Prochownik's Dream

by Alex Miller

  Marina watched him.

  He looked at her and smiled. ‘I used to think I was going to build the temple of my father’s dreams with my art. But it’s not that easy, is it?’

  ‘No, it’s not. It’s not easy at all. You had that intensity about you when we first met you. I thought you were aloof.’

  ‘Keep drawing,’ he said. ‘I like to watch you working.’

  Marina resumed drawing the trees. After a while she paused and looked across at him. ‘Go on. Don’t stop now. Tell me the rest. What happened to your father’s pictures?’

  ‘In the mornings, when he’d left for his shift, Mum would gather up the previous night’s batch of pictures and carefully put them between sheets of newspaper, then she stacked them flat in his old suitcase. That suitcase had travelled everywhere with him. She told us it was the one thing he had with him when he arrived in England. I guess someone had given it to him. They kept it under their bed—which is where his pictures still are. Mum let me have one of them. They belong together, she said. He wouldn’t want them scattered around the place. I had it framed. It’s hanging on the wall in the passage at home. It wasn’t there when you and Robert came over for dinner that time. You can see it next time you come over.’

  ‘I’d love to see it.’

  ‘Dad painted the same things over and over. It doesn’t matter how skilled you become, he used to say, you can never paint the same thing twice. Look at the work of Morandi! He’d tell me, A thing will always surprise you when you look at it again. There will always be something new each time. And the more you look, the deeper the mystery, the deeper the silence of the object of your contemplation. Those were Dad’s words to me. Nothing in art is ever finished, he’d say. Everything is always a work-in-progress. Even if you never go back to it. The artist is not interested in completion, only in the work. That was my dad. The artist is not a priest, he warned me once, when he saw how seriously I was taking it. Remember that! But the artist must have something of the priest’s irrational persistence. A faith that doesn’t ask why but just is. Art was my dad’s answer to the cruelty and the ugliness of the world.’

  She was silent a while, drawing, then she said, ‘You must miss him very much.’

  ‘I’ve never talked about him like this before.’

  She looked at him. ‘I feel very privileged. Thank you.’

  ‘I don’t know why, but it all seemed to be suddenly there for me to say.’ She was a picture herself. The sketching block on her knees, her pale legs bare in the sunlight where her dress was rucked up. ‘Trees,’ he said. ‘I remember you drawing those big old trees at your parents’ place that time.’

  ‘The elms at Plovers. Yes. I’ve always loved to draw trees. They don’t get fidgety sitting for you.’ She looked around at the bush. ‘Isn’t it beautiful? We’re so lucky. What you just said was beautiful, too.’

  He stood up.

  She was startled. ‘You’re not going?’

  He grinned. ‘I need to take a walk.’

  ‘Oh.’

  He walked off some way into the timber and took a leak. The wind had died and, on an impulse, he kept walking, drawn into the warm aromatic stillness of the bush, picturingMarina back in the glade under the wattles alone, doing her drawing; the scene of their own private déjeuner sur l’herbe. Sharing with her his memories of his father had made her seem more real to him. In the telling he had recaptured something of the intensity of those early years, his passionate hopes for his art and for his father’s dream. Teresa would be fiercely jealous if she knew he had shared something like this with Marina. He had not meant to, but had just found himself suddenly able to talk to her. He stopped and looked around. He and Andy would have loved this place when they were boys. Marina was right, it was a truant’s island. A place for escapees. Full of little hillocks and hollows and hidden glades where the hunter could hide or approach the enemy’s camp unseen. A pulsing of bullets through the leaves and the felled bodies lay twitching on the grass. Step in and finish them off. The coup de grâce . . . He realised he had no idea which was the way back. He was amused at the notion of being bushed in this island remnant of wild Australia in the middle of the city. It was an uncanny feeling of being suddenly alone. A loss of direction. An absence of familiar reference. A white-eyed crow observed him from a nearby tree, the malevolence of the opportunist in the bird’s eye.

