The Painting on Auerperg's Wall

by Erika Rummel

  I told Cereta about the garden shed. We developed a storyline, acting it out under the blanket, at night. It was the story of a young man seducing us and wanting to get his hands between our legs. Sometimes, we let him get away with it. We took turns being the naughty young man, who touches the girl’s crotch, trying to find the forbidden pleasure spot and to wriggle a finger into her hole.

  Such smutty scenarios were unthinkable in Opa Auerperg’s elegant flat. The Louis Quinze sofa in the drawing room kept you upright in mind and body. Above the sofa, in a place of honour, was an oil painting in a gilded frame: Liebermann’s Herbstwald. When Dad dropped me off at Opa Auerperg’s apartment, he stopped and gave the painting a searching look, as if he couldn’t believe it was genuine.

  “Why do you keep looking at the painting like that?” I asked him one day.

  “It used to be in my parents’ place,” he said.

  “You remember that from when you were a baby?”

  “No, I was too young to remember. Aunt Eva told me about it.”

  “But you always say: Don’t believe in hearsay.”

  He smiled. “Okay, you win, Laura.”

  One day when I came to visit Opa, the painting was gone. In its place was another landscape, an alpine scene with snow-capped mountains. Liebermann’s Herbstwald had been moved to the study and was hanging above Opa’s desk now.

  “Why did you move the painting?” I said.

  “I like the alpine landscape better,” he said. “Which do you prefer, Laura?”

  Liebermann’s Herbstwald was a jungle of blurry green foliage with generous splurges of red. Everything was soft-edged. The brush strokes kept you guessing: Was that a person on the path leading into the wood? A child bending over? Or just a smudge, an unevenness in the canvas? The greens and reds were faded, as if a great weariness had overcome the artist. The autumn in Liebermann’s painting was permanent, with no possibility of renewal, of spring refreshing the colours. It was a sad painting, but I felt a familial connection to it.

  “I like the painting of the forest,” I said to Opa. “Dad told me it was in his parents’ apartment once.”

  “That’s right,” Opa said. “I bought it from them.”

  “Why did they sell it?”

  “They needed the money to escape the Nazis.”

  “But they didn’t escape.”

  “Your father did. His aunt took him to Hungary.”

  The Liebermann painting was the last of my grandparents’ possessions, the last material proof of their existence. Can’t you buy it back? I said to Dad. I don’t have the money, he said.

  One afternoon, when Opa Auerperg nodded off in his chair, I went up to the painting and ran my fingers over it. I wanted to feel its texture, but then touching didn’t seem enough, and I picked at a blob of paint in the left-hand corner of the painting and scraped off a fragment. The chip got stuck under my nail. I reamed it out and was looking at the chip when Opa sighed, the kind of long sigh a man makes waking up, but it sounded as if he had caught me and was sad because of what I’d done. I panicked and swallowed the paint chip.

  He opened his eyes and fixed them on me. “What are you chewing, Laura?”

  “Nothing.”

  Guilt has etched the scene on my mind. I still remember his probing eyes, his slightly raised eyebrows, the lines forming brackets around his mouth, when he asked me what I was chewing.

  When Opa Auerperg died, the visits to his apartment ended. It was strange to know that the rooms were still there, in the building on the Herrengasse, but out of my range, like something that had slipped sideways. Cereta and I made detours on our way home from school and looked up to the third floor, at the row of windows that belonged to Opa’s apartment. I had a choked-up feeling when I turned into the familiar street. I pictured the apartment empty, the furniture gone like Opa Auerperg himself, but if there had been a change, it wasn’t evident from the sidewalk. The curtains were drawn close, as they had been drawn during Opa’s lifetime. Direct light was bad for his paintings, he said. Opa’s son, Max, had emigrated to California. We expected him to sell the apartment, but he decided to use it as a pied–à-terre for his family. They spent their summer vacations in Vienna. The first time Max and Nancy asked us to dinner, I was absurdly afraid of going to the Herrengasse, of seeing the apartment desecrated by new inhabitants. I wondered what it would be like without Opa Auerperg.

