by Paul Watkins
I found a shop at the end of a cobblestoned alleyway, somewhere in the labyrinth of market stalls. A sign on the front said: Fournisseur des Matériaux Artistiques. R. Quatrocci. Prop. It was done in swirly letters and borders of painted ivy. The sign stuck out about a foot into the alleyways on either side of the shop.
Everything in the shop was coated with dust. The place was crammed with stacks of artists’ paper and jars of pencils and half-used tubes of paint. Old artists’ paintboxes and portable easels hung from the ceiling. The owner, a large man with deep-set, sleepy eyes, had to keep moving things aside whenever he moved about in the shop. He wore a painter’s smock that was dirty from the constant wiping of his hands across his chest. When I walked in, his big hands were in mid-wipe over his chest, like a woman trying to hide her naked breasts.
“I need some paper, please,” I said, “and charcoal pencils, too.”
“Bof,” he said and puffed up his cheeks. “This whole place is made of paper. What type of paper do you want?”
“I need it for sketching,” I said.
Just then, a man stuck his head in and shouted, “Rocco!”
I couldn’t see who it was and neither could the owner. Our view of the entrance was blocked by a large gilded frame that held the shredded remains of a painting. It hung from the ceiling on two old leather belts.
“Rocco Quatrocci!’ said the man, with the voice of a ringmaster introducing his prize act to the crowd. “Quatrocci, the King of the World!”
Rocco waved uncertainly and smiled.
“Rocco!” said the man again, as if the word felt good in his mouth and he could not help saying it again. Then he was gone, whistling, the echo calling back to him from the overhanging rooftops of the alleyway, where dandelions grew in the leaf-clogged gutters.
“I have no idea who that was,” said Rocco. “Paper. Let me see.” He walked his fingertips up and down his lips, which popped against each other with a sound like water dripping. “There,” he said, pointing to a stack that lay beneath a shelf of brushes, divided up by size and stacked in old jam jars. “But it is very old.”
I hauled down one of the sketchbook pads. I could tell by the writing style of the manufacturer’s name on the front that the pads were from the turn of the century or perhaps even before. The paper in them had browned at the edges. It was brittle. In some places the paper had started to come apart like dead leaves crumbling. I asked him how much they were.
“I am thinking,” said Rocco, the King of the World. He flippered his lips again. Plip plop plip. “Will you buy all of them?” His voice sounded breathlessly hopeful, as if he carried the weight of all this dusted junk not only in his shop but in his mind.
I didn’t buy all of it, but I bought more than I’d planned to.
I liked it there at Clignancourt, being around all the old books and clothes and china and cigarette cases and wallets picked from pockets years ago and dusted with mold the color of weathered bronze and sold now in heaps on collapsible tables. I liked the way the present and the past collided in the relics that made their way here, whose stories you could read like Braille in each chipped cup and crease of leather.
I rode the streetcar home, feeling the sweat cool on my back from the effort of carrying the heavy paper to the tram stop. My pockets were filled with old charcoal pencils and pastels, mostly broken but still good. I had three sable brushes tucked into my socks because I had no other way to carry them. Their quality had once been good. I didn’t think Pankratov would mind me working on this stuff. I smelled the mustiness of Rocco’s shop in the paper. Rocco, King of the World. I even said it to myself a few times, under my breath, my voice lost in the jangle and clatter of the streetcar.
I made calculations, mumbling the sums, figuring how many more days it would buy me in Paris to work with cheap supplies.
The conductor made his way up and down the car with his metal ticket maker slung across his chest, flipping the red, blue and yellow plastic buttons, then striking a lever that spat out a thin yellow slip with a rapid zipping sound.
There was a warm breeze blowing in from the west. “It’s blowing in from Normandy,” said one old lady. “You can smell the apple blossoms from the trees outside Bayeux.” People smiled and filled their lungs. I didn’t smell any apples. Bayeux was a long way off. It was just a thing to say, but still it made everybody smile with the pleasure of remembering the smell. The breeze filled the space of the streetcar, and people turned their faces to it, closing their eyes. I did the same. I felt the dizziness of clean air deep inside me and knew a part of me belonged here now, in the flow of people and machines.
