The Color of Light

by Helen Maryles Shankman

  I had tipped the waiter well to lure him away. This was my chance. My heart was knocking so hard I was sure she could hear it. I had already made a lame first impression. What could I possibly say to undo it?

  “Pardon,” someone was saying. “Excuse me…”

  What if I told her how I felt? That her eyes made me want to save her? Or that I was already thinking about what paints I would mix to get the exact color of her white skin? I looked down at my sketchbook, at the quick caricatures of café patrons drinking coffee, reading the paper, posturing, smoking. My fingers gripped the pen so tightly it hurt.

  “Excuse me, English?”

  I raised my eyes, and there she was, leaning towards me, trying to get my attention in the noisy bistro.

  “Yes?” I wondered if she could hear my voice shaking.

  “Please, I did not get your name.” she said apologetically. From her accent I guessed she was from somewhere in Eastern Europe.

  I introduced myself, stuttering over the syllables. “But you can call me English if you like.”

  “Raphael.” Her voice was low and husky in the din of the busy lunchtime café, and I had to lean close to hear her. “The angel of healing.”

  “I liked your drawing today,” I told her. “There was something about it…there’s a real wallop to your line.”

  Her eyebrows drew together. They were thick and black, arching up to a peak and then sharply down again. It was a look which was not in fashion then, but they set off her eyes perfectly. “I do not understand, but it sounds like you think it was good.”

  “Yes. I meant that it was good.”

  That made her happy. She gave me a shy smile, as if she were not used to being praised.

  “Where are you from?”

  “Poland.”

  “Oh, really. Warsaw?”

  “No. I come from town you never heard of.” The forgotten cigarette was smoldering to ash dangerously close to her fingers. With an exclamation, she dropped it in on her bread plate and put her burned finger in her mouth. I handed her my glass. She dipped her injured finger into the cold water. “That is my hand I use to draw,” she murmured. Then she raised her eyes to mine, transfixing my heart once again.

  “You speak English very well,” I said, unable to come up with anything more clever.

  “I study it with teacher,” she replied, and suddenly she looked away as if she had thought of something unspeakably sad.

  There was a terrible grief in her eyes that made me want to know her better, made me want to take it away whatever it cost me, but I could think of nothing to say. And then Sawyer was back, wedging his big rangy body between us like a barrier, grumbling about the waiter calling him away for nothing.

  The waiter came, we ordered. God, I can smell it now; sausages in wine and onions, bouillabaisse, pork with red cabbage, raw oysters, snails drowned in butter. Mysteriously, Sofia would only have coffee. Only later would I come to understand. This was her way of keeping the kosher laws.

  “Anybody up for a round of Exquisite Corpse?” said Leo. “Sinclair, may we borrow a page from your sketchbook?”

  I thought for a moment, then scribbled furiously, folded it over, passed it to Sawyer. He bent close over the paper, took his time. When he was done, he folded it over and passed it to Sofia. She smoothed the paper, sat contemplating for a moment. I watched thoughts flit over her face, taking in the curve of her neck when she shifted positions. Finally, she smiled and began to draw.

  Only children play it now, but Exquisite Corpse is an old Dada bar game. You know. The first person draws a head, folds the paper over to cover it, and passes it to the next player, who begins where the last person left off. And so on.

  It fell to Leo to finish the feet. He smoothed open the paper, folded like a fan, studied it as we waited. Then he looked at me, his eyebrows raised.

  It was a crazy amalgam of different creatures and styles. Along the way it had acquired huge breasts, sea lion flippers, donned a Nazi uniform, arms tattooed with snakes. Long tentacles wriggled out of the bottom of a sultry black evening gown. But crowning the top of the fantastic beast was a perfect portrait of Sofia.

  After that, I saw her almost every day. I grew to know every detail of her body from behind, the way her head bowed over her drawing board, the graceful line of her back, her thin shoulders, the way her hair parted along her neck.

