by John Klima
I felt myself blushing in turn, for the passion of the writing had shocked and excited me. It was almost too much to be granted such an intimate glimpse into the mind of stranger on a first encounter. Especially when she was sitting just across a small marble table.
I glanced up anxiously, to find that Frida was still watching me, a distant fire in her eyes, a strangely satisfied smile on her lips. I was sure she could see right through me. I felt naked.
“But what about you?” She asked, idly dipping her strong, writerly fingers into her wine-glass. “I have been monopolising the conversation perhaps . . .”
“Oh, I . . . that is . . .” I stuttered. “I really don’t know . . .” For the truth was that, having been brought so suddenly face to face with her achievements, I felt quite inadequate. Comparing myself to her—her drive, her focus, above all her precocious and undeniable talent—I felt like the worst kind of dilettante. My two little books of poetry . . . My superficial familiarity with the Paris art world . . . My no doubt undeserved reputation as one of the avant-garde’s favorite models . . . Where did that leave me? And she wrote brilliantly. Beautifully. Far better than I did, and English was not even her native language. How could I measure up to this mysterious, attractive, and above all, gifted woman?
But in the end I told her some more about New York and Paris. About taking absinthe with Luis Bunuel and oversize Havana Club cocktails with Hemingway, hashish with Jean Cocteau and tea with Janet Flanner. And after a while I even felt relaxed enough to tell her about my scarlet picnic in the Bois de Boulogne, where everything, including the bread, had been dyed red with a truly nauseating volume of cochineal, and which a roving reporter had placed on the front page of the Daily Telegraph, after several of the unwitting participants had been taken ill. Though I’ve always suspected this particular editorial decision owed more to the Telegraph’s prurient interest in my shaven-headed nuns, in their resplendent red cowls and their silver constructivist rosaries, than to any actual harm that had come to our victims.
I had recounted it all before, of course, many more times than I cared to remember, and for a while I was afraid I might be boring her. But then I realized that this kind of “news” did not usually travel well between cities—indeed, there had been times when it had hardly seemed capable of making the short jump across the Seine—and Frida was clearly enjoying herself. So we arranged to meet the next afternoon, and we bid each other good night in a flurry of high spirits that carried me through the rest of the evening, like the dance of her wayward rusalkas. She seemed different, though, in the cold light of sobriety. Subdued. Haunted. Ill-at-ease. No longer the gay raconteuse. Almost as if she were suddenly afraid of me.
She was sitting in the Cafe Slovanka, on one of those short, busy streets by the river, where the trams dash past the site of the old pagan burial ground, up to the gloomy old townhouse, where Dr. Faust reputedly once sold his soul to the Devil. A journal I instantly recognized as This Quarter lay on the table in front of her, its spine cracked in a way that told me she must only recently have been working her way through the pictures. One hand was stretched out across the back of the chair to her left, tapping arrhythmically, while the other fiddled nervously with the rough edges of the magazine’s cover. Her face was dark and unreadable. Then she glanced up, and her expression changed to one of guilt and embarrassment, and I was dismayed to find myself responding in kind, like a tremulous schoolgirl.
But surely it could not be that edition?—I caught myself thinking. How had it got to Prague? And how had she found it so quickly?
But of course it was, and she turned it over to show me the documentary evidence of my misspent youth. All of sudden, my naked torso, in Lee Miller’s racy, black-and-white portrait, stared up at us from the sedate mahogany table-top of this stuffy haven of Central European gentility.
“Why did you not tell me you were famous?” she cried in a constricted voice, as I sat down heavily. “I had no idea . . . I did not realise . . .”
“Oh, I’d hardly call it fame.” I tried to be as dismissive as possible. “Infamy maybe . . . It’s nothing. It’s just something I did.”
“But the photo . . .” She stammered. “It is beautiful. You are beautiful.”
The sincerity with which she blurted this out was so guileless, I hardly knew how to respond.
