The Ecliptic

by Benjamin Wood

  Down on the front lawn, the Frenchman in his yellow poncho was walking in large circles with another guest—I could not see who it was. I had not bothered to study them too closely, but as they started yet another lap, I realised that the other man was not a guest at all. The Frenchman had made a scarecrow out of a broomstick, an old peacoat, and what looked like thatches of dry leaves. He was dancing this strange manikin around the boggy grass as part of some performance. With every circuit, it seemed that he dismantled a piece of the dummy, and, the longer it went on, the more of its guts and fibres lay strewn upon the lawn. He was calling out now in French, but I could not understand what he was saying.

  After a moment, guests started to emerge from their lodgings to watch. An audience of short-termers gathered on the portico steps. Ender looked on from the path, his arms stocked with firewood. Even Ardak was tempted from the outhouse to see what was going on, and leaned there, pulling off his work gloves while the Frenchman kept on calling out his nonsense. And when I heard the provost’s voice below—that murmuring tenor with all its affectations—I sensed an opportunity. The fuss about the Frenchman’s piece grew louder, fuller. Everyone was preoccupied with it. And so, as fast as I could manage, I edged along the parapet and climbed back down the ladder, through the roof beams, until I reached the empty hallway.

  The provost’s study was in the other wing of the building, across the upper landing, and the parquet floor resounded with my every step. I lifted off my shoes and left them in the corridor, striding past the staircase and the mess hall underneath me. The floor was oddly warm against my feet. I expected the door would be locked—and it was—but I was able to scrutinise the keyhole. It was a warded lock that required a short, fat key, most likely of the same dull brass as all the door fixtures.

  I hurried down two flights to the lobby, where Ender’s door was still ajar at the back end of the house. There was a cheery rumble of voices out on the portico, and I tried not to be seen, stepping quietly along the hall. The Frenchman kept on crying out his garbled script. I pushed inside the old man’s room, unsure where to look. A fleet of leather slippers was neatly lined under his bed, his pyjamas folded on the pillow. The muslin curtains were tied back with ribbon, and I could see right into the old man’s bathroom: a clot of foam left on his shaving brush, a rim of whiskers in the sink. There was no time to feel ashamed. I searched his desktop and the bending bookshelves, rifled through his cupboards, finding nothing. My blood began to cool. In the drawers of his writing table, I discovered only envelopes, boxes of baklava (his private stash), and a mound of typewritten pages in Turkish.

  I could hear boot soles on the floor outside, amusement in the corridor. The old man was coming back—I felt sure of it—and I stole into his closet, holding my breath. My head grazed a row of hooks behind me on the wall. All manner of things hung from them: bales of twigs, a whistle on a lanyard, large blue beads with painted eyeballs, and keys on metal loops. When Ender did not appear, I snatched two of the stumpiest—one brass key, one silver—and fled back to the hall. Heading for the portico, I was certain I would feel a meaty hand upon my shoulder, hear a chiding tsk from another guest behind me. But it never came. I was able to break out onto the steps and merge with all the short-termers, while the Frenchman carried on his strange performance. He was calling: ‘Adieu! Adieu! Adieu!’

  Gluck seemed more bemused by it than interested. His tufty eyebrows were pushed into a point over his nose. I went to him and said, ‘Do you know what all this gibberish is about?’ And he gestured to a sign that hung around the scarecrow’s neck that said: DOUX ET NÉGLIGEABLE. ‘It’s very polemical,’ Gluck said, ‘but I don’t really know the motivation. From an aesthetic standpoint, though, I’d say it’s quite successful.’

  Something else you will not learn at art school: real inspiration turns up only when your invitation has expired. There is no preparation you can put in place for it and no provision you can make that will entice it to your door. It will find you either sleeping, occupied with chores, or entertaining the dumb neighbours you allowed in as a compromise. And when it finally shows, you will have to wake up fast, abandon everything, turf out the pretenders just to make it welcome, because it will take less time to disappear than you spent waiting for it. There is no finer company than inspiration, but its very goodness will leave you heartsick when it goes. So do not waste time asking it to wipe its feet. Embrace it at the threshold.

