Gael

by Mok, Judith;

  We drove for twelve hours to arrive in the late evening. A huge wine celebration was taking place. While he drove me to his apartment, dragons and grotesque medieval figures feasted around our creeping car. We had opened the windows and the air blew a hot breath of alcohol in our faces.

  I was drowning, drunk with the knowledge that I had come back to this place where the Irishman lived, in ignorance of my presence. Tomorrow I would ring his doorbell and climb six flights of stairs to his apartment, just as I had rehearsed it in the last six months of dreaming. We arrived at my apartment. The antique dealer, who had hardly said a word throughout the entire journey, brought my leather bags full of clothes upstairs. He showed me around the place. It was big, full of Art Deco furniture, and it smelled. What did he keep in the cupboards? I asked jokingly. He didn’t smile but announced that tonight he was going to share the only bed in the place with me. It was too late for him to go to his mother. I was still holding a case with toiletries in my hand and was close to the door. Without a second thought I went for it, ran downstairs and found myself on a broad avenue full of tipsy people. The city was partying. I bumped into tables full of wine bottles and baskets overflowing with grapes. Young men talked and whispered, hissed and whistled close to my face. It was two o’clock in the morning; I had no choice but to ring the doorbell of my future lover.

  It was noon the next day when I woke up in his arms. We had talked so much in the past that that meeting was silent. A ritual burning of everything said, a measuring of our flesh. The unexpected leap of him into me, his wolf-like sexuality. Here was an animal I hadn’t encountered before. My body felt flooded with orgasms; under a sheet of flame. He circled my ankles with his hands, tenderly wondering how they could be so narrow. Teasing my fingers into decadence while his admirable member started swelling yet again. The combination of such lust and love started closing in on me like a cage. I already knew, back then, that without this I would hurt myself banging away at its walls.

  We collected my luggage and I secretly moved into Gael’s room decorated with revolutionary posters. My husband was not the type to phone very often, so I rang him and told him about the obnoxious antique dealer and how I now shared a flat with a couple of artists that I’d previously met. He sounded vaguely uninterested, but happy I had a place to stay, no doubt happy he was alone with his work. Or maybe just quietly happy for me.

  There was not much room to analyse how I felt about my husband at that time. Somehow I was wearing the elegant cover of what I imagined to be French grace, but I didn’t explore the material it was made of. It was so much easier that way.

  Whenever our bed was not a playing field, it was because of work. Music, painting and lessons were a useful blur that resulted in money for food, which was consumed in bed. I juggled around a lot with my credit cards to procure us luxuries in the form of underwear, exciting hotel rooms on the coast if we didn’t make it home, and material for him. For he was painting hard between six and ten in the mornings.

  I played with the orchestra and instead of working on Bach’s solo Partitas I scratched away at songs about girls rolling over in clover, and taties that were out in the springtime. Or bits of broken melodies that he’d hum for me in which I could hear Arabian undertones, so close, so close to some sad Yiddish tunes.

  Did he know? I sat naked on his bed on an overcast Sunday and made my violin sing for him. Sombre Sunday was the title of the song. A suicide song. Well, in Budapest mostly, where people were sombre anyway. He listened and laughed away the tears in his eyes while he started warming his hands between my legs.

  He loved potatoes. With what? Butter. Did I know there had been a potato famine in Ireland and that millions of people had perished? So now he had taken the hunger of those masses upon himself and ate only potatoes. Okay, butter as well. We were standing at the kitchen sink in the late afternoon, trying to figure out a meal that would satisfy both our foreign palettes. I forced some red wine down his throat. Little Jesus in velvet trousers. What? The wine like a precious hostia. He folded a potato between two slices of bread. There: a chip butty. Great delicacy. Love it. The sheet he was wearing had slipped and his strong white limbs were all too visible. A delicacy. And here’s my dish. There was only juicy me. Me...

  I was there in golden boots and a very short skirt. Lost to reason before breakfast. Ignoring opportunities to audition for solo work. Spending a lifetime of love in a couple of months. Just that and I would go home again.

