The Swan Thieves

by Elizabeth Kostova

  My clearest one:

  I am in receipt this very moment of your letter and am moved by it to write you at once. Yes, as you compassionately hint, I have been lonely these years.

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  And strange as this may seem, I wish you had known my wife, although if that had been possible, then you and I would have come to know each other under proper circumstances and not in this otherworldly love, if you will permit me to call it that.

  I hadn't known that Robert could be so flowery in a letter, or anywhere else--his notes to me had always been short and brisk. For a moment I felt more sickened by this surprise than by the fact that it was a love letter. The courtly, almost old-fashioned tone of it was a Robert I could hardly recognize, a gallant Robert who had never wasted his gallantry on his wife, whom he wished the addressee of the letter knew, or had known at some point.

  I stood holding his words in the sunny library and wondered what I was reading. He had been lonely. He had fallen in otherworldly love. Of course it had to be "otherworldly," since he was married and had two children and was also possibly crazy. And what about me? Had I not been lonely? But I didn't have anything otherworldly, only all the reality of the world to cope with: the children, the dishes, the bills, Robert's psychiatrist. Did he think I liked the real world any more than he did?

  I went slowly into his studio and looked at the easel. The woman was there. I thought I'd gotten used to her, to her presence in our lives. It was a canvas he'd been working on for weeks -- she was alone in it, and her face was not yet fully painted, but I could have filled in that rough pale oval myself with the right features. He had placed her at a window, standing, and she was wearing a revealing, loose robe, pale blue. She held a paintbrush in one hand. Within another day or two she would be smiling at him, or gazing seriously, steadily, her dark eyes full of love. I had come to believe that she was imaginary, a fiction, part of the vision that drove his gifts. That had been trusting, too trusting, because it turned out my first instincts had been correct. She was real, and he wrote to her.

  I had a sudden desire to wreck the room, tear up his drawing

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  pads, knock the lady-in-progress to the floor, smear her and stamp on her, rip the posters and chaotic postcards from the wall. The cliché of it stopped me, the humiliation of being like a jealous wife in a movie. And a kind of sneakiness, too, a stealth that crept over my brain like a drug--I could learn more if Robert didn't know I knew. I put the scrap of paper on my desk, already planning to copy the words for myself and put it back on the floor at the open door of his studio in case he missed it. I pictured him stooping for it, thinking, I dropped this? That was a close call. And putting it in his pocket or in the drawer of his table.

  Which was my next move--I went delicately through the drawers of his studio table, replacing with the care of an archivist anything I moved: big graphite pencils, gray erasers, receipts for oil paints, a half-eaten chocolate bar. Letters in the back of one drawer, letters in a handwriting I didn't recognize, replies to letters like his. Dear Robert. Darling Robert. My dear Robert. I thought of you today while I worked on my new still life. Do you think still lifes are worth doing? Why paint something that is more dead than alive? I wondered how to put life into something with just your hand, this mysterious force that jumps like electricity between the sight and your eye, and then your eye and your hand, and then your hand and the brush, and so on. And back to your eye; it all comes down to what you can see, doesn't it, because no matter what your hand can do, it can't fix dimness of vision. I have to run to class now, but I think of you constantly. I love you, you know. Mary.

  My hands shook. I felt nauseated, felt the room trembling around me. I knew her name, then--and knew she must be a student, or possibly a faculty member, although in that case I would probably have recognized the name. She had to run to class. The campus was full of students I hadn't met and hadn't even seen--I wouldn't have seen all of them even in the time we lived there. Then I remembered the sketch I'd found in his pocket during our move to Greenhill several years earlier. This had been going on a

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  long time; he had surely met her in New York. He had traveled north often since then, including his long semester away--had he gone so he could see her? Had that been the reason for his sudden leave of absence, his reluctance to take us with him? Of course she was another painter, an art student, a working painter, a real painter. He was painting her himself with her brush in hand. Of course she was a painter, as I had once been.

