The Painting

by Nina Schuyler

  What? he asks.

  Shipment. The next shipment, she asks, when is it?

  He’s still dazed, uncertain what she’s saying. He follows the words and scrapes off their sheen.

  He forgot about the next shipment. Why, it’s today, he says. I completely overlooked—

  I’ll pack the boxes, she says.

  Her gesture, forgotten, as he pushes his thumbs into the clay. He is usually so organized about the shipments. If she hadn’t reminded him, he’d have to wait a month to ship the boxes; the Parisian dealer who ordered his vases and bowls would probably cancel any future orders. He quickly pumps the footpad twice and grabs another handful of clay. He will make a magnificent bowl. Strong now from so many bowls, his hands bend and move the huge ball of clay. The potter’s wheel turns faster.

  HOURS LATER, HE IS DONE. He rises without looking at his finished bowl and announces he’s going inside for lunch. He asks if she’d like to join him.

  No, thank you, she says, not looking up.

  He nods and almost says, Of course not; when does she ever choose to be with him? Right before he makes his safe exit, he turns and looks at his new bowl. Why did he look? How awful, he thinks. How hideous and unsightly and he must restrain himself from rushing back to his wheel and smashing it with his fist. He wills himself to open and shut the door. Not now, he tells himself. I’ll come back later.

  For these last hours, she has been painting around and around him. Now that Hayashi is gone, she pulls out her earlier painting. There is her lover, in a light blue kimono. He is waiting for her. She mixes yellow and red and makes peach. She begins to paint herself.

  HE SETS HIS TEA cup on the kitchen table, his mind agitated. Her gesture. Her fingertips pressed so hard to the temple. At last he remembers. How long has it been since that memory visited him? How could he have tucked it away? The cherry-bark man clamped his hands to his head. He did this as if some thought just occurred to him, some horrible thought, then he collapsed and died on the floor of Hayashi’s hut.

  Of course, it is a painful image, he thinks, but he is relieved that he remembered, that he recovered a bit of the cherry-bark man. He smiles. A father to me, he thinks. The maid fills his wooden bucket with ice water. She hands him his Emerson book and pours more tea. He’ll go back to the studio and get rid of that ugly bowl. He will soak the dried pieces in water. From the new ball of clay, the hideous thing gone, he’ll begin again. Emerson probably never created anything horrible. He looks at the book cover. The Dutchman gave him this book when he was eight years old, but the fire took it. Years later, the Dutchman sent him more Emerson, and he read them at the mountain monastery. His father had met the Dutchman with pale hair in his tea shop and hired him to teach his son Western history, literature, and English. The man had pale reddish skin and pale hair on his arms. He came every Monday with a bag of books on his back.

  In the West, a man can do what he wants, said his father. The way of the West is the only way for Japan.

  He learned the Greek myths and the legendary figures. He wrote essays and learned English. After the tall man left for the day, the boy practiced the way the man threw back his shoulders, his chest puffed out, his chin tilted up and to the left. He chewed on his pencil and, like the man, spit out the pink eraser tip. He held his tea cup with both hands wrapped around it, as if he might crush it. As a boy, he insisted on a fork and knife and spoon. He fashioned a hat out of a piece of cloth and wrapped it around his head, like the pale man’s cap. He scratched letters on a chalkboard until the chalk scorched his hand. When it was time for the Dutchman to leave Japan, he left the boy with one book, Emerson.

  He heard his parents argue at night. His mother worried the boy might be injured if anyone in the government discovered what he was learning. It’s against the law, she hissed. His father said he was preparing the boy for the future.

  He sets his books down now. What good came from his father’s efforts? What has become of him? Only a mediocre potter who can make only one bowl well—the one the monks taught him how to make so long ago. How many years has he been making it?

  He is ruminating, falling deeper into sadness when the maid comes in and says there’s an old man standing at the temple door knocking and knocking.

  Hayashi puts on his slippers and steps outside. Excuse me. May I help you?

  The man scurries toward him. My son, he says, his face lined with distress.

  Hayashi freezes.

  You must give my son a proper Buddhist burial.

