Afternoons in Paris

by Janice Law

  I followed them into a warren of small, dark streets with companionable buildings leaning against each other for support. The road was dirty, the facades dark with smoke, and all was permeated by the distinctive stink of French drains. Shortly, I reached a more open area, perhaps a park in better times, for there were tree stumps scattered between the ramshackle buildings.

  The men from the café were clearly residents. They hollered greetings in Russian as they passed each building and waved to the shirtless men playing football or sprawled in the sun with bottles of wine or vodka. The regularly spaced buildings had some surprising decorative elements, suggesting the pavilions of an old amusement area long fallen into neglect. The sagging roofs were missing tiles, and nearly every building had at least one broken window, usually with an exhaust pipe puffing coal smoke to darken the grayish sheets and yellow underwear drying on lines between the buildings.

  Glass crunched underfoot, but that did not deter the barefoot children, scantily clad and dirty legged, who raced about followed by skinny dogs. Women in thin slippers or wooden clogs went in and out with baguettes under their arms and baskets with cabbages and onions. I’d feared I might stand out, but I saw several men wearing paint-stained smocks. Surely I was near the artists’ colony Pyotr had mentioned. If so, I was dressed just right.

  A high wall set off what might once have been a garden, and I soon reached an elegant iron gate set amid the ivy. Visible through the bars was a remarkable three-story octagonal building with a complicated roof, decorative sculptures, and a balustrade. Although in disrepair, the building and what had once been its grounds seemed incongruous amid the slatternly compound. Could this be La Ruche, the famous “Beehive” of the older avant-garde?

  In my excitement, I forgot the Russians. I skirted piles of litter, including fragments of a stone carving—this was definitely the place!—and squeezed past shacks, even flimsier than the rest, that leaned against the wall. Beyond one of them, a small iron door had been propped ajar. I had just stepped onto the paved forecourt when the door banged shut behind me. I glanced back to see two men with wide shoulders and broad Slavic faces, patrons of that charming café, Trois Étoiles.

  Toughs for sure and normally just my type, but today I wasn’t susceptible to their charm. “You,” one said in French. “What you want with Pyotr?”

  “He owes us a modeling session,” I said, shifting my arm so that he could see my sketchpad.

  The man gave a coarse laugh. “Modeling, my ass. Or rather his.”

  He laughed again and so did his friend.

  “You’re maybe his friend, yes? You maybe know where that little”—and here he broke into Russian but I still got the point—“is hiding. Yes?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m looking for him myself.”

  “But you come here,” he said.

  “I followed you. You’re Russian, I thought you might know. But if not—” I moved a step farther. “I won’t take your time.”

  This produced another laugh. “We have all the time in the world. But you, tovarisch, you don’t have time. Not if you are a friend of Pyotr’s.”

  With this he grabbed my arm and twisted it behind my back. I stamped on his foot—I’ve found I quite like rough men, but I’ve no time for bullies. He gave a yell and a hop. I dropped my sketchpad and twisted away but not before a fist landed against my ribs, and I caught a glimpse of a close-cropped hair, blond stubble, a scarred temple.

  This one was demanding answers in Russian. Good luck with that. The only words I understood were Pyotr and Igor, but I knew I was in big trouble. I swung my free arm wildly and connected at least once, producing another flurry of blows.

  The other man was screaming at me in French: “Où est Pyotr?”

  “I don’t know! He stole four pounds from me!” I cried in English, danger causing my français to take French leave along with my common sense. I felt blood in my mouth, and I had fallen to my knees when the main door of the Beehive creaked opened.

  A shouted warning with an added bouquet of pungent French.

  The blows stopped. I got my hands on the pavement, levered myself upright, and scrambled for the open doorway. Two men stood there. One carried a mason’s mallet and looked to have the muscles to use it. The other was a rawboned chap hauling a big chunk of stone on a wooden dolly.

