by Mok, Judith;
She heard Loth’s mother ask whether he had visited that old Jew, the artist, your girlfriend’s papa? She heard his faint answer. He knew she was listening, although she pretended to stroll around the living room with his father who explained where and when he had acquired his Picasso, his Kandinsky, his Klees and his newest: a Kiefer. There was no small phalanx, no bond between her and her Loth, against these white capitalists that were his parents, these anxious well-dressed frames.
They had stopped for a picnic in the woods by some stream. Nobody around to spy on their lovemaking. She had stripped off her clothes and pulled at his pants, breathless for an honest erection. But he would not show his genitals to an oak or a birch. She went cold, limp and opaque, no shine to her skin next to him, her voice muted by disbelief. Watched him walk the path back to the car. His loose jacket on his back, shoulders drawn up in defence.
He kept his long fingers on the steering wheel. Nature did not have any sex appeal he said. She laughed and hoped that her body was not part of nature.
The paintings gave her the wrong impression: she thought his parents respected art. But it was the value of their canvasses that made them smile and speak with admiration of the artist. There was a smell of death in their very designer house. It floated over the dishes while they ate dinner. She politely tried to ignore it and kept her gaze fixed on the tall windows, trying to think of the pure smell of the mountain air beyond the glass. He watched her pour water out of a ceramic jug, another Picasso as his father had just modestly mentioned, pour and forget that she was pouring, so everything was soaked. She did not apologize, just quoted Rilke’s poem about pouring liquids out over a dinner table. She laughed. Loth then noticed the smell of decay and felt free to mention it. Her faux pas was put aside. They all stood and searched the house for the smell that was growing stronger.
At night the duvet covers were smooth and cold, and her body was drifting. She had left him for her favourite dreams. He was awake in the dark trying to remember why he had brought her here, rather than his former Greek girlfriend, the daughter of a shipping tycoon. He had told his parents that he was going to get married to this strange woman. She was changing so quickly, growing accustomed to his habits. He deeply loved her edgy feelings and exaggerated tastes. She seemed to splash them around a little less these days. She had started taking cover. Seemed to have ideas about perfect Parisian behaviour. Too much, nearly. Cultivated her looks with extravagance. His mother wanted to know whether her curls could be combed properly and also if Jewish nails always grew in such a crooked manner. A comb had been presented to her when she was shown their quarters. She didn’t notice it. He heard her play her violin late into the night. He loved Bach.
It turned out to be a rat that had died under the floorboards. They found a maggot-infested corpse with a solid tail. The stench was unbearable; they opened windows and doors to let the air circulate and threw the rat into a ditch outside. She went to look at it, and saw how it had defended itself against death by pulling up its hind paws. She could feel the strength of their rigid kick, the sharp nails sticking out into the air, the front paws falling softly, abandoned to the other life. The tail was as good as new. God might use it again she thought.
Hundreds of white maggots were in a great hurry to rid the earth of this carcass. Theirs was hard labour. She felt an urge to draw. Her fiancé called through the garden. He walked up to her and let the cherry tree rain its blossom on him. For that she thought he came close to hope, close to a future for them.
Black pearls were not for a young woman. They threw a dark shine on to the wrinkled skin of the salesman. His hands held the delicate beads up before taking them away. She had never seen them before; their darkness attracted her attention. So many full windows had been shrugged at before she made an abrupt halt. Stern, a name that could have come from the cold countries; it reminded her of familiar faces from her childhood.
His hesitation disappeared as soon as he saw her ignorance was genuine and her taste unborn. Stern opened its doors to them. She went for the old man, bent and bespectacled, polishing the display cases with a large cloth. Why him? How would she know that this man, who was modest enough to walk around with a polishing cloth, was actually the owner of this shop? Loth knew the man, his family were regulars here and often discussed him. How lucky he had been to be able to buy a Stern franchise. He was an Italian refugee, of course, but they liked his manners as a salesperson.
His smile was kind and wise when he showed her the necklace and told her not to buy such a thing. She nodded like an obedient child and followed meekly in the direction of the engagement rings. Rubies, warm stones, a flame on her hands. Red gold setting, again with a sunny glow to them. She listened big-eyed and big-eared to his lyrical comment on the jewellery.
With a circle of red stones around her finger she accompanied Loth to the antique bookshops. The old streets of Geneva were famous for their book dealers. Along the steep streets of shining cobbles, lined with young trees. There was music coming from the shops filled with heaps of books and piles of scores. She thought she could smell parchment. She struggled along the narrow path searching for violin music. Obscure names, composers who had never been performed, she read through the scores and listened to the music they produced in her head. The paper of the ancient operatic scores felt rough beneath her hands.
