The Painting on Auerperg's Wall

by Erika Rummel

  “Would you like us to start reading tonight?” he said.

  She hesitated.

  “We could read Brecht together,” he said.

  “Brecht? That would be nice.” The confusion in her eyes cleared. “I left my books at the apartment,” she said. “There is not enough space for them here. Besides, this is not a permanent arrangement. Nancy wanted a house-sitter for the summer. But now you had to do the house-sitting for me.”

  “Not a permanent arrangement?” he said with a twinge of regret. “You mean, we are only temporary neighbours? In that case, we have no time to lose. Why don’t you come over to my place when you are settled in? I’ll make us dinner, and afterwards we’ll read Brecht.”

  THEY MOVED FROM the dinner table to the sofa. Unlike Nancy, Laura was the right fit. Her body was too light to make the cushions sigh. And she did not seem to mind the dowdiness, taking the room in with the same wondering look she gave to everything.

  “How old were you when you came to America?” David asked to break the silence Laura had carried with her from the table to the sofa. The silence surrounding her threatened to spread to him. It wasn’t an uncomfortable silence, but David thought he should break it up, as a therapeutic measure. She was under doctors’ orders to practice speech.

  There was a delayed response to his question, as if she had to calculate the number of years first. “Thirteen,” she said.

  “And you wanted to be with Zoltan rather than with your mother?”

  She considered the question. “Maybe the choice was for America more than for Zoltan.” Her speech was clunky, as if the toxins had rusted not only her speech but the whole narrative machinery. She sighed, exhausted by the effort of speaking or by the difficulty of his question. She chewed her lip, becoming for a moment the Laura he had met at the party, her eyes distracted, her mouth impatient.

  “My parents came to Austria from Hungary in fifty-six,” she said, “but they weren’t happy in Vienna. Zoltan wanted to move on to the promised land.” She laughed ruefully. “That’s what he used to call America. ‘The promised land.’ My mother wanted to move back to Hungary. She is a poet, you know. She needs to live within earshot of her native language. I mean…” Laura waved her hand. “I can’t explain it. It is too complicated.”

  She slumped and gave David a helpless, suffering look.

  David lost his footing in the marshy terrain of Laura’s eyes. Images collided in his memory, of the cool sophisticate at the party and the tired woman on his sofa, who had aged more than the passage of two weeks could justify. There was a murmuring dissonance, a consequence perhaps of the confusion in David’s mind.

  “I shouldn’t be asking you questions about the past. We should concentrate on the present.”

  “That is what Zoltan says. A few years ago, he wrote his memoirs. To put the past behind, he told me, and get on with the present.”

  “And now he is writing about the future. He’s working on a sci-fi novel, isn’t he?”

  “He has not told me about that,” she said. “Or perhaps I do not remember.”

  “It’s about rejuvenation, about staying young and healthy by shifting your old age to a clone,” he said, and a crazy idea came into his mind, a connection between Laura’s weariness and the plot of Zoltan’s sci-fi novel. Had Nancy shifted her surplus years to Laura? He pulled himself up sharply. Nonsense.

  “Oh, but that is…” She searched for words. “Silly,” she said. “I am not interested in such constructions. Let’s read Brecht.”

  She reached for the volume of Brecht’s poems on the coffee table, opened it and ran her finger down the list of contents. “‘In Memory of Marie A.’ Do you like that?”

  Brecht’s poem about a kiss on an autumn day, under a young plum tree. Was that a wise choice?

  He took the book from Laura’s hands and read of a cloud in the sky, incredibly white, incredibly far away, of a lover’s face long forgotten.

  I only know: I kissed her once,

  Would not recall the kiss

  But for the cloud,

  So white, so far away.

  Laura’s eyes were solemn, full of grief for something lost, her memory perhaps.

  He turned the page and read the next poem: “Changing the Wheel.”

  I sit by the roadside.

  The driver changes the wheel.

  I do not like the place I have come from.

  I do not like the place I am going to.

