by Alon Preiss
Emmett froze. Above the thin, blood red tie was a black void, a face of wet, swirling darkness. A nothing-man stared in Emmett’s mirror with his nothing-eyes, and Emmett looked at the nothing-face and began to whimper. “Come on, Emmett,” the nothing-mouth said. “I have some candy for you.”
The next thing he could remember he was under the bed and his father was talking to him, telling him he had offended Mr. Solomon, and that he should apologize. Emmett shouted, “I’m not sorry, he’s dirty,” and Emmett’s dad said, “Sorry about this Stephen.” Mr. Solomon eventually left, and Emmett got a spanking.
*
When Irina was five years old – or maybe six, or maybe even nine – her family traveled to Sochi, a beach-side resort in Crimea. The trip took place back when her family had still been together, when her father had been young and smiling, and vodka, while not absent from his life, had not become an intrinsic part of him, part of his smell, stuck to his skin. Years later, after the death of her father, after Irina had failed to gain admission to university and had been grateful for a factory job in Yaroslavl, after all that, and more, it would be impossible for Irina to remember on anything other than an intellectual level the feelings that had once moved her: that unquestioning adoration, that smile she felt all over her body when she saw her father.
Irina and her family embarked on the coveted journey to Sochi back when the dull sheen of Brezhnevism had not worn away completely, when lazy patriotism was enough for most people – another point-of-view that, for the vast majority of Russians, would become very difficult to remember. Young Irina had no feelings about Brezhnev but absorbed the emotions of the time: weariness, quiet optimism. Everyone still smiled on May Day, and the apparatchiks in Sochi still snagged the best rooms.
At the train station in Sochi, old women wandered up and down the platform, offering rooms for rent with impunity. The Sea lay to the south (the crashing waves were audible when the train pulled out) and the mountains rose up on either side of them. Every Russian goes to Sochi once, her father had said, and he had pulled every string to get them a beach-front room, a quiet, spare cabin with electricity inside, and outdoor plumbing, with a good view of the Sea and the pale bodies that lay on its banks.
One morning, her mother lunched with a friend who had just arrived; Irina splashed in the Sea; her father lay on a beach-towel on the glistening white sand, keeping an attentive eye on his young daughter. A recent issue of New World Magazine lay beside him on the sand, opened to the Russian translation of a book by Kurt Vonnegut.
A man renting the cabin next door praised Irina. Look at her blank, innocent stare! the man exclaimed to Irina’s father. With some little girls, you never know what is inside. Look how quietly she plays in the water. You can see an innocence radiating from within her; she is absolute purity, she lacks any evil motive. You must be praised, my friend, for creating such a child!
Irina smiled at the man, and she let her eyes widen a bit. Blankness to the inside of her soul. That’s what they admired.
The man smiled back, with an intensity that made Irina uncomfortable. She looked away. A few feet to the East, Irina saw another little girl with jet-black hair, in another little blue bathing suit. The girl came closer, and she stared curiously at Irina, her face full of hatred. At Irina? At the adults in Sochi? At the universe? Everything and anything seemed possible. Irina felt as though she were looking into a mirror that had grown as big as the world. Except for the energetic hatred that surrounded her like a mist, the other girl looked exactly like Irina: she had the same little pug-nose, the same specks of freckles on her cheeks.
The girl sneered at Irina, made a face of contemptuous dismissal, and turned her attention to the gulls squawking a few feet away. She kicked sand on the unfortunate birds until they all flew off. A little boy, not more than six years old, stood behind her, laughing at her fury.
She pelted him with pebbles, and he ran away, crying.
The girl ran to the surf, splashing and pounding her fists in the water, emitting little furious shrieks. After stumbling a bit, and regaining her footing, she kicked the waves more aggressively than before.
Irina sat beside her father. That little girl looks just like me, doesn’t she? Don’t you think? Her father scanned the beach. What little girl? he asked, and when Irina looked again, she was gone. She looked exactly like me, Irina said. Then, more uncertainly: She was me. Her father smiled and laughed and explained to Irina that she was one-of-a-kind, that there was only one little Irina. Irina nodded, but at this young age, on this day, here in the bright sunshine, having seen what she had just seen, it seemed perfectly reasonable to believe that the little girl who had appeared and vanished with such haste was just another side of Irina, the side that would come out if she ever threw the sorts of tantrums she felt inside of her. She looked back out at the Black Sea. Off in the distance there was a tiny boat, rocking in the waves.
