The Drowning People

by Richard Mason

  “The apartment has not been opened since the funeral,” he said.

  “I wonder what we’ll find.” My heart was quick with excitement as he put the key in the lock.

  “I wonder myself.”

  With a grind of rusty bolts the door opened and, on cue, the light in the passage went out. We pushed on in darkness and Eric fumbled once more for a light switch and once more found one and flicked it on. This time, however, we were bathed in a tremendous wave of electric light. The chandelier above our heads—as I later had leisure to count—had thirty bulbs; and it illuminated every corner of the Aladdin’s cave in which we stood.

  I remember that first glow of light, the physical shock of that brightness, and I remember that my life has not been wholly without adventure.

  Eric and I were standing in a long, narrow room, the stone of its floor carpeted haphazardly with Turkish rugs, its walls completely bare and painted a deep, rich red. A film of dust covered everything, hushing the colors of the carpets and the drapes, an imperial yellow, which hung tentlike from the ceilings. I sneezed and the sound broke the tension and made us laugh.

  “My God,” I said, “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  Eric’s eyes danced. “Let’s explore.”

  So together we explored the apartment; and excitedly, like awed schoolboys in a museum, we went through its rooms, occasionally picking up and showing each other some of the more eccentric examples of Madame Mocsáry’s taste: a small golden elephant with sparkling red stones for eyes that sat on the piano; a cheap plastic fan of lime green and pink which lay, for decoration, on an occasional table; an ashtray of old blue crystal, heavily cut. The room we were in served as a kind of entrance hall cum sitting room—what purpose it had served in the Sherkanskys’ days I could not tell—and from it opened two doors, each set back in pillared alcoves. The first opened onto a dank little passage which led to a poky kitchen and a bathroom with a large porcelain bath and no taps. The second—which we explored only after a hopeful but disappointing examination of the kitchen equipment—was more rewarding.

  “Mon Dieu,” said Eric as he opened it. “Come and see this, James.”

  So I came and together we entered the Picture Room for the first time. It was a perfectly proportioned square, its walls twelve feet apart and set at right angles to each other, a false ceiling setting their height at twelve feet too. Every inch of the four walls, saving only the door through which we had entered and two long casement windows overlooking the street, was covered with canvases. Some framed, some not, they clustered together as if for comfort in the chilly room, hiding the wall—which was a deep red like the hall—in a riot of color: fantastic, half-realistic shapes painted over many years in a progression which—as I later discovered—could be traced.

  “So this is it,” Eric said quietly.

  “What?”

  “My great-aunt used to write to my mother about her Picture Room. She was convinced that she would not finish it before she died.” He paused and looked about him. “It has something of the grand effect, has it not?”

  I nodded.

  I can see that room now: the single most cohesive creation of a brilliant mind. It housed an explosive outpouring of artistic inspiration, from the first ink sketches of a young girl to the assured, experimental works of an older, more mature artist. The images were varied: some were small, some huge; some in oils, some in ink or acrylics; most were on canvas, some were on board. They coagulate in my mind though I once knew them so well. I cannot make out their individual subjects, for the passing of the years has cast a film over them which blurs their outline and their detail. It is strange that I should not remember, for I came to love those paintings and the room which housed them; they came to mean a great deal to me. Perhaps that is why I have forgotten. Who can say?

  The spirit of Madame Mocsáiy was everywhere in that eccentric apartment: from the faded yellow drapes which hid the cracked ceiling of its hall to the collection of bric-á-brac that covered every available ledge, surface and shelf. For an hour Eric and I wandered about, fascinated; only then did the practicalities of our situation occur to us. Madame Mocsáry, it seemed, had had no use for a bed.

  “She must have had one at least,” said Eric. “We must find it.”

  But search though we did we could unearth nothing that even resembled a mattress, let alone anything more sophisticated or comfortable than that. It was I who discovered the key to the secret of where Madame Mocsáry had slept, and by the time I had done so Eric and I had been searching fruitlessly for almost an hour. The dust in the apartment had been making me sneeze so I decided to air the drapes that covered the furniture. It was when I removed the blue velvet square from the sofa that I discovered that it was not a sofa at all but a single bed pushed against the wall with cushions on its three sides. How we laughed to have been outwitted for so long by a ghost.

  I remember Eric’s laughs. He abandoned himself to them. They were throaty guffaws of white teeth and disheveled hair and streaming eyes. And they will return to my nightmares with the smile which preceded them and the clap of his hand on my back. It has taken fifty years to banish all thoughts of Eric, to close my dreams to the sight and sound of him. Now I have undone the work of decades; I have remembered. And Erie will return to haunt me; tonight he will revisit me, no longer happy but tortured, no longer carefree but hunted. Who is he? What is he? An image. A sound. A touch. A young man who had a happy life but an unhappy death. He is nothing more than that, surely? He is dead. But he lives on within me; my conscience will not lay him to rest for it no longer stomachs deceit. And so his laugh shrieks at me, accusingly, across the years.