  It was more or less the same. Nancy had done some redecorating, but nothing drastic. Freshening up, she called it, as if she had to get rid of a stale odour. It was comforting to see Thea, Opa Auerperg’s old maid, who was back for the duration of Max’s visit. She was moving around stiffly, at her usual, glacial pace, dressed in her black maid’s uniform and wearing laced-up canvas boots. She said her ankles needed support because the job kept her on her toes all day. I still missed Opa, but the Americans had brought us a consolation prize: their son Jerry. He was our age, a ginger-haired boy, looking fey, except when he laughed and showed an impish gap between his front teeth. Cereta and I both fell in love with him at once.

  After dinner, I excused myself and went out into the hall. Instead of crossing to the washroom, I stopped in front of the wardrobe. It was a hulking piece, polished to a sheen, darkly glowing, with a scalloped frieze along the top. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirrored doors, looking worried, afraid of being caught in a place where I had no business to be. I opened the door of the wardrobe slowly, inch by inch, to mask the creak of the turning hinges. Opa’s winter coat with the Persian lamb collar was still there. I felt a sudden, violent yearning and buried my face in the sleeve, breathing in the tobacco and lavender smell.

  When I came back to the dining room, Thea was serving coffee. My moment of nostalgia came at a price. Cereta had slipped into the seat next to Jerry and was trying out her English on him. The cat. The cat on the mat. A black cat is on the mat. Jerry was laughing. It had been a mistake to leave Cereta alone with him. We were competitors for Jerry’s attention, and she was in the lead now. When Thea served us hot chocolate in gold-rimmed cups, Jerry said he didn’t like chocolate, and we, too, pushed away the treat. We were no longer children.

  When Jerry came to visit our flat, I kept a wary eye on Cereta. We showed him our room and shared with him the secret of our games. We invited him into our blanket tent, and gave him an athletic performance, tumbling like clowns. We allowed him to be the ringmaster, following his hand signals. Jerry knew only a few words of German, but that didn’t bother us. We made up dialogue for him and put words into his mouth. All we wanted from him in turn was his accommodating body, his willing fingers, his butterscotch smile.

  At first, we were apprehensive about his visits, embarrassed about the dreariness of our flat. It was a comedown from Opa Auerperg’s apartment. All our furniture had plain edges. There was nothing curlicue or gilded. The pictures tacked up on the walls were black and white, a rotating number of abstracts anya painted on large sheets of construction paper. She drew the same thing over and over again, variants of whirling, spluttering galaxies, explosive natural catastrophes, produced night after night. There were days when we woke up to wads of construction paper draped over the living-room furniture, slightly puckered at the edges, shiny black where the ink was barely dry. On rare occasions, anya used indigo blue. Once, she did a green and black combo and tore it up before it had a chance to dry. It isn’t me, she said.

  Anya painted only at night. She was sluggish during the day but had an awakening at dark, a mysterious transformation of werewolf dimensions. She allowed no one to witness her metamorphosis. Painting is a private thing, she said. She hung the pieces on the wall reluctantly, at Dad’s prompting, and took them down again after a few days, adding them to the stack she kept under their marital bed. She left the walls bare for long periods of time until Dad humoured her into another “show.” It’s so hard to do, she said. It’s my soul. You do
n’t put your soul on display.

  Her soul? I followed the arcs of black droplets, the swishing strokes across the construction paper.

  “What is it really?” I said. “I mean, what’s in your soul?”

  “Az érzéseimet. Gondolataim,”she said tersely, refusing to give explanations. The Hungarian words hung over us like a black storm cloud: Her feelings, her thoughts. Anya closed her eyes and ears to Vienna, wouldn’t expose her soul to the jab of German vowels and consonants, didn’t allow them to pollute the insides of her mouth and ruin her Hungarian vocal chords. She spoke a few words of English with Jerry, but we could tell she was uneasy. She would rather preserve the Hungarian configuration of her lips and mouth, and leave him to us.

  When Jerry left Vienna at the end of July, and we were by ourselves again, the summer began to drag. There was nothing to do. Cereta and I were tired of being each other’s pretend-lovers now that we had experienced real love. We were glad when school started again and scheduled our lives for us. At home anya spread ennui by her very presence, lounging on the sofa in the living room, limp and somnolent, or wearing a suffering look. Listening to LPs was the only daytime pleasure anya allowed herself. When we came home from school, she told us to do our homework at the kitchen table and closed the living-room door on us. We could hear the desolate strains of Bluebeard’s Castle starting up. We recognized it at once. It was anya’s favourite record and her favourite composer: Béla Bartók.

