'I showed him all the photos and he was briefly, well, I won't say enthralled, but he did take a good look.'
She noticed that Tony wasn't bothering to keep his voice down. By now he must know there was no need, since nothing penetrated the forcefield of Mischa's concentration.
'I even managed to drag a few quotes about his family out of him.' He made a wry face.'I've been finding it hard to get anything personal out of the maestro. It's kinda like pulling teeth. Or is it just me?'
She allowed him a tolerant smile. 'It's not just you. He doesn't like talking about himself very much. Especially to strange men.'
Tony looked humorously crestfallen. 'That's too bad. I'm trying not to act overly strange.'
'Perhaps the trouble is with your acting.'
Now he looked really, pleasingly, downcast. 'Well, any tips or crumbs you can offer would be gratefully accepted.'
'Oh,I've got no tips at all,'she said briskly.'Or crumbs. I warned you before, the maestro doesn't dwell on the past. That includes talking and thinking about it.'
'Thinking as well, huh? Can you really be so sure about that? If you don't mind me asking.'
She glanced across at Mischa. Everything about him was reassuring and solid. She thought, he's wrapped in the protective cocoon of unconsciousness that is his working habit. Neither seeing nor hearing the world around him.
'Yes, I can be so sure. I know him fairly well, remember.' And a great deal better than you do. Except for the time before I met him.
'Right.But–'Tony seemed genuinely perplexed.'Is he really,you know,that knowable?'He paused.'That simple?'
'He's not in the least simple. And in his creative life I readily admit that there is a vast area where he is not remotely knowable or predictable.'
'To himself as well, would you say?'
'Perhaps principally to himself.' The mystery of the origins of his work, she had always believed, was the source of his obsession with it. She added: 'His art is a conduit. I think that may be the secret of its hold on him.'
She remembered how she had envied the mystery of his creativity. It had always been an autonomous entity, invulnerable to any outside forces. Unlike her own.
'Art is his way of tapping into his subconscious? Of plumbing the id?'
Greer smiled involuntarily.'That sounds a touch – glib, if I may say so. I think it's a lot less straightforward than that.' She paused.'Art is not a means to an end for him.It would be misleading to think of it in those terms. His work is a compulsion, an end in itself.'
'Maybe it's also his way of connecting with the past.' Tony had raised his eyebrows, which seemed to widen his blue eyes.
'Possibly, but if so I doubt if it's in any way conscious.' She thought, here we are, having this very personal discussion about Mischa in his own space as if he wasn't there, and Tony is taping it. It's an incongruous situation entirely of Tony's making. He has engineered it, no doubt for his own purposes.
Tony said slowly,'It almost sounds like Mischa has some kind of a mental block about the past. His own history. Could this be because he's uncomfortable with it? That's the usual reason, isn't it?'
Is it Mischa you are really talking about?
'It might be the usual reason,' she said tersely, 'but Mischa is not a usual person. As you may have noticed. I think you'll just have to accept that his past doesn't interest him much any more, simply because it's over.When something is over for him it's done with.'
'And that applies to friends and family alike? Artists are notorious for discarding people, I guess, when their usefulness is past.'
This sounded more like a joke than a question, but it did strike her as unduly punitive and she felt obliged to amend it, as if she were touching up a portrait she was making of an image-conscious celebrity. Am I protecting Mischa, airbrushing him as if he were a supermodel, she thought, when he emphatically doesn't want to be protected or airbrushed? Or am I striving to protect myself?
'When he has physically moved on I think he moves on mentally too. But I also think this is largely accidental, it's a by-product of his single-mindedness, his driven concentration on his work. Perhaps it would be different if his sister was living in the next village, I don't know.'
'Did you ever encourage him to contact his parents again?'
He was straightening the photo of Mischa with his family. She wanted to object, to say harshly, why would I, when it was a bond between us? We had both jettisoned our families, can't you grasp even that seminal fact? We were on our own together from that time forward.And on the same imaginative level, too.We saw ourselves in terms that were strictly romantic.We were on the run.