  That afternoon, though, I heard his laugh with pleasure and laughed too. We laughed and laughingly wrestled each other for the privilege of the bed. Eric, though broader than I, was the loser; and it was decided that after an adequate cleaning and airing, the velvet drapes with which the apartment was full should be piled on top of each other to provide him with a makeshift mattress. That important issue resolved, we turned our attention to the prospective difficulties of the job at hand, opening cupboards; examining shelves; exploring the nooks and crannies of an eccentric old lady’s private world. And we discovered that the cleaning of the house, unlived in since Madame Mocsáry’s removal to a nursing home almost a year before, would be no easy task. Whatever skills a boarding school education had equipped me with, the handling of dusters, detergents and the like had not been amongst them; and Eric was hardly more skilled than I was. Our enthusiasm gave us confidence, however. And we went to DUM at once and armed ourselves with mops and buckets—for my friend insisted on viewing the process as a military operation—and returned exhilarated by our expedition to face the immediate task of airing the fabric.

  Thus it was that a rather bemused Czech audience was able to observe us, over the course of that afternoon and early evening, dancing wildly in the street below our balcony and tugging huge squares of velvet—red, yellow, blue, purple, green—with all our force. We beat them with tremendous vigor and a great deal of noise on anything that presented itself: lampposts, building walls, railings. Nothing was safe from our furious efforts. But by nightfall we had finished and were ready to hang the velvet to air on the balustrade of the central staircase—giving it, incidentally, something of the splendor it must have assumed on feast days in the past—and to climb to our apartment, naked without its fine fabrics. There the furniture stared at us, grimy, bare and uninviting; and we left it in search of dinner and wine, drinking and laughing together until we could barely walk, returning unsteady at dawn to the glorious decay of the Sherkansky Palace and the desolate grandeur of Sokolska 21.

  It was those public fabric beatings which first brought Blanca into our lives: Blanca, the wrinkled old woman with the carefully dyed blond hair who had been Madame Mocsáry’s cleaner and confidante. She lived in a much shabbier building farther down Sokolska Street, on the opposite side; and we learned from her later t
hat she had watched, horrified, as two unknown men had gone about destroying her old mistress’s possessions in the street below her very own apartment. Our impertinence, she told us afterwards, had required immediate action on her, Blanca’s, part; and although not a large woman, she, Blanca, was both fierce and unafraid, not frightened of young upstarts, and not about to let their impudence go unavenged. So she had gone to meet us, bent on violence, and she had found us as we were carrying the last of the drapes down the palace staircase. An unexpected, neatly aimed kick at Eric’s shins had been enough to incapacitate him, while a loud barrage of enraged Czech had awed me into silence.

  We calmed her eventually, but only with great difficulty, repeating our explanations first in English and then in broken German, Eric nursing his ankle all the while, I doing my best to placate our unexpected aggressor with soothing phrases from a half-remembered Czech phrase book. At length the situation was clarified, and when it was Blanca’s apologies were scarcely less alarming than her previous fury had been. On no account were we to clean the apartment by ourselves, she told us; she must make amends for her insult. And in any case, men were notoriously unreliable. What did we think we were doing without a woman’s guidance? There was no knowing what damage we might cause if left to our own devices.

  Faced with such an implacable opponent, there was little for Eric or me to do but to submit, so submit we did; and from thenceforth Blanca assumed control of the project in hand and worked with expert energy, talking nineteen to the dozen all the while and delegating enthusiastically as she did so. Under her guidance, the days which followed our arrival at Sokolska 21 saw a whirlwind of activity on a par with anything the building could have experienced in the course of two long centuries. Arriving promptly at nine o’clock, Blanca worked her “troops” (as she came affectionately to call us) from the moment she crossed the threshold until late into the night, setting us to scrub, clean and sort with tireless authority.

  It was understood that any furniture which the Vaugirard family did not want for itself was to be sold with the paintings; and the six days of our house cleaning were devoted to salvaging the odd treasures from the amorphous heap of junk which Madame Mocsáry had accumulated in the course of nearly eighty years. We found things in curious places. One of the floorboards—suspiciously creakier than the rest—lifted to reveal a bundle of neatly tied letters; the lid of the piano concealed, below the strings of the instrument, a tiny black box with an old amber broach in it; and taped to the top of a kitchen drawer was a gentleman’s pocket watch made of a metal which looked to me like gold.

  All these items—and many more—I showed to Eric on discovery, and it was he who decided their fate. Of the letters he said slowly, “Love letters. Let us burn them.” And so, itching with a curiosity I could not satisfy, I placed them in the corner of the balcony we called the bonfire site. There were about fifty in all, written on the same paper and now cracking with age, in a spidery handwriting and a language I did not recognize. Eric cast an eye over them. “Not my great-uncle’s writing,” he said sternly; then he softened. “But let us preserve an old lady’s secret.” And holding them in his left hand he lit his lighter under them and we watched as they burned brightly and turned to ash.

