A Mind of Winter

by Shira Nayman

  The only way I can think to convey Oscar’s disconcertingly different auras is to compare them with the effect that differing light can have on the composition of a photograph. A landscape photographed on a sunny afternoon will of course differ from the same landscape photographed on a blustery evening (imagine spears of lightning or a darkening horizon), though the shape of the dead tree trunk against the shoulder of a mountain remains virtually the same in each exposure.

  Until I stumbled upon Oscar sitting in the orchard engrossed in his book, I thought I’d had a pretty good grasp of his unusual, shifting nature. But there, in his mystifying solitude, I sensed a transformation of another order. Let me point you back to the example of the two photographs taken at different times of day. I draw your attention, now, to a third photograph. At first, you are puzzled; you have never seen a composition like this, though it is a strangeness you cannot identify. The same landscape scene, with a small house in the middle distance, a summer cottage perhaps, the retreat of someone who likes his peace.

  The contours of the house are sharp and clear: they could not be better delineated. Every leaf on the trees surrounding the house and spreading unevenly toward the mountain is visible, even the veins standing out, which you know cannot be, given the scale of the picture. You scan the photograph for clues. What bubbles to consciousness is that in this picture, there is no sky. Moreover, you know, by intuition, that there is also an absence of air. And, while you know rationally that the photograph could not exist without it, you become convinced that what is most decisively missing here is light: no sun, no seepage of day through cloud, no candle or lantern or lamp, no flashbulb, not even the quivering, feather-tip flame of a match. It is impossible, but there it is: an earthly reality devoid of its most grounding ephemera—air and sky and light—a world buckled in on itself, though invisibly, lifedefying as a vacuum.

  Truly, what would this look like? What would you see?

  “The East,” Barnaby said.

  I had come to Barnaby’s rooms several times, now that Simon was away. I reached for a cigarette.

  “All of it?” I held the flame to the tip. “Numerous countries, hundreds of islands, you loved them all?”

  “No,” Barnaby said. “But I did love Shanghai. Despite its cruelty. Or maybe because of it.”

  “Cruelty.” I exhaled the smoke. “Do tell.”

  Barnaby took a cigarette from my silver case and struck a match. If it was possible for him to look even more comfortable than usual, it was when he was about to embark on a story about his travels. Was I imagining it, or did his happiness deepen the further away the country of his recounted adventure?

  Now, he described a late-night rickshaw ride through streets that were alive with activity: spice merchants preparing their stands for the morning, an old woman sorting dried herbs, a butcher stringing ducks by their necks upon rows of metal hooks. Beyond the commercial district, prostitutes gathered in little groups, wearing tight-fitting dresses, slit from calf to thigh. He described how he reached an alley near the bay, where the air was filled with the stench of rotting junks. The only light on the street came from the doorway of a narrow building, and this was where the rickshaw man, his shirt soaked with sweat, let Barnaby off. Inside, Han Shu, the proprietor, took Barnaby to a large room lined with carved mahogany benches, where opium smoke hung in such thick clouds that the people, some seated, others lying stretched out, seemed to him to be very far away. He told me how Han Shu scanned the room, pointed to the corner, called out something in Chinese. A slender woman dressed in an evening dress emerged from the fog of blue smoke. Strawberryblond hair framed her delicate features and she smiled, then handed Barnaby a pipe. She was an Englishwoman, and her name was Christine.

  I flashed on that odd moment in the garden, when Oscar had looked at me as if I were someone else and called me Christine. Could it be a coincidence? The same name as the woman Barnaby professed to have known in Shanghai? Could Oscar and Barnaby possibly have known this same woman?

  For a moment, Barnaby hesitated, casting at me a quizzical eye. “Funny,” he said. “It hadn’t occurred to me before.”

  “What hadn’t occurred to you?”

  “You remind me of her. And yet, the two of you couldn’t be more different. Opposites, in fact.”

  “Barnaby, you’re not making any sense.”

  “It’s as if one of you is the negative, and the other the photographic print.”

  “Heavens—I’m not sure which I’d rather be. Mysterious and transparent, or two-dimensional but well-defined.”

