I suppose living hidden lives makes it seem like you’ve outwitted all the poor sods that get only one.
Seem like?
Well, so often the first thing people do with their freedom is to just exchange it for another version of the thing that imprisoned them. Besides, we all know how it turns out in the end. Here, she hands me a glass.
Oh, it’s good.
It’s Greek, she says, showing me the label, though I find it hard to read with my minimum-efficiency eyes.
It tastes like pine needles.
Let’s sit on the balcony.
Slowly night comes. There are people walking hurriedly home, a couple holding hands, a white Vespa zooms by. A teenager walks a small dog. An older man who looks like a playboy from a bygone era, the pomaded kind with a thin moustache and mahogany tan, buys a lottery ticket from the tabac. A young man eating a banana jumps off the bus at his stop and I am reminded of the fierceness of youth. The physicality of it. Everything they do is beautiful, every moment full of what is to come. How utterly sick of the body you become when you grow old. And conversely, how protective of your own thinking. Uninterested in fictions, I have no tolerance for novels now. I look to things for my own imagination to work through. Romantic slush holds the least appeal. I want information, things that are real. There are voices and laughter from nearby cafés, the honking cars, the tap tap tap of metal clinking down, closing the boulangerie below, the butter pastry smell still in the air. I think of how rarely I set foot in this arrondissement when I lived here. Where Tacita and Istvan first met, decades ago. How Paris can be different but still so much the same. The long colonnades of wet chestnut trees. The silver rooftops. The patisseries with names and interiors that haven’t changed in three hundred years. Everyone revering a different era, always from a time that came before. I have never felt of this time. Not of any time. Why here? Why now? It is just an improbable series of events.
—
I’m going to Iceland next week for work, Ondine says.
Have you been?
She shakes her head.
It is like a fairy tale with all those fjords and volcanoes.
I always picture it covered in ice. Like that book you lent me.
Which one?
About that big flood in Italy when millions of important books and masterpieces were underwater. And while they flew in all the experts and desperately raced against time trying to decide how to save them, they realized the answer was to freeze everything until they figured out what to do. Ivory?
Yes?
She looks at me, uncertain. Tell me. She takes a big sip from her glass. Are you happy?
Oh, Ondine, I say, not you.
Well I know you don’t give anything away easily.
What about you? I say flatly.
She tucks her legs under her and takes another sip. Me? I don’t know. I love to fly. There is Lucien. My boyfriend. All my boyfriends, she laughs. It’s just. I see you, alone in your Spartan accommodation wherever you go, stooped over your work. And yet when I am with you, I always see the heart of another woman. One who likes to laugh. Enjoy herself. A strange expression on your face sometimes when you are in Paris, a smile that contains such warmth and then suddenly it goes out, like a match.
Don’t you find, she says after a moment, that even when you’re not working, you are always at work?
I don’t separate the two.
So often I never hear back from you. Sometimes I worry.
About what?
You.
Don’t. I am not grounded to this livelihood you know. We grant men a right to solitude, why can’t we do the same for women? I exist more completely in it, I say. Though I suddenly wonder how she sees me. I remember reading about Nikola Tesla. Old and alone, living in a rundown hotel with a wounded pigeon he dragged back from Central Park. He never had a relationship his entire life but was said to have feelings for the pigeon. He said he loved her, like a man loves a woman.
I look down at my glass. You ask about happiness and I think, I am not really interested in happiness. Happy people have nothing to tell. They have been happy and that is—perfectly unproductive.
Well, she says, reaching over for the bottle. I have seen you working in Lapland when you came in with your face red from the cold, grinning. Playing me the reindeer sounds, madly drawing your ruled parabolas all over sheets of graph paper. Or when you figured out that foxes have that system of twenty vocalizations or whatever it was. She laughs. You know you are like the veery birds you have recorded. A songbird able to harmonize with itself. It’s just that— She hesitates. I wonder sometimes. You wear your work like a shield. You have no—attachments. You resist mightily any talk of the past.
