Her papa was back after weeks in Bucharest. She would run to him and he would pick her up and swing her round. He would have a present for her. When he caught her his arms were strong. He smelt of the city and tobacco and of dust and the road.
The boy in the loft had seen her go. Then closed his eyes once more.
4
Again Safta breathes his name upon his hand. Does he know it? In this hospital he is not Tinu any more but Ioan. If she were to breathe this new name on to his hand there would be no movement to it. No plosion in it, nothing to feel. The word Ioan exists only in the throat and in a subtle twist of the mouth. Does he remember who he was?
The white light of the ward is stark on his face. His oddity is more noticeable now that he is older. In the boy it was only at moments that one saw that he was different from others, and one saw it in the expressions rather than in the form of his face. These expressions have fixed now into lines and into the set of the muscles around his mouth. His muteness and his experience have become written on him. He is a little stronger than when he first came. He is taking food. Yet there seems to be no change in his mental state. He is passive. Even his eyes do not engage. It is a strange exile, an iron bed with chipped white paint lined up alongside so many other identical beds, and yet the man seems like an exile to her: one who has been cut off from his world, from names and things.
His silence becomes catching.
She used to be able to natter away at him all the time, tell him everything she thought about, what she felt about everyone, every trivial thing. She was utterly without self-consciousness with him; but now his eyes throw her back into herself.
Each day she comes into the ward and sees him there doing nothing, looking at nothing. She has to grope for words.
There is this ward, then there is the hospital, and beyond the hospital, the city. There is the stillness of the ward and the idea of the city beyond the open windows: that life is happening there, outside. But when she gets out into the city, life is not there either but somewhere else, beyond. As if she too is an exile.
‘I wrote a letter.’
The meaning falls away.
‘I’m trying to find your mother.’
If she could find the words she would talk to him about that time when they were children at Poiana. So much growing apart there has been since then. It is as if they had grown and gone to other countries and now they meet far from home. She had almost forgotten him. But Tinu had a way that let you forget him. Even when he stood right in front of you there was no insistence to his presence. He appeared always at a remove, contained within himself. He had been easy to abandon. She had done it often, abandoning him lightly, carelessly, as children abandon one another, living in the present, moving on from one moment to the next and letting go of the moment just passed. Things are different now. Time is different. The present is less vivid than it used to be. She tells herself that she will not abandon him now.
‘You’re very dedicated,’ Adriana says, seeing her again at his bedside.
‘I thought it would do him good to have a visitor.’
There has been no reply to her letter. She thinks she will write to the priest a second time, just in case the letter did not arrive.
In the wards where she is used to working there are always visitors about. Wives, mothers, family, bringing food, supplementing the hospital’s care, camping out even beside those they love. In the dreariest of them there is an echoing life. This ward is different, filled with absence. The patient has gone from the next bed. She assumes that he has died. She cannot imagine that he can have left for any other reason. The last few days she has been aware of the erratic nature of his breathing; periods of wheezing and then pauses as if he did not breathe at all. As if he was passing through voids.
This nurse must think it strange that she should come like this and sit here beside the mute’s blankness, and leave beside him pencils and blank pages on which he does not draw. Yet her look has sympathy.
‘How is he? He seems a little better. What does the doctor say?’
‘He needs drugs. There are drugs that would cure him but the hospital does not have them.’
‘Do you know anywhere I can get them?’
‘They’re foreign. They’ll be very expensive.’
What else should she spend her money on?
5
Each morning after the cows were milked Paraschiva gave the boy some of the warm milk to make him strong, then wiped the white foam from about his mouth and brushed his hair. However hard she brushed it sprang back up as oddly as before about his little pointed face. She did not know why they were so interested in him at the big house. He was intelligent, they said. He had a special talent for drawing. Certainly she had never seen any child, or adult either, who drew so much. He drew when he went up to the nursery, and when he came back to her he drew again, drawing what was before him and also the places where he had been, clearly so that she would know them, and other scenes and views that she believed he must have invented. At first he had drawn only in pencil, but at the house they gave him paints and colours, and if these were not the colours he wanted then he made his own pigments by grinding stones and mushing berries and things from the kitchen, experimenting with them, shading the powders and juices with chalk or soot, wetting them with water or with his spit to make them flow on the paper. He brought his pictures back to their little cottage, pages and pages of them, more paper than she had ever possessed. József the groom who was his friend made him a box in which to keep his pictures and he spent much time sorting and arranging them. He folded them and piled them by size, or sometimes he tied them into bundles or folded them into books. At first Paraschiva stitched the books for him, but then when she saw how handy he was with a needle she let him do it himself, bothering her only for string or a length of wool, then stitching on card from packages or sometimes scraps of cloth for their covers. He wrote on the covers in big letters so regular in form that they might have been printed. The writing at least made her proud. Since she could not read herself she could not have known whether his letters spelled words or not. He made pictures of the little house where they lived, first the outside of it and then the rooms inside, so precisely that she would look at them and recognise even the corner of a window or a table leg. The rooms he made empty of people. He made people separately, cut from pieces of thick paper or card so that they stood on their own. The people were strange to her. If the rooms were real, then the people were not. They were only symbols of people. They had no smiles. Didn’t children’s drawings of faces always have mouths and smiles? Hands? Waving arms? Augustin’s people were always made in a similar way, their basic form a simple rectangle but with divisions across it or occasionally separate pieces that conformed to the normal human proportions of head, torso, legs. Some of the heads had all the features of a face but some had only eyes or nose. There were others that were entirely blank or had just one or two horizontal lines or random patterning across like postmarked stamps. Did he not care about people? He put more ingenuity into their clothes than into their faces, laboriously drawing and colouring shirts and waistcoats and all kinds of hats, and sometimes adding scraps of fabric or stitching patterns like embroidery on to them. He made horses better than humans. He knew the form of horses well from all the time he spent with József around the stables. He made horses and cows and chickens. Once he made a bird that pleased him very much. It was made from pieces of card. The beak was bright and shiny orange, separate but fixed, and the wings were a softer grey card and loosely threaded so that they could be moved up and down.
