A few times he repeated the long walk down into the valley and then the spine he’d seen from above broke up into its parts: men and machines, horses, trucks, ox carts, guns. There was dust or mud depending on the season, churned-up ground, black exhaust fumes. The first lot of soldiers wore smart uniforms like soldiers in pictures and they gave chocolate to the children who came running behind them – and once to him, so mute and birdlike among them. The chocolate was good and the soldiers were pretty, yellow-haired and blue-eyed so that they reminded him of the English governess. The soldiers who came back later from the other direction were not so pretty. Their uniforms were dirty and torn and some of them had lost their boots. These men had cloths wrapped around their feet and some had cloths about their heads that he saw were bandages but not white as bandages should be but greyed with dirt and rusted sometimes with blood. The soldiers in these columns hung their heads like stray beaten dogs at the edge of the village and he was wary of them as he would have been of the dogs. A group of them came close and sniffed about him as dogs might have done, as if he might have had food in his pockets for them, but he had nothing. He opened his hands to them like empty spoons and they snarled. After that he did not go down to the columns again.
The tanks found their way into his pictures. He could see the weight of them, the thickness of their armour, the way they mounted ditches and crushed the undergrowth, the compaction of the earth where they had passed. He drew their huge squat shapes, the turrets and the gun barrels and the great tracks; detailing machine guns, hatch-covers, handgrips, vents, the heavy metal links that made up the tracks and all the wheels that turned within them. He painted the German cross on the front of one tank, Soviet numbers on the turret of another. He cut out the shapes from cardboard and worked at making a turret and gun barrel that would swivel like the real thing. He imagined as he worked how it would feel to be the man standing with his head out of the turret, riding in such a great machine that made the ground tremble about it, swivelling the turret to point the barrel in whatever direction he chose.
Then when some planes had bombed the river crossing he came upon a ruined tank, and he climbed on to it as if it were some ruined building and found pieces of men cooked inside. He understood perfectly what he was seeing. He saw that from inside the tank was a hard and claustrophobic box, a metal trap, an oven.
The last of the family had left Poiana before any of that. It was at the end of winter or early in the spring when there was still no green to the land. There was a formal goodbye to the servants who stood in a line on the lowest step beneath the porch. The house servants wore only their indoor clothes though the Văleanus were dressed for travel in hats and furs. There was a biting wind that fluttered the women’s skirts and aprons. Paraschiva wept openly. Old Stanislaw stood stiff as a soldier but with tears in his eyes. Even Mama Anica’s face was very red, and a quiver ran through her as she kissed her mistress’s glove.
Every space in the car was tight with boxes and there were trunks tied to the back. It was clear by all that luggage that they would be gone for a long time. Augustin saw them go with eyes that were whipped wet by the wind. They have gone to be with Safta and the boys, he thought. The children had already been away for a long time. He pictured some other house like a mirror image of Poiana. The children would be there waiting, the trunks taken in and unpacked, the family reunited. He was working indoors for quite a few days after their departure, with his mother and Mama Anica and Stanislaw, and Ileana who had come only a short time before to work as a maid, moving furniture, covering sofas and chairs with dust sheets, packing smaller things away in crates. They trusted him with this indoor work because he was so neat with his hands. He packed everything with his customary careful touch, wrapping tissue about china vases and dishes and figurines. As he packed he pictured the servants in that other house unwrapping the figurines and arranging them on other shelves: a shepherdess, a harlequin, a goddess. He imagined the rooms of that other house empty and being filled just as the rooms at Poiana were becoming empty.
There was logic and order to the work, but there was something that had happened the day they left that defied his understanding. It was so disturbing that it came back again and again before his eyes. It had no cause that he could understand, no symmetrical conclusion. If he did not push the thought of it away his fingers became hard and unsteady. He felt a terror that he would break whatever piece of china they held, some gleaming fragile cup or jug or vase smashing to the parquet floor. With an effort of will he kept his fingers supple, and nothing was broken. The crates when they were done were stacked in the hall and then later Mama Anica called the gardeners in to carry them up to the attic.
