by Mok, Judith;
She tried to make wild love to him that night and again he had to point out his limitations to her. Not in his heart. Only in his body.
It had all been a summer joke: her foaming green dress and flashy green stones, impossible heels and her even greener smile. They had been married in the sour company of his parents and the lively presence of her friends. The food nearly killed his French friends and her parents had joined the party as if they were relatives going to some distant cousin’s funeral. Her mother drove Loth’s parents to their hotel late that night, driving a little faster than she usually would. So she told Loth with a smile the next day as she saw them off.
Primroses everywhere around his country home, plenty of wild strawberries on the kitchen table, gifts from the neighbours. When they arrived, a married couple now, they forgot about honey and wine. The hours were filled with music. He drove her hard, for he had plans for her. At the end of their summer she had to be ready for an international competition.
She won a prize in the chamber music section of the competition and received an offer to play in a southern city. She was a musician again, alone, with foreign streets to walk along and foreign lives to meet. She was going to come home to him every second week.
He kissed his wife goodbye. Somebody took a Polaroid. He was embarrassed by the tears in his eyes. When she looked at the picture in the train she noticed how long her hair was. It had grown.
Letters or phone calls were not his forte, but when she was at home she wore her stones and made careful love to him after a performance or a grande visite, as she used to call their social outings. There were enough elegant phrases and silences for them to continue their marriage as it was: lived from a safe distance. And when she came back she threw herself even more into the tastes of the town. She lost all superfluous weight, learning a most important lesson: if you can afford all the food in the world, you don’t eat it. Her nose was slightly too big, but apart from that he found her quite flawless. She became more and more what she believed he wanted her to be.
She confined her dreams to her music. It was her poem, her passion that he respected, and as long as she followed his rules he would continue to respect her true love.
But she left him, with her cases and a few jewels, a wedding ring and all her scores. She gave him a drawing of a dead rat half-consumed by maggots.
He told her to keep away from the Irishman. He told her that in his circles divorce was not the done thing. There was enough room for this other man. Nothing had to change. She was going to take her music to a place where there were no melodies. He knew what her music needed. She listened to him creating her mythical life. She listened to his anger. She forgave him for saying it in the end, that his parents were right about her. He never suggested giving her money, neither did she ask for it. He told her he loved her.
12
It was a sad summer I had, the year of my thirtieth birthday. I loved getting presents and letters and celebrating my birthday deep into the night with my friends. Instead, I retreated to my parent’s house for the summer. My lover had rented out our house and gone to work on his paintings in Ireland, taking the earnings of his exhibition and the rent with him. I got to mind the cats, and over the summer learned their language. I read his daily letters in smudgy handwriting. I looked at my face in the newspaper when my exhibition was announced and felt proud of myself. My father was ecstatic, and brutally dismissed my regrets that my ‘fascist’ wasn’t there to celebrate with me. He would be back anyway for the opening.
What did I need him for? I had my music, my art, many admirers. I had my mother and father, who were all-understanding. And I was beginning to make enemies, which meant my name was beginning to be heard in the art world.
I was being a good sport. I started jogging in the early mornings, eyeing the flab on my legs, pounding out images over the asphalt, the grass, while hanging my own paintings, looking meagre, in the lush trees. I pounded my way through his absence. I had to understand the goodness of being me.
I took a bottle of vodka to bed with me. One glass had been the peak of my drinking, but it was my birthday and I was going to celebrate with alcohol.
Summer life was overrated.
Come cat, come back to me black cat. Have you seen him looking for me? My black cat comes, came back black. His tail round the street corner in the dark, his voice the only visible one. Lets himself be picked up and brought home. Together they came, my lover and cat, black hair and yellow eyes.
He was back, wrapped in splendid egotism. He had a red phase, he told me, and that was all. No need to disturb him. But I did.