* * *
“SEE ME AFTERWARDS,” SAID Pankratov. He had collected our Duarte Museum sketches at the end of the previous day. Now he was handing them back.
I stared at the folder, unable to hide my dread. Pankratov’s words reminded me too much of what my old Latin teacher used to say when I had failed a test.
After class, when the others had cleared out, I remained at my stool. I hadn’t touched the sketches.
Pankratov sat down in his chair. “Come over here,” he said.
I slipped off the stool and walked toward him.
“Bring the sketches,” he told me.
I turned around, returned to the easel and fetched the damned sketches.
Pankratov held out his hand for the folder.
I handed it over.
He opened the folder and looked through the sketches again. “These are very good, you know,” he said.
For a moment, I was too surprised to reply. I’d had no idea what he would think of my work, but had just assumed the worst.
“Did you hear what I told you?” asked Pankratov.
“Yes,” I replied faintly. “Thank you.”
“They’re very good. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“I think so,” I told him.
“I’m impressed,” he said, looking around the room as if unwilling to look me in the eye when making such a statement. Then his head snapped back to face me. “All right,” he announced. “You can go now.”
As I walked down to the Rue Descalzi, I replayed his words over and over in my head, not trusting their meaning. Sure that he intended something else. I had never expected any kind of compliment from him. I didn’t think him capable of it. Slowly, as I began to relax, I realized what a hold this man had on me, and how badly I needed his approval.
* * *
THE NEXT MORNING I woke, as usual, to the sound of muttering voices in the Rue Descalzi. I could smell the particularly sour, perfumey reek of Matelot tobacco, which was the cheapest brand. When I looked from my window, I saw a line of men outside the gates of the Postillon warehouse. They were shabbily dressed, with floppy caps that hid their faces in the shadows of the morning. They stood with the bowed heads of men down on their luck.
When the foreman arrived with his hobnailed boots echoing in the street, his Dragoon mustache was always freshly waxed. Brass buttons gleamed on his double-breasted tunic. He picked out a few of the men, selecting each one with a jerk of his chin. He didn’t make his choices by who was first in line, but the other men offered no protest. Either they were too tired or they knew they would never be picked if they kicked up a fuss. They shambled away down the street with their hands in their pockets. The chosen men followed the foreman into the warehouse. A few minutes later, they rode out of the warehouse on rickety bicycles. They carried wooden placards on their backs. On the placards was the wine company’s motto—BUVEZ LES VINS DU POSTILLON.
Ever since Fleury had brought up the idea of staying in Paris, I tried to push the idea to the back of my mind. I still had a month to go before the Levasseur grant ran out. But every morning when I saw those men outside the warehouse, waiting for work, I tried to imagine myself down there with them. Even if I did decide to stay, I had no idea where the money would come from. At this rate, it certainly wasn’t going to come from the paintings. And then there was the thre
at of war, which was on everyone’s minds these days. The whole idea of remaining here seemed hopeless to me. I kept seeing those men lined up outside the warehouse. I could practically feel the weight of the placard on my back as I bicycled around town. Buvez les Vins du Postillon. It had become an ugly little chant in my head, like a meaningless taunt shouted across a playground at some unpopular child.
I sat down at my three-legged kitchen table, which was bolted to the wall to stop it from falling over, and pawed through the strange blues and browns of the French notes in my moneybox, wondering how long I could make it all last.
Chapter Four
“YOU KNOW THE WAR is coming, Monsieur Alley-fax.”