We sit in uncomfortable silence.
And— She hesitates again. I think that, for instance, you’ve probably always known that Eudoxie, my sculptor friend whom you’ve met before, was friends with Volkov’s wife, the French writer. The one after the short-lived American—
Ondine, please.
You know she said you are the only one who ever left him.
—
I stare fixedly ahead. A woman waters her plants on the balcony across the narrow street. We are both silent. Ondine doesn’t know what’s going on inside of me, and I don’t know what’s going on inside of her, and the woman watering plants has started to talk to a baby two storeys below. I know that Eudoxie knew Lev’s wife. Istvan did too. His letters always in their architect writing, in perfect French learned from Tacita. Lev’s exhibitions. His images, fame, his name everywhere. These bright hard little facts recede against my own beliefs. The belief in what I chose. In wanting what I chose. I don’t really know how people whose lives have a clear before and after can possibly continue to live the same life and still survive. For me it was necessary to alter everything. And speak of nothing. Of all the countries I have been to, conducting research in the field, the gold-eyed creatures darting through foliage, the conferences in cities scattered across the globe, the labs, and sound rooms, the whole world dropping away while I am filled with these sonorities, this opalescence. All of this against the ridiculous fact that we could never get very far from each other. These places and moments in time on which we have been caught. Of course I am not unaware that most people observe holidays, and fill their lives with firelit rooms, children running through—with laughter and meals. Children cast your life wider, you get to live beyond your own generation. It’s so obvious why we domesticate. But these things to me are both dreamlike and dull. I would never have allowed myself to want them, let alone go near them. I have always traded on the notion that I did the right thing. But how does anyone know for certain that they have done the right thing?
Ivory, I can hear Ondine say, I don’t mean to upset you. I only bring it up because sometimes I think that you might one day want to talk about it but not know how. Or find that it’s too late, after all this time, she says, resting her chin on her hand. She gets up, putting her hand on my arm, and fills my glass.
I know she feels genuine concern. But my entire life I’ve scarcely been the object of it, and have no idea what to do with it now. I know that Eudoxie was friends with Lev’s wife. The French writer whom I could never bear to read, though I heard she was good. He had wives, children, exhibitions, all of it. With him it was always a widening beauty. Nothing could be changed by an irreversible act, because that would be admitting the darkest version of life. I am not that different except in my work. I know I have been strict with myself in an unforgiving way. But I needed something more durable than love, more subterranean.
She takes the thin clip from her teeth and repins it in her hair. You want food?
I nod. I thought I was having a heart attack but I think I’m just hungry.
Don’t joke about these things.
You know people give women bad advice, I call after her. She is inside for a few moments and comes back from the kitchen with cheese and olives and small red tomatoes on the vine, and two triangles of
cake from the shop below. We eat with plates resting on our laps.
How do you mean?
We are so rarely left alone to love what we want to love, I say. Happiness comes from accepting the world the way it is. I’ve worked against this notion my whole life.
You seem to have no need to transmit anything to anyone. You know that’s odd don’t you? Maybe it’s from all your time alone. Unlike someone like Eudoxie. I find her madly absorbing but also overstimulating. I always have to lie down right after seeing her. She holds the cake to her lips. But are you not worried that as you get older—
I am older, Ondine.
For most people, she ventures, work is utilitarian. Or I suppose, in some cases, decoration.
I don’t know, I only think about what I’m going to do tomorrow. And what I want to do tomorrow is my work. Most times I am so interested in what I’m working on that I can hardly wait to get up and get at it in the morning.
That makes you a child, she laughs. Only children can’t wait to get up in the morning to get at what they want to do.
Well isn’t that the goal?
I guess because you’re always on your own I just want to make sure you have what you need, what you want. I don’t know, she sighs. What does anyone live for?
These are questions you don’t really ask if you are truly occupied.