The gardeners’ hands worked alongside his, holding the corners of the crates.
They were strong hands.
There was soil on them, in the cracks and beneath the fingernails.
The gardeners had buried the Lipizzaner and the memory of it was fresh on their hands.
He took a crate and carried it up the stairs.
Careful, said the man behind him, as the crate juddered and almost slipped from his grasp. Hold it there.
He caught his breath, resting the crate momentarily against the landing wall. He looked up at the portraits that were all that was left of the family, hanging unmoved above him. Then he took the weight again and nodded to the man that he could carry on.
It was he who had groomed the horse that morning, combed out its mane and tail, worked its white flanks until they shone, and brought it out to Constantin Văleanu; and Constantin had stroked its neck and nose and murmured to it close, and then mounted it, though he did not often ride now, and rode off to the wood taking his rifle slung in its case over his shoulder.
Augustin looked into the space where they had gone. It was an empty space and he did not see the horse return there, but only the small figure of the old man on foot, walking swiftly with the gun again in its case over his shoulder. The old man walked by him, not meeting his eye. He walked by and then he called the gardeners and sent them off with their spades. Augustin followed, and he sensed before he saw it what he was about to see: in a clearing in the wood, the Lipizzaner fallen on its side, hooves stuck out like chopped branches, teeth bared, a thick dark blaze of blood spreading between its eyes.
It was the first of the senseless killings. No meaning to the sight, no precedent that he had known. That the animal should be killed by the man who loved it, and that it should be buried like this. He had seen other animals killed before, but those were for eating, not for burial. There was purpose to that.
23
There is an image that he must make for Safta. Not the horse. She also had loved the Lipizzaner. No need for her to suffer that. There was another death of which he must tell her, but he is not strong enough yet to make the picture. The deaths and the processions press and tangle in his memory. No pattern to them, no chronology either. There are tanks, men, horses, lines of men dressed in the colours of the soil, of mud and dust; and if they were stripped of their clothes they would be pale and bare like pale stalks that should be concealed beneath the ground, covered over again with soil. And also they are like the figures he has seen on the walls of churches, the pale lines of naked men marching up and down the scenes of judgement. He does not know their meaning but he confuses in his mind those living men that he has seen with images of the dead. If he would draw them he would draw one outline merging into another like those of the naked souls passing through purgatory and hell: long faces and long limbs, the landscape shattered about them, dust, mud, craters, ruts crossing and dividing over the torn valley floor; the landscape shattering further, cracking open, about to swallow them up.
First he might draw the jeep for her. Another of the stray events of those years. Sometime later, much later than the horse, sometime when the armies were going to and fro. A jeep that came with two soldiers in it, a driver and another man who did not drive but who he always thought of as the driver. No mistaking him even th
ough he was a passenger now and in uniform, thinner and more sober. His jeep was dirty and snagged with grass. It drove up into the stable yard, right up to Augustin where he stood. The engine kept running and the young man shouted at him. Augustin just spread his hands wide and shrugged his shoulders.
Gone, he was telling him, they have all gone. And the young man remembered that he was deaf and understood.
Where, his hands asked.
Don’t know. Only, they are gone.
And the young man took a little book out from a pocket of his tunic and tore out a page and wrote a note, while the jeep’s engine was still running. Then he crumpled the note in his hand and went back to the jeep and had the driver stop the engine. He went to the steps of the mounting block and sat down there and took a long time writing a second, far longer message. This one he folded, and he wrote Safta’s name on the outside.
If she comes back, give it to her.
I’ll keep it safe. Augustin held the note to his chest. If she comes, I’ll give it to her. I’ll look after it till then.
Thank you. He was still brown and smooth, the young man, but he had become harder, like hard wood. Augustin looked into his eyes and saw the weathering in them and liked him better than he had before. There was trust in his eyes. The perfect young man was putting his trust in him.