Pankratov and Valya and I were alone in the atelier. Balard and Marie-Claire had been sent out on assignments, the result of Pankratov’s pinning a giant map of Paris up on a wall and making each of us in turn throw a dart at the map at a distance of ten paces. Wherever the dart landed, the person had to go and paint that place. Since my dart missed the map entirely and stuck itself in the door, Pankratov said he would take pity on me. He decided that since I could not even throw a dart, I would mostly likely just get lost trying to find any location on the map. I would paint Valya instead.
I tried to look suitably humiliated. The truth was, I’d done it on purpose. I didn’t like painting in the street. People were always coming up to you and staring over your shoulder and making comments under their breath that they thought you couldn’t hear.
The others clattered away down the stairs, hugging their boxes of paints and their collapsible easels. Then it was just me and Pankratov and Valya.
“How do you want me to be?” Valya asked Pankratov, to show she didn’t care what I did with her body on my canvas.
Pankratov shrugged. “Ask the American. I’m not painting you.”
She turned to me. “Well?” she asked, holding out her arms.
I asked her to stand by the large window. I said she should keep her clothes on.
She obeyed without a word, as if this was what every artist asked her to do when given the chance and it was all very boring and she had done this a hundred times already.
That day, I tried to paint the cold outside. I gave the work a steely look to match the light of the late afternoon. Valya was in silhouette. I painted her as if she were shadows coming to life, the way incense rises to form shapes around the altar of a church. I painted the crumpled light that each windowpane allowed into the dark space of the atelier. I allowed it to be warm inside, but just beyond the thin veil of the glass, I made winter settle on the woman by the window.
While I painted, Pankratov sat in his camp chair, fingertips pressed together in front of his face, eyes unfocused. “The war,” he said again.
I didn’t look up. I measured out varnish and paint, then stirred them together with the narrow, rounded blade of my pallette knife.
“The war, Monsieur Halifax.”
I didn’t want to talk about it. For me, back then, all notions about the safety of France began and ended with the Maginot Line, miles and miles of tunnels built into the French-German border, underground railways, barracks, even cinemas, gunpits arranged to blast anything that tried to cross the frontier. Nothing could get through that. It was the most advanced fortification in the world. The Germans said they didn’t want France, anyway. They wanted places that had been German, or at least partly German, like Austria and Czechoslovakia.
It was already a dead topic. Talk like this had been going on for years and people were tired of it. If there was going to be a war, I told myself, I wouldn’t be able to do anything to stop it. It seemed to me most people felt that way.
“I wanted to know,” asked Pankratov, “whether you have made provisions for leaving. For leaving in a hurry, I mean.”
“No, sir,” I said. “All I’ve been thinking about lately is staying.”
Pankratov made a growling noise at the back of his throat. He rose up from his chair and walked over to the door. “I have to go out,” he said. He lifted his faded canvas coat off a brass peg nailed into the wall. The peg had been placed without alignment to anything else in the room. It lay directly in the path of his leaving the room from his chair and at the height required for him to sweep his jacket off the hook without effort. He seemed to have no real sense of order beyond the immediate practicality of things. They were placed where he needed them, without regard to color or style or the convenience of anyone else.
Pankratov shut the door and from the other side the shape of his body blurred behind the pebbled glass window. It made him look like a bear standing up on his hind legs. His footsteps clumped down a few paces and then stopped.
He must be lighting a cigarette, I thought. Unconsciously, I found myself waiting for the footsteps to continue. When, after a few seconds, they didn’t, I looked up from my work and straight into Valya’s eyes.
She was waiting, too.
Eventually, after what seemed a long time, the footsteps continued, fading down and down until there was a distant boom as he closed the front door of the building.
“Pankratov doesn’t trust us here alone,” said Valya, whispering, as if he were still listening to each breath that passed between us. She called him Pankratov, just like the rest of us.
“Seems that way,” I said.
“He’s afraid he’ll come back and find us doing it right on the platform. That would give him a shock he’d never get over.”
I looked up from my painting. “He wouldn’t be the only one in shock.”
She chose to ignore what I said. “Do you know what he’s really afraid of?”
I peered over the top of my easel. “What?” I asked.