Most people never seem to have the time to consider it, she says, brushing her fingers on the parts of the geraniums that are dried out, the stiff petals scattering over the balcony.
Most people dull their wits, Ondine. They don’t stop to think about just what it is that’s disappointing them about their own lives. And they spend even less time on what to do about it. Though if they do, it is always something inconsequential, like a new town or a new job. It’s at the end, when it is all running out, that people finally feel the weight of their own lives. And then they die leaving their plates and books and closets full of old clothes, and hearts blank as walls.
STARLING
Wings across the star field, across the crescent moon, closing the evening.
THE LINEN THREAD FINDS the holes Mme. Tissaud has measured and punctured with the awl. She works on an order of two dozen volumes bound in white that will eventually dwell in the smoking room of one of her clients while I also sew.
Why white? I ask her.
His name is Angel. He is from Latin America and grew up with the white libraries there. They are vellum or alum-tawed bindings, not the tanned leather that we are used to here. She describes the tanners who sell her leather—toothless, criminal eyes, hairless up to their elbows from their arms in the chemical baths—as arrested characters. Un sale métier.
Some of the leather is tanned with brains, she tells me, not looking up.
That is grisly.
She shrugs. It is the fattiest organ.
What will Angel use these for?
We go to the things we know from childhood, she offers up as explanation, needle between her teeth. South America, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East are mostly white. Libraries covered in frost. Northern Europe’s libraries are mainly brown, she says. It is the white libraries that have far less deterioration.
It makes me think of Archangel, the medieval Russian city near the White Sea where Lev has told me his father came from. Where deterioration does not occur in real time. Lev says that, as with the rest of Russia, Stalin is destroying their churches. Archangel’s was dismantled by some of the men whose own grandfathers had built it. Pride in the shining domes now beaten with sledgehammers and then burned to the ground. The priest taken out and shot. Fire is so complete. Gleaming golden domes, and the sublime bells, once treated as living things, believed to be not a note, or a chord, but the voice of God. Lev said they smashed the bells and melted them into a tractor that gleamed gold along the dusty tracts of land.
I try to explain this to Mme. Tissaud. For someone who stands in darkness, Lev’s ability to bring such beauty and jubilance seems a feat of alchemy. But his complexity startles.
In other words, says Mme. Tissaud, a real Russian.
I bristle at such generalizations, but with Mme. Tissaud, it is different. She eyes my hands. I know what she thinks. She thinks, How dangerously inhabited she is. I am sewing buttons onto Lev’s coat. The needle stabs at the ends of my fingers. He didn’t ask for this. I know that he will meet a woman in this coat. And though I feel no neutrality in this, I am complicit.
We stitch in silence, drinking our café crèmes that Mme. Tissaud prepared on her hotplate at the back of the atelier, with its smell of matches and violet lozenges. She takes theatrically loud slurps from her mug, letting the liquid sputter through her lips. This, from her, is endearing. The front windows are still warm with sun, though the grey looms.
Mother found my contact with nature almost carnal. Now Lev is the wilderness, only this one is hard going.
Mme. Tissaud gazes at the window growing moist as the darkness begins to fall and says quietly, Entre chien et loup.
Pardon?
The time when night moves in, entre chien et loup. Haven’t you heard that expression before?
Why between dog and wolf?
The uncertain light, where you cannot distinguish one from the other, she says, going back to stitching. The shift from domestic to wild.
Though she carries with her a very cultivated set of beliefs like Mother, the way they are decanted is far less aggressive. With her it is all feeling.
Cocotte?
Yes.
Please be careful.
Of what?
Of him.
These words leave a small scalded space between us.
She makes these concise delicate prophecies. Ones that, despite her not wanting them to, become true.
—
In the evening, Tacita and I meet at the café where Istvan and the other artists are. She shows me a song sheet, starling feathers, and three miniature spoons she found in a rubbish bin, though she is unsure how she’ll use them.
Group them together in one of your boxes. Call it Game.