  But there and then I lived with him. That I had a husband was a mere notion that helped me pay for our martinis and Sunday lunches in the park. We never discussed the moral aspect of our liaison. Morals were scarce on the ground in that city, which grew sunnier by the day. I lived with him in my music and in the paintings he made of me. It was understood that I would leave at some stage soon. I made him take showers with me in the morning. He made me stand in cafés and bars; if there was only one seat available, it would be his. That surprised me more than it bothered me. I took him to concerts of classical music, and he howled with laughter the first time he saw a balding quartet of oldish men working away at their instruments in an immense, badly lit hall. He didn’t hear the effortless melodies they produced; he saw only their raw, rather ugly appearance. It made me shrink from him, judge and immediately forgive.

  We would stand outside the concert hall with a whole night of love ahead of us. He held my hand and talked me into a wild session of clubbing so we could forget the ugly four. He said he would marry me if I hadn’t been married already. No use explaining that in my Europe people got divorced. I was married and he was too much. Too much on the rough side of a life I could not live. But never enough of the dents that his deep voice left when he spoke to me in the dark, never enough of his hands on a canvas showing me where his life was, never enough of his body and mine floating attached or unattached through the same sensual seas. Never enough of him hiding in a silence where he could hear only me. The shells of his small ears tasting salty, pink where the curls touched them or where I did. Never enough of losing control. Not that I said these things. I just cultivated them so I could leave without the unbearable pain of separation.

  We went to the Palacio, one of his favourite nightclubs. I took to wild dancing, and he took to wild drinking with his old friends Carmen en Merce and the other dark-haired beauties that seemed to be close to him. I had no friends there. I had him. The Irishman.

  4

  She talks and plays, and acts out the story of a life. Loth sits in the dark, talking back in silent images. Mute memories of his life with her before the island became a shadow on the map of her brain.

  They had big tarnished copper pots. Emilie, their housemaid, loved to polish them and stare at her distorted reflection.

  His wife had just walked in, barefoot as usual. Small feet, high arches, her nails dark. Loth would buy endless amounts of shoes – Jourdan, Saint Laurent – to dress them and make them even more desirable. But there they were, flattened out on the black and white kitchen tiles, innocent-looking. Their cook’s rabbit came to sniff at them.

  She always sneaked downstairs in the afternoon to chat with the cook. She wanted to be au fait with the menus and the wines that needed to be ordered. She loved to watch the dog and cat asleep together in the basket. But above all she loved the light in the afternoon. Somehow it reminded her of Pieter de Hoogh, who always kept a door or window open in his paintings, to let in that peculiar light, signifying life, hope, promise. She would rattle on about the light, not knowing that her husband spied on her through a little window in the entresol, a cupid’s eye that had probably been put there to check if work was being done properly in the kitchen.

  Loth remembered one perfect afternoon in October. It was the time they call entre chien et loup. The light in the kitchen was at its best, tinted by the warm autumn. The kitchen was alive with food. They were having some writers or maybe a minister for dinner. She was talking about food, he was sure. He couldn’t hear her. He
r bra strap bit into her arm. The house pets moved around silently. Her feet tapped a heartbeat on the floor.

  He suddenly saw how in a few decades she would be a total eccentric. He could even imagine her living under a bridge. But there, in the embrace of that afternoon, he was sure she was happy.

  On their first evening out between Sèvres Babylone and Chatelet she had already made it clear to him that he couldn’t compete with the trio that they were going to hear perform. He couldn’t think music. He could explain it all right, she said. That was her opinion after she had been to one of his lectures on music at the Sorbonne.

  She still amused him, bemused him. She had made fun of his suggestion to go to the zoo on a first date. To watch animals fuck behind bars? Then how could he possibly enjoy the Beaux Arts trio? Laughter changed the colour of her eyes; love struck him instantaneously.

  She laughed as they walked towards the Theatre de la Ville. She didn’t mind that the wind was turning the ends of her beautiful evening dress into ridiculously flapping tongues. She was right; all through the concert his love of music was tempered by his love for the straps around her ankles. He was simply sitting there to enjoy her.

