In the Full Light of the Sun

by Clare Clark

  Luisa glanced at Mrs Noah without interest and slipped her into her handbag. Then she frowned. ‘You’re serious about this? It’s not some kind of trick?’

  ‘It’s not a trick.’

  ‘Only you should know that I’ve made certain arrangements. Should you consider changing your mind.’

  ‘I’m not going to change my mind.’

  ‘So you say.’ She tucked her handbag into the crook of her elbow. ‘Still, I think I’ll wait to tell Mazur he won’t be wanted, just until everything’s final.’

  ‘Mazur?’

  ‘Come on, Ju, you can’t have forgotten Tarmo Mazur. Tall, Estonian, beautiful eyes. You met him the night of that party, remember, with Harald Baeck? From what I understand you got a pretty good look at him.’

  Tarmo Mazur. The other man in Luisa’s bed. The one Julius refused to remember.

  ‘That was why I wanted to see you,’ Luisa said. ‘To tell you about Mazur’s decision. Not that it matters now, of course.’

  ‘What decision?’

  ‘He agreed to testify.’

  It took a moment for the words to sink in. Julius shook his head. ‘That’s—that’s impossible. The man would have to admit in court that he’s a homosexual. Sodomy’s a criminal offence, Luisa. He’d get five years. Baeck too.’

  ‘If anything was proven. Which it might not be, given that by then the sole witness would have been exposed as a blackmailing perjurer. She shrugged blandly. ‘Mazur seemed to think it was worth the risk.’

  ‘Worth it for what? What the hell is there in this for him?’ He stared at her. ‘You wouldn’t.’

  ‘It’s a painting, Julius, and a creepy one at that. What else is it good for?’

  The boat idled in the shallows, its sails slack. The boy watched it. Then, tugging off his shoes, he waded into the water and gave it a push.

  ‘It doesn’t matter now anyway,’ she said. ‘Not any more. I just thought you should know. I wouldn’t want you to have second thoughts.’

  The anger was ashy in Julius’s mouth, its fire burned out. He told Luisa he would have Böhm send the paperwork to her lawyer, and watched as she walked away across the park. He would do as he promised, he would drop the petition and accept the part of the guilty husband, but there was no distinction in it. It was not self-sacrifice but justice. He might be able to fool Konstantin for a while, he was too young to know better, but he would not fool Matthias. He would not fool himself. For all his peacock display of honour he was just the same as her. The boy’s boat drifted in the middle of the lake, marooned and out of reach.

  XV

  Neurasthenia, the doctor called it. Nervous exhaustion as a result of overwork. He prescribed rest and, when Julius was sufficiently recovered, a cure, a month at least in Baden-Baden or the Swiss Alps. At Julius’s age, he said sternly, a man could no longer take his strength for granted.

  Julius took the sleeping draughts he offered. The sleep was dense, a viscous blackness that sucked him down. A sleep that clung to him even during the short periods of wakefulness, clogging his head, his thoughts so mired in its gluey tar that he did not have the strength to reach them. Night and day blurred. When he woke to find Matthias standing by his bed he closed his eyes again, too woozy even to wonder at the dream that put him there.

  ‘The doctor said no visitors. But I suppose if you don’t stay long—’

  ‘I won’t. I promise.’

  It took all the strength Julius had to open his eyes.

  ‘Hello,’ Matthias said softly. ‘Thank you, Frau Lang, you’ve been very kind.’

  ‘I’ll be just outside the door. If he needs anything.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  The door clicked shut. The faint breeze was sweet with lilacs.

  ‘Julius, listen to me.’ Matthias spoke urgently. Something was wrong. A sting of alarm pierced the fog in Julius’s head. He tried to nod. ‘Oh God, Julius, is this my fault? I’m so sorry, so sorry. I never should have believed her.’

  Julius touched his tongue to his lips. His eyelids were made of lead. He raised them with an effort. ‘Emmeline?’ he managed.

  ‘It was the drawing,’ Matthias said, clasping his arm. ‘She sent it back, she said she couldn’t keep it. It turned out she—it was none of it true. I should have known, I should have trusted you, and instead . . .’ He looked down at Julius, his grey unshaven face on the creased white pillow. ‘I’m so very sorry. You needed me and I failed you. Forgive me.’

