by Dara Horn
And then he met Comrade Chagall.
SINCE BORIS HAD arrived at Malakhovka, there had been no art class; the teacher had fallen ill, and had departed for Moscow. But that early spring day, for the first time, art classes were scheduled to resume.
Boris had never been in the art room before, which doubled as a classroom space for boys older than he was. When he entered that morning for his first art class, the artwork by the students from three months earlier still hung on the dirty walls. Their paintings were full of grinning workers, muscular boys and girls hauling bales of hay, Red Army soldiers waving proud fists in the air, a red dawn always rising in the background. Boris looked at the pictures and thought they were ugly. But he sensed that this might be a wrong thought, a bad thought, the kind of thought that—he had learned in his socialism class—led to things like horses and boys being beaten, though Boris could not understand the connection, and he tried to look at the pictures with an appropriate amount of awe as he filed into the room with the rest of his class. Boris sat near the back of the room, behind several long rows of shaven heads. Suddenly the boys in front of him jumped to attention, standing beside their seats. Between their heads, Boris saw that a man had come into the room.
“Please, sit down. You make me nervous that way,” the man’s voice said.
The boys sat down in unison, their backs straight. Now Boris could see the man clearly. He was a tall man, younger than most of Boris’s other teachers. He wore clothes that none of his other teachers wore—gray pants with thin white stripes on them, and bright red suspenders over a dirty white shirt. His head was covered with dark curls, which made Boris jealous. He looked at the class, his eyes wide, then glanced at his own hands. He coughed once, and the noise was still bouncing off of the concrete floor when he began to speak.
“Good morning, boys. You’ve probably guessed already that I’m your new art teacher for the term. I’m Comrade Chagall.” He coughed again, into his fist.
The boys answered in a chorus, and Boris joined them: “Good morning, Comrade Chagall.”
The teacher pressed his thick lips together and leaned back against the wall. A hiccup of air escaped his lips, and he quickly turned to the side, pretending to fix the cuff of his sleeve as he cupped his mouth with his palm. He glanced back at the class and stuck out his lower lip like a child, blowing air up so that a lock of hair on his forehead rose and quickly fell. Then he began to pace around the edge of the room, looking at the paintings on the walls. The boys watched him, motionless.
“These,” he said suddenly, sweeping his arm across a broad wall of red dawns. “Who painted these?”
The class was silent, unsure of what was coming next. Finally the boy directly in front of Boris raised a finger. “Students, Comrade Chagall.”
“What students?” the man asked. “You students, or other students?”
The boys glanced at one another, their eyes narrow. Was it a compliment? Boris leaned back slightly in his seat, relieved that he had never had an art class before. “Some are from us, some are from the other boys,” a big boy next to Boris volunteered.
The man nodded slowly, still looking at the walls. “I asked,” he said, turning to face the class, “because I know that you can do better than this.”
Boris watched as the pale neck of the boy in front of him turned red. The boys in his row squirmed in their seats, their eyes on the floor.
“How many of you have had art class before?” the man asked.
The boys looked at each other and bit their lips. A few raised their hands, carefully, as if afraid to disturb the air, staring into their own laps.
“What did your last teacher tell you about how to paint?”
A pause hung heavily in the air, until a boy Boris hated spoke—a cruel boy whose head sprouted the shaved beginnings of orange hair. Boris had seen him throwing rocks at stray dogs. “He just told us to paint what we see,” he said.
“To paint what you see,” the teacher repeated, as if he were the student. “To paint what you see, or to paint what you look at?”
The orange-headed boy looked at the teacher and opened his mouth, but said nothing.
“Just because you look at something doesn’t mean you can really see it,” the man said, looking first at the boy and then at the class. “Look at my hand, for example,” he said, waving his left hand in the air. “If I were to cut myself, the blood that would come out of my hand would be red. Blood is red, right?”
