For years afterwards, perhaps for always, no Chinese meal would ever taste as delectable as that one in the obscure, dusty little diner that was only a truckies' pit stop, with its red formica-topped tables and plastic chopsticks.
She decided to throw down a small private challenge, secure in the knowledge that her mental film was locked away unprojected,safe from Tony's prying eyes.'It was rather good, in fact, the Chinese place.Very good, actually.' She let this hang, then added, 'I remember we had Mongolian shredded beef, Szechuan prawns and mermaids' tresses, Confucius-style. It was nothing if not eclectic.'
They had been ravenous. Greer, in particular, was on the point of collapse. It was their first real meal of the day, and they'd eaten and drunk themselves into a stupor. Following this they had returned to the motel, emerged somehow from the stupor and fornicated into oblivion.
In hindsight this binge and her equal part in it struck Greer as a last burst of excess brought on by a mixture of relief and almost unbearable apprehension. Those two ingredients made for a volatile cocktail. Even at the time it had occurred to her that she was living through a highly personalised version of the calm before the storm.
And it was a short-lived calm, inevitably. A day or two later, after they reached Sydney and found somewhere to live, she had summoned every ounce of courage and dropped the bombshell into Mischa's lap.
Greer sat down heavily on the bed.The intensity of this reel of interior pictures, with their graphic, X-rated content, made her suddenly unsteady.Tony perched on the corner of the bed, quite near her again, and scribbled in his notebook. As she expected, her little challenge had passed safely under his radar. She had an uncomfortable suspicion, though, that he was allowing her time to recover.
'So, do you still make portraits?'
And pigs might fly. Far from allowing me time to recover, he's attacking from the left flank.
'No, I don't.'
'You had a flair for it. I mean, a real talent.What made you stop?'
How was this to be answered?
Tony proceded smoothly, as if to divert the question into a statement. 'Of course, he painted you rather obsessively in the early days.That must have taken time.'
This was easier to pick up on. 'Actually, it didn't take much time. Mine, that is. I didn't often have to model for those pictures. They weren't full-face usually, they were more oblique, like glimpses, or reflections.'
'That's true. If they're front-on, your face is mostly concealed by spots of light.Or in shadow.And that brilliant, disturbing group of pictures, the so-called Shadow period, followed directly on from there, didn't it?'
This was the time when Mischa began painting people, usually but not always variations of herself, with elongated shadows that extended upwards into buildings and trees and threatened to overpower their owners. Then figures with intricate, dismembered shadows, reflected like semi-cubist jigsaws in mirrors or on the surface of choppy water. And finally and most hauntingly, shadows that were detached from their owners and seemingly unrelated to them.
'Yes.'
'Do you think they're in any way commentaries on the past? I've wondered a lot about this, if they could be interpreted as being meditations on his former life?'
His delivery was impersonal and academic. She thought, he has reverted to his art critic mode,which is preferable.But it was an uneasy speculation, and one she had made herself.
'Well, you could try asking him that, couldn't you?'
'I did, but he just tells me it's a mistake to look for meanings in pictures. I've tried, oh how I've tried, you don't believe me – as Agnieszka might say.'
She produced a half smile.
'But the extant pictures from the Australian period were all painted either before, or directly after, the time in Sydney?'
It was a sudden strike, without warning. She gave a cursory nod, expecting something further, and marshalling herself. But he seemed to be content to go off on another tack, ruffling his hair with his hand and drawling almost negligently, 'While you did your own thing. Which didn't include making portraits?'
'No, it did not.'
She had spoken sharply, but he showed no reaction to the tone. Now he behaves as if we're having a completely unthreatening dialogue, she thought, about the weather or the price of fish. Now he looks as if butter wouldn't melt in his mouth.
She glanced across at Rollo and Guy's house.The leaves of the Virginia creeper were coming out. In a few days the flecked stone walls would be invisible, hidden by an impenetrable green cloak.
Two could play at this game. She could see a way out.