  Shakily Julius put his hand on Matthias’s. ‘Of course. Always.’

  Matthias put his free hand on top of Julius’s, squeezing it. There were tears in his eyes. ‘Do you believe in miracles? Only I think I do now. While I was away—no, I’m going to do this all wrong if I try and explain. Words, they—they say the wrong things by mistake and in the wrong order. But pictures . . .’

  Julius had never seen Matthias so agitated. He watched groggily as the young man hoisted a battered suitcase on to the bed and fumbled with the clasps. Inside was a moth-eaten picnic blanket. Matthias lifted it out, unfolding it to reveal a package wrapped in brown paper.

  ‘Here, let me help you sit up,’ he said. His nervousness was contagious. Julius propped himself up on his elbows, letting Matthias arrange the pillows behind his back. When he was propped up Matthias handed Julius his spectacles, then set the package in his lap. A painting, framed from the feel of it, perhaps twenty inches by ten.

  ‘I should have waited, I know, you’re not well, Frau Lang tried to stop me, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t bear it, for you or for me. Ever since I saw it, ever since I started hoping, all I’ve thought of is you. Of bringing it to you. Sharing it with you.’

  ‘What is it?’ The words were clumsy in his mouth.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Matthias shook his head. ‘Not for certain. Perhaps it’s nothing. It could be nothing. I’ve made so many mistakes before. But I want you to know that if it isn’t nothing, if it is what I think it is, it’s because of you. It found its way to me because of you. If it is what I think it is we—you and I—oh God, Julius, just open it.’

  He pushed the package towards Julius, who fumbled with the string. Matthias tugged at it, pulling it free. Under the brown paper there was a layer of yellowed newspaper. Like a children’s game, Julius thought. He could not think of the name. The newspaper was in Russian, the Cyrillic script at once exotic and familiar. Since Lenin’s death, a second wave of artworks had found their way out of Russia to Berlin, many of them masterpieces unseen in Europe for decades. Julius’s heart jumped in his chest. Struggling to sit up straighter, he tore at the paper. Another layer, an old length of white fabric that might once have been a sheet. He could hear Matthias breathing, the rapid rasp of it. He unfolded the sheet.

  White noise. A sudden joltingly accelerated heart rate. The medicine did that to him sometimes. He inhaled slowly, deliberately, and tried to listen to himself but his head was thick and, instead of a clear note, he heard only a discordant cacophony, as though his mind was playing a dozen different pieces all at once. Closing his eyes he felt the churn in his stomach, a fermented bubble of excitement. Or was it apprehension? He could feel the throb of his pulse in his temples, at the base of his throat. The bed seemed to tilt.

  Catching his breath, he opened his eyes and made himself look again at the painting. A still life of almost monastic simplicity. A shallow wooden bowl of bread rolls on a bare table, in composition not unlike the study of potatoes Julius had seen in The Hague before the war, and painted like the potatoes in muddy Flemish browns.

  ‘I see paintings in the dirtiest corners,’ he had written to Theo from the Borinage. ‘And the force that drives me towards them is irresistible.’

  Matthias’s hand found Julius’s shoulder, his fingers digging into the flesh, then abruptly let go. He kept his face resolutely blank, but Julius could sense the pull of his longing like the draw of a magnet, north to south. He had come back. He knew Julius was innocent and he had come back. They could beg
in again. He glanced up at Matthias, who gazed back at him silently, his eyes burning, his fists clenched so tightly together that the knuckles shone white, and the love that pierced him was pure and fierce.

  He looked back at the painting. He felt clearer suddenly, the queasiness dissipating like an early-morning mist. Yes, one of his, surely one of his. The brushwork crude in places, of course. No meat, no wine, no brilliant colour or play of light. No lightness at all but that would not come till Paris and the transformative influence of the Impressionists. A brusque, unkempt, inelegant painting, its dirty palette unleavened by the copper-and-gold luminosity of later works.

  ‘It’s been in Moscow,’ Matthias murmured. ‘No one has seen it for thirty years.’

