It was his father in him, people said when they saw it. It was so long since his father had left Poiana, and his existence there had anyway been so light and brief, that the villagers had almost forgotten who he had been. The stolid Paraschiva and her slight mute son had been taken as they were, without history or requirement for paternity. Now they saw the boy at his work they remembered how his father had appeared one day bringing a horse from a famous stud in Transylvania. The man spoke little enough himself, but they did not know if this was only because his Romanian was so poor. His name was István Szabó and he was Hungarian, and there was no one around but József who could speak to him in his own language. His eyes were steely blue but otherwise he was wiry and dark, and his way with the horse was that of a Gypsy.
They had seen how he could crouch on the ground, tiny and low, before the elegant creature, and focus all of its attention. How the animal’s eyes would fix on him, its ears pricked to every minute sound he made, the connection between man and horse taut as if there were threads stretched between them. From his position on the ground, close and trusting and within range of the horse’s hooves, István Szabó would hold up his hands. He held them up loosely, palms gently cupped, and his fingers moved as if they pulled in the invisible threads. Like a puppeteer, he pulled ever so slightly one way or another, and the horse would walk or step neatly sideways or backwards as well as if he rode it.
Like father, like son. When Paraschiva saw the talent her son had inherited it made her uneasy. She would have preferred that the boy work in the gardens or on the farm, where he might be bound down by the touch of the soil and its weight on his boots. Even when she saw how firmly he sat on the Lipizzaner’s bare back when he brought it in from the field, how happy he seemed to be, she was not entirely reassured.
Marina Văleanus would not have said it to her cook but she realised that Paraschiva had been right from the start. He’ll not learn anything, Paraschiva had said. He’s what he is, and that’s all. There’s no point teaching him. No changing a thing like that. She saw the boy go by with the horses or the hay and regretted her mistake. It had been an error of her charity, however well meant. She realised that his remarkable drawings should be taken simply as they were, as the work of an innocent, and of God.
As the years passed she had become more remote and more devout. Her face had set in solemn lines so that she seemed always at a distance. Plans were made for the boys to be sent away to school in England, and for Safta to be ‘finished’ in Paris or in Switzerland after a final year with a new governess. The prospect of her children’s departure did not affect her as much as it would have in the past. She had removed herself even from these arrangements. She left them to her husband, and when he was away, as he so often was, to his father who lived with them at Poiana.
It was old Constantin Văleanu who had decided that England was the place to send them. He said that for the times ahead the boys would need the most reasonable minds, the broadest and most liberal education available.
Constantin Văleanu carried himself still with the authority of his past distinction. He had a diplomatic career behind him, a fine bearing, white temples, a malachite head to the cane he carried. While most men of his class looked to France for culture, Constantin was Anglophile. He admired England’s tailoring, its politics, its sport and particularly its gardens. He had laid out the gardens at Poiana in the English style. He had visited gardens in England, consulted the works of Gertrude Jekyll and come back with plans and lists of plants. Beds of lavender were put in along the terrace; herbaceous borders cut out of the formal lawns; exotic trees planted in the distance, a catalpa, a Ginkgo biloba, a black locust tree. The Moldavian climate was so much harsher than the English one that he had to adapt the English plantings. There were species that were too tender, that must be cajoled through the hot summer and mulched or lifted entirely in winter, or relinquished from his plan. He saw, but wished he did not see, a metaphor there: that Britain’s moderate climate fostered a democratic variety of plants, far more than the extremes of his homeland.
‘England’s so far,’ his daughter-in-law had said. ‘What if there’s a war?’
‘If there’s a war then what place could be safer than England?’
Much as he admired the spirit of the British, he pitied them just a little. He was invited to England every year to shoot grouse in the north. The scale and the form of the land up there, the dales and the moors, reminded him of his home, but the weather was dreary. Beyond that was always the knowledge that he was on an island that was small and damp and tamed. That harboured no wolves, or bears, or wild boar even. That lacked the drama of his homeland – melodrama, some might have called it – the heat, the storms, the vividness; the sense of continental vastness which he knew whenever he looked out towards the River Prut and the eastern horizon.
Though he was over seventy, he went himself with the two boys to London. He took them to Harrods for their uniforms. He bought them trunks and tuck boxes and cricket bats. Then he entrusted them into the hands of an experienced housemaster, personally recommended to him by a shooting acquaintance, in a rambling red-brick house, all stairways and panelled corridors, that was part of a famous English school.
After that he spent two days in a Mayfair hotel with a view of grey streets and interviewed replacements for the tiresome Fräulein Lore, who seemed to have grown ever bonier and more strident as her country did. It rained endlessly. The pavements outside were black with umbrellas and taxis, and the governesses came in variously damp and dishevelled. He met them wearing a Savile Row suit and carrying his stick, and yet his bearing and his dark features were unmistakably exotic even before he spoke a word in his precise but accented English. He chose Clare Sanders because of her freshness which, he thought, made the drops of rain rest lightly on her like dew. She had qualifications in French and in art and the history of art, which he thought ideal for the teaching of a girl. He thought that Safta, lonely without her brothers for the first time in her life, would warm to the young woman’s smile and prettiness. And she really was pretty, like Queen Marie when she was young.
