The Painting

by Alison Booth

  Julius was obviously unstable and she was certainly not going to contact him again. She needed to forget about him but that proved to be impossible. Her thoughts continued churning around. All she’d told him was that her father reckoned it had been bought from a state auction or from the consignment store. A sentence that implied her father knew a bit about its provenance but not that he or any close relative had purchased it.

  Yet savings weren’t allowed in Hungary; her grandparents must have gone against the Communist Party in acquiring their collection, and Sebestyén Tinódi might have too. Of course, they wouldn’t have been alone. There was a thriving black market in Hungary, a concealed network of contacts and exchanges. The last thing Anika wanted was for her family to get into trouble.

  Chapter 8

  Tabilla was in the kitchen when Anika got home. The door to her sewing room was open and Anika saw that Flossie was modelling one of the bridesmaids’ dresses. It was made of light pink silk, the fabric gathered in tiny pleats from the padded shoulders down to the bosom, where it was caught into a narrow band before cascading down to just below the knee. The style would suit someone very slim but Flossie was adjusted to her most buxom setting.

  ‘How did you get on?’ Tabilla said.

  She looked exhausted and the last thing Anika wanted was to upset her. There was no need for her to know what Julius had said about the painting. She had surely suffered enough in her life, and Anika didn’t really need to add this to her woes or raise doubts in her mind about how her husband had acquired it.

  ‘Not very well.’ Anika leaned against the kitchen door jamb. ‘Did Julius call you?’

  ‘No. Should he have?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  It was as Anika had hoped. Since Tabilla hadn’t told Julius the portrait belonged to Tabilla’s husband and neither had she, as long as Julius didn’t phone Tabilla it was unlikely that he would ever learn about her husband’s involvement.

  ‘Did he give you an idea of how much the painting’s worth?’ Tabilla peered at Anika short-sightedly. With the strong arch of the bone above her eye sockets and the dark semicircles under them, she looked almost like that picture of a raccoon that Anika had seen in the National Geographic.

  ‘He didn’t. It wasn’t a very successful meeting. Mr Singer got distracted.’

  ‘That’s too bad. I’m sorry about that. I know he’s a very busy man. Did he suggest you go again?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Perhaps I should ring him again though I don’t really want to.’

  ‘Please don’t do that, there’s no need. I’ll wait till next week and see the place Daniel recommended. He’s going to drive me there.’

  ‘You told me that. And you’re seeing him again next Saturday.’

  Tabilla had a knowing expression on her face that Anika ignored.

  ‘So the trip to Julius’s gallery was a bit of a wild goose chase,’ Tabilla said.

  ‘You could call it that.’

  ‘I’m sorry I sent you.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Let me get you some wine.’

  Anika poured two glasses from the wine box of Sauvignon Blanc that was kept in the refrigerator. The box was almost empty and she had to angle it to fill the second glass. She waited until they were sitting in chairs on the little area of brick paving immediately outside the back door that Tabilla termed the terrace before posing her question. ‘Do you mind if I ask you something, Tabilla?’

  ‘Ask away.’

  ‘Why don’t you want the painting?’

  ‘Didn’t you ask me that before? I don’t like it much. It’s not quite chocolate-boxy but it’s heading that way. Besides, it brings back sad memories. About the last time I saw it. The day Tomas died. I really don’t want to go through all that again.’

  ‘Yet you don’t mind me having it here in your house?’

  ‘Not in the least.’

  This seemed inconsistent. If it brought back sad memories, Anika couldn’t see what difference it would make having it hanging in her bedroom rather than the lounge room. Either place she’d see it every day.

  Tabilla said, ‘I’ve always thought that when you decide to move on you should. You shouldn’t be trammelled with things around you from the past. So the point is that I don’t want stuff from that old life. But I don’t mind if other people have it.’

  ‘But what if I don’t want it either?’

  ‘I know you do. I see the way you look at it. I heard you when you said it symbolises home. That makes me very happy.’

  ‘And if I were to change my mind?’

  ‘That’s entirely up to you. That’s the thing about a present. When you give it away, you give up all responsibility for it. And the act of giving means you forgo the right to stipulate what it should be used for. You look puzzled again.’

  ‘I’m just thinking about what you said. No strings attached, that’s what you mean.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Tabilla said, smiling.

  For once Anika didn’t want to smile back. She felt unsettled. Beyond the back fence, the rows of terraced houses – and beyond them the Glebe Island wheat silos – were catching the late afternoon sun and glowing golden. Yet she was relieved that Tabilla hadn’t asked any more about Mr Singer. They sat in silence for a while, until Anika heard Tabilla’s stomach rumble and remembered it was her turn to cook. Perhaps pasta with a tomato and ham sauce and lots of fresh oregano from the garden, and a small salad.

  She swigged down her glass of wine and got up to start cooking. When the pasta was on, she checked the wine box: there was a small amount of liquid sloshing about inside. After managing to break open the cardboard box with the kitchen scissors, she cut out a corner of the bladder inside and topped up Tabilla’s glass and then her own.

  When they were sitting with their tea after dinner – as usual Tabilla wanted hers in the Clarice Cliff mug – Tabilla asked Anika how she was going to track down the Rocheteau’s provenance.

