I had to know — I had to — but it was complicated. I could not formulate the question with meaningful precision. All I did was nod my head, clear my throat.
'Do . . . do you . . . like it?' she asked ingenuously.
I scrutinised the rest of the canvas for a clue, but as I said, it was unfinished. Our faces were blank; she'd painted nothing around the house, nothing besides us in the house.
'It's too soon to say . . .'
***
I changed my mind and didn't confiscate her oils.
After that, I sneaked in every chance I had. For several weeks, nothing on the canvas changed. I never saw Elsa return to it, yet she must have, for one afternoon, just by chance, I took another peek at it and found a new detail. A vertical line cut my face in two, as a horizontal line did hers. I pondered the significance of this. Why would her eyes be separated from her mouth? Did it mean her eyes and brain were somehow higher than her mouth and body, the latter more concerned with physical gratification? But she still hadn't drawn in the eyes, nor the mouth, so what was I worrying about? The line on my face was easier to understand — it was faithful to my appearance. I turned my eyes back to hers. Why was her line different to mine? Did it suggest we saw the world differently? Did it insinuate that our viewpoints clashed? Was I somehow vertical, standing, and she not? I racked my mind with these questions, and countless others. Over a week went by and I was given no additional clue.
Just past noon a few days later I heard the floor creaking. She was in the library again, walking about. Thinking I heard her leave, I hastened in. To my surprise, she was seated on top of a pile of books, reading. She looked up with a victorious smile when she saw my eyes stray to the easel. I snatched up the first book I came across and left. Thereafter, I seized upon any excuse to walk past the library. I romped about emptying waste-bins into one another, in and out for the mail, whatever would take me past that doorway. She didn't go anywhere else until late in the afternoon. As I'd hoped, she'd painted something. Almost imperceptible, at about the level of our ankles, a small crack ran between us. Why had she even bothered? Maybe it was only to make the wall behind us solid. Without the crack, the house had looked like an empty frame, open front and back.
Days passed and leaves grew from the crack. The crack in fact wasn't a crack at all, it became the stem of a houseplant. I had a good mind to blot it out with white. If I didn't, it was only because I was afraid that might stop her from continuing. I should have, should have killed it before it grew against the back of the wall, its leaves unfolding like morning hands awakening. It made its way between us, entwined our legs, arms, bodies, necks. Soon it was a tree cramped within a house, the top bent over under the ceiling, the branches reaching far out the windows, the roots pushing down through the floor and wandering outdoors, like great muscular fingers lifting up the house. The house was a cracked pot, too small for its savage tree. All that remained of Elsa and me was two bleak faces. Not even. The horizontal and vertical lines in front of them had been integrated into windowpanes so we were each looking out of our own individual window. All that could still be seen of us, really, were two cunning brown eyes in Elsa's case, and two blue, blind and fish-like, in mine.
What was she telling me? Was it good — a symbol that our love would grow? Did she dream of something growing between us? A child? No, it was bad. I could feel it. She knew more than I did and I was the one being duped.
Without knocking, I walked straight into the bathroom where I found her soaking in the bath, pinkish and slippery. She'd used half a bottle of shampoo to make a layer of bubbles, though I'd told her a hundred times not to waste it in this way. I held the canvas in front of her flushed face.
'Tell me what it means. I want to hear it from your mouth. What is the meaning?'
Slightly embarrassed over the excess of suds, she clutched at some, used them to lather her hair. Only when she lifted her arms did her breasts sit high on her chest, as they had before. 'It means I only had one canvas, Johannes. You took away the rest. It's common to paint one subject over another. For centuries artists have done that. Read art history.'
'I want to understand. Please, just tell me what it is I'm looking at.'
She shrugged her shoulders, high bumps of foam fluffing over them like fleece. That, in light of the Aesop's fable that my grandmother used to read to me at bedtime — 'The Wolf in Sheep's Clothing' — aroused more misgivings in me.
'A landscape over a dual portrait,' she replied.
'Why? I want the reason.'
