Prochownik's Dream

by Alex Miller

  He stayed silent and Teresa also said nothing more. Then, without thinking, he lifted his brush from the canvas and looked up at her. ‘Mum and Dad could have settled permanently in England after the war but they came here instead,’ he said. She turned and looked at him. ‘They could have gone to the US or to Canada. Or to New Zealand. Coming to Australia was an orderly migration for them. You know that.’ She did know it. ‘They had a choice. They were migrants, not refugees. Night work is what I learned from Dad. It’s my tradition.’

  ‘Whatever you say,’ Teresa said without a trace of interest, as if she had forgotten ever having said a word about it in the first place. She looked down at him. ‘So how come you’re working on the floor?’

  He was annoyed with himself for having let himself get annoyed. But why couldn’t she just accept his explanation? They were his parents and it was his story! So he should know! It was simple. He tried to sound relaxed and neutral, but could hear himself sounding aggrieved. ‘I like the way the glaze pools in the horizontal.’

  ‘I only asked,’ she said mildly. ‘There’s no need to get angry.’

  ‘I’m not getting angry. I’ll work on the easel later when I’m using a thicker glaze.’

  After a minute she said, ‘You’ve set up your dad’s old suit again.’

  He turned and looked at the old three-piece on its rack, standing over against the wall, as if a dark-clad figure observed them from the shadows.

  ‘It’s spooky,’ she said. Then after a moment, ‘I thought she was still out here.’

  So that was it! He laughed. ‘Marina left hours ago.’

  ‘I didn’t hear her car.’ She looked him over. ‘You were working in nothing but your underpants while she was here?’ She stepped into the studio and walked over to him.

  ‘I was dressed.’ He gestured to his T-shirt and jeans, which were lying on the cane chaise.

  Teresa stood above him. ‘So what else do you two need the bed for?’

  ‘It’s not a bed, it’s a chaise.’

  ‘I can see what it is. It’s a bed. You’ve been sleeping on it, haven’t you?’

  He looked up at her from the floor: she was foreshortened for him, wider than tall, her fists tight in the pockets of her dressing gown, her arms held against her body, pushing her breasts together. He said gently, ‘You’ll be a wreck in the morning if you don’t get some sleep.’

  She was silent a moment, her lips compressed. Then she said, ‘I want our old life back.’ It sounded like an ultimatum, but there were tears in her eyes. ‘I’m sitting up there on my own every night watching that box. You come over for your dinner as if you’ve wandered into someone else’s house. When I speak you don’t hear me. When do we talk any more? About us? About anything? I’m trying to go along with this project. I’m doing my best to stay with it. I know how important it is to you. But I didn’t expect to be sleeping alone. I want to know if you’re coming back to our bed, or if you’ve settled out here for good?’

  ‘Of course I’m coming back. I just need a few undisturbed nights, that’s all. I have to get this picture right. It’s my first big one. Ever. I have to find it.’ He considered the painting and made a slow sweeping pass over its surface with his open hand, as if he were a shaman invoking a spirit. ‘It’s not right. Something’s holding it up.’

  ‘I can’t sleep on my own,’ she said. ‘I’ve forgotten how to do it. I can’t switch off on my own. I need a body next to me. I get up and come out to the kitchen and I look at your light on over here. I’m standing up there just now looking across the courtyard asking myself, Is she still down there with him? The working partnership!’ she said almost violently. ‘Jesus!’

  ‘It is a working partnership,’ he insisted quietly.

  ‘It can’t all be in my imagination.’

  ‘We’re working. That’s all that’s going on. I finished the sitting with Marina hours ago and she left straightaway.’ He turned and indicated a pile of drawings on the plan press. ‘Have a look. I did lots of work. It’s all there.’

  Teresa did not move or look towards the press. ‘You’re not with us anymore,’ she said.

  He squinted at the likeness of Theo. He had seen something that demanded adjustment. ‘Of course I’m with you,’ he said absently, as if it were part of an incantation. He loaded his brush and leaned and dabbed at Theo’s brow. ‘It was too dark there,’ he murmured.

  ‘Listen to you! You’re talking to yourself! You’re not talking to me.’

