Caging Skies

by Christine Leunens

  Elsa rolled the tip of her paintbrush lightly over black so that minute beads like caviar stuck to the hairs. Her timidity didn't last long. Within days she was submerging it down to the collar, staining the wooden handle, transporting undiluted globs, enough to fill an oyster shell, which didn't always make it to the canvas. Embarrassed, she glanced down at her coat and around her, then resumed her handiwork as I brooded over the landing place she hadn't seen on her hem or the cuff of her sleeve.

  I wanted to tell her not to use the canvases to test the colours — they were expensive and too bulky for me to carry more than two at a time — but I didn't want her to think me stingy, or be distracted by my petty concerns. She went through a dozen a week, proud of how hard she was trying. I think she simply had no idea of the cost. She was too alienated from the real world, and whose fault was that?

  Her concentration was so intense she forgot about me. To win her attention I would stretch, push my yawns further than they would've gone on their own, roll around in an exaggerated fashion to crack my back. The crease between her eyebrows let me know I was being a nudnik — Yiddish for something like pest. The questions I made myself ask — 'Do you think you'll be famous one day?' 'Could you fancy being rich as the Pope?' — probably didn't merit answers, which is why they got none.

  Feigning interest in what she was doing got me further. 'What's the name of that green?' 'That's a lovely brush stroke — how did you do that?' Her explanations nevertheless contained a hint of impatience. Maybe I asked too many questions. The only ones that truly interested her — 'Are you hungry? Thirsty? Is there anything I can get you downtown?' — usually won me a few instants of attention and a warmer tone of voice, unless asked too early, before hunger, thirst or any other need had manifested itself.

  Despite all this, I loved to watch her. She positioned herself at the window and her face would change according to what she saw, even if this was impossible because the shade was lowered. Her dark eyes could brighten up with feeling, or the light inside them could switch off, leaving them dull and still. I didn't ask her what it was she saw, though I drove myself crazy wondering. A noisy, bustling city? Fields of corn, buzzing flies and bumblebees? Children giggling in knee-deep snow? The bleak horizon of a flooded world, blue meeting blue, the curtains of mankind closing? I knew it was one of those questions that would not get an answer.

  Without being unrecognisable, the objects she painted the first year simply lacked substance. Her bottles were soft, her melting candles cold, the flame on the wicks frankly stiff, and, from some technical deficiency I couldn't determine, her skies were without exception artificial. At the end of the day, when it was clear nothing had come of what she'd tried to depict, work gave way to play. She exaggerated the traits of her self-portraits — eyebrows rose to grotesque heights, chins fell down to the ground, noses turned into muzzles before she covered the canvas with swish-swashes.

  I was much more indispensable to her during the process of destruction than I was during her long attempts at creation. Then, the moment I'd long awaited. She pulled up a chair for me, stretched out her legs on my lap, and actually looked at me. My new status was that of the willing ear. She criticised herself extensively, analysed what she'd done wrong. Her conclusions were optimistic: all we needed was patience, perseverance, a book on sketching, on shadow and light, on depth, tone, proportion, trompe-l'oeil. I was up and ready to go: she'd said the magic word, 'we'.

  The cluttered shop I went to was kept by an elderly couple who soon got to know me. It wasn't infrequent that I slipped in a minute before closing to purchase a yellow pigment, then was waiting at the door before they opened next morning to purchase another. If you didn't hold both tubes up in the light, you couldn't tell them apart. They elbowed each other when they saw me coming in rain or snow without an umbrella, which I never brought because I simply had too much to carry as it was, and often had to resort to my mouth for help. Sometimes I paced from the sketchbooks to the charcoal, canvases or turpentine, frustrated, indecisive, worried over the correct choice and price. Their eyes followed me with unconcealed awe. To them I was an impassioned, prolific artist whom fame would ultimately embrace. They handed me the articles religiously, as if they, too, were part of the great cycle of art in the making.