  And yet--Mary--such an ordinary name, the name of the person with the little lamb, the name of the mother of Jesus. Or Queen of Scots, or Bloody Mary, quite contrary, or Mary Magdalene. No, it didn't always guarantee blue-and-white innocence. Her handwriting was large and girlish but not crude, the spelling correct, the turns of phrase intelligent and sometimes even striking, often humorous, sometimes a little cynical. Sometimes she thanked him for a drawing or added a skillful sketch of her own--one took up a whole page and showed people sitting around in a café with mugs and teapots on the tables. One of the notes was dated from a few months earlier, but most had no dates and none had envelopes. He had somehow thought to throw those out, or perhaps he'd opened the letters elsewhere and not cared about the envelopes, or carried them around without envelopes -- a few of them were frayed, as if they'd been in a pocket. She didn't mention any meetings or plans to see him, but she wrote once about a time they had kissed each other. There was nothing else really sexual in those letters, in fact, although she said often that she missed him, loved him, daydreamed about him. In one she referred to him as "unattainable," which made me think that maybe nothing more had ever happened between them.

  And yet everything had happened, if they loved each other. I put the notes back in the drawer. It was Robert's letter that upset me most--but there were no others from him, only from her. And I found nothing else in the studio, nothing in his office, nothing in his extra jacket, nothing in his car when I searched that, too,

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  that evening, on the pretext of looking for a flashlight in the glove compartment--not that he would have followed me or noticed much. He played with the children, smiled at dinner--he was energetic, but his eyes were distant. That was the difference, the proof.

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  CHAPTER 34 Kate

  I confronted him the next day, asking him to stay home for a few minutes after my mother had gone out with the children--I knew it was a day when he didn't have class until afternoon. I had hidden the letters in the dining-room sideboard, with the exception of the one in Robert's handwriting, which I put in my pocket, and I sat him down at the table to talk. He was impatient to be off to school, but his body stilled when I asked him if he realized that I knew what was going on. He frowned. Now I was the one trembling--with rage or fear, I wasn't yet certain. "What do you mean?" His frown seemed genuine. He was wearing something dark, and his remarkable handsomeness leapt out at me, as it sometimes did, without warning--the regal body, the strong features.

  "First question--do you see her at school? Do you see her every day? Did she come here from New York, maybe?" He leaned back. "See who at school?"

  "The woman." I said. "The woman in all your paintings. Does she model for you at school or in New York?"

  He began to glower. "What? I thought we'd been through this before."

  "Do you see her every day? Or does she send you letters from a distance?"

  "Send me letters?" He looked flabbergasted at this, pale. Guilt, surely.

  "Don't bother to answer. I know she does."

  "You know she does? What do you know?" There was anger in his eyes but also bewilderment.

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  "I know because I found her letters to you."

  Now he was staring at me as if he had no words, as if he actually didn't know what to say. I had seldom seen him so disoriented, at least not in response to something from outside himself. He put both hands on the table, where they rested against
the sheen of the grain, Mom's polishing. "You found letters from her to me?" The strange thing was that he didn't sound ashamed. If I'd had to characterize his voice and face at that moment, I would have said he seemed somehow eager, alarmed, hopeful. It enraged me--the note in his voice made me realize that he loved her uncontrollably, loved even the mention of her.

  "Yes!" I shouted, jumping to my feet and pulling the pile of notes from under the place mats in the sideboard. "Yes, I even know her name, you stupid fool! I know it's Mary. Why did you leave them in this house if you didn't want me to find out?" I dropped them in front of him on the table, and he picked one up.

  "Yes, Mary," he said, and then he glanced up and began almost to smile, but sadly. "That's nothing. Well, not nothing, but not so important."

  I began to cry in spite of myself, and I felt it was not because of what he'd done so much as what he'd seen me do, that dramatic pulling out of letters and tossing them down in front of him. It was as humiliating as I ever could have dreamed. "You think it's nothing that you love another woman? What about this?" I pulled his own scrap of letter from my pocket, the one indisputably in his handwriting, crumpled it up, and hurled it at him.