  ‘I’m talking to you. That’s what I’m doing. I’m talking to you.’ He touched the brush to the picture again. ‘I feel like Dad when I’m painting. It’s amazing. The way his hand used to move. I see it.’ He moved the brush around, as if he were conducting an orchestra, conjuring a secret music from the air. He looked at the brush with surprise, almost tenderly. ‘I’ve noticed I hold the brush exactly the way he used to hold it. I never realised that before. The brush feels free and light in my hand when I hold it the way he held it. It’s incredible how you learn these things and you don’t know you’re learning them. As if your hand learns them and you just follow along obediently. Then, suddenly, you realise you’ve been doing it without consciously thinking about it. Somehow that makes it more real. I don’t know why. But it does. I paint with Dad’s traditions in my hand. I really do. Honestly. It’s not an empty boast.’

  She watched him painting a while, saying nothing. Eventually she said with grudging admiration, ‘I don’t know how you do that.’

  ‘Me neither.’

  ‘It was easier when you were doing installations. You didn’t need these people then. You only needed Andy. Andy’s a real person. He’s the best friend you’ve got.’

  ‘I still need Andy. I’ll always need Andy. Nothing’s changed.’ He fossicked around on the floor among the scatter of drawings and picked up a charcoal of Theo’s head. He could see the moulded substance of Theo’s living flesh behind the rough likeness on the sheet. It was a visual note, an aide-memoir, the drawing like a letter from a friend, not the friend himself but the familiar words of the friend. The drawing represented for him an elusive presence, but a real one; it was a fragment of another, less complicated and truer reality that he believed in with a passionate longing, as if it were something he had lost and needed to recover. There had always been for him a sense of something real having been touched upon in his drawings, no matter how incomplete or sketchy the drawing, a sense of having postponed the decay of the meaning of the experience for himself by drawing it, as if with drawing he encountered a lost or forgotten truth within himself. Even his childhood drawings had possessed this slightly magical quality for him, as if they had referred to another world, a world within which he had once been more at home than he was in the world of the everyday; as if his art were his quest to recover his place in that lost world. He wondered what Theo’s Marguerite would have had to say about such an idea. He pictured himself meeting her in Paris. A woman still beautiful and young despite the passing of the years, a woman still filled with the spirit of an eager curiosity about the mysterious inner lives of her fellow human beings. He had never been to Europe, but he could imagine it . . . The cobbles of the street gleaming blackly with rain, the woman greeting him confidently as if they were old friends, I feel we have always known each other . . .

  Teresa said, ‘She’s stopped asking where her daddy is.’

  He looked up.

  ‘She’s started keeping her feelings inside. That’s not a good sign. Children should be free to express their feelings.’

  ‘Sometimes we need to keep things inside,’ he said. He looked again at the charcoal of Theo. The problem of Theo Schwartz—horned beast or fallen angel? Theo’s double image of himself. His double image of humankind, mutilated by lust. He set the drawing aside on the floor. Theo would have appealed to his father. He could see the two old men talking art and life. It was a subject for a painting by Rembrandt. ‘It’s not going to be for long,’ he said, examining the figures
in the big oil. ‘She’ll be okay. Children are resilient. You said so yourself.’ He liked the way he had dealt with his figures; they were flat, dry, stoic and unreal, not so much likenesses of the actual people as memories of people touched by some unexplained cause for sadness or regret. To see in these figures that he had visualised Robert and Marina and Theo as inhabitants of a nostalgic reality gave him an intense pleasure. He had placed them within the lost world of his own imagination. Some quality of the truth of his drawings had survived the less intimate process of the large painting. But still the background was not right. It was too close to the everyday realities of their Richmond situation.

  ‘She needs you,’ Teresa said, shifting her foot closer to the painting, her brown toes intersecting his gaze millimetres from the edge of the canvas. He looked at the broken edges of her alizarin crimson nail gloss, the pale line where her sandal strap covered the dorsal rise of her foot during the day. Her aggression and her vulnerability in her foot. He had an impulse to bend and kiss her feet, There! All better, as if she were a child who had hurt herself. ‘So why don’t you let her come out here with me?’ he said. ‘You know I don’t mind having her around while I’m working. She’s happy doing her drawings. She doesn’t interrupt me.’ He ran the pads of his fingers delicately over her foot. ‘You’ve got beautiful feet.’