  The boy’s comics were exactly where I left them: spread out on the workbench with the muller rested on the inner page of Issue 5. I went to light my stove and filled the kettle. My nerves were still fidgeting and I needed some weak tea to calm myself. Lying on the couch, I gazed at the paint-spattered ceiling and thought of Victor Yail. His face all shapeless with grief. His lenses fogged by tears. Cracks in his voice. I tried to think how I was going to break the news to him, but every sentence I conceived was banal: Your boy is dead—I’m sorry . . . He took his own life . . . We threw him in the sea . . . How else could I say it? The facts would not change.

  As the fire burned rosily in the stove, I grew so absorbed in looking at the flames that my head began to haze and drift. I made the tea and took it to the window. No promise of sunshine outside. Clouds like sooty thumbprints on a chimney breast. Turning round, my hip knocked against the workbench and the muller slipped slightly off the page. Something caught my attention: the grain of the image underneath the glass. Blurry discs of colour.

  Standing over it, I held my eye up to the muller as if it were a gem loupe. And through the glass I saw the printed substance of the illustrations. Their colours were made up of tiny dots in rows: magenta, cyan, yellow and black. Some overlapped, some were spaced apart, the rest were tightly packed. A galaxy that could not be seen from far away. A thing that was there, and yet not.

  When the lunch bell rang, I did not leave my studio. I pulled out the timbers I had been keeping underneath my bed, wiped off the heavy film of dust, cut all the angles with a mitre-saw, and screwed them into place to make a stretcher. I rolled out all the canvas I had on the studio floor and pulled it taut across the frame, hammering in the tacks. Before long, I had a four-by-nine-foot rectangle of blankness staring back at me. It spread across the full width of my studio and there was not one inch of it I feared. The primer coat still had to dry, and I stood near, projecting the image onto it in my mind. There seemed no point in making a cartoon: the mural I had conceived was very simple—pure abstraction—and it was best to let the idea express itself without too many constraints. First of all, I needed darkness.

  The boy had ruined all but one of the mushroom garlands in my closet. There was the tobacco tin of pigment stowed behind the bathroom cabinet—not quite enough to get me through the night. I could grind up what was left, but I would have to harvest more.

  My muller and the mixing slab were already clean. Still, I gave them another rinse for procedure’s sake and organised my workbench as normal. I drew the shutters, stapled the roller blind against the window frame, and then—with a sadness that twinged the length of my spine—I went to fetch a new roll of tape from the cupboard and left it on the tabletop for later.

  When the dinner bell sounded, I ignored it. It struck me that I did not have to wait for dark to harvest what I needed. I knew the route into the woods so well that I could walk it blindfold. And with all the other guests now gone to the mansion for their evening meal, I did not have to worry about being noticed. So I stuffed a roll of tin foil into my satchel, edged lightly down the path, and slipped into the apron of the trees.

  In the vapid daylight, the woods became a different place, cloistered but not as menacing. The pines had a crisp, fulsome scent, flushed out by the rain. I looked for the notches I had knifed into the trunks—the four short lines upon the bark that I used to help me navigate at night—and followed them, one notch at a time, until the air turned dank and the ground felt more elastic underfoot. Up ahead, I saw the enclave with the leaning trees, and then the na
rrow clearing with its nest of rotting logs. And there they were: the mushrooms, so ordinary before sunset. Plain brown clusters of fungus with brims almost translucent. I dropped to my knees and sliced every last fruithead from the bark, until the tinfoil sheet was covered by them. I wrapped and taped them inside, putting the packet in my satchel. Dashing back between the pines, I got the feeling I had left something behind—my knife, perhaps my scarf.

  I stopped.

  There was nothing on the ground that I could see. But the clearing had a plundered look, the logs all stripped, forsaken. And I sensed that I would not return to these deepest woods again, that there was no more pigment after this. Because I would be gone before another cluster had grown fat enough to harvest.

