoken pact never to mention their visits to the tenor’s flat. In the end, they stopped going; there were too many unexplained relationships and too many quarrels, and what had seemed exciting to them at first was now unsettling. Shortly afterward both of them became engaged to their respective suitors—a book-keeper, and a teacher (my father). Winding up her story, she said, “So you see,” but I didn’t see anything, especially what it might have to do with me, who had no suitor to fall back on.
Marta began to intrude on our drawing sessions more frequently and to stay longer than she used to. She perched on a stool just behind him, so that he could not see but could certainly feel her. And hear her—for she talked all the time, criticizing his drawing, the state of his cheerless room, the cold that he seemed never to notice, except that in the worst weather he wore gloves with the fingers cut off. In the end he gave up—his concentration long gone—and he threw his pencil aside and said, “But what do you want?”
She stretched her green eyes wide open at him: “Want? What could I possibly want from you, my poor Kohl?”
But once she answered, “I want to invite you to my birthday party.”
He cursed her birthday and her party, and her eyes opened even wider, greener: “But don’t you remember? You used to love my birthday! Each year a new poem for me . . . He wrote poetry,” she told me. “Real poetry, with flowers, birds, and a moon in it. And I was all three: flowers, birds, and moon. Now he pretends to have forgotten.”
Birthdays were always the occasion for a fuss, even for those lodgers whom no one liked very much. I suppose that, in celebrating a birthday as something special, people were trying to take the place of the family we had all lost. Usually these parties were held in our basement kitchen, which was the only room large enough—the rest of the house was divided up into individual small units for renting out. My aunt was known as a good sort and was the only person everyone got on with; she was always ready to let people come down to her kitchen and tell her their troubles as though she had none of her own. For birthday parties she covered the grease stains and knife cuts on our big table with a cloth and made the bed she slept on look as much as possible like a sofa for guests to sit on. She arranged sausage slices on bread and baked a cake with margarine and eggs someone had got on the black market. Those who wanted liquor brought their own bottles, though she didn’t encourage drinking; it seemed to make pe
ople melancholy or quarrelsome and spoiled the mood of celebration.
Marta’s party was not held in our kitchen but in her room at the top of the house. Since this was too small to hold many people, she had persuaded Kohl to open his studio across the landing for additional space. Although the two rooms were identical in size, their appearance was very different. While his was strictly a workplace, with nothing homelike in it, hers was all home, all coziness. There were colorful rugs, curtains, heaped cushions, lampshades with tassels, and most of the year she kept her gas-fire going day and night, careless of the shillings that it swallowed. There were no drawings or paintings—Kohl never gave her any—but a lot of photographs, mostly of herself having fun with friends, when she was much younger but also just as pretty.
On that day, her birthday, she was very excited. She rushed to meet each new arrival and, snatching her present, began at once to unwrap it, shrieking. Apart from my aunt and myself, the guests were all men. She hadn’t invited any of our female lodgers, such as Miss Wundt (who was anyway under notice to quit), and these must have been skulking down in their rooms listening to the party going on above. Not all the men lived in our house. Some I didn’t know, though I might have seen them on the stairs on their visits to Marta, often carrying flowers. There was one very refined person, with long hair like an artist’s rolling over his collar. He wasn’t an artist but had been a lawyer and now worked in a solicitor’s office, not having a licence to practice in England. Another, introduced as a Russian nobleman, bowed from the waist in a stately way but was soon very drunk, so that his bows became as stiff as those of a mechanical doll. To celebrate the birthday, a great deal of liquor had been brought in by the more affluent guests who were not our lodgers; one man, for instance, though also a refugee, had done very well in the wholesale garment business.
My Nine Lives Page 19