That night, Irina could not sleep, and she called out to her father, who happily sat down by the side of her bed and told her a fairy tale in his gentle whisper of a voice. It was a story about a beautiful princess in an ancient, peaceful land, and the handsome, uneducated farm-boy whom the princess loved, and who coveted her hand in marriage. Her father, the King, treated her cruelly and ridiculed her love for a boy with no money. The greedy merchant who controlled commerce in the ports of the capital city wanted to marry the princess and rule the nation. “As it happens,” Irina’s father added, “this story has a complication.” In the shadows, all gray and covered with scales, lived an evil goblin who desired nothing more than to wreak havoc, to cause trouble. Why? Irina asked, and her father replied, “Because this is a fairy tale story, and in fairy tale stories, there are creatures who are just mean, who – for no reason whatsoever – want to see evil win over goodness.” This goblin sought his victory in an alliance with the merchant; he taught the greedy man black magical tricks that would change his appearance, give him charm, win the King’s admiration. When you are in power, the goblin told the merchant, I will come for my reward. But no one could fool the princess, of course, whose genuine love for the farm-boy was more powerful than all the magic in the darkest of hearts. After many misadventures, including a kidnapping, travels through mythical lands, and a frightening fall from a snowy mountain peak, the princess prevailed, due to the courage of the farm-boy and the last minute intervention of her guardian angel, who, with a wink and a wave of his wand, sent the goblin to another world, far far away.
Always, people were around to save princesses, Irina noticed, her head all swoony. What if the princess were all alone? What if there were no one to help her?
Her father smiled, and he ran his fingers through her thin black hair. “It’s a fairy tale story, honey,” he whispered. “It’s very old, and made up. In these stories, people always rescue the princess. The princess is always safe. Someone always saves her.”
Irina nodded, reassured, and she quickly fell asleep.
*
As the years passed, Daniel gradually forced himself to stop thinking about his public humiliation. His quiet moment on that chilly stage no longer seemed a sudden, irreversible break with the happy childhood he had enjoyed as a very young boy, before his parents had uprooted him by moving to a strange alien land and then again by dying at such a young age. Daniel learned to pretend that his early childhood had not been so happy, nor his later childhood so bleak. As a result, Miss Jay’s brutal miscalculation one day became nothing more than a funny story he sometimes told when he was drunk; his parents became people he had briefly known when he was very small, and whom he barely remembered.
In the end, when he reached the age of suits and commutes, Daniel was not a wounded child mourning what had been denied him. He was a success, an attorney at a firm called Johnson and Tierney who represented the interests of large and wealthy industrial polluters in environmental lawsuits. This brought him some economic comfort.
One night, sometime in the late 1980s, Daniel
stood in a brightly lit downtown art gallery, sipping slowly from a glass of champagne, in a gray suit that he’d acquired at four hundred dollars below the list price, and a snappy, bright red tie. He was carefully taking note of a painting called “Democratic Kampuchea,” an homage to the nation of Cambodia during its most desperate hour. The canvas was almost entirely black; but either by looking closely or stepping all the way to the other side of the gallery, the spectator could make out a large view of an excruciatingly anguished human face, almost entirely hidden in shadows.
Beside that painting was a smaller work, depicting a human hand and part of an arm. The hand, clenching a well-bitten pencil, rested on a desk cluttered with papers. The arm was clothed in a dark gray jacket sleeve, and the cuff was monogrammed. The entire scene conveyed a sad desperation and tension, and the title of the painting was “Daniel.”
Standing next to Daniel now was a young man dressed in expensive, stylish clothing, whose manner betrayed money to which he’d been born and a life, so far, of idleness. The young man was speaking about the painter without any acknowledgement of Daniel’s presence, without any awareness of the importance Daniel had played in the painter’s life for the last near-decade. The young man’s ignorance stung him, and he felt as though something had been irretrievably lost. It would strike him with the force of a small dagger each time the young man spoke the name of Daniel’s estranged wife: Natalie’s new work is wonderful, or: I’ve teamed a lot from Natalie, or: Natalie’s preparing now for her own show and it’s brilliant!