  Together with us, her new friends, she would laugh at jokes, listen to jazz, watch a movie, debate the political situation. But there was something she wasn’t saying, a secret she wasn’t sharing. She could be helpless with laughter, and her eyes still wise with sorrow.

  As for me, I was completely besotted. My sketchbook, previously filled with quick drawings of café patrons and old men sitting on park benches, suddenly began to sprout passionate love poems.

  I was obsessed and unfulfilled; I wanted to possess her, to rescue her from the mysterious sealed fate her eyes predicted, but something about the way she held herself kept me from even speaking to her.

  “What was she like? As an artist, I mean.” Tessa didn’t know why it should matter to her, but it did.

  He closed his eyes, remembering Sofia’s bold lines, shading so fine he couldn’t see pencil strokes. Copies of Raphaels and Caravaggios she had made at the Louvre, propped up against an old wooden steamer trunk in her room. Grave Madonnas on the escritoire. Holy Families on the vanity. A single Pietà, lovingly rendered in crow-quill pen on the mantle.

  Models with plump thighs and round bottoms. Models with skinny legs and flat asses. Models with thick necks and sculptured torsos. Models with scars, models with moustaches, models with stockings and garter belts, models in corsets and high heels, framed and lovingly arranged on the peeling papered walls of her sitting room.

  His voice broke with a despairing awe. “Extraordinary. I’ve never seen anything like it. There was a swaggering sexuality to her work, it was always there, didn’t matter whether the model was fat, ugly, naked, or asleep…something about the thick black lines describing the figure gave me goosebumps.”

  A Klimt hung on the wall over the piano. His eyes flicked upward to study it, the portrait of a heavy-lidded, dark-haired beauty, in a gown that was a shimmering tower of swirling gold pattern. “Oh, my love,” he muttered. “My sweet, sweet love.”

  Tessa felt the flesh on her arms prickle. He wasn’t talking to her. He was talking to Sofia.

  Now he turned to her. “There was a time when a box of Wizotsky tea could be found in virtually every home in Eastern Europe, did you know that? The Tzar of Teas, they called it.”

  The story came swiftly, like a precious object he’d been keeping for someone else, and the time had finally come to unshoulder the burden and pass it on.

  The first Monday in February, she didn’t show up to class. Neither was she at the Louvre in the afternoon, nor any of our usual haunts that evening.

  Tuesday found her absent again. My eye, trained to glance up at regular intervals to rest on her slight figure, kept returning to her empty seat, like a tongue running over the space where a tooth has been pulled.

  What if she was sick? What if she needed help? Worse, what if she had returned to Poland? I resolved to visit her apartment that evening. How I would find her apartment, I had no idea.

  After a dismal painting session at the Louvre where I ruined a week’s worth of progress with sloppy brushwork, I went to La Coupole for dinner. By the time I arrived, the party was going full swing, hundreds of people ordering hundreds of meals, drinking gallons of wine and having a wonderful time.

  As I walked in, I bumped into Leo, who was just leaving with Margaux. It was all over town that she had left her husband to move in with him. They were accompanied by another woman, tall, with long legs and wide hips, high round breasts. She had bright intelligent eyes that made promises of carnal adventure, and scarlet lips that curved into a greedy smile when Leo introduced us.

  We made the smallest of small talk. I felt a hot poker
of desire flare inside my gut. Margaux murmured that she was an old friend, did something in fashion, they would be at Le Dôme later in the evening. We said our au revoirs, and they moved languorously on to whatever was next on their full social calendar.

  I found an empty table, ordered something, took out my sketchbook and pencil. I felt someone’s eyes upon me, so I glanced up, and there she was.

  Sofia was alone at a table by the wall. There was a forgotten plum in a glass compote sitting in front of her. Next to it lay an open letter. And though it seemed as if she was looking at me, she was a million miles away.

  I waved at her and broke the spell; she blinked and gave me a small smile of recognition. I picked up my sketchbook and went to say hello. She gestured to the seat across from her. Sit. So I did. Our saga together had begun.

  “Where have you been?” I asked her. “We’ve been worried. It’s all anyone can talk about. I thought Sawyer was going to call the police.”