  Barnaby offered no rejoinder; he seemed lost in some complicated thought, as if puzzling something out.

  “Barnaby,” I prodded gently, my interest piqued. “You were telling me about Christine.”

  “Yes. Christine.”

  Whatever it was that had momentarily unsettled him seemed to vanish; Barnaby glided right back into his story. He talked for some time about her, and I found myself feeling more and more uncomfortable. Not jealousy—I still suffered those curdled depths when on occasion I would torture myself with thoughts of Simon and his first (his only?) great love. No, this was something else.

  It was one thing to make a story of a panther, even of poor Charlie, who had himself made a narrative of his own life. But making a story out of Christine’s life seemed another matter. I listened closely. There was a beginning and a middle, and now Barnaby was moving into the part that would be the end. It involved Christine’s terrible decline—and then, something about her disappearing, but the details kept eluding me, slipping through my fingers like sand. As for Barnaby, I’d never seen him so engrossed.

  The story ended as I knew it would: Christine desperate, Barnaby as savior.

  “I looked everywhere for her. In all the seedier dens, where they offer a lower grade of smoke. The rooms were twice as crowded—almost all Chinese. Foreigners didn’t go to those places much. I only had to mention that I was looking for an Englishwoman, and someone would remember her. But I kept missing her—once, by no more than an hour. Finally, she showed up on my doorstep. I scarcely recognized her. Opium can suck the life out of you, if you let it.”

  I rose, refilled Barnaby’s glass, then emptied the crystal decanter into my own. “So it wasn’t the whole of the Far East you loved,” I said. “It was a woman. Christine.”

  “I’m not sure I’d put it that way.” Barnaby’s voice was serious, but I could see mischief in his eyes. We drew on our cigarettes, exhaled long trails of white smoke.

  I walked to the window.

  “I see,” I said, drawing aside the blue drape and looking out at the black stretch of lawn. “So that’s what you like to do. Save people.”

  Another broken night. Sleep, I knew, would not come now. I rose, glanced with a pang at Simon’s empty side of the bed, and dressed. I’d been working too long on this project; it had been foolhardy to take on the essay for the catalog.

  Frayed by tiredness, though my legs felt strong, I moved down the stairs noiselessly, two at a time. The basement studio was the last place I wanted to be. I headed toward the kitchen for a glass of milk.

  I was sick of the work. I had begun to think of abandoning the project altogether. An image reared up in my mind: a woman photographer in a jeep, crammed in among a group of American GIs, bouncing along a narrow paved road. The driver turns onto a dirt path, the jeep careens. They all jam together; a soldier lets out a whoop. The woman holds her camera on her lap, tightening her grip each time the jeep hits a bump. The men are alive with chatter, excited to have a female companion. It is a fresh sunny day. The war is over, though an observer would sense, in the giddiness and the fragile edge to the banter, that this is not yet a reality the group can entirely believe. Of one thing, though, the men, to a person, feel certain: they are the liberators of Europe.

  When they drive through the gates, the assemblage turns silent. They are out of the jeep now, scattered about the raked-dirt quadrangle. A white open sky emits an
incantatory glow. The woman looks around her for some time. She sees everything, but what she photographs is the commandant’s body. He lies in the center of the square, facedown in a threeday-old slick of blood crusted and cracked as dried mud. Two officers talk to each other in low voices. This she photographs as well. They are discussing the fact that the enlisted men don’t want to remove the body: that they want it to remain where the recently freed prisoners left it. The officers are considering the practicalities: maggots, the threat of disease, the stench of rotting flesh.

  I was not there, I did not see this. One of my exhibition collaborators described it to me. Neither of these photographs was among the ones she sent me; perhaps they were part of the group she destroyed. It made no difference. I saw them all, the pictures she gave me and those she just told me about. I don’t know which imposed themselves more cruelly.

  I am seeing it, I thought numbly. I did, in the end, stay away, but I may as well have been there all along. For a moment I hated every one of my collaborators, and I found myself gripped by the urge to set fire to their contact sheets locked in the metal drawer downstairs in the studio.

