by Liam Durcan
This was the place, the house, the room, where Martin understood he was destined to return, where he had come to in those moments in his life when he’d needed reinvention. He was here now, waiting, it seemed, for that moment to occur again, needing that moment to understand the direction his life would take, but all that came to him was the past.
We had become invisible to each other, he repeated to himself. Leaving only meant that we admitted this, that we were truthful. Of course, Sharon was right; she was more truthful than he, even not knowing the full details behind their breakup. There had been a woman, Marina, a designer he’d met on a trip to New York, for whom, in retrospect, he was able to discover only enough emotion to pry himself from his marriage, someone who, in the end, did not even get close enough to slap him. He allowed himself a moment of disappointment (the adult variety: muted, even tinged with relief) when things did not work out, but even with this and the guilt of having hurt Sharon and the girls, he did not question his decision to leave. It was simply what he had to do.
As if to justify his decision, his career entered a renaissance in the years that followed. Jean-Sebastien Houde joined the firm with requisite hoopla and Fallon/St. Joseph became F/S+H, a name initially disliked by Catherine, who read it mathematically and saw herself as relegated to the denominator of the equation with Jean-Sebastien. Success in competitions, a second governor-general for the provincial archive in Alberta, and then a series of projects that Jean-Sebastien called the ICMs—the important cultural monuments: the museum additions and libraries and occasional private prestige residence for whichever tastemaker had wandered into camera range of the local lifestyle magazine.
But that was it. There hadn’t been the next step. There had been a steady stream of work, but the name-making projects had not materialized, and as this dawned on him, he realized that the appellation “prominent local architect” was an epithet to his ears, a coded accusation that he had enough talent to make a living and not much more. There would never be a golden season and he would never be great. He realized that if there had been a vision, he had abandoned it, or forgotten it, among all the trappings of security.
Martin looked up at the ceiling of the bedroom and tried to remember the way he’d felt when F/S+H—his design, fought for by him against the wishes of Catherine and J-S—won the competition for the consulate, and it surprised him that it he couldn’t recall exhilaration or even vindication, but only the anxiety that came with trying to bring it off.
To be visionary demanded ambition, demanded that one abandon other visions—sometimes visions of security or popular opinion—and he obviously lacked that tenacity. He had conceded to the firm and walked away. The Australian architect Murcutt, whose career could be summed up by saying he had similar ideas to Martin’s, except executed on a smaller scale—nothing built outside his adopted country, Australia, just an array of outback cottages that would have barely filled a smallish trailer park—persisted with the material, and what he got for it was the Pritzker in 2002. From vernacular obscurity on the other side of the world to the Pritzker. All it took was perseverance. It had been the one thing that Martin lacked.
The mention of Murcutt’s name alone—so phonetically apt, as though describing an inadvertent laceration—was enough to give him pain now, and looking at the man’s work, featured everywhere in the aftermath of the Pritzker, his bunk houses and precious sheep-shearing lean-tos, any sense of vindication for the choices he’d once made as a young architect were swallowed in the recriminations he felt for not remaining true to his vision. It could have been him. He had walked away from his family to get to this point, and then just given up.
Melnikov would have persisted, he thought. Melnikov, weathering what he must have thought were the temporary gales of political will and professional envy, would have stayed true. He would have been judged harshly by a man like Melnikov, judged as someone lacking a personal vision or insufficiently principled to follow that vision.
The walls of the room around him seemed to move almost imperceptibly, the insides of an animal breathing along with him.
There were times when Sharon had been so immune to him. Unimpressed that he was an architecture student. At the point where they’d been dating for a year and had discussed moving back together to Toronto when she graduated, he announced that he’d finally been chosen by Lanctot to travel to the USSR—The USSR! Melnikov! We are going to need visas and diplomatic attachés! She responded as though he told her he was going to take the bus to Ottawa for the weekend. She been completely unimpressed that he was a draft dodger, maybe even then understanding that escape is escape for any number of reasons, some of them principled, some more plainly pragmatic, some even capricious. She wouldn’t sleep with him on that first date, and he attributed this to the fact that he knew her uncle (when he admitted this rationalization later, she snorted a laugh and shook her head, and he didn’t pursue it further). Maybe that was why he had fallen in love with her, just the notion that she was different, more discriminating.
And through it all he had believed himself to be a good man, to be the continuing presence as a father to his daughters in spite of the divorce, but he had come to realize, early on, that a distance had been established between them. Norah and Susan would dutifully spend the agreed-upon alternate weekends boarding with him, accompanying him to restaurants or museums with what seemed to be quiet contentment, but he began to realize that an invisible barrier had been erected between them, and no amount of platonic goodwill could make up for the basic fact that he’d walked away from the family. From them. This had been their first betrayal. He accepted this, reasoning that they were almost adults and their new detachment was part of the cost of a difficult decision that he’d had to make. He told himself that this was no reason for him to be upset, that if they did not want to spend time with their father, the mature response would be for him not to insist. He began to find excuses for why he couldn’t take the girls on his assigned weekends, and when there came no request, from Sharon or the girls, to make up for the lost days, he understood that a decision had been made.
