by Alex George
Ahead of him, two men are shuffling down the sidewalk, their heads close together. Both are wearing hats and heavy coats, despite the warmth of the day. Souren is about to step into the road to skirt around them when familiar sounds snag the edges of his consciousness.
The two men are speaking Armenian.
At once he falls back into step behind them, no longer interested in navigating past the slow-moving pair.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” says the shorter of the men, who leans heavily on a cane as he walks. “Old age is a terrible thing. My poor Sirvat! She is so lost, so sad.” He gestures at the street in front of him. “She thinks this is Diyarbakir. Every day she frets about going to visit her mother, who died thirty years ago, God rest her soul.”
“And it never lets up?” asks the other man sympathetically.
“Not even for a moment.” The first man shakes his head. “Perhaps I should be grateful. If she knew that we’re living in France, she would be heartbroken. Although she was the one who insisted that we leave, you know. She could see the way the wind was blowing before anyone else. Me, like a fool, I wanted to stay. I was sure we would be safe.” The man sighs. “Sirvat was right, as usual. And now she remembers none of it. As far as she’s concerned, we never left.”
The second man puts a consoling hand on his friend’s shoulder. “Perhaps it’s for the best,” he says.
“Ach, who knows? These days she just stays in bed, the covers pulled up over her face. The outside world terrifies her now. She won’t even look out of the window. She last left our apartment six months ago. We went for a little walk. She spent the whole time looking over her shoulder and asking why she couldn’t understand a word anyone said.” The man pauses. “She saved my life by getting us out of Anatolia before it was too late. Truly, she did. But now when she needs me to save hers, there’s nothing I can do. My heart breaks for her every day.”
Souren is now so close behind the two men that he can hear the soft fall of their shoes on the sidewalk. His heart balloons, despite the sadness of the man’s words. This stranger’s mournful elegy for his wife is the sweetest sound he can imagine. He has not heard another person speak his language since he arrived in France a decade ago. All at once he is drowning in a sea of old memories. He is sitting at the family dinner table, passing food, laughing with his father, fighting with his brother. He is streaking through the streets with Yervant, staring at the pretty girls, too scared to do anything but yell at them and run away as fast as he can. He is—
“Watch out!”
The man with the cane has stopped and is looking at Souren, furiously rubbing the back of his leg. “What’s wrong with you?” he demands in French. “You hit me with your suitcase.”
Souren blinks at him. He wants to talk to them in the language they share, but the man’s anger catches the words in his throat. “Excuse me,” he mutters, also in French.
“There’s no need to walk so close to us,” says the second man.
Oh, but there is, Souren wants to tell him.
The man with the walking stick stares at him for a moment longer, and then turns back to his companion. “Clumsy idiot,” he mutters in Armenian.
The two men start walking again, each delivering one last, suspicious glare at Souren as they move away. He picks up his suitcases, not ready to let the men go just yet. This time he follows at a more discreet distance.
“You’d think the French would have worked out by now how not to step on each other as they walk down the street,” complains the second man. “There’s plenty of damn room.”
“Such an arrogant bunch,” says the man with the cane. “Their noses always stuck up in the air!”
The second man points over his shoulder toward Souren without looking back. “And half of them are imbeciles.”
“This place. I won’t be sorry to say good-bye.”
“You’re really going to leave?”
A nod. “Once Sirvat is gone I’ll have no reason to stay.”
“You don’t think you’re a little old to start a new life somewhere else?”
“Oh, probably so. But that apartment will have too many memories for me.”
“So move to another apartment! You don’t have to cross an ocean!”
The man with the cane wheezes in amusement. “The trouble with you, Grigor, is that you have no sense of adventure.”
“And Sirvat suspects nothing? She hasn’t asked why you have started bringing home all these books in English?”
“My sweet wife barely knows who I am anymore. She doesn’t care what I’m reading.”
“How is your English these days?”
“Getting better. The novels help, of course. But it’s one thing to be able to read a language. Quite another to be able to go into a store and ask for a loaf of bread.”
