‘Every detail is prescribed by tradition,’ the Abbot told her, ‘recorded in the manual which the copyists use. The form of Christ’s fingers as they are raised in blessing, which contain the Greek letters “IHS”, formed not for their elegance or expressiveness but for their meaning. The composition of the Dormition, where the Christ carries the Virgin’s soul depicted as a baby as once she carried him. The colours too are prescribed, even the order in which the elements are painted: first the gold leaf is laid on, for the background and the haloes, and then the architectural detail, the clothes, and only finally the hands and head. The painting is a ritual, undertaken in a spirit of contemplation.’
The gold of the unfinished icons on the easels glowed beneath the light he held. The windows reflected the forms of the icons and their shadowy figures moving between them.
‘For the monks who work here the making of icons is a form of prayer.’
‘I thought about that. I thought, perhaps, you would consider . . .’
‘Taking the mute boy here? What do his parents say to that?’
She did not mention that she had not asked his mother. In fact, in all the time that she had had an interest in him, she had scarcely spoken to Paraschiva about him. Paraschiva was his unlikely root, that grounded him. She preferred to think of him as some kind of changeling, as independent and separate of any others as if he had sprung of himself.
‘It would suit him. Such a life would suit him. The silence of it. He would learn the icons and painting them would be his prayer.’
The Abbot’s pause indicated some weight of reluctance in him.
‘There are some you know who say that a deaf man, a man entirely without words, can have no sense of God.’
‘What, do you mean that God is only a word?’
‘That isn’t what I said.’
‘Well, will you take him then?’
‘When he is older perhaps. Perhaps we might speak about it when he is older.’
She went back to the guest house. The night began blustery, restless. She went to her room which was beside that of the children but she could not sleep. The wind crashed in and blew about the courtyard and shook the glass and the doors and once swept something from the roof that she heard fall on the ground below. Rain followed, surges of it like waves dashed against the walls. She lay and listened to the wind and the rain, and imagined other lives she might have led. She imagined that she was no mother but a nun, painting icons in a convent, walking in a heavy black gown that rustled about her legs. Or when the storm at last dropped, in the bitter stillness of the last moments before dawn, she imagined that she might have been one of the kind of women her husband had come to love, with their sleek hair and high heels and half-wrapped furs, coming out of a city nightclub with metallic laughter that carried like cock’s crowing through the air.
For a long time Augustin also did not sleep. It was the first night in his life that he had slept in a house other than his own, here in the great monastery, in a narrow bed in a strange room. If he did not hear the wind he felt its disturbance of the air. He felt it inside him and saw what he felt as the waves on the Sea of Galilee, sharp little waves that carried a boat balanced on their tips. Then he smelled the dampness of the rain. The waves were blue and the boat was brown and its sail was white. The men on board wore cloaks the colours of rust and verdigris, and held out their arms to the mast to save themselves from being tipped into the sea. In the blackness of his sleep the boat itself was tipped, and broken on the sharp points of the waves, and everything blackened and the men drowned. He saw them drowning about him, slim naked figures pale as worms, men and women too, a mass of them, more people than he had ever seen, tumbling and falling.
All that he had seen in that day came back raw to his eyes, turned and twisted within him. The serried ranks of humanity and angels. Ladders of men; men tumbling off down black ravines and into fire. Shamed sinners cowering in lines, shivering in their nakedness, covering themselves with long hands. A line of beheaded martyrs, saints bowed over with their haloed heads rolling on the ground; slim executioners beside them, black tights and red tunics, pointed toes and pointed helmets, swords raised high over their bloodied necks. Augustin moaned in his horror, softly at first, but then he cried out, and Safta woke. She was afraid. She did not know this terrible voice was his. She left her bed and came to him, groping for him in the dark which was dense now that the rain had come. His arms flailed about him when she tried to touch him. His eyes did not seem to see her at all. She could feel the heat of his terror coming off him like a fever. Since she could not soothe him any other way she tried to cool him down. She stripped off the bedclothes, found the water pitcher in the room and brought a wet towel and laid it on his hot forehead. All this she did in silence, and gradually he became silent also, returning to himself. When he was still and cool, she got into his bed beside him and pulled the blankets over them, the bed so narrow that the two of them lay in it like pins, side by side.
The next day was a festival. People came to the monastery from all the villages around. The church was full when they went into it, people crowding at the back, grey-bearded monks like statues in the stalls against the walls, other monks milling about, their raven forms prostrated in the corners or grouped about the lecterns to chant the liturgy. Marina Văleanu led the children in, took Augustin’s hand in hers and pulled him forward. He felt faint at the press of people, the smell of peasant pilgrims mingled with the heaviness of incense. He felt the pull of the tower over his head like a black vortex into which he would fall upwards, not down, an inverted well where smoke swirled grey across the light and the soot of endless years clung to the walls. He felt that he would fall, like a stone or a feather. But she tugged him on until they stood at the front before the iconostasis. They got there and she let go of his clammy hand, and at the same instant the iconostasis doors opened and the priest was suddenly revealed. His apparition came like a conjuring trick, a man appearing with a confusion of gold and smoke and lights about him. Big as a bull he seemed, the blackness and the thickness of his beard fearful in themselves. It was too much for Augustin. The image was too strong. At the same moment the congregation surged forward. His nightmares came back to him and he sensed an awful power in the bearded man. He panicked. He turned and ran – or tried to run, forcing himself between the press of people. There was no clear way. He had to push and elbow himself out, even putting down his head and butting like a goat. Out from the smoke. Out from the black well. Out into the glare of the day. He ran out of the church into the great courtyard, out beneath the painted tunnel and the great wooden doors of the gate.
