The Painting Read online

  The Painting

  F. K. Wallace

  Copyright 2010 F Wallace

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  Chapter 1

  We met in one of Berlin’s anonymous bars.

  I had moved to the city some months earlier, in search of a life I had only encountered in rumours. I had no trade; I thought I might become a writer, and so inevitably I was struggling to survive both emotionally and financially. I haunted those places until my presence became a joke. They called me the little Polish ghost, and indeed I lingered in dark corners, my eyes drinking in what I saw in an attempt to satisfy the thirst of my body.

  The names stayed unknown to me, the faces did not. I learned much during those silent, hungry days; watched to see who could be trusted, who left each night on the arm of a new lover and returned the next day with another, and who could turn in a second from wealthy Berliner to vicious street thug. I saw the ebb and flow of the dark sea that lapped the foundations of the city, whom it drowned, bore up or simply swept away.

  I was looking for a life that no longer existed. Outside, Europe was shifting; borders drifting smokelike, people drawn first one way, then another. Within Germany thousands searched for work, while others begged in the streets, died quietly from malnutrition or simply killed themselves. The end of the Weimar Republic had closed the doors on tolerance, real or imagined, and the bars I visited had a furtive, shuttered air, always in fearful anticipation of a raid by the SS. Fear was the overwhelming emotion, only held at bay by the belief that somehow this could be survived. But after the Night of the Long Knives ended, and we emerged shaking onto the street that July morning to hear the news from the still more terrified survivors, I decided to return to Silesia. Berlin had fulfilled none of its promises and life on a farm was infinitely more attractive than no life at all.

  I found a nondescript café and sat in the shadows at the back, ersatz coffee growing cold as I considered what I should do.

  Suddenly he was in the chair across the table from me, calling for a drink, his eyes liquid with anticipation. ‘You’ve been watching me.’

  ‘I haven’t!’

  Stung by nervousness into foolish schoolboy denial, I clamped down on any further speech and stared at him, a rabbit caught in the torchlight glow of his personality.

  He grasped my wrist. ‘Can I draw you?’

  My store of words, so easily transferred to paper, folded away and vanished when required for speech. I gaped at him.

  ‘I’m an artist.’

  He leaned forward, his grip tightening, intense in expression and movement. I do not know how he saw my acquiescence, but even as I made the decision he released me and reached instead for his drink.

  Within minutes we were on our way to the Kurfurstendamm, where he occupied a wide attic room that ran the length of three houses. Short walls ended above in the slope of the roof, hung with as many paintings as would fill the available space, and more canvases were stacked upright at the far end. To one side was an old, paint-splashed kitchen table, big enough for a family of a dozen, covered in paper and the other tools of his profession, with unused canvases leaning against one scratched leg. Generous skylights were open to both the sun and the sounds of the city, but the latter became at this distance remote, meaningless.

  A scuffed wooden chair stood in the middle of the floor. Without hesitation I walked towards it, shedding my clothes. It seemed natural that I should be naked; there was no suggestion, no coercion. The smooth wood was cool and the chair creaked as I sat sideways, one foot tucked onto the seat beneath me, my chin on my knee. He did not take his eyes from my face as he reached for pen and paper and began to draw.

  The only sound I remember in the room for the remainder of that morning was the scratch and rustle of his movements. I saw him change his mind many times, begin again, pick up and discard charcoal, ink, pencil and sheet after sheet of paper. He worked with an intensity I recognised, for I found it in myself when I sat at my desk each day, losing myself in the rich contentment of words.

  He would move me, indicate in silence what he needed, and I would obey his gesture until he held up a hand, fingers stretched, eyes seeing me and beyond me as he began to draw again. He moved me from the chair to a table, from the table to the floor, made me curl until my spine ached and I had to stretch cramped muscles. Giving me a cushion for my head he waited until I shifted once more, lying half on my side, staring up at him.

  The bare boards were cold; I shivered. For a few seconds he was still, then, dropping his pad and pencil he swept a blanket from the bed and wrapped me as I stood. He was about to speak; I stopped him. Words, for once, were not what I wanted.

  The desire of that first afternoon could have been born of my many months alone, the slow seduction of his eyes on me, or simply that we had found each other. I realised later as I lay in his sleeping arms that I had discovered something new, and worried that he might not have experienced it in the same way.

  The bed we shared was a large mattress on the floor, blankets and cushions strewn over its rumpled surface. Now I had leisure to look about me I could appreciate the touches of faded opulence that contrasted with the workmanlike aspects of the room. Four oriental rugs lay end to end, worn threadbare in patches, in others their colours glowing where the sun slanted down across the rich pile. In one corner heavy velvet curtains flowed and cascaded in indigo folds onto the floor. Even the bed was draped in a multiplicity of fabrics; with a sweep of one hand I could touch smooth silk, a fine white linen bordered in ivory lace, an ancient patchwork coverlet in shades of green and blue, and heavy, rough wool blankets. Apart from the table the few remaining pieces of furniture were mahogany, worn but cared for, surfaces and handles gleaming in the gentle light.

