There was no sense to any of it. The interrogator’s anger. His pictures that he drew so privately, that were only for himself, exposed for all to see. Himself, exposed. No sense to this event, or the next or the next.
Down to the cellar.
Up again.
Another place.
Another interrogation room, the pictures again displayed.
Where he was taken in a transport, his pictures must also have been taken, handled by other hands, packed away in their boxes, re-sorted, rearranged according to systems other than his own.
He learned to be no more than an object, like his handled and folded and re-folded pictures.
To keep his head down, hands limp to his sides. To stand always in the corners of rooms, against the walls.
Not to look up.
And not any more to draw.
31
To get to the village Safta takes a route out through the overgrown garden and orchard and through the fields, directly to the priest’s house on the little rise of land beside the church. She wants to be seen by as few people as possible and hopes that she will not be recognised by those who do see her. She is so much older than when she was here last, so much changed. But the priest’s wife knows her as soon as she opens the door. ‘You’re just like your mother,’ she says. ‘I would have known you anywhere.’
The priest’s wife herself seems to have aged twenty years in the last ten, the priest also. He is feeble now and white-haired though she remembers him bushy-bearded and robust.
He says that he sent a reply to the letter she wrote him.
‘Where did you send it?’
‘To Iaşi. To the address you gave.’
‘I didn’t receive it.’
A touch of fear in that: where letters do or do not go, who it is that reads them.
‘There was nothing in it. Nothing that could matter. I said only the little that I knew. That Paraschiva died in the war and that the boy went south in the famine. A lot of people went then. The old woman went and the boy went with her. Many of them didn’t come back.’
‘What happened to Paraschiva?’
‘Only the boy knows, if anyone does. It was when the Russians were here. They were living at the house. I didn’t put that in the letter. There’s a grave in the forest, not far off. We helped him get a cross made. The lad was very withdrawn after that.’
‘And Mama Anica?’
‘She was one who didn’t come back.’
There is a moment of silence. She looks away from him and out of the small window, down past the church to the village street. There are not many figures on it at this time of the morning when most people are out in the fields, but there are chickens, and geese wandering along the banks of the stream, and a couple of old women spinning on a bench. Anyone would think nothing at all had happened here.
She asks about the house.
‘The Russians did most of the damage, then it was abandoned. One night someone set fire to the stables. That was around the time of the expropriations. There were some acts of arson like that. On one of the other estates the peasants burned the forest. What a foolish thing to do, to burn the landlord’s forest once he doesn’t own it any more. We could see it in the distance. It went on burning for days. The stables seemed only a small thing after that. And God was kind. The fire didn’t touch the house. That was luck, that there was no wind that night. There wasn’t anybody trying to save it. Since then it’s been locked up. Nobody has a use for a house like that nowadays.’
‘No. I see that.’
‘But you mustn’t stay there. Somebody will see you.’
‘We’ll not stay long. Only a few days, for Augustin to rest and recover a little. He’s been very ill.’
‘He was ill when he came here in the winter.’
‘So he was here? I thought that he was.’
‘My wife tried to make him stay with us but he wanted to find you. He wrote your name. I didn’t know that he could write.’
‘He can write a few words, that’s all, and my name is one of them.’
‘I’d heard that you were at the hospital in Iaşi. It was important to him to find you.’
He’s lying in the grass looking at the sky. She had expected to see him where she had left him but the verandah is deserted and his papers screwed up on the floor. She goes back into the garden to look for him, almost stumbles on to him hidden in the long grass.
‘Look what I’ve got. This will keep us fed for days. And the first of the plums are ripe in the orchard. I tried one. There are masses of plums.’
She kneels down beside him and shows him what she has in the bag the priest’s wife has given her: bread, sheep’s cheese, sausage, vegetables from their garden. She breaks off the end of a loaf and takes a bite from a tomato. It’s so ripe that she has to lean away to eat it so the drips don’t fall on her blouse. Then she throws herself back on the grass with her arms wide. Her hands reach into the stalks. Her grandfather’s lawn, how high it has grown. She thinks of him walking there with his pale dogs.
‘Do you remember the lawnmower? Perhaps it’s still here somewhere. I wonder what they’ve done with it. Remember how grandfather had that lawnmower shipped out here? He wanted the place like England. He wanted a lawn in stripes like they had in England. But nobody could bear to use the thing. My mother said it made a hellish noise and wouldn’t let anyone start it so long as she was in the house. Ilie was the only person who was trusted to work it, but he thought it was beneath him. He was a driver, he said, not a gardener. Then some piece of it broke. Perhaps Ilie broke it himself to save his dignity – either that or one of the gardeners sabotaged it – and grandfather had to send all the way to England again for the part. You remember all of it, don’t you? You were always there, watching.’
She rolls over and looks into his eyes. ‘I sometimes think you see everything.’
She is solemn now.