  I’m sorry, says Hayashi. But it’s impossible—

  The old man says his son died of a fever in the middle of the night and he was so young, only seventeen, and such a funeral would help him pass through the other side so he could quickly return.

  Hayashi stands rigid with fear, hearing the echo of the government men—the threat, the smell of burning still so fresh in the air, the panic—but he thinks, Here is this poor man, look at his face, deeply creased with such desperation, and his pleas, and the way he looks at me, as if I am the only one to save his son. But it is impossible.

  I’m sorry, he says. The temple is closed for such things.

  He cringes as the old man looks at him, dumbly, incredulously, and wishes it were otherwise, wishes he had the courage to say, to tell the townspeople, tell this poor man the temple is open and we will hold a grand funeral for your son. But he can’t; he’s a quiet man who prefers his solitude, who doesn’t want trouble; and the old man is shaking his head.

  He tells the man to try the temple on the outskirts of town. I don’t believe that one has been closed, he says, though he doesn’t really know. There is a long awful pause. The man doesn’t move; his face is still open with hope.

  My son, says the old man again, the pleading in his voice louder.

  Seconds pass; to Hayashi, it feels like hours. Finally the man turns and begins walking away, and Hayashi is flooded with regret and guilt and must fight the urge to run after him, stop him, and begin the services immediately.

  Go to the other temple, he shouts.

  The old man shakes his head dolefully, opens the heavy iron gate, and shuts it with a bang. Hayashi jumps at the sound and rushes back to the house.

  SHE TILTS OVER HER painting and falls into the colors of memory, mixing in more red and black, wrapping the image of herself in a blood-red kimono.

  They met at the fast-moving river. She arrived and stood at the river’s edge, skipping stones, and before she saw him, she saw his reflection in the water, as if he were emerging from the depths, coming straight to her. Five times she visited the river. On the sixth visit, with the sun pouring down on their patch of grass at the riverbank, they leaped across the water and climbed the hill to the flowering plum tree.

  His hand, a thick, calloused hand, in hers. She feels his hand now, pulling her into the painting. His fingers stroke her cheek. They are on a terraced hill above the rice fields, the place where they met in secret until they found the empty hut.

  Up on this hill, they are alone. There is the farmer down below, his back bent, his head covered in a large-rimmed, straw hat, too busy with his plowing to notice them. They lie together under the plum tree, his hand haunting her breast.

  A branch from a Japanese maple tree scratches against the studio window. She looks up. The branch is stripped of its red and orange leaves. A wand waving around in the wind. Ugly, she thinks, just a line without color. Not like the flowering plum tree, with its blood-red leaves and in spring, pale pink flowers. Under the tree, they looked through the leaves to the sky, and she remembers thinking, This is what joy looks like.

  She adds a soft yellow to the leaves for light.

  Afterward, the grass was green, greener than she’d ever seen. And the reddish leaves, like the glow of a summer dusk. She looked at them closely, closed her eyes to memorize them, and opened them to see again. She did the same thing with him. Memorizing each detail so that she could recall this moment exactly.

  The sun
drops below the tree line now; she lights a candle and puts it in the lantern. By the light of a paper lantern, she finishes her painting on thin mulberry paper. In the right corner, she writes, Beneath the plum tree even the discreet heart is seen.

  When she was young, she used to play a game with a loop of string, turning it into various forms. She called it string origami, and that’s what she thinks now as she puts the shipping string around the wooden box. Inside, she’s wrapped the painting around her husband’s ceramic bowl.

  FRANCE 1870

  THIS IS A STINKING, lousy job, Jorgen mutters to himself, but where else can he go? What else can he do?

  A week has eked by since he began this rotten job as a clerk, but he won’t let himself complain, won’t bemoan his stingy bastard of a boss, the mundane tasks, won’t do any of that, though he hates it here, and certainly doesn’t belong in a dusty room counting objects, his mind swallowed up by the crude details of conducting inventory.

  Ignoring the pain in his leg stump, he reaches up, shoves aside a stretch of curtain, and yanks open the paint-sealed window. The cool breeze flutters over his sweaty skin. Only now, with the air on his face, does he realize he’s been working for hours in an airless, hot room. And there, he looks longingly beyond the city walls to the small fires dotting the green landscape, the French soldiers’ blazes—though the way the French fight, they will soon be Prussian, he thinks. Not long ago, he was out there on the battlefield, huddled next to a fire with his brigade.

