by Dara Horn
Sara moved into the room on delicate bare feet, not wanting to disturb them but fascinated to see what they were making. With soft steps she approached the bald man, who was engrossed in the mound of clay in front of him. She edged closer until she stood beside him, her eyes following his expert fingers as they nudged the clay into a face, a narrow face with a thin nose and narrow, anxious eyes. She watched the delicate fingernails scraping eyelids into existence, and then suddenly recognized the face. It was Ben.
Now Sara looked around the room in awe. There was her mother: her hair, eyes, nose, and mouth were woven into a long, detailed tapestry that a weaver was just now completing along the bottom of her chin. A few feet away, Ben appeared again, this time being freed from a block of marble, his heavy brow merging with his nose as his curved spine slowly announced itself, protruding amid chipped rock and dust. Her mother’s features emerged once more from molten silver, a sheet of gleaming metal pooling into soft lips and narrow cheeks. And then she saw herself, taking form in the shape of blown bubbles of sculpted glass, her smooth child’s body glowing and growing into a woman’s before dissolving into her own reflection on its surface.
She stepped back toward the door, afraid, suddenly, that one of the works of art might see her, fully formed. But as she edged away, she saw her father enter the workshop through another door. Like the other artists, he wore a dirty apron, but the dirt on his was colorful, splashed with bright streaks of paint. He wore the same large glasses he had worn while he was alive, but he walked with two legs. When he at last squinted to look at her, it seemed to her that he wasn’t seeing her, but someone else—or, perhaps, as if he weren’t seeing who she actually was, but who she could be. He opened a wooden cabinet and took out a palette and paintbrush. Before she could wonder what he was going to paint, he approached her, still looking through her, the way she would later look at her own canvases before painting them. He dipped his brush in brown paint and raised it to her head, holding her shoulder with his free hand and brushing curls into her hair, his eyes focused on his subject as she leaned against the door. Then the door opened behind her and Sara plummeted to the earth, waking an instant before reaching the ground.
The next day, late in a long morning of fasting and prayer, came the memorial service for the dead. Sara watched as all the other children in the congregation, everyone but her and Ben, filed quickly out of the room, shooed away by their parents. With no one to mourn for, the other children had no reason to stay at the service; they were granted a recess from God. Sara watched them out the window as they raced each other into the parking lot on the bright fall day, playing under the rain of shining colored leaves.
“A shvarts yor,” her mother said under her breath, “that you should have to stand here next to me.”
A shvarts yor, Sara thought. A black year. A black year? And suddenly Sara had words to understand what she had been seeing all along: time.
It was true what Ben had often said, that Sara didn’t remember things. But that was because for Sara it had become impossible to “remember” things, just as it was impossible to “predict” the future—impossible because there was nothing to remember or predict, but only things to see, a vast landscape of time spread out all around her, the months and years and days assembling and crowding her vision with colors. From that moment forward, Sara did not imagine the past, present, or future, but saw them. She stood among her days, assembling them around her like her mother and brother at the dinner table, and she watched them just as cautiously. Some were pale, grayish, and dull; some shimmered green in dim light; others throbbed red or flamed orange. But the last year was black, like her mother had said, and Sara entered it now, walking slowly past scattered minutes from the past and future that fluttered down from the trees of hours—moments of different colors, different shapes, different degrees of delicacy and softness against her cheeks—and stepping into the cave of a black year.
Inside that black year, the darkness was almost total. But there were nuances, subtleties, perceptible only to the trained eye that has learned to see time for what it really is. A black year comes in many shades. In places—near the entrance, yes, but also elsewhere, unexpectedly—the cave was filled with black smoke. Sara gagged as she moved through it, and sometimes found herself crawling on the floor to breathe, swallowing black mud as she pressed her lips to the ground. In these places she glanced up and saw the air burning in the darkness, a thick smothering smoke that coated her face and filled her brain until it was impossible to imagine light. But in other places the smoke dissipated, leaving a polished hard darkness like an onyx stone, alternately smooth and jagged under her fingers. Still elsewhere, as she proceeded through the year, the black shadows softened into something like pools of ink that squished as she moved through them, with even softer dark holes where she could sit and almost feel comforted, bathed in the soft black air. At some points bits of light leaked through—not directly, but vaguely, announcing their presence through the graying of the rock, the shift from black ink to graphite pencil shades. In those places she could stand, squinting among the shadows until she felt like she could walk for miles and no black year could hold her back. She would stride with shabby confidence across the pools of shadows until, without fail, her head would slam into a gray stalactite, and she would fall back into a dark black hole. But that was hardly the worst. In the deepest part of the cave (just past this point, Sara knew, there was an opening to the light—a small one, a narrow aperture that she could barely squeeze herself through, but an opening all the same) was the wide yawning mouth of the abyss. Sara knew it was there because during that year, she had seen it—blacker than black, not a black made from a mix of colors but a black made from the pure absence of light, a throat, a void. It was featureless, textureless, and worst of all, bottomless. If one fell into it, there was no end, not even laughter. And one could get dangerously close.
