The summer passed. They worked the length of narrow fields that seemed to stretch to the horizon. They hoed baked soil in straight lines, rows of tomatoes and peppers and onions, the uprooted weeds wilting fast on the ground behind them. Augustin was a good worker. There was wiry endurance in his body, and he had persistence. He would close his mind to everything but the blade of the hoe on the soil and the day would pass. Sometimes he would pause a moment to stretch his back and he would see the woman watching him. She was heavy and coarse but she had soft eyes like a cow’s. He bent to the hoe again and forgot her.
When the work was done he would sit in the shade of the vine on their side of the yard and take out whatever paper he had found and start to draw. At first this was hard as the children gathered about and jeered at him. They laughed all the more when he wrapped his arm about his picture and turned his back so that they could not see. They shouted behind his back to make him turn and, when he did not, they roared louder, and if he did not hear then in the end he sensed their presence, and he looked round and saw their vicious little faces with the big shadows of the vine leaves falling across them. Mama Anica came out and scolded them. In Poiana any child would have been broken by her scolding, but here in this other place she seemed to have lost her power. They went on with their staring and their taunting until one evening Augustin flew into a rage. He grabbed the child who was closest, who happened to be the oldest boy, and beat him hard. The boy was hurt, and worse, he was humiliated. He kept his distance mostly after that.
Augustin drew the kind of things he had always drawn. The room they lived in. The saucepans in the summer kitchen. The rest of the place. The land that was just a dull line beneath the jutting fingers of trees. The big road that went through the village though the village itself seemed nowhere; the trucks that went along the road so much faster than the wagons. And he drew the signs that had sprung up at the entrance to the village and the banners that hung down from the big two-storey house at its centre: red signs with white words and white signs with red or black words; and the same words appeared again in newspapers and on pages stuck to posts and walls. He liked these new words that were printed in a variety of typefaces, bold block capitals, oblique, chunky, standing sometimes on their shadows. There were human figures that went with these new strong words that were like real people but bigger and stronger, with square jaws and outstretched muscled arms, standing tall against the sky. These he drew also. There was a bold and graphic beauty to them that he sought to imitate.
Mama Anica saw the drawings and was glad that there weren’t any more soldiers in them. At the shop in the village she bought him chalks in a variety of colours, extra red ones as that was the colour he had begun to use most. She did not worry about the meaning in what he drew. It wasn’t as if she could read the words herself but she appreciated the way that they were formed.
Mama Anica was asleep in their room the night that the woman first came to him. It was a fine moonlit night, so light outside that there were shadows along the floor of the yard. Augustin had not gone to bed at his usual time but sat out late in his place beneath the vine and watched as thin blades of cloud passed across the white disc of the moon. The night was exceptionally bright and to him in the yard there it seemed exceptionally still. There was a wedding party going on at the other end of the village but he knew nothing of the noise and the dancing. From where he sat the village might as well have been abandoned. When the gate was opened it surprised him to know that anyone was around and awake.
It was the owners of the house stumbling home. It was clear to him that both of them were drunk, but from the way they clung on to each other you could not tell which one was the drunker. They went to their room and lit the lamp. Augustin sat in the dark and saw the room become bright. He watched without guilt. There was never guilt to his watching of others. He saw the man throw himself down on to the bed fully clothed while the woman undressed. He saw the lamp go out. And then after a little time the woman came out again into the moonlight. She had only a shawl about her. He could see her nakedness beneath the shawl. It gave him such a shock to see her that he thought she wasn’t real. She was an apparition, some blown-up and monstrous figure from a dream. She came right up to him and she was hot. He could feel that even before she touched him. She was hot and she smelled of drink and already she smelled of sex. She spoke words that he could not hear. Crude words. She was swearing about her bastard of a husband passed out on the bed.
She came to him again. In the day he looked for acknowledgement from her but there was none. Not once again did her eyes meet his. He knew because of this that it was wrong. She was using him like a thing. He looked back with revulsion at her heavy face, her body when she was working in the field, her thick legs spread apart, her breasts that hung down and swayed as she bent to pick tomatoes. He began to avoid her, working away from her at the far end of the line, shutting himself inside his room, ensuring that she could not find him alone. He had some idea of punishment. He punished himself by working harder when the sun was higher. One evening he made a figure of her. There was obscenity in the figure. He made her naked as when she came to him, pink. He made her out of a piece of soft card that melted with the pressure and the sweat of his hands. It started to come apart and he crushed it into a ball, threw it away.
He could not know that there would be a consequence to his rejection.
30
He has a page before him. It is a page cut square from a newspaper, a background of dense columns of type. It is the sort of page on which it is usually easy for him to make a picture. Yet he does not know how to begin what he now wants to draw. He makes a line, makes another beside it, shades, cross-hatches. When pictures come to him usually the lines suggest themselves, one after another, the elements falling into place like pieces of a construction, piecing together into the final form. For this particular thing that he has in mind no satisfactory form emerges from the lines he makes. He turns the page over and starts again.