  ‘Don’t try changing the subject.’

  ‘It’s true. I’ve always thought you had beautiful feet.’

  Teresa considered her feet. It was true. She was proud of her feet, as if she had had a hand in designing them herself. ‘Be realistic. She’s a child. She can’t sit up all night with you. She has to get her sleep. Once she was out here she’d want to stay out here all night. She needs her regular hours.’ She fell silent and stood looking around the studio. ‘These materials you’re using are costing a fortune. I can just hear Dad when he sees the bills.’

  He stood and drew his brush through the rag then swirled it in the jar of turps. ‘You said to use the best materials. You said not to worry about the money. Just buy what you need, you said.’

  ‘I didn’t know it was going to cost this much.’

  ‘I’ll make some money with the island show. We’ll pay your father back.’

  She considered him. ‘Why can’t you paint my father instead of his old man? It would flatter Dad a bit if you did his portrait. That wouldn’t hurt, would it? I mean, just because you’re an artist, it doesn’t mean you can’t do something nice for someone now and again, does it?’

  ‘Maybe I will paint your dad,’ he said mildly. ‘One day.’

  ‘My father’s a beautiful man!’

  ‘He is, that’s for sure.’

  ‘He’s an old god. There’s history in Dad’s face. And if you don’t want to paint dad or me or your daughter for some reason, and I’m not asking you what your reason for that might be, then what about Mum? Mum would secretly love to have her portrait painted. I know she would. Maybe you could do one of her and Dad together? They’d be proud. It would soften their attitude a lot towards you, you know.’ She looked at him, alight with her idea. ‘Why don’t you do it? Really? Put my parents in this show?’

  He busied himself putting away his brushes and paints.

  ‘Well?’ Teresa said.

  ‘These things have their time. Things happen when they’re ready to happen.’

  ‘Things happen when we make them happen!’ She waved her hand impatiently at the painting on the floor. ‘These people aren’t even a normal family.’

  He laughed. ‘There are normal families?’

  ‘Normal is normal! Don’t start that! You know what I mean. They decided not to have children! What kind of married couple decides not to have children? It speaks for itself. Why get married, if you’re not going to be a family? They don’t want what we want. They don’t want a normal life like other people. They don’t think like us. Neither one of them ever looked me in the eye or listened to anything I ever said or ever asked me a single question about myself. How’s that? Think about it. You know where their minds are.’

  ‘They listened to you.’

  ‘For people like them I don’t exist. It’s you they want to see. When they went to Sydney I thought I was rid of them. Now they’re back, taking over your life again as if you owe them something. They’re not like the artists we knew at Andy’s in the early days. If that crazy lot came here, I wouldn’t mind.’ She stood glaring at the painting. ‘Did you ever see either of these two get drunk or smoke a joint or do anything stupid?’

  ‘Robert and Marina are disciplined people.’

  She drew in her breath sharply and glared around. ‘God, when I think of my brothers renovating this into a studio for you!’

  ‘I’m grateful. I’m using it as a studio. What am I doing?’

  She measured the painting on the floor as if she were thinking of stomping on it. ‘His old man deserted his family and lived in Germany for forty years and he’s only come home now he’s dying of Parkinson’s and needs someone to cook for him and do his washing. What kind of a father is that?’

  ‘Theo had a wife in Germany. He had another life there. That’s not a crime. His wife died two years ago. Theo came back so he wouldn’t have to die alone.’

  She pointed at the image of Marina. ‘And her old man was a barrister and a member of the Melbourne Club! You’re betraying your origins with these people. They’ve never been our kind of people.’

  ‘They’re my friends.’

  ‘They’re cold people. You’re not a cold person. They only pretend to be who they are.’ She turned away from the picture and made a flinging gesture at his small unframed canvas of Marina asleep on the island. ‘And what’s that doing propped on the plan press I gave you for our wedding? Is it supposed to be an invitation, the way she’s lying there making herself helpless?’

