The Swan Thieves

by Elizabeth Kostova

  I felt the warmth of her hand in my own for the rest of the evening, after I'd tactfully left early without speaking to Robert again so that he would not have to cope at all with the question of where I was staying and for how long, and also after I had driven a few hours back toward DC, when I lay curled, mute, in a motel bed in southern Virginia, full of having seen him. Having seen them--Robert and his wife.

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  May 1879

  Étretat

  To: M. Yves Vignot

  Rue de Boulogne, Passy, Paris

  Mon cher mari:

  I hope this finds you and Papa as well as can be expected. Have you had a great deal of work? Will you be returning to Nice or can you stay at home for some weeks, as you hoped? Is it still raining?

  I am getting on perfectly here and have spent the first day painting on the promenade, as the weather is very bright for May, if cool, and am now resting before dinner. Uncle accompanied me. He is working on a large canvas of the water and cliffs. I confess I have done only one thing I like, and it is rather sketchy, at that--a couple of local women with delightful big skirts tucked up and a child wading alongside, but no doubt I will have to try something grander in order to keep up. The landscape is as lovely as I remember from our visit, although it is much changed by the season's difference--the hills are just greening now, and the horizon looks gray-blue, without those fluffy midsummer clouds. Our hotel is quite comfortable, so you should have no worries--it is spotless and well appointed, and I like the relative simplicity. I ate a hearty breakfast this morning--you would approve. The trip did not tire me at all, and I fell pleasantly asleep the minute I reached my room. Uncle has brought with him notes for some articles he is working on when we are not painting, so I shall be able to rest during those times, as you requested. I have also begun reading Thackeray for entertainment. There's no need for you to send anyone to

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  me. I am managing perfectly and am pleased that Esmé cares so tenderly for Papa even while she does other things. Please keep yourself very well--don't go out without your coat unless the weather becomes more springlike there. Know me to be your devoted

  Béatrice

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  C HAPTER 75 Mary

  One morning I realized I hadn't had a letter or a drawing from Robert for five days, which was now a long time for us. His latest sketch had been a self-portrait, humorously caricaturing his own strong features, his hair on end and somehow alive, like Medusa's. Under it he had written: "Oh, Robert Oliver, when will you pull your life together?" It was probably the only time I ever knew him to criticize himself directly, and it startled me a little. But I took it as a reference to one of the "melancholies" he sometimes described offhandedly to me, or as an acknowledgment of the increasingly double life he led through our letters. I took it, in fact, as a kind of compliment, which is the way one wants everything to look in the midst of love, isn't it? But then he didn't send anything for three days, then four, five, and I broke my rule and wrote him a second time, concerned, yearning, trying to be casual about it.

  He never got that letter, I'm sure; unless the post office has closed his box and thrown my letter away, it's probably still sitting there, waiting for the hand that never reached in to pull it out. Or perhaps Kate cleared out the box eventually and threw it away. I like to think she didn't read it, if that's the case. The morning after I sent it, my apartment buzzer rang at six thirty. I was still in my bathrobe, my hair wet but combed out, getting ready to go to my drawing class. No one had ever rung my bell at that hour, and I thought immediately about calling the police; that's the nature of the neighborhood I live in. But just to see what

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  was going on, I pressed the button on my speaker and asked who it was.

  "Robert," said a voice, a big, deep, strange voice. It sounded tired, even a little hesitant, but I knew it was his. I would have known it in outer space.

  "Just a minute," I said. "Wait. Wait just a minute." I could have buzzed him in, but I wanted desperately to go down myself; I couldn't believe it. I threw on the first clothes I could find, grabbed my keys, and ran barefoot to the elevator. On the first floor, I could see him through the glass inner doors. He had a duffel bag over his shoulder; he seemed very weary, more rumpled than ever but also alert, scanning for me through the lobby.