“He thinks we’ll steal his chair and sell it.” She left her pose by the window and walked over to the chair and sat down in it. “The thing I can’t understand is why he holds on to this when it is so damned uncomfortable. This chair was once the only thing he owned, apart from that ridiculous belt buckle of his.”
I was only half listening. I gazed at her hips as she sat in the chair and she knew I was looking at her. She made no move to draw my eyes back to her own. Seeing her now with clothes on, knowing each crease and smoothness of her skin beneath the material, did more to me than seeing her naked. I found I could not freeze into my blood the detachment I needed to paint her properly, to be aware of each part of her and not overwhelmed by all of her at once. I had to snap out of it. I looked at the empty space she’d left behind against the wall and realized I preferred the picture without her in it. With the palette knife, I scraped away the layers of paint that had made up her brooding shape and began to paint over it.
“What are you doing?” she asked. Without waiting for me to reply, she got up and walked over to my easel. “You just erased me!”
“It’s not about you,” I told her. “Not any more. It started out being about you but now it’s only about the painting.”
“Why get me to stand there at all?”
“If you hadn’t moved, I wouldn’t have known it was better this way. It’s nothing personal,” I said.
“It seems personal to me.” She couldn’t decide whether to be amused or indignant. “I only wanted to sit down for a minute. I didn’t realize there would be a penalty.”
Now I smiled at her. “I didn’t know you had a sense of humor.”
“One of several things you don’t know, Alley-Fax. And now that you know something about me, let me ask you something about yourself.”
I glanced up. Here we go, I thought.
Valya smiled, knowing that we understood each other probably better than we wanted to. “Why have you ditched all your friends? You used to be such a social butterfly. Now you just hole up and paint as if you’re possessed or something.”
I sighed and set down the brush, which was what she had wanted me to do from the start. I considered giving her some sarcastic answer that would allow us to change the subject, but I decided I would speak plainly instead, to fin
d the honest words as much for myself as for her. “It’s how I make sense of the world.” I took up the brush again. “I don’t always paint because I like it. Sometimes I don’t like it. Sometimes it’s too hard to like what I’m doing.”
“So why do it at all?”
“Because it isn’t on a balance of liking and not liking. I am driven to do it. I need to do this. And when I am done with it, and I stand back and see what has been made, then I understand why I paint.”
“If it’s any good, that is.”
“No. Good or not. When I stand back from the work, I see what pushes me on.”
“A fat lot of good that does your friends,” she said, and shook her head pityingly in my direction.
Just then, I pitied her too. As far as she was concerned, I spent my life being hounded by demons from one frenzy of work to another. But in my mind, I felt as if I were constantly trying to unravel some kind of puzzle that was greater than myself. No one painting would do this. Perhaps even all of the paintings put together would not be able to reveal it. But sometimes, in the midst of the work, I felt myself brush up against the source of some great mystery. Once you have felt that, I wanted to tell her, then you feel sorry for anyone who does not know what they are built to do, and who is not driven on to do it. I wanted to explain this to Valya, but I could tell her mind was closed now, so instead I asked her, “Why sit in his chair if it’s so uncomfortable?”
This got her all worked up again. “Because he’s so damned precious about it! He thinks more of it than you or me or anyone else. This stupid thing of wood and canvas. When he came to Paris, it was all he brought with him.”
I tried to keep my thoughts far away in the wintry light of the painting, in the thick liquid sweep of the brush across the canvas and the hypnotic reek of linseed oil and varnish.
“Do you know the difference between a White Russian and a Red Russian?” Valya wanted to talk. “The Reds are the Communists,” she explained.
“Yes, I know,” I said.
“And the Whites were against the Communist Revolution. You know. Fighting for the Tsar. Well, Pankratov was a White Russian. That’s what his belt buckle stands for. The royal crest of the Romanovs. It’s the only thing left of his old uniform and he’s too cheap to go out and buy himself a proper belt.”