‘The priest told me about Paraschiva. I’m sorry. Did you see that too? I think you did, didn’t you?’
He is not looking at the sky any more but watching the sun and the clouds passing in her face.
She bends close, putting her two hands to his cheeks.
‘If only you had words for what you’ve seen.’
Later in the day he sits again at his drawing table on the verandah. She sees him get down to work with great seriousness. She wonders if there is some memory that the house has stirred in him, some memory perhaps of his mother. It has become clear to her that the drawings are his way of sorting and securing the world about him. If he has no words, she thinks, then at least he has these pictures. And when, as now, he makes such earnest steps at preparation, cutting out his pages, sharpening his pencil, arranging himself just so, closing his eyes in concentration, she thinks that he must have some project of importance in mind. She starts to move away from him to give him space, moving quietly even though she is aware that her noise cannot disturb him. There are still nightmares in him, she knows that. Perhaps the drawings will draw his nightmares out.
He looks at her directly, pulls her back, points to the second chair. She must sit there while he works. She had assumed that it was for himself that he was compelled to draw. The difficulty he is facing at this moment is that these drawings he wants to make are not for himself but for her.
He draws a gateway standing in a field. The field is wide and flat and there is nothing planted on it but the arch of the gateway, which has lettering along the top of it – spelling nothing – and stars.
He draws a group of low rectangular buildings. They are arranged in straight lines along a grid. Each building has many small windows. There is a high fence around the site.
‘Poor Tinu,’ she says. ‘How could they do that to you?’
He draws line after line of slim rectangles with square heads on them, masses of identical totem figures one beside and behind another.
He draws another of the figures, but larger, on a separate page. When he comes to th
e square outline of the head, he pauses. He looks thoughtful. Then inside the square he draws what appear to be wings. The wings are somehow familiar but she can’t think where she has seen them before.
He draws the wings again, but as they appear on the bonnet of a car. He has remembered the car precisely, the pattern of the radiator, the straps and vents on the bonnet, the curve of the running boards. It is the Lagonda. She sees that. Then the figure must be the driver of the Lagonda.
‘But that’s Andrei, isn’t it? I don’t understand.’
He holds the pencil over the drawing, looking intently at her, willing her to see.
‘It can’t be Andrei, not if it’s what I think it is.’
So he takes another page, draws the camp gates again and stretching from them three rings of barbed wire fencing, watchtowers spaced along the rings, so many barbs between each tower, all very clear and orderly. In the centre of the rings he repeats the winged figure.
‘Andrei went to France before the war. I saw him go. How could he be in a camp?’
He draws a second, smaller figure beside the first. He puts a cross where its mouth should be. He points at himself and at the figure.
‘It’s you, with Andrei.’
This is where he starts to tell her. He has bungled the chronology. He tells her about the camp but he has failed to tell her about that earlier time when the man came as a soldier to Poiana. And now that he has begun here he does not know how to go back and show her what was before. He can only go on, ahead from this beginning.
Safta puts out her hand to his that holds the pencil, stalls it and looks into his eyes. She has never seen him make so much effort to communicate anything before.
‘He came back. Is that what you’re telling me? Can you be sure?’ Perhaps he was mistaken. ‘But I know that he went to France. He went to France and he was going to be an engineer. When the war ended he would have become an engineer. There, not here. He didn’t want to be here.’
Augustin is stubborn. He wants to go on drawing. Gently he moves his hand away from hers. He takes up another piece of paper.
She watches his drawing hand that is so nimble and expressive, his other hand that lightly secures the edge of the page; the lines that form, all of them small lines, delicate, slowly massing.
She dreads the image that will appear. When his pencil becomes blunt he sharpens it with a few deft strokes of his knife, goes back where he left off. You don’t have to do this, she wants to say, not for me.
There is so much that he would like to tell her, now that he has begun. He would like to show her how it was. The flatness of the land. How bare it was, cleared of trees and anything that grew; the soil black, drying in the sun to fine black crumbs like cake, soaking up the wet when it rained to become heavy black mud. How at the edge of the land there was the marsh, and this they were burning away until it was as bare and black as the land. Men went out and set light to it and he could see it burning, the smoke rising from it in the day and a flat red line in the night. And where the land and the marsh were cleared, they were digging a river through it.
He came there at the start of the summer. It was not too hot then. The heat and the mosquitoes did not get bad until later. In the first moment of arrival he was glad simply that he was outdoors, in a world of colour. He could see in an instant the difference between the men who like him had just come from prison, whose faces were so pale that there was almost a blueness to them, and the men who already belonged to the camp, whose skin was dark and brown. He did not know what he was coming to, or how soon he would come to hate that huge bright sky.
She tries to go. He senses it and looks up immediately. She must stay until he’s done. She sits frozen again in the chair and closes her eyes. Beyond the scrabble of his pencil she can hear the hum of the afternoon passing, the crickets, the calls of the swallows that fly above the lawn. Whenever she opens her eyes Augustin is still drawing.
