Painter of Silence

by Georgina Harding

  ‘It’s that girl. She’s turned his head.’

  ‘Who’s that? Someone in the village?’

  The women laughed together and he noticed the commotion and looked up with his strange separateness. His hair stood in a tangle. His shirtsleeve was flopping into the soup bowl.

  The Romanians called her Domnişoara Clara. They thought the English Clare too simple and plain a name. And as the days passed she felt less and less English, even though she knew that it was her job to be English, to teach the language but also the ideas, the qualities that were considered special to an English education. As if to remind her of this, Constantin Văleanu persisted in calling her Miss Sanders as he had done that morning in Mayfair. And Mama Anica, who was quick to see trouble coming, just called her a surly Miss Clare.

  The first moment she had arrived at Poiana Clare Sanders had been shown into the drawing room to meet her charge’s mother. It was a long light greenish room. There were vases of flowers and landscapes and mirrors on the walls and formal chairs stood about like people on a country platform waiting for a train. Marina Văleanu sat on a green silk sofa. When Clare went forward to shake her hand she saw that she had a sombre beauty like that of the cloaked and bejewelled boyars in the portraits in the hall. The elderly Polish butler served tea from a samovar, and gooseberry jam to eat from a tiny saucer, and she thought that she had wandered into a Russian novel. She answered a string of courteous but searching questions about her age and education and family and religion. She answered precisely as if this was the interview and she hadn’t yet got the job, and felt as she listened to herself that her answers all sounded disappointingly flat and suburban and twentieth century.

  She did not meet Safta’s father until he came up from Bucharest a week or so later. Alexandru was standing in the hall with the staircase winding up behind him and the boyars looking down on him so like his wife. He was taking a cigarette from a silver case, a man in his forties, not as handsome as probably he once had been but powerful in his presence. She wasn’t naïve. She recognised the look he gave her and knew in that moment that she should keep her distance. If as the summer went on she failed in this, she put it down not only to his charm but to the exotic nature of the place, the heat, the Gypsy music whose sound carried in the nights, the ease with which these people with whom she lived slipped from one language, as from one identity, to another.

  Augustin saw it in her face when he brought her his drawings. He saw that she paid less attention to them and had less time to sit with him and teach him. Her own sketchbook, even when she carried it with her, did not fill up in the way it had before. He was alert to details in the behaviour of the people he knew. One day he sat beside her on the white bench beneath the catalpa and Alexandru Văleanu came across and spoke to her. Though the man stood back some distance in the sun, and she who sat in the shade had to frown and raise her hand above her eyes to see him against the dazzle, Augustin knew as if he had heard the words that they were intimate ones. He saw her eyes run after him as he walked away, sensed the rush in her.

  All those summer weeks he watched the governess and saw the lines she made through the garden and the grounds, and the lines made by her lover, and where they intersected. There were people staying, men in straw hats and women in print dresses coming in and out of the house, putting hands to their eyes as they walked from the shade into the sun. He did not know who these people were but he saw that their faces changed from time to time; that some came and others left, but it did not matter because life at the house went on the same. The boys were home and sometimes Safta went out riding with her brothers in the early morning when it was cool, and came back hot as her horse, wet and shining with the heat. Sometimes her father rode and he looked on horseback like the statue of a hero in the town square. Clare Sanders who did not ride looked up with admiration.

  Then one morning very early he saw her go.

  Sudden movements were rare at Poiana. Comings and goings seemed always to be attended by long greetings and partings, decorous circlings, nothing so abrupt as this. Augustin saw the car taken out and brought up to the front. Marina Văleanu was standing between the columns of the porch, stiff as a pole. She did not move her body but only turned her head. The governess came out through the open door and went into the car as if she was blown by a gust of wind.