When they found him later he was already sitting in the car. He did not sit in the driver’s seat where he liked to play but in the passenger seat behind, stock still, eyes looking directly ahead, hands rolled into fists at his sides.
It was late in the day when the car got back to the village, the time of day when half the population was out along the road, come in from their work in the fields, waiting as the cows returned from pasture. The homecoming herd came in at just the same time as the car, so that for a while they were forced to wait while the flow of the animals parted about it, muddied rumps rubbing past its shiny metal sides. Any other day Augustin might have been proud to have been seen in this way, travelling so grandly in the Văleanus’ car. This day he did not seem to be aware that anyone at all was watching. When they got to the house, Ilie went round and opened the boot, and he took out his bag and his drawings, and it was a private act. He walked off without looking at any of them, not even Safta. He carried his little bag in one hand, his sketchbook in the other, with the folder of drawings he had made slipping awkwardly beneath one arm.
Once he was inside the cottage he let what he was carrying drop. He closed the door and leant his back against it. Then he took up the folder of drawings and went out again, this time into the yard. To the side of the woodpile there was a hole in the fence, roughly blocked with a plank to k
eep the chickens from straying. He moved this aside and went through, propping it back behind him. He walked through the mud along the edge of a vegetable patch, out to the fields that led down to the river. There were only a couple of old women still at work that time of day, and they saw him pass with urgent steps, walking a straight fixed line. They saw his back recede and knew that he had some deliberate intention; but the boy was strange to them, his ways were always strange, and they did not question his direction any more than they would have questioned that of the wind.
The water was high, heavy and muddied after the storm. He walked down the bank and stood on a gravel shelf beside the shallows, where there was a wide flat rock to which the women came to beat their clothes. On the far side of it the water ran in a fast and tangled current. He stepped out to the rock and knelt on it, then untied the folder. One by one he took each picture he had made in the church and tore it, and scattered the coloured pieces on to the water and watched them swirl and rush away.
In the stillness of her study, Marina Văleanu prayed before the tender Mother of God. Dusk was falling across the garden, the hills, the view of the village. In the river, darkening scraps of colour grew sodden and began to sink unseen. The boy walked home across grey fields. All colour was gone now; the plank fence about the yard, the barns, the woodpile reduced to a smudged charcoal blackness. In the icon there was still a glimmer of light, in the gold behind the Virgin’s veil, in the ring on the finger of a long hand raised in peace. Everything else fell into shadow – the pale oval of her face, the long almonds of her eyes, the head of the woman praying. Marina Văleanus prayed away her shame and her disappointment. She crossed herself and kissed the cool metal. Her mind went over other things that the Abbot had said. How God might be found in the performance of simple tasks. How he might be found in silence itself.
6
Recently he has begun to look at her pictures. He still hasn’t touched the drawing things she has given him but he looks at the pictures she brings. He takes them from her one by one and looks at them very seriously, and then he folds them away according to some incomprehensible logic of size or subject or colour, on to one pile or another in the locker beside his bed. Sometimes his interest is in the image on the reverse of the page she has intended to show him, some odd detail or simply the form of a word that appeals to him. One day she brought him a matchbox with a hammer and sickle and a slogan on it in broad red letters on white: TRĂIASCĂ 1 MAI. Now whenever she sees a matchbox with a new slogan she brings him another. In white on red: TRAIASCA PRIETENIA ROMANO-SOVIETICA, 7 NOIEMBRIE; Citiţi” Scânteia”. She is happy to think that for him these words have no significance whatsoever.
It was not difficult to find the drugs. One of the doctors helped her.
‘They’ll be expensive,’ he said.
He thought she would not have the money but she still has a few pieces of jewellery she can sell.
‘That’s all right.’
‘He must have the full course. No point him starting if he doesn’t have the full course.’
‘I’ll get him the full course.’
It was clear the doctor could not see why a nurse like her should help this one mute patient among all the others. People don’t do things like that. He suspected something unsaid, some connection.
‘He reminds me of someone. He reminds me of my brother.’ It wasn’t true. It was only something to say, and yet she felt that it was true in the moment that she said it. There was feeling in the way she spoke.
The doctor softened. ‘OK, I’ll get them for you.’