Prison was blackness. Whiteness. A box where there was only darkness or light. When it was dark there was nothing: no knowledge of anything existing beyond the door, nothing but the sensations of his body, cold, hunger, the touch of the walls, of his rough blanket – grey, he would remind himself that the blanket was grey before the light went off, that the walls had been white but were scored with grey; he would deliberately recall the form of each thing within his reach (all of them things of right angles and flatness and without colour) in an attempt to fill the void. Then when the light came on again it was a light so bare that there were no shadows or depths. And still, nothing beyond the door, nothing outside the box.
When he was first brought in there were doors and passages; a bleak high space with metal staircases and landings; doors along the landings, rows of doors. They made him climb two flights of stairs to the upper landing. He walked so tentatively that the guard hit him from behind and pushed him like an animal herded towards a pen. When he looked down to his feet he could see through the diamond pattern of holes in the metal grid to the lower landing, and through that to the floor such a long way below. He repeated the memory to himself time and again so that he might fix himself in some exterior reality: the sequence of doors, passages and stairs and landings. He held to each image like a man holding on to the edge of a cliff, but in time all of them dissolved like dreams and he felt that he was falling, and he kept on falling until the door was opened once again and he was taken out and back along the landings and down the stairs and through the passages and doors, and outside into a yard where he saw that there were others like himself walking in circles – or rather in squares, walking a straight line and turning at the corners. All of the prisoners had faces that were very pale. There was a covering of snow on the ground, not where they walked but in the centre of the yard that was like an island between them, and the faces of the men were white as if they had taken on the reflection of the snow. It could not be the reflection of the sky. The sky above w
as a grey rectangle that had less light in it than the snow.
He takes other pieces of newspaper. He draws door, walls, bed, blanket, bucket. He draws a box from the inside. Then from the outside, as if he looked down on it from some distance above. He screws up each drawing when he has done it and throws it away.
He understood at the time that it was the drawings that were his crime. He understood and yet he didn’t understand, because no one had showed interest in his pictures before – not strangers anyway, not peasant women or villagers or men from the town, like these big men in long coats, who crowded into his room and then left, leaving the door locked against him. Three of them returned later with boxes. They went inside and again they closed the door. When they came out the boxes were filled with all of his papers. Every piece of paper from the room was gone: the pictures he had pinned to the walls, the figures he had lined up beneath the window, his stack of home-stitched books, the stacks of unused paper as well, all the scraps and labels and receipts he had collected, the schoolbooks the children had let him take when they had finished with them, the old newspapers and magazines and pamphlets and election flyers. Even Mama Anica’s icon was gone, and hardly any of that was paper. It was made almost entirely of tin.
He saw them carry the boxes out, three full boxes, each one as much as a man could carry on his own, to the waiting car. The boxes were too tall for the boot to shut on them so they opened a passenger door and put them on the back seat, two of them piled one upon the other, the third in the centre. He went to the door of the room that had been his home. Everything in it was overturned, thrown across the floor. There was not a space clear on the floor, and the walls were bare, bald as eggshell. Bare, white, smudged, stained, they were like the shell of an egg that has lain forgotten on the henhouse floor, that he would not want to pick up because of its smell if it should crack. He closed his eyes to close out the sight but that did not stop it from cracking.
A hand gripped his shoulder. He was quite passive under the hand. His head was full of the foul smell. They took him to the car. There was barely room for him on the back seat, crammed in beside the boxes. The three men sat together in the front so that their shoulders and heads were like a wall before him. He looked to the side, out of the window. At the gate of the house, Mama Anica was an old crone crying, and the woman stood there sullen and knowing with her children beside her and watched him go. He noticed that they had arranged themselves in a line in order of height as if for a formal photograph. They had all of them been husking maize when the car arrived. In the open barn behind them he could see the mountain of yellow cobs and a buff litter of husks. In other yards and barns, as the car passed along the road, the same image was repeated. It was a grey day and the yellow of the maize was strong.
The car drove on out of that village. The road was straight and after a while another village spilled along it in the same way as the first. Every place looked much the same in this landscape and in every place there was maize. Then at the edge of a town they turned off to a large low building that must previously have been a manor, not so beautiful as Poiana but it had a fine red banner and a star over the front door. They took the papers out first as if those were all that mattered, left him in the car with the driver who did not watch him but only leant on the wheel and smoked. Later someone else came and took him into the house, but by a back entrance and down to a cellar where there were other prisoners, a crowd and a stink of men pressing against him.
He didn’t know how much time had passed in the cellar, only that he was hungry. They took him upstairs into the room that had once been the dining room of the house, with a long table and faded rose damask curtains still at the windows. He had hoped there might be food but there were just his drawings laid out on the table and a man standing behind it.
He did not pay the man much attention at first. He had eyes only for his pictures that were so neatly arranged there on the polished wood.