  His voice was unsteady, hoarse with hope. Julius let his eyes run over the dimples and ridges of the paint. Medication and exhaustion had dulled his instincts. It was his, of course it was. He was there in every brushstroke as he always was, all of his roughness and his rage, and all of his raw faith too. The painting might lack finesse, back then he still had much to learn, but it was a truthful painting all the same, as blunt and plain as the coarse bread it portrayed. A painting that was both a howl against the bitter hardship of the men who worked the earth and a love song to their dignity and courage, their forbearance and humanity.

  Leaning closer, Julius saw that on the right side the rim of the wooden bowl was awkwardly executed, the shadow overworked. The flaw touched him deeply. Vincent had sent his work to Theo with instructions to destroy anything he considered a failure. But, though the canvases crowded his apartment, piled on top of wardrobes and under tables and beds until there was barely an inch of space left, Theo had destroyed nothing. He had understood what Julius had always understood, that the heaviness, the clumsy doggedness of some of his early work was as much a part of the man as the frenzies of lyricism that possessed him in Arles. That the true nature of his brother’s genius lay not in the paintings themselves, which sometimes failed, but in his vision, that, whatever he painted, successful or otherwise, van Gogh only ever painted himself, the stroke-by-stroke portrait of his trial-and-error soul.

  Julius took a long slow breath in, holding the certainty tight inside him, letting it harden. And, as his heartbeat steadied, he felt it, the faint familiar warmth along the underside of his ribs. A flawed painting, certainly, marred by haste and inexperience, but by God it was gloriously, violently alive.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘My God, yes.’

  Matthias gasped, sagging against the bed as though the news had knocked all the strength from him. ‘You’re sure,’ he said, his voice choked. ‘It isn’t signed.’

  ‘Most of the Nuenen work wasn’t.’

  ‘But he has been copied, hasn’t he? His friends in Paris, other artists—I’ve heard some of the copies are good.’

  ‘That may be so. But this is not a copy.’

  ‘You’re sure.’

  ‘I’m absolutely sure,’ Julius said and the joy of it broke something open inside him, flooding him with peace.

  Matthias put his hands over his face. Then, reaching out, he took Julius’s hand. They stood like that for a long time, or perhaps it was only a few moments. Julius felt the throb of his pulse beneath his fingernails. Then Matthias pulled away.

  ‘There are more,’ he said. ‘Lots more,’ and his laugh was high and wild.

  ‘My God.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In Moscow?’

  ‘In Switzerland.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Six, seven? Possibly more. I don’t even know.’

  ‘But where do they come from? Who owns them?’

  ‘Everything? It’s a long story.’

  The sun was setting, a blaze of coral pink above the trees. Matthias switched on the bedside lamp. In the soft light the painting had a glorious simplicity, the gold frame casting its warmth over the humble table just as Vincent had known it would. Julius smiled and it was as though they stood together, breathless, at the crest of a hill, the future unrolling like a landscape towards the blue of the horizon.

  ‘Go on,’ he said.

  Emmeline

  Berlin 1927

  1

  Perhaps it was the airlessness, the cram of people and cigarette smoke. Perhaps it was the cognac or the vodka or the flashing coloured lights or the fact that Irina’s mouth tasted faintly but distinctly of pickled herring. Whatever it was, the nausea burst inside her like a firework, hot streaks of ice shooting through her so that she barely had time to twist her face away before the vomit was in her throat, her mouth. Her body juddered violently as she clutched the edge of the banquette, letting the sour gush of it splatter into the ice bucket in its silver stand. For a moment Irina’s hand hesitated between her thighs, the tips of her fingers brushing the skin at the top of her stocking. Then, with a sharp turn of her wrist like pulling a tooth, she extracted it.

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ Irina snapped. Her German was idiosyncratic, a mishmash of idiom and slang, but she always swore in Russian. German curses were like the German people, she said, stolid and lacking in flair. In Russian the words threw anger to the ground and stamped on its face. Irina was not afraid of anger. Her rages had a grandeur to them, a pure and magnificent violence like an avalanche or a tidal wave. Unlike Emmeline, Irina never wondered what to feel.

  Slumping against the banquette Emmeline wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and closed her eyes. Her legs were trembling. One of the straps of her dress had slipped from her shoulder but she did not pull it up. She sat very still, floating on an emptiness that was almost euphoric. The trumpets and the saxophones and the low thump-thump of the double bass washed in and out and over her, their syncopated rhythms distilled to a low roar, like the sound of the sea. She could feel the sticky prickle of the banquette through her stockings, against her bare shoulders. I’m in a train, she thought, leaning her head against the upholstery, a train that will take me far away, and she could almost hear the shriek of it, the rattle of the wheels.

