by Tove Jansson
Victor said, “It’s starting to get dark. You’ll hardly be able to see them.”
“Darkness,” Papa said. “Darkness, twilight, dusk – we have more than enough of all that in this place, and that’s just what I want to look at in your pictures. Whether you’re painting this moor or a loaf of bread or some potatoes, they’ll all be in the same damned twilight. But why do you paint such small pictures of such a large moor? And yet your moor is larger still … Well, why don’t you say something? No offence, but your bread loaves are boring. I don’t know how you put life in a loaf of bread, but anyway you haven’t done it … No, don’t go away, sit down, sit down … I criticize them because they’re good enough that they could be better … Why don’t you paint one of their roosters in red and yellow? There are lots of roosters around here, all of them highly potent, stretching their necks every morning, crowing long before we get a new morning around our necks, ha ha. But you’d probably paint them in twilight too. I’m going to bed.”
He waited a little but didn’t ask. It was Victor who spoke. “Yes, I’ll lock up. They can’t get in.”
When it was quiet Victor went out in the garden. The sky was as dark as the heath. Just at the edge of the horizon was a narrow yellow band of sunset. He waited, and then the lights of the train crept forth out of the night, a long way off. They called it the evening train, the one that never stopped. The local train came in just before dawn and paused for barely two minutes.
When the night came for his departure, Victor’s papa was so tired that he barely turned in his bed and said, “Are you sure you have everything?” and fell back asleep.
The wind was blowing straight in from the grassy plain as usual. No lights had been lit yet in the henhouses. Victor put down his suitcase on the platform. It was very cold, the dark blue of the night had just begun to turn grey. You never knew, sometimes it came in early, and there had been times when the engineer simply drove right through.
Now the first rooster crowed. And he saw the train coming, a long row of lights. It stopped. It stopped out on the moor, quite a distance from the platform. He grabbed his suitcase and ran along the track, felt rather than saw the train start to move again. When he reached the first car, he jumped on but missed the second step and hit his chin on the iron railing, damn, wrestled his suitcase into the carriage, which was empty. And now the train stopped where it was supposed to stop, beside the platform. It just stood there, much longer than it should have. But you can never count on trains. The first light of dawn was reflected on the river, the bridge clearly outlined against it, along with someone on the bridge. The engineer did not blow the whistle as he started slowly forward and, just before the river slid past, Victor saw his papa throw up his arms in an extravagant gesture of farewell, and all the roosters crowed.
♦♦♦
At long last, Victor arrived at the large building where artists from every corner of the globe had their own studios for whatever period of time was considered appropriate to their talent – in Victor’s case, seven weeks. The building was two blocks long and very tall. The lobby was huge, surrounded by glass walls. Outside, a stream of cars surged by in wave after wave. People who didn’t seem to know one another sat around a glass table in black plastic armchairs, and, behind a counter, two young women were typing. Victor put his suitcase down beside the counter and waited. Between the onslaughts of traffic he could hear a strange whispering sound like rain but couldn’t figure out where it came from. He lined up his documents on the counter, every paper signed, stamped and witnessed, everything in perfect order. Now the young woman approached. Victor gave her one additional paper, on which he had tried to express his gratitude and pride in this foreign language. She smiled a slightly tired smile, he thought, and gave him a form to fill out. Her face was small and tapered, with enormous eyes painted black. She was dressed self-consciously in the nonchalant offputting style which was that year’s sexual challenge. Victor thought her clothes indicated poverty. He did not understand the form she’d given him – a lot of text that maybe involved some sort of hasty commitment. He covered the form with his hand and looked at her. She pointed to the blank line at the bottom and he signed his name. She gave him a key. The whispering sound still filled the lobby like a distant waterfall without the slightest change in volume or quality. “What is that sound?” he asked. And the young woman explained something in detail that he didn’t understand.
The lift was at the other end of the lobby. He walked to it with all the others who were headed upstairs, a tightly packed crowd. The lift rose quickly and soundlessly, no one said a word but tried as best they could to avoid each other’s gaze. Now it came to his floor, the doors glided open, he elbowed his way out, forgetting his suitcase, and then the doors slid shut again. He pushed the button, all the buttons at once, but the lift didn’t return. He should have hidden his money in a money belt, in a bag around his neck, his passport, everything. It was terrible to have come so far and then, the first day … He rushed up the stairs to meet the lift, wait for it, then down to the lobby again, where he shouted to the young woman with her eyes outlined in black, “Suitcase! I am unhappy!”
She looked at him, shrugged her shoulders ever so slightly in a gesture that he later realized was more sympathetic than indifferent – and now the lift arrived, still jammed full of people. He dashed in, pushing his way heedlessly through the crowd, and grabbed his suitcase, which was still there, not gone. He opened the lid and found his money immediately. He was ashamed of himself. But no one seemed to notice him, they all went their own way and new people streamed into the lift and disappeared.
Victor was exhausted and felt a bit ill. He took his suitcase and climbed the stairs. There were long corridors running the whole length of the huge building, floor after floor, tunnels with distant openings of glass out towards the daylight. Doors at regular intervals, numbered black doors on both sides of the hallway. On the third floor, someone was playing the piano, the same passage over and over.