The house needed some care after the summer so I went down on my hands and knees to work away with a brush in the hallway instead of going to a rehearsal as planned. I couldn’t live with the caked-in footsteps and the smell of tomcats. He came out of his studio, screaming that I should be at a rehearsal, shouting that he could hear me using the brush and did I not realize that he was going to get rich with this series of red paintings he was working on? His voice echoed roughly against the clean tiles. Of course my lover was right; I should have gone out with my fiddle to make a bit of money while he was creating his fame and fortune. I felt guilty, splashing lots of water on the tiles. I did not love him enough, did not respect, admire enough, I kept thinking while I scrubbed the dirty steps one by one. I fixed him a great meal to make him forget. We threw the brush out of the window, had our meal and used the table for sex. It was the meal that got me pregnant.
Now let me play something for you, a lullaby maybe?
He took a studio outside the house and decided to give up his job for a more lucrative freelance existence. I would have to work harder now that I would have my child to support and a babysitter when I was away. Responsibilities rained on our disorganized lives. I found a new agent, the kind that rings at six in the morning for a replacement job and uses the same cold and formal tone to greet you, discuss your fees and provide you with details about the repertoire you’re supposed to play. The money was good.
Gael helped me choose clothes that would hide my bump at the first night of my exhibition. And he spoke warmly of my work, although he talked more about his own. We smiled for a magazine photographer. I had the feeling I was looking through smokecoloured glass and could see my breath on it but couldn’t wipe it off. My paintings on the wall didn’t matter anymore. There was only the silence between me and everyone else in the room.
13
His house is a temple and he has to provide for them, the ones sharing his faith in his temple. He has a wife called Laxmi. She is the wife of the Hindu Provider. And he is that now. He has seen her with the cats, sharing their paws, growing black arms, six of them already with sharp nails to get hold of him. More arms growing in her belly, arms that will grab him at birth and demand to be provided for. It is to the cold country that he brought her because she was going to provide for him there. Or so he thought. He did not know then that her name was Laxmi. She changed her name when she changed the beautiful coloured clothes she used to wear for the simple wrappings of the moderate. He had to leave his colours behind and cross every bridge in the new city to find it: the perfect grey. The transparent steel of the ice, the cracked ice like a non-colour, a diamond cut in the wrong place. The water covering his sleep, like a dark blanket covering his head so he could not get away. He had hoped she would serve him until he had painted the perfect grey in the painting that would bring in gold. She kept him fed and clean, but she stole some of the grey for herself and her own paintings, and she went around with her instrument to come back with coins instead of notes. He asked the cats to speak to him and teach him how to provide, but they just wanted to be stroked until their round heads were silk. Like her, Laxmi the goddess, who wanted to be stroked to grow more arms in her belly. He wandered away from her in the hours, but couldn’t keep away for days. Silk brushes like the cat’s fur, that’s what he was looking for, to smooth out her portrait. Laxmi the cat mother, the inde
pendent wife dependent on the provider. He wanted to paint himself in his temple, but he did not know where he was or who she was. They were both asleep in this country. And so were the little big people he met who shook their clean fingers at him silently, voicelessly. To warn him against himself, not to try and reach the horizon, for even if he kept going, borrowing money for the road in Laxmi’s name, he would never reach it here. It was flat and dissolved if you came too near. He was Hindu with her, living with the hope that she would provide the temple’s candlelight, soft enough to make him see the warmth of grey.
Already he could not remember her as she should have been, a sensual symbol of his belief. A generous goddess of the rich earth. The grounds they walked together were frozen and she let him handle the biggest axe to open them and look for the riches she wanted, she needed. He had dreamt of her in the past as the woman who would fit inside all his paintings. And he had seen her in his life and felt her presence around him as a thick glove that would warm him and protect him from the others who wanted to be him and live his life. His hands had been free to paint in any religion; he did not mind turning them into Hindu hands as long as her name was not Laxmi. He promised he would paint whatever she wanted, even music, some bells, maybe, which would look so good that she could hear them. Most of all he wanted to paint the Provider for her to look at and take her gaze away from him. She said no to that painting; that was not to be. He could paint as much as he wanted but he could not paint himself away from her and the embrace of her arms. It was the only thing he recognized. The musk on her skin, the scent of a country he longed for.