“Really . . .” I paused, trying not to sound either insensitive or bumptious. “I was just in the right place at the right time. Your own photo in the same pages would be ten times prettier. Maybe twenty . . . Do you not have any similar photographers in Prague?”
“Well, yes, there is Drtikol . . .” She swallowed. “But I couldn’t . . . I could never . . . My parents . . .”
Her voice had started to rise, and for a moment I thought she was going to burst into a childish and distinctly unbecoming wail. But then, as if remembering where she was, she glanced at the surrounding tables—at the two fat ladies to our left, and the ascetic young man with what seemed to be a Czech edition of William B. Seabrook to our right—and continued almost in a whisper.
“Prague is too small.”
Her distraction seemed genuine enough, but all the same I couldn’t help wondering if she was using her family as an excuse, for I thought I detected an element of excitement under the surface of her apparent embarrassment. Was it possible that, in actual fact, the real reason she was flustered was because she had discovered there might be circumstances, under which she, too, would want to be naked for others? Or was it simply that she was so unused to receiving compliments?
“Come . . .” She said suddenly, regaining something of her old composure. “There is an exhibition I wanted to show you. Toyen, the Czech woman artist, has a private view this afternoon, and I think you would like her. The gallery is just around the corner . . .”
She led me to a modern, white-washed building, tacked onto a medieval water-tower on one of the islands in the river. There was already a crowd inside, milling around the stark, functionalist interior, which was hung with large, colorful canvasses.
I was expecting her to produce a ticket at the door, or at least some kind of invitation, but the major-domo simply waved her through with an obeisant bow. She was a deep one, was our Frida—evidently much better known around Prague than she liked to let on. No wonder she had started to worry what our neighbors in the cafe would think. A couple of ladies in the gallery smiled as they saw her, and Frida nodded in return, clearly right back in her element.
“Look,” she said, pointing at a young woman in a suit, with her hair slicked back like a boy’s. “There’s the artist. And there” —she added with a moue of distaste— “is that potato-headed idiot of a husband she takes with her everywhere . . .”
“But she’s hardly more than a girl,” I protested unthinkingly. “How can she possibly have painted enough to fill a whole gallery at her age?”
Frida laughed. “She’s two years older than me. Twenty-nine. And she’s been working for the best part of a decade. You’d be amazed at how much you can produce in ten years, if you really set your mind to it . . .”
And there we had it. I was slow and lazy.
I looked again at Toyen—at her slicked-back hair and her deeply shadowed eyes—her androgynous manner, and the way it was contradicted by her unmistakably female figure—and decided there was something quite mysterious about her. A sense of immanence in the way her mere presence seemed to illuminate the gallery around her. A luminosity. A sheen. A lustre at the back of her eyes, and a rotundity to her spirit . . . She seemed as ripe with the seeds of unexpressed artistic forms—as heavy with reverie—as a pomegranate.
And then I spied the fat man from the previous night—Nezval, as I would later learn to call him—standing to one side in another of his rumpled suits, staring at Toyen hungrily, as if he would like to swallow her whole. So he felt it, too. That fecundity.
It was all there in her canvasses. Superficially, of course, there was something of the surrealist abo
ut her, but she was quite unlike anyone I had seen in Paris. She had a plasticity of form—a fullness of color, an integrity of vision—that somehow succeeded in conveying a feeling of great depth, both physical and psychological. There were none of de Chirico’s nightmare colonnades or Dali’s calculated elisions here. Her paintings were, rather, inhabited by organic forms—by the uncanny womb-like creatures of her spectral forests, and by sea shores full of coded eroticism—by the blue-and-orange honeycombs of her tropical coral reefs, and by giant white eggs laid bare on the red sands of the Gobi. Her compositions seemed to have grown spontaneously out of the mulch of her unconscious by bringing together a variety of natural features—rock formations, tree stumps, mushrooms, owls, meadowsweet—and transforming them, like the Welsh goddess Blodeuwedd, into a living entity.