Within a year, their time together had shrunk to an awkward four days around Christmas and a week at the house at North Hatley, where they seemed to meet only for meals and the wordless appreciation of a sunset, Susan imagining the type of buildings she would want to build, Norah seeking refuge from the house on the patio.
He tried to think of the lake house, how if he were to be judged, it would be by the standard of this work, but he could remember only Sharon and the children, how they’d lived in the camper the summer they set the foundation in North Hatley. How they’d all jumped into the lake the very night they finished the dock, the girls like squealing, barking seals, blue-skinned from the chill of mid-May lake water. The sound of their voices always seemed to form a refrain. A warning that he now felt had gone completely unheeded.
A mild panic, like the sound of water inside a house, arrived, and he got up from the bed and maneuvered to the desk on which the model of Melnikov’s pavilion sat. It had been a totem of reassurance, but running his fingers over the surfaces now brought only a feeling of agitation, that the shapes he encountered were not the simple artistic expression of space but had become a barrier to what he needed to know, to what was really there.
Martin closed his eyes and ran his hands along the plane of the desk that the model sat on, for the first time in a while appreciating the grain in the cherrywood, the once-familiar beveled edges. This had been his first desk, a gift from Sharon to him after they were married. After they had refurbished the F/S+H offices and duly filled them with acceptable pieces of modern furniture, the desk looked stodgy and out of place, and so it migrated to a study at home and then, finally, to a bedroom in the country. A typical cascade in the relegation of objects. The desk had been the place where he once kept important papers and plans, but here it had become depersonalized, emptied and mostly unoccupied. Hotel furniture, a surface upon which luggage w
as placed. Still, it was beautiful, Martin thought, each hand reaching out to grasp a corner of the desk, understanding its heft, its history. A hundred years old, the drawers were a marvel: precision-built and crafted to smoothly glide on nothing more, nothing less, than craftsman’s skill. Martin pulled out the center drawer to appreciate this once more. He opened his eyes and found himself staring at a neatly stacked pile of paper, the only thing in the drawer. He picked up the papers and studied the title page. His name beside Melnikov’s. Now he remembered.
THE PROBLEM OF MELNIKOV: EIGHT CHAPTERS AND ONE VISIT
Martin Fallon
ICONS
You paint Mary. Over and over again. Eyes cast down on her folded arms, on her child. Sweet mother, stern mother. You can imagine her face more clearly than your own mother’s after a week of painting.
Prokhorov’s studio has twenty boys like you, all smelling of tempera, all stumbling toward the same thing, the right expression for the face of a saint. Mary is elusive. Prokhorov spoke to you about your most recent efforts, reining in your desire to depict depth in the painting. He told you there are rules to the painting of icons that must be respected, just as there are rules in any apprenticeship.
You paint Mary.
All you can think about as you paint one more pair of flat Marian eyes is the village of Likhobor, the three-room house where you lived with your family before you were sent here. You can smell the chickens. You can hear your brothers and sisters, even in the silence of the studio.
Prokhorov speaks to you again about your work, the subtle changes in the facial features of the Virgin, more noticeable with each rendition. Is there a reason for this? You have not noticed, but Prokhorov shakes his head and tells you he has seen this before with the new apprentices. He sits down and talks with you, and this stern man becomes momentarily kind, eyes an icon painter would want to capture for Saint Vladimir.
“Kostia, I will call for your father.”
You are alarmed, worried that you have offended your master. But his face remains kindly. He tells you he knows that you wish to return home. It is nothing new with apprentices. You cannot deny he is right. Though you are twelve, you pride yourself on being an adult, and you ask him how he knew you were homesick.
He smiles. “An icon painter must learn to refrain from painting Mary in the image of his mother.”
THE PARTICULAR AND THE GENERAL
At the time, you were just an office boy working in the engineering firm Chaplin established with Zalesskii. Working is perhaps the wrong word; the economy this winter has stalled, halting construction in Moscow, and the office is accordingly quiet. Reams of unused paper abound. Your duties are scant and you are left to your own devices. For the first time, you hold a mechanical pencil—itself a miracle of design and utter beauty—and wielding it you experience a precision to drawing that you had never known, a delight no icon could match.
You draw houses and steam engines, intending to take them home and show your brother. But you forget the papers. Vassily, the Ukrainian doorman whose son you resemble, finds the drawings, labels them “Kostia,” and puts them on Chaplin’s desk. When you are summoned to Chaplin’s office, you find the engineer with the drawings held in his hands, and you assume you are to be dismissed for wasting paper.
“Did you draw these?” You nod. Chaplin is silent for some time and you imagine a judgment is being rendered. You are half right. “They’re quite good,” he says, leafing through the papers.
