by Alex Miller
‘I do. I like them very much. But I should have asked you all the same.’
‘Curiosity’s not a crime. Not yet. Tricks. That’s all it is. That’s all I’ve got. A bag of tricks. Impressive only if you don’t know how it’s done. It’s better to keep this stuff hidden, however. Perhaps we’d better not speak about it? What do you think?’ He chuckled mischievously. ‘Now you’ve seen mine, you must show me yours. That’s only fair. We must strike a bargain.’
‘I don’t show my work till it’s finished. Your drawings are finished.’
‘Show me anyway,’ Theo said playfully. ‘Change your rule, it’s a silly one. What’s ever finished?’ He reached and touched the tie on Toni’s folio, as if he meant to unslip the knot. He lowered his voice. ‘I shan’t tell a soul. I promise! No one need ever know. If you show me your drawings,’ he lifted his hand from the tie, ‘I’ll let you see the rest of these. You haven’t seen the best yet. I have thirty books like this one. Yes! Thirty. One for each year. More than thirty. I’ve lost count. They deal with my struggle. My little journey. You know? A lifetime of desires and torments. The usual thing. But not only women. Other things, too. Even things that perhaps you’ve never thought of. So what do you say? Drawing has been my consolation.’
‘My drawings wouldn’t interest you,’ Toni said. ‘They’re just private notes compared to these. Yours are real pictures. They’re works of art, no matter what you say.’
‘So you found them pleasantly disturbing?’
‘Impressive more than anything. Yes, I suppose disturbing too, in a way.’
Theo gave a little smile of secret pleasure. ‘Marina is pleasantly disturbing, don’t you think? But now I am offending you. No, you’re right. We’ll say no more about my son’s wife. Anyway, think about my proposition. Robert tells me you’re a fine draughtsman.’ He waited, then added slyly, ‘I may die before you finish your pictures. Then I’ll never see your work. Would that be fair?’
Toni laughed. ‘I don’t think you’re going to die that soon.’
‘So now you’re a doctor? In my condition, believe me, death is already here. These days I’m just an onlooker. Would you like coffee? Life is still a great excitement for Robert and Marina. She wants to have his book waiting for him when he gets home. She knows how much he needs some good news at this moment to bolster his spirits. That’s not being in the presence of death, that’s being in mid-stride. I, however, just watch. But I still make good coffee. It’s the one thing I can still do well.’ He stepped across to the bench and looked into the coffee pot.
Toni watched him. ‘Your drawings make me realise what a beginner I am. They’re really great.’
‘Not so! No! Not great. Nothing special. Great is not a word you should splash around.’ He spooned coffee grounds. ‘I’ve been living between Paris and Hamburg for the past forty-three years. Since Robert was seven. I suppose he’s told you what a cad his old man is?’
‘Robert has only ever spoken of you with respect.’ It was a lie, Robert had hardly ever referred to his absent father in all the years Toni had known him.
‘Well, that’s nice, but I don’t deserve it from him. Mine’s the old story. There’s nothing unique about it. I fell in love with a beautiful Polish girl while I was visiting Paris and I couldn’t resist her, so I abandoned Robert and his mother and returned to live with her in Hamburg. My beautiful Marguerite!’ Theo made a sound somewhere between a throaty chuckle and a sob. He put the coffee pot on and lit the gas. ‘She died two years ago. I’ve been living on my own since. Without her I’m an empty man.’ He looked at Toni. ‘She would have liked you. You are the young man I should like to have been myself once upon a time. Your situation would have interested her. She was a doctor. A psychiatrist. People and their situations interested her. She understood the transference of the artist and his subject. I told her I would take her to my old home one day. Well here I am! Alone!’ He shook his head and turned away. ‘Two years is nothing. It’s nothing! I have lost time. It’s terrible. I’m not going to get over it. They told me it would take a year then I’d be okay again. But they didn’t know what they were talking about.’ He turned back to Toni. ‘I’m not a great moral example to anyone. This jumping disease is my just deserts. It’s a lingering disease. You were right, and unfortunately it’s not going to do for me any day soon.’