There was something intensely feminine about all this. As if my own womb had been pinned out for everyone to see, with an umbrella and a sewing machine, on the operating table of her oversize canvasses. I felt instinctively that this was what Frida might look like inside, if I were to dissect her.
Frida must have sensed my excitement because she sidled up to me now and asked, “Do you like her?”
“Oh, yes,” I replied, my heart still full of translucent indigo waters and strangely mutated lobsters, my eyes full of stars and starfish. “She’s fabulous.”
“Of or pertaining to fable . . .” Frida laughed. “An apt description . . .”
She led me over to a particularly imposing piece called Morning, its colors bright and sparkling as Monarch butterflies, its indeterminate forms ridged and suggestive as oysters.
“Do you know what I like about her most?” she asked, gesturing at the wall in front of her. “It’s the way she constructs her canvasses in layers . . . Layers of paint . . . Layers of images and blankness . . . Layers of found objects and meanings . . . She’s like an archaeologist in reverse, piling on the strata, until her intentions emerge into the light, like Neolithic hand axes pulled up out of the ground by a medieval ploughshare . . . Like ancient cycads weathered out of the Old Red Sandstone by the spontaneous action of air and water . . . Like jelly hedgehogs plucked out of the leaf litter by curious bands of passing children . . . And yet, despite their complexity, her pictures somehow never acquire the artificiality of so many of her colleagues’. There is always a transparency about her. As if her canvasses are acts of divination, and not just paintings. As if, through the rituals of her art, she is able to recover lost fragments of myth and folklore—forgotten dreams and beliefs, antique fears and obeisances—out of the depths of our collective unconscious . . .”
Like you, I wanted to say. For what were her own studies, if not acts of reclaiming? Her admiration for Toyen was clearly that of one Sibyl for another. But instead, for no very good reason, I was suddenly reminded of the film we had seen the previous evening. Its visionary quality.
“Like Murnau and his vampires?” I asked on impulse. I think I was just as surprised by what had come out of my mouth as she was.
“Yes.” She replied eventually, her eyes clouding over again. She seemed troubled, as if she was being forced to remember something she would rather have forgotten. “Yes, exactly. Like Murnau and my vampires.”
She paused, and then with an evident effort, turned to face me. “Zora,” she said in a voice so small it made her seem half her age, “there is something I have to show you. I’ve been putting it off all day. All night. Since yesterday . . . But there’s no escaping it. Will you come back with me to my apartment?”
I am ashamed to say I hesitated. It was only our second meeting, after all, and what I did know of her, really? Was I ready for the escalation of intimacy that was implied by her question on such a casual acquaintanceship?
But Frida, seeing me draw back, misinterpreted my reasons. “It’s all right,” she assured me, “you don’t have to meet my parents. My father is in Olomouc, and my mother is almost certainly at the Scheinpflugs. We shall be quite alone, except for the maid. It’s just that I don’t have my things with me. Won’t you please come?”
Well, of course I went.
She led me out of the gallery and back in the direction of the Slovanka Cafe, and then to a No. 16 tram. It was heading for the municipal cemetery, I noticed, and I wondered for a moment if, despite appearances, she might not have more in common with Murnau than she was admitting. But after five stops, she leaped up and pulled the bell cord.
We found ourselves on a steeply sloping street, lined with luxurious, but slightly old-fashioned, Art Nouveau apartment blocks, with a view out over the parks and rooftops of the southern suburbs. It was not hard to see why the medieval kings of Bohemia had chosen this particular hill for their vineyards.
“It’s spectacular, isn’t it?” Frida had stopped in front an ornate five-story wedding cake of a building, painted an improbable shade of chartreuse, but I assumed she meant the panorama of the hills to the south, with their faint hint of green meadows and blue-flowering chicory, just on the far side of the railway line. Something about the light always gives it away, that transition between the new city street and the old rural suburb. I knew it only too well from Paris—from all those absurdly over-optimistic small towns on the edge of New York, and before that, from London.