  Lying on my back, his arms around me, I looked up at the skylight above and watched clouds drift slowly past, shape-shifting into new and wonderful forms. Somehow I had gone in a matter of hours from one extreme to another; I had found my place in the city and I no longer wanted to leave.

  Gunter was fourteen years my elder, educated, intellectual, bourgeois. I ached for his knowledge, his experience, entangled in the same confusion with which I ached for his body. He spoke French and English, read Latin; history breathed for him in a way it rarely could for me, educated in the rigid, repetitive tradition of the Polish village school. Improving my rough command of German, gleaned from my mother and a single textbook, was a task he set himself with great good humour that summer of 1934.

  I was in awe of him. Dark hair, dark eyes, dark moods; at times I would back away from the force of his existence. I came from a sunnier world, and his name for me—farm boy—reflected my simpler past. We made an odd pair, blond and dark, tanned and pale, blue eyes and brown, country and city, poor and rich. That last, I think, bothered me for a long time.

  His family was wealthy, his parents, defying a tradition that I knew instinctively to be aristocratic, had wed for love, thus consigning their son to a search for the same fulfilment. His father died in 1917, his mother two years later. I once asked him how she died.

  ‘Of grief,’ he answered, before attacking a fresh canvas with a ferocity that boded ill for the remainder of our evening.

  Security came with the sale of all that had belonged to his family—house, furnishings, land. Coming from generations of farme
rs I at first found this incomprehensible, despite his attempts at explanation.

  ‘You cannot recreate memory.’

  ‘Physically, no,’ I argued. ‘But the emotional consequences—’

  ‘Enough!’

  It was the first time he had shouted at me. I retreated to my desk a cowed child under his adult chastisement. Not until the last dying reach of the sun had passed beyond the windows and the room was filled with fading twilight did I feel his touch on my shoulder.

  ‘Sorry.’

  I reached back, clasped his cold fingers and drew them down, warming them in my own.

  ‘How I spoke to you…I am sorry. I had no right.’

  ‘I ask too many questions.’

  ‘No.’ His other hand stroked across my skin, reassuring. ‘It’s because I don’t have the answers. And the longer I live the more questions there are.’

  That night we lay together for shared comfort while we talked. There was no need, no desire for any but the slow tracing of fingers on skin, the warmth of an embrace.

  He sold the family home after his wife died there in childbirth. He had married at eighteen (she seventeen), acceding to the wishes of one dead and one dying parent in the belief that the love of a childhood friend for him would be enough to support them both. He carried now the guilt of betrayal. When he told me how, in the last fading minutes, with her skin bleached by loss of blood, her dead child in her arms, she apologised for failing him I am unashamed to admit that I wept, too.

  It brought us closer, that night of low-voiced confidences, established bonds of honesty and trust. It also freed me from the constricting punishment of regarding him as my elder. Accepting our differing but shared needs, our responses to one another, I could at last take my place as an equal in our relationship.

  That was what he had been waiting for. As we watched the stars extinguished one by one above us, night fading into a windy day of scudding clouds and fragmented sunshine, he pressed closer to me. I turned to look into his eyes, so near to mine it took a moment to focus. In that silent exchange we made a commitment that even a craftsman of words like myself cannot describe. A little later he sighed, warm breath flowing over me, rested his head on my chest and slept.

  Gunter attacked his canvases with a passion that alarmed me at first. Over time the alarm turned to nervous anticipation; he would pause, survey the picture, and if happy with it come stalking across the room, wiping his hands on a rag before flinging it away and leaping on me with the same enthusiasm he had expended on his work. Sometimes I would run from him in a flurry of paper; a furious chase would ensue in which I dared not catch his eye—he could mesmerise me in a second and I would become a living canvas for him to paint his desires upon me.

  One afternoon it was the stillness in the room that broke in on my concentration. I looked up, pen in hand, to find him watching me.

  ‘Take your clothes off. I want to paint you.’

  I sighed and began to undo buttons. He stood there, staring at my hands, and then walked an arc to observe me from the side as I dropped the garments to the floor. I was never sure whether his gaze was erotic or artistic, knowing that for him the two formed a continuum.

  Standing in front of him, my skin prickled under his gaze. I had once suggested that he, too, should be naked while he drew me, but he claimed that the cold would be a distraction, and I sensed it would be more than cold that would sap his concentration.

  He picked up a brush and advanced on me.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I stepped back.

  ‘What I said. I’m going to paint you.’

  ‘The canvas is over there.’

  ‘No, it’s not.’

  Comprehension dawned; I took another step away. ‘You’re mad.’

  He said nothing, but waited, silent, as I reflected that he knew me only too well.

  ‘Go on, then.’ I admit I was intrigued—what was he intending? I was also relieved as he began gently, a slow line from the base of my neck to my shoulder. He had selected a brush with stiff bristles and the sensation was pleasant, a faint scratching, attenuated somewhat by the paint.