  Why with impatience do I

  Watch him changing the wheel?

  Laura had sunk back on the sofa with her eyes closed. Was she concentrating or getting tired of his reading? David put the book down and observed her closely, silently, like a thief stealing a forbidden pleasure. He studied her small perfect ears, the dark fringe of her eyelashes, her whey-coloured cheeks. There was a pale scar on her chin. He hadn’t noticed it before. It was visible only now that she was leaning back, a scar on the cusp between her chin and throat. It took away his breath. He felt endangered suddenly, burdened with unexpected affection. It must be a trick, he thought, an illusion brought on by Brecht’s poem. He needed to sort this out: Had Laura caused the unmistakable warming around his heart, or was it the poem? He listened to the silence between them, the harmony of their breathing and remembered their eyes meeting at the cemetery, at Jerry’s funeral. Two solitudes. We are both in need of friends, he thought.

  Laura’s eyes fluttered open.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I stopped listening. That line about the cloud — ‘very white and terribly far above us’ — reminded me of a painting in my grandfather’s study: Herbstwald. Autumn Forest. I used to look at it while he read Grimm’s fairy tales to me. I imagined that the castles and the giants and the witches were right there in that forest, under a great billowing cloud.” She stopped and bit her lip as if she had said too much, as if it was too intimate a story. The sadness in her eyes deepened. “I thought about the painting and drifted off. Sorry.”

  “No need to apologize,” he said. “I guess my voice put you to sleep. Maybe we should think of something more interesting than reading poetry. Like organizing a homecoming party for you.”

  She shook her head. “No party. No. I don’t want anyone to see me in this state.” There was something solitary and troubled in her voice. She reached up to her head and ran her hand through her hair, which had grown ragged at the edges. The red streaks had faded, had washed out. Only a pink glow remained. She was wearing a roomy T-shirt and jogging pants. It made her look suburban. He hoped the change wasn’t permanent.

  “But people will understand,” he said.

  “No, I don’t want a party, I don’t…” She stopped and bit back the words.

  She is holding something in her heart, David thought, something she won’t allow to pass her lips. Her reticence was like a barrier. He feared he could neither go back and desire Laura, nor go forward and be her friend. He could feel the doubts moving in like a fog bank, grounding his brain.

  ZOLTAN RETURNED bright-eyed and punchy as if he had just won a poker game. He phoned David. “I’m at Laura’s,” he said. “Come over, let’s celebrate her recovery.”

  He welcomed David at the door. He was playing host in Nancy’s absence.

  “She’s still in Vienna,” he said. “She’ll be back in two weeks.”

  He took David through to the backyard, plunked a bottle of Johnny Walker on the table by the pool and went in search of glasses and ice cubes.

  Laura was sitting at the edge of the pool, dipping her toes into the water, shallow-splashing. She barely looked up when David came into the backyard and gave him only an absent-minded wave of her hand.

  Zoltan returned with the glasses and served them drinks. He was full of loud, fall-off-your-chair jokes.

  “Smile,” he said to Laura. “Life is good.”

  She g
ot up and joined them at the table, still unsmiling.

  “Come on, Laura, what’s eating you?” he said and chucked her under the chin.

  She pulled away, refused to get into the party spirit.

  For David, the afternoon had a sad finality about it. Was Laura feeling it as well? It was the end of their togetherness. David was no longer needed. Zoltan was ready to take over and look after Laura and Bébé.

  “Thanks for being a friend to Laura,” Zoltan said and kept talking, fighting David’s moodiness and Laura’s silence. He moved deftly from one topic to the next. What we need is innovative thinking, he said, offering them an array of dazzling futuristic ideas: jacuzzis for pets, chicken coops on apartment balconies, cross-country skiing on sand, subdermal scannable IDs, water sommeliers who tasted and rated tap water.

  “You know what’s limiting our creativity?” he said. “Information technology. It reduces our imagination to what can be represented on the computer in patterns of ones and zeros. It works on us like genetic engineering. In the long-run, all knowledge will be reduced to multiple-choice boxes.”

