He would settle at the back of the weekly meetings in the editorial office, by the window, so that he could flash Isabel brief, sharp, whip-like glances. When it was Isabel’s turn to speak, he would turn and focus his attention on her face with the intensity of a dog sniffing at the ground, barely able to hide his excitement.
Karolis Galcikas, nostrils flaring, brought her coffee on a couple of occasions while she was editing her articles at the typesetter’s computer. The first time was the 23rd of March - she remembered it as clearly as if it had been the day before – he had placed the cup on the table and Isabel had thanked him without lifting her eyes. The second time, a week later, he put the cup of coffee directly into her hands, as if it were some kind of coded love letter. His fingers trembled slightly. Sensing something, she glanced up absent-mindedly and smiled.
Sometime later they had coffee together in the café downstairs. They even had lunch together, though it was difficult to shake off their colleagues.
As time passed Karolis managed to attract longer and more personal glances from Isabel, though, in fact, the look she gave him was no different to that which she flashed the young waitress who everybody liked because she always knew what people wanted for lunch. The waitress had complained once about how weak her immune system was.
‘You could do with drinking freshly pressed grapefruit juice,’ Isabel told her, eyeing the snuffling girl carefully.
Karolis, at that moment, was so envious of the attention Isabel gave to the girl that he even began sniffling himself. And then he blushed.
At the beginning of April he plucked up the courage to ask Isabel if she would model for him. He had to prepare something for his exam, he explained, and Isabel’s unusual and subtle features would really suit the idea he had. He wanted her portrait, he quickly clarified. And then he almost blushed again. Isabel wasn’t surprised – she raised her eyebrows as if chasing a thought that had escaped her - she was in the middle of editing an article.
She agreed to be photographed. First they dropped into a café to have something warm to drink. In the street the snow was thawing quickly. Occasionally the sun shone brightly, but then it hid behind the thick spring clouds. Karolis’ fingers trembled so much he was reluctant to touch his camera. Stirring lemon and honey into her tea, Isabel lifted her gaze to his high-cheeked, flawless face. The peak of his leather cap cast a shadow over his anxious, melancholy blue eyes. And suddenly Isabel understood.
‘Your hands are trembling,’ she said softly.
‘Yes,’ Karolis answered in a whisper.
‘I’m thirty two. I’ve lost everything that I had managed to build up over the years. I’m afraid to start anything new,’ Isabel said after a pause.
‘Isn’t it too early to make such assumptions?’
She didn’t answer. For a long time, as if mesmerised, she stirred the tea until it turned yellow from the lemon juice.
‘Anyway, I wasn’t expecting anything,’ Karolis murmured.
She carried on stirring her tea. Then the tea spoon clinked and stopped.
‘Well, maybe I was expecting… But – I’m not asking for anything,’ Karolis corrected himself.
He managed to steady his hands. The conversation had cleared the air; it explained the trembling and brought his intentions out into the open.
It was Isabel who now began to shake.
‘You see, we won’t get anywhere today,’ she said hiding her trembling fingers. She smiled widely – it was a shame Karolis wasn’t able to press the camera’s shutter button.
The next day Isabel borrowed some money from a colleague and bought some canvases and oil paints. It was Thursday evening and the snow had nearly melted. The pull of the earth was strong, almost over-powering, but Isabel felt as light as one of the natural bristles on her new paintbrushes. On Fridays she was usually not missed in the office so a long weekend awaited her. She whistled all the way home to Puskai, trying to calm the energy that pulsed impatiently from her fingertips, begging it not to be in a hurry. With a joyful hiss the car splashed through the snow.
She took all the lamps into the workshop, stretched a canvas and took one of the brushes.
She was still painting at dawn.
From the canvas poured a chaotic mantle of blood and diamonds. In its whirls flashed barely discernible human foetuses - or perhaps souls, thickening and searching for a form, cracked like precious stones, pierced by lightning and separated from each other by strange arabesques of plants and mythical animals. Here was the eye of a unicorn - glittering planets flew within it at incredible speeds. And here, in swelling space, a bloody horn which a brown-eyed angel blew like a trumpet of war, while peeling off the devil’s skin.