His next picture shows the digging. There is the black land, flat to the horizon, and then there is the line they are cutting through it, the heaps of soil on either side. It has been surveyed and marked out as a straight line, all neat and tidy, but the work is not tidy at all. What he draws is chaos. The inanimate things are chaotic in themselves: between the huge ditch that is the base of the digging and the high sides of the banks, the random heaps of tipped soil, of rocks and timber, the jumble of hoists and wagons. And these are only the background to the figures he must draw. The flat ground and the banks alike swarm with figures, but these cannot be standing figures of the type he usually makes. Every one of them must be in motion, at work. He remembers how it was: how they had to appear to work even if they did not work, incessantly, how it brought punishment to be seen to be still. Of necessity these figures he draws must be more complex than any that he has drawn before, broken into more parts, jointed so that he can make them stoop, dig, bend, contort. This whole drawing must be more complex than any that he has ever made.
Safta sees the marks appearing on the paper. He draws swiftly and with intensity. The strain in his fingers is clear. He is pressing hard and the marks come out very black. The drawing becomes harder to decipher the more he adds to it. The figures begin to spill everywhere, down the banks and across the floor of the ditch, among the rocks and trolleys and wagons. She has a notion of an antheap disturbed, the ants all on the move, racing in different directions. The little thin figures, with their broken bodies and their oversize heads, are more like ants than people. And yet they are people. She sees that all of them are holding tools – shovels, spades, pickaxes – and that above them all, high on the top of the bank, two straight figures hold what appear to be guns. In the space of sky, which is the only remaining space in the picture, he draws the arm of a crane. The clarity of this image – the straightness of the interlocking lines – is almost reassuring after the furious mass of pencil strokes below.
She is beginning to guess what is the purpose of this extraordinary scene of labour. The crane is the link. Everyone has seen the propaganda images in the newsreels and newspapers. A canal that is the great project of the nation, a thing of glorious music and banners and marching workers. A marvellous construction done by brave men pulling levers of gigantic and wonderful machines. Bulldozers the size of houses, diggers with giant shovels tipping boulders into the marsh. Far away in a field, hands press down on a detonator and great holes are blasted out of the ground, fountains of rocks and dust blown into the sky, the explosions going off in sequence as in a battle. But in Augustin’s drawings the work is done by men alone without machines.
He puts his pencil down. He is worn out.
‘I think I see. May I take the picture?’ She puts her hands out to it.
He nods.
The paper trembles as she holds it out into the low sunlight. Some of the drawing is so dark and dense it needs to be brightly lit before she can make out the detail. She feels a terrible pity at what she sees.
‘You’ve done well, Augustin. It’s an amazing picture.’
Then she says, ‘But that’s enough. Isn’t that enough for now?’
He has taken up his knife and is sharpening the pencil to begin another drawing.
He knows that he would not have survived if it had not been for the driver of the Lagonda. He was already ill. He would never have been strong enough for the work.
He did not recognise the man at first. That summer he had spent at Poiana he had been so young and handsome, even that time he came by during the war. Now he was just a prisoner, thin, filthy, shaven-headed like everyone else. That was something about the camp, that after a time there was no one who stood out as an individual, nothing distinguishing about anyone. Augustin had noticed this man only because of the work he did, which was different from that of most other prisoners. Sometimes he carried papers about with him or stood and unfolded sheets of plans. The plans had the sharp clean identity to them that the man had lost.
One day he was coughing badly. The camp was wher
e he began to be ill. He was at the diggings and he was bent over coughing and the man pulled him over. The man knew him for who he was and even remembered his name. He spoke it and Augustin read it on his lips. Then the man spoke for him.
He was sent to the doctor and put in the hospital for some days. When he came back he was given work with the horses. He thought that the man must have told them how good he was at working with horses.
The man spoke for him and now he must speak for the man.
He makes the Lagonda figure again, but this time he makes it lying flat on the ground. It is hard to draw. His fingers are shaking.
How can he draw movement? He has never drawn movement. All he has drawn in the past are static forms: rooms, landscapes, standing figures. Even these ant figures he has drawn building the canal are not moving in the drawing but static, each one of them caught in a still piece of motion, in its specific pose, as in a photograph. They are the closest that he has come to drawing movement but they are not moving.
He must draw the bank again, the walls of the canal and the heaps of extracted soil and the workers. Then he wants to draw the whole bank in motion. This motion should be rushing, like water.
The summer was over. They had had some weeks of cool when the work went smoothly and well, and then there came days of torrential rain. The chocolate soil, that crumbled so easily and was so treacherous, made its transformation to treacly mud. He had never seen such mud, coating every man and every surface, making deep ruts where the carts clogged so that the horses could get no traction and slipped in their traces. And it went on raining. All the vast grey sky was emptying itself on to the land.
Painter of Silence Page 20