  She smiled at my joke. I felt tingly all over.

  “Hello, English.” Her perfume rolled over me, blending with the smell of coffee. Lilac. “My brother was visiting. Better he doesn’t know I go to art school.”

  The letter lay on the table between us, written in a spidery foreign hand. “Letter from home?”

  She nodded.

  “Money, I hope.” I joked, trying to keep it light, and she smiled a little smile, then burst into tears.

  Oh, God, my first moments alone with the woman I craved, and I had made her cry. Not good. I fished in my pockets for a handkerchief, and not finding one, gave her my napkin.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to…” It wasn’t my moment after all. “I’m sorry. Why don’t I go.”

  She shook her head no, wiped at her eyes with my napkin. Her red lips were even more captivating now, all soft and puffy and quivering, paralyzing me. She wiped her nose, exhorting me not to watch. And then she began to talk, the words gushing out of her like water from a broken main.

  Sofia’s story began in a place called Wlodawa, a city of seven thousand souls in the far southeast corner of Poland. She grew up in a white Baroque villa on the edge of town, set amidst trees and gardens, attended by servants, with electricity, running water and indoor plumbing, great luxuries in that place in that time. There were party dresses and a pony, holidays in the spa town of Rapkha, sleigh rides in winter behind horses with bells on their harnesses, feasts on the Sabbath and Jewish holidays. People rang their bell all day long looking for charity, and her pretty mother would come to the front door, always a few zlotys for anybody in need. Her family didn’t call her Sofia; she was Shayfaleh, little lamb, or Shayna maidel, pretty girl.

  Every Saturday morning, she would put on her nicest dress, buckle on a pair of shoes that were just for this purpose, and go to shul with her family. She could see the synagogue from her house, a grand white edifice with gold onion domes. On New Years and the Day of Atonement, two thousand people filled the seats. High up in the gallery, she would hold open her silver-clad prayerbook and listen to a superstar cantor from Lodz sing the prayers in a sobbing, operatic voice.

  A fairy-tale upbringing.

  One day, when she was six or seven, she found a little bird dead in the front yard. She ran inside for a pencil and paper and spent the next hour drawing it in great detail. When she was finished, she brought it in to show her mother, who accused her of making up stories. She was sure her older brother Yechezkel had done it; it was far too sophisticated for someone so young.

  The next day, she showed her mother a drawing of Yechezkel in the bathtub. For this, Sofia received a spanking. She had drawn him naked, and nice Orthodox girls were never to see boys in the altogether until they were safely married.

  After that, she drew everything in sight; her father, her mother, the cook, the driver, the furniture in her room. The horses that pulled the carriage, the flat Polish landscape. In the mornings, the teacher at school scolded her for drawing on the cover of her grammar book. In the afternoons, the rabbi scolded her for drawing in the margins of her prayer book.

  Her father smiled wistfully at her, told her how talented she was, arranged for her to receive lessons from someone in town. His sister had been artistic. She had died before the first world war, of a disease she could only name in Polish.

  On her twelfth birthday, she looked at herself in the mirror as she was getting ready for her bath and noticed that her body was changing. Fascinated, she drew herself. She had gotten in trouble once for drawing a naked boy. Nobody had said anything about naked girls.

  She became obsessed with the human body. Furtively, she studied her brother when he dressed, the housekeeper as she bent over the beds, the children playing by the pump in the village. When her friends took off their clothes to go swimming, she observed the details of their anatomy and recorded it on paper, which she naively stashed in her writing desk.

  One day, when she came home from school, she found her mother waiting for her, holding an armful of her drawings. Nakedda nekayvas, she spat out as she shook them in her face. Sick in the head! Something must be wrong with you to make you want to draw these things!

  Her mother threw the drawings into the kitchen fire. The flames licked the pictures of her family and friends, then consumed them.

  She took away Sofia’s pencils, told her if she ever caught her drawing again, she would put her fingers in the fire. When she looked to her father for help, he avoided her gaze. Then he took off his belt.