  I must have worn down the footpath between Baumeistergasse and Goldschlagstraße, a walk as dusty as it was noisy with reconstruction. I fell into the habit of watching my shoes advance step by step. The tips were detaching from the soles, the seams coming apart, the leather cracking. One morning I thought to myself I must be getting used to the French troops because I was noticing them less, maybe because I was too busy staring down at my feet. Barely had the thought crossed my mind when it became a common sight to see lines of tanks ploughing down the streets. The French troops were leaving Austria for Indochina, where France was still at war. If one had to cross the road it could be a long wait. The infrastructure in our section of the city became degraded, identity controls became less frequent. I took advantage of the situation to stop going to school and was glad no one did anything to force me. I was at last free.

  Elsa found many uses for my freedom. She was overtaken by a boundless zest for life, and decided exercise would now form part of her daily routine. She had no ballet barre, so I had to lift one short leg up gradually until she said ouch, then let it down, this twenty times over. Then the other leg. Her knee should be turned out, her toes pointed. Speaking of which, could I please help her arch her feet more? Yes, if I just held the toes like that — why didn't I put my knees on them? Not too much weight! My arm was tired? Crouch down to rest; she could use just my back. Higher, lower. Her heel dug into my spine; if she lost her balance she grabbed my hair. She had no mirror — could I hold the candle up so she could see what she was doing? I coveted her shadow, would have snatched it off the wall and made it mine.

  My grandmother was warming her hands on a cup of tea, frowning at the steam. 'Edeltraud has ruined your wallet, not just your health. I just received a polite reminder from the bank, Mein Gott! I'm going to have to stick my nose into those bankbooks and visit my banker to shuffle the fat around a bit. Look at you — pale, lifeless.'

  'I know, Grandma. She's getting on my nerves, too.'

  'Why don't you go see this Dr Gregor of ours? He's good. These past years he has kept me ticking beyond my time. He's right next door, what could be easier?'

  'There's nothing he can do.'

  'He'll be able to help.'

  'With what? A love potion?'

  'You were just talking about your nerves.'

  'If she would just behave differently I'd be okay.'

  'Let him see you first, then he can see her.'

  'He can't see her.'

  'I understand.' With a shrewd look, she blew the steam away. 'Afraid if you own up at last she'll disappear?'

  'It's not hocus-pocus like you think. She'll just get up on her own and go.'

  'She'll have to come out in the open one way or the other if you ever want to heal.'

  I couldn't decide whether the tasks Elsa gave me were to test my affection or torture me. Once, I caught her peeking out a corner of the blind. She was so entranced by the snowflakes she hadn't heard me come in, or had chosen to ignore me. She begged me to cross town for a bowl of snow from Aspernbrücke. A bowl from our garden wouldn't do. I could have given her any snow — how would she have ever known the difference? — but I proved my love to her, if not to myself, by going all the way to the bridge in question. When I came back, red and chilled to the bone, her face fell. She said I must've held the bowl too long in my hand: the snow had melted. Couldn't I go back, and carry it back this time in a basket, so it would remain crisp and so white as to crunch between her teeth? Please — she'd so dreamed of compressing a snowball from Aspernbrücke in her hands!

  Likewise, she bid me to bring her back leaves that didn't exist outside her faulty memory. A maple leaf with blue veins, a white lily pod big as an elephant ear, a
pointed leaf with velvety stripes that smelt of mint — she couldn't remember its name but could draw it. Regularly, she made me go to the horse-drawn carriages in central Vienna, a popular tourist attraction, and rub my hand on a horse's neck. How foolish I felt, at my age, standing there patting the horsy, but I did it. She brought my palm close to her face; her deep inhalations against my skin gratified me. But most of my tasks brought no such reward. She had me fetch her heavy textbooks — philosophy, astronomy, biology, zoology, Latin. One out of two I was obliged to return. It wasn't biology she'd asked for, it was botany! It wasn't Latin, it was the history of Latin America!

  As nice as I was to her, it became common for her to complain about my tone of voice. On one occasion she clipped her lips together with a pair of my mother's earrings I'd just given her, so they whitened and puckered grotesquely. I didn't think it was very funny. I hadn't said more than her name when she removed them with a swing of her hand and burst out, 'Please, Johannes! Stop snapping at me all the time!'

  She was the one who'd just snapped, not me.

