But Augustin has forgotten him. They have come round a bend and there is a great landscape that suddenly draws all his attention: a long golden view into Transylvania. He has seen so much in the past few days, sitting up high in the cart with the land passing so slowly all about him. He has done no drawing but he has stored away image after image that he will be able to draw in the days that follow. Before this view, the mountains. The gorge. Between the gorge and the last climb into the mountains, a slender valley. They had stopped there beside a dark-coloured lake that had stumps of trees sticking out of it as if a whole broken forest had drowned in the water. He was not to know how it was formed, by a natural landslide that dammed the river and flooded the valley; and how the stumps of the trees had stood bereft in the water since long before he or even István was born. To him the broken trees looked sinister and raw like the work of men, not nature. It had made no sense to him. He could not understand why the soldiers had attacked the trees.
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge two inspirations: the work of the artist James Castle and Patrick Leigh Fermor’s introduction to Matila Ghyka’s The World Mine Oyster.
Then I would like to thank all those who helped with the research and with my attempts to get things right: Mihaela Teodor, Tibor Kálnoky, József Rózsa, Marie-Lyse Ruhemann, Sherban Cantacuzino, Dana Codorean-Berciu, Laura Vesa and Kati, and the friendly children of the Project at Hârja.
I must also thank Alexandra Pringle, Mary Tomlinson, my agent Broo Doherty, Ariane, and David, as ever.
A Note on the Author
Georgina Harding is the author of two novels: The Solitude of Thomas Cave and The Spy Game, a BBC Book at Bedtime; and two works of non-fiction: Tranquebar and In Another Europe. She lives in London and the Stour Valley, Essex.
By the Same Author
Fiction
The Solitude of Thomas Cave
The Spy Game
Non-fiction
Tranquebar
In Another Europe
THE SPY GAME
On a freezing January morning in 1961, eight-year-old Anna’s mother disappears into the fog. Looking back, Anna will wish that she paid more attention to the events of that day. That same morning, a spy case breaks in the news. Obsessed by stories of espionage, Anna’s brother Peter begins to construct a theory that their mother, a refugee from eastern Germany, was an undercover spy and might even still be alive. As life returns to normal, Anna struggles to sort fact from fantasy. Did her mother have a secret life? And how do you know who a person was once she is dead?
*
‘A compelling tale suffused with hauntingly enigmatic images’
GUARDIAN
THE SOLITUDE OF THOMAS CAVE
August 1616. The whaling ship Heartsease has ventured high into the Artic, but now must begin the long journey home. Only one man stays behind: Thomas Cave makes a wager to remain here, alone, until the next season. No man has yet been known to survive a winter this far north. As the light recedes and the ice begins to close in, Cave pits himself against blizzards, avalanches, bears – and his own demons. For in this wilderness that is without human history his past returns to him: the woman he had loved, the grief that drove him to the ice.
*
‘Divine and mesmerizing … rouses the spirits of Defoe, Hawthorne and R. L. Stevenson’
THE TIMES
Copyright © 2012 by Georgina Harding
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury USA, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Harding, Georgina, 1955–
Painter of silence / Georgina Harding. — 1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-60819-787-3
p. cm.
1. Deaf—Fiction. 2. Artists—Fiction. 3. Social classes—Fiction. 4. Romania—History—1944–1989—Fiction.
I. Title.
PR6108.A724P35 2012
823’.92—dc23
2011042284
First U.S. Edition 2012
This electronic edition published in September 2012
Painter of Silence Page 23