'I thought you didn't like it. Oh, you did?' She beamed, crossing her hands over her heart, splashing a flock of foam at me. 'I didn't think you cared, you never said a word to me about it.'
I eyed her suspiciously. Was she sincere? Her lips looked as if she was suppressing laughter, and just before they failed, she ducked her head under the water. Air bubbled up. I felt a fool. She surfaced dynamically and the water of her supposed half bath flew over the edge on to my feet. I watched a boulder of foam settle lightly down.
'You want me to scrape the tree away?' She was as excited as a child. 'I can. If you really liked how it was before, I will!'
I was just starting to be convinced I was wrong, that I'd been mistaken about her, that she was innocence itself, pure, unselfconscious, when I studied the painting once more. Her eyes came off as cunning because they had two points of light in them. Mine didn't have two such fine white points. Why not? My indignation was returning when another thought came to me. The lights I saw could also be interpreted as faith. Yes, enduring faith. A religious faith that I didn't share, a belief in something beyond. 'Please, Elsa. You must tell me now. What do you know that I don't?'
She considered my face, shifted her eyes from feature to feature, preparing her words. 'That you have too much imagination for your own good, but besides that, you're the cutest boy on earth . . .' She threw her sudsy arms around me and beckoned me into the bathtub, fully dressed. But I wasn't as dumb as she thought. I was beginning to detect a pattern — her unquenchable desire for me overtook her whenever I was on to her. Whenever I believed her to be the little lamb she pretended to be, she had no desire for me whatsoever; on the contrary, she spurned me without scruple.
She gave it another try, wanting to dull my mind by dunking it into the pleasures of the body, and deadening it by degrees. If only there weren't that little crack . . . And why hadn't she planted her landscape around the house?
***
Madeleine and my father returned from their Kitzbühel resort holiday tanned, slimmed, healthier in complexion and, to top it off, in new matching coats which I must admit were almost respectable-looking. My father actually smiled on seeing me, not as his son, but as some cohabitant he'd grown accustomed to. As he unpacked their new personal effects, singing a tune a mulattress once did to us at a hunting banquet of Günter Boom's (an old bachelor friend of my father's, and this, in passing, is English not German), 'Nehever gehet mah sihllay ahz offah yah,' I headed for the door.
Madeleine bailed me up, as I'd feared. 'Listen, this trip cost more than I was expecting. I need more cash.'
'Again? Every trip you've taken you've gone over budget. Switzerland, it was the change in currency. Como, Italy's tourist traps. Baden Baden, the mineral springs.'
'Just hand me over a thousand and I'll be fine.'
'You will, but I won't.'
'It's not your dough anyway, it's your father's, so I wouldn't be tight-fisted about it if I were you.'
'I don't have any more ready cash. Our bankbooks are showing figures that are getting embarrassingly low. You've been burning the candle at both ends. Look around you — this is all that's left. You want me to start digging into the house? It's up to you.'
'Be careful. I've held my tongue until now. But if I do start digging into the house, you might have to fork out more than I'm asking you for now. I think you know what, or rather who, I'm talking about.'
I was thunderstruck. Without knowing what
I was doing, I emptied desk drawers and gave her whatever I found. She didn't take the coins. Though it wasn't a third of what she'd hoped for, she seemed satisfied.
At once, I warned Elsa that I was having to pay Madeleine to keep her quiet. Elsa naturally interpreted this as a German out to destroy a Jew and make a profit out of it. I advised her to keep her distance, and to not talk to Madeleine, should their paths happen to cross. That very night Elsa, completely shaken, sneaked back up to my room without having made it down to the bathroom, told me I'd better go and see what was going on.
I descended the stairs softly. From halfway down I saw Madeleine on the sofa, balancing on her arms so that her bottom wasn't touching it, with some stranger holding her legs up and out in a V as he exerted himself. I was so beside myself, I might have dragged him away by the ear if Elsa hadn't convinced me to wait until morning and respond more sensibly.