  ‘Nyenye told me who gave it to Tomas so I thought I’d try there.’

  ‘Did she? That’s more than I ever knew. Who was it?’

  ‘Sebestyén Tinódi.’

  ‘Are you sure she said Sebestyén Tinódi?’

  ‘Positive. She said that he got it from a dealer who got it from the state auction house.’

  ‘That’s impossible, Anika. I knew Sebestyén. He was a very good friend of ours. He had no money and absolutely no interest in art. His only passions were politics and tinkering with motorbikes. And besides, Tomas had that painting since he was a boy, and Sebestyén was much the same age as Tomas, or maybe a bit younger. So I think she got that wrong.

  ‘Perhaps I could ask him about it anyway. Is he still in Hungary?’

  ‘No, Anika. Maybe your Nyenye meant another Sebestyén.’

  Anika didn’t much like the way Tabilla said your Nyenye. It was almost as if she didn’t have much respect for her and this upset her. Struggling to keep her voice calm, she said, ‘Nyenye definitely told me it was Sebestyén Tinódi.’

  ‘Well, it couldn’t have been him, I would have known. And you certainly can’t ask him. He was one of the people trying to get over the Austrian border the night I left. He was shot dead in the middle of the swamp near Andau.’

  Anika felt shocked by this. She hadn’t known Tabilla’s crossing was dangerous and didn’t know what to say.

  ‘Why don’t you ask Nyenye if maybe she meant someone else?’ Tabilla said. Her face had gone paler than that Daz whiter-than-white advertisement and Anika guessed hers had too. ‘You could do that next time you talk on the phone.’

  ‘Nyenye doesn’t have a phone.’

  ‘You can ask her in one of your letters.’

  ‘Nyenye’s convinced her letters are checked by the censor. She’ll only write about little
things.’

  ‘Ask your father then.’ Tabilla’s voice was subdued. She was staring out towards the wheat silos with unseeing eyes.

  Anika collected the tea things and turned on the sink tap to rinse out the dregs. With her back to Tabilla, she said, ‘What did my grandparents do in the war?’

  ‘Your paternal ones? I don’t really know. I didn’t meet Tomas until we started university and it was a year later that I met your father György. Tomas was only ten when the Germans occupied Hungary in 1944 and eleven when the Russians kicked them out in 1945 and occupied Hungary themselves. Hasn’t your grandmother told you what they did in the occupation?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Perhaps you haven’t asked. I’ve noticed young people aren’t much interested in that sort of thing until it’s too late.’

  Anika sat down at the table again.

  After a pause, Tabilla said, ‘When Tomas died, I decided I was going to leave Hungary.’ Her voice was so low Anika had to lean forward to hear her words. ‘At once, that evening. When I got home after telling Tomas’s parents, I looked around our flat. We had just a few belongings scattered around the room. They are only things, I told myself. With Tomas gone there’s nothing to keep me here.’

  Tabilla picked up her water glass and absently swirled the liquid around before putting it down again. ‘I knew there’d be photos of me circulating. People were taking pictures of the demonstrators and we’d thrown a few Molotov cocktails at the Russian tanks. Some of the photographers were bound to be AVO. I was in no state for interrogation. So I picked up my overcoat and handbag and headed for the Austrian border.’

  Anika took her aunt’s hand. It was icy cold. ‘No looking back?’

  ‘No looking back. That’s always been my way.’

  Anika kept hold of her hand and waited. After a few seconds Tabilla continued, ‘I met up with a couple of friends who were also trying to get to the border. One of them was Sebestyén. On the way we bumped into someone else we knew, Sandor. Have I ever mentioned him to you?’ When Anika shook her head, she said, ‘He was a student with Tomas. His family was from eastern Hungary, from the marshy area near the border with Austria. He was guiding people across the border. That’s how some of us got away. Not Sebestyén though. And now I think I’ll go to bed, Anika. It’s been a long day.’

  She went upstairs and shut her bedroom door, and not long afterwards Anika heard the strains of classical music. She’d got to know her aunt well enough to understand that her choice of music was a barometer to her emotions. What she was playing now was one of Shostakovich’s piano trios, the part that made you want to weep. It sounded manic and tragic at the same time.

  * * *

  Tabilla’s information about Sebestyén Tinódi had blown away any hope Anika had of verifying Tomas’s ownership of the Rocheteau through contacting Tinódi. That evening she called the international operator and gave him her parents’ number in Budapest. When the connection went through, her mother picked up the phone. Immediately afterwards there was a little click, barely discernible but once you’d learned to recognise that sound you never forgot it. Anika heard that little click every time she called home, every time her parents called her; the barely noticeable sound that indicated somebody was listening in.

  Anika’s mother’s voice was thick, she had a sore throat that she couldn’t seem to get rid of, but that’s the way it is, Anika. She talked on and on and Anika let her lovely voice, huskier than usual with her cold, wrap her in that warm feeling of security it always induced, overlaid with an intense desire to be sitting in the same room as her mother. She felt tears fill her eyes and wiped them away before beginning to answer her mother’s questions about what she’d been doing and how the studies were going and her trip to the beach.