  After their souper he suggested that they should become lovers. ‘Maybe for a month,’ he suggested modestly, ‘if you’ll have me that long.’ ‘Are you for rent?’ was her answer. She didn’t have a lover just then. A Swedish acrobat had juggled with her heart, had made it bounce and then break. This man was into sugar-coating her. The idea was attractive.

  And there was something about him that was new for her: that you could actually formally ask somebody to become your lover. Her ‘yes’ made him lie down beside her on her theatrical bed, his eyes carefully stroking her. Keeping his movements small and delicately sensual. Looking at her quietly, looking at her all the time.

  He was allowed to drive her to her Nordic country in his Jaguar. They shared a stupid weakness for cars. They had to be old, sleek cars.

  Being her lover entitled him to visit her home. They drove along grey skies on perfectly drawn motorways. Being in the car gave him the sensation that they could travel through time together, that they were in a timeless vacuum. She was sitting beside him, her legs on the dashboard, talking, gossiping, watching the landscape that wouldn’t last longer then a few minutes until they reached the flatlands. He had never liked the flatlands.

  She told him about her father. His refusal to look at the past. The faces of his murdered family members that appeared in his paintings, hidden in a mist of abstract colours. Sometimes he didn’t speak for days, because he was concentrating on his work and that took him back into the suffocating reality of death, of multiple deaths, of an eternity of death. She seemed to describe him in big lines against that never-ending horizon that they drove towards.

  Her parents lived in a house on the canal, with tall, narrow rooms and ornate ceilings. Her father’s hair shone like a silver crown against the light in the marble entrance hall. He embraced his daughter and kissed her warmly. He made small talk: did they have a good trip, was the weather bearable, had they eaten? He took their coats and peered through the glass door to make sure their car wasn’t parked too near the water.

  His French was fluent and heavily accented. As was her mother’s. She was silver-haired, too. Slight figure, light voice as if she was about to laugh. A smooth face without a wrinkle; the suffering of the war had left no trace. She came from a wealthy background and had become destitute after the Germans had taken over her family properties and bank accounts. When she’d met her husband she’d been as poor as he was. An eighteenth-century silver spoon was all she had left from her parental home. She showed Loth the spoon. It was small and elegantly decorated, just like herself. A slim, silver object.

  The house was warm and pleasantly lit. Her father suggested drinks. With filled glasses in their hands they went around looking at his paintings and the works of many of his famous friends. He was a small, stooped man who moved quite quickly and asked pointed questions, jumping rapidly from one subject to the next. He clearly had an encyclopedic knowledge of a wide range of subjects. But he seemed modest enough, and kept apologizing and joking about himself and all his talking, all the time gazing at Loth kindly, inquisitively. That his daughter had brought a lover home was nothing special; all her acquaintances were welcome in their house, welcome to share their food, to share her bed, if that was her wish. But she had expressed an intention towards this Frenchman and so he needed to be tested. Gently.

  Loth had been warned that these people had no time for sentiment. They loved their children and fed that love from the roots up, every day of their lives. Wandering out into the world was part of their growing-up; their education was going to make them stronger, enable them to adapt to any culture. No matter what the circumstances were, or the people they would mix with, they would have to learn to understand. Understand absolutely why people would want to murder them, extinguish them.

  Yes, Loth thought, they were rather impressive. Pity they had no real money. This clever painter had made very little out of his name and talent.

  Although it was Friday night, no prayers were heard and an old menorah stood candleless on top of a bookshelf. He sat beside her, quietly taking in the modern furniture and the healthy food. He watched her hands move as she described a concert, people, a painting she had seen. As they talked the family grew more excited, shouting almost, although he had no idea why they were getting so worked up.

  The wine was good and loosened him up so he could show some brio in the subjects he at least knew something about. He was amazed at the almost physical pleasure the family took in conversation. He loved the cold analytic feeling he had when analysing a musical score, and the equally cold admiration he felt for certain performers. But the feeling was not sensual, as it seemed to be for them.