When he first visited her temple she was surrounded by parents and he felt familiar with their images. She had asked him to look for her elsewhere. That was a time before her skin would lose its glow and her mouth would shrivel.
He stayed, and made her taste what would make her mouth at least contract if not shrivel: his idea of life. The days she began to suffer from being deprived of all her superfluous needs were good days for him. For he was teaching her, now entering her temple as a Hindu priest. Slowly he started to borrow her colours: blue came first. He took it from her, but she smiled and said she didn’t mind because hers was a different blue. So he tried yellow and crimson and orange. All to the same effect, her smile and her belief. He said he was her husband. But he did not provide her with a new temple – theirs was a rented one. She didn’t seem to mind that much. With the cats, her black allies, she sharpened her claws on whatever material was available. Sometimes she put her soft paw on another man’s arm, and if he complained she would strike and cause him the pain of a deep cat’s scratch.
They sold it in the shops: air and rags. She wasted money on them and came back to worship him, crippled with guilt and joy about her new possessions. Small things that she did not deserve. Because they do not deserve anything. And he was not the man to provide air and rags or even admiration for her. But she was right in one thing, to come and worship him.
14
Rembrandt was the name of the train that carried me through the Rhine valley, past the castles. Castles in France were alive in time, with a mixture of blood and wine flowing through the veins of their splendidly dressed inhabitants. Castles in Spain kept their walls rigid with religion. Castles in Ireland had the wind blowing fairytales through their ruined walls, but castles in Germany retained the threat of power and war.
I looked out of the window, my vision blurred with morning sickness, hoping to see the rock where the Lorelei had sat. ‘I don’t know why it is, dass ich so traurig bin,’ I could hear my mother sing. The woman combing her golden hair to lure men to their death.
There was no money left in my purse when I arrived. I had been alone in the train. Because I was going to be paid in cash I hadn’t brought any cards with me. I grabbed a taxi to the theatre, desperately hoping it would be paid for. Greetings and bowing, Very Respected Frau, the manager and conductor were waiting to escort me from the taxi and kindly paid the fare.
I made my way through the Bruch concerto and winked at the kolnidrei, the theme that evoked a synagogue lit by a thousand candles and the blowing of the horn to reunite all in friendship.
I took the night train back. Somebody with a sinister-sounding name paid me and accompanied me to the station. He threw a bodiless shadow over me and when the train left he still stood on the platform, and then he waved.
It happened too often. The carefully planned amount of money in my purse would be gone at the most painful of moments. I had to start improvising free trips on trains, hiding and sweating in toilets in case the conductor might find me, because I had to be in time for a concert or a recording and didn’t have the cash to get there. Did he not understand that I couldn’t work under those circumstances? But I could. I played better than before, and that fascinated me. Anxiety seemed to push me beyond my limits.
He admitted that he took the money from my purse. It was his as well. And it was not as if I was bringing in a lot. With all my teaching and trips he still earned more. Maybe I should take up translating, too; my French was good enough. I was pregnant so I needed to do something about it. He’d checked our bank account and saw that I spent too much on shoes. I protested that he bought them for me, but he got angry and told me not to annoy him. If I didn’t want him to take money from my purse that was my problem. Not his.
I got heavier and nervous before leaving the house. There were the chores, there was the purse that had to be hidden and checked, there was the father-to-be of the baby who wanted a cheerful kiss before I took off on another miserably paid musical errand. And the child took off with me, listening all the time to the tunes I played for it.
There were my friends who shook their heads and said I shouldn’t have a child. That was for different people who had their lives sorted out and deserved what I didn’t.