He seemed a good man. He was tall and wore his clothes loosely and his hair fell across his forehead. He had sympathy for some imagined tragedy of a lost brother. And there were so few people she knew in this city. She smiled, switching on her brightness for him, feeling his attractiveness. But the possibility lived only for a moment, then she closed the shutter. She had already lied to him anyway.
She asked only, ‘How long must he stay in hospital?’
‘A month. Six weeks perhaps, we’ll see.’
‘And then?’
‘And then he can go home.’
She did not say that he had no home.
This day she has a whole magazine for Tinu, an old illustrated magazine from before the war.
‘Look, it has a Lipizzaner on the cover. Like my grandfather’s. There’s a whole article on Lipizzaners.’
She had been browsing a stall in the market, heaps of books and lace tablecloths and bric-a-brac, and the magazine happened to catch her eye. A beautiful white horse rearing, a soldier in hussar’s uniform on its back. She didn’t know what she was doing there really, what she was looking for. She has so few needs beyond the immediate, living as she does in a hostel with twenty others, living day to day with little to call her own. And yet she finds herself poking through the stalls, full of nostalgia for other people’s discarded things.
‘There are more pictures inside, I’ll show you.’
In the Spanish Riding School in Vienna, a line of white horses like a corps de ballet. The building where they perform like a vast ballroom with chandeliers and high white Corinthian pillars and a floor of golden sand.
‘They teach the horses to dance and people go to watch. They used to make them dance for the Austrian emperors.’
She has his interest now. She leans across him and turns the page. The next picture shows a dappled grey horse with four feet high in the air, high as its trainer’s chest. It looks as if it’s flying.
‘I thought you’d like it. It’s like Grandfather’s horse, only Grandfather’s was whiter, but maybe that was partly age. The foals are born dark, that’s how they are in the pictures here, and then they go whiter and whiter as they grow older.’
Soft sentences, pauses between them.
‘Since you came here I’ve been remembering things. Things I hadn’t thought about in ages. I wonder who’s left, what’s left.’
She is speaking for herself, not for him.
He has taken the page from her and traces the images with his fingers. There is a series of a single white stallion performing its steps. Capriole, courbette, pirouette, passage, levade: neat, white, perfect in the photographs as if it was not a real horse but a statue carved of marble. She looks at his face that also might be made of stone; mouth and eyes and expression so still and fixed. And she sees that there are tears on it.
‘You were happy there with the horses, weren’t you? It was better than with us. The horses liked you. All the animals did.’
It comes back to her. The warmth and smell of the horses, their eyes like molasses.
‘If only you could go there now. That would make you well.’
7
After that trip to the monastery Marina Văleanu decided that he should learn a job of work. There was discussion about what this should be, and József the groom was getting old and needed help so he ended up in the stables. That was all right, Safta had thought. Tinu liked to be in the stables.
She did not see him so often after that because it was the start of winter. The weather was cold and kept her indoors. She was a girl and there were many things a girl could do indoors. Her cousins came to stay. There were games. Only sometimes there were rides, on fine days. They rode out and up across the hills that were dusted with snow. If she glimpsed him in the yard when they came back she was too full of the ride and the hot smell of horse and the bite of the cold on her cheeks to notice him. She sat high in the saddle and talked over his head to her cousins. And then she dismounted and gave him the reins to lead the pony away, and the pony shook its head sharply up and down and breathed steam into his face.
When there was no work to do he sat and made his drawings at the bench in the tack room amid the smells of leather and saddlesoap and wax and horses. Mostly he drew in pencil, sometimes shading and polishing till the graphite shone black. He had no need of colour here. The tack-room walls were white. The tack was brown. He did not draw any more angels
or demons or people who walked on clouds, but real things: the stable; the stalls where the horses were kept, with wooden partitions and hay-filled mangers and a floor of herringboned bricks with the dark runnel of a drain down the centre; saddles mounted one beside another on poles stuck out from the wall; bridles with looping reins hung alongside; harnesses. Sometimes he stole just a word from the life at the big house, some letters memorised from a book or from the nursery wall, and added them to the drawings. He drew their forms with the accuracy almost of print but he let them slide their positions around and across the rest of the work. His favourite image, one that he worked on over a series of days, depicted the wide archway that was the entrance to the stable yard – an arch columned and pedimented, almost as grand as the portico of the house – and within this frame all the inanimate elements of the yard were crammed together in rows: the doors to the stables and coach house, the mounting block, water trough, carts, muck rakes and tools and buckets. When he had completed this picture he folded it in half and half again and put it into his pocket. After that, he could bring it out and look at the yard even when he wasn’t there.
At first he only mucked out the stables and cleaned the tack but József taught him to wash and curry comb the horses and plait their tails and manes, and saw that he had a knack for it. He seemed to have an understanding with the animals, that he communicated by touch and by the movements of his hands, even by eye, but also by the closest that he ever came to speech. He blew through his lips as the horses did. Sometimes he made a clucking sound by touching his tongue to the roof of his mouth. It was a gesture that seemed to come to him out of instinct.
Painter of Silence Page 5