His dirty white robe swung open as he moved about attending to the coffee and Toni caught glimpses of his chalk-white body, the greenish phosphorescence of decay, the livid patches of ulceration. Theo’s body was a scene of carnage and a fascination to his eye.
After a minute the coffee maker began to wheeze, the smell filling the kitchen.
Theo poured coffee into two cups. ‘If you want good coffee, don’t go to Hamburg, go to Vienna.’ He handed a cup to Toni. ‘Let’s sit down before my knees give way. My hips too. Everything aches. We all get our share of pain before this game’s over. I’m not complaining.’ He slipped the rubber band over his sketchbook, slid the pen between the band and the cover, and preceded Toni through into the dining room. They sat opposite each other at the round table. ‘Marguerite suffered.’ He fell silent, gathering his resolve. ‘We were never closer than during her last night.’ He looked up. There were tears in his eyes. He struggled to continue. ‘Then, suddenly, she was gone and I was alone.’ He sat a moment. ‘The silence is something you can’t imagine.’ He sat gazing into his coffee. After a while he said, ‘They had two teams of rats. One team they fed on caffeine. The equivalent of a hundred cups of coffee a day. The other team they fed with normal rat food but no coffee. They couldn’t induce Alzheimer’s in the rats to which they fed the caffeine.’ He smiled, a boyish smile suddenly, in which there was a ghost of the spirited young man he must once have been. ‘We’re only complicated rats. So I make it strong. She was a beautiful woman. Without her I’ve become a garrulous old man.’ He laughed and sat looking at Toni over the rim of his cup, the red flash under his left eye gleaming moistly. ‘You know why old men talk so much? They don’t mind dying, that’s not it. They hate seeing their experience go for nothing. It all dies with them. They’d like to pass it on, make it real again, give it a touch of immortality. You’re not a big talker yourself.’
‘I get going after a few drinks.’
‘There’s nothing interesting about dying.’ He leaned back and regarded Toni, the fingers of his free hand playing over the cover of the sketchbook. ‘These are drawings. Don’t confuse them with life. Art makes life bearable, not the other way around. Look at the rest of them, if you want to.’
‘That’s very generous.’
Theo shrugged. ‘Promise you won’t tell Marina and Robert?’
‘Of course not. I was wondering what my father would have thought of your work.’
‘Was your father an artist?’
‘Yes. I believe he was a very good one.’
‘What was his name?’
‘He never showed his work. He was unknown.’
‘Anonymous, like the Master L.D. I like that. His work might outlive his name. Did anything survive him?’
‘My mother collected all his work.’
‘Good! Then he has outlived himself.’
‘He used to say the purpose of art is to resist the world’s ugliness.’
‘That is beautiful in itself without the art. All such sayings are true, even when they contradict each other. That is the mystery. Art is instinctive. It’s primitive. The learned man sacrifices his instincts to reason. The most dangerous time for an artist is after his work has found favour with the public. Then he is tempted to stop struggling. And that’s what finishes him. He stops taking risks. Not Picasso. He knew he was a god. He risked everything to the end. That is divinity. Picasso was the exception. Great art, like great music, comes from struggle. There’s no easy way.’
Toni had noticed that Theo’s hands had begun to jump and twitch again, his long wispy hair floating around his head as if it were charged with the static
of his thoughts.
‘If you and I are going to be friends, then I had better tell you the real reason I came back.’ He waited a considerable moment, as if he were debating with himself whether to confess his secret to Toni. ‘I wondered if over here, where I was born, my old memories of home and my youth might return and overwhelm the pain of losing Marguerite. I came back because I was hoping to distract myself.’ He sat staring at Toni for a time. ‘It was a futile hope. You won’t tell Robert, will you?’
‘No. Of course I won’t.’
‘But he’s your friend? Sometimes we tell friends things we didn’t mean to tell them. It would hurt him to know I had not returned to spend my last days with him. And I don’t wish to hurt him. He calls me Dad. Marguerite would have said that is his denial of the futility of his own hope, the hope of having a real father. But denial is sometimes our only refuge against despair. All our consolations are based on illusions. To the artist, illusion is everything. Illusion is the artist’s sacred ground, not religion. Robert is a stranger to me. How could it be otherwise? But he is my son, and I see him struggling to make sense of his life. I’ve finished with that. That’s over for me.’