  He worked all the day and watched out for her but she did not come back. That evening he made another figure. He cut it from card. He needed yellow for the hair but he had no yellow – no yellow crayons or paint or chalk, or cloth or wool either. There was only the yellow of the flowers in the little garden Paraschiva tended before the gate, and the colour of them was too strong. He had blue though. He had a piece of blue silk that had come to him from the house, that he kept in the box with his treasures. It was just the right colour. Nothing else that he or Paraschiva owned was that shade of blue except for the walls of the rooms in which they lived. He cut the silk and pleated it in fine folds about the figure, and tied it round and round with a thread.

  9

  From his bed he has a clear view of the doors to the ward, a view down the length of the room along the lines of floorboards that he knows narrow with the distance. There is a certain time of day when he looks down this perspective of the boards and watches the doors. It is the time when Safta comes. They are double doors but usually only one of them is opened at a time; one is enough for her to slip through. But today the doors open together. She is pushing a wheelchair. She has pushed it against the doors so hard that they go on swinging long after she has passed. It is a bright day. Since morning when he woke the ward has been streaming with light. It seems to him that some of the brightness of the day has gone into her and made her eyes darker.

  The other patients lie still in their beds. It is as if the whole ward is still, or its motion slowed, before the dark speed of her. She comes down the aisle between the beds, directly to him. Her eyes are on him, communicating without the need for words. He knows that she is smiling beneath her mask.

  She had decided as soon as she woke: she would take him outside this day for the first time. Only she had to do her shift first, and find the wheelchair because he is still so weak. She will take him out like a newly washed sheet that she would hang high in the breeze and the sun. Hold him up and let the sun run through him. She comes straight to his bedside, and all in one movement she picks up the coat she has found for him and turns back his bedding.

  His face is pale as his pillow, the discoloured grey of white cotton long used and roughly laundered. When he raises himself he leaves the greyer indentation of his head there behind him. He edges forward, turns his body and puts his legs over the side of the bed, lets his quivering weight down on to them. He puts on the old coat she holds out for him, first one arm and then the other, and she buttons it right up as if he were her child. Yet it is she who seems young, the girl Safta. He is an old man before her, sitting now, the chair wheeled rapidly, if not so fast as before, out of the ward and along dark systems of corridors to a creaking lift, down then and through more and darker corridors and along a ramp and out into the yard, where the sun hits him full face and hot like a slap.

  He closes his eyes against the first dazzle of it. There is colour still beneath his eyelids: yellow, a burn of magenta running through. He opens them to blue sky and the green of new leaves. The yard is shaded by tall trees, limes and chestnuts. It is enclosed on three sides by the hospital buildings but on the fourth there is a high iron railing and beyond it the street.

  It is like a public garden only the people in it wear pyjamas, dressing gowns, white coats. There are men on benches, old women shuffling, a young woman rocking a pram, sleeping dogs. Safta pushes the wheelchair along the paths until she finds a place where it catches the sun. She sits beside him for a while.

  There is a patient who is a barber and has set up shop on a bench beneath a tree. A patient barber with patient customers. An old man takes off his pyjama top, has a robe put
around his thin white shoulders, holds his head erect to have the barber snip at wisps of hair.

  She looks at her watch.

  ‘I’ll be back later,’ she says to his eyes. ‘I have to go now.’

  As she leaves the yard she takes a look behind her. Another patient has come up to him, an old fellow she knows by sight. He has been at the hospital as long as she has worked there. He has some chronic condition that keeps him there as if it is his home. When the old man approaches, Augustin puts his index finger up to cover his ear and then passes it back and forth before his mouth. It is the first piece of communication she has seen him use since he came to the hospital.

  Each day after that he spends some time in the sun. Once he is strong enough to walk on his own he can go out whenever he wants. The fine weather continues. The leaves on the trees have fully unfurled so that the yard is washed about with green. There is a bench where he particularly likes to sit, in the corner of the yard where he can watch people come and go through the gate. He sits very still. His hands that seem too big for the rest of him lie flat on his lap, fingers rising and falling now and then, faintly twitching like leaves in a breeze. Sometimes other patients come and sit beside him. They know now that he is deaf. Some sit and are happy not to speak. Others use the opportunity to talk. They begin with random words or casual pleasantries. Then sometimes they let go, talking, telling, confiding in a flood of almost whispered words. He knows the urgency in them by the tension in their bodies and he turns his head and put his eyes on them. He understands that he must sit like that impassively until whatever flood it is has ebbed. In times like these it would appear that a deaf mute may be ideal company.