“Well, this is it . . .” Frida had found her tongue again, the discomposure of her departure from the gallery apparently forgotten.
She opened the engraved glass street door and flipped a suggestively round, brass toggle to light up the heavy, stone staircase. I gazed at the light fitting in wonder. It looked, for the world, like some hapless water-nymph’s ice-puckered, pre-Raphaelite nipple, and Frida had just tweaked it. Who designed these things?
I paused for a few moments on the threshold, and briefly—fleetingly—I was seized by a strange sense of anxiety, like a voyeur who is finally about to commit her first act of trespass. But then it passed, to be replaced by a rush of hilarity. I felt ten again. It was all I could do, not to seize Frida by the hand and run up the stairs, skipping and jumping and belting out nursery rhymes like a hoyden.
I think Frida must have caught something of my mood, too, because she laughed out loud, and started to take the stairs two at a time. By the time we reached her door, we were both quite out of breath, and though, of course, it’s easy to say this with hindsight, I wonder, now, how much of that was simply down to our having raced up four flights of a very steep stairwell. Because, undeniably, I was excited by Frida. I was attracted by her wildly unconventional, angular good looks, and her charm and her hospitality. I was entranced by her scholarship and her urbanity and her brilliance. And as she searched for her keys, I realized that, somewhat unexpectedly, I was looking forward to this visit with far more than my usual half-hearted sense of anticipation.
What was it that this strange and beautiful young woman could possibly want with me? What was her secret? And what was it that she had so urgently needed to show me, that we had abandoned the equally brilliant Toyen’s private view?
The apartment itself, when we entered it, was huge and quiet, with high ceilings and ornate plaster mouldings, and an extensive lining of books and paintings from the end of the previous century. Evidently her parents’. But for all their age, they were clearly still well-loved and carefully tended. One picture in particular, tucked away between an impressive library of the more obscure French symbolists, and a well-thumbed edition of Zeyer—evidences, no doubt, of that earlier generation’s idle and bookish childhood—caught my eye almost immediately. It depicted the half-length figure of a young man with a camellia, his eyes dark and brooding under strangely vulnerable, hooded brows, his skinny body draped asthenically in the folds of an over-sized frock coat. If it were not for the wispy brown line of his moustache, he would have looked almost exactly like Frida.
Frida saw me examining it, and just for a few seconds, she looked mortified. Like a pilgrim who discovers, at journey’s end, that the promise of palm trees she has been pursuing all d
ay is, after all, only a mirage.
“Your father?” I guessed.
“Yes,” she nodded sheepishly, and I could almost taste her embarrassment. “He used to be quite good friends with Svabinsky, when he was younger . . .” She said it, as if she was making excuses. But then, who doesn’t feel the need to apologise for their parents?
A maid—in uniform, no less—chose that moment to stick her head out of the kitchen, but Frida dismissed her, and the girl left us alone to contemplate the mixed blessing of families.
“Come, let me show you my study . . .”
She led me down a narrow corridor to what turned out to be the front of the house, and into a large, sunny room, centred around an alcove with a view of the street and a huge wooden desk. There were bookshelves everywhere, and papers weighed down by fragments of pottery, and a sofa which looked as if it might also double up as a day-bed. A strange mixture of straw masks and carefully-framed pieces of folk art hung on the walls, while a glass-fronted cabinet held what seemed at first sight to be a pile of rusting manacles.
“Sit . . .” Frida waved me over to the sofa, while she herself wandered over to her desk. She seemed anxious again, I realized.
“So this is where you wrote your masterwork?” I asked, only half-teasing.
She nodded absentmindedly, flushed and seemingly intent on her papers.
“It looks cozy. Lived in . . .” —I continued, trying to put her at her ease— “. . . a powerhouse. I’m impressed.”