This is why you have been called upon to contribute to the publication—the only woman. You are always so sure. Like a man. Or a cliché of one.
What is the word for cliché in English?
There are some words that cannot be translated.
Why is that?
I don’t know. There are just some points when a translator knows when to stop. Like cliché.
I cannot think of a single one other than that.
Avant-garde. Blasé. Coup. I could go on.
Of course. I always forget that you are a translator.
Was a translator, she says, tilted smile.
Anyway, I don’t know if “like a man” is quite right, Tas. That some of these men we conspire and create art with, these men interested in invention and uncharted realms, still uphold such dated conventions. Is this what you are referring to?
I think you grew up unaware that you were meant to consider yourself inferior. You have always been fully formed. It’s given you the confidence that most of us have yet to completely inhabit.
I’ve never thought about it.
See!
Well, that isn’t entirely true. Remember when I asked why we don’t study any women artists?
I remember. The instructor said, Because there aren’t any. The room went silent. And then you said that there have always been female artists, but since females have been considered inferior animals, we don’t know too much about them. Everyone laughed. He didn’t like it. It’s the kind of misstep you are only allowed once. I think it was the first time that he didn’t know what to say.
But he did say. He sent me out for disrupting the class.
I remember what you looked like, she laughs. You looked like you wanted to stab him with a knife.
Well, normally I am rather quiet.
Really, I? she says, raising an eyebrow. What about Félix? Istvan told me that when some of you were in his studio,
he turned to you and gave you a handful of centimes and asked you to get him cigarettes.
All I did was look around the room and see that I was the only woman. I said no.
Istvan told me what you said. You said, Bloody well get them yourself.
—
I see a flash of dark, like a crow’s wing. I know that Lev is in the room. I have lost count since the last time I heard his voice. When we met in the night at Parc des Buttes Chaumont and he told me that in my white I looked like his dream. I appeared, illuminated, licking icing off a knife. He says my white fills an empty space, it is both a cure for isolation and a mystical pronouncement.
Since that night, I have been hiding in the ordinariness of my days. Absorbed but uncertain, like the morning after a dreamless night. I spend time illustrating, stitching. These things that occupy the hands but not the mind. Like Mme. Tissaud, who when not binding books is knitting. All the knitting. All those women who incessantly click their needles on the benches in the Jardin Luxembourg. I think some women knit because doing something with their hands means they are doing something with their lives. But not Mme. Tissaud. She makes things out of zeal.
I am possessed but do not possess. I have submitted myself to this, with all its risks and cruelties. None of the single sentences and kindness of Mme. Tissaud or the inspiring sistership of Tacita can save me. I have brought it on myself. I haven’t had a choice in the matter, though if I did, it would still be the same. I cannot get far enough or near enough. Everything depends on Lev, whether I see him or whether I don’t. Each day the world larger/larger then smaller/smaller.
I’ve taken on a few commissions from the antiquarian book collector for biological illustrations of birds despite Lev’s dismissal of such work. Mme. Tissaud lent me a copy of Audubon’s Birds of America for reference. She tells me his project began by attempting to paint a bird a day. I see that he has used coloured pastels and layer upon layer of watercolouring to add softness to feathers, which is useful for the owls and herons I am drawing. I learn that herons have three-metre wingspans but weigh only a few pounds because they are mostly feather and large hollow bones. They move slowly but can strike like lightning. They are both optimistic and awkward. Under each coloured plate Audubon writes, Drawn from nature. I learn this means that he shot the birds. He killed them for pleasure and then took them home to stuff them and prop them into rigid poses by filling them with armatures of wire. There are no heads drawn back at majestic angles. The larger birds are contorted because he needed to fit them to the size of the page. It explains why you can look and look but what you are seeing is not really a bird. Where is the bird? Each illustration carries the weight of Lev’s disapproval. He believes in submitting to your art, regardless of hunger, rent, or other practical matters. I realize that sometimes I am a bit afraid of him.
The Dictionary of Animal Languages Page 15