  He sees that people’s faces have changed since he has come back into the world. In the place where he has been there was a particular kind of face. Before that, in the village, there was another kind. And now here again they are different. The features may be similar, but the differences between them are as profound as the differences between a summer and an autumn and a winter landscape.

  He expects that he will be leaving this place soon. The fat nurse has brought him clothes to wear. She is a kind woman, he can see that. She has tried to teach him her name. She points to herself, denting the broad white front of her nurse’s apron into the deep valley between her breasts, opens her mouth wide and speaks her name. Four movements to it: lips wide, then drawn, wide, drawn again, tongue coming forwards. He does not read the shapes but he knows that she is good. The clothes she brought were too large so she measured them against him and then took them away, and when she came with them again she had shortened the trousers and taken them in at the waist. So now he has the shortened trousers, and the shirt and the jacket that also are a little too big but which she does not alter, neatly folded in the locker beside his bed, ready for when he leaves.

  Most of the time he does not think about where he will be going. He expects only that men will come for him as they have the other times. There will be men, uniforms; of that much he is sure. Only sometimes when none of the nurses are about him, or at night when he is awake and there is nothing to see and he might be alone in the ward, floating in the dark, only half-conscious, his thoughts come to him in pictures, pictures in which memory and nightmare are combined. There will be a transport of some kind standing at the hospital gates, black, rectangular, like a square black hole cut out of the city street. He knows how it will be inside: hard floor, hard walls, darkness, judders running through him, the bitter smell of men, the blindness of knowing nothing because it is always others who get to sit at the back or by the barred window and have the chance to see where they are going to or where they have been; men to whom he is chained but with whom he has no further connection, each one of them shut away within himself, not so much as looking him in the eye. And he lies very calmly and sees the pictures through and ignores the faces of the men and then they go away. He has experienced fear before. He knows that the pictures will dissolve in the end if he is calm.

  In the morning it gets light and he looks out of the window and they have not come. He watches for them coming through the doors. He is ready to put on his clothes. But there is only breakfast and the doctors on their rounds, and lunch. And still wearing his pyjamas he takes his stroll in the garden, and sometimes he goes right to the gate where there is a kiosk selling flowers and he can see the people who pass on the street.

  ‘I think he has someone,’ Adriana says. ‘I think he’s waiting for someone.’

  ‘How can that be?’

  ‘Haven’t you seen how he stands about the doorways? He stands around, waiting. And I’ve seen him standing on the stairs, where they bend round above the lobby and you can see everyone down below and they don’t see you. He watches, as if he’s expecting someone.’

  His case is no longer acute. If he had someone to care for him he might have left the hospital already. But Safta has received no reply to her letters.

  ‘What if nobody comes? What will happen to him then?’

  ‘If he’s not in the hospital then I suppose they’ll say he’s a vagrant.’

  ‘What happens to vagrants?’

  ‘I don’t know. I think they arrest them, don’t they?’

  Safta seats herself beside him in the garden.

  ‘What are we to do with you, Tinu?’

  There is a cat that has attached itself to him. He does not appear to have sought its friendship any more than he has asked for the confidences of the other patients. Only the cat comes to where he is sitting and rubs its back against his legs.

  ‘I thought that perhaps I should go to Poiana and see who I can find. It’s risky. I’m not allowed there. None of us are allowed back. But I wouldn’t be there for long.’ She watches the cat as she speaks, listening to herself. Her voice seems clearer than her thoughts, a light, fresh, clear voice. The cat is thin and mangy but Tinu doesn’t seem to mind. He drops his hand as if to stroke it but it doesn’t quite trust him yet and pulls back, stays just out of range watching the hand which he leaves dropped there, open for approach. ‘I’d just see a couple of people, that’s all. I don’t know who’s left. If there was no one to answer my letters, then I can only imagine your mother’s gone. If I go there then perhaps I can find out where she is. And then of course she might be there, after all. Maybe it was just that the letters didn’t arrive. Maybe it’s all there, like it was.’

