The Drowning People

by Richard Mason

  Mr. Kierczinsky took Eric and me out to lunch, at the Estate’s expense, to discuss the situation and be introduced to the head of the best of the establishments to have sprung up since the revolution. “It is like Christie’s or Sotheby’s,” he said in his introduction to Mr. Tomin, of First Auctioneers, Ltd. “It caters to a very … discerning clientele who think nothing of paying Western prices.” He was speaking of the new Czech rich, of the developers and speculators who had made a killing out of the political uncertainties surrounding the fall of Communism. They were a class despised by the majority of their countrymen for usurping the first fruits of freedom; but for men like Mr. Tomin they were the lords of the new market and thus clients to be favored and fawned over.

  Pavel Tomin was a tall man with sunken Slavic cheekbones and black oiled hair. He bowed very low when introduced to Eric and me and spoke English to us with an aggressive American twang. I did not warm to him. “There would be nothing that would honor me more,” he told us, “than to be able to assist with the disposal of your collection. I speak, specifically, of the paintings.” There was a pause. “The furniture is very good too,” he went on quickly, anxious not to seem indifferent to any of our concerns, “and some of the pieces, particularly the piano for instance, will fetch high prices.”

  “There are many new … enthusiastic musicians in the new republic,” said the lawyer blandly. He was a master of neatly timed irrelevance.

  I made a tentative suggestion about the desirability of interesting a museum in the sale. The two Czechs looked at each other awkwardly.

  “I think that will be … difficult,” Mr. Kierczinsky said at last.

  “Of course,” said Mr. Tomin hurriedly, “we will do our best to ensure that as many of the pictures remain together as possible. But the Czech museums are really not in a position to buy them for anything like their market value. And foreign museums might be interested in one or two, but not all. There are many enlightened private individuals who would appreciate them, I am sure, in a manner which Madame Mocsáry would have liked.”

  And that was the best we could do, for as Eric explained to me his father was not a rich man who could afford to keep and look after the paintings, even if he had been interested in art, which he was not. So lunch ended awkwardly, with Eric and me disgruntled but impotent and Mr. Tomin suspicious of our philanthropy and concerned for his commission. There was nothing more to be said or done; the day after our lunch the valuer made his final visit, this time unaccompanied; and the day after that, in impressive full-page advertisements, the sale of Madame Mocsáry’s private collection and personal effects was announced in the national and international press.

  It was on the day of this announcement that I received a letter from Camilla Boardman. I recognized her handwriting — large, rounded and confident — as soon as I saw it; and by the thickness of the overfilled envelope I knew that life in London had not been dull for her whatever she might say; for it was one of Camilla’s endearing affectations to dismiss all pleasure as drudgery.

  She had written on several sheets of lined file paper, which surprised me, for I had expected Regina’s embossed stationery at the very least; and she had written her address by hand on the top right corner of the first sheet. In bold round letters I read 16 Cadogan Square (the unfashionable side) and the date of a week before.

  Dearest James, Camilla had written.

  It’s no use my fanning your ego and telling you how utterly utterly Utterly boring London has been since you left it so I won’t but believe you me it has. Mummy’s been in a frightful temper about her churches appeal — now that you’ve gone she’s got no more tame stars on hand you see — and everyone’s been having far too many parties full of girls who are far too pretty for their own good and really quite unfair competition for someone as dowdy as me!

  Camilla, you see, wrote as she spoke; and her indifference to the comma was legendary.

  But I have been soldiering on bravely through it all because one simply has to as you know but it’s been hell really it has and I’d’ve liked nothing better than to leave this bloody city and go somewhere wildly romantic like Prague. Speaking of which how are you liking it? Is Mendlevitch or whatever his name is treating you well? Tell him from me that he’s got me to deal with if he’s anything but lovely to you and see if that scares him. I know what these famous music-king types are like — bloody-minded more than likely and far too impressed by their own genius to even consider the possibility that another person on the planet like you for instance might be talented or even gifted or even perish the thought potentially better than them! They’ve got to be kept under control so don’t you let him get away with anything!

  Is Prague very beautiful Jamie? Someone at lunch yesterday was saying that it’s just like Paris was in the 1930s and full of struggling writers and painters and everything and so beautiful and so cheap too it sounds like heaven. London’s far too expensive and dirty and full of people one knows and the weather’s lousy on top of that. I’m sure it’s cold in Prague as well but at least you’ll have snow when winter comes and the northern lights and things of that sort…

  Camilla’s interest in natural phenomenas had always been vague.

  … and it’ll all look just like the set of Anna Karenina and there will be beautiful women wearing furs and those big cuddly bear-like men so much better than the crummy variety we have in England. All the ones here keep getting colds and Ed Saunders is the only one who’s even vaguely interesting (though I shan’t marry him of course no matter what Mummy has to say on the subject) but taken as a job lot they really are very cold fish indeed and so tiresome at parties just standing there gawping and looking awkward or else getting drunk and throwing up. Why can’t English men talk properly? It’s something I’ve always wondered and a question which concerns me increasingly the more I come into contact with them present correspondents excepted naturally of course.