But not, she wanted to add, with the same stakes. The stakes for me were of a different order. I had overturned one of society's most cherished norms. I think I saw myself as a moral outlaw.
She said instead, aware that her voice sounded taut and strained,'I don't remember speaking about it.' Her voice was always the giveaway.
'I say that because in spite of all the feuding within the family before he left he never fell out totally with them, according to Grete and others.There was residual affection there.'Tony's pitch continued to be light and breezy, but she sensed he was working up to something. He had an agenda. But then it was wise to bear in mind the fact that Tony always had one of those.
'I'd rate it as a fair to average childhood overall,' he went on, 'say six or six point five out of ten, wouldn't you? Not quite as high on the happiness quotient as your own, right? How would you rate yours?'
It was a chatty little question. His teeth flashed in a smile.
'Mine?' She had a sudden mental picture of the family group, the two sisters with their parents at Greer's twenty-first birthday party, the day they had all been photographed together for the last time.
'My childhood was happy, yes.' She looked away, caught off guard by a wave of emotion.
'That was my impression. He never got on with his sister like you got on with yours, did he? Or, for that matter, with his parents.'
Where had that impression come from? Charlie or Josie? Or both? As she attempted to regroup, to grapple with this issue in her mind,he remarked,'It must be nice,to have had a happy childhood.'
She was aware of his unblinking eyes on her.
'You didn't?'
'Two point five. Three, maybe.' She refused to engage those eyes. 'My mom adopted me out when I was a little kid. She and my dad were never a couple, and she was struggling with another baby from a new guy who definitely didn't want to know me. She just couldn't hack it. Kind of a banal low-rent scenario, I suppose, right?'
What was he doing, here? The eyes were still on her. He laughed.
'My new parents went on to have two of their own biological kids later – that happens a lot, you know? Two more boys. I grew up feeling I was Cinderella, except my brothers weren't that ugly. To look at, anyhow. The only thing I got back from my real dad was his Italian name, Corbino.'
Why are you telling me these things? Why do you imagine I want to know anything about you? No, you don't imagine anything of the kind.You want me to know.
'You managed to do all right, in spite of everything.'
He laughed again,almost gaily this time.'Yeah,I guess I did OK, didn't I?'
She felt vaguely nauseous, and turned away from him to the fourth photograph. It was larger and in colour, and showed a narrow house, three storeys with a steep gable, Juliet balcony and decorative black-painted fretwork.
Tony had taken this photo only last year. There were different owners now, of course, but they'd let him take a look inside and he'd seen the very room where Mischa came into the world. It was a simple, sweet house,Tony went on, as if this subject flowed naturally from the previous topic, and Mischa lived here until he was seventeen. It must have influenced his aesthetic sense.
Under the heading 'Chapter Two: Prague, 1957–1969' were two postcard-sized reproductions, atmospheric paintings of the city at dusk, with elegant street lamps and lighted
windows. One showed a downpour on the Charles Bridge and glistening water on the road. Both were new to Greer, but the artist's youthful virtuosity was evident, even in these small-scale images. Tony touched them in a manner that verged on the reverential.
'These are amazing, aren't they? You don't get much of an idea with prints this size, but he's blended quite dramatic chiaroscuro with elements of grisaille. Gone for and achieved kind of gothic effects with the elongated treatment of the houses. The technique is incredibly confident and daring already.'
Neither had she seen the pair of black-and-white personal snaps pinned here. One was a grainy group shot, which Tony had identified underneath as Mischa's art-school class.
'Isn't this a classic? He's the unwashed hippie here,' he pointed, 'dangling a yard of ash off his fag. How about the long hair and stubble? And the scowl. He's ostentatiously ignoring the camera. La vie de Bohème's the desired effect, wouldn't you say, en route to an absinthe at the