  Speaking to someone who cannot hear is more than thinking aloud. The words make a trail of their own.

  10

  One summer a young man came to Poiana in a long green car. It was clear that he had travelled a great distance to get there because the car was so thick with dirt. When they cleaned it the green came out from beneath the layers of dirt like a bottle dusted from the cellar. The beautiful car was given a space in the coach house beside the carriages and landaus. Augustin used to put out his hand to it and touch its metal sides, stroking along the bonnet and the curve of the mudguard where it swept down into running board. He thought it like a fierce sheepdog stretched out there, only seeming to sleep amongst the sheep.

  The young man had arrived with a friend but when the friend left he stayed on. He stayed while other parties came and went. In the heavy heat of the summer days he would drive people off between the acacias and bring them back wet from a swim in a lake or hot from some picnic in the sun. Sometimes in the mornings he came alone to the yard and took the car out and worked on it. He folded the bonnet back to work on its engine, or went into consultation with Ilie, or lay right beneath it and wriggled out with blackened hands and a smear of oil across his cheek. The oil did not make him look dirty but emphasised the cleanness of him, his sleekness and the whiteness of his smile.

  ‘Take a look if you like.’ One day early in his stay the young man had waved Augustin over with his oily hand. It was soon after he arrived and he did not know that the boy couldn’t hear him. Augustin’s look seemed to show intelligence so he held forth for some time about spark plugs and pistons an
d carburettors, explained his marvellous engine to the stable lad. His fingers moved with precision between gleaming and greased pieces of metal, pointed and touched. Augustin’s eyes widened. Such alertness was easy to interpret as comprehension. The young man bent and took the crank and started it up. Augustin saw the pieces of metal shiver into motion. He felt the vibration of the car as if it was inside him. He saw the air melting blue above the metal as it grew hot.

  The young man folded the bonnet back and strapped it shut.

  ‘Get in. I’ll take you for a drive.’

  Augustin had been in a car before, but the young man was not to know this. The Packard in which he had been driven to the monastery was closed so you had to put your head out of the window to feel the wind. This one was open and the wind was all about you. He closed his eyes and it seemed to him that he flew.

  They went down the drive and off on a circuit of the valley. In the dip at the bottom of the valley the air was hotter, close even as they sped through it, hot about them with the smell of their own dust that they threw up on the road. In the village boys ran after them and were soaked up in the dust. Then they climbed again into fresh air and hay smell, the shadow of the car racing beneath them, the peasants standing fixed like photographs in the fields. On they went to the top of the ridge and along it. Augustin laughed at the top of his voice and the young man thought that he heard a scream and looked round but saw that the boy was happy, not afraid. At last they turned for home, taking the track back through the forest where they went slower and the air was cool and brown.

  Close to home they came upon Safta walking alone with a jarful of wild strawberries she had picked. The young man stopped and Augustin got out and squeezed into the narrow seat at the back, and Safta got in the front, and turned and gave him a handful of the fruit. They drove on through the woodland and down the avenue towards the house, through stripes of light and shade. The sun dodged behind the trees, dazzling them at one moment and hiding from them the next. He ate the tiny strawberries one by one. The girl’s hair flew back in dark waves towards him. Her slim brown hands gathered the tangled length of it together and tied it loosely, held the knot against the bared nape of her neck. Even when he had eaten all of the strawberries the scent of them stayed with him. He watched Safta’s hands that were so close to him. They had become the hands of a woman, not those of a girl. They were conscious of themselves and their effect. He saw her face like a woman’s when the hair was pulled back from it, turning towards the young man at the wheel.