  He admired her feet in bed that night. And her drawings, realizing for the first time that she did have another talent. She had told him before she liked to draw.

  Now she laughed about her mother’s cooking. Servants had looked after her, and then she had just gone hungry. And the furniture, oh la la. She teased him in a manner he found very amusing. It pleased Loth that she seemed to be making some allowances for him. His elegance obviously attracted her. Her thoughts. He wanted them. To spin a web through his brain so that maybe he could see into the movement of her feelings.

  Breakfast could not be spoiled was his first thought when he woke up entangled in her long curls.

  Her father greeted him very formally that morning. The table was laid with a white linen cloth and napkins, fresh bread and coffee. Or would he rather have tea? Her mother was friendly but aloof. Both old people were immaculately dressed. Their daughter was still in bed. Waiting for her mother to bring up her food on a tray. The cats would follow. He remarked on the cats, who sat devotedly by her father’s chair. Yes, the old man admitted, these were miraculous animals.

  Loth stared at the fat tabbies, sceptical of their powers, while eating his toast.

  Had they plans for the weekend? Would he like to visit the studio? Her mother asked all the questions while her father stared at an indefinite spot on the table, shaking his head from time to time. The old woman chatted away as if she were at an English tea party. She was nervous, she kept rubbing her hands together so that he noticed the big liver spots on them. She had to be much older then he’d originally thought. She babbled on about his car and how she’d learned to drive in a Bentley as a young girl. But just as she’d reached the perfect level of elegant small talk, they took a dive into the hard facts of life.

  Nothing changed in her facial expression behind the slow clouds of her cigarette smoke as she mentioned German cars and how some brands had also provided gas for the camps. Had he seen the books upstairs in his bedroom? How could he have missed them? There was some interesting material about that period, maybe he would like to read some of it, or take the books back with him to Paris? He said he had some knowledge of th
e period. Some knowledge, the old man imitated him, and again shook his head, yes, yes, very good, he murmured. Was he interested in the great German painter Max Beckman, and did he realize that he had lived in this country during that period? He’d kept fascinating diaries, in German of course, but naturally Loth read German, any musicologist would read German, would they not? As a matter of fact Loth did read German.

  All this at breakfast. He asked her parents if he could have a go at the piano. Of course, they would be only too happy to hear him play.

  The scores lay scattered on the piano. Loth chose some pieces and began to play. Her father stood behind him, hopping from one foot to the other, now humming and then swaying as if in a religious trance. When Loth stopped, her father laid a hand on his shoulder and told him that his sister had been a good pianist, that these were her scores. He looked at the biblical name on the sheet music and bit back an overwhelming emotion.

  They hadn’t noticed her standing in the room in a tiny night slip, with her violin hanging loosely from her hand. Her mother had already provided her with a coffee, which she slurped in great haste. He had not yet accompanied her. Today was beginning to look like an all-round skills in art and life exam. She stroked his hair, nibbled his neck and then came the hissing: come on, be good. While he deciphered a piano version of the Brahms violin concerto she had turned her slip into a stage dress and performed. He could hear her structure, her line, he imagined he could even hear some feeling. Within himself.

  Once it was over there was a silence in which they all moved towards the more practical things of daily life. It seemed to Loth that the others had to make an effort to find them.

  Now Loth was sitting in their old Citroen, squashed in the back between her and her student brother who had just turned up. While they drove along they sang songs in whatever language came to them. Her mother had a raw voice and shook her silver curls as if she was an old gypsy. Perhaps she was. It made him decide to be careful. Careful in his judgement of these people who, after all, he did not know, and were now singing in their ridiculous old car. She was dressed in a long, red coat with furry edges and a velvet flambard, and seemed a bit out of place to him. Had their few months together turned her into this flamboyant being? She was well dressed when he’d met her. Her mother was elegant. Her parents had laughed about her designer outfit; she was such a snob, they said. How could soft fur against a perfect cheek, the clinging of cashmere against a sensual curve, be snobbish? It was the way to forget that they were sitting here in an uncomfortable vehicle.