Boris cringed. There wasn’t a boy in the room who didn’t intimately know the color of blood. He glanced around quickly, noticing how the other boys hid their wincing—drawing their eyebrows together, rubbing their shaved heads, pressing their palms against their cheeks. The red-fuzzed boy looked down at his desk, his lower lip lodged between his teeth. No one spoke or even whispered. The entire room sat in silence, waiting.
“But look at my hand right now,” the man was saying. With awkward, jerky motions, he rolled up his stained sleeve and revealed a pale left arm. “See the veins?” He traced a dirty finger along the back of his hand, holding it out to the class. “This blood isn’t red. It’s blue!”
The man turned to the jars of paint resting on the table in front of him and chose a brush, dipping it first in blue, then in green. Boris leaned to one side to see around the head of the boy in front of him. While the boys stared, the man put the brush to the back of his hand and began running it along his skin, tracing branching rivers up from his fingers along his forearm, all the way onto the edge of his shirt cuff above his elbow. Boris watched as the man leaned forward with both hands on the table in front of him, his two arms like twins, one clothed and one naked. Boris’s eyes traced the paths of blue blood running up from the man’s knuckles like water through the roots of a tree, up through his forearm and elbow and shoulder and toward the man’s heart. “I don’t want you just to look, or even to imagine,” the man said. “I want you to see.”
The man gathered a pile of large papers up in his arms and began quickly distributing them along the sides of the room, and then started passing out brushes and jars of paint. The boys, unable to understand the concept of someone doing something for them, got up out of their seats and began distributing the supplies themselves. “Today I want you to paint something you have seen yourself,” the man said.
Boris glanced around the room again and saw the other boys—the ones passing out supplies and the ones still sitting down—avoiding each others’ eyes. He couldn’t think of anything he had ever seen that he would want to paint.
But the man kept talking, and Boris saw a smile creeping up over his face as the boys in the front row began to wet their brushes. “Whether you saw it yesterday or years ago, I don’t care. It doesn’t matter what it is, either. Or how you paint it. It could be a person. A tree. A rectangle. I don’t care. So long as you paint what you really see.”
Boris’s row finally got its supplies. There wasn’t much, and they would have to share the colors. The boy on Boris’s right began painting a thick blue stripe along the bottom of his paper. Then Boris thought of something he had seen that seemed to fit what the man had said, something inside, like the blue blood in the man’s veins. And he began to paint a picture of a womb.
Most people have never seen the inside of a womb—or, rather, everyone has seen it, but almost no one remembers it. Boris had been reminded of what it looked like on that night the previous spring, but that was just red blood, like the man said. Instead he painted what he had seen, inside, before. He made an outline of a body, bulging at its center, remembering something his mother had told him. For the past three months at Malakhovka, he had remembered nothing, but now he discovered that his thoughts were like the man’s veins, suddenly and clearly rising to the surface.
The baby had been kicking a lot that day, she said. He saw her very clearly now: she was sitting beside him on his bed, her heavy body pulling the blanket tight. It was a spring night, and cool. Her bulging blouse glowed gold in the l
ight of the lamp. She took his hand in hers (did he see the blue blood flowing in her fingertips as she took his hand, or was he only imagining it?) and placed it on her stomach. “Feel it,” she said.
Boris tried very hard, but felt nothing, and was so embarrassed to have felt nothing that he pretended that he had felt it. There was a quiet shame in lies like these, not-quite lies that were only not-quite lies because they would never be noticed. A silent shame. Afraid of the silence, Boris strained to say something, anything. “What’s the baby doing in there?” he asked, suddenly realizing that he did not know. “Why is he taking so long to come out?” And so his mother told him what happens to people who are waiting to be born.
Before being born, his mother explained, babies go to school. Not a school like Boris’s, but a different kind of school, where all the teachers are angels. The angels teach each baby the entire Torah, along with all of the secrets of the universe. Then, just before each baby is born, an angel puts its finger right below the baby’s nose—here she paused to put her finger across his lips (could he see the blood under her skin, or did he only imagine it?)—and whispers to the child: Shh—don’t tell. And then the baby forgets.