  He walked on, feeling stimulated and excited by the talk. He was restless now to be doing something. A few minutes later he topped a low rise and she was there below him, lying in the broken shadows of the wattle tree on the bleached grass. He stood on the rise among the trees looking down on her. She was a stranger, really. They had never been close, not as he and Robert had. She was lying on her side in the silver wattle’s overhang, her straw hat under her head. Her left leg drawn up under her, her right leg thrust out, the sandal fallen from her foot. Her sketching block and denim bag abandoned on the grass beside her. The blue and white tea towel with the two plates, chicken bones and scraps of lettuce. The empty wine bottle and two glasses on their sides on the grass catching the sunlight. The bright orange plastic float with the keys to the island.

  He made his way down into the hollow.

  The heat of the afternoon and the wine had felled her. He stood admiring her and wondering about her, his eye drawn to the back of her knee in the cast shadows of the wattle’s foliage, a dimple in her bare flesh where ligament and muscle were linked in tension to the bone beneath the skin. With care he stepped to her side. It was the cautious action of someone who did not wish to be discovered. He stood above her, the body of the woman lying on the grass. Robert’s wife sleeping in the sun at his feet. After a moment he leaned to pick up her sketching pad and pencil case. He carried them back to the gum tree and sat with his back against its trunk. He recognised the pencil case. It was the one she had carried during his holiday with Robert at her parents’ house at Mount Macedon all those years ago. He had been in his first year at art school then, and a little awed by the grand manner of Marina’s parents, the ample style of their lives, the imposing gabled front of their enormous old house with its tall chimneys rising from twelve acres of winter garden, hundred-year-old laurels and a ground mist of bluebells. The red-brick bulk of the house and its gardens set against a rising woodland of leafless elms and oaks. He remembered making a drawing of Marina one afternoon while she was sleeping off a migraine on an old-fashioned cane chaise longue in the conservatory.

  For some reason, he and Marina had been alone in the house that afternoon. Perhaps Robert had been taken by Marina’s mother to visit an ‘interesting’ neighbour. Migraine seemed to him then to have been Marina’s excuse for avoiding doing things she did not want to do; her excuse for staying quietly out of the main game, just as her return to Melbourne now was a retreat from similar demands. But perhaps the migraines had been real, too, for she had emerged from them grey-faced and washed out, purple half-moons under her eyes, her gaze glassy and absent. As he had passed the conservatory that day he had seen that the shutters were half-closed across the tall windows. The figure of a woman lying on the cane chaise longue asleep, her form a tonal arrangement among deep shadows. He had paused at the door—then, as now, the unobserved voyeur—and had decided to take her likeness.

  •

  He sat with his back to the gum tree and examined her pencil case. The seams were hand-stitched and it was held closed by a row of four large wooden buttons that might have come from a woman’s expensive overcoat. One of Marina’s mother’s old coats. A camelhair coat that women of her style used to wear. A coat his own mother would admire but would never put on her own back, even if it were a gift. Not a coat he would have included among his featureless mob. The pencil case was a thing that a woman who had learned to sew as a girl might make if she were thinking back to her schooldays. It was an article intimate to Marina’s hand, suggesting to him the image of a domestic moment in that grand house, Marina sitting in a deep armchair by the fires
ide sewing and dreaming, the black rain of Mount Macedon streaking the windows, the dog asleep on the hearth rug at her feet.

  He laid the case open across his outstretched legs and tested the feel of an ink pen between his fingers. But the pen was not right and he put it back. He touched the pencils, the broken pieces of pastel, her sooty stubs of charcoal. Everything in Marina’s pencil case was toned to a smoky hue by powdered charcoal. He picked out a thick stub of soft pencil and fitted it to the grip of his left thumb and two fingers, the pads of his fingers in contact with the lead, something at once familiar and potent in the feel of it. He set the open pencil case aside on the grass and took up her drawing block. He flipped it open, his thumb smudging the page of her abandoned study of trees.