She said, 'Stopping portrait painting wasn't a conscious decision. It just evolved, partly because of practicalities, our madly peripatetic life in those early years. After we had left Australia behind.'
And all that Australia implied. She regretted making even this glancing reference, although Tony seemed oblivious. But she had a foothold now, a stepping stone to safer ground.
'We were always travelling, finding places to rent for a while so Mischa could work. And often living in confined spaces, which, if it didn't mean one room, frequently meant us sleeping in one and him working in the other. Not always, of course. In parts of Asia and Greece, for instance, we often had masses of space.'
'And partly because?' He was acute, she had to give him that.And tenacious,when he wanted to be.Well,she had an answer ready for this too.
'I suppose the reality is that it's hard to have two artists under the same roof. I certainly don't mean that he tried to stop me, he wouldn't have –'
He waited.
'He wouldn't have noticed if I was working or not, really.'
He responded to that with an appreciative laugh. She felt a moment's gleam of satisfaction.Tony might be acute, but he wasn't too difficult to deflect. The reasons she had given him had hardly a grain of truth in them.The simple truth was, she had tried, and failed.
She had tried to work, tried hard, and Mischa urged and encouraged her. At the start she had pushed herself to source materials and embark on sketches. Sometimes she picked out individuals with arresting faces and invited them, often in sign language, to sit for her. When these portraits failed she looked elsewhere for subjects, to landscapes and urban scenes. But there were endless beginnings, and no endings.
For a long time she would never leave their home base without a sketchbook in her bag. One morning, defeated by the accusing pages of half-made figures and marks that followed the faltering path of her concentration and trailed away aimlessly, she carried a notepad and a novel instead. She had packed the sketchbooks away in the bottom of her father's trunk where they remained to this day, down in the cellar.
At the time Greer had told herself: in some people the artistic impulse is fragile. The reasons for its departure are not always subject to logical analysis.They are shifting and ambiguous, as unpredictable as quicksands. This particular impulse has not died, it is quiescent and one day it will return, she had told herself. My heart is not in it, for now. Meanwhile, I will do other creative things instead and wait for it to return. But it had not returned.
A door in the high perimeter fence that enclosed her safe private landscape had eased open a crack.In her scramble to slam it shut Greer had an out-of-body sensation. It was a fleeting glimpse in which she seemed to observe herself playing for time.
'You've got more than two rooms these days,'Tony was saying, 'you could start up again, and with any kind of an even break he still wouldn't notice.'
'I've got the space now but not the time. Although I suppose one can always make that. If the desire is strong enough.'
'One's capable of anything if the desire is strong enough, and that's for sure.'
She left the room ahead of him. It had been a playful remark, light enough and in the overt spirit of their conversation, but it carried an astringent aftertaste that tainted the air.
The phone rang.The caller was Greer's friend Stella Castles, demanding a fix of gossip, and more of
the same. Had the young biographer shown up? How was it going? Would he like to meet a dateless and desperate married woman? Stella was overseeing the restoration of a farmhouse on the Umbrian border, while her surgeon husband,Victor, worked at St Thomas' Hospital in London.
Greer took the call in her study,aware of Tony's presence around the corner in the next room, sifting through the boxes on the living room floor. Yes, the biographer had arrived, she confirmed in a low voice. He was right here actually, so she couldn't talk about him now. She supplied the required ration of amused responses to Stella's inventive litany of complaints about builders, plumbers and Victor. They made an arrangement to meet in a week.
Returning, she saw Tony stretched out on the hearth reading newspaper reviews of Mischa's first show.
'Would you tell me,' he asked when she sat down, his caramel voice warmly involved,'if you'll excuse me trespassing on such an intimate matter, about the day you first met Mischa? Was it anything at first sight?'
'Strong antipathy, if anything,' she'd replied, matching his delivery. He questioned her closely with the tape running, avid for every detail of the encounter.
'It's the little things,' he said, 'the nuances that I crave. The minutiae of it.Take me there. How was the weather?'