“Why does he have to forget?” Boris had asked, moving his lips beneath her finger. He didn’t want to know, not really. But his mother’s back had stiffened, and he could feel that she might get up at any moment, put out the light, walk away, disappear.
She pulled her hand away from his face, resting it on her own stomach. “So that for the rest of his life,” she said, “he will always have to pay attention to the world, and to everything that happens in it, to try to remember all the things he’s forgotten.”
Boris thought about this for a moment, but his mother was already leaning forward, about to kiss him good night. Please, he thought, don’t leave. “Have you ever remembered anything?” Boris asked desperately. “I mean, any of the things you forgot?”
“Only a few,” she whispered, brushing her lips on his ear. But before he could ask her what they were, she put out the light and vanished.
The womb Boris painted was dark inside, cavelike, with painted stalactites dripping down from its sides, and illuminated only by a single ray of narrow painted light. But inside it was a treasure house, like the one he had once heard about that explorers had found in Egypt, an underground hideaway filled with everything necessary for the next world. Bookcases climbed up the back wall of the womb. Its bottom was cushioned with piles of old scrolls. In the middle of it all was a small table—it was difficult, Boris found, to make the table straight, with the brush trembling in his hand—where a little baby sat on a chair. A thick pink baby (Boris, by accident, had made him a little thicker than he should have been), bald, as if he were already an old man. (Boris wondered: Do some people grow young before they are born, the way some people grow old before they die?) The baby was sitting in front of a large book, but he was looking straight ahead, a gaze that was unintentionally unnerving. Next to the baby floated an angel. Not like the ones he had seen carved onto the doors of churches, with two wings, but like the ones his father had once described, with six wings: with two it covered its face, and with two it covered its legs, and with the final two it flew. In the womb on Boris’s crowded page, the angel hovered just to the left of the baby, a feathered cloud of white and blue paint. As he finished the angel’s final wings, Boris was annoyed to see that a drop of blue paint had fallen, by accident, just beneath the baby’s nose.
“It’s marvelous,” a voice behind him said.
Boris looked up. He hadn’t noticed everyone else leaving the room. Now the room was empty except for him and the teacher who stood behind him, blue paint wrinkling the skin of the hairy forearm that he leaned against Boris’s desk. Boris shivered. He hadn’t been alone with an adult since that morning in the cemetery, when someone had found him in the grave.
The man leaned in closer over the table, examining the painting. To avoid looking at the man, Boris examined it, too, and realized that none of it had come out the way he wanted. The baby was far too fat; the beam of light looked more like a sheaf of straw; the angel looked more like a cloud than a bird. And then there was that blue mark below the baby’s nose, exactly where it shouldn’t be. The cheap paint had already begun to dry. Boris waited for the man to speak. The man kept looking, though, and suddenly he started whistling. Afraid to move, Boris listened to the thin blue melody rising from the man’s heavy lips. It sounded less like a whistle than a wail, crying condensed into a narrow beam of breath. Then Boris recognized it. It was the tune for the prayer El Maley Rachamim, “God Full of Mercy,” the one sung in cemeteries. In the past year Boris had often stolen money from the pockets of mourners at crowded funerals, while they listened, bawling, to cantors howling out that song.
The whistling stopped. “Marvelous,” the man repeated. “What’s your name?”
“Comrade Kulbak,” Boris answered.
The man coughed, and in the cough Boris thought he could detect a hidden laugh. He felt his face becoming pinker than the fat baby’s. Noticing a blotch of paint on his own hand, he wondered if his face, too, was marked beneath the nose. He rubbed his upper lip. “Comrade Kulbak,” the teacher repeated. “I would love to have this painting, if I could. To put on the wall for the class.”