8
Augustin saw the yellow-haired governess the day that she arrived. The car stopped in the village and she leant out of the window to look about her. He saw her again the day after. She was wearing a blue dress the colour of the sky.
Constantin Văleanu had on his usual linen suit. He was a tall man and with age had developed a way of looking draped, even when he was walking, slightly creased like the suit itself. He was holding his cane up in the air, pointing at this and that, and the two slim beige dogs that followed him everywhere hovered beneath the stick as if it was about to be thrown. The dogs were agile enough to have reached and snatched the stick but it was only a game that they were playing with their master. Beside him walked the governess and on her other side was Safta, and now and then one of the dogs ran an impatient circle about the three. Safta looked sleek and dark beside the blonde woman. She was almost the same height but girlish still, her hair tied back, smooth and dark as if it was polished, her plain red skirt slim about her like a tulip. To Augustin she seemed slender and distant, the old connection between them smoothed away. He observed the three of them blandly and without self-consciousness, as a photographer might watch through a camera. They entered the yard and went to the stable where the Lipizzaner was kept. The horse came to the door of its stall and ate the sugar lumps that the old man produced from his jacket and held out on the flat of his hand. The governess reached to stroke its nose, tentatively as someone would who was not used to horses.
When he went in that evening Augustin made their shapes. He coloured them with some stubs of chalk which the schoolmaster had given him. He chalked the figures blue and scarlet and bone.
‘Who’s that boy?’ Clare Sanders asked. ‘I’ve seen him at the stables.’
‘It’s only Augustin,’ Safta said.
‘Why does he watch us?’
‘Augustin wa
tches everything.’
The summer days were so hot and beautiful that the governess had thought she would bring the girl down to do her work on the verandah. The verandah stretched the whole length of the house that faced the garden and the various chairs and tables scattered along it allowed spaces for privacy. Every morning Constantin Văleanu took coffee at one end, where he had a chair with a faded cushion and a small table beside it with an ashtray and the newspaper – the previous day’s since Poiana’s remoteness meant the news was always a day late – set out upon it. Clare Sanders arranged another table at the furthest end, where the morning light fell green through the overhang of wisteria. Even there there were distractions, movements, people coming by, flights of swallows slipping past. Now the men had come to mow the lawn, and Augustin had been sent to help.
The men, five of them, were mowing the lawn with scythes, working in a diagonal line across the width of the terrace. Augustin stood behind with his rake looking vacantly towards the house.
‘He used to come and play here and do lessons with Fräulein Lore. Until my mother decided he was stupid and let him work instead.’
‘Shouldn’t he be at school?’
‘He’s deaf and dumb. No point in him going to school.’
‘I think he was there in the village, the day I came.’
In this country she had every now and then the sense that she had strolled into some picture that she had seen, that she did not know was real. She had taken a train across all of Europe to get here. In Paris and Venice she had stopped for a day or two and seen the sights. She had seen the Corots and Millets in the Louvre, the Renaissance paintings in the Accademia. Then there was the Danube and Bucharest, and another long train journey of a day and a night. She looked out of the window of the train and saw living scenes from the paintings, and when she arrived at the station Constantin Văleanu was there to meet her, and there had been a dusty drive past pale oxen pulling carts and men walking with scythes on their shoulders, and they came to the village and stopped, and a man with a face from a Duccio came to kiss their hands. There was the ploughman from Brueghel’s Icarus. There was this boy, standing aside like Brueghel’s shepherd. And now there were these men mowing, all dressed in white, the sweeps of their scythes moving in slow waves across the grass.
Constantin folded his newspaper and took up his hat and stepped down on to the grass. His dogs got up from the floor and followed him, brushing against his legs. They were Weimaraners, hunting dogs with sleek coats of the softest mushroom grey. One and then the other stretched, stood, rubbed against his legs. When they went out into the sunlight their colour seemed almost no colour at all. ‘Come, Spitzy, Heinz.’ The dogs were a German breed. He loved the dogs and had given them German names, though he did not much care for Germany nowadays.
He stopped before the mowing men. They did not look up but went on working. Their rhythm held, passed down the line: a stroke, a step forward, a geometric passage across the lawn; a pause every now and then to whet a blade. Such a slow, medieval process. He watched and shook his head and idly put out a hand to stroke a restless dog.
‘Grandfather’s getting a lawnmower.’
Safta was meant to be working on her English grammar. Her English had a long way to go before it would be as good as her French or her German.
‘The mower’s coming from England.’
‘I know. I helped him to buy it.’
‘He says the lawns in England are very green and mown in stripes, and Gheorghe and Mihai will play cricket on them wearing white shirts and trousers like the peasants.’