He took to invisibility, my lover. Hours, days, he disappeared to roam the fields of his inspiration. He would come back with stories about his paintings and how they were going to improve our lives later on.
We got married when I had a belly to show to the world. Before the ceremony we took a short trip to Ireland to tell his parents. We had to stay in a hotel, for we were sinners and the neighbours did not approve of sins, especially not visible ones in the shape of a pregnant belly. Once more I sat for a couple of hours on the parental sofa and watched them pour lemonade into the cognac that I’d bought for them. The violation of the colour made me shiver. A deadly pink fluid seeped its way through the amber of the cognac and the drink disappeared loudly down their sinless throats. Meanwhile I was introduced to his twenty-year-old virginal sister who had a tan because she was just back from a Greek island where she’d probably screwed at least half of the young male population. But her hymen had grown back when she arrived home.
Mine was not blessed, which meant spending a tumultuous night above a disco sweating it out in polyester sheets and watching the various disco lights flash on the wall.
At eight-and-a-half months I sat down on stage and felt tired. A little extra pregnancy money from the State would be welcome, he said, now that I had a few free weeks I could stand in the queue and see to it. Being married meant being responsible for each other. In bed he recited the names of his favourite bailiffs to me and the baby that pushed its ass up my belly in his face.
Samuel was born to officially married taxpayers.
I had three weeks to spend full-time with him and the realization that I had given birth to death. Whenever the stupefying little bells of his bed toy played a simplified Schubert song, sadness would have all of me, a shapeless human being, a mother.
I would go to the window to count the seven bridges over the canal, seven rings that shaped a tunnelled view of light and water. Then I noticed the people on the bridges and they took me with them away from my life indoors.
My new husband was a possessive father and a baby-lover. He knew how to cuddle and cradle and shush an infant. His miraculous son was his gift for me, h
e said. I just laughed.
Again we slept long hours in the bed, which was now like an ark, with cats and baby coming along on the night trip. Friends brought flowers, presents and smiles. Mine were not the kind to give advice. His basket soon stood beside the cellist when I started rehearsing for a chamber music concert. We got a nanny from Ghana for Samuel. A singing Christian mother, she sang psalms all day long to my slumbering baby in a sling on her back. O Lord, O Lord. I could hear her from downstairs thundering God’s praise into his baby ears.
The first six months of his daily life were hers. I was busy rushing my bow over my violin, enjoying Mozart and at times getting dizzy from playing too much lesser music. That first Christmas we took the train with baby Sam to France.
Friends were waiting for us at the station and drove us through the mountains to the forge they had converted into a house. We looked at the snow on the peaks and felt warm inside the car, warm with hope. There would be talking and music and lots of food, and all kinds of people to welcome us, including babies and greybeards, princes, or one prince at least, and bricklayers, though bricklayers who wrote novels on the side.
One whole wall of the house was occupied by the original blacksmith’s fireplace. A red-haired man dressed in jodhpurs and riding boots leaned against the fireplace to warm his naked torso. He was discussing the merits of Napoleon Bonaparte’s fighting skills with a pipe-smoking American seated at the long dining table. He was a Royalist, a King would have saved this country, it was good that the English had royalty and nobility they could send out to slay the French at Waterloo.
Samuel had been sleeping but now decided to scream for food. The two men noticed us in the corner of the huge kitchen and introduced themselves. A painter, huh, he said to my husband. The pipe-smoker’s dark eyes were mad, he didn’t like Picasso, the greatest flop of the twentieth century. My husband immediately agreed, just for the sake of the argument. I went up to the riding boots man who introduced himself as Napoleon. Still have some running to do, care to join me before it gets dark? I declined the offer and he was gone. We saw his very white skin on the mountain road under a freezing sun, running to his next battle. Our host arrived amidst a crowd of barking truffle dogs. He threw some bones on the floor and some truffles on the table for us. One of the dogs licked Samuel’s hand. He howled with laughter. We had never heard him laugh like that before, a generous production of sound to express his delight.