  “Au secours!” I shouted, and the man with the mallet stepped aside. In my haste, I knocked my shin on the dolly and tumbled inside a big, round space, lit by a dirty skylight high overhead. The two Russians thought to follow but if the shouts in Russian, French, and Italian were any indication, the sculptors were no friends of theirs. Good. But better would be an exit. There were doors evenly spaced all the way around the room, and I tried one after another without success. Outside, the Russian voices grew more insistent, and I was considering the rickety stairs to the second level when a door swung open.

  A thin face with a long beak of a nose, black hair, bony cheeks, a stubble of beard, and remarkable black, fathomless eyes. Then a hand, thinner than the face with long fingers, paint stained at the tips, beckoned. “Vite! Vite! Les Cosaques!” I didn’t hesitate to jump inside. He ran a sturdy board between two heavy staples, then motioned for me to sit on the sole chair, a wooden contraption with uneven legs and a cracked back.

  I sat down to assess the damage. There was blood on my face. A tooth was looser than it had been at lunchtime, and my left side burned. They say broken ribs heal stronger. I hoped so. My breath sounded like a broken-winded horse, and the peculiar stench in the room did nothing to help my struggling lungs.

  When he saw my distress, the painter rummaged among his tubes, brushes, and cans for an inky-looking bottle of wine. He poured some into a glass and held it out. “Boire,” he said.

  I did and coughed. It was a remote relative of rotgut, but it shocked my lungs back to cooperation. “Merci.”

  He grunted and, after a quick glance out the window, returned to work at his large easel, seemingly quite incurious about either my arrival or my appearance. After a few minutes, I recovered enough to stand up and look around. The studio was spacious and well lit, but the broken panes in the big windows must let in a frightful amount of cold. The improvised shutters protecting the lower part of the windows and the extra barrier on the door suggested undesirable neighbors, perhaps les Cosaques. The floor was filthy with paint stains and littered with old sketches and empty bottles. But that did not account for the truly sinister odor that permeated the room.

  I took a step forward and saw the canvas. Although only medium size, it was the most brutal and vigorous thing I’d seen in France: a dead rooster splayed on a greenish-black ground. The clawed feet were almost of human expressiveness as was the massive beak, open in an almost human scream. Then I noticed the model: the carcass of a fowl many days dead.

  “C’est formidable,” I said, although I had not intended to disturb him.

  “You like?”

  “Very much.” When I added that I had seen nothing so vivid since Berlin, he wiped his brush and put it in a jar of turps. He picked up his painting stool and motioned for me to return to his sitting area. He poured us each another glass.

  “I’m not able to travel to see as much as I’d like at the moment. But if you’d be so kind as to describe the work in Berlin—”

  I said I’d like nothing better, except to see some more of his work.

  “In time,” he said.

  With this promise, I launched into an account of everything good I’d seen in Berlin. He had me repeat the painters’ names and asked for detailed descriptions of the works that interested him. I really had to concentrate to convey the density of the canvases and the eccentric drawing in my limited French. At one point, I had to pick up a pencil to give him some idea of the open line and ferocious caricatures of George Grosz.

  “They are painting the war,” he said when my report ha
d satisfied him.

  “The war, the aftermath. Many disasters.”

  “And what’s to come? Are they painting what’s yet to come, eh?”

  I shrugged. I was barely eighteen—what did I know.

  “It’s what’s to come,” he said and actually wrung his hands. Then he took another slug of the wine—his digestion must be cast iron—and walked over to the side wall where dozens of canvases were stacked. He turned a couple face out for me.

  These were finished works, heavy with impasto, the paint laid on with thick ropy strokes, all conveying the most violent emotion. I was impressed and said so. He nodded without speaking. I wondered what it would be like to be that good—and possibly to know you were good—and to be living in squalor with marvelous work that had no market.

  Armand’s dictum, The market is God, was in my ear when the painter turned over a portrait: a boy roughly my age in a striped shirt with a raw, shifty expression—definitely a shifty expression. He was leaning back on a chair with his legs apart, and the wild brushstrokes brought him vividly to life. “Pyotr,” I said.