Isabel leant back; she was short of breath, as if she had just read her own secret story.
She stretched a new canvas on the easel; daubed some strokes on it but suddenly felt tired. She made some coffee and, having dipped an old hard bun in warm milk, she swallowed it in few bites. A gloomy Friday morning was breaking outside the window. In the distance Pranciska, wrapped in a shawl with roses on it, tottered across the fields which were loud with the song of the larks. Her eldest daughter, Jadviga, had been running the shop for a number of years, but when her health permitted, Pranciska, moved energetically between the boxes of bread and flour, chased out flies and talked to the customers every day until lunch. Many of the customers had dropped in specifically to talk to her. But on those days when God didn’t grant her health, Pranciska would slump in the chair next to the fridge with the ice cream and drinks (every village shop had one of those fridges with glass windows - she would say with surprise), observing eagerly who bought what and keeping an eye on how much change they received.
Isabel drew the kitchen curtains and returned to the workshop.
By lunch the clouds had begun to clear and a blot of sun blossomed on the canvas which smelled strongly of paint. Isabel laughed; a short, sharp laugh, like the stroke of a paint brush. Then suddenly she felt that there was somebody at the window.
Instinctively she lifted her head and behind the glass saw a pair of eyes.
Not brown. Intensely blue.
He didn’t wear a cap to mask his anxiety.
He met Isabel’s surprised gaze and his attractive nostrils quivered. He managed to hold her look and his cheeks remained as pale and hard as marble.
Recovering herself, Isabel put down the brush and unlocked the door to the garden. Karolis turned to her, putting a smouldering cigarette to his lips. Next to him his dirty bike rested against the wall.
‘How did you find me?’ Isabel asked.
He didn’t answer. He examined her face as if attempting to gauge whether she was unhappy about his sudden appearance, and then once again he drew hungrily on his cigarette.
‘Come in,’ she said.
She left the door open.
They made love until Saturday evening, with short breaks for food and drink. Even then their fingers searched for each other’s as if they were iron and magnet, or strands of hair wound into a single plait. They jumped on each other with the last bite of food still in their mouths, or having met in the doorway – rip off what couldn’t be ripped off, eager to give something it wasn’t possible to give.
His body was young but strong and virile – more mature than his eyes, which lost in those hours their arrogance and knowingness. Yes, he knew how to touch and satisfy her, though he wasn’t aware of that himself. His nature unfolded, sensitive and sensual, slightly feminine; tangled in the sparkling white sheets he looked vulnerable and at the same time frighteningly strong. Tired, they embraced, wrapping their legs and fingers around each other, sprawled like two single strands of fabric, silently scrutinising each other, for a short moment sinking back inside themselves as if plumbing the depths for some kind of an explanation. Or they talked, lazily, their voices tired. They talked about themselves, lifting from the dark depths fragments of their essence and bringing them up to the light in words. They spoke an
d listened to each other. Until they were struck once more by desire, sparked by a movement or a glance; it would tense their muscles, glue their bodies together and create from them innumerable shapes.
On Saturday, at dusk, Isabel lifted her sleeping lover’s arm from her chest and locked herself in the workshop.
He knocked after midnight. He stood in the doorway naked, ruffled, his eyes half closed, squinting in the bright light of the lamps, and from him the decaying smell of their relationship diffused, like from a bouquet of withering flowers. He snuggled against her, searching for her lips, desperate to carry on as they had the previous night. But no feeling of desire stirred in Isabel.
Karolis went to bed alone and slept through until midday on Sunday.
Later they drank coffee in silence. Over the rims of their cups they exchanged long, intimate glances. In the morning light Karolis looked unforgivably young and slightly sour, but a single cheerful glance from Isabel would brighten his features. He waited for Isabel to suggest that they should meet up again, but the only thing she could think about was the three canvases drying in the workshop. She felt both an uncontrollable desire and at the same time an intense fear that the drawings would have changed or would look different to the way they had at night. She attempted to explain this to Karolis, but talking about other things hurt him. Isabel stopped talking and turned to the window.