  “You exaggerate,” David said mildly.

  Laura looked down on her hands and said nothing.

  Zoltan stirred his drink and started up again.

  “I’m not exaggerating,” he said. “But you can’t fight progress. It’s going to happen, whether you want it or not. You have to deal with it, and here’s my solution for people who don’t want to waste their time, who don’t want to get lost in the cyber jungle: trend hunting.”

  “Trend hunting?”

  “The majority of web traffic comes from search engines, right? People need a pathfinder, someone directing their hunting expeditions.” He raised a prophetic finger. “Today, we have personal trainers,” he said. “Tomorrow. we’ll hire personal content managers, someone who will identify your taste direction, or shape it, who will dowse for cool if that’s what you want.”

  “Are you considering a career as a personal content manager?” David said.

  Zoltan wrinkled his brow. “Not me,” he said. “I’m an ideas man. I leave the execution to others.”

  That was unexpected. Zoltan admitting to limits. At Nancy’s party, in the soft reflection of the silver serving dishes, he had looked omnipotent, a producer, a facilitator, a man capable of pulling off anything. Out here on the patio, in the bright sunlight, he looked shabbier and hairier. The hem of his T-shirt was unravelling, his sneakers decaying at the toes. His gut was pronounced, but in spite of his bulk, he refused to be anchored to the spot. He was vibrating with the energy of his ideas.

  Laura ran her finger over the rim of her glass mechanically, clockwise and back again. She had withdrawn into an opaque wordlessness and was once again the reserved woman David remembered from the party, only thinner and less stylish.

  Zoltan finally ran out of steam and stopped. His eyes were on Laura, probing, as if he, too, was trying to remember what she looked like before her illness, as if he, too, had to get to know her again.

  David emptied his glass and stood. “I’d better get back to my work,” he said vaguely. It was time to let Zoltan take over the poetry readings and the grocery shopping and the cat feeding, and for David to return to the default position at his desk, transcribing the manuscript.

  He went back to his house, determined to stay out of Zoltan’s way, but his thoughts wandered across the fence with surprising frequency. He was suffering from withdrawal. He missed the caretaker role. He missed Laura, the other Laura, the cool woman at Nancy’s party.

  Every afternoon, he forced himself to sit down at the computer and work on his book, inserting words, taking them out again, rewording a footnote, rearranging a sentence here and there. The computer desk was still angled to take in Nancy’s driveway and backyard. David couldn’t keep from watching the comings and goings next door. Zoltan usually pulled into the driveway at dinnertime, carrying bags of takeout food, and left again around nine. On Saturday, there was a new development. When David sat down at his desk, he saw that Zoltan’s car was already parked next door. Zoltan himself appeared in the driveway. A furl of belly-flesh showed between the belt of his jeans and the hem of his dryer-shrunk T-shirt. He walked around the Mini Cooper and out of David’s field of vision.

  A moment later, the doorbell rang. He answered the door. It was Zoltan. David waved him in.

  “Coffee?”

  “Sure. Thanks. As long as I’m not interrupting anything.”

  David went to get two mugs.

  “Milk?” he shouted from the kitchen.

  “Hold the milk. Double the sugar,” Zoltan shouted back.

  They sat in the sunroom, clutching their mugs. David couldn’t figure out why Zoltan had come over, what he wanted. He seemed to have run out of original ideas. He got caught in dead-end sentences. David refused to help him along. A creeping annoyance took hold. Zoltan was too big for the room and too restless. His incessantly moving elbow was rubbing the tufted upholstery of the swivel chair. It was meant for a mid-sized man who didn’t fidget.

  Zoltan put down his cup and reached for a piece of the carrot cake David had brought from the kitchen. He failed to navigate the distance between plate and mouth, dropping crumbs on the way, eating with a ravenous appetite to make up for the gap in conversation.

  Why had he come over? What did he want?