Victor found his way to Number 131, opened the door with the key the young woman had given him, then closed it behind him. He was home. It was very warm inside, and the sound of the distant waterfall was stronger than before. He stood still and stared at his studio, a large, anonymous square, light grey. Table, chair, bed – grey, black and brown – his own colours. The window was enormous, covered in plastic. And the whispering voice of falling water. Victor walked around the room listening until his hands felt the stream of warm air blowing up from the hot air registers under the window. He was hidden behind a drapery of hot whispering air, an invisible flood, inaccessible, as if at the ultimate edge of the world.
A little later someone came, a porter, and brought an easel. It was very large and looked like a doubled cross or a guillotine. Victor thanked him and pointed to the window, couldn’t remember the word for “open” but the porter understood and made that little gesture with his shoulders, amiably apologetic. Afterwards, Victor rolled the easel in towards the wall. He thought the massive construction was far too obtrusive, intimidating in some vague way.
In the lobby they had a bulletin board with the names of all the residents, their native countries and room numbers. He had no compatriots. There was also a shelf with many small boxes for mail. His Papa had written.
Beloved son,
Writing a letter feels unusual, to say the least, and I assure you it won’t be repeated often. Your change of scene is presumably quite powerful, which is excellent. Beware of advice and comfort and in any event forget what I said about red and yellow. Roosters are idiotic. Actually I have nothing special to say, in any case nothing I consider worthy of your attention – perhaps a hope that our new distance (geographic, that is) could give us surprising possibilities.
People have already started sending Christmas cards to each other, and their illustration choices are, if possible, even more banal than usual.
G.b.w.y. (God be with you)
Your father
; One thing that bewildered Victor was that all the fortunate individuals allowed to work in this great building had nothing to do with one another. It was almost as if they avoided contact, in the lift, in the hallways. They scuttled through their doors as if the Devil himself were after them, and then the corridor was empty again. And yet they were all doing the same thing – a private idea that was more important than anything else, with only so much time to see it realized. Shouldn’t they try to spend more time together? He wrote to Papa, a cautious letter. Papa answered immediately.
Beloved son,
You want to be left in peace and still be with others. It can’t be done. Choose the one or the other, and whichever you choose you’re up the creek. I know. The other night there was a wolf in my chair. Now don’t imagine I’m nosy enough to ask how your work is going. For that matter, ignoring the expectations that always poison success is, in my opinion, an acceptable attitude. If you can afford it, you can always play around a bit with autonomy – if you know what I mean, said your papa …
G.b.w.y. and so forth
All the windows in the big building were covered with plastic – at least on the painter side, where an even northern light was considered essential – so no one could look out and see what was happening on the street. The rules also specified that each studio was reserved for one artist alone, the idea being that family or friends would break concentration.
Once a young man knocked on the door and came in and sat for a while. They had no common language, his guest did not want any refreshment, and from shyness and perhaps a kind of conceit Victor did not show him his work. The playful sign language that can be amusing in a café seemed suddenly inappropriate.
Victor knew that many of those whom the people behind the counter called inmates did not complete their months, their precious weeks, but swallowed their shame and fled back home to their own countries, unable to tolerate a life too luxurious, too warm, too lonely.
In the beginning, Victor worked in a state of ecstatic unreality. Early in the morning, long before the traffic began streaming endlessly past, the only window showing a light was his. The studio seemed as lovely to him as a geometric image of purity – the empty window, the absence of colour – an abstract space. The constant whispering and the torrent of warm air enclosed him day and night like a protective wall. From a need to complete the emptiness, he hid everything he’d brought from home in his suitcase under the bed. Sometimes he ate in a cheap café on a side street and he bought his art materials in a shop nearby. It never crossed his mind to venture deeper into the great foreign city. He had no need of it.
During this time of hectic happiness, Victor gave hardly a thought to his early youth. But there were certain simple objects that he missed and continually painted – a water jug, a brown platter … He bought bread, potatoes, vegetables and set them out in his studio, but they remained alien, shadowless, meaningless. Then he painted the winter moor as he remembered it and knew it. No one and nothing bothered him. His works grew darker and darker and at last there was nothing but a narrow band of sunset yellow just above the horizon.
When Victor had three weeks left, he set out his paintings along the walls and looked at them. For a whole hour, he sat and just stared, surrounded by an unbroken moor, sometimes distant, sometimes closer. Occasionally there were people walking by in the snow, some with wagons, horses pulling loads, but mostly the landscape was empty, just a shade less uncaring without people and horses – and the constant table with the loaf of bread, the root vegetables, and the jug, all in a row as if in a shop, lit by a dead light, totally meaningless to him and to God and to the whole world!
Victor was gripped by a depression so bottomless that his whole body ached. He saw that he’d been a better painter before he left home. He threw himself on the bed and fell asleep.