  “The torture chamber,” I said. The Armory. The Treasury. I identified each scene by the orchestral arrangement. Distant brass chord swept over us. “The Kingdom.”

  “You know what she’s doing in the living room, don’t you?” Cereta said, as the music took on an air of dread and foreboding. “Dancing, all by herself.”

  We sneaked up and opened the door a crack. The sound of trilling flutes hit us full force. We were in the castle’s secret garden now, when Judith asks Bluebeard if he loves her, and for a microsecond we saw anya swaying to the music. Then she saw us, stopped dead, and turned down the sound.

  “What do you want?” she said, frowning, blinking, trying to blink us away, but we had seen the expression on her face. It was all screwed-up and dreamy. The LP was still turning, and Judith’s muted voice was like an echo of anya’s dreamy smile: Do you love me?

  Did the ink splashes on construction paper represent dances, arms moving, and body swaying to Bartok’s music? Was there dancing in her soul?

  It was hard to tell, but we knew the reason why all her paintings were black. Anya was unhappy.

  “I don’t know why I bothered going to university,” she said. “You don’t need a degree in Hungarian literature to make beds or boil potatoes.”

  “You could read us your poems,” Dad said.

  She waved him off. Her discontent made us feel guilty. It put us all under an obligation to cheer her up. Cereta and I weren’t very good at it. Most evenings it was Dad who was on caper duty. He spun records and played air guitar. No Bluebeard for him. He put on Chubby Checker: Come on, let’s twist again like we did last summer. He did fancy footwork and sang along: Do you remember when things were really humming. “Let’s dance,” he said to anya, but she shook her head. “Don’t be ridiculous, Zoltan.” On Sundays, Dad played chef. He served us with exaggerated flair and spoke with a faux-French accent: “Thees is why Michelin geeve me three stars.” It was easy for a kid to like Dad. He had stories to tell when he came home from the personnel department of the AMA, the Austrian Mineral Administration, where he worked in the Personnel Department as a counsellor. What do you do working as a counsellor? we asked him. I solve people’s problems, he said.

  “Everyone at AMA is a character,” he said, telling us about the woman with the one-inch nails painted cardinal red, whose problem was hitting the keys of her typewriter, and the manager, whose problem was an itchy scalp and who scratched his head so hard that dandruff rained down on his desk.

  “Eew, gross,” Cereta and I said in unison, but we couldn’t get enough of the flakey stuff.

  That was one reason why I chose Dad over anya. He was entertaining. The other reason was Jerry. I jumped at the chance to go to California with Dad. When the question came up, I was first past the post. Can I go with you, Dad, can I? I left Cereta no choice. One of us had to stay with anya. We couldn’t all desert her. It would have been indecent.

  That night, under the blanket tent, Cereta refused to play. She was angry with me. It was unfair. Why should I be the one to go to California with Dad? Why not Cereta? Because she likes to play the victim, I thought, but I didn’t say it. I offered to flip a coin. Heads, I go. Tails, I stay.

  “Okay,” she said.

  I feared for my fate, but the coin toss confirmed my choice, that manifestation of a desire which took its definitive shape when I put it in words and said, “Can I go with you, Dad?” Cereta acquiesced to her bad luck. “It’s my miserable, wretched…” She groped for adjectives and couldn’t think of any words matching the enormity of her bad luck. “It’s just stupid,” she said weakly and broke down in tears. She already knew: She was tops at play-acting, but in real life I had the upper hand. I was the dominant one. Cereta was younger, not much younger, admittedly, but she was born after me and was smaller at birth than I. Clearly, I had the first run on the nutrients.

  “We’ll come back,” I said lamely, refusing to put a consoling arm around Cereta, keeping my distance in case her bad luck was catching. I didn’t want her tears wetting my shoulder. “We’ll come back, or he’ll bring you and anya over. They’ll make up eventually.”