  I thought I must be dreaming, but I unlocked the door anyway and ran to him, and he dropped the bag and lifted me up in his arms and crushed me; I felt him burying his face in my shoulder and hair, smelling them. We weren't even kissing in that first moment; I think I was sobbing with relief because his cheek felt the way I'd thought it would, and maybe he was sobbing a little, too. We pulled apart with our hair sticking to each other's faces, tears, sweat glistening on his forehead. He had let his beard grow out for a few days; he looked unshaven, a lumberjack on the sidewalks of a DC neighborhood, one old shirt over another. "What?" I said, because that was all I could manage.

  "Well, she threw me out," he admitted, lifting the bag again as if that were proof of his exile. And at my look of shock, I guess: "Not because of you. Something else."

  I must have looked more shocked than ever, because he put an arm around my shoulders. "Don't worry. It's all right. It was just about my paintings, and I'll explain it to you later."

  "You drove all night," I said.

  "Yes, and can I leave my car there?" He pointed to the street, its signs and litter and incomprehensible meters.

  "Certainly," I said. "You can, and it will be towed sometime after nine." Then we both began to laugh, and he brushed my hair

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  back again, the gesture I remembered from our encounter at the camp, and kissed me, kissed me, kissed me. "Is it nine yet?"

  "No," I said. "We have more than two hours." We went upstairs with his heavy bag, and I locked the door behind us and called in sick.

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  C HAPTER 76 Mary

  Robert didn't move in with me; he simply stayed on, with his big heavy bag and the other things he'd brought in his car, the easels and paints and canvases and extra shoes and a bottle of wine he'd picked up for me as an arrival gift. I would no more have dreamed of asking him his plans or telling him to find his own place to live than I would have moved out of the apartment myself. It was a kind of heaven for me, I admit, to wake up with his golden arm spread across my extra pillow, his dark hair in ringlets on my shoulder. I would go to class and then come home without painting at school as I usually did, and we would go back to bed for half the afternoon.

  On Saturdays and Sundays we got up around noon and went to the parks to paint, or drove out to Virginia, or visited the National Gallery if it was raining. I remember distinctly that at least once we went through that room in the NGA where Leda hangs, and those portraits, and that amazing Manet with the wineglasses; I swear he paid more attention to the Manet than to Leda, which didn't seem to interest him--at least that's how he behaved when I was with him there. We read all the plaques, and he commented on Manet's brushwork, then wandered off shaking his head in a way that meant admiration beyond words. After the first week, he told me sternly that I wasn't painting enough and that he thought it was because of him. I'd come home regularly to find a canvas prepared for me, toned in gray or beige. I began to work harder, under his guidance, than I had in a long time, and to push myself to try more complicated subjects.

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  I painted Robert himself, for example, sitting in his khakis on my kitchen stool, bare to the waist. He taught me how to draw hands better, noticing that I routinely avoided them. He taught me not to disdain flowers and flower arrangements in my still lifes, pointing out how many great painters had considered them an important challenge. Once, he brought home a dead rabbit--I still don't understand where he got it--and a big trout, and we piled up fruits and flowers with them and painted a pair of Baroque still lifes, each in our own kind of imitation, and laughed over them. Afterward he skinned the rabbit and cooked both it and the trout,
and they were delicious. He said he had learned to cook from his French mother; he certainly almost never did it, to my knowledge. Often we would open cans of soup and a bottle of wine and leave it at that.

  And we read together almost every night, sometimes for hours. He read his favorite Milosz aloud to me, and poems in French, which he translated for me as he went along. I read him some of the novels I had always loved, Muzzy's collection of classics, Lewis Carroll and Conan Doyle and Robert Louis Stevenson, which he hadn't known growing up. We read to each other clothed or naked, rolled up together in my pale-blue sheets or sprawled in our old sweaters on the floor in front of my sofa. He used my library card to bring home books on Manet, Morisot, Monet, Sisley, Pissarro--he loved Sisley particularly and said he was better than all the rest of them put together. Occasionally he copied effects from their work, on small canvases he reserved for that purpose.