Paraschiva could see that it was clever but such strange cleverness disturbed her. She could see no use for his skill. He would be better off working on the land or somewhere else about the place. There was an old man in the village who whittled spoons. Augustin might have gone to him and learned to make spoons also. There was a clever thing the old man did, making a spoon with a hole in the handle and a ring passing t
hrough the hole, all from a single piece of wood. If Augustin was so clever with his hands he might have learned to do that, and then decorated the spoons with patterns of his own. But no, they had decided up there in the house, and each day she must make sure his clothes were clean and brush his hair and send him to the German lady. She could have told her from the start that she was wasting her time. The Fräulein was trying to teach him things that he would not learn. She did not know what his mother knew: how hard he was inside. There was something in him that was hard, fixed, black, like the black buffaloes on the farm. A buffalo was the sort of animal that you kept but that was never entirely yours. It was docile only to a limit. It would seem to go along, and then could stop, just when you least expected it, and drop its sullen head and stiffen its back and legs. That was how he could be. A mother knew that sort of thing. Mothers know the ugliness in their children even as they love what is beautiful in them. Paraschiva could see his stubbornness in the way he stood and in the set of his lips and the separateness of his eyes.
Paraschiva did not know it but Fräulein Lore was coming to the same conclusion. What was required, the textbooks said, was patience, repetition, focus. She had put her best effort into it, she told herself, despite her initial scepticism. She had given him all that, and more. She had gone beyond the usual requirements of her work, and she had received viciousness in return. Never in all her career had she met a child with a nature so entirely closed to her as this elfin peasant boy. She briefly considered handing in her resignation but professional pride held her back. She had never resigned from a post before. And in so many other ways this was a good position: the family was eminent, their land stretched to the horizon, the girl was clever, the boys manageable, the conditions reasonable, generous even.
She went to her mistress in the study where she sat every morning to write her letters.
‘I must tell you, Madame, that I can make no progress with this boy. Words are nothing to him. He does not see the point of learning them.’
He is obstinate and difficult, she wanted to say. He has a devil in him. She chose rather to retain a position of professional objectivity. ‘There is something missing in him. There is something that is assumed in all the books I have studied that in this boy is entirely missing, and that is the will, the simple desire for speech.’
Marina Văleanu’s voice was dark and musical, like a viola. ‘You told me he took to it so well at first. He was so amenable. There are all those lovely drawings, all the lettering he has done.’
‘That’s all they are, Madame. Drawings, pictures. He does not mean them to be anything more.’
As she spoke she thought of him drawing. How fixed he was. How he sometimes hummed with concentration. How tight-lipped he was, frozen inside himself. Once he was concentrated on his drawing he had no awareness left for anything else. She had come to think that he would not speak so long as he could draw.
‘I think that may even be the root of the problem. The drawing, I mean. The wretched boy is making pictures instead of words. Don’t you see? He won’t so much as try to speak so long as he’s allowed to draw.’
‘But his pictures are beautiful.’
‘If he did not have them, then he might be taught to speak. To write at least.’
‘That would be hard.’
‘Sometimes in education one must be hard.’
Marina looked at the governess and felt a quick dislike of her. She sensed the anger beneath the Fräulein’s smooth and regular face, the resentment there. Was it possible that the governess might even relish depriving the boy of his ability to make pictures?
‘No, I will not have you do that.’
The Fräulein was well qualified and came with the best references but her fastidiousness and her intuition suddenly rebelled against the woman. She was so deliberate, so ugly, so down to earth. If the mute boy could learn to write, then what would she teach him? What words would they be? And if he were to learn to speak? She thought of what she had seen in his face: something fine, ethereal in him that was not like the other peasant children; some still solemnity that was there also in what he drew. When the deaf spoke they groaned and made strange sounds that might have come from underground. That was not what she wanted for him. She wanted for him something altogether higher.