It was almost evening when Victor awoke and remembered what had happened. The room was transformed, hostile, the noise of the hissing hot air seemingly an octave higher. He stuffed wet newspapers into the vents, but the cruel whispering continued. He tried to pry open the window with his knife, but it wouldn’t give. Sobbing with rage, he fished out his dictionary to find the words he needed, ran down the stairs to the lobby, and knocked on the counter with his key, vehemently, shamelessly insisting on the young woman’s attention. And when she came over with her little tapered face and her repellent clothing, he shouted, “Air! Hot air! I hate.”
“Everyone does,” she said quietly and gave him a form for complaints and a letter that had come with the evening post.
Victor ran out into the street and rushed head over heels into the foreign city. It was very cold. He walked at random, further and further, the streets grew steadily smaller and at every corner he chose the narrowest one. It was the hour just before dusk, all the shops still open, everyone buying and selling. He joined the stream of people sweeping along, flowing apart and together again. The pavement was slippery with discarded vegetables, the air reeked of food and humanity. Glittery Christmas decorations sparkled above the hawkers’ stands along with sausages and animal carcasses adorned with gold and silver flowers, long strands of coloured lamps stretched across the street, above them the dark, crowded facades of the buildings, a canyon with the sky for a ceiling. The sunset had flared up into a penetrating blaze of red and pink roses, and for a short time the streets and houses were drenched in a fleeting embrace of unearthly sweetness, whereupon the heavens grew dark and sank down on the roofs.
Victor walked and wept but no one seemed to notice. The street altered with extraordinary speed. The shops were screeching down their blinds and turning out their lamps, the people were going home. In the end, only the cafés were lit and open. He went into one on a corner. There were only a couple of tables. A fire burned in a stove at one end of the room; at the other end they’d piled empty boxes and packing material against the wall. Several men stood at the bar, talking together in low voices. Victor got his coffee, moved further away, and opened his letter.
Beloved son,
You may think that I don’t know the great cities, but I do, I knew them. They are splendid and pitiless. Now you are there, G.b.w.y. Last night the Wild Beasts went round our house, but don’t let it worry you in any way. I’m the only one who hears them. No one has asked me to say hello and that’s probably a good thing. You might feel you have to send them a postcard from the great city. Forgive me, I don’t actually feel contempt for anything. I think of you sometimes, but I don’t miss you more than necessary.
Papa
PS One night there was a violent thunderstorm on the heath. Imagine, in the middle of winter. You should have been here. I got reckless, didn’t close the doors, and watched the way it rolled in and burst into lightning and thunder and a downpour. Just think of all the terrified roosters and hens. It was lovely, washed clean!
PPS But the next night They were back again. Don’t worry about it. I just wanted to tell you that They were back again. (They’re not afraid of thunderstorms, ha ha.)
Victor went back to the café every evening when the streets were full of people. It wasn’t as pretty as the first time, but the street was the same, swarming with movement, full of colours and smells and voices and all those faces.
They got to know him in the café. He already had his own table, a little round iron table behind the stove and a bit to one side. Every evening he drew faces on a big sketch pad, using only black. No one paid any attention. He drew the young woman with her eyes outlined in black and the faces in the corridors and the lift, finally the faces in the street. He captured them all in his despair and forced them to speak.
He went to the studio only to sleep, and he returned to the café every evening. Gradually his faces began to change, he could no longer control them, they just came, and he let them come and trapped them in an unreality that was entirely his own. He captured the invisible ones that roamed about the house where his papa lived, gave them horns and wings and crowns however he pleased, but ha
rdest of all was to draw their eyes.
I punish them, he thought. I give them faces that they can’t escape, they’re imprisoned. They pursued me even when I was little. The wolf in Papa’s chair! But all that matters is: these pictures are good.
One evening in the café, the proprietor came to Victor’s table and said, “Here’s a tramp who possibly speaks the same language you do. He drinks only wine.” And he beckoned to an old man who was waiting by the door.
Yes, the old fellow spoke the same language, but didn’t want to talk. He sat down as close to the stove as he could and they drank hot red wine together. Victor showed him his drawings. His guest looked at them closely but said nothing. He declined Victor’s invitation to spend the night in his studio but thanked him solemnly, stood up and, with a modest bow, left.
“Did you understand each other?” the proprietor asked.
“Yes,” Victor said. “We understood.”
It had been a mistake to show his drawings. What had he expected? Praise? Astonishment? Revulsion? Yes, whatever, but not silence.
He didn’t go back to the café. He continued working in his room. He no longer called it his studio. His figures grew larger, more unmanageable. They fought and made love, they came close to suffocating from heat or loneliness, perhaps from confusion, but he had no compassion. He freed himself from them because it was necessary. In the evenings, he went out into the city, wandered at random without concern for anything and returned only towards morning.
He sent the drawings to his father.
On his last day, he gave Young Woman with Eyes Outlined in Black to its subject. She thanked him, a bit surprised, and gave him a letter.
Beloved son,
They arrived. You have managed to portray my companions. You’ve given my other reality a face. Their hideousness calms me, there is no longer a wolf in my chair. And they’re excellent.