  Sometimes Robert fell into a quiet or even sad mood, and when I stroked his arm he would say he missed his children, and even get out his photographs of them, but he never mentioned Kate. I was afraid that he could not or would not stay forever; I also hoped he might eventually find his way out of his marriage and into my life in a more settled sense. I didn't know that he had a new post office box, one in DC, until he mentioned one day that he'd picked up his mail there and read Kate's request for a divorce. He'd sent her

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  a PO address, he said, in case she needed him in an emergency. He told me he'd decided to go home briefly to get through the initial paperwork and see the children. He told me he would stay in a motel or with friends--I think that was his way of making clear to me that he didn't plan to return to Kate. Something in his firmness about never returning to her chilled me; if he could feel that way about her, I knew, he could one day feel that way about me. I would have preferred to see regret in him, some ambivalence-- although not enough doubt to take him away from me.

  But he seemed oddly certain about leaving Kate, saying that she didn't understand the most important thing about him, without saying what that was. I didn't want to ask, since that would make it look as if I didn't understand either. When he returned from five days in Greenhill, he brought me a biography of Thomas Eakins (he always said my work reminded him of Eakins's, that it was somehow wonderfully American in flavor) and told me with zest about his little adventures on the road, and that the children were well and beautiful and he'd taken lots of pictures of them, and said nothing of Kate. And then he drew me into what I thought of by then as our bedroom and pulled me down onto the bed and made love to me with insistent concentration, as if he had missed me the whole time.

  None of this minor paradise prepared me for the gradual shift in his mood. Autumn came on, and with it a dampening of his spirits; it had always been my favorite season, the moment of a fresh start, new school shoes, new students, glorious color. But for Robert it seemed a kind of wilting, an encroaching gloom, the death of summer and of our first happiness. The ginkgo leaves in my neighborhood turned into yellow crepe paper; the chestnuts scattered themselves in our favorite parks. I got out new canvases and tempted him on a midweek trip to Manassas, on my day off from teaching, to the battlefield there. But Robert for once refused to paint; instead, he sat under a tree on a historic hill and brooded, as if he were listening to ghostly sounds of the clash that

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  had occurred there, the carnage. I painted in the field by myself, hoping he would get over it if I left him alone for a while, but that evening he was angry with me about almost nothing, threatened to break a plate, and went out for a long walk alone. I cried a little, in spite of myself--I don't like to do that, you know; it was just too painful to see him in that state, and to feel rejected by him after all our glorious times together.

  But it also seemed to me natural that he would suffer an aftershock from his legal separation from Kate--they had another three months to go before the divorce -- and from the permanence of his departure from his old life. I knew he must feel under pressure to look for work in DC, although he didn't show any signs of doing that; I had the sense that he had some small independent income or pool of earnings, probably from selling his remarkable paintings, but it surely wouldn't last him forever. I didn't like to ask about his income either, and I had been careful to keep our money separate, although I was paying the rent as I always had, and buying our food. He often brought home a few groceries, wine, or some useful little gift, so I hadn't noticed any great strain, although I'd begun to wonder if I should eventually ask him to split the rent and the utilities with me, since I struggled at the end of each month. I could have gone to Muzzy for help, but she had not been encouraging in her response to my living with a soon-to-be divorced artist, and that stayed my hand. ("I know about love," she said mildly on one visit I paid to her during Robert's sojourn with me. It was before the horrifying spectacle of her tumor, her tracheostomy, her speaking box. "I do, dear, more than you might think. But you're so talented, you know. I've always wanted someone who would take care of you a bit.") Now Robert would surely need to pay child support, and I didn't dare ask him the details when he sat glowering on the sofa.

  On sunny weekends, his mood would occasionally lift, and I would find myself hopeful, easily forgetting the previous days and convincing myself that these were growing pains in our

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  relationship. I thought, you see, not of marriage, exactly, but of some kind of longer-term life with Robert, a life in which we would commit ourselves, rent an apartment with a studio, combine our strength and resources and plans, go to Italy and Greece on a pseudo-honeymoon so that we could paint there and visit all the great sculpture and painting and landscape I'd longed to see. It was a vague dream, but it had grown while I wasn't looking, like a dragon under my bed, and it had undermined my romance of "all by myself" before I'd realized what was happening. On those remaining happy weekends, we went on short trips, mostly at my insistence, and with picnics packed to save money--the happiest time was to Harpers Ferry, where we stayed at a cheap inn and walked all over the town.