  When at last the old man came to snuff the candles in the portico, I closed my door and sealed its frame with the tape. The tacky lengths of it came off the roll so noisily, and I tried not to think of Fullerton or the sounds he must have heard when he had used it. I was responsible for that, I knew, and I would say as much to Victor on the phone. But there was nothing to be done about the boy till morning. The only time I knew for sure the provost left his study was just after sunrise, when he liked to take his Türk kahvesi on the front steps with Nazar. I would have to plant myself inside the mansion before then, but there was no sense in wasting the darkness.

  My samples gleamed upon the wall: a chequerboard of blues. They were my guide in every way: not just because they gave me a small amount of light to paint by, but because they helped me judge my mixes and my tones. All that work I had done in the past few seasons—getting the pigment right, learning all its facets and refining my technique—came to fruition that night. For the first time I could remember, I knew exactly what I had to paint and how to achieve it. I could not tell if this was clarity or just the prelude to it, but I hoped it would never leave me.

  I emptied all the mushrooms from my satchel, cutting through the liners. A spume of blue rushed from the punctured plastic, as though I had unearthed some underground lagoon. It did not take me long to garland them—eight strings of fungus in total, densely packed—and I hung them from the crossbar of my closet to dry out. I retrieved the one remaining garland from the depths where I had hidden it; its glow was that bit fainter than the rest, but it yielded plenty in the mortar when I ground it down. Loading all the powder on the slab, I went to consult my samples, checking the dosages of oil and fruithead sizes that were noted in the margins of the squares. Choosing the right tone and gleam, I made the measurements, added the linseed to the powder, slid the muller over it until I had a good consistency: thin enough to coat the bristles of a medium sable, thick enough to rest upon the blade-edge of a palette knife. And, loading up the largest, roundest brush I owned, I made the first commitment of the paint to canvas.

  I had considered using a compass to put chalk lines on the nap that I could follow, thinking it would look cleaner if the circles were precise. But I changed my mind. Although I wanted it to be a purely abstract image, I had to do more than simply colour in blank spaces. Better to paint the overlapping circles freehand. If they were imperfect, fine. I needed them to look man-made. So I swept the brush around, using the natural roll of my shoulder—fast, flowing strokes that came from the whole arm, not just the wrist. And when the paint began to scuff out, I loaded up the brush again, and kept on going with the same circling motions, over and over, working from the outside in, using up the whole batch of paint until I had made a complete disc. It rested on the left side of the canvas, neatly within the limits of the frame—the lighter of the three I planned to paint. A hue so radiant it soothed me like a nightlight, so lucent I could see the trails of brush marks and the nap of the primed fabric underneath.

  The mortar and the pestle, the muller and the slab, the brushes and the knife, the workbench—all of them had to be washed and dried again before I could start the next phase. I went about the task quite hurriedly, impatient to begin again, and wary of the failing darkness. When everything was clean, I lifted the bathroom cabinet from its brackets, got out the tobacco tin and brought it to the slab. More tape to unpick and peel away—I thought again of Fullerton—and as the lid hinged open, there was a powder-puff of blue that almost made me sneeze. I scooped it all onto the marble, checked my samples for the apt mix ratio, table-spooned the linseed on and worked it with the muller. This paint had to be a little thinner, with a deeper tone, a richer glare. When it was ready, I applied it to the canvas with the same sweeping gestures. This circle was supposed to be exactly the same size, and I needed to judge its scale by instinct. Its left-hand side was meant to overlap the other circle at the halfway mark. So, as the two discs overlaid, both tones merged, forming a segment with a hue all of its own.

  I did not stop working until all the paint was spent and the mural showed two beaming discs of blue, one fractionally weaker than the other. I had no pigment left to make the final circle. Birds were chirruping outside and I was running out of darkness. The paint would need to dry but I could not leave it for the world to see, so I covered it with bedsheets, fixing brushes to the top edge of the frame to keep the linen off the surface. I scrubbed my hands with soap. And, checking that the old man’s keys were still in my pocket, I pulled my door until the tape tore off and it swung back. The sun was not quite up yet. There was a rinse of dew upon the lawns that smelled familiar. I slatted my eyes against the light and sprinted for the mansion, still in my painting clothes, with pigment on my boot caps and my hair part-streaked with oil.