Of course, beyond the cave stood an entire world of years. Indigo years, yellow years, orange years, years that blossomed like roses and years that froze like snow and years that dissolved like sand, weeks that rooted themselves and grew and rose and towered out of the earth, and months and months of hard pebble days that bit into sensitive soles and callused them for good. There were times Sara could never have dreamed of—looming pink cliffs of seasons that had to be scaled on their faces or climbed on treacherous paths, roaring iridescent cataracts of entire decades thrown over the edge, vague yellow dunes of sleeping hours, sudden eclipses of nightmares. A few weeks were hard shining apples, or thick bread. One year, her first, was pure white milk. And there were tiny instants, fractions of a second—glances, touches, kisses, sounds, words—that flooded over the time around them, raging, surging with churning currents, and washing entire years away. Yet even these, if you rode their currents, often led into caves. Sara circumnavigated her lifetime and found that it had borders—not borders she could see, but borders she could perceive as she wandered each path through the seasons and found herself at another cavern of black years. She didn’t know, of course, what these moments meant or how they might come to be—she often suspected, in fact, that the timescape wasn’t pre-existent, but was brought into being by her presence, that each step she took determined the next, that perhaps the route that led up the side of a cliff was her own fault, that she might have taken a different path into a different kind of time, that, frighteningly, it was all up to her—but here they were, wordless and undeniable. And no one else was there. The time was hers alone.
Once Sara discovered how to see time, she rarely closed her eyes. As she grew older, everything, not merely time, but everything, turned into color, or light and shadow. Sounds were colors, flavors were colors, even the touch of her mother and Ben and Leonid—Ben’s narrow arms around her, her mother’s gentle shoulder above her head, Leonid’s soft lips on her skin—were colors, shimmering colors, her brother a sturdy gray-green of a growing tree, the segue between gray and green from a fluttering leaf to a bra
nch, her mother a deep, resonating blue, like a square of sky caught in a windowpane just after sundown, and Leonid was the gleam of light on water, a glimmering orange reflection of a brightening sun. More often, though, Sara saw shadows, deep shadows that she moved through from moment to moment, astonished each time to see how little light there was in the world. But after exploring the black years, Sara was no longer afraid of the dark. She remembered once contemplating her own face in the mirror on the eighth black day of the first black year, long ago, when the mirrors were uncovered again. She had stared at her own eyes. Her eyes were mostly white, of course, with a dark part in the middle, divided by a small ring of blue. It seemed to her that a person should see out of the white part of the eye, not the dark part. But that was not how things were. It was only through the deep hole of darkness that she could even perceive herself in the mirror.
Sara rose from her mother-in-law’s bed and returned to the painting. Steeling her stomach against another wave of nausea, she mechanically reattached the canvas to the frame. Then she placed the grayish canvas on the folding easel she had brought with her and pulled open the window blind. The canvas lit up instantly, a block of solid glowing light. Sara saw it and stood transfixed, as if she herself were the primer on the canvas—pallid and dull until suddenly made radiant by the light of the world, a pure brilliant rectangle of light. So much beauty in the world, and no one sees it! She stood for a long time looking at the blank canvas, captivated by light and beauty. Yet when she finally allowed herself to think of what needed to be done, she had to look away. It was as if she had just been told to execute someone, and now the condemned man stood before her, bending his neck across her easel and waiting for her to slash it with her brush. But then she thought of her brother, of her mother, of her father, and forced herself to paint.
She worked without stopping even as the day began fading, darkening the colors, adjusting the lines. She examined the original constantly, afraid to trust the eye within her mind. With a delicate hand, she constructed the layers of buildings on the dark silent street, the arches of the windows, the street itself, the bricks and iron rods of the fences. She painted in the planks of the wooden fence and the tight strokes of the two narrow tombstones before it, sliding her brush along the shiny tin roofs and steeples. With a knifeful of white, she caked snow onto the road and the shiny rooftops, going over the surface again with a wide brush to create furrows in the paint. She let the texture of the canvas peek through the mottled surface of the round brown towers in the foreground, imitating precisely the stick-man shadow on the left and the cobweblike wheel on the right. She alternated thin umbers, stained even darker and moistened with linseed to swirl the surface, with thick grays and whites on the tree whose bare branches (she suddenly noticed) were twisted into the shape of the Hebrew letter that begins one of the names of God. Every brushstroke was exact, every color perfect. Sara was shocked by how easy it was. She felt preoccupied, in the literal sense—as if someone else had previously occupied her hand, and now that former occupier had returned, painting with her until the preoccupied canvas was occupied, effortlessly, by something new. But she also sensed that this was a false feeling, a moment that seemed to be solid ground but melted into quicksand underfoot. And she was right. The feeling vanished as soon as she began to paint the central subject: the man with the pack and cane floating behind the cross of the church steeple in the sky.