That was easy. If he craved the nuances, he could have a few anodyne ones to go on with.
'How did he look? What was he wearing?'
That was easy too.
'You were there alone in the gallery while he hung the pictures. So what did you say to each other?'
She told him about Mischa's singing. He got a big kick out of that.
'"Jerusalem"? A rock version of the English hymn? You're kidding me!'
'He had an aunt who recited English poetry.'
'Ah, the famous great-aunty Olga. Of course.'
Tony knew all about her. They spoke about Mischa's youthful addictions. Blues, swing and Dixie, American musicals and '50s rock 'n' roll. The hoarded vinyl records, scrounged from anywhere with the help of this maiden aunt who shared his enthusiasms, and played on a wind-up gramo-phone.Some of these tastes persisted while others had waned.
She relaxed a little.Tony seemed to have turned down another road, to have left the subject of the first meeting behind. Mischa's early life was cushy territory. If he wanted her take on the years before she entered the picture, she was more than happy to oblige. She offered him a glass of wine.
Tony responded with some tableaux of Mischa's existence as a student and embryonic artist in Prague in the '60s. It was obvious that he knew about this period in considerably more detail than she did. He had spent time in the country, checking out the scene. Inspecting for himself the tenements and rooming houses Mischa once inhabited. Following up leads, tracking people down.
He'd managed to unearth from forty years ago, he reported with a sidelong look at her, a residual activist or three who remembered Mischa well. Among them were survivors from a couple of scrimmaging factions in the postwar capital. One had been an entrenched group of older intellectuals, the other a collective of young artists who wanted a Western adolescence for themselves and wanted it now. The tribes intersected at times, when young and old found themselves aligned against a common foe.
'Both sides were politically active. I needn't tell you that Mischa was not a prime mover there. He was born political, not. Is that right?'
'And he was a joiner, not.'
'Exactly. How I see it is, he was always a bit of a lone wolf. Kind of a maverick, with a foot in both camps. He hung out when he felt like it, but he was never one of the boys. That detachment gave him a kind of glamour, but it also caused some rancorous feeling.'
Tony's informants had showered him with grim stories of life after the Soviet invasion of 1968. A somewhat ambivalent view, generally speaking, he told Greer, was taken of Mischa's defection.
'Strong emotions are still harboured there, it must be said. Resentment, jealousy, envy. Especially the last two. He got to shoot through while they were left wading in deep shit.They stuck with it, so now they're holier than him, was the general line.That they could have taken the same escape route as he did tended not to be given much airtime. And nor did his reasons for leaving.'
He broke off and looked at her, eyebrows raised. 'I'm sorry, Greer, am I droning on? Please feel free to tell me to shut up if I start lecturing. I have a bad habit of getting carried away by my subject.'
She thought, this boy has a complete armoury of insinuating,charm-school smiles.That one was ruefully bashful.
'Don't worry about it. This is a house where you can feel free to get carried away any old time.After all,Mischa's your prime suspect, isn't he? Not me.' She flashed a brilliant smile of her own, and saw him momentarily disconcerted.
He bounced back, laughed.'Right on, then.Well, I guess along with not being political or a joiner he wasn't very into confiding in other people. He kept his reasons close to his chest, so many of them were taken by surprise when he bolted.There was a lot of – speculation.'
She caught the gamey whiff of a bait being thrown into the temporarily placid waters between them. He was fishing for something here. She made a noncommittal sound.
'At any rate, he was the only one of his pals to get out at that time.And my impression was that the stayers were too in love with the cloak and dagger stuff by then. They were outlaws after the Russian tanks arrived. Ferals, with their own incredible underground network.Kind of,you know,a socio-political forerunner of the internet? Talking with them, you could see they had a real nostalgia for that time, in spite of everything. Or maybe,' he caught her eye again, 'it was just the routine nostalgia people have for their misspent youth.'
The lure bobbed below the surface of the water, a sassy red feather.