  One evening in early December, I came home to find Robert gone, and I didn't hear from him for several days. He returned looking oddly refreshed and said he'd been to visit an old friend in Baltimore, which did seem to be true. Another time he went to New York. After that visit he seemed not refreshed but actually elated, and that evening he was too busy to make love, something that had never happened before, and stood at his easel in the living room making sketches in charcoal. I did the dinner dishes, tamping down my annoyance--did Robert think the dishes did themselves, day after day?--and tried not to watch over the counter that divided my tiny kitchen from my tiny living room while he sketched in a face I hadn't seen since my impulsive trip to Greenhill for his college show: she was very beautiful, with her curling dark hair so like his own, her fine square jaw, her thoughtful smile.

  I knew her immediately. In fact, when I saw her I wondered how I could not have noticed her absence all these happy months; I had never questioned Robert's leaving her entirely out of his paintings and drawings in the time he'd been staying with me. He had never even included the distant figures of mother and child I'd seen in some of his earlier landscapes, like the one he'd painted on the

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  shore in Maine during our workshop. Her return that evening had a strange effect on me, a crawling fear like the sense you get when someone has entered a room too quietly and is standing behind you. I told myself it wasn't fear of Robert, but if it wasn't that, what was I afraid of?

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  C HAPTER 77 1879

  She watches Olivier paint.

  They are standing on the beach in the afternoon light, and he has begun a second canvas: one for morning, one for afternoon. He is painting the cliffs and two large gray rowboats the fishermen have pulled far up onshore, their oars stowed inside, the nets and cork floats catching an elusive sun. He sketches first with burnt umber on the primed canvas, and then begins to mass in the cliff
s with more umber, with blue, a shadowy gray-green. She wants to suggest that he lighten his palette, as her teacher once told her; she wonders why this scene of shifting lights and sky looks to Olivier so somber underneath. But she believes that neither his work nor his life can change much now. She stands in silence beside him, about to set up her own work, her folding stool and portable wooden easel--delaying, observing. She wears a thin wool dress against the chill in the afternoon's brightness, and over that a heavier wool jacket. The breeze catches at her skirt, the ribbons of her bonnet. She watches him bring the churning water partly to life. But why doesn't he put more light into it?

  She turns away and buttons her smock over her clothes, arranges her canvas, unfolding the clever wooden stool. She stands before the easel as he does, instead of sitting, digging her boot heels in among the pebbles. She tries to forget his figure not far away, his silver head bowed over the work, his back upright. Her own canvas is already washed a pale gray; she has chosen this one for

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  afternoon light. She puts in aquamarine, a heavy smudge on her palette, cadmium red for the poppies on the cliffs to the far left and right, her favorite flowers.

  Now she gives herself thirty minutes by the watch on her chain, squints, holds the brush as lightly as she can, painting with wrist and forearm, quick strokes. The water is rose-colored, blue-green, the sky nearly colorless, the stones of the beach are rosy and gray, the foam at the edge of the waves is beige. She paints in Olivier's dark-suited form, his white hair, but as if he stands at a great distance, a minor figure on the strand. She touches the cliffs with raw umber, then green, then with the red specks of poppies. There are white flowers as well, and smaller yellow ones--she can see the cliff both up close and far off.

  Her thirty minutes are gone.

  Olivier turns, as if he understands that her first pass over the canvas is finished. She sees that he is still working slowly across an expanse of water, has not yet reached the boats again or even the cliffs. It will be a careful piece, controlled and even beautiful, and it will take days. He steps near to see her canvas. She stands staring at it with him, feeling his elbow brush her shoulder. She is conscious of her skill, as seen through his eyes, and of the painting's flaws: it is alive, moving, but too rough for even her taste, an experiment that fails. She wants him to be silent, and to her relief he doesn't interrupt the rumble of the waves on the heavy gravel, the wash of stones rolled over and out to sea. Instead he nods, looks down at her. His eyes are permanently reddened, a little loose around the edges. At that moment, she would not trade his presence for anything in the world, simply because he is so much closer to the edge of it than she is. He understands her.