  After a while I could see that I had ceased to exist for him, that my skin was simply a different surface and he had lost all sense of the person beneath. In a sense I found this gratifying; it was no calculated prelude to seduction, but a genuine extension of his skill. I admit to casting longing glances towards my desk, the sentence broken off mid-word, but it seemed selfish to interrupt his work for mine. As I frequently reminded myself, his work sold.

  He turned me into a building. Most of his paintings were geometric, architectural, fulfilling his public persona as a realist. Anything else could have been lethal, would lead to condemnation as a degenerate, a traitor to the ideals of the new Third Reich.

  I looked down at myself as he knelt to complete my ankles.

  ‘Very nice. Will I ever be allowed to wash?’

  He tilted his head back, grinning, his eyes alight with mischief. ‘In a couple of weeks. Maybe.’

  This time I pursued him round the room, threatening dire fates until he skidded to a stop.

  ‘I’ve an idea.’ He touched my chest, satisfied himself that the paint was still tacky. Pulling his largest canvas out he laid it flat. ‘Lie down on that. Like a human lino cut.’

  The white expanse was inviting, and his madness had infected me, too. I lay on it, rolled back to front slowly, trying not to smudge.

  The result was a disaster.

  ‘I think you’ll do better as a writer,’ he said, surveying the mess. ‘Try it again.’

  On the theory that the more paint on the canvas the less I would have to wash off, I obeyed him. He picked up an immensely long handled brush, tickled me as I rolled.

  I wriggled, smearing streaks of grey and green. ‘Stop it!’

  Taking off his shirt and trousers he threw them to one side and knelt beside me, scooping up a fingerful of paint and using it to extend a curve I’d started. Encouraged, I drew another and he ran a tangent from his to mine, stopping as our fingers touched.

  ‘I find you very distracting, do you know that?’ With one paint-smeared hand he pulled my face towards his own.

  Fortunately that canvas was tough; it had to withstand a lot that night. We conserved just enough energy to sponge each other down before falling into bed.

  I awoke alone, and rolling over saw he had set the ‘painting’ on an easel and was standing naked in front of it. Flinging some clothes at him I dressed, discovering the paint we’d used was more like dye.

  ‘You even put it on my face,’ I grumbled, letting myself out to buy breakfast.

  He worked on the picture all day, using the streaks and smears to create a city that grew outward like a living organism. At sunset we sat together, looking at it.

  ‘You’d never know how it started off.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What are you going to do with it when it’s finished? Don’t sell it.’

  ‘Stefan, I have to. Everything I sell is insurance against the future. One day the money will be important. It could save our lives.’

  ‘It’s just…’

  ‘I know. Maybe one day I’ll be able to buy it back. Or we could make more of them. Start a whole new school of painting.’

  He sold it to an upright Prussian matron of advancing years and impressive dimensions. I sat at the desk, biting back my laughter as I listened to him persuade her of its ideological purity, its amalgam of German pride in the land and modern, functional architecture. He interspersed this with outrageous flattery, and I dared not look in his direction until the door shut behind her. As he turned back into the room the same suppressed emotion was in his face. We listened to her footsteps recede until the door slammed several floors below.

  He could be urbane, slyly funny, devastatingly charming when he wished. He disdained the moneyed Berliners with their artistic pretensions, and yet he was in constant demand from them. Preferring the company of men, he could a
t the same time set out to seduce his hostess, leading her as far as was possible in public and then coolly departing at the end of the evening, fragments of emotion littering the floor behind him. Salesmanship was just an extension of his skills.

  Another of his customers arrived that day, a man I knew only as Mordecai. I first met him when he commissioned Gunter to paint his daughter, a smiling, brown-haired girl who, once over her initial shyness, sat happily for him. Mordecai was an intelligent businessman with an interest in literature, and we conversed for long periods. Gunter worked on, rolling his eyes in cheerful complicity with the girl as my conversation with her father took us to the more obscure writers in the German canon. After the portrait was finished, he visited us several more times, always pausing to drink coffee, more than once purchasing a painting that caught his eye.

  The last time I saw him he wore a crude yellow star stitched to his coat, the rough printed material contrasting with the soft wool beneath. He had come to say goodbye. He was taking his family to America, the move permanent. Given the treatment I had seen meted out to his people it was understandable, but it still seemed strange that a man for so many generations a German should feel forced to leave. There was a sadness about him, a sense of loss that I shared. I too had a homeland, one I had left to find the life I now lived. At the start of the year I had become a German citizen, at Gunter’s suggestion. It removed the fear that we would be separated, and had been far easier than I expected, given the average German’s opinion of Poles. At the interview I had been complemented on my Aryan characteristics, automatically attributed to my German mother. I didn’t bother to correct them. In fact my fair hair and blue eyes came from my Polish father. My mother was as dark as a gypsy.

  Mordecai looked from Gunter to me and back again. I had the feeling he missed little.

  ‘You should leave, too.’