“Perhaps you won’t need it much. There are plenty of Armenians in New York.”
“Five of my cousins, for a start,” agrees the first man. “I last saw them at the train station in Diyarbakir. We planned to leave together, but there wasn’t enough room for all of us on one train—so they left first, and Sirvat and I waited for the next one. That was all it took to blow our family apart. Now there’s an ocean between us.” He pauses. “They live in a place called Queens. Queens! What do you think about that?”
“America,” says his friend in wonder.
“You should come with me, Grigor. Keep me company on the boat.”
The second man holds up his hand. “I’ll stay here, thank you.”
“Our countrymen are scattered across the globe now. You could go anywhere in the world and feel at home.”
“Ah, my friend, now you’re telling fairy tales.” The man called Grigor shakes his head.
The pair walks in silence for several minutes. Souren continues to follow them. Consumed by the echoes of his youth, he has lost his bearings. Halfway down a street the men’s pace slows.
“Here we are,” says the man with the cane.
“What are you going to buy today?”
A shrug. “Something funny would be nice. There’s a writer I like called Wodehouse. He writes about the English aristocracy. They’re buffoons, every last one of them. It’s a miracle the British Empire still exists.” With that he pushes open the door to a shop and the two men disappear inside.
Souren puts down his suitcases. The language of his childhood has filled his ears and his heart, and now loneliness and regret threaten to overwhelm him. Ten years he’s been waiting to speak Armenian with another person, and when the moment finally came, all he could do was to stammer two words in French. Of course, the two men had dismissed him as another clumsy Parisian, unworthy of their interest. He wants to follow them inside and make them understand their mistake. Souren looks at the building that the men entered moments earlier. He is standing in front of a large window, filled with books. No two titles on display are the same, and they are all in a language he does not understand.
That is when he sees the painting nestling in the lower right corner of the window.
* * *
The painting is of a small house, in the middle of a wood. On either side of the house erupts an army of trees, streaking upward into swirling knots of darkness, black stars of mordant energy. Ranks of lichen-wrapped trunks surge toward each other, a sinister labyrinth of shadows. There is no sky: the dark forest marauds across the canvas, annexing every square inch. There is a strip of lawn in front of the house. On the grass stands a solitary wooden chair. An owl is perched on the back of the chair. Its feathers are silver and purple. It is gazing off into the distance. A path leads to the house, but there is no door there, just a wall. The walls of the house are painted white. All the light gathers here, a radiant defiance against the encroaching shadows. But Souren cannot see what lies within the little cottage in the forest, because it has no windows. No windows, no door … but no, there is a door. It is a rich, deep blue, and it sits in the very center of the building’s façade, suspende
d halfway between the ground and the roof. The door is the only way into the house.
Souren stares at the blue door. Is is beautiful and unreachable.
He can barely breathe.
This painting, Souren knows with absolute certainty, was created with him in mind. The artist has looked into Souren’s soul and has painted what he saw there.
He cannot take his eyes off the canvas in the window. He steps forward until his nose is almost touching the glass. He is crucified with a yearning to be close to the artwork, to disappear into the artist’s two-dimensional universe. Souren stares at the ridges left by each brushstroke. There are raised knots of color, straining to escape the canvas. Not quite two dimensions, then: the painting is a roiling landscape of tiny hillocks and fortifications, a choppy sea. It’s marvelously, undeniably alive.
Souren feels as if someone has reached inside him and neatly filleted his heart into slices. Tears fill his eyes. A stranger has painted him from the inside out, and the truth is there for every passerby to see.
He knows what lies inside the little house. He knows what is on the other side of the blue door.
It is everything he has ever wanted. And it is forever out of reach.
The door opens and the two Armenians step back out onto the street. The man with the cane now holds a small brown paper bag. Seeing Souren, he stops abruptly and turns to his friend. “That’s the fool who bumped into us earlier,” he says in a low voice.