Marina loved art almost as much as she loved religion. To her the two were inextricably linked. On the wall above the desk where the governess had come to her was a very precious and beautiful icon, an antique image of Our Lady of Saint Theodore, richly framed in gold. The black-veiled Virgin was a daily inspiration. She was so sombre and yet so tender, her hands long, her head angled so gracefully against the head of the finely made child who seemed almost to stand on his own tiny feet on a fold in her robe. Marina would feel that serene look on her even as she wrote out lists and invitations and made household payments, and now as she put an elbow thoughtfully on the desk and addressed the tall governess who stood before her. For herself, the presence of the Virgin raised even the most trivial activities a little above the level of the mundane. And she was not unaware of the effect the icon had on others coming to her at her desk, the dark compelling eyes on the wall behind her echoing her own eyes and adding to her dignity. A woman who has grown up knowing that she is beautiful has always an awareness of how she is perceived.
‘No, I will not have you do that. The boy has a gift. Such gifts come from God.’
And she continued, turning away from the woman and addressing the icon, ‘From now on I shall teach him myself.’
The impulse of a moment became a mission. It had been a mistake to try to teach the boy words, she saw. His path to God must lie in his art alone.
There was a monastery a few hours’ drive away that was famous for the beauty of its paintings. She visited it often. The church was ancient and revered. It held relics of many saints, the toe of an apostle and the skull of Saint Simeon encircled in a crown. The air within the monastery walls was calm with centuries of contemplation and intoned liturgies. The monks within it moved in unhurried order. The Abbot was a cousin of her husband’s, a man of broad shoulders and slow dignity who would make them welcome and who might besides advise her what to do with the boy.
They went there in the car one blowy November day, herself, the two young children and Ilie the driver. Augustin had sat in the car often but he had never been driven anywhere before. Ilie let him sit in the car sometimes when it was in its garage or even – and that was better – when it was parked before the house. He would sit in the driver’s seat with the smooth ring of the steering wheel in his fingers and imagine that the car was moving, around the fountain and the turning circle, between the shimmering trees and down the drive. Now he sat in the back and watched Ilie’s hands in leather gloves, the wheel turning. The wind had blown the last of the leaves from the trees, and was blowing them again where they had fallen, swirling them up across the road. He watched Ilie’s hands on the wheel and on the gear, and only after a long time did he look out to see the land go by. They had already left the village behind them, the church and the school and anyone to whom he might have liked to wave. The road went on, and they passed horses and carts and oxen and carts and men on donkeys but hardly ever another car. There were trees along the road, tall trees widely spaced. Because of the lines of trees you could see where the road went a long way ahead, where it crossed rivers and wound up out of valleys. The land was wide and rolling, most of it dull brown and gold, rising away into a shining purple distance where there were mountains unlike anything that he had ever seen.
The monastery lay just before the forest and the mountains. In the foothills and valleys there were other monasteries and hidden hermitages but Augustin knew nothing of them. To him this was the last building before the wilderness. And it was the biggest building he had ever seen. The tall white walls of a fortress, a great gate that might have opened on to a city. Within, the space of the courtyard, all the more wide and bare beneath the November sky. In th
e centre of the courtyard, the church. Within the church, another sky and a crowding coloured mass of forms and figures that set up a clamour in his mind. He looked up and gaped, and turned round and round like a country boy come to the city for the first time.
The pictures he made that day were full of colour. He worked his crayons until there was a polish to the surface of the page, and the colours were those of jewels: emerald and ruby and amethyst and turquoise and sapphire and gold. He drew ladders of angels and saints with haloes about their heads; and a man that was Jesus walking in sandalled feet on scalloped waves, and another that was Peter falling into them flat on his face. He took pages from his sketchbook and joined them one after the other in concertinaed lengths. He made vertical lengths of the damned tumbling layer upon layer amongst the black demons in hell, and on a horizontal he made orderly lines of the saved, figures that repeated again and again. In the sapphire skies above them he painted golden stars shooting, and flying golden words in Cyrillic letters that he copied precisely, that were like but also unlike any letters he had drawn before. The November day was short and it began to grow dark. The colours faded about him but he went on working. The lamps were lit. A mass of points of light glowed like stars in the great brass chandelier that hung beneath the tower. Black-robed monks gathered for the evening liturgy. When Marina Văleanu finally pulled him away he dragged after her like a dreamer, turning and looking back.
She went to dine with the Abbot and showed him the pictures. She told him how she meant to bring this boy to God.
‘He does not understand what he is depicting.’
‘There must be something there though, don’t you think? He is learning something. The meaning is in the pictures themselves.’
They went out from the Abbot’s residence into the courtyard and up an open staircase in one of the towers. At the top he took a key from a niche in the wall and let her in to the workshop where his monks painted icons. She thought the room beautiful, the order of it, with the high stools of the monks, the easels covered over with cloths, the paints and brushes laid out beside them. The Abbot carried a lamp and lifted the covers on the easels one by one so that she could see the icons in progress.
Painter of Silence Page 4
