He turned to look at the second painting. The hot summer days, the tinkling bell of the ice cream seller, the flowers crushed under foot, crumpled in people’s hands, too many plants, too many flowers, a perfume that was overly sweet, that troubled and lulled the spirit; too much light, a savage glare, the songs of birds in the sky: this was his land, his past, and he was rediscovering it.
He had walked into the bookshop without thinking, but overcome by inexplicable shyness, he didn’t yet ask to see the paintings; he picked up books at random, felt them, opened them.
‘Are you selling paintings now?’ he asked at last.
‘No, Monsieur Harry,’ replied the bookseller, who had known him since he was a schoolboy and helped him put together the valuable library that he had begun creating aged fifteen. ‘No, but the artist, who is young and unknown, asked me to display them, as a favour. She’s a woman,’ he added after a moment of silence.
‘Ah!’ said Harry.
But whether the painter was a man or a woman didn’t concern him.
‘I’d quite like to see them,’ he said.
He took them and leaned them against a stack of books. He became engrossed in studying the sombre sky, the small hovels that seemed whipped by the wind. He felt intense, exquisite pleasure when he looked at the golden, fiery garden. The northern springtime when icy fog and windy storms gave way to an intoxicating, wondrous summer . . . how could he have forgotten it all?
‘They’re not bad,’ he said out loud, forcing himself to sound indifferent.
‘Not bad at all, especially when you think they’re the work of a young woman who can’t be more than twenty. But then, I think you know her, don’t you?’
‘Me? No.’
‘Didn’t you see her name?’
He hadn’t thought to look. He made it out in the corner of the painting: ‘Ada Sinner’.
‘Well, that’s funny,’ he said, recognising his own name. ‘A young girl of twenty, you say? What does she look like?’
The bookseller smiled.
‘You really don’t know who she is?’
‘No. Why?’
‘Because . . . Do you remember that book that was mysteriously sent to you a few years ago, just before you got married? It was the same young woman who bought it.’
‘That isn’t possible!’ cried Harry, with a sharp gesture of surprise.
‘I recognised her at once. She has dark brown hair, rather beautiful; she looks foreign.’
‘Have you had these paintings here for long?’
‘Several months. You’ve walked past them twenty times without ever looking at them. I think the young woman only insisted I take them because she hoped that one day, sooner or later, you’d notice them. That was partly why I agreed, and also because she was so determined . . . I’ve never met anyone more persuasive. In the end, it was impossible not to give in.’
Harry frowned. He had more or less guessed the truth. He didn’t associate Ada with the little girl who had appeared at his house on the day of a pogrom, in the wind and snow, but he sensed that she was a compatriot and a Jew, undoubtedly all alone in Paris and clinging to the name of the rich Sinners as to a supreme hope. Like all Jews, he was more sharply, more sadly scandalised than a Christian by the faults that were specifically Jewish. And that tenacious energy, that almost savage need to get what one wants, that blind scorn for whatever anyone else might think, all these things were classed in his mind in a single category: ‘Jewish arrogance’.
He had absolutely no desire whatsoever to meet this Ada Sinner.
‘I’ll gladly buy these two paintings,’ he said to the bookseller, ‘but you must handle all the negotiations and you can’t say that I am the buyer. This young woman must be some distant relation and I haven’t the slightest inclination to meet her. But I like the paintings. Ask her how much she wants.’
20
Harry had no desire to meet Ada Sinner but he couldn’t stop himself from talking about her paintings and showing them to guests who came to see him. People liked them; they found them realistic yet poetic in a strange, wild way. At the lunches that Laurence gave, there was always a small group of people asking where ‘the pictures by the unknown artist’ were. Harry kept them in his own room; it was elegant, with a bay window that shed an unusually soft light on the two paintings.
And so Ada’s name began to become known in a social circle whose very existence was as obscure to her as some faraway planet, while she continued living her poor, lonely life. One day, some friends of Harry and Laurence who had lunched with them remarked that, after all, this young woman might have other works to show them, just as interesting as these. They proposed to go and visit her in her studio, if she was still alive and well, and living in Paris. It would be amusing, they thought, to turn up at her door with no warning, to dangle before her eyes the possibility of fame and fortune, ready to forget her in an instant, however, if she did not completely live up to the hopes they placed in her. Naturally, they didn’t put it in this way: they were full of good intentions, they were civilised and caring, but curious and always eager for new experiences. After all, they loved Art above all else. Hadn’t one of them even said – she was an American with rosy cheeks and white hair – ‘I simply couldn’t live without music. I would even abandon my sick child to get to Salzburg to hear Eine kleine Nachtmusik.’ But she said anything that came into her mind without thinking. She had no way of knowing what she would really do at the bedside of a sick child: she only had dogs.
Harry – he didn’t know why – tried to dissuade them; but they were so enthusiastic, like children eager to see some new spectacle, that they finally convinced their host.
‘Oh really, Harry! You know you’re mad about this young woman’s painting!’
‘It’s not that. I think she has both talent and awkwardness in equal parts, but she also has a wild, dark side . . .’
‘Exactly, and you adore that . . .’