Clare Sanders wondered if they had really better go and work indoors. Yet she had found the old nursery unbearably stuffy. Heat gathered up there beneath the roof and the sun slanted in just so much as to make the two of them feel caged. She had felt the atmosphere there of the past: the rigid teaching of her predecessor, who had put up the world map on the wall and marked on it the major European capitals and pinned and arrowed facts and photographs beside them; the fidgeting of the boys who had scratched their names on to the desktops. Sometime she would add to the map more notes and pictures describing Romania itself, which seemed to have been neglected, but she would have to learn about it first. That could wait until the summer was over.
‘Do you know how to play cricket?’ Safta asked.
‘Of course.’
‘Can girls play?’
‘I don’t see why not. But you need lots of people to make a team.’
‘We could get some of the children from the village.’
The boy in the garden was watching them again. There was something that distinguished him from others. He was thin, small, a little abrupt in his movements. She pictured him fielding, standing out in the deep field looking on. Imagined the boy inside the still body suddenly flinging himself into the air, birdlike, to take a catch.
She spoke to him despite knowing that he was deaf. She spoke in the soft tone she would use if she were talking to an animal. You would speak to an animal knowing that it could not understand, so why not a deaf boy? She spoke first in English, then used the few words of Romanian she had learned. Perhaps he could lip-read; there was no one to tell her. She enunciated the words slowly, aware of the forms of her lips. She put her smile into her eyes as she invited him forward, sitting back herself, not moving her position. If you move towards an animal you risk frightening it away. The thing to do is to make it come to you.
She was sitting in the garden painting. She had a little canvas-bound sketchbook and a watercolour box suitable for travelling, that she had out on the grass beside her. She was making a painting of the house. The light of the late afternoon was long and brought out all the yellows, the lemon in the acacia leaves, the cadmium and golds of flowers in the border. She heard him come and stand behind her, and had the sense that since he did not hear himself he would not know that he was heard. He gave the impression when she smiled at him of being caught in a secret.
He did not look at her so much as at her paints. He looked at them greedily, the square colours in the box shining where her wet brush had touched them.
‘Do you know how to paint?’ Somehow she thought that he did. She held out her sketchbook to him and he looked at it very closely, page by page, then he went away.
The next day he came with some work of his own to show her.
A book the size of her own sketchbook but home-made; cardboard cover and brown-paper pages stitched together with blue thread.
A title page with letters on it grouped like words, no words she knew but only letters shaped like print, regularly and rigidly formed, seriffed and spaced.
Ten pages of pictures, charcoal sketches that had smudged when they were folded. All of them showed flat and empty spaces: the stables, the tack room, a room without furniture, a room with a table and a chest, with a window, a doorway, a chair alone; a ladder set up against a wall in the yard; a fence, an open gate and a rounded hill behind. The forms were precise, carefully shaded with regard to their texture and all pretty much to scale.
Clare Sanders gave his drawings as much attention as he had given hers. There was something special, strange and still in the work. She thought she would have noticed that even if she had not known who had made it.
‘You draw beautifully,’ she said. She was wearing the blue dress that made her eyes bluer. It was strange to him to be looked at by such blue eyes. ‘But I wonder if there’s something that I can teach you.’ She spoke the English words softly and if he did not hear them he saw by her lips that her meaning was soft.
She tore a page from her own sketchbook and put it beside the first drawing. She copied the room that he had drawn, just as he had drawn it, and then alongside she drew the room with the correct perspective. ‘See, that’s how it’s done. That makes the room look deeper. More real.’ She did not know if he saw what she meant so she drew it again, and did the same with one or two of his other subjects. He watched intently but without expression. She repeated
the simple drawings a number of times, wondering why she was bothering with it. ‘I don’t know why I’m doing this. I just thought I’d show you. Of course it doesn’t really matter how you draw things. Your pictures are lovely as they are.’ She smiled and offered him the pencil and a couple of clean pages. ‘Take these anyway. Draw whatever you like.’
He took the pencil and the page, and the sketchbook on which to rest it. Then he began the drawing of the room again, copying her lines this time. When he finished it, he showed it to her with satisfaction. She was astonished that he learned so fast.
He drew frantically in the days after that. He redrew the rooms and the stables and the barns, all the subjects he had drawn before. Their forms were already so precise in his memory that he did not need to go out and sit before them, but he could draw them at the table in the kitchen while he waited for his dinner, bent low over his work while the women worked about him, Mama Anica helping to peel potatoes or chop onions, Paraschiva before some boiling pot at the stove. He shielded the page with his spare arm so that they could not see the pictures as he made them. Then when he had finished he drew a blank page across as if for decency.
The women were used to having him there like a lone person in the midst of them. Most of the time they ignored him as he did them, only pushing him aside, or his pages if they spread too far on the top of the table and took up cooking space. When they put food before him he would put his work away and eat. Now they noticed a change in him.
‘What’s got into him?’
‘He won’t even stop to eat nowadays. That soup’s getting cold.’
His mother tapped his shoulder, offered him the spoon.
Painter of Silence Page 6