  Jorgen jerks the curtain shut and glares at the stacks of crates. He jimmies the nails from one that’s dirty and has several cracks in the boards, reaches in with both calloused hands, and hoists the heavy bowl from the bottom. A thin paper is wrapped around the bowl. He tosses it to the dirty floor. Balancing his weight on his crutch and one good leg, he heaves the bowl on the work-table and stares at it.

  A goddamn bowl, he grumbles. Damn French. There’s a war going on and all they can think about are exotic, useless things. A bowl, for God’s sake. A damn heavy bowl. Some rich Parisian couple probably ordered it while soldiers, good men, are fighting with guns that backfire, or some even without a gun. He turns from the bowl and looks toward the direction of his room, down the hallway, and thinks of his rifle tucked underneath the bed. The only possession he cares about, not some useless thing like a glazed bowl. He feels the urge to hold his rifle, press the cold metal to his fingertips, smell the lingering gunpowder, the remnants still nestled in the barrel. Before the war, before he arrived in France, he traded the rifle that his father gave him as a boy for a chassepot and adapted it to fire a metal cartridge, giving it a farther range. He wanted to be prepared. He wanted to be an ideal soldier. He glances at the red stamp on the crate that held the bowl. All the way from Japan.

  Another fifty boxes tower behind him. Seven rooms on the second floor teem with boxes, and there are more rooms on the first floor. The house, once a brothel, has been converted into a storage facility with a small shop in front. His boss said in preparation for the war, he imported most of his inventory, but sometimes Jorgen finds a box labeled PROVISIONS FOR ARMY or addressed to MUSEUM. The room to his right holds canned goods—corn and beans and boiled mutton and beef imported from the Middle East. The room at the end stows spices, nutmeg and cinnamon and thyme wafting into every room. The perfumes—lilac and rose and jasmine, which the French women wear like bathwater—are farther down the hall. Another room teeters with lamps and kerosene; another is stacked with guns and ammunition. In the room to his left, silk and jewels, he knows only some of the names, ruby, sapphire, and moonstones; in this room, the newly arrived boxes of wine, to be sorted, and sculptures and paintings stacked on top of each other. Nothing stays very long. Soon the cans are opened and the artwork and jewels are sold to the rich.

  The small window with its faded yellow curtain stingily lets in dim light. His leg throbs—the leg that is no longer, what he calls his ghost leg—but he must scoop out the contents of twenty more boxes, jot an entry in the log before lunch. Setting his crutches against the wall, he sits and rubs his forehead. A white marble statue of Zeus stares at him.

  What do you want? he asks the marble face. I have nothing for you. Nothing.

  He has to pack up the statue and send it back; a hairline crack snakes down its forehead, as if it suffered a head wound. Serves him right, the rich Parisian who ordered it, he thinks. He throws a rag over the statue.

  A week ago, Jorgen was in a Parisian hospital when a doctor threw back the bedsheet, glanced at the stump of the amputated leg, scribbled something in his chart, and told him he could go home. The doctor was about to scurry away—the injured men were everywhere, in cots, lying on the floor, pressing their backs against the steamy walls, and streaming out the front door—but Jorgen grabbed his sleeve.

  What? said the doctor, whose drooping eyelids were underscored by heavy purplish blue circles, his skin waxy and pale.

  When can I join my unit again?

  The doctor shook his head, bewildered, and then laughed bitterly. You’re damn lucky to be alive, said the doctor, shaking free his arm. Perhaps if you’d been brought in earlier, your leg could have been saved. He said most amputees don’t live very long—the infections, the complications. His tone was matter-of-fact, too tired for the extra effort of politeness. If he lived to the end of the month, he ought to go to church every day and thank his patron saint. The doctor penned something on a sheet of paper and shoved it at Jorgen. A prescription for painkillers, which Jorgen could fill, said the doctor, if he could find someone who had any extra medication. There weren’t enough medical supplies or instruments in any hospital. The doctor rushed away and Jorgen stared at the wall. A nurse set by his bedside his bag containing his few belongings—red trousers, a blue overcoat faded from years of sun and rain. One of the red epaulettes was torn off the shoulder of the coat, and his white gaiters were gray brown, splattered with mud. In a bag, the contents of his coat pocket, an extra pair of black socks, one with a hole in the heel, some francs, bullets, a Danish passport, a knotted ball of string, and a black polished stone, like a glassy eye. Next to the bag, his treasured rifle. When the nurse said they needed the cot for someone else, he didn’t budge, just breathed in the stench of decaying flesh.