When Daniel and Natalie first met, they drew pictures of each other, sketches in charcoal, a few full paintings, angelic pictures, beautiful pictures of beautiful people. In Daniel’s paintings of Natalie, yellow rays of sun poured in through dozens of skylights, swirling around her head in halo formation. He gave one picture to her parents a year later, when the mawkishness of the concept had become clear even to him, and they put it in the closet until they could “find a good place for it on our wall.”
Meanwhile, Natalie’s sketches of Daniel began to lose their saintly appeal. What she’d intend as an innocent shadow falling gently across his brow would cut a knife slash through his face, the twinkle in his eyes would take on a demonic tinge, and she was never again able to draw his crooked nose to scale; it would eat up his face.
Daniel had never been the perfect artistic subject. While photographs of Daniel suggested a fit and ethnically handsome fellow, reality presented a man seemingly uncomfortable in his own skin. In person he seemed somehow just a little too dark, and, in spite of his actual height, a little over five foot ten, just a little too short. He always needed a shave, even immediately after shaving. Suits never quite fit him, either hanging loosely from his body or clinging uncomfortably. Tailor-made suits were no help. Wherever he was, he looked as though he belonged somewhere else. But when Natalie’s sketches of him became insultingly monstrous, she gave him up as a subject to spare his feelings, turning for a time to elaborate charcoal collages of modern tragedies, blood-stained victims of fascist tyranny, bodies in ditches, lynchings and executions, all pasted against pleasant floral-print wallpaper. In the waning days of their marriage, these drawings began to turn up in a small gallery downtown, receiving equal shares of horror and admiration.
To Daniel, Natalie was warmth personified: far too lovely for him, a limber, dark-haired woman he had known for many years, who had never made an enemy, who could vanquish all resistance with one doe-eyed glance. But to others, as Daniel occasionally surmised, she was beautiful and icy. You should see her around her husband, the owner of a gallery once said to an employee after a particularly mirthless visit from Natalie. It’s like a different person. All the hostility vanishes, and she literally melts into his arms. Her eyes widen, her body relaxes, her voice loses its harshness and becomes almost soothing, like sunshine ... I wonder which is the real woman. Can’t be both – they’re too different. To almost everyone, the nature of her artwork seemed no more than a natural extension of her personality. To Daniel, it all seemed inexplicable. Even now, with so many things to be angry about, the mention of her name brought back memories of spring days when possibilities were infinite, when their lives were bathed in a flood of seemingly endless affection and warmth; Daniel’s existence was filled now with an impenetrable sense of guilt for having betrayed the beautiful promise of those spring days, nearly a decade ago.
Daniel stood before the two paintings for a long time before Natalie came to greet him. She held a glass of champagne, half empty, in her left hand.
“Human misery in Cambodia and a New York lawyer,” Daniel said.
“You are making too much of the juxtaposition,” she said unconvincingly. “These were just two paintings I liked.”
“I don’t believe you,” Daniel said. He looked at the crying face in the dark shadows of the canvas. “I thought they were the good guys at first, you know. The Khmer Rouge. I thought they’d bring liberté, égalité ….”
“I know. You’ve always made the wrong choices.” Natalie said this without any evident recrimination. “I still can’t draw your face,” she added, changing the subject as she gazed with some admiration at the painting of Daniel’s hand and arm. “I don’t know why, really. But the real Daniel is there, somehow, around the edges, in the air, like a little smoke. That’s how I feel, anyway.” She smiled, just a bit. “Someday I’ll tackle the face, Daniel. In sixty years, maybe I’ll be up to it.”
“Well, I’m flattered anyway,” he said. “I’m flattered that five percent of me amounts to fifty percent of your exhibition.”
She nodded. “I’m surprised you’re here.”
“Oh. Well, you sent me an invitation, and here I am,” he said, nonchalantly. “I thought it would be a nice, friendly thing, Natalie. I wish you the best, and I just thought it would be the friendly thing to do. To come here, and let you know that I wish you the best.”