Boris swallowed, and pressed his dirty hands down along the painting’s edges. “What’ll you give me for it?” he growled. This was what he always did, ever since his first beating, whenever someone wanted to take something from him. Months earlier, someone had asked for his shoes, and he had gotten four rolls and two pieces of candy for them. He still had no shoes, but it had been worth it.
This time the teacher laughed openly. “Comrade Kulbak, you’re a little capitalist!”
Boris kept his eyes on his painting, his grip fierce. He didn’t understand what the word meant, exactly, though it had been explained to him many times. All he knew was that it was something terrible.
But the man didn’t seem to care. “You’re very smart, Comrade Kulbak,” the man said. “If it’s a trade you want, fine. That’s fair. Come with me, and we’ll see if I have anything to trade.”
The man offered Boris his hand, the one with the blue-painted veins. Boris looked at the hand, then at the man’s face, and then back at his hand again, unsure of what to do with it. After a long time, the man laughed again and took hold of Boris’s hand. Boris felt his chapped palm rubbing against the man’s hard slab of a hand, like chalk writing on stone. The touch made him shiver. With his other hand Boris clung to the edge of his painting, careful not to drag it against his side. Silently, the man led him out of the room, across the muddy lawn, and toward the main road. As they walked across the mud, Boris looked at his own bare feet and saw the blue blood beneath his skin. He looked at the mud and saw the things it was made of: fallen leaves, bits of bark, melted snow, pieces of bone. In a few moments they were standing outside a large stone house that Boris had seen many times before, one that the younger boys said was haunted. But Boris wasn’t afraid of the dead.
“I’M SORRY ABOUT the smell,” the man said as he pried open the wooden door. “We don’t use the ground floor. We keep the windows open all the time, to try to air it out. It’s still too dirty to live in.”
Boris followed the man inside, his eyes growing wider to let in the feeble light. The man’s comment shocked him. Three months ago, he would have considered this a palace. There were two dark rooms, with a narrow wooden staircase between them. Empty medicine bottles were scattered over the floors, interspersed with heaps of animal dung. A cold breeze blew through the open windows, and the smell—a familiar smell from the streets where he once slept, sickness condensed into a breath—coated the air around him like a layer of paint. It smelled orange, and green. The man pinched his own nostrils closed as he led Boris up the stairs. “My wife and daughter aren’t here now,” he said, his voice ringing through his nose. “They went to visit my wife’s family in Vitebsk.” At the
top of the stairs, he opened a door, and Boris followed, allowing the door to slam into the smell behind him. And suddenly Boris was standing in a place that reminded him of a womb.
It was a long, narrow room, with light pouring in like a river of gold through a single window on one side. Under the window an easel was set up with a canvas propped on it, its white radiance untouched. Bookcases climbed up the back wall of the room, the middle and high shelves sagging with books of all colors and sizes, while the bottom shelves were taken up with rolls of canvas. There were two tables scattered with dozens of tubes of paint—real tubes, metal tubes, not like the watery jars they had used in class—and with drinking glasses filled with green and brown and orange water. Large paintings hung on the side walls one after another—a woman flying on a man’s hand like a flag, a man and woman flying together through the air, a bride and groom held together by an angel, the bride with a little person embedded in her cheek. Along the edges of the room, stacked canvases leaned against the walls, the uppermost of which were vertical portraits of people who looked to Boris like they had been broken into pieces—a man playing a violin, a fat woman clapping her hands, and last, an unfinished pale man in profile, writing on a scroll. In one corner was an iron bed like Boris’s, stretched to a width longer than its length by a stack of old wooden boards that were rotting like railway ties. There was a sink and a stove, and a few wooden chairs. Pink and yellow dolls’ clothes were strewn across the middle of the floor, which was stained with blotches of blue paint. Boris looked at the clothes and imagined—no, he didn’t imagine, he saw—the absent dolls (had there been many dolls, or just one well-dressed one?) lining up to leave the womb. The angel from the painting of the wedding came down from the wall and stood by the door as each of the dolls went by, pressing its finger into their little lips, to make them forget.