One of Tony's contacts had put him on to Mischa's formidable elder sister, Grete.Their parents were long dead, but Grete, now in her mid-seventies, lived on in Karlovy Vari.
'Doesn't speak much more than a half-dozen words of English and still managed to scare the hell out of me. She suffers from an odd bunch of ailments – acute intimidatory syndrome coupled with verbal diarrhoea, and on top of that a triple, or should that be a quadruple, humour bypass. Chalk and cheese, Grete and Mischa.You haven't met with her,right?'
Greer shook her head. He must know she had not, or he wouldn't be talking in this curiously tactless way.
'Her browbeaten son translated for me. She was indignant that her celebrated baby brother had never been back to see them. Said the family felt abandoned.'
Was it her imagination, or had there been a faint emphasis there?
Grete had put Tony in touch with a very old retired schoolmaster whose voice, when he could be induced to speak about Mischa, still quivered with aggravation.
'He told me some good stories though,'Tony said.'Your man was a full-on nightmare student, you'll be amazed to hear. I think the thing was he always did what he wanted, which usually was to make pictures, instead of what they wanted. I don't mean he was a really delinquent guy or anything like that. He just –'
'Preferred to please himself?' She had to smile.
'And it drove his parents and teachers completely and utterly bananas, through his entire childhood. And beyond as well, am I right?' He flashed her a grin. 'He had no time for authority figures telling him what to do, basically. Regarded them as muscling in on his turf and making irrelevant demands. But then, on that score, it makes no odds if we're talking sixty years ago, today or tomorrow, does it?'
These were cheeky signals that they were on the same wavelength, sharing mischief.
She opted to play ball.'It definitely does not.'
'So does he talk to you much,' he went on, 'about the old days? His old life?'
'Not at all.' It struck her, suddenly, where he was heading. He likes to lull me, she thought, before he strikes. She repeated, as if to stonewall him, 'Mischa never dwells on the past. It simply doesn't interest him. Especially nostalgia for misspent youth. I actually believe
he finds nostalgia nauseating.'
'Sorry, I wasn't talking about nostalgia here. Anything but, I guess. I mean, you know, past relationships. Significant predecessors.'
She toyed with the idea of feigning ignorance, but his intonation was unmistakeably – as Rollo might say – site-specific.
'You mean Elsa.'
'Elsa Montag, yes.'
'Did you speak to her?'
'Yeah, I met with her. She wasn't too hard to locate. Although I admit, to give the disapproving Grete her due, she wasn't the one who pointed me in her direction.'
Doubtless there would have been plenty of volunteers happy to point him that way. Elsa Montag was the young woman Mischa had left behind in March of 1969, when he skied across the border into Austria.
'I got on to her via her former husband, actually, Pavel. You can always count on a cuckolded politician to hold a grudge.'
'Her husband's a politician now?' She realised her mistake immediately.
'Still is, yeah. He's a survivor. It's Machiavellian how those guys manage to dig themselves in. Old Pavel Montag's quite a big shot in the government these days. Mischa never mentioned his little brush with the underworld of politics Pavel-style?'
She said shortly, to terminate this,'I wouldn't remember if he had. Mischa loathes politics and we haven't mentioned Elsa or Pavel Montag for years. I told you, he doesn't like to talk about the old days, or about her.'
She could have added, we don't talk about sensitive subjects too much,I suppose.I'm used to it.Quite comfortable with it, to use one of your phrases. From the start, neither of us wanted to revisit the past. We didn't see the need for mutual psychoanalysis.We communicated very well in other ways.
10
In his bedroom Tony wielded the iron on a pair of brown moleskins. The rust-coloured shirt he planned to team with them, on which he had just done a touch-up job, hung over the back of a chair. As he ironed the crease out of the trousers he spoke into his dictaphone, which was balanced on the end of the ironing board.
'I knew I had to tread on eggshells with her, but I got such a buzz when I found she'd done the drawing the day they made their getaway, that very night, I nearly got ahead of myself and trashed the whole thing. I had to backtrack quick smart.
The Biographer Page 13