  He said nothing. The picture still surprised him. The joy of painting again that he had felt while he was doing it. He stood looking at it. It would always remind him of the day on the island.

  Teresa looked at him gazing at his picture. She said contemptuously, ‘I need a cigarette!’

  He turned from the picture and watched her leave. She had not smoked since she had been pregnant with Nada.

  As she stepped out the door she said over her shoulder, ‘Stand there looking at her all night if you want to.’

  He picked up The Schwartz Family and leaned it against the plan press. He would take another look at it tomorrow. The background of the pale wall at Richmond and their painting of the naked man drifting above the cold blue sphere of the world had begun to irritate him.

  He put on his T-shirt and jeans, switched off the light and stepped out into the courtyard. The summer night smelled of diesel fumes and car exhausts. The smell of his city. The pile of old clothes and racks out in the middle of the open space like a bonfire of personal belongings prepared for the burning: every last trace of them shall be destroyed! A yellow half-moon hung in the smoky sky, the same moon that had hung over his father’s old town when his father was a boy. One thing that had not changed since then. He thought of the two of them as they had been, himself and his father, painters in the night. It was art that had sustained his father through his years on the moulding line at Dunlop. An artist and an intellectual by nature, required to be a labourer. His heroic silence all those years about the experiences of his childhood. Not wanting to burden his family with those old memories. Never painting his family, only their things, his sense of their vulnerability, his knowledge of the fragility of human happiness. Then the terrible event of his eldest son’s imprisonment that had silenced them. It must have seemed like a fragment of past horrors come back to lay its claim on him.

  He turned and went into the house. He could not bear to think of his father as having been a man broken by experience. He paused outside Nada’s door and stood looking in at the little girl. Her picture of him with the flaming hair! He must remember to pin it up before it was lost under the junk t
hat was accumulating in the studio. Her belief in him evident in the confident image she had drawn of him, as if she were the bearer of a message of hope to him from his dead father. He stepped into her room and leaned to touch his lips to her cheek. Her delicious smell! If he were blind, he would know his daughter. He straightened and walked out of her room.

  In the bedroom he undressed and climbed into bed. Teresa rolled towards him and they held each other without speaking. ‘I’m sorry, darling,’ he whispered and he kissed her.

  ‘I couldn’t bear any longer the suspense of not knowing if she was still down there with you. I was going mad wondering.’

  He kissed her cheek, her forehead, her lips.

  She lay close against him. ‘Did you go in and look at her?’

  ‘She was sleeping.’

  ‘Was she still under the covers?

  ‘I straightened her up.’

  ‘Dad’s mum had twelve. Two of them died. How did they live with that?’

  ‘You want twelve?’

  ‘Two would be nice.’

  •

  The sound of Teresa’s voice entered his dream. The pressure of her head on his chest, the smell of her hair, the weight of her arm across him. In the dream his father had entered a dimly lit room and handed him a small canvas. Here’s your painting, son, his father had said. He had not been able to see his father’s face. There had been a silent companion with his father, as if his father had needed a guide in order to find his way back. Discovering that his father was still alive filled him with remorse; ‘They told me you were dead! I never checked! I just accepted what they told me! That’s why I haven’t been to see you all this time!’ The pure hit of grief at the sound of his father’s voice. Disbelief that he had never thought to check that his father really was dead, but had meekly accepted the reports of his father’s death as fact. How could he have been so stupid? The companion from the other world led his father to a chair in a dark corner of the room and his father did not speak again. As he was about to look at the painting his father had given him, the murmur of Teresa’s voice entered the dream and he was suddenly awake. Their hands had not quite touched! If only he could have felt the touch of his father’s hand! The rush of grief and longing of the dream, the weight of his father’s gift of the painting in his hands, so real he could still feel it. A certainty the painting existed somewhere. His father’s gift to him. What was the subject of the picture? Here’s your painting, son, his father had said. Your painting? His own painting? The kind of painting he was trying to paint? Did his father actually say those words, or had he just handed over the painting with that feeling behind it? Toni longed to slip back into the dream.