  ‘Daniel is a nice boy, I hope,’ her mother said.

  ‘He’s no boy, Mum, he’s probably late twenties.’

  ‘Time he was married then.’ She must have noticed Anika’s ostentatious sigh but she carried on talking without a break. ‘And how lucky you are to be young and by the ocean, I should love to have some sunshine to help me to get rid of this infernal cold.’

  Anika’s father interjected a word from time to time. He had been listening to this conversation. Her parents had some semaphore system to let the other know that Anika had called, though it wouldn’t have needed to be all that sophisticated. They were never far apart. In the butchers’ shop or out of it, they were nearly always within a coo-ee of each other.

  When it was Anika’s father’s turn to hold the receiver, her mother backed out of the conversation. Anika had prepared what she wanted to ask him, the vague words to use so that he could understand her meaning but no one else but her mother could.

  ‘Remember that thing you gave me when I left?’ Anika asked him.

  ‘That thing?’ There was a pause. ‘Oh yes, that thing, what about it?’

  ‘Where did it come from?’

  ‘I think you know that.’

  ‘But beforehand.’

  ‘It came from the bakers,’ he said, deliberately obfuscating. ‘We knew how much you love those poppy seed cakes.’

  Anika understood then she was not going to be able to get anything out of him in a phone conversation. They chatted on for a little while, not too long, for her father was a man of anxieties and silences. Yet when they had talked themselves out, she hung up feeling a little more grounded, as she always did after calling home, although none the wiser about where Tomas got his auburn-haired lady from.

  Upstairs in her bedroom she inspected the painting. ‘If only you could tell me your history,’ she told the portrait. ‘I wouldn’t need the provenance. And I certainly wouldn’t ever need to visit that Julius Singer again.’

  Chapter 9

  Sydney folk who lived in a Neighbourhood Watch street thought it made them feel safe, Anika reflected, as she turned off Victoria Road and into Boggabri Street. It had the reverse effect on her, making her feel uncomfortable; were curtains twitching as she walked by, or was she imagining that? When she was almost home, she saw that Mrs Thornton was standing just inside her picket fence, so still she might have been a part of the council furniture, a sculpture like the one that appeared overnight a few weeks back in the pocket-handkerchief park beyond the corner shop.

  Anika checked the letterbox while Mrs Thornton embarked on one of her monologues. Something about Penny and Jane, the women Anika’s age who lived down the street and were building a brick wall around the little garden in front of their house.

  Anika stopped listening when she saw that there was a letter for her from Nyenye. It had been weeks since she’d last heard from her grandmother. They never spoke on the phone though Nyenye could have used Anika’s parents’ one. But she wouldn’t talk on it, nor would she have a phone in her flat, in spite of the pleas of Anika’s parents. They were worried that something might happen to her, she was an old woman after all, in her mid-seventies and living alone.

  With undisguised curiosity, Mrs Thornton stared at the airmail envelope Anika was now holding. ‘Is it from your family?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Sad when you leave your loved ones behind.’ This thought stimulated a new stream of consciousness, and off she went. She could talk with the ease of a prayer wheel spinning its mantras.

  Anika broke into the flow with a mantra of her own. ‘Must dash,’ she told her, and repeated the words twice, before sticking her key into the front door lock and shutting it firmly behind her.

  There was a murmur of voices from the front room where Tabilla must have been doing a fitting. In the kitchen Anika found a knife and carefully slit the flap of the envelope. It never did to open a letter too quickly. It was better to prolong the experience, to enjoy the anticipation. Then to unfold the pages and slowly read the cramped handwriting. And here was a surprise: the first page
was written in Miklos’s hand; Miklos her brother who was so busy completing his PhD at the University of Szeged that he rarely had time to write letters.

  Anika took the sheets of paper into the garden. Sitting on the step of the little terrace – where the scents of rosemary and roses mingled with the star jasmine that Tabilla was training over the side fence – she began to read.

  Dear Anika,

  I am in Budapest for the weekend and Nyenye is standing over me with a whip in her hand. She said I don’t write enough letters and she is right, of course, but what’s a man to do when there’s too many other things demanding attention? Wine is wonderful, women are wonderful, song is wonderful. And the trouble is that I’m better at maths than at writing. But you’ll be pleased to know that I’m over halfway through my thesis now. I’ve read your letters to Mama and Papa and I’m glad to hear that all is well with you.

  Love you, little sister!

  Miklos

  Miklos’s few words made Anika laugh. She visualised him struggling with a pen at Nyenye’s kitchen table. Miklos with his ovoid head, high cheekbones, sandy colouring and the green eyes flecked with yellow, writing his exquisite calligraphy in large letters, while Nyenye hovered behind him to make sure he filled an entire sheet of paper. Wine, women and song; how typical that sentence was of him. He was the only member of Anika’s immediate family who managed his life with joy, who was unfailingly demonstrative. And who saw only what he wanted to see.

  Nyenye wrote about domestic things, about the herbs she’d bought from the market that were flourishing on her kitchen windowsill and the spring cleaning she’d begun. Her letters brought her to Anika as if she were sitting by her side.