  Cereta nodded and wiped away her tears, but neither of us believed in the possibility of a reconciliation. Dad had stopped clowning around in the evening. He left anya stewing in her funk. It was a sure sign that their marriage was over. Cereta didn’t say that anya had been her second choice, not to her face. She didn’t tell her that she would rather have gone away with Dad, and anya didn’t ask. It was a done deal. Cereta took the credit for being loyal. I accepted the blame for deserting her. Now I wonder whether she enjoyed playing the loving, caring daughter the way she had enjoyed playing pet and licking my hand. But I suspect that anya held the leash so tight that Cereta couldn’t stop playing pet even when she got tired of it.

  Of course I suffered punishment for winning the coin-tossed lottery. I paid the price for my cosmic good fortune. As soon as we got on the plane, I felt wretchedly lonely. With a queasy despair, I realized that I needed Cereta after all. Without her, one side of my being was exposed to rough weather, to the raw winds. But Jerry was waiting for me in California. He provided the lee side. He was still malleable, allowing me to graft my lonely self onto his mind and inject my wishful thinking. We acted out the story of teenage sweethearts. He did what I asked him to do, almost as if he preferred me to himself. He was equally good at playing the male or the female lead. He had a hairless chest, long lashes and a ripe mouth, and he had no trouble switching roles. We became a secret society of two, flushed with complicity. We became best friends, no, best lovers, no, we coalesced into something indefinable.

  The scenes we played were nothing like the elaborate fantasies I had constructed with Cereta under the blanket tent. The plain façades of the buildings and the square layout of the streets in Mendocino did not inspire baroque tales. We ended up playing ourselves, but not our ordinary, everyday teenage selves. We gathered up bits and pieces from fan magazines to transform ourselves into sexy Hollywood stars. We became Laurabeth Taylor and Jerry Rock Hudson. I was an avid reader of tabloids detailing the scandalous lives of movie stars, and of nature magazines with alarming or pathetic stories about exotic people in exotic places. I scanned the fashion magazines at the hairdresser’s salon for haute couture fashions and designer homes. They were the props of my fantasy life. I loved glossies for the revelations they offered page after page, and the tabloids for the fodder they supplied for scenes. I no lon
ger confined them to a blanket tent. Jerry and I acted our scenes in the backseat of his car, or in Max Auerperg’s book-lined study, which was silent and dark beyond the halo of the reading lamp on the desk. It was our safe house. We knew we would never get caught there because Max was at the office during the day, and the creaking stairs gave us advanced warning of anyone’s approach. Besides, hearing Nancy or the maid moving around downstairs gave us a thrill, and we rubbed against each other rhythmically, in sync with the vacuum gliding back and forth over the carpet in the living room below. The possibility of discovery, however remote, and Jerry’s willingness to run the risk excited me.

  I didn’t tell Cereta about those trysts. I felt sorry for her. I had Jerry, and she had nothing. Worse than nothing: She was stuck behind the Iron Curtain. After Dad and I moved to California, anya decided to go back to Hungary. She couldn’t write poetry in Vienna, she said. The sound of the German consonants clogged her mind. Cereta put on a brave face. I think that was the role she took on, the girl with the brave face, when she wrote that it wasn’t so bad, that the Iron Curtain was lifting. There were tourists in Budapest now, and special stores that had everything, where they accepted only foreign currency. And so we can use the dollars Zoltan sends us, she wrote. She had started calling Dad “Zoltan” after the separation, to document the distance between them, the thousands of miles, or maybe she let anya write the script for the scenes she was playing, because I think at some point she turned into anya’s mouthpiece. She didn’t rename me. She still called me “Laura,” but her letters had nothing familiar about them. They were official communiqués, a sort of diplomatic exchange dictated by anya.

  I was a free agent. I didn’t even show Dad the long letters I wrote back, but I self-censored. We couldn’t get through to each other. Although my letters were handwritten, they were like the xeroxed sheets people sent out at Christmas then. One-third was sincere, one-third was bragging, and one-third was complaining to atone for the bragging. I complained because I didn’t want Cereta to feel that she was missing out on all the good things. I wanted her to know: I was suffering, too. I complained about Dad picking me up from school in his beat-up Chevy and bear-hugging me in front of my friends. He is so embarrassing, I wrote. And those stupid T-shirts he wears, with corny messages. Make love not war. He’s hopelessly stuck in the sixties. And his girlfriend (groan!) laughs like a hyena. Sometimes, Cereta and I talked on the phone, but calls were worse than letters. Nothing meaningful could be said with Dad standing by and waiting his turn.