  Life has been very dull indeed and I’ve not got much gossip to report except oh yes! you might be interested to know that Ella Harcourt’s broken off her engagement to Charlie Stanhope. You remember Ella don’t you? She was at my birthday party and you were a darling and took me to her engagement lunch at that fabulous house in Chester Square — so sweet of you — but anyway there’s more to that particular story than meets the eye. You remember her cousin Sarah? The pretty but superior one who hardly said a Ssingle thing at lunch but just sneered and was quite unnecessarily frosty to Sophie Scott-Chivers …

  Who was, I remember now, the girl with the villa in Biarritz.

  … who really is a sweetie even if she’s not all that gifted intellectually but one shouldn’t hold that against her should one? Anyhow you remember Sarah. Well a few weeks after you left she published this monograph in a historical journal called Living History all about how American money supported English feudalism or something of the sort and she used her own family as material and included everything right up to the suicide of her grandmother — who jumped out of a window quite tragically you know — and the interesting thing was that this was the first public mention of it. The suicide was all hushed up at the time you see. And the tabloid press being the thing it is questions were soon being asked and then it emerged that Sarah’s grandmother wasn’t the only member of the Harcourt family to die in tragic circumstances and you won’t believe this but Lord Harcourt’s sister (Ella’s aunt) also killed herself and driving back from her funeral Ella’s mother and both Sarah’s parents died in the most terrible car crash. Awful isn’t it? And of course the newspapers have got hold of all this and trumped it up into a big story about a family curse and unearthed all this silliness about insanity running in families and of course as Ella’s the one who’ll inherit when her father dies — and is just the kind of person the tabloids like writing about being rich, pretty, etc. etc. — they’ve started saying that she’s living under some sort of ghastly curse. All the most ridiculous nonsense but papers must pump up their circulation somehow I sup
pose and the result of it all is that they’ve been besieging Chester Square and taking photographs and asking all sorts of questions and generally being a complete nuisance. And in the middle of this all — silly timing if you ask me — Ella quite unexpectedly announces that her engagement to Charlie is off and the very next day there’s a headline in the Sun about “Cracking Under The Strain” and a whole lot of awful rot.

  So that’s been interesting I suppose and to tell the truth Ella has been behaving quite strangely lately but I don’t even begin to dream that it’s at all as serious as the papers say. Can you imagine how Sarah’s feeling being the one who sparked the whole thing off in the first place? So stupid. I bet she’s kicking herself. But I’m sure it’ll all die down these things always do.

  And when it does London will be even more deathly dull than it is already (even unfounded scandal about one’s friends is quite fun you know) and then I don’t know what I shall do. So hurry up and come home and entertain me and for heaven’s sakes please play in some of Mother’s concerts because her anxiety is driving me quite mad (no pun intended because Ella Harcourt is a friend as you know) and that would never do would it?

  Anyhow I must be ending now because I’ve been writing this in a history of art lecture—Mummy’s making me do some frightful course—and the class is just ending so take care Jamie darling and write soon and be good and don’t let any of those Czech beauties tempt you from the virtuous path and all that.

  Much much Much love,

  Camilla

  xx

  I was standing in the Picture Room when I read Camilla’s letter, looking at the pictures complete in all their glory for the last time. I remember reading the line about the breaking of Ella’s engagement; remember smiling to myself over the fact that Camilla felt it necessary to remind me who Ella was; remember my rush of pure joy on hearing the news of my love’s freedom; remember thinking that it would mean mine, too. I gave no thought to Camilla’s gossip about curses and publicity; I suspected, rather, that much of what she had written was colored by the taste for drama which was as much a part of her as her incredible curls and breathless emphases. As a personality Camilla chafed against the limitations of the commonplace: if excitement did not exist she invented it to tell; and I thought then that her letter was another example of a little news being made to go a long way, and dismissed it as such with a smile.

  As you pass through life the future shrinks and the past expands. I could not have known then that the future is seldom as it appears; that the present passes with the blinking of an eye; that the past is an Atlantis, a sunken island in the sea which we can never hope to reach again. I know it now. I know that Eric is buried on it, among the sharp spires and gracious glinting domes of a city we loved, of Prague as my memory has preserved it. For me he died there and not in France; for me he never floated in that icy pool of water far below; I never watched his body as it … But still I cannot speak of it; I have not yet found the courage to face what I did, what I have done. I will. But not now. Not yet.

  Now I sit toying with the idea that maybe life is a game after all, a game we play just once. I am coming round to Sarah’s view, perhaps. But if life is a game then it has no practices; no training; no preliminary rounds. It is a game played on the principle of sudden death. And to play it properly, to play it fairly and well, we need all the strength that self-knowledge, courage, will and discipline can impart. At twenty-two I had none of these things, or if I had them I could not use them then. I had not yet learned to take life seriously; to know that it is not like other games; that it matters who wins and who loses; and that how they win and lose matters also. I had no idea either that victory could be Pyrrhic; nor did I know that the end seldom justifies the means. I could not have known any of this without experience, and of that I had none. I was innocent; and innocent of my innocence.