The man was the hardest part of all. His proportions were surreal, the length of his body covering several buildings on the street. The lines of his silhouetted profile were drawn as if he were standing straight, his pack sagging and his coat wrinkled as if by gravity, but he was oriented nearly facedown, almost horizontal over the town. Only the angle of his cane suggested that he knew he had been released from the earth. What made him so difficult to paint was the darkness. In the original, he floated entirely in shadow, backlit by an invisible sun on a bare yellow and white winter sky, with only the dimmest suggestions of colors, of an arm, a beard, an eye. The only feature with the slightest light in it was the man’s hand, a set of fingers curled in perfect order around the cane planted in the earth. Sara squinted at that hand and suddenly saw—she didn’t remember or imagine, she saw—her father’s fingers curled tight around the handle of his crutches, pink knuckles in perfect rows except for the straightened index finger that he was now stretching toward her, about to press it into her soft eleven-year-old palm, until he disappeared.
After that, she couldn’t paint anymore. She managed to complete the man, wisping in the white strands of his barely visible beard, but her movements were automatic. She was applying paint to canvas, but she wasn’t painting. When she had at last finished and stepped back, it was obvious to her that she had failed. The man was an exact replica of the one in the original painting, down to the uneven edges of his cloak and the shadows of his face. But Sara could see that her man was a dead body, propped up by a rotting wooden cane. A floating corpse.
Biting her lower lip, she tried to ignore it. She set about decorating the back of the canvas with age marks, meticulously replicating the stains on the wooden canvas frame. She consulted The Art Forger’s Handbook again and gently drenched the left edge of the canvas in water to reflect damage from damp storage conditions. At the very end, mixing the perfect proportions of yellow ochre and burnt sienna, she forged the signature of Marc Chagall.
Yet she had failed, and she knew it. When Sara made her own paintings, she always knew when they worked, because she could look at the picture and see that something had been found. Or not “found,” exactly. More like recovered—as if she were suddenly recognizing something she had seen a long time ago, like a dream that returns in fragments: a phrase, a room, a feeling of intense fear, a smell. But here, in this dead town shadowed by a dead man, there was nothing to recover, nothing to find. There was scarcely anything to see. As she backed away from the canvas, she noticed the two tombstones in the foreground and realized whose they were.
She staggered to the bathroom and vomited, then crouched on the bathroom floor, gasping for breath. Surrounded by blank white tiles, she struggled against the tug of the not-yet child within her, pulling her into the future.
BEN ARRIVED THAT evening, too anxious to wait to see it, and Leonid came with him. Sara was still sitting on the bathroom floor when they knocked at the door. When she dragged herself up to let them in, she saw her husband and her twin brother standing in the doorway, a framed confluence of loves.
“You look—colorful,” Leonid said, and reached for her. As she raised her arms to hug him, she saw what she thought he meant. Her skin was streaked with paint.
But Ben was more blunt. “Sara, you look sick. What’s wrong?”
“It’s the baby, that’s all. I’m fine,” she muttered. Even now the smells in the hallway were orange and green.
Leonid bent down to kiss her, and then sniffed at the air. “The fumes are probably bad. I should have thought of the fumes.”
She shrugged, feeling ill. “I paint every day, and it doesn’t bother me,” she said weakly.
“This is worse for some reason,” Leonid answered. He turned his head, sniffed again in the apartment’s narrow hallway, and then wandered off toward the window. As he occupied himself with trying to pry the window open, Ben touched her paint-stained arm, glancing up to gauge Leonid’s distance from his voice.
“I don’t know if I can do this, Sara,” he said softly.
“Why not?”
“Because—because of Erica. The one you met, from the museum,” he stammered.
Sara watched as the red color that had drained from her own skin seeped into her brother’s, dyeing his neck and ears. She held back a smile.
“She’s going to think it’s real,” he said quickly, glancing across the room. Leonid had finally managed to throw the window open. “She—she believes me. I just don’t know if I can—”
“You’ll do it,” Sara said as Leonid returned. “It’s already done
.”
“I need to fix that window,” Leonid announced as he returned to the twins. Sara watched with quiet awe as he casually inspected the room on his way back to them, testing the air conditioner and the closet doors. He had never lived in this apartment, but he had helped his mother buy it the previous year. His enormous shoulders were built for burdens. He reached the doorway and stooped before her, executing an absurdly sweeping mock bow. “Your highness, may we have the privilege of observing the masterpiece?”
“In the kitchen,” she said, then edged along with them toward the little newspaper-covered room. She glanced at the real painting, and then at the canvas she had made. When she saw the forgery, she could hear the heavy thunk of dirty colors, the rattle and thud of the dead man and his cane. It was a joke, she realized. The two weren’t even close.
“I’m sorry,” she said. But then she turned around to see her husband’s and brother’s faces frozen in shock.
Ben was the first to find his voice. “What are you talking about, Sara?” he breathed. “I don’t even know which one is real.”
Leonid wasn’t one for guessing. He moved closer to the canvases before Ben did, shifting his towering head until he could see the glare reflected off the forgery’s wet paint. “It’s incredible,” he murmured. He turned and embraced her, nearly crushing her in his arms. “Absolutely incredible.”
But Sara was watching her brother. Ben had stepped back again from the two canvases, his eyes wide. He turned his head from one painting to the other, and Sara found herself hoping that he would notice something missing from the one she had made—not something one could see, but something one could feel. When he opened his mouth to speak, Sara’s heart thumped out a prayer. But it was pointless.