  Alone in the kitchen, I glanced down to see an enormous water bug casually crossing the floor.

  What do you do with a tainted eye?

  In the blue suite, Barnaby asleep, I tiptoed from the bed to the sitting room. Still muffled by drowsiness, I positioned myself by the window and peered into the thickness of the woods beyond the lawn. I fancied I heard a clear ringing pierce the silence, as when a wet finger is slowly rubbed around the rim of a crystal goblet, only louder, more penetrating, and insistent. It seemed to be coming from where the moon clenched onto a knuckle of black sky, and I remember thinking that it must be the cold lamentation of moonlight, exiled to earth. On any other night, I might have taken this as an omen or sign, but that evening, everything was swaddled, allowing no movement, no meaning at all. Outside, the horizon was obscured by the jostling ovoid heads of trees. Nothing but flatness, and the ringing of the moon, dulled now to a cool and mineral whine.

  The evening’s work was done. I looked up to see that the yellow light in Oscar’s study had been extinguished. I packed my contact sheets away in the drawer and headed back into the corridors of the sleeping house.

  Outside, the air was cool. Halfway across the courtyard, hugging my cold arms, I realized I had left my sweater behind, draped over a chair. Tired, so very tired, I could think of little else besides the comfortable bed awaiting me in the yellow suite. But then, suddenly, I could not bear the idea of my sweater alone in that room, limp on the back of the chair. I sighed, turned back toward the east wing.

  As soon as I entered the darkroom, I sensed that something was awry. I peeled the sweater from the back of the chair. A new wave of fatigue passed over me. I sank into the chair, rested my head for a moment on the counter. The cold metal surface felt soothing. My mind drifted: fragments, colors, snatches of sound, the shimmery descent into sleep.

  A muffled crash awoke me. I sprang upright and scrambled toward the source of it, the cubicle on the other side of the room. I drew open the heavy black curtain. It was Oscar. Not the Oscar I knew, but someone else. His face looked somehow bruised—his eyes, usually the serenest blue, were those of a cornered beast: inward, dark, without language. His head turned slowly toward me and, though I could see he was trying to smile, could see, too, the jerky rise of his rigid shoulders in an attempt at a shrug, there was no hiding the inner collapse that had transformed my friend. I took in the rest: the brown leather portfolio in his hand, the vat of steaming chemicals in the trough. The portfolio was unzipped. It flapped emptily where Oscar was holding it above the vat.

  “What happened?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “I didn’t know it was open,” he said, looking dumbly at the portfolio. “Stupid,” he mumbled to himself. “The solvent wasn’t ready, it was just acid. I filled it with acid and—” He looked down at the vat; I followed his gaze in time to see a tiny corner of paper dissolve to nothing.

  “I was going to restore them,” he said flatly, again not to me, his eyes fixed on the vat.

  “Oh Oscar,” I said, a bit too desperately, reaching for the pair of tongs on the bench and plunging them into the vat. He shook his head.

  “It’s too late,” he said, his voice restored to his own. “They’re gone.”

  I was back for a few days in Manhattan to scout through some files. I opened all the windows and watered my wilting houseplants, neglected by the neighbor who’d promised to tend them. I realized how overdue this visit was—how much I needed a break from Ellis Park.

  I made some coffee, gathered my papers and books, and sat down at my desk. There was a lot to do: checking quotations and facts, hunting up numerous obscure details.

  The river below was in the throes of its gentle commerce: egging two sailboats upstream, frilling prettily around a steamship, reflecting back bulging images of swooping gulls. Downriver, a barge: it must have been hauling a heavy cargo, I’d never seen a barge move quite so slowly. I stopped what I was doing to watch it, recalling a line from a poem: Walt Whitman musing on this same river, this same sky, thinking of someone not yet born—why not me?—addressing himself to this imagined somebody and saying that, once in a past that was his present, he too had felt what this future soul would surely feel, looking at river and sky.