Her fiancé bought first editions. His voice was dry as he haggled with the bookseller. The bookseller stood rubbing his hands, bent over as if suffering from severe stomach cramps, muttering a price that was immediately rejected by her lover. Huge amounts passed over the counter for these precious old scores. She stood and listened, clinging to the one score she had found and wanted. It turned out to be expensive, so it was her turn to look the seller in the eye and offer him half the amount he wanted. He treated her differently, smiled and let her have her way. She thought she had a bargain but her lover assured her that the old man had earned it back on him. Clever, he said to the bookseller. The man smiled again, encircled in the afternoon sunlight, and said the young lady would be honest with the music and that the young man would probably never use the scores but let them increase in value his already well-filled bookcases.
They all laughed, each for very different reasons. As she put her hand out to shake the old man’s hand her ring sparkled. He held her hand and admired the stones. Ah, rubies from Brazil, he said.
9
Everything seemed to belong to my husband. The inherited Limoges, the silver, paintings and furniture. He very much wanted to keep my childhood quilt and a first edition of an Oscar Wilde book. I agreed to my minimized possessions. Two suitcases were enough to take back home, back to my parents’ home.
Dressed defiantly in a tiger print mini-dress and fuchsia high heels, we dined outside on the Place Beaubourg before he drove me to the train station.
A definitive kiss from his tight lips. He waited until the train started moving and waved as if he had been told to. I waved back at a man I had been married to.
My father never mentioned my husband. My decision was my own business. What mattered was that I was happy and productive in my line of work.
My mother sighed a little and let my father do the talking while she was driving us home.
Something seemed to be bothering her. Had something happened, I wanted to know, standing in the living room with one of the cats in my arms.
Just a phone call, she said, from that Irishman she had met in my flat in the South, the one with the tall stories and the torn jacket. A talented young man. He had called, wanted to know when I arrived. Could I call him? He was here.
Within three days he was sitting on my parents’ sofa, discussing painting with my father over many glasses of wine.
‘At least he’s a man,’ was my father’s only comment late that night as I gave him a goodnight kiss. Had I been married to something else? I lay pondering in my old bedroom. I dreamt that a dog with one green eye and one brown came to me and complained ab
out its loss of hair. I woke up and dug out a photograph of my ex-husband. His hair was thick and wavy, his teeth perfect, his cheeks smooth. He stood, tall and slim, and smiled at me.
I couldn’t sleep anymore. The attic rooms where I had spent so many years making and learning to make music were filled with voices and moving shadows. I went to the front room and sat looking down at the canal, at the water that pushed me back gently into the folds of other periods in my life.
How I had sat with my friends in the window, smoking pot, aiming the smoke at nothing at all and laughing until my throat hurt. Boys had to be beautiful, and be quickly discarded afterwards.
Falling for an older man, a man who insisted he was weak, every time I had ridden his twenty-five-year older body. A flat boat drifted by with its motor turned down to a gentle purr. It was filled with mud. A man with a grey cap and a long coat steered it out of sight under the next bridge. Did he know that I was sitting there looking at him? Is that why he looked up at the window? Had he heard the voice of one of my memories? And where was he taking that mud anyway? Surely something had to be buried underneath that mud, maybe bodies. It only took one man in a boat in the middle of the night to create this tale. I was going to tell people about it tomorrow. But what if the mud turned out to be just mud? Then I would be an even greater fool then I already was. Was I? To have left my house and life in Paris and now to be standing here in front of a reproduction of a Memling painting that I had hung on my wall years ago. A yellow monkey on horseback beside another horse. The horses were drinking from a clear stream.
The monkey looked so confident. I had spent a lot of time thinking about that monkey and his absurd self-assurance about his position in life. To be riding the ultimate horse, to make it drink and lead it. Which animal had I led up till now?
A balding dog.
I had spent my youth working hard and earning enough to buy beautiful clothes, books and scores, but for a long time now I hadn’t had to think about rent, mortgages or bills that had to be paid. My husband had provided. I stayed in my childhood rooms and took on orchestral jobs abroad to avoid my Irish lover. He had decided to stay and move into some place on a canal in another city. Living off an arts grant and painting the greys of the Nordic winter seemed to keep him busy. We met sporadically during a period of about four months. I thought of getting a place of my own and paid a visit to the bank.
The three-piece-besuited manager frowned at a well-dressed divorcee with a freelance job who wanted a loan. I was so young, he smiled a fat smile, surely I would soon hook another wealthy fish? I stared at him in naive disbelief and began to realize that I had never thought of asking my ex-husband for money. Surely I could provide for myself ?
My black orchestral outfits were all designer and expensive and irritated some of the female members of various orchestras. Better go for solo work. My clothes seemed to do half the work for me at auditions. A toss of my long hair and a solid technique did the rest.
I should have left it at that. That night my lover collected me after a performance and took me to a restaurant. He suggested I move in with him. I looked at him and remembered his island. I looked at my love and my life and came up with all sorts of hard, rational arguments not to live with him. He cried while I suggested, quite coldly, trips abroad, a widening of his education. He was young enough. But he wanted a woman like me. A woman who loved her music that deeply and his work just as much. I did not know that women ‘like me’ existed.