There were some of his cut-out figures. There was one they had chosen that he had made with a handsome uniform, gold buttons on it and gold epaulettes, and it had a bushy moustache and a military hat with stars, and there was another that had a head shaped like a tank.
There was one of his books, that he had stitched together and covered with red card. It was one that he had made with care, made like a real book inside, with pictures of men and lines of writing beneath the pictures, and red frames around them made from strips of the same red card. The faces of these men were like real faces because they were copied from photographs. They were the four men he saw all over the place in posters and newspapers and in frames on walls and above doorways. Though the figures he drew from life or from imagination were no more than totems, when he copied from a flat page he could make a good likeness, and these faces were instantly recognisable in their line of nose and eye and eyebrow, and the shape of each grey beard or drooping moustache. The words also were real words that he had copied from pieces of print, random words that caught his eye: ŢĂRANI,; nu credeţi! TRAIASCA.
Then there was the wall newspaper. This had been a large-scale work for him on which he had laboured for days on end. He had modelled it on the wall gazette that stood outside the House of Culture. The base was as big as an actual sheet of newspaper and he had coloured a border around it and was gradually filling it with smaller items and notices, some of them images of his own, some cut out from print: items of solid script, cartoons, photographs, headlines. CETĂŢENI luaţi SOARELE. The symbol of the sun that had been everywhere on posters at the time of the election. B.P.T. PCR. JOS BURGHEZIE!!! JOS CAPITALISMUL!!! Then, JOS MUNCITORII. And across the page in a bold red diagonal like a banner: MOARTE CRIMINALILOR DE RĂZBOI.
It was his work. All of these things were his work, put on view in this alien place. He walked the length of the table. He went from one item to the next, remembering how each one was made, seeing it anew, familiar and yet strange at the same time, observing details as he had not seen them before, noting where something was wrong or should be added or taken away, what he should not have done, what he might have done instead, where white space might yet be filled in the wall newspaper. He studied them all with an artist’s compulsion. There was a little booklet that he had covered in white linen on which he had chalked a landscape – he had been pleased with that – and above the landscape that same symbol of the sun, but the chalk had become smudged and besides, they had placed it the wrong way up. How careless they were. They had put the sun underground and not in the sky. Didn’t they see? He reached out to pick it up and turn it round, and as he did so he noticed the man again. He had almost forgotten that the man was there.
It was one of the men who had arrested him. He was not unfriendly to look at, a chubby-faced, balding man. He looked like a peasant really, as if he was not quite used to his city clothes. He had big crude peasant hands and a brightness to his eyes that Augustin did not at first interpret as anger. And he was shouting. Augustin was used to the look of people shouting. People always shouted when they discovered he couldn’t hear, and it distorted their faces. It made them look hard and sometimes frightening but he had come to understand that usually they meant no aggression. In such circumstances it was his habit to withdraw, to hang his head, put his eyes to the floor. But this man came closer when he did that and shouted all the more vigorously and slammed his fat hand on to the little linen-covered book. Augustin looked down at the hand. He could tell how close the man’s face was to his without looking up. He could feel the anger coming off him now, and he determined, stubborn as he was, to look down and stand his ground. To take a step back would only give the man more power.
His interrogator called him a saboteur, a counter-revolutionary, an enemy agitator. The more the interrogator shouted, the more the man came to hate him. This prisoner might be mute, the interrogator thought, but he was intelligent. He could see that in his eyes, which were cold and quick and clever. That humble downcast pose did not convince. He pulled up his head and slap
ped him hard. The eyes stared into his for a split second and then looked down again. A silent hooligan, that’s what he was. A vagabond, a subversive, a danger to society.
He picked up a piece of folded paper from the table. It was the picture Augustin had been given by the Russian soldier, that he had folded down to fit inside a matchbox and had carried with him the four years since Paraschiva died. The interrogator took it in his thick fingers and folded it out again and again, and finally smoothed it flat on the table top.
‘Look at this!’ He slammed the table again with his fist.
The paper was much worn with handling. The gold border was torn. Parts had been scribbled over with flying words in Cyrillic script. Other parts of the image were worn away. Even so, any fool could see who the man was in the picture.
‘Where did you get this?’
The interrogator had never known a subject so still before him, so apparently implacable. A subject who did not even look at him, as if he were not in the same room. If he were to look at him, deaf or not, then surely he might read the questions on his lips? He called over the guard who stood by the door, had him hold the prisoner’s head so that he could not any longer look away, hit him each time he closed his eyes.
‘Where did you learn to write Russian? Who taught you this?’
They had had the Cyrillic words translated. Some were crude, obscene. Augustin had learnt them from the things Russian soldiers had scratched on the walls at Poiana. Others he had memorised long ago, from icons and iconostases and painted skies in churches. Those words the interrogator recognised for himself from his own past. They were holy words, names of saints and angels. They called to mind his peasant mother’s piety and his own superstitions, which remained in him even in these changed times. How could this supposed mute use such words to deface a picture of Stalin? This was not just counter-revolution. This was a double blasphemy.
Painter of Silence Page 19