He said nothing. How could he make them understand the superstitious thrill that gripped him whenever he looked at those paintings? It was like stepping into an abandoned house where people you once knew and loved had lived, but were now dead. What was the point of saying anything? It was better to give in.
‘It will be my pleasure to go with you, if you like,’ he replied politely.
The men, their faces red after the long meal and the excellent old wines that Laurence served, and the women, who’d touched up their make-up, left, heading for Ada’s lodgings, whose address they had obtained from the bookshop on the Rue des Belles-Feuilles.
They walked up the stark staircase. Ada came and opened the door when they rang. She seemed extremely young, almost a child, they thought. The short skirt she wore added even more to the impression of extreme youth. Her dress was several years old, when they were made very short, above the knee. As soon as Ada saw the strangers, she thought of her inappropriate skirt and blushed; tears welled up in her eyes. She looked unhappy, terrified and defiant. She took a few steps back. Harry caught the look she gave them from beneath her long eyelashes, a quick, piercing look, rapidly suppressed, that seemed to beg the familiar walls for help.
‘Poor little thing,’ thought Harry.
He wanted to reassure her.
‘Forgive us for intruding on you in your studio,’ he said softly, ‘but I and the people here are great admirers of the two little paintings of yours that I recently acquired. We wanted to tell you that.’
She thanked them. Her voice shook at first, but she ended her brief sentence rather calmly. Laurence, who had been moved by the obvious emotion of the young woman, felt suddenly colder towards her, even hostile. These foreigners had such confidence . . . all hidden beneath a ridiculous shyness. This young woman already seemed so at ease. Only Harry noticed how she quickly put her hands behind her back, presumably so that no one could see they were shaking.
‘Come in,’ she said, nodding towards the door.
She blushed again sadly when she
caught them staring at the shabby furniture. They gathered around her easel. Feelings of curiosity, excellent intentions, the desire to shine, to be amused, to have their spirits soar, rushed through them, drove them towards Ada, inspired exclamations of admiration, as if they were at a zoo, studying a rare, wild animal in its cage.
‘But how old are you?’
‘Twenty-three.’
‘So young! How could you possibly paint like this?’
‘I work a lot,’ Ada replied.
But her explanation was too simple to satisfy the need for the miraculous that lives in every person’s heart.
‘No!’ they immediately cried out. ‘What you do is so sincere, ingenuous, barbaric! That’s what’s so beautiful!’
‘Don’t you find there’s something Dostoyevskian about her?’ a woman murmured, looking Ada up and down through her lorgnette.
‘Are you related to Harry?’
Ada and Harry looked at each other and smiled. She broke through the circle that surrounded him, walked towards the young man and asked quietly, ‘You are my cousin, Harry Sinner, aren’t you?’
‘Yes. I’ve seen you before; I remember now, but it’s as distant as a dream.’
‘You don’t remember Israel Sinner, who worked for your grandfather a long time ago, back home?’
‘I don’t recall.’
‘And you don’t remember a little boy and girl who hid in your house one morning? The morning of a pogrom?’ she asked, looking sharply around her and lowering her voice even more, just as someone who knows a secret rite speaks more softly in a crowd when only one person is meant to understand.
‘I remember now,’ said Harry.
And his face, normally so cold and impassive, suddenly became so passionate, so attentive, so like the boy he once was, that Ada lost all her shyness.
‘Really? You really remember?’
‘Yes: a little boy with torn clothes and a little girl with wonderful eyes, a long fringe and a thick head of black, dishevelled hair . . . How could I have not recognised you? That is one of the most vivid memories of my childhood in a way, one of the clearest, one that is cutting through me again right now, one that I still dream of. Yes,’ he whispered, looking at Ada in surprise, ‘I dream about you, very often.’
She pictured him so clearly, beside his sleeping wife, in his large French bed, dreaming about her, that an extraordinary feeling of joy filled her heart.
He smiled.
‘But my dream always ends up as a nightmare. You come in, take me by the hand and lead me God knows where . . .’
He laughed, but with a slight quiver of pain on his lips. ‘You aren’t angry?’ he asked.
‘No. But even in a dream, I could never hurt you.’
‘That little boy, what happened to him?’
‘I married him.’
‘He was ugly . . . but he also had a face that you don’t forget.’
‘Do you remember,’ Ada suddenly asked, ‘the weather, the air back home? The evenings on the riverbank? The streets near where you lived had so many lime trees that, in springtime, you walked beneath an archway of blossom and on a carpet of flowers. And the dust in summer?’
‘The shouts of the chouroum-bouroum, the carpet seller,’ murmured Harry.
‘A Tartar who went from door to door?’
‘Yes. And the little red-headed children, the acrobats who came to perform outside people’s windows in winter?’
‘And the crazy old man who had sung at the Opera and thought he was still a singer, draping himself with faded fine clothing, a crown of dried leaves on his head, making grand gestures and imagining that he was singing, though not a sound escaped his lips?’
‘Yes. And the snow fell on him and his beard was tossed about in the wind; and when the children were naughty, the maid would threaten them: “Be quiet or I’ll give you to the crazy old singer.”’