His companion nods. “He’s been waiting for us.”
“Have you ever seen him before?” asks the first man. He sounds worried.
“I don’t think so.” The two men turn away from Souren, their heads close together. “What could he want from us?”
“Don’t worry,” whispers the man with the cane. “We’re safe enough. It’s broad daylight. We’re in the middle of the street. There’s not much he can do to us here.”
“And if he follows us home? We can’t very well outrun him. He’s young, and he looks as strong as an ox.”
“What do you think is in those suitcases, Grigor?”
The two old men look at each other in silent apprehension. All these years after they were driven out of their homeland, the men are still terrified. Souren picks up his suitcases and walks over to the two men.
“Puppets,” he tells them. Tiknikner.
The men are too surprised to respond.
“My suitcases are full of hand puppets,” explains Souren gently, in Armenian. “They’re perfectly harmless, I can assure you. You have nothing to fear.”
He feels the astonished stares of his countrymen on him as he sets off down the street. He does not look back.
* * *
Souren enters the Jardin du Luxembourg at the northeast gate. He carries his suitcases to his usual spot beneath the regimented ranks of well-pruned chestnut trees, where he and his audience will be protected from the summer sun. He opens the larger of the two suitcases and begins to screw together the poles that make the skeleton of the puppet theater. As he works, his mind drifts back to the painting that he saw in the window of the bookshop. He wonders about the man who painted it. What has happened to him, that he can move strangers so profoundly with his art? Souren looks up at the passersby as they stroll up and down the pathways. He is dazzled by the idea that there is someone walking the streets of this city who understands him so precisely. The thought gives him comfort: he is not alone. Then he wonders if he’s the only person so arrested by the little white house and all of the unreachable promise hiding within its walls. Perhaps there is a whole tribe of people like him in Paris! Suddenly he is consumed by an urgent, visceral need to lay eyes on the painting again. He resolves to return to the bookshop after his performance.
Once the poles of the tent have been erected, he stops to eat the first of the apples that he purchased from Younis that morning. His lunch finished, he pulls the sheath of striped fabric over the frame. It is a good, tight fit. There is a window in the front of the tent around which Souren attaches a wooden proscenium arch. Twelve inches behind the stage hangs a sheet, the backdrop that hides him from the audience while he performs. Beneath the stage is a shelf. Before each play Souren arranges the puppets he needs there, where they wait until he is ready for them.
Souren walks across the gravel path to a hut that stands near the gate by Rue de Vaugirard. Around the back of the building there is a metal bucket hidden behind a small bush, exactly where he left it. Souren fills the bucket with water from a spigot and carries it back to the puppet theater.
He is ready to begin.
26
A Fleeting Vision
GUILLAUME CLOSES THE DOOR of the gallery and sets off down Boulevard Raspail. He walks quickly, trying to outpace his despair. Emile Brataille has refused to lend him the money he needs, and so that is the end of that.
He crosses Rue d’Assas and steps through the gate of the Jardin du Luxembourg. He makes his way along the gravel path toward the center of the park. He would love to sit for a moment and watch the children play, but every bench is occupied on this beautiful afternoon. There are couples, holding hands and gazing into each other’s eyes. There are solitary readers, immersed in their books. There are mothers, watching their children skitter carelessly between the trees.
As he walks, Guillaume considers his hastily improvised act of revenge. He does not feel particular satisfaction at the prospect of Brataille unwittingly provoking the ire of the violently inclined pimps who work at Le Chat Blanc. Justice will be delivered. Whatever happens will be no more than the art dealer deserves.
The sun is warm on Guillaume’s back. He feels thirsty, and remembers a small bar on Boulevard Saint-Michel that he likes. It will be as good a place as any for a final, valedictory drink. He exits through the gates on the east side of the park, the grand dome of the Panthéon ahead of him, and turns toward the river.