  He turned to a clean sheet and sat holding the stub poised over the pad for a long moment, his knees raised, his eyes narrowed, examining the rising curve of Marina’s thigh beneath the folds of her summer dress, the swelling line of her hip and midriff, the turned obliqueness of her shoulder, his eyes lingering on the dimple behind her knee. He braced his shoulders against the tree and, without looking at the pad, his eye following the line of Marina’s form, he inscribed a series of lines on the page with the soft pencil stub, the nail of his forefinger touching the paper lightly, his guide, steadying the line, keeping his hand obedient to his eye . . . After a few minutes he looked at what he had done, holding it up and squinting at it, then he bent close and began working on the suggestion of form, giving it volume.

  •

  As the summer afternoon slipped by, Toni scrubbed out his drawing repeatedly and reinscribed it, his eye returning again and again to Marina’s sleeping form in the drifting shadows of the wattle. The knuckles of his fingers scuffing the paper, working his line into a softground chiaroscuro, establishing the volume of her form that would permit the expression of the alluring dimple, the substance and structure that would coax the tension of ligament, muscle and bone behind her knee to emerge. He was not a draughtsman of light but of shadow. He scrubbed out with the side of his hand, his familiarity with the drawing increasing with each erasure, the line of Marina’s bare toes, the curve of her instep . . . It was elusive, exhausting and exhilarating, and he was lost in his task. The more you look the deeper the mystery. His father . . .

  The two magpies delicately removed the remains of the picnic item by item.

  Marina woke, suddenly. She rolled over and sat up, turning and looking at him.

  The magpies ran away, looking back over their shoulders in alarm.

  On Marina’s cheek a red mark, like a birthmark, where she had been lying on her hat. A spike of sweaty hair sticking out sideways from behind her ear. Her broken dream in her eyes.

  He flipped her sketching block closed.

  She frowned. ‘Did you say something?’ Her gaze went to the block in his hands. ‘You’ve been drawing me! What time is it?’

  He looked at his watch. ‘Shit!’

  ‘You forgot Nada!’

  ‘Christ! It’s after four!’

  ‘I’ve got my mobile.’ She searched in her bag, took out her phone, and handed it to him.

  It was picked up on the first ring. ‘Welcome to Greco Travel. Tanya Bacovic speaking. How can I help you?’

  ‘Hi Tanya, It’s Toni.’

  ‘She’s not here, Toni. The kinder called. She’s gone to pick Nada up.’

  ‘How was she?’

  ‘Yeah. You know? Not so good, eh? They called her out of a client conference.’

  ‘Shit!’

  ‘Yeah.’ The young woman laughed nervously.

  ‘Thanks, Tanya. See you.’

  ‘No worries, Toni.’

  He handed the phone back to Marina. ‘Teresa’s picking her up.’

  ‘That’s okay, isn’t it?’

  ‘How could I have forgotten her?’

  She was watching him. ‘Can I see your drawing?’

  He was shocked at himself. ‘I’ve never forgotten her before.’

  ‘It’s all right, isn’t it? Teresa’s picking her up. Let me see what you’ve done.’

  He handed the sketching block to her. The act of drawing her had excited and disturbed him. He knew already that what he had achieved on the page was an offer, an authentic mark. He waited now for Marina to confirm it. The drawing was a beginning. It was an offer of work.

  She said admiringly, ‘No one draws like this anymore.’

  He leaned down and reached for the wine bottle. He held the empty bottle up to the sun, squinting through the green sunburst in the glass. ‘Teresa’s going to kill me.’ He set the empty bottle on the grass and straightened.

  Marina held the drawing at arm’s length. ‘I can’t believe you haven’t done any drawing for four years. It makes me so happy to see this, Toni. Suddenly there’s something definite to be happy about. For the first time since Sydney I feel as if coming back is really going to work out. Don’t look so grim. Teresa will forgive you. She’ll be glad you’re drawing again. That’s the main thing, isn’t it?’

  He saw how she was seeing herself as the sleeping woman in the transformed shadows of his mind’s eye. Confusing the erotic illusion on the page with her own reality. His wishful seeing beguiling her. ‘You were dreaming,’ he said. ‘You kept jumping. You don’t mind, then?’