Your parents, as unfamiliar with Chaplin as they are with the Moscow School of Painting and Sculpture, regard this man’s offer of patronage as a somewhat less promising alternative to painting icons. But Chaplin, a self-made man, impresses your father. When you fail your Russian-language examination, Chaplin takes you into his family to benefit from a summer with his daughters’ tutor. This, and your eventual acceptance to the school in 1905, elevates Chaplin’s status in the eyes of your family to the point where if you were still painting icons, they would demand you paint him.
What did he see in the drawings, in you? Was it a talent that demanded to be fed, or were you simply a vehicle, the chance for a “small deed,” that most Russian of intentions, the expression of a progressive’s desire to better society? Are you the particular reason or the general? Was he a man simply waiting for the right time and circumstance to fulfill these impulses, all his motives finding voice in a young boy drawing pictures in his office?
The general or the particular. You hope it was the particular. It mattered to you that you were worthy of his efforts.
You remember watching the man as he reviewed plans for a heating system to be installed in a factory, how his eyes took in details and made sense of them in a way that was impossible for others. You recall his voice, that tone that you have come to identify with competence—never raised, a quality that extended to the household into which you were invited. At the end of the summer you shared with his children, you thanked the younger daughter for her kindness, and she looked at you quizzically. You could only explain that your clothes embarrassed you and you thanked her for not mocking them.
“Papa forbids it,” she said.
DEBUT: PARIS, JUNE 21ST, 1925
The flash welds your eyes shut and a second sun throbs, trailing off to deep space. The sulphur smell drifts over you next, along with the wreaths of smoke, and finally you can see again.
“Un autre, Monsieur Melnikov, s’il vous plait,” the photographer says, and you nod your assent. He lifts his tripod and camera with such tenderness, backing up, his footsteps soundless. You can see what will come next, a shot up the stairway, with you standing along the sheer wall of the pavilion. He wants scale. (Another photographer, with whom you argued, as if understanding his intent, took a picture of you from below as you stood cross-armed in front of the pavilion, making it seem as though you dwarfed the building, as though you were about to abandon the desire to build and instead head toward Paris to devour those buildings that did not bear your name.)
You turn your head to the left. All of Paris is talking about you. Hoffman has written approvingly about you in the papers. Le Corbusier has shaken your hand and pronounced you a visionary. The pavilion has been described as a revolutionary building, like nothing seen before, a model of the Constructivist aesthetic. But they don’t really know the building. They don’t know you.
The Pavilion’s admirers walk through the main hall and tell you they have never seen anything like it. But none of them has ever seen your preliminary sketches for the Lenin sarcophagus—your preferred design rejected in favor of a simplified glass case that embarrassed you for the way it made the leader look like baked goods on display. If they had agreed to your choice of sarcophagus, perhaps the Parisians would have seen this pavilion not as a revolution but as the next necessary step. They would have found the pavilion’s floor plan already set, noticed how the precisely measured angles of the glass vault that was never built for the great leader were reborn in the pavilion. You explain nothing. It is enough for you to know that you have built what they would not let you build before. If anyone had known you, perhaps they would have expected to see how you defied space and admitted light. They would have known that the Soviet Union’s official pavilion for the Paris Exposition was not revolutionary, but simply a statement that any architect wishes to make, that the sentiments that devised such design will exist, must exist outside of revolutions, and will certainly outlast them.
He motions for you to move to your right. “Monsieur, pourriez-vous soulever votre main et toucher le mur?”
“Certainment.”
Straighten your tie. There is talk that Le Corbusier has secured a commission for you, a parking garage in Paris. Rodchenko, who is miserable here and revels in his misery, has told you to be wary of him, of his flattery and promises. But you can already see the design, the flow of vehicles through the structure like corpuscles through a body. Order from chaos. Order never imposed, but always derived.
It
was standing here with Anna only a few days earlier that you asked her if she would be happy in Paris. There is work here, you wanted to say, but what you meant was there was possibility here. It was a question you were asking yourself, of course, trying to find some design of your true feelings in her response. She was taken aback at the thought of not going home. “Paris is beautiful” was all she said, and you were unsure if this was her argument for staying or something said to obscure the argument.
Between the photographer’s requests for positioning as he adjusts his aim for the shot, he is solemn. The man is dressed formally and works in silence under the black hood that tents up around the back of his apparatus. A black-sleeved arm protrudes from the hood, jutting into the air and wavering there, supporting the little platform on which sits the incendiary powder for the flash.
A ridiculous-looking animal. An emu in mourning clothes. A photographer. You grin at the thought, and the photographer emerges from the depths of this strange animal as if to chastise you. He has an aesthetic order to maintain as well. At the last second, just before the flash, you pull your hand away from the wall. You wonder about this later, once you see that particular photo that shows your hand caught in midair, mid-movement. Did you intend to move your hand? The photographer will be displeased by this image—the seeming intrusion of a blurred bird in flight—but you are captivated by the impression that the photo gives, particularly that one cannot tell if your hand is moving toward or away from the building. One more secret kept to yourself.
But at the moment, all you feel is another explosion of light. These Parisian cloudbursts. Their echoes already approaching. You steady yourself.