  Of the dozens of poems I wrote to her during this period, I will include one, representative of the state of mind she left me in.

  An Empty Frame

  A window pane is but heaven's frame,

  An eternal painting of a majestic hand,

  Whose palette an' brush must e'er change,

  From raging greys to blues no less bland.

  Darkness is painted with points of light,

  Noon with darkness at its feet,

  Pigment endlessly shuffled, rearrang'd,

  Daybreak's pink at dawn already obsolete

  Only mankind's oils grow cold and dry,

  Catching life in his frame as he would,

  Trapping seconds, penning runaway days,

  Stillness in itself a falsehood.

  My angel, you have taken the chore,

  To make truth of a spectrum of lies,

  Looking for less, you are looking for more,

  Are you, too, searching for the violet sky?

  Abandon life, leave my affections behind,

  Treat me with cursing and blame,

  'Tis only artifice and fame you will find,

  Lost in the rich vastness of your empty frame.

  Folding my poem in four, with overzealous attention to the final crease, she said, 'We humans can never repaint reality as perfectly as God, therefore reality is frankly of no interest to me.'

  To be spiteful, I asked her to name one single thing that wasn't grounded in reality.

  'Unicorn,' she replied. 'Centaur. Sphinx. Dragon. Griffin. Minotaur. Harpy. Nixie. Medusa.' When she was mad, she liked to show off.

  'A unicorn is nothing but a horse with a horn. A minotaur is just a man whose head has been replaced by a bull's.' I didn't want to venture further because I was unsure exactly what the others were made up of outside of bird and woman. 'Why don't you come up with something entirely on the other side? With nothing from this earth? Hmm? You can't. All you do is take reality, steal snips and pieces from it here and there, and shuffle them around.'

  The way she bit her nail, I could tell my challenge was worth some brainwork to her. I knew her well: if she could prove me wrong, she would do it in a heartbeat. Hours went by; neither of us spoke. I resisted offering lunch, wanting her to be the one to have to ask, for once. My belly made inelegant roils, it irritated me that hers didn't. At last she turned her canvas around for me to see. She'd painted herself as a paper doll holding a pot of sunflowers, each of whose six sparse petals was triangular and rigid enough to break; the middles of the sunflowers were hexagonal rather than round.

  'Oh.' I lifted my eyebrows. 'How novel.'

  'Are you still dwelling on that childishness? Don't you see? Well, it's good you don't. The sunflowers are six-pointed stars. There are other symbols. You don't see them, do you?'

  'No.' I resented her ready supposition of my ignorance all the more because it was right.

  The day at long last came when Elsa was satisfied with one of her paintings. Her smiles were so sweet, my hope was renewed, after a year and a half of rejection. She rushed to me giggling, threw her arms around my neck, but before I could get any hopes up for what any young man in my shoes would have given his back teeth for, she wrapped my arm around her waist and did a sort of ballet spin. When I understood she was trying to get me to play the part of a male ballet dancer, I felt preposterous. Then without warning she leaned back and I nearly dropped her. I wished she'd keep still but she stood doing little impatient jumps in front of me.

  'Lift me up, Johannes!'

  'How?'

  'Put your hand here; lift as I jump.'

  I hadn't been expecting her to matter-of-factly set my hand under her most forbidden part. Of all the dimwitted things to do, I refused! Sure, I wanted to — I'd wanted to for years — but I dreaded the humiliation in store for me if I wasn't strong enough to lift her off the ground.

  'Come on. Don't be a party pooper!' Her back was sweating and she smelt sweet, almost peppery. Her hair was dishevelled, her eyes dark and alive. I noticed two freckles on her cheek I'd never seen before. Her chest moved sharply with her effort, in and out, I had trouble keeping my eyes off it. My desire, to my embarrassment, was beginning to show.

  'Please.' She got closer, lifted herself up on her tiptoes, her eyes level with my chin, stood with her arms in a ballet pose over her head, her breasts sticking out.