  ‘Mind?’ she said emphatically. ‘Of course I don’t mind. God, it’s wonderful.’ She was silent, looking at his drawing. ‘Today is the first time I’ve relaxed properly for months. For years. it feels like! You can’t remember what I was dreaming, I suppose? Can you? I can never remember my dreams.’ She looked at the drawing again. ‘I’d love to keep this. Can I?’

  He hesitated, his eyes going possessively to the sketching block in her hands. ‘Sure.’ He waved his hand. ‘It’s yours.’

  ‘No,’ she said and held it out to him. ‘No. You don’t want to let it go. I can see that. You did it for yourself, not for me. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.’

  He took the sketching block from her. It was his reference. He needed it. He examined it. He was thinking of his father. Those first crushing days of his bereavement. His blind grief. The uncharted life without his father that had stretched ahead of him. The emptiness when he had attempted to return to work, the enervating sense of futility draining him. He looked up from the drawing. With the drawing in his hands he was beginning to feel whole again.

  She said seriously, ‘What made you do it?’

  ‘I was just filling in time.’

  ‘I don’t believe that.’

  He considered her. ‘Let’s say I’m glad to have you around. Let’s say Melbourne’s a more interesting place with you and Robert in it. Is that better?’

  She looked at him levelly. ‘Yes. That’s much better. I like that. Just filling in time has never been you, Toni.’

  He was still reading her, his eye awakened, tracking her, following the line of her shoulder as if his eye had a will of its own, noting the slightly double-jointed backward angle of her elbow where she was resting her weight on her hand, the invitation to exaggerate, to rearrange her likeness, to imagine her . . .

  She laughed, self-conscious with his scrutiny. She reached down and straightened her dress. ‘I must look a fright.’

  He watched her bend and put on her sandal. The curve of her back a unique trajectory describing who she was, her history coded in the way she moved, the way she had grown, the woman she had become. Bits of grass and small twigs were sticking to the back of her grey dress, as if she had been rolling in the summer grass with her lover. She had felt herself welcomed home by his drawing.

  She kneeled on the grass, her hands resting on her thighs, and said regretfully, ‘I suppose we really do have to go. What a shame today has to end.’ She put the orange key float and her sunglasses in her hat and set about gathering the remains of their picnic, packing the things away neatly into the basket one by one.

  He did not offer to help her.

  She put her shoulder bag on top
of the plates and the cups and bottle and she smoothed the tea towel over the packed basket. When she had done this she got up off her knees and stood picking the leaves and grass from her dress. ‘When you’re young you think you can do this sort of thing whenever you like,’ she said. ‘Then when you’re older you realise days like this are never to be repeated. You realise this is what beauty is. Something that catches you off-guard and is gone almost before you’ve had time to see it.’ She stepped across and stood beside him. ‘It has been our special day,’ she said. ‘Hasn’t it?’

  They waited for something to settle between them.

  ‘We’ll come out here again,’ he said.

  ‘No. It will never be the same. How could it be? Today you did your first real drawing since the death of your father.’

  It was true. He saw the shadowed uncertainty that was in her eyes now and which had not been there before. Something of sadness or reflection, or perhaps discontent. A ghostly offset from those old purple half-moons of her youthful afternoon migraines. The indelible mark of her concealed history.

  He reached to take the basket from her and they walked together through the trees. She did not take his arm this time; sensing, maybe, that the gesture might no longer have the simple neutrality it had possessed for them earlier.

  four

  Teresa’s Honda was not out the front of the house in its usual place. As he was crossing the courtyard the sun went in and he looked up. The storm front of an approaching southerly change divided the sky from horizon to horizon. When he opened the door of the studio the humid stench of the old clothes hit him. He went in and put on the light. Setting Marina’s sketching pad on Nada’s table beside her drawing, he bent and took hold of one of the timber racks by the base and dragged it out of the tangled pile of clothes, as if he were dragging a body out of a bomb site. He dumped the rack in the doorway and went back for another. He worked steadily, sweat soon running down his cheeks, his T-shirt sticking to his back, the light dimming and brightening, thunder rippling across the city.