‘When will we see each other again?’ Karolis asked with studied indifference.
‘I don’t know, at the office.’
‘That’s not what I had in mind.’
‘I’ll call you.’
‘Sure?’
‘Yes, of course.’
Isabel was not sure, but ‘yes’ sounded nicer than ’no’.
She walked with Karolis up to the woods. His bike rattled by his side like the keys to the heart. On the narrow road they looked at each other and hugged, suddenly, the former attraction and heat rising in them, their lips opening for a long kiss that delighted the mind. Then he walked away along the road, pushing his rattling bike, pressed in by the fir trees. His light hair fluttered, a drop of gold drawing into the distance. And as he disappeared into the depths of the wood, her eyes followed him and Isabel realised that she missed and would always miss what one person could never give to another; it was something they could only awaken and fuel.
The canvases were waiting for Isabel, luring her with the aroma of a spell. She, though, was afraid to walk through the doorway and look at them.
She stood in the yard for a long time gazing out across to the woods, across the garden with its apple trees, which were as knobbly as arthritic fingers, and at the fields on the Kurpiskiai side, that were shyly flushed with green.
Later she wandered in the woods; they were damp and smelled of earth. She crossed the road and found herself in the alder woods where bright, sharp leaves were forcing themselves out from buds, their thin cuticles sparkling in the sunlight creating an aura of thickening green light.
She walked for a long time among the pale trunks, which were finely dotted like the feathers of a thrush and stretched so tightly that it looked as if they were about to burst from the tension. It grew hot; she took off her jumper and tied it around her waist. A sticky, spring wind bit into her bare chest.
A small lake flashed among the tree trunks.
The lake lay quietly in the depths of the forest, as round as a polished precious stone. Emerging from the trees it would be possible to stumble upon it unexpectedly and on a sunny day the light on the water would be blinding.
Isabel stopped at the water’s edge and inhaled its sun-glittering blueness.
At that moment the water was disturbed and small waves broke on the bank. A grey head appeared in among the rushes. Isabel let out a silent gasp, then, realising it was a grey haired woman, she stepped back into the shade of the bushes.
The woman climbed out of the water. Droplets sparkled like scales on her naked, bony body. Isabel felt as if she were looking at herself. As if a hidden part of herself had stepped out of water – famished, with small sagging breasts, mobile, jutting hipbones like cogwheels, a dripping knot of grey hair at the back of her head and skin wrinkled like crumpled paper. Yet still full of a frightening, vital force.
Without noticing Isabel who was hidden in the dense undergrowth, the grey haired woman began putting clothes on her wet body.
Isabel could bear it no longer.
She turned round and started to run, struggling through the wet moss and horror.
She ran until she reached the road.
In the fir woods everything was familiar and she attempted to slow down. To resign herself to eternally walking in the woods. With every moment her skin grew looser and began falling away from her bones, wrinkled, like a cape slipping off. The boy who had flashed like lightning between her sheets did not exist at all – she had only taken him into her bed because he reminded her of somebody long lost. The sheet in the big room was crumpled and scented only with her longing and her inability to stand the deafening silence which was interrupted only by the squeak of the door she opened.
The following week she didn’t raise her eyes to meet Karolis’ gaze.
And he seemed to accept Isabel’s mute distance.
He didn’t do anything drastic; he didn’t demonstrate his determination. Occasionally he appeared behind her unexpectedly, as if he was waiting for a sign, as if he was trying to transmit his thoughts to her. Isabel didn’t listen. Again and again she climbed out of the lake which never grew warm, feeling as lonely and as aged as the knobbly branch of an apple tree.