  I deduced from the streaks of soot on the deck that the cargo might be coal. A lone figure stood stern-side, looking up at the clouds. I watched, trying to calculate how much coal a barge like that could carry, how many men it took to load and unload it, when all of a sudden, the barge came to a stop. The man at the stern crouched, as if to retrieve something that had fallen. He righted himself and strolled toward the bow. From where I sat looking down from the eighth floor, he looked like a rickety puppet.

  I watched him amble the length of the stalled boat. Holding my red editor’s pencil in midair, peering down at the river, I had the sense that I was about to witness something dramatic. I felt a wave of regret for the little puppet man. Instinctively I reached for my camera, which was in the blue canvas duckbag on the shelf by my desk. But I withdrew my hand.

  I had hesitated then too, that day in London, years ago, amidst the ruins, sighting the boy in the olive-green jacket in the viewfinder of my camera. “He made it down into the cellar through an open grate,” the rescue worker was saying, his voice a dreadful distraction which threatened the harmony of the shot.

  I had taken two steps away from the rescue worker, trying to brush him off, desperate to be alone with what I was seeing: the extraordinary power of the sky, with its unnatural metallic streaks—colors I might never again see, born as they surely were from the idiosyncratic mixture of gases rising from this particular site of devastation. I focused on the curve of the boy’s shoulders, aware that the slight dip of his head was in perfect equipoise with the shape his foot made as it nudged the clump of charred timber. It ached, this composition; I could feel it as a human force. Here it was, my holy grail: meaning, unity, beauty, grief.

  The rescue worker’s voice broke through, shattering the harmony. “War,” he said bitterly. “Don’t you love it?”

  For an instant, I took my eye away from the viewfinder. “Please,” I responded a little desperately, struggling for some phrase that would keep him from saying another word.

  My tone must have conveyed something, for he shrugged and began to turn away, but then paused, and added in a low voice: “I understand he was the only survivor.”

  I slammed the camera back to my eye. The sky had changed: there was a bare remnant of that exquisite, awful, unearthly color that was as much shape as hue. The sky, those streaks, I could feel them dissolving in the full arrival of the day. And the boy … How could I not take the shot?

  Now, outside my window, on the Hudson River far below me, I watched as the small fire erupted, watched as the puppet man flung himself about deck with what looked like a wet blanket and
a bucket, struggling to get the little blaze under control. It was an old instinct which set my fingers to itching, that fierce longing to feel the weight of the camera in my hand.

  Leave it be, said an inner voice. Let the world get along without you.

  I turned back to my work.

  Later that evening, I opened a can of soup, buttered some toast, and ate looking out the kitchen window at the round white moon, aware of a sense of calm at having the large spare rooms of the apartment to myself. I washed my bowl and plate and poured myself a bourbon. At the first sip, I was overcome by a crushing exhaustion. No more work this evening, I thought: a long hot bath and early to bed.

  I was just stepping out of the tub, reaching for a towel, when the buzzer rang. Three long, hard rings: the doorman, Gerald, not a man who kept his emotions to himself, was clearly irritated. I reached over to the basin for my watch: eleven o’clock. I rubbed myself dry and wrapped a towel around my head.

  “Someone to see you, madam,” Gerald said over the intercom. “A Mr. Harrington.” In his tone, severity and curiosity both.

  “Thank you. You can send him up,” I said.

  Barnaby. Here at Riverside Drive. Not part of our unspoken agreement. I just had time to pull on my bathrobe before the doorbell rang.

  I opened the door. There he was in a linen blazer, a single rose in one hand, straw hat and bottle of wine in the other.

  “You’re surprised to see me,” he said, the half-smile now in his eyes, touching them with that hesitant, coaxing warmth that was in fact not hesitant at all. “You’re angry.”

  He offered me the rose, which I unthinkingly raised to my nose. He must have taken this as a sign of invitation because a moment later he was behind me in the hallway, balancing his hat on the hat rack. He took my shoulder and turned me toward him.

  “I wanted to see where my dove nests when she’s in the city.” He ducked his head so that he was peering both down and up at me at the same time, the little game of tender imploring fully at play in his face. In my absent haste on my way from the bathroom to the door, I must have picked up my drink; I noticed, suddenly, that I was holding it in my hand.