We sat in silence. The food dried out and changed colour. I heard the trams go by, the bells when they stopped or warned a cyclist not to get too close. A strangely old-fashioned sound for modern transport.
I meant to encourage his talent. I started talking again while I watched his tears. I somewhat enjoyed this emotional outburst, like something from a Russian novel. But I wasn’t ready for it.
For some time he stayed out of sight and made me miss him. And when that missing became acute, I found him drifting around the stage door late one night. I took him home with me.
He started working in my father’s studio and left his dirty clothes on my bedroom floor.
This quickly turned into an unwanted routine for me. To hear him sit down and joke with my father at breakfast while I sorted out his mess upstairs. A new and degrading experience. But not enough to destroy our nights together.
At breakfast we would all lose ourselves in conversation and I would forget about his dirty socks on my bedroom floor.
My parents and I went on a short trip. He was to stay on his own in their house to work in my father’s studio. As long as he didn’t touch some pigment colours that were rare and hard to find, my father was quite happy for him to be there.
My parents liked the dunes, the yellows and faded green of helm. They were at peace in the small house on the beach that belonged to my brother, who was painfully clean and organized. I was restless without my violin and told them so. Late at night I lay in my narrow bed and listened to the waves composing Mahlerian crescendos and wide Beethoven symphonies, and scoring the sand in narrow squared patterns like some oeuvre by Bach. I romantically endured the sea of symphonies during half sleep, but Bach kept me awake. I started reconstructing the Goldberg variations in sand shapes, lines and water maps, and eventually their strict variety made me sleep.
On our way home I told my parents about my experience. I never told my lover. Him being so careless made me think more. Left me on my own to move deeper into my music and what my love for it meant.
The pigment paints were all gone. My father asked my lover if he had used them. No, he said, he hadn’t touched them. But nobody else had access to the studio. My father asked him again why he had taken them. And again my lover said they weren’t gone. ‘Well,’ my father said, ‘then I must be mad or a liar.’
When I discovered some of the colours in his new paintings, I brought the subject up again. He didn’t want to talk about it. But I did. How could I be such a nuisance and interfere with his work? Such arguing was a revelation to me. Was this Jesuit justice? Within a few minutes I had become the burdensome, over-inquisitive female who seemed to have no other purpose in life then to annoy him with unimportant questions.
I kept my mouth shut in order to open it again in the presence of my parents. He had used the pigments. Why did he not tell us? He kept quiet and announced in an angry tone that he did not want to talk about it. But we do, my father said. He acted as if we were torturing him. After all, a bit of paint was not the end of the world. No, but the makings of a fascist were.
That’s what my father called him, from then on until he died: ‘your fascist’.
10
Tiles hit the streets the day I moved in with him. Loose pages from my scores flew around the street and floated on the water in the canal. A storm raged while we pushed our bits and pieces of furniture up the narrow stairs. We had a small house with three floors connected by winding stairs. There was enough room for us to work and live. My parents had given me a piano. I could start teaching the violin and even accompany my pupils on the piano. The idea of pupils frightened me. Would I be able to help them find music in their playing?
We put the piano downstairs in a medium-sized dark room right off the street. People would be able to hear music coming from the house, but not the neighbours, who didn’t use their ground floors as living space. It had never occurred to me before that I could disturb people with my playing. Neighbours had been scarce in my former existence. As had lack of heat. There was only one gas stove in the house. We lit it and decided to go for a walk down to the river while the house was heating up.
We struggled along in a turmoil of multicoloured leaves, moist smells of autumn and gasoline and our confused feelings about starting a life together. I held my fashionable coat closed with both hands and kept my head down against the force of the wind. Gael struggled on beside me. He never looked at me; it was always me looking at him, admiring his profile, loving. He didn’t hold my hand, and he kept the
pace going until we reached the river. We stood looking at the well-preserved houses, lived-in museums they seemed, warm, well-lit and filled with an overflow of luxurious cosiness. Centuries of comfort shone through the big windows. Nobody had curtains so we could see the people living their lives. Gael had been very quiet. ‘I want you to know one thing,’ he said. ‘I am never going to support you.’
I hadn’t given the matter a thought so I shrugged off the cold sensation his words gave me. The memory of them was already branded in, though, with a red-hot iron, with a voice that shrieked in my head.
When we returned there were two kittens in the house waiting for us in boxes. They were our children, he said, could I think of a name for them? They were both black.
I fixed something to eat in the tiny kitchen and listened to him talking and joking, bringing the house to life with his mad stories.
When his grant was finished, my friends found him a job teaching drawing at the Royal Academy and my father organized an exhibition of Irish painters with him as the central showpiece. He hated having a job but loved spending. Antique jewels appeared in little velvet boxes beside my plate. He would go to Ireland regularly and bring back cakes and salmon for all the neighbours.