  Irina had not wanted to come. She liked the working-class dives in the north of the city where the tomboyish girls turned up in their Sunday best, all stiff collars and ties, and someone banged out tunes on an upright piano. Emmeline thought she was mad. Those places were full of salesgirls and typists, tired dumpy-looking girls with darned stockings who worried about politics and wrote down every pfennig they spent in little notebooks. What was sexy about that? At Zanzibar, the windows were blacked out and the sign on the door read CLOSED FOR PRIVATE PARTY, and downstairs girls in dinner jackets and see-through dresses kissed luxuriously as Lola the six-foot proprietress sang husky French love songs and drank brandy from a champagne saucer. Lola was actually a Polish refugee called Ludmilla who had fled her village when the communists tried to burn it down, but she never talked about that. At Zanzibar no one was the person they were by daylight.

  Emmeline could feel the nausea rising in her again. Swallowing carefully, she opened her eyes. Irina leaned against the edge of the table. She had taken off her dinner jacket. Her pale silk camisole emphasised the narrowness of her back, the sharp jut of her shoulder blades. She drew on her cigarette and tipped her head back, a ribbon of smoke unspooling from her lips. Emmeline knew that other women were looking. There was something about Irina, not just her beauty but her careless defiance, as though it had nothing to do with her. Men always stared at her mouth, her full red mouth with its exaggerated bow, like a fruit about to burst, they panted at the promise of it, their tongues out like dogs, but then men were pitifully simple machines, only three moving parts according to her friend Anton, and he had devoted his whole life to the subject. A man would never notice the whorl of a girl’s ears, the heart-breaking arch of her eyebrows. Irina was maddening, impossible, but she had the sexiest eyebrows Emmeline had ever seen.

  She was going to be sick again. Pins of sweat pushed up through the powder on her forehead, her upper lip. She tried to breathe lightly, sipping the thick, used-up
air, but she could still taste it at the back of her throat, the stale clog of cigarette smoke and face powder and perspiration and the greasy dust of the banquette. Fighting the urge to gag she sloshed a shot of vodka into the glass in front of her, knocking it back in one swallow. Zhizinnia voda, Irina called it, the water of life. The straw-scented hit of it like hot wires through her chest, behind her eyeballs. The holy drink, that was the other name for it. Courage before battle and afterwards an anaesthetic, a disinfectant, a healer of wounds. As the shock of it cooled, she poured another and gulped it down. In Russia in the Middle Ages, Irina said, vodka was used to make gunpowder. Emmeline could taste the cordite on her tongue.

  With the third shot the swirl in her stomach gave way to a steady warmth. She felt a little better and then, abruptly, exultant. Suddenly all she wanted to do was dance, to slide herself in among the bodies on the tiny dance floor and move with them, against them, their bare flesh kissing hers. She slid to the edge of the banquette, her dress riding up further around her thighs, showing the tops of her stockings. A group of men and women in evening dress were sitting at a table across the dance floor. One of the men was watching her. There were always men like him in places like this, tourists there for the show. His companion said something to him and he nodded and sipped his drink, but he did not look away. His eyes were dark and greedy over the rim of his glass.

  Emmeline knew he was watching as she slid out from the banquette. She twined her arms around Irina’s neck, pressing herself hard against her, her hands caressing her waist, the curve of her buttocks. The thought of the man’s excitement excited her.

  ‘Dance with me,’ she murmured, her mouth against Irina’s ear, but Irina only frowned and pushed her away.

  ‘You’re drunk.’

  ‘Of course I’m drunk. I’m having fun. You should try it.’ She kissed Irina hard on the mouth, then threw her head back and began to sway. In the crush a red-haired girl was dancing. Her sequinned dress was cut away at the back almost to her buttocks and when, languidly, Emmeline ran her fingers down the crest of her spine, she turned, laughing, and slid her arms around Emmeline’s neck. They kissed, their tongues coiling, before the girl pulled away. She was still laughing. Emmeline laughed too and turned back to Irina, the music moving through her body like a wave.