  I gave it a try, mostly so she wouldn't discover what was pressing against her hipbone. I strained to get her halfway up but her soft belly smacked me in the face, was smothering me. She pressed hard down on my shoulders to push herself up higher, my legs about to give in under the weight. Suddenly I heard a loud knock, followed by Elsa's shriek. I deduced that Pimmichen had just barged in and was face to face with Elsa, her bony finger pointing the way out of the house. But no, Elsa had only clipped her head good and hard on the ceiling. Her body slackened and I let her down. She wasn't crying, as I'd thought, but laughing to tears. I even got a hug out of it. She hadn't been so high-spirited in ages. Five minutes of attention was all it took for me to forget the long span of mistreatment I'd undergone — mistreatment I now deemed against all analytical reasoning to be an exception to the rule. This was the Elsa I used to know.

  ***

  'Nice of you to come down to see your moth-eaten ancestor. We live in the same house, unless you have forgotten? Rescue me — my pillows aren't comfy.'

  Giving the cushions a few good punches, I noted reddish-violet blotches on Pimmichen's skin.

  'How are you feeling?' she asked me before I could her.

  'I should be the one asking you.'

  'I'm feeling achy and moss-backed, just as I should at my age. What concerns me is you. You have a long life ahead of you after I'm gone.'

  'Fine and dandy.'

  'Have you gone to confession lately?'

  'If it makes you happy, I'll go next Sunday.'

  'It's Sunday today. There's evening Mass.'

  I found an excuse about having to return upstairs to finish a painting before it dried. In rearranging a hair clip she brought more of her pinkish scalp into view.

  'How's Edeltraud?'

  I grinned. 'There's hope. We're getting along much better.'

  'You're enjoying your life together upstairs?'

  'We danced ballet this afternoon. I twirled her up, down, all around. You should've seen us, it was stupendous.'

  'One can presume she was light as a feather?'

  'Depends. Not always.'

  I noticed white hairs had recently grown on her chin.

  'Tell me, how do you imagine her, Pimmi?'

  'Well . . . I'd say she's thin and very light — so light I never hear her. It could be her, just as that little scratching could be a mouse. She has golden waves down her back. A long, graceful neck. A straight, thin nose, a tall, intelligent forehead, tiny teeth like a doll, a voice so soft you must close your eyes to hear it. Big blu
e eyes full of compassion. Cute ears that can listen for hours . . . Tiny nimble hands . . . She comes and goes as you wish, just like a fairy . . .'

  I nodded my head, thinking how different her description was from Elsa.

  'Now you tell me, Johannes, how is it you imagine her? That's what really counts.'

  I rested my back against her headrest, pulled her cover over my legs as I'd done years earlier when we were both at the end of our tethers. 'Well, if you really want to know, she doesn't always listen to me. In fact she rarely does. She doesn't outright tell me to be quiet, but she has her silent ways of letting me know what she'd like and wouldn't like me to do. She has her way of getting whatever she wants, whenever she wants. She's headstrong, stubborn as a mule. She has a crease between her eyebrows from thinking all the time. She presses her lips together, and from how she moves them you can tell whether what she's thinking about is good or bad. It's true, she has small hands and feet, but I'd say other than that, she's rather solid. She has a good back, shoulders, a strong chest . . .'

  'You mean bust?'

  'Yes. She's very feminine.'

  'Ah.' Pimmichen nodded discerningly.

  'She has long hair like you said, only it's dark, wild. She doesn't comb it much. Her eyes are dark too; you can barely make out the pupils, especially if she's angry.' I continued, despite the curious face Pimmichen was making, 'Her forehead isn't high, but believe me, she's too intelligent for my good — she guesses everything in my head. If she puts her ankles together her knees won't touch. Soft round knees as tempting to pat as a baby's head. She has a freckle here and one here.' I pointed to two places on my face.

  Pimmichen cleared her throat. Hands on knees wasn't something one talked about back then. 'You seem to know her as well as yourself.'

  Feeling the heat in my face, I turned my attention to her pill box that I opened and closed like an uncanny mute mouth. 'I've been living with her for some years now.'

  'You didn't tell me anything about her neck.'

  I had to think. I knew the back of her neck, yes, but the front — there was nothing particular about it. I'd never really paid attention to it; my eyes were usually fixed higher or lower. I shifted positions. 'It's a neck . . .'