  “You know him?”

  “I’ve seen him around. He’s why I came here. He owes me money.”

  “Stay away from him. A bad type. One of the Cossacks.”

  I must have looked dubious.

  “You see what they do,” he said, nodding toward me.

  “But surely not all Russians.” Even if it was at the last minute, Pyotr had given me warning at some risk to himself.

  “They are all Cossacks if you’re a Jew,” he said. Something in his tone told me I’d overstayed my welcome, and I said that I should go.

  Without any response, he opened the door. Before I could properly say good-bye, he had closed it behind me and clattered down the bar, leaving me in the gloomy atrium. Murky light filtering through decades of dust. A faint whiff, still, of the painter’s dead subject, mingling with the odor of paint and thinner. The sound, close by, of metal hitting stone. I looked out the cracked and patched the front door. No sign of the “Cossacks.” Were they waiting beyond the wall? I was trying to decide the best line of retreat, when someone called, “Monsieur.”

  It was my savior, the mason. I turned back to thank him for my timely rescue.

  “It was nothing,” he said in polite French, and looking at his massive physique and the ease with which he held the heavy mallet, I could believe that seeing off a couple of toughs was easy for him.

  “Your face,” he said and motioned me inside. His studio had a washbasin, and he let me clean up. “That is better,” he said when I had dried my hands and face on a scrap of towel. “You look fit to meet the world.”

  “Your neighbor treated only the inner man.”

  “I thought I smelled some of his wine. Lucky you are still on your feet. I think he makes it himself. Poor Chaim is a genius but very eccentric.”

  He shook his head and handed me my sketchpad and the bundle of pencils.

  “Thanks. They are mostly just wallpaper variations, but my boss would have been furious.”

  “One must live.” Then, as if he sensed my apprehension, he added, “I have only a little more to do this afternoon before I’m off. Wait, if you don’t mind the noise and dust. No one will bother you if you walk with me.”

  Chapter Three

  I had a drink with the mason, whom I should properly call a sculptor, as he has serious ambitions and interesting ideas. This was at his local café, where I bought us sandwich jambons in an effort to sop up the nearly toxic wine I’d drunk. The sculptor leaned against the bar, and said, “Simplify, simplify,” as his large hands shaped the air into graceful curves. He was a poet and intellectual who aspired to pure shapes and le aerodynamic forms. Women, men, birds were to be reduced to their essences and captured in stone.

  A fascinating idea and potentially beautiful, too, if the half-­completed work on his stand was any indication. But not for me. I don’t think the pure and the beautiful will ever be my terrain. There are too many flaws and too much dirt and mess in life for that. Still, that afternoon counted as a red-letter day in my art education, and on the way back to my room, I bought Nan a postcard showing the banks of the Seine with Notre-Dame rising in the background.

  I send Nan a postcard every time I see something really interesting, and while the view of the Seine is a good deal more decorative than the artists’ colony, I knew that she would enjoy it more. All well. Met interesting painter and a sculptor today! Mon français is improving. Love, Francis.

  I could, of course, have told her of my latest adventures. I can tell Nan anything, but gunshots and thugs and what appeared to be a loose tooth would only worry her and make things seem worse just when, thanks to my visit to the sculptor’s café, the events of the afternoon no longer looked so serious. Even the night in the cemetery might have receded into memory if I hadn’t passed a news kiosk splashed with headlines all telling the same tale: shooting victim discovered in cimitière de montparnasse.

  With a psychic jolt, the good effects of the grape vanished. I’d been kidding myself. One of the Russians had been killed, murdered, deliberately assassinated. Pyotr was in danger, and I was both in danger and broke. That counted as trouble on a number of fronts. My favorite boulevard cafés were out. If Igor was looking for me, those would be the natural place for him to begin. No cafés meant no chance of a free-spending boulevardier or sensation-­seeking­ tourist. I’d better hope I could coax an advance out of Armand.