He had tried to keep that trust. He had kept the note for years. He had kept it in his room among his papers, and when he left and went to live in the village he took it with him, and when he left the village he took it in his pocket. He would have it still if it had not been taken from him. So now he begins with the image of the yard. He must begin his story there. He draws it with the utmost precision as if he had the place before him, or a photograph of it, a sharp still shot. He draws every window and doorway, the latches on the doors, the shingles on the roof and the cobbles on the ground. He must make her see first the yard, and then the jeep, and then the young man. Only in that way will he be able to tell her what happened.
He shows it to the two women when they come in from the hospital.
‘Look what he’s done, Safta. It’s a yard, stables. A country place.’
Safta looks at the picture over the other woman’s shoulder.
‘Well, what do you think?’
‘It’s a lovely drawing. A stable yard, like you say.’
‘I think it’s a real place, don’t you? It must be where he lived.’
‘Probably, yes, now you say that. I should think so. Or at least, somewhere that he used to go.’
‘I wonder if we could find it. We might find out where he came from.’
‘There must be thousands of yards like that. There will be a yard like that in every village in the country.’
‘Yes, but he might do more now that he’s begun. Don’t you think so? He might do other pictures from memory like that. This is a breakthrough, don’t you see?’
He has made the picture for Safta, not for Adriana, but Safta has given it barely a glance. He has a story to tell her and he is for a moment sharply aware of his incapacity to tell it. She is remote from him. She will not see what he needs her to see. She does not even seem to perceive his disappointment. Adriana goes to Augustin where he stands with his back to the wall and hugs him. She has come from the hospital in the heat. She smells sharp with sweat and disinfectant. The smell is not so much unpleasant as safe and functional. She takes his head in her hot disinfected hands and kisses both his cheeks.
In the days that follow he draws the yard again and again. He has found some good brown paper that takes pencil well. He draws the outlines in minute detail and then he shades them until they shine.
Adriana is disappointed that he does not move on to other subjects. Often he continues with the drawings long after the point at which she has thought they were finished. He goes on shading and overdrawing until the details disappear. Doors and openings of stables and barns become solid. Roof tiles merge with walls. The walls become so black that they can no longer be distinguished from the ground. She takes up each drawing and holds it to the light so that she can make out the outlines at least. She cannot understand what it is that he is meaning to do.
24
For a long time the war remained something separate, in the valley by the river. Something remote and fated and continuous. What came to them at the house was not the war but a series of stray events. Stray men turned up wanting things. They came individually or in packs. They ate and they washed at the pump and they slept in the hayloft, and left as suddenly as they came.
There was a motorcycle and sidecar, two handsome soldiers wearing goggles and shorts. They drove into the yard and the passenger stood and drew his pistol and shot a turkey. It was an ugly old male with hideous wattles that hung almost to the ground. It would have been tough to eat as leather. When they stuffed it into the sidecar and drove away the wattles streamed out like pulled guts. Paraschiva roared with laughter. Paraschiva laughed first, and then Mama Anica, going to the gate to see the motorcycle go. They doubled over cackling and Augustin came and stood beside them and laughed too, in great long peals, until the motorcycle was out of sight.
After that they moved most of the livestock out into the forest. They buried bags of flour and potatoes in pits. Other stocks they walled up in the cellar. They learnt that there was just time to hide things between the moment vehicles were first sighted on the drive and their coming in at the gate. Mostly the soldiers hesitated a moment before the house, and then went on to the yard once they saw that it was deserted. The look of absence had come to the house quickly, its luminousness gone the instant the shutters were closed. Even in bright sunlight and when the acacias were in fresh new leaf, the house beyond them looked hollow and grey and dead. The soldiers must have seen other such houses on their way, dead and emptied before them. So they paused only a second. It was enough time for Mama Anica to be ready for them. She would meet them in the yard looking older even than she was, knowing the impunity that she might gain by age and by an apparent absence of fear. Once she encountered a band of foraging soldiers with a broody hen she had just saved held beneath her shawl. It made her seem only the more hunched and grotesque. The hen was quiet so long as she kept its head clenched in the dark of her armpit, and the eggs she kept warm in the pocket of her apron. The soldiers were generally simple boys and men from villages not so different from Poiana. The old woman scared them like their own grandmothers.