The following morning my father was up early, singing his old tune as he washed in the bathroom. Wanting to join him, Madeleine was undoing the knot of my mother's housecoat belt on the wrong side of the door.
'Madeleine.' I led her aside by the elbow. 'It's time we had a little talk.'
'Ooh . . . some bug's nipping at your tail.'
'You could say that.'
'What about?'
'About last night, for example.'
'Right. I knew that'd come up sooner or later. I know what's got your goat. Here,' she pulled a roll of bills from her brassiere, counted and held out half. 'You gave, and now you reap tenfold.'
I backed away from it, scandalised that she'd misunderstood my intentions. 'That's not what I meant. Not at all!'
'Who're you trying to kid? Money's money. There's no such thing as clean money. Buy yourself a banana for twopence? What about the natives who were overworked till they dropped dead so those bananas could be chopped down cheap for some darned company? Pitch a coin into a collection box — how many innocent folk did your holy church massacre? I don't kill anyone. There's no blood on my money.'
'Madeleine, this can't go on in this house. Under this roof. Money is not the problem.'
She hooked on to my bicep. 'Let's be partners. Business partners. We could turn this house into a chic, first-rate bordello. Look how many rooms there are! Imagine how much so many girls could rake in! We'd get the cream of the crop into this house.'
'It's out of the question. Even the thought's revolting.'
'Look. You got the house. I got me. You got someone fine up there who does good work, or so it seems from the way you keep her closed up and all to yourself. I got the know-how and the contacts. Let's do something fair, like fifty-fifty — what do you say? Spit here!'
'I'm not in the habit of spitting, though your idea has brought me closer than I've ever been.'
'It's legal. It's upfront. And you? You've got a nerve to play prude with me. Like I don't know you're hiding her from the brothel you got her from. Throats have been slit for less. Not that anyone will ever know, if it's up to me. But to stay quiet, I have to stay happy.'
I was so relieved that she was miles from the truth in assuming Elsa was a lady of pleasure that I could have kissed her on the spot, and then turned right around and told her off for her assumption. I set my hand on her shoulder, kindly but authoritatively, and told her it was no, whatever the consequences.
My father came out of the bathroom, pinching the skin of his Adam's apple so he could breathe better. I hoped he wasn't becoming asthmatic. He looked from her to me as if he were trying to blink through a cloud and was spotting a sparrow that disappeared and reappeared. This wasn't the first time I'd seen him straining his features like this, but this time his squinting was so concentrated, I backed off and turned to the belt that he had let fall behind him, a raw leather specimen of Madeline's taste. Consequently I didn't see what happened next. I just heard two blows and spun around to see her on her back, propped up on her elbows, blood dripping from her nose.
'Vater!'
'What have you done with my wife?' he shouted down at her.
She was sobbing mutely, holding the bridge of her nose.
'What you're wearing, it's hers! Roswita's!' He stomped away, checking left and right as if he might have missed her, then came back and grabbed Madeleine by the throat. 'Where's my wife?'
'I don't know. Really!' She coughed and pointed her bare foot at me. 'Ask him!'
My father approached me in half footsteps. His blinking had grown so chronic, I didn't know if he was furnishing a greater effort to remember or hold back tears. But he didn't confront me; simply walked past so just our shoulders touched.
Sick to my stomach that my father had struck a woman — be she whatever type of woman — I handed Madeleine a towel for her face. He was beyond hope.
'They're all the same . . .' she bawled. 'They just use you to mend their private lives, then they ditch you. Always beat you up in the end, too — yes sirree, blame's all yours. Seeing you all ugly, they have no regrets letting the street-cleaners sweep you back to hell . . .'
She couldn't stop crying — or talking. Crying set loose her words, or talking set loose her tears: I don't know which. She told me how she'd been abandoned in the streets when she was only six by her mother, who'd just met some Czech man; how she didn't even know her father's name, and neither did her mother, it could have been any of several; and many more sordid details, until I half pitied her. As I admitted later to Elsa, my calming her ended in a brotherly hug.