  CHAPTER 16

  THE FOLLOWING DAY CHAOS REIGNED on the top floor of the Sherkansky Palace. A large burly Czech with hair cut short at the front and sides and left long at the back was directing operations. He nodded to us on arrival, but was soon too busy barking orders at his minions to pay us much attention. Men were running up and down the palace stairs, rolling back carpets, screwing doors off hinges; folding; packing; lifting. The grand piano, dismantled, was the first piece of furniture to go, and it was carried down the stairs like a sedated elephant. The other pieces in the apartment followed it: a large dresser that had stood in the kitchen, its china carefully wrapped and packed into boxes; the heavy bed on which I had slept; a prettily carved bookcase; two occasional tables; an armoire; lamps; Madame Mocsáry’s dilapidated collection of French novels.

  The paintings were moved last, when everything else had been carried down to the waiting removals van; and with agonizing, painstaking slowness they were taken from the walls they had graced together and wrapped in great sheets of thick plastic which dimmed their colors and hid their outlines. As each was lifted off its hook a square of wall, garish and red, unbleached by the sun, was exposed where the painting had preserved it; and ranged together these gashes looked to me like wounds, like flesh that has been stripped of its skin; but I did not say so. Eric and I watched the removals men in dejected silence, as if they were dismantling the house we had been born in— and in some respects that apartment had witnessed something of a rebirth—but our reserve passed unnoticed by the voluble Mr. Tomin.

  “There are several foreign collectors who are showing an interest in this sale,” he told us proudly. “A friend of mine at Christie’s in New York has spread the word. And I myself was in London last week and told some people. I think you are selling at a very good time.” And he trotted excitedly around the apartment, talking to the chief of the removals men, supervising the packing and transportation of the paintings, poking and peering and prodding, meddling delightedly in everything and all the time keeping up a patter of conversation with us in English, punctuated by the odd hoarse order in Czech.

  Surrounded by dust and activity and sharply barked orders Eric and I stood, ignored, by the Picture Room windows. He tugged at my sleeve.

  “This is no place for us anymore,” he said; and he led the way abruptly out of the apartment, past the line of workers on the staircase and the removals van blocking the street outside. He did not stop walking until we had reached Florian’s, where we spent the rest of the day morosely drinking hot chocolate and talking occasionally to two American poets, the sole other occupants of the café, who sat surrounded by torn sheets of densely covered note paper, smoking joints fixedly and staring into space. They were not enlivening company.

  “There is not even our friend with the nose here to amuse us,” whispered Eric as we ordered second cups of chocolate from Jean.

  “No, not even her.”

  And because the café was unusually quiet and we needed diversion, we longed for the crowd of debaters with their long words and lank hair; we missed the sound of their passionate, short-lived conflicts; we listened vainly for their championship of ideas which we—and I daresay they—only dimly understood. In the smoky gloom of their habitual haunt their voices rang out to us, ghostly in the silence.

  “The most important thing about Kafka was that he was a Jew….”

  “Was that he was a Nationalist at heart….”

  “Was that he lived in inspirational times….”

  “In beautiful surroundings….”

  “In a changing world….”

  “The most important thing about Havel is that he is a thinker….”

  “A philosopher….”

  “A playwright….”

  “Who’s written nothing since the revolution, incidentally….”

  “A president.”

  “Marginalized.”

  “A focal point.”

  “Obscured by Klaus.”

  We missed the rhythm of their arguments, the regularity of their disputes, the violence of their reconciliations. And we realized how much we would always miss th
em.

  But regardless of our despondency, the day of the sale moved inexorably nearer. Originally set for a fortnight after the removal of the paintings and furniture, it was brought forward—on the advice of a member of the Musée d’Orsay’s purchasing committee—so that it should fall before the passing of an imminent bill expected to restrict French spending on foreign artworks. “It is not something one usually does, of course,” said Mr. Tomin, “but in this case I think it would be wise to make an exception. The French museums are highly interested in Madame Mocsáry’s work. And their involvement might spur on the Czech museums. This country is in need of a cultural icon.”

  He was right. Madame Mocsáry’s death had come at the best possible moment for the preservation of her reputation for posterity, and national interest in the sale of her work ran high. After the first flush of revolutionary fervor, Czech cultural officialdom was casting its eye about for evidence of a new Golden Age, a suitable parallel to the flowering of arts and letters which the First Republic had witnessed. And the fact that Madame Mocsáry had been French by birth and had done most of her work under the Communist regime did not deter it, or the wider nation, from honoring her as one of the most significant artists of her generation. “Mocsáry,” said the Prague Post, an English-language daily which Eric and I read, “revivifies the long tradition of Czech cultural excellence, and lights the flame of national creativity in our time. Her work is a moving testament to the power of the human spirit in adversity, and her later paintings are full of the frantic optimism of our new age.” When we were asked for comment Eric and I forbore to say that her later paintings were probably less frantically optimistic than rushed. We were not about to tell the world what we had discovered from Blanca, namely that Madame Mocsáry had only finished the Picture Room in the final weeks before her removal to a nursing home. It seemed somehow disloyal to her memory to do anything to endanger the formulation or the acceptance of her myth; and we were grateful for all she had done for us, even in death.