They came like animals, like strays or herds. Their physical presence was like that of animals, not only their smell but the way they moved, looked, brushed by him as if he were of some other species. They used the pump. They stripped before it to wash and their bodies were streaked with rashes from lice. They slept in the hayloft. They ate whatever was there for them to find. And the women always left a little out, the basics, enough to prevent the place being ransacked, or worse. There was corn and potatoes and salt. Eggs. Wine from the cellar. The appetite of the soldiers was sometimes astonishing. There was one soldier who swallowed twenty eggs raw. He was a big hefty red-necked man and Augustin watched in amazement as his Adam’s apple moved and yolk after yolk slipped down.
Then there was a band of soldiers who came and stayed. They came at the end of a summer when everything was at its most hot and dusty, all of them stained and dusty and weary. These men were not just looking for food. They broke open the doors of the house. They went in with purpose, as if they knew the place was meant for them, and occupied the whole house and let one or two of the horses in as well.
They behaved as if they were lords. They opened up the kitchen and made Paraschiva come and work in it. Paraschiva was a realist and Paraschiva loved to cook. So she opened up a few of her hidden hoards and fed them well. She fed them her delicious sour soups, and bacon and polenta and bowls of cream, hoping to keep them happy until the time that they would go.
They kept the shutters closed on account of the heat. The façade of the house looked as empty as before but the doors lay
open to the porch and pieces of chaos spilled out: boots, rucksacks, clothing, horse manure. The soldiers did not seem to care where they slept, on the beds or the settees or the tables or the floors. They made Augustin bring them wine from the cellar and he had no choice but to go in as they said. He did not see why they had wanted the house and had not gone to the stables like the animals they were. He thought that men such as these must not have known the use of a house before. He wished that his mother would not feed them so well. He did not know as his mother did what there might have been to fear if she did not.
Even in the shuttered light he could see the damage that was being done. They were so untidy, these men, so careless, with their lumbering movements and their big clumsy hands. They had moved about the house like cattle. They had slept and drunk and eaten and vomited, and someone had defecated in the corner under the stairs. They had sat on the chairs and settees shrouded as they found them. They had put their feet up and the dust sheets had rumpled off. His fingers itched to take up the sheets from where they lay in the dirt, and shake them clean and white and put them out again. There were dark bruises on Marina Văleanu’s pale silk damasks where filthy heads and feet had rested, and in some places the fine fabrics had begun to split and tear. He took it all in as he moved through one dim room after another. He saw every defilement: marks on the walls, parquet scuffed, tables scratched, a bedstead broken, a mirror smashed, a door off its hinges, two balusters broken from the staircase. The trophies in the gun room had been shot again and again: the stag and deer heads and a boar’s head shot up on the walls; a stuffed lynx taken outside for target practice beneath the trees.
They shot the lynx with their machine guns and it disintegrated in puffs of fur and taxidermist’s stuffing. Augustin knew the use of shotguns and rifles but he had never seen the power of a machine gun before. One day when there was a great storm coming, and there was a wind bringing it that kicked up the dust and made everyone restless, they stayed indoors and used their machine guns on the portraits in the hall. These like the chandeliers had been left where they hung since they were too big to move to store. They had remained like the last of the family, looking on, the only inviolate part of the place and its past. Augustin had expected the guns to make holes. He had not understood that they could do so much more than make holes. They could cut right through things, one bullet following on another so close that they could cut right along a boyar’s jewelled belt and slice a canvas in two. His horror must have shown on his face when he saw because it set the soldiers laughing, and one of them pointed his gun up at the chandelier and shot down a mass of pieces of crystal like a shower of hail. Augustin ran. He ran out between the columns of the porch just as the storm came in, and stayed out as hail turned to rain and he was soaked to the skin, and did not come in until it was night.
Painter of Silence Page 14