  Isabelle Mocsáry and her unusual style intrigued me; and if I could not read her letters I could at least follow Blanca’s unceasing reminiscences with great interest. “Madame was a very fine lady,” her former cleaner would tell us in reverential tones as she scrubbed. “A very fine lady. I was her servant but she treated me like her friend.” And as Blanca dusted she would tell us a brief history of each object she touched. Eric and I listened, fascinated, as she reeled off the names of the people who had drunk from Madame Mocsáry’s teacups; the works of the intellectuals who had frequented her card table; the genius of the musicians, Eduard Mendl foremost amongst them, who had sat at her piano. “Oh yes, she was a very fine lady,” Blanca would finish. “Even in the hard times she was generous and kind. A very fine lady. And she never held with the Communists, never. Not once did she hide it, either. She said things to strangers that one didn’t say to friends in those days. Oh yes she did. And what is more: they never dared to touch her. She was a woman who could make a noise and they knew that.” With a little prompting from Eric she would expound for hours, too, on the state of the country and its new regime. “Life was not so bad under the Communists,” she said once, as she cleaned the windows. “There was safety at least. Now there is no safety. Only the young can gain; we who are old are left to die. To die,” she repeated, almost savagely, eyes narrowing in a cracked face lined with work. There was an awkward pause. “But one must not complain,” Blanca continued, sensing our discomfort, “one must go on. That is what Madame used to say. ‘While there is food on the table and love in the heart you cannot be unhappy for long.’ It is an old Bohemian saying which she liked to use. I think she liked this country, Madame. And Mr. Mocsáry too, though I did not know him so well. He died many years ago.” She paused meditatively, looking sadly around the room we were dismantling. “Yes, Madame liked this country despite everything,” she finished at last. “It seems a pity, somehow. Her pictures should not be sold and separated. She would not have liked that They should be put in a museum for people to see.”

  I agreed with her. I had spent many hours in the Picture Room amongst the vibrant colors and flowing lines of Madame Mocsáry’s personal collection; and I came to know her paintings intimately; to appreciate the richness of their texture; the provocation of their subject matter, the hidden technique of their execution. I came also to trace in them a steady progression from the passions of youth to the tranquillity of age; and I saw by their dates that she had painted one a year, quite incidentally to the rest of her output, for almost sixty years.

  “There was always a painting. Always she would be painting,” Blanca told us one day. “She began this room the year that she married; and she used to say that when she had covered the Picture Room her life’s work would be complete. She didn’t care what happened to the paintings people bought from her. She cared only about the ones she kept for this room.”

  Hearing this, I thought with amusement of the crowds queuing outside the Musée d’Orsay to see the Mocsáry retrospective there; and I chuckled as I did so, wondering what they would think if only they could hear Blanca’s words now, as I did. Eric smiled too; and our eyes met, sharing the joke, before a stern word from our self-appointed supervisor sent us back to our work. I returned to my scrubbing, pleased to think that the Picture Room had been finished before its creator’s death, that Madame Mocsáry’s grand plan, adhered to for so long, had finally borne fruit.

  “She lived very alone when she grew older,” continued Blanca, following the train of her own thoughts. “And her family did not visit her. They came only to the funeral and what good is that I ask you?” A pair of gimlet eyes met us both in a moment of beady interrogation. “A person needs other people in life, not in death. Once they are dead they have the angels for company.” Blanca paused. “The good ones, at least,” she added after a moment’s consideration.

  Eric looked down at the painting in his hands.

  “I think, maybe,” the old lady continued, with uncharacteristic gentleness, “that the best ones have the angels with them on earth too. I think, maybe, that Madame had the angels with her on earth.”

  And with that she went on with her work and we returned to ours. No one spoke; and it was only when Blanca sniffed that I saw she was crying.

  CHAPTER 14

  IKNOW—AND THIS IS A KNOWLEDGE I cannot escape, however hard I try—that we are responsible for what we do; and that I am responsible for what I have done. I acknowledge that. I am no longer concerned with masking my guilt. But when you’re twenty-two and footloose in a foreign city you give no thought to the future. Certainly I did not. I devoted myself instead to adventure and enjoyment and music; and from this last at least I gained something whole, something good.

&nb
sp; Our days passed happily, mine divided between the Conservatory and Madame Mocsáry’s apartment, where Eric spent his time sorting his great-aunt’s papers, arranging the sale of her things, playing her newly tuned piano. Not long into our stay we both bought bicycles and on these it was possible to dodge through the crowds of traffic on Sokolska Street and the forest of tourists who spent long hours on the Charles Bridge, anxiously consulting out-of-date maps, marveling at the view, touching the bronze base of St. John of Nappomuk’s statue with superstitious delight. I remember how we loved that bridge with its looming statues and sinister towers, its street musicians and pavement artists; I remember the hours we spent lounging in the cafés beside and beneath it, talking of everything and nothing.

  The machinery of permits and exemptions and death duties necessary to begin the sale of Madame Mocsáry’s effects was slow to grind into motion; and Eric and I delighted in its inefficiency, for it left us longer undisturbed in the now gleaming splendor of her apartment. Our days were carefree; and as I search my memory of them I find no sign that the coils had yet begun to twist. My life was light then and I rejoiced in its lightness; I had not learned to look for creeping shadows.