‘I shan’t tell Robert what you’ve said. I promise.’
Theo pushed his sketchbook across the table. ‘I want you to have this. I’ve finished with it.’
Toni hesitated.
‘Take it!’
Toni took the book and held it. ‘You mean for me to keep it?’
‘It’s yours. You’ll make use of it, I can see that. A little of my experience may be secured with you for a time, eh? To give a gift can be a selfish act.’ He laughed and put his hand to the table. ‘Now, give me your arm. I’m going back to bed. But I shan’t make it without your support.’ Toni stood and Theo reached up and took his arm, leaned his weight on him and got up. ‘I’m sorry about the unpleasant smell.’
‘It’s okay.’ They went down the passage together and Toni helped him to his bed. Misty came in and stood in the half-light watching them.
•
He had been alone in the studio copying Theo’s head from the sketchbook for more than an hour when he heard Marina come in. He was lost in the work and had more or less forgotten about her. He quickly put Theo’s sketchbook away in his bag and looked up as she came into the studio. She was carrying a parcel.
‘I met Panos,’ she said, coming across the room to him. She put the parcel on the cupboard. ‘You remember Panos? He used to do those enormous blue and grey field paintings. He was in the queue in the post office. He had just been told, this morning, an hour ago—he had just come from the hospital. He’s got inoperable pancreatic cancer. My god! Apparently there’s no cure for it. He’s my age. He’s devastated. They told him he has a month or two at the most. He looks perfectly healthy. Just a little tired, a little drawn, that’s all. I took him for coffee and he wept in my arms. It was terrible and wonderful. I haven’t seen him for years, and then there he was in the post office queue, his eyes begging me, and then I suddenly recognised him. He lives alone.’ She stood close beside him, her hip resting lightly against his shoulder, looking over his pad with its pencil studies of Theo’s head. ‘They’re extraordinary,’ she said. ‘Theo’s been sitting for you?’
‘No.’ He remembered Panos as a fierce loner, his vast blue and grey canvases strangely obsessive and dated.
‘You’re doing them from memory? How incredible.’
‘Theo and I were talking for an hour.’
‘They’ve got the look of drawings from life. You really do have an amazing eye. I envy you.’ She moved away from him and indicated the parcel. ‘Two advance copies of Robert’s new book. I’ll leave it for him to open later. I don’t feel like working. Meeting Panos has upset me. We were never really friends, not close or anything, but what horrible news! Imagine living through a day like today for him . . . Then waking up tomorrow morning and finding it is still all true.’ She rested her back against the wall and closed her eyes.
He said, ‘You’ll feel better if we work.’
She opened her eyes. ‘I don’t think I can.’
He turned the page and began drawing her quickly, the lines of her body, her attitude one of submission to her distress.
‘Don’t!’ she said. ‘Please!’ She straightened and moved away from the wall.
‘It’s time to work,’ he said severely. ‘Get changed and come out and work on your picture. You’ll feel better if you do.’
She stood looking at him.
‘Caving in won’t help Panos,’ he said. ‘Did I tell you I’d done an oil of you from my old Macedon drawing?’
‘I’d love to see it.’
‘I also did an oil study from my drawing of you asleep on the island.’
‘You didn’t say.’
‘I don’t tell you everything.’
She stood uncertainly a moment. ‘I’ll change. You’re right. We should be working. So you’re using oil, not acrylic?’