The bar is quiet at this time of day. Two old men are playing cards at a table in the corner. A waiter stands behind the zinc, reading a newspaper. Guillaume sits down at a table near the front of the room, with a view of the street. The waiter carefully folds his newspaper and glides over to him, an inquisitive eyebrow raised. Guillaume orders a glass of pastis and settles moodily back in his chair to watch the passersby. He downs his drink and orders another one, considering his ever-dwindling options. The only sensible thing to do is to leave the city before Le Miroir and his thugs find him. He should go directly to Gare Montparnasse and wait for the next train to La Rochelle. He thinks about his beloved apartment, and the empty wall where Suzanne’s painting used to be. At least it will be easier to leave Paris without it there.
Suddenly he is flattened by a riptide of bittersweet regret. Gertrude Stein bought his painting! Perhaps Brataille was right, he thinks ruefully. Perhaps everything was about to change for him. Even now the little cottage in the woods might be up on her wall in the apartment on Rue de Fleurus, next to all those Cézannes and Matisses. He sips his drink. He imagines Pablo Picasso admiring the painting, insisting that his hostess reveal the name of the artist. He can almost hear the knock on the studio door—and there is the famous Spaniard, marching into the room, grabbing the younger man’s hand and pumping it enthusiastically, proclaiming his genius. Guillaume will tell Picasso about looking for him at the Cirque Medrano all those years before. He’ll explain about the acrobats, about Suzanne. Picasso will be enchanted by this story. They will become firm friends. Under the Spaniard’s mentorship, Guillaume’s rise will be stratospheric, legendary. He will move to Montparnasse. Emile Brataille will beg to sell his paintings in his gallery, and he will refuse. Collectors will fight over his work. He will be rich beyond his dreams—and finally he will knock on Suzanne’s door.
Except none of this will happen, not now. As soon as he finishes his drink he’s going to the train station and will leave Paris for good.
That is when he remembers that Gertrude Stein’s six hundred francs is still in the studio, hidden beneath his
mattress.
One of the old men at the back of the room says something in a low voice, which provokes wheezy cackles of laughter from his friend.
Just then Suzanne walks past the window.
She is holding her daughter’s hand. The young girl is skipping, laughing and talking nonstop, just as she always does. Guillaume stares at the pair of them, thunderstruck. They should not be here. They are on the wrong side of the city. For a moment Guillaume wonders if they’re ghosts, hallucinations summoned by his regret—but no, he’s not imagining them. This is no creation of wistful longing on his part. He has watched them from a distance for so many years that he would recognize them both at a hundred paces. He looks through the window at their retreating backs, paralyzed. They’re walking in the direction of the Jardin du Luxembourg.
Guillaume is not a religious man, but he recognizes a sign when he sees one. There’s a reason Suzanne has materialized in front of him, here, on today of all days: he has to say good-bye.
He picks up his glass and finishes his drink in one long swallow. With fumbling fingers he throws some coins onto the table and gets to his feet. He pushes open the door of the bar and turns quickly to follow Suzanne and her daughter down Boulevard Saint-Michel. He walks a few steps and then stops, scanning the street in front of him. He can no longer see them. He starts to move through the crowd. People are dawdling along the sidewalk. Guillaume dodges and weaves between them as fast as he can. He is looking for Suzanne’s hair glowing in the sunlight, but he does not see her. He pushes on until he reaches the corner of Rue Soufflot. There he stops, hands on hips, breathing hard.
They have disappeared.
Lost in a sea of ambling pedestrians, Guillaume’s last soupçon of hope is brutally rubbed away. This feels like the cruelest twist of all, a final reminder of everything that he has lost and is about to lose. If only he had been faster on his feet! He closes his eyes and sees Suzanne’s painting, but to his horror it has begun to change: the forest is inching forward. The knotted tree limbs stretch and unfurl, slowly wrapping the little house in their sinister embrace. Their black tendrils swarm across the whitewashed walls. The blue door in the middle of the wall is disappearing. Soon the house will be swallowed by the dark and hungry woods, its light forever extinguished.