  In the meantime, head down, Francis. I returned to my room in daylight—a miserable novelty—and showed up bright and early at Armand’s. I worked late, too, because his lunch meeting had been a great success and I had more tulip variations to paint. By the end of the day, I had hostile feelings toward Dutch bulb growers and most of the Netherlands.

  A visit to Shakespeare and Company to borrow a book. Fortunately, they already knew me there and I was trusted. A small dinner at a small restaurant, courtesy of Armand who was moved by my battered face and a tale (false in detail if true in substance) of being assaulted by thugs just after I’d collected my allowance. He didn’t necessarily believe my account, but he parted with a few francs and a great deal of advice. Then home to bed.

  After a few days of this regimen, I was ready to risk anything for the pleasure of going out on the town. What’s the point of living like a monk in a cell—and in Paris, no less! I was sick of my room, and when I left Armand’s on Tuesday, I’d convinced myself that all was well, that the Russians, Cossacks or not, had gone to ground, and I could come out of hiding.

  “Monsieur Bacon.” The dulcet tones of my concierge, a nosy biddy of the first water.

  “Madame.” I waved and started up the stair.

  “You have company,” she said. She disapproved of visitors in principle.

  I stopped. I was expecting no one.

  “Foreign,” she said.

  “English? American?”

  She gave a sly smile. “Russian. Two.”

  One was bad, two was twice as bad. “Upstairs?”

  She shrugged. “They were most persuasive, Monsieur.”

  “Tell them I’ve never come back,” I said and parted with a franc.

  “That is understood, Monsieur.”

  “And when they leave, if you would pack and bring down my things.”

  She looked indignant. She was not a chambermaid.

  “Then you can rent the room. Immediately. I will come by and collect my bag tomorrow.”

  “D’accord, Monsieur,” she said with a nod.

  I was prepared for an uncomfortable night at the train station, and the whole business would have been a total loss if not for a handsome conductor. He looked sharp in his SNCF uniform and he had beautiful strong legs and a key to a disused carriage. I will forever think kindly of the French rail system.

  I left w
ith the dawn, collected my bag, and showed up at Armand’s with all my worldly goods and the excuse of working late to finish up the fabric designs. I’d expected him to be delighted, but although the afternoon was interrupted by carrying on around the modeling stand, I could tell that he’d rather have me gone. Perhaps he had someone else in mind for the ivy wreath and the Bacchic dancer.

  No matter. I was weary of the textile designs, which seemed thin stuff after the paintings I’d seen.

  I hurried my work on Thursday, and when Armand left earlier than expected, I followed as soon as he was out of sight, eager to tell Madame Dumoulin about my discoveries.

  “Francis! You’ve met with an accident!” Madame said when she saw me outside the Louvre. My tooth had settled in again, but I still had bruises on my face and a healing lip.

  “A sort of accident. I had some money stolen from me and when I went to get it back—voilà.”

  She was properly alarmed and sympathetic.

  “But, Madame Dumoulin, it was all worthwhile because I made some wonderful discoveries.” I pushed mon français to the utmost to describe the remarkable work I’d seen, so that I wound up in front of the Nike of Samothrace waving my hands to describe the fat lines of paint that re-created the dead rooster and the big pulse of vitality that ran through the painter’s work. “Words cannot describe,” I finally admitted.

  “Words can describe,” she said, “but not your French. I have thought for a while, Francis, that your work with Monsieur Armand, while very valuable for your technique, is not the best thing for your language.”

  “Monsieur Armand is usually a man of few words,” I admitted. Except, I thought, during his “photo” sessions, but the vocabulary I picked up then was not so generally useful.

  “You rent a room?”

  I nodded.

  “You should be living with a French family where you will hear correct French morning and night. Now, what I propose, is that you come and live with us for a month, a month at least.”

  “Oh, Madame! I couldn’t impose!” I said, but I knew that I jolly well could. This was wonderful.