  He caught it and smoothed it out on the table. I thought I read disbelief in his face. Then he seemed to rally. "Kate, what the hell do you care? She's dead. She's dead!" He was white around the nose and lips, his face rigid. "She died. Do you think I wouldn't give anything to have saved her, to have let her go on painting?"

  Now I was sobbing in confusion as much as anything else. "She's dead?" The one dated letter from Mary meant she must have been alive even a couple of months before. I had the weird

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  social impulse to say, Oh, I'm so sorry. Had she been in a car accident? Why had he not acted traumatized these last months or weeks? Nothing had seemed different. Perhaps whatever the relationship had been, he'd cared so little, actually, that he hadn't grieved for her. But this struck me as terrible in itself--could a person be that coldhearted?

  "Yes. She is dead." He gave the word a bitterness I wouldn't have thought him capable of. "And I still love her. You're damn right about that, if that satisfies you. I don't know why you should care. I love her. And if you don't understand the kind of love I mean, I'm not going to explain." He stood up.

  "It doesn't satisfy me." Now that I had started weeping, I couldn't stop. "It makes it all worse. I don't know what you've been up to or what you mean. You have no idea how hard I've tried to understand you. But we're done, Robert, and that satisfies me--that does satisfy me." I picked up our Chinese vase from the sideboard, where it had always sat well out of child-reach, and threw it across the room. It smashed to heartrending bits on the hearth, under the portraits of my father's parents, stalwart people from Cincinnati. I regretted its destruction already. I regretted everything, except my children.

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  CHAPTER 35 1878

  The village where they stay is quieter than nearby Étretat, but Yves says he likes it better for that very reason; their day in Trouville he found even more unsettling--in summer there must be as many people on the promenade there as on the Champs-Élysées, he tells Béatrice. They can always take a horse-drawn cab to Étretat for some quiet elegance, if they like, but this hamlet of houses in walking distance of the broad beach pleases all of them, and most days they stay there in serenity, walking the pebbles and the sands.

  Every evening Béatrice reads Montaigne aloud to Papa in the rented parlor with its cheap damask chairs and shelves full of sea-shells. The other two men listen or talk in low voices near them. She has started a new piece of embroidery as well, to be sewn into a cushion for Yves's dressing room, a birthday present. She applies herself to this task day after day, straining her senses over the fine, small flowers in gold and purple. She likes to work on it while she sits on the veranda. When she raises her head, there is the sea, the gray-brown, green-topped cliffs off to the left and far right, the peeling fishermen's shacks and the boats pulled up on the beach, the clouds above a blustery horizon. Every few hours it rains, and then the sun breaks through again. Every day is a little warmer until a stormy morning suddenly keeps them inside; the next day is brighter still.

  Her pastimes all help her avoid Olivier, but one afternoon he comes to sit beside her on the veranda. She knows his habits, and this is a change. In the mornings and again in the late afternoons,

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  when the weather is fine, he paints on the beach. He has invited her to accompany him, but her hurried excuses--she doesn't have a canvas prepared--always put a stop to that, and he goes by himself, cheerfully, whistling, touching his hat as he passes her in her chair on the porch.

  She wonders if he walks more briskly because she is watching; she again has that strange sense that he is shedding years under her gaze. Or is it merely that she has learned to look through his years, now more transparent to her--that she sees through them to the person they have made him? Whenever he takes leave of her, she watches his straight back, his favorite old painting suit retreating down the beach. She is trying to unlearn what she knows about him, to view him again as her husband's elderly relation who happens to be on holiday with them, but she knows too much about his thoughts, his turns of phrase, his dedication to his work, his regard for hers. Of course, he doesn't send her letters here in this house, but words linger between them--his slanting handwriting, the sudden leap of his mind on paper, his caressing "tu" on the page.