  Poor Sofia. They never looked at her the same way again, not really. The belt was applied regularly and with conviction if she so much as doodled on the corner of a newspaper. They made her pray three times a day to be released from the demons that must have possessed her to make those pictures.

  Though they tried to keep it hush hush, somehow it got around that the Wizotsky girl was sex-crazed. Nakkeda nekayvas! Maybe it was the help, maybe it was Yechezkel, but everyone in town heard the story. When she went to synagogue the following Shabbos, people turned around to stare. When she walked through town, people whispered, and women hid their children behind their skirts. It was a shonda, the kind of scandal that ruins a family’s reputation.

  The shonda reflected badly on all of them, but her parents’ fortune eased the pain, and her brother was married off anyway. Grandchildren followed shortly thereafter. One year went by, then another, but there were no takers for the Wizotskys’ damaged flower. Though Sofia was accomplished, intelligent and beautiful, nobody in the Orthodox world wanted to have the girl who drew nakkeda nekayvas for their daughter-in-law. The story of the shonda floated through the Polish Jewish world like feathers from an opened pillow.

  This suited Sofia just fine. She didn’t want to marry those boys in black coats and black hats anyway.

  At twenty-two, she was practically an old maid. Her parents worried for their unmarried daughter, with war threatening and no husband to protect her, so in the winter of 1939, they packed her off to Paris. She would be safe there while their search continued, someone perhaps more modernishe, or with lower standards. They had a friend with a house in the Pletzel, the old Jewish neighborhood in the Marais. There was a flat on the top floor Sofia could rent while the landlord’s wife kept a sharp eye on her.

  Her father was busy directing the movers when he came across a drawing, hidden behind her bed. Angrily, he yanked it out, ready to be outraged. But it was an innocuous landscape, massive gray storm clouds rolling over a patchwork of plowed fields. He stared at it for a long time. Perhaps he was thinking of his dead sister. Finally, he sighed and murmured, “So beautiful. So talented. What will become of you, my shayna maidel?”

  They sent Jewish suitors for her consideration; a widower in his fifties, bald, bearded and fat. The one with the crippling limp, one leg a full foot shorter than the other. A hunchback with a profound speech impediment. The one who was terribly scarred.

  She rejected them all. For the first time since she was twelve, Sofia was truly happy. She w
as on her own in a city that was, in itself, a work of art. Men and women strolled casually down the boulevards with portable easels under their arms, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. The Louvre, filled with the world’s masterpieces, was open every day. She would get so close to the paintings that she made the guards nervous. She took the money her mother gave her to buy pretty dresses and spent it all on art classes.

  There were caveats. She had to be back in her room by nine o’clock every night. She was allowed no visitors, male or female. If her landlady thought her dress was immodest or too alluring, she would send her back upstairs to change. She was supposed to take all her meals with the family she lived with, but she flouted that particular rule, posing as a vegetarian at the cafés and restaurants she frequented with her artist friends.

  Every day, she prayed to God that her parents would never find that suitable match for her, the man who would take her away from the life she loved. Each time she opened a letter from home, her hands shook and her heart pounded with fear as she raced through her mother’s longhand, searching for the words that told her she was still free.

  Sofia had run out of words. We sat in silence. A table of people near us exploded into uproarious laughter. The sounds of cutlery scraping plates and the babble of conversation went on all around us.

  I wanted to take her in my arms and hold her and stroke her hair and kiss her eyes until there was no sorrow left in them. I wanted to take her back to my flat and make sweaty, reckless pornographic love to her till she was washed clean of everything sad that had ever happened to her.

  She made me swear not to tell anyone a single detail. Bewildered, I asked her why.

  “I just want to be Sofia,” she murmured as she lit a cigarette. Her face became blurry, lost in a haze of blue smoke. “Just Sofia Wizotsky, for a little while longer.”

  She tapped my sketchbook. “Forget everything I told you. Let’s play.”

  I tore out a page and passed it to her. She borrowed my pencil, looked at me sharply, bent to her task.