  In the stifling storage room, he rises from the table, dispensing with the pain in his stump. Damn his leg to hell, he thinks, and yanks open another box, this one stamped AMERICA. He slides his knife through reluctant tape, and inside, shiny tin cans of meat. He pulls out a can. The tin feels cool to his fingertips. It fits neatly in his palm. He closes his fingers around it and watches it disappear. For the first time since he arrived at this stinking boardinghouse, Jorgen feels a brightening, a moment of lightness. Grabbing another can from the box, he slips them into a cloth bag and hides it behind a box. Not to eat, but to sell to a Frenchman. From each box, a little bit, nothing noticeable, just an understandable error on the part of the shipper. He’ll take the money from the things he sells, and with the small pittance of a salary, he’ll buy a leg and reenlist. Yes, that’s what he’ll do. He rips opens another box, feeling a wave of excitement at his new plan. There he finds blue bottles of perfume, and he stuffs a handful into the bag and is about to reach for another handful when the front door opens and closes. The woman calls out. Natalia is her name. Next to his cot in the hospital, her older brother lay dying. The doctors stopped attending to him; only the nurses came by, fluffing his pillow, arranging his thin blanket, and bringing him thin broth, when they remembered. Jorgen watched Natalia come visit her older brother every day. What was his name? Edgar? Edward?

  Hello, hello, Natalia calls out from the bottom of the stairs.

  Hello, Jorgen says, without thinking.

  Come down for lunch when you are ready. I brought you some things.

  Jorgen doesn’t answer, wishing he hadn’t said anything; if he’d been quiet, she never would have guessed he is here. And now he is overcome with a strange feeling, foreign t
o him, a preference, no, a consuming need for solitude. For no one to stir him up or ask questions or demand anything of him. He’ll make this money, get his new leg, and leave here as soon as possible. This job has its advantages, its solitude and the extra money he’s going to make from pilfering.

  He hears the tap tap of her heels walking along the wood-paneled floor downstairs. In the past, he would have gone downstairs, flirted with her, made her blush by pointing to the freckle on the side of her neck, asking if it was a beauty mark. He knows women like that kind of attention, and he knows if he helped her unload a box or scrub the dirty dishes, she’d be so pleased, so delighted by his assistance, she’d do nearly anything for him. In the past, he would have done these things, even though he does not find this woman attractive. Her brow is too intellectual, her mouth too large for beauty, her hair dull brown, her eyes piercing, too full of expression. And that’s no beauty mark, but an ugly mole. Despite this, there was a time he would have at least made her smile.

  She is humming now. Plunging his hands into the packing material of scrunched up newspapers, he hears her melody through the floorboards. Now she is singing. Singing with a full voice. She is too cheery, he thinks, and he feels irritated by her noise, for the world is not the way she sees it. Not at all. He coils into himself, wishing again he hadn’t answered her. He remembers with shame that night in the hospital. Natalia set her chair in between her brother’s cot and Jorgen’s. In his sleep, he reached for her hand and pressed it to his chest. He remembers the weight of her hand made him fall into a deeper, more peaceful sleep. He woke when she slowly removed it. At first he was uncertain what had happened, but then, as he realized what he’d done, he told himself it was unintentional. It meant nothing. He could have grabbed anyone’s hand; by chance it happened to be hers. In the morning, she said her younger brother ran a boardinghouse not far from the hospital. A room had become available. She said her brother might need help in his shop. She told him her brother used to own a fine art gallery, but with the war, he turned it into a general merchandise shop. He sells anything and everything, she said. A businessman. Are you good with numbers? And he told her he was, though he wasn’t at all.