‘Why did you send me a gift a few years ago?’ he asked suddenly, with no affectation or harshness, but with a strange kind of anguish. ‘Why do something so mad?’
‘I don’t know. I had to.’
‘So mad!’ he said once more.
This time, she remained calm. She looked at him pensively, sadly.
‘You can’t imagine what you’ve meant to me.’
‘But that was . . . back home . . . so long ago . . .’
‘Yes, back home . . . but what happened there is perhaps more important than you might think, more important than anything else, even your life here, your marriage. We were born there; our roots are there . . .’
‘You mean in Russia?’
‘No. Before that . . . further back than that . . .’
‘It isn’t just some climate or particular place on earth,’ murmured Harry, ‘but a specific way of loving, of desiring . . .’
‘What have you desired most in the world?’
‘The young woman I married. And you?’
‘To know you.’
‘If you desired it as passionately, as hopelessly, as I desired . . . having Laurence,’ he said very quietly, ‘well, then, I feel sorry for you.’
‘Hopelessly? Why do you say that? You have her.’
‘Yes,’ he said, somewhat bitterly. ‘Like an object seen in a mirror, a reflection, a shadow, but which you can neither grasp hold of, nor . . .’
He stopped.
‘Don’t listen to me. I demand the impossible. The truth is, I’m happy.’
People were walking towards them.
‘I want to help you; I want to see you again . . .’ he said hurriedly. ‘What can I do to help you?’
‘Nothing, oh nothing,’ said Ada quickly. ‘I’m happy that you have the two little paintings in your house.’
‘Can’t I do anything for that boy . . . your husband?’
She shook her head.
‘No, nothing.’
People were coming towards them. She walked away from him without saying a word.
21
When Harry and his wife got home, Laurence immediately went in to see the baby, who was twenty months old; carrying him in her arms, she returned to where Harry was waiting for her. It was an hour before dinner and the child’s bedtime. One by one, all the rituals were carried out: Harry watched his son roll about on the carpet; he sang him a song, walked around with him perched on his shoulders, pretended to box with him, and finally, when he was excited, happy, his cheeks red, his black curls having lost their beautifully controlled shape and turned back into the frizzy, dishevelled mass God had intended, he handed him over to his Swiss governess.
He went back into the library. Laurence placed a small table next to his armchair that held his ashtray, the book he was reading and a glass of sherry, then she switched on the lamp. Each of her gestures was graceful, Harry thought once more. No one could arrange flowers, light a fire, adjust a lampshade better than her. At the beginning of their marriage, Harry thought he would never tire of watching her coming and going, doing the simplest of things. During their secret engagement, this was what he most often, most happily imagined: walking beside her, sitting opposite her during meals, silently contemplating her face illuminated in the lamplight. Was everything as he had hoped? Is anything ever as one hopes? He wasn’t ungrateful to Laurence, not at all. More than anything, he wished to make her happy. And she was happy . . . sometimes even too readily, too easily pleased by a pretty outfit, a bouquet of fresh flowers, an unexpected gift. It was strange . . . he was grateful she was like that, but, at times, simultaneously wary, worried. He could not believe she was really so easily satisfied. In the early days of their marriage, he continually asked her: ‘Are you really happy? Is everything exactly as you dreamed it would be?’ He asked so often, sounding so sad that Laurence became irritated (but she was wiser than him and so said nothing). But then again, she had never felt that insatiable thirst for happiness, had she? Dear Laurence . . . He took her hand as she handed him the paper knife that he was looking for without realising it. (He wasn’t e
ven aware he’d been trying to find it.)
‘You know what I want before I do,’ he said.
She smiled.
‘I watch you all the time. I read your face like a sailor who studies the shape of the clouds to predict calm waters or a storm.’
Such goodness and solicitude, her sweet disposition and even temper made her the best of women, he mused.
‘My kind Laurence,’ he said, sounding calm and affectionate. Why could he find nothing to say to her?
He had loved her so passionately! But she had yielded to him with modesty and mockery . . . Oh, a very slight mockery, but still . . .‘Your Oriental love, your wild love,’ she would say. But he could only love passionately, madly, with total abandon, or . . . cease to love. And so they sat side by side, without saying a word.
‘So you really like what that young woman does so much?’ she asked, leaning towards the fire while slowly toying with her jade necklace. ‘Did you see the painting on the easel when we went in? That low sky, those foreign men with curls falling down their cheeks, walking in the snow behind a coffin set diagonally across a sleigh?’
‘A Jewish funeral,’ said Harry.
‘It’s sinister, sordid, don’t you think? And of course, it’s not new. We’ve seen those brownish grey tones and that flowing silvery white a hundred times before.’
‘But you can’t imagine how real it is, how true,’ said Harry, suddenly animated and leaning towards her. ‘You shouldn’t look at it as an art lover, do you see? Her technique is weak, but the way she paints affects me in a way that makes me forget the picture and allows me to rediscover myself, the real me. And that is undoubtedly what she is aiming for in her work. Along those strange, twisting paths, I find myself . . .’
The Dogs and the Wolves Page 12