'You'd better watch out,' Elsa warned. 'Don't you see she's a manipulator? She's losing her hold on your father, so now she's making a move on you.'
'No more a manipulator than other women,' I replied, and, in afterthought, 'like you.'
'I beg your pardon?'
'If you see it that way, I could say you're a manipulator too. Look, you got me in the end, didn't you?'
I'll skip over all the stupid things I went on to say, because frankly I'm embarrassed. Suffice to say, our fight was a two-hour ordeal. Her answers alone give an idea of the inaneness I put forward. She answered that Jews were never looking to steal Germanic blood, that Jews married Jews — any Jew's parents would've been hurt if a son or daughter wished it otherwise. She swore it was true, on her own head — if it had been on mine, I wouldn't have believed a word. She mentioned the irony in the Nuremberg Laws prohibiting marriage between Aryans and Jews, even though back then it had remained unspoken within the Jewish community. Among those generous donations of her stores of knowledge: their calendar, lunar and having thirteen months, was far more ancient than the Gregorian (which incidentally I learned was ours); it then would've been the year 5713 (she thought — counting on her fingers once gave 5715 and later 5713). Just as Christians were divided into Catholics, Protestants, Baptists, Quakers and what have you, so were Jews into Orthodox, Conservative, Hasidim, Reform . . . Fresh fuel for an explosion: Christianity and Islam developed from Judaism! The best of all was when she claimed that Jesus, Mary, Joseph and the twelve disciples were Jewish! I didn't know what lies she'd been fed, but set her straight on that one. This led to a heated debate, even though I was no great believer myself. What I didn't wade into. She gave me detailed historical accounts until I could listen no more to the sandy desert yesteryears, right or wrong.
It took time to assimilate what she had said. Somehow, whatever one learns as a child in school leaves behind a solid core. It's impossible to replace this core within oneself; one can only grow on from it, go on from there. One's beliefs through life resemble the rings of a tree, each year solidifying what we successively thought, doubted, believed. Nature takes no note of the contradictory ideas, all of which are packed in, one after another, to make the trunk we are: the compact, unified remainder of our diametric yesteryears.
***
For some days there was calm, and the relationship between Madeleine and my father picked up again, though more weakly on his part. My father was sleeping in till noon, taking two naps a day, and still he tucked himself in
straight after dinner. Those rare hours when he wasn't out like a light, he was aloof to her lovey-dovey petting, her terms of endearment, but that was the extent of his protest to her hand squeezes, forehead kissing, her bending over backwards to cook him meals or to give him sponge-baths in bed (otherwise he didn't wash). It didn't seem he was silent as a matter of will or against his will, but rather just silent at heart. Madeleine nagged him to go with her on another trip. With persistence she actually succeeded in getting him to nod at the destination: Salzburg. I didn't mind supplying the money to see them go — I would have paid double, in truth, had she asked.
It was 3 am. Their suitcases were standing by the door. Their train was scheduled for 7 am. Madeleine had the tickets I'd given her the cash for, but was going to pay for the hotel and meals herself. I was sound asleep; so was Elsa and probably the whole neighbourhood. Suddenly, out of the blue, there was shouting and screaming. I thought my father was killing her. I hustled down in my pyjama trousers and found them on the floor beside their bed, where they'd slid, along with the bedclothes. He was precariously seated on her chest, slapping her with the palm and back of his hand, from side to side, shouting, 'Whore! Whore!' She'd grabbed a pillow and was making a pathetic counter-attack by smothering his face.
The instant he saw me, his hand stopped in mid-air, whereupon she somehow squirmed her leg around and kicked him under the chin four times until she knocked him over.
'Find someone else to put up with you, you brute!' she shouted, and got to her feet, red marks all over her face. 'Go and find your wife — go! A lot of comfort you're gonna get from her! Ha! A lot of warmth!' She threw a coat over her lacy nightdress and screwed her bare legs into her boots. 'You'll regret swapping me, after all I've done for you! And put up with in this goddamn loony bin!'
Caging Skies Page 24