  Zoltan swallowed the last bit of cake, eyed the plate as if he wanted to give it a lick, and announced with incongruous formality: “I’ve accepted a position as counsellor at UC Irvine.”

  “Congratulations,” David said and decided to keep to one-word answers from here on in, to make Zoltan go away.

  “I’ve rented a place in Irvine,” Zoltan said. “Laura is coming with me. She’s taking a leave of absence from the Getty. She needs time out.”

  Whose idea was that? Laura needed her own space. That’s what she’d said. Had Zoltan overruled her? David’s resolution to keep to one-word replies wilted.

  “When are you moving?” he asked. He was thinking of Laura, how to keep in touch when she was no longer next door.

  “I’ve already moved my stuff to Irvine,” Zoltan said. “And Laura is packing up as we speak.” He gave David a prompting look that was hard to resist.

  “What about Bébé?” David asked, obeying the prompt.

  “That’s the problem. It’s a bit of a commute from Irvine. I hate to bother you, David, but would you mind taking over again? Nancy will be back in a couple of days.”

  David nodded mutely. He wished he hadn’t made it so easy for Zoltan. Laura could have stayed a few days longer, until Nancy’s return. She could have taken care of Bébé. What was the hurry?

  As if sensing David’s resistance, Zoltan said: “We really need to settle in and establish a routine before term starts. Otherwise, it will be hard on Laura. She tires easily. We don’t want a relapse.”

  He reached into his back pocket and dangled Nancy’s key ring. David meekly held out his palm to receive it.

  “Thanks,” Zoltan said. “I really appreciate it.”

  Casting about for something to say in the awkward silence that followed, it occurred to David that he had never asked Zoltan about his vacation.

  “I never got around to asking,” he said. “How was the Nile cruise?”

  “Alright I guess.” Zoltan pushed away the empty cake plate and waved his hand, as if he wanted to erase the memory of the cruise. “I’m not keen on that sort of thing. The cruise was Nancy’s idea. She thought it was the perfect set-up for writing. I think she told you that I’m working on a science fiction novel. She is very supportive of my work, but I write best at home, alone, out of the sunlight. Splendid vistas destroy the concentration.” He gave a self-deprecating laugh. “Nancy wanted to pamper me, but I wasn’t in the mood for luxury. I had to think about the rest of my life, make up my mind. Do I tak
e up writing full-time or find another job as a counsellor? But one can’t always be thinking of one’s career. Nancy had her heart set on the cruise, so I went along. I think it was good for our relationship.”

  He trailed off, waiting for an encouraging question, but this time David held firm and refused to be cued.

  “Does the Great Systems Theory come into this?” he asked instead. “The reductionist-vitalist argument?” He couldn’t hide the irony in his voice.

  Zoltan erupted in a belly laugh. “Oh that,” he said. “I made that up on the spot. I got bored with the huckster talk around the table and thought I’d inject a little bafflegab into the proceedings. You had me cornered at one point, and if you had pressed me, I would have owned up to whole thing. I was waiting for you to call my bluff.”

  “You should consider a career on stage, Zoltan,” David said. “You are a first-rate actor. You had me completely fooled. I even googled you afterwards to see whether you had written anything on the Great Systems Theory. All I found was a memoir: The Rescue.”

  “Is that thing still floating around in cyberspace?” Zoltan said.

  “I looked for a copy, but Amazon doesn’t carry the book. Is it out of print?”

  “It started out as a pamphlet. I wrote it for Max — Nancy’s husband — after he had a stroke. When he passed away, Nancy had copies run off and handed them out at the memorial service. She wanted people to know that Max and his father saved my life.”

  “They saved your life?”

  “The Nazis deported my parents in 1939. I was saved only because my aunt, who had Aryan papers, claimed I was her child. The Auerpergs, who were our neighbours in Vienna, realized what was going on and went along with the cover-up when they were questioned. That sort of thing took courage — a courage worth commemorating. You know what happened to people who collaborated with Jews? They were deported, together with their protégés.”

  “I see. And how did you end up in Hungary?”