  Today there is a book instead of an easel under his arm. He settles down next to her in a big chair as if determined not to be rebuffed. She is glad in spite of herself that she has put on her pale-green dress with the yellow ruching at the neck, which a few days before he said made her look like a narcissus; she wishes he were even nearer so that his gray-jacketed shoulder could brush hers, wishes he would go away, wishes he would get on a train back to Paris. Her throat tightens. He smells of something pleasant from his toilette, some unknown soap or eau de cologne; she wonders if he has worn this scent for many years, whether it has changed with time. The book in his lap stays closed, and she is certain that he doesn't intend to read it, a suspicion borne out when she sees the title, La loi des Latins; she recognizes it from the dull shelf just inside. He obviously snatched it up before coming to sit with her, a ploy that makes her smile down at her needlework. "Bonjour," she says with what she hopes is a housewife's neutrality.

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  "Bonjour," he answers. They sit in silence for a moment or two, and that, she thinks, is the proof, even the problem. If they were genuine strangers or ordinary family members, they would already be chatting about nothing in particular. "May I ask you a question, my dear?"

  "Of course." She finds her tiny scissors with their stork's beak and embossed legs; she cuts her thread.

  "Do you intend to avoid me for a full month?"

  "It's been only six days," she says.

  "And a half. Or six days and seven hours," he corrects her. The effect is so droll that she glances up and smiles. His eyes are blue, not elderly enough to put her off as they should. "That's much better," he says. "I had hoped the punishment would not last four weeks."

  "Punishment?" she asks as mildly as she can. She tries in vain to rethread her needle.

  "Yes, punishment. And for what? For admiring a young painter from a distance? After all my good manners, you could surely afford to give me a little cordiality."

  "You understand, I think," she begins, but the needle is giving her unusual trouble.

  "Allow me." He takes the needle and threads it carefully with the fine gold silk, then hands it back. "Old eyes, you know. They get keen with use."

  She can't stop herself from laughing. It is this spark of humor between them, his ability to mock himself, more than anything else, that undoes her. "Very well. "With your keen eyes, then, you will understand that it is impossible for me to--"

  "To pay me as much attention as you would pay a stone in your pretty shoe? Actually, you'd pay mu
ch more to the stone, so perhaps I will simply have to become more annoying."

  "No, please--" She has begun to laugh again. She hates the joy that sparkles between them at such moments, the pleasure that might become visible to anyone else. Doesn't this man understand

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  that he is part of her family? And elderly? She feels again the elusive-ness of age. What he has already taught her is that a person doesn't feel old inside, at least until the body claims its dismal due; that is why Papa seems old although he is younger, while this white-haired, silver-bearded artist seems not to know how he should behave.

  "Stop it, ma chère. I'm too ancient to do any harm, and your husband thoroughly approves of our friendship."

  "And why shouldn't he?" She tries to sound offended, but the strange pleasure of his closeness is too great, and she finds herself smiling at him again.

  "All right, then. You have argued yourself into a corner. If there's no reason for objections anyway, you can come out and paint with me tomorrow morning. My fisherman friend down on the beach says it will be fine, so fine that the fish will be leaping into his boat. For my part, I thought they leapt higher on rainy days." He is imitating the dialect of the coast, and she laughs. He gestures toward the water. "I don't like your languishing here with all this sewing. A great artist in the making should be out with her easel."

  Now she feels herself flushing from the neck up. "Don't tease me."

  He turns serious at once and takes her hand as if without thinking, not as a gesture of courtship. "No, no--I am in earnest. If I had your gifts, I would not be wasting a minute."

  "Wasting?" She is half angry, half ready to cry.

  "Oh, my dear. I am clumsy." He kisses her hand in apology and lets it go before she can protest. "You must know what faith I have in your work. Don't be indignant. Just come out and paint with me tomorrow, and you'll remember how you love it and forget all about me and my clumsiness. I'll merely escort you to the right view. Agreed?"