‘You never quite know how oil’s going to go on. You’re never really in control with it. Acrylic’s too predictable.’ He watched her leave the studio. He was still seeing Theo’s drawings of her; the old man’s sketchbook and its contents a kind of confirmation of what he was doing. He liked the feeling. It was intuitive. Theo was right. His father would have agreed. His energy for the project seemed to be inexhaustible. He had never before felt so confident about his choices.
nine
It wasn’t long before he had begun painting during the night and sleeping most of the day. He liked the night stillness of the city and the feeling of heightened isolation with his work that it gave him. Then, one night, when he had finished work and it was almost dawn, he did not go across to the house as usual but instead slept on the cane chaise. He told himself he was sleeping in the studio out of consideration for Teresa. She was showing signs of strain and irritation; she was working too hard and worrying about money and he did not want to disturb her sleep once again in the early hours of the morning. But in fact sleeping in the studio was really more of a yielding to the seduction of the night silence, in which he was able to enjoy a sense of unbroken intimacy with his work, than a simple act of consideration for his wife. He lay awake for some time in the pre-dawn thinking of Theo and Marina and Robert, and of how he was mining the intimacies of their lives for his art, and he knew he loved doing it and that it was like a surprising gift that had been brought to him, a trust that had been laid upon him, for which he was grateful and of which he was a little afraid.
He woke mid-afternoon and went over to the house. He cooked eggs and bacon and made coffee and toast and put on the radio. Teresa was long gone with Nada and such was the liberty of his occupation of the empty house that he might have been living the solitary life of a bachelor again. He did feel a touch of guilt at the pleasure he derived from the situation, but it seemed to him that it was inevitable and only right that a certain edge of guilt should mediate a reconciliation between the suggestively transgressive nature of the imaginative life and the daily life of the family, which ideally subsisted within that steady condition of normality so dear to Teresa. Theo had cautioned him not to confuse art with life, but by what means did one achieve such clear-sightedness? Wasn’t Theo’s advice merely an example of the wisdom of old men? Hindsight, in other words, on a life in which he had himself failed to avoid this very confusion?
•
It was some time after midnight and he was squatting on the floor of the studio working on his ambitious painting, the two metre by two-metre oil, The Schwartz Family. The picture was well advanced, but he was having trouble with it. It was not the figures that were giving him trouble but the background. He was missing something and had yet to understand the problem of the setting for his figures . . . He became aware, suddenly, of someone standing in the open doorway to the courtyard and he looked up from the canvas. Teresa was holding her purple dressing-gown closed across her breasts and was gazing at the chaos of drawings and can
vases scattered about the studio. She did not say anything or look directly at him and after a moment he resumed working. It was a hot night and he had stripped to his underpants. Sweat was glistening on his back and flecks of paint patterned his arms. He reached and loaded his brush, leaning and dribbling the thin glaze at the fugitive likeness of Theo.
‘Why do you have to work in the middle of the night?’ Teresa asked, her voice was flat, toneless and unnaturally loud in the stillness, something aggressive in her manner.
‘My father painted in the middle of the night,’ he said quietly. ‘Painting in the night is my family tradition.’ He looked up at her, the brush poised in his hand. ‘No one interrupts you in the middle of the night.’
‘You don’t have family traditions,’ she said. ‘Your people were refugees.’
‘They were immigrants, not refugees,’ he said levelly.
‘What’s the difference?’
‘There’s a difference.’
‘Then why do you always tell people your dad was a refugee?’
She was being provocative. He understood that, and he resolved not to get annoyed. ‘Dad was a refugee from Poland when he was a boy. But not from England. From England he was a migrant. No different to your own people from Calabria in the fifties.’ He sat back on his heels, squinting to see the work in front of him. He did not want to have this conversation. It was a conversation he and Teresa had often had and it settled nothing. It was a difference of view which they never seemed able to finally resolve and which seemed to arise as a point of disagreement whenever there was tension between them. He knew he should just let it go and say no more. And that was what he meant to do. So for some considerable time he kept his thoughts to himself and said nothing. But the question had unsettled his concentration and continued to needle him. Whether his parents were to be viewed as having been refugees or migrants bore upon his sensitivity about their dignity and their precarious social status. He did not wish to think of his mother and father as having been bound by external circumstances in the important decisions of their lives. He did not want to think of them as victims of their fate, but as people who had enjoyed the dignity of personal freedom. The distinction as to whether they had been refugees or migrants was important to him, however, not only for the sake of his parents but also to his sense of who he was himself and why, in particular, he was an Australian and not a Canadian or an American or a New Zealander— or, for that matter, still a European like his mother’s and father’s own ancestors.