  The fatigue hit me when I reached the hallway. My muscles burned and pinched. But I kept going, quietly up the stairs, trying to mute my every footstep. The floorboards gave off cawing sounds until I reached the landing, where the mess hall door was fully agape and I could hear the clatterings of Gülcan in the kitchen. She worked ten times as hard as anyone: the last to bed, the first to rise. I could not say what made her do it, but she always did it smiling.

  I went bounding up another flight—the highest stairs were carpeted and dampened my footfalls. There were empty lodgings in the east wing, but I did not know which doors would open onto them. I had to guess. I pressed my ear to the wood and heard the sounds of snoring. I chose another door: silence. Twisting the handle steadily, as though a single squeak from it would wake up all of Heybeliada, I pushed at it and stole inside. The mattress was bare and mapped with stains. Day was dawning in the window. I was alone.

  It was impossible to stop my heart from jouncing; slow breaths in and out did very little. My bones were lagging. I kept the door ajar a tiny crack and peered along the hall. For a good while, nothing stirred. I wondered what would happen if the provost shunned his Turkish coffee. How long would I wait for him? Until the breakfast bell? Till lunch? I thought about my mural, feeling a pride so copious it warmed my cheeks. It occurred to me that even if the provost caught me I would soon be leaving. I could deliver my message to Victor in person. And this notion made me anxious. I started reasoning myself into a knot: Did I even need to make the call? Was it not safer just to finish off my work and leave with all my documents in order? How important was it, really, for Victor to be told?

  Suddenly, there came a scrape of claws in the corridor. Nazar was hurtling for the stairs. I watched the provost edge out from his room, locking the door. Such languidness about his movements. He trailed his bamboo cane along the skirting boards and yawned. Reaching the landing, he leaned upon the balustrade. I thought he might have seen me. But then Nazar whimpered from the flight below and he spun round. ‘Ah, there you are,’ the provost said. ‘I thought we agreed you wouldn’t do that any more?’ And he went downstairs and out of sight, saying, ‘Get on with it, scamp, or you’re going to get trampled.’

  I allowed a few moments to pass before stepping out. A sediment of dust teemed in the angling sunshine halfway down the hall, and I passed through it with the sureness of a child rushing at garden sprinklers. I had to tread softly while going at pace, and I felt certain that every time
my boot soles clapped the parquet someone underneath was taking note. But I made it to the provost’s door. The brass key did not fit the lock. The other went in snugly, and it turned.

  I did not expect to find the curtains drawn inside. The air was bitter with the stench of stubbed-out cigarettes: unmistakable. It was one of the broadest rooms in the mansion and the most ornate. The green velvet settees had been arranged to face each other, as though to host some tournament of conversation, and dangly crystal light fixtures were mounted on each wall. The provost had a hulking antique desk made out of cherry wood. The wallpaper was floral and intense. The rugs were vast and plush with mazy patterns, and cream upholstered chairs were placed in every corner (it was not quite clear what for). On the side-table was a silver tray of çay glasses with silver rims on silver saucers. The leather headrest of the provost’s desk-chair was dinted and worn down. (Seasons back, I had been shown this room during my introduction to the refuge—it had been a matter of some pride for him to explain the strange paperweight on his desk, a cast-iron seagull once owned by his favourite author: ‘I’ve been assured that it once sat on manuscripts of Gürpinar’s. The photographic evidence exists, I promise you.’ It had still been on the desk, several days ago, when the four of us had perched upon those green settees and heard him talk about some boy named Fullerton. How far away that afternoon now seemed. The paperweight was missing, too.) I was wasting time just standing there, gawking at the provost’s things. But the room was so luxurious in comparison to my lodging, and the urge to sleep on the soft cushions of the couch took some resisting. Every joint inside me ached. My brain felt panel-beaten.