“That’s an awful thing to say to anyone you ever loved, Daniel. Are you going to be one of those ex-husbands who want to stay friends?” She still wore her cocktail party smile, though her voice had lost all trace of good humor.
“I don’t have time, really,” Daniel said, truthfully. “But it would be nice if I could call you that. A friend.”
“I wanted to stay married,” she said sadly. “It was never my idea to fall in love, get married, get separated, then have to be your friend.”
She didn’t look at him.
“I have fallen in love with someone else,” she said. “I just wanted to say goodbye. I thought I might give you a last chance to see me, and a last chance to look at my art. To get everything out of the way, you know.”
She kept staring at her paintings.
Had Natalie asked, he might have lied and told her that he was seeing someone else now, or at least he thought that’s what he would have said. Had she asked him to return to her, had she confessed that the invitation to the opening was nothing more than a pretext, he would have relented without much resistance, admitted the lie, apologized to her, again and again, and resumed their married life, making all sorts of promises that he would sincerely intend to keep. But, of course, Natalie had neither asked about his love-life nor begged him to return. Perhaps her bitterness was the only way she knew to ask. Perhaps she really had met someone else, and she really did invite him to say goodbye. He didn’t know.
When, a while later, Daniel went to the coat-check to retrieve his raincoat, he caught a glimpse of Natalie in the midst of a crowd of art patrons, smiling and nodding, beaming brightly and laughing as though Daniel had never been born. Then someone stepped in the way, and Natalie vanished from sight.
Daniel took a taxi home, changed out of his suit, walked into the living room, turned on the television and hopped onto his exercise bike; with the remote in one hand, he flipped from channel to channel among the various 11 pm news shows. The war in Cambodia dominated that evening, and one man in America was mentioned in every news report: Senator Steph
en Solomon from New York, a tall, slouched individual with dark circles under his eyes and a smile that always seemed uneasy. Perhaps no one in America had ever devoted more thought, time and energy to Cambodia than Solomon, who, when questioned, could never explain his obsession beyond vague allusions to democracy and peace, followed inevitably by finger-pointing accusations. Daniel’s bosses at the firm always voted for Senator Solomon, based on only a vague sense of the man’s politics, and Daniel always voted against him for the very same reason. Solomon could be glimpsed in the news reports on his way to Senate briefings, getting out of his car and refusing to make any comment on the latest developments in Cambodia as he pushed his way through hordes of reporters, his eyes proud and defiant. This war, it seemed, was bringing him some inner satisfaction.
A more extended feature on one of the networks detailed some new massacre in Cambodia – Daniel wasn’t really listening, but it seemed that either the Communist government was annihilating whole villages with Soviet-made machine guns, or perhaps the rebels were annihilating whole villages with U.S.-made machine guns. The report then flashed a clip of the senator speaking to reporters, movingly praising the struggle of the rebels, urging more aid, and movingly praising his own foresight in long-ago recognizing the importance of this Asian trouble spot. Daniel disagreed with the senator’s politics, but for a moment he was swept up in Senator Solomon’s passionate, inexplicable obsession. He would not shrink from a fight, the senator told the assembled reporters. The battles fought in the jungles of Asia were his own battles, and in some deep sense they moved him nearly to tears. He loved this war, this long, courageous, righteous war. He worshiped the bravery of his soldiers, who struggled on through the land-mines and the bombing raids, through the hellish heat in the swamps of Asia. Solomon only vaguely understood what it meant, who these soldiers were, the terrain over which they traveled. Solomon knew little of the nation that he had made his life’s work: he could not speak its language, had barely been beyond a little hotel room in Phnom Penh, had never been caught in either of Cambodia’s annual monsoons, had never seen the country from a boat drifting down the Mekong River. But he belonged to Cambodia; while his physical body slept, his spirit slipped silently through the country’s alluvial plains, living and thriving in the humid Cambodian night, listening to the bombs and mortar rounds somewhere in the nearby forest. Beyond all the petty posturing, the deal-making, the secret journeys to the other side of the world, the needling and persuading that occupied the better part of his time ... beyond all that, he loved this war.