OVER THE next four year more canvases emerged. Isabel was consumed by a tireless, playful spirit; it rioted and poured out through her hand. At first she had to borrow money for the canvases and paint. Then buyers appeared. An elderly Lithuanian from Chicago, Benecijus Krincius, bought three painting at once. He wore rubber boots and a waterproof coat and in his search for her farmhouse had prepared himself as if he were going on an expedition. He paid so much for the paintings that the cottage in Puskai got running water and Isabel installed an internet connection and fixed the roof. She was free, now, not just from ever having to borrow money, but it allowed her to write articles only when she wanted to.
In addition, Benecijus put Isabel in touch with a few more wealthy clients. In Puskai Benecijus felt he was Columbus discovering America. It wasn’t hard to guess that it wasn’t just the gloomy nature and the art that attracted him to Puskai, but, among other things, the hostess herself who fluttered like the flame in an oil lamp. He wrote her long, intellectually sensual letters. He would arrive wearing a bright, white suit, like a peace offering, and from a distance his smile would shine as luminously as his outfit. He openly begged her to paint his portrait and indirectly too; he was ready to buy a cat in the sack as long as it was painted by Isabel.
At first, Isabel wasn’t interested in the idea of painting portraits. And not just of Benecijus.
But then one spring she met Beatrice in town.
The afternoon was stuffy; Beatrice wore a strapped dress with Egyptian hieroglyphs on it. At her sides, like two sphynxes, stood her sons, who had grown bigger and were dark like her. Isabel had heard that Beatrice had left her position as the headmistress of the orphanage, had separated from Eimuntas Brasiskis and gone to find happiness in London. It was difficult to tell whether she had found it. She had barely changed, though possibly she looked slightly more worn, but that might have been just that she had forgotten to apply red lipstick to her full, quirky lips. They stood at a polite distance from each other, hiding their embarrassment and smiled into the space between them.
The conversation that followed was muddled, with uncomfortable pauses. Beatrice’s bored guards kicked around and grumbled. Isabel was not keen to talk about herself or listen to Beatrice’s news. But a brown eyed boy flashed in the space between them like a bat.
‘Well, we have to get a move on. Let’s meet up some day for a glass of wine and a chat,’
Beatrice said at the end of another long pause.
‘Call me when you’re free,’ Isabel agreed.
‘By the way, did you hear that Ilya ran away? It’s been about six month now with no news. Vaidotas Zulonas is in my place now. He’s such a conformist…do you remember? Even at university he knew whose shoes to lick…I’m sure he couldn’t care less about the child. He could find him if he looked. But he doesn’t care.’
On her way back along the sun dappled road to Puskai, Isabel already knew that she would paint a portrait. She would paint Benecijus. She would paint freely, not from a model but from memory and with a friendly touch of irony.
However, after a couple of hours in the workshop, two piercing brown eyes shot out at her from the canvas. Isabel leant back, surprised and frightened, but her hand cared nothing about her emotions and continued to slap against the canvas, mercilessly spreading the familiar features.
She finished as dusk fell. From the bloody twilight the confused yellow face of a boy stared out at her. His lips were pressed tightly together, his forehead thrust forward like a lamb’s, a shy plea for help lingered hauntingly in the depths of his eyes.
Isabel turned the canvas towards the wall and went out into the yard.
She felt short of breath. In the darkness, soft gusts of wind ruffled the leaves of the apple trees and then sank into silence. There, the pattern of the breathing trees converged in a black ball – Isabel went down the veranda steps and plunged into them. It was cool and damp there, the bark of the fruit trees whispered incoherently, with a caressing, motherly shushing. She felt everything so sharply and deeply – the uncut grass tangled like wet hair around her calves, a veil of cool air drew over Isabel, dew trickled through her hair. Above the apple trees bats shuttled silently like black maple leaves; at the bottom of the garden the spring gurgled and the nightingale, its trill a silver needle, stitched the darkness. All this nestled up against Isabel, talked to her, blessed her. She, too, radiated warmth and sound and caressed the night with her breathing; she was woven of that same cloth. But a human weariness and a sense of disappointment prevented her from uniting with it fully, from believing in her transparency… I am too heavy, Isabel whispered, leaning against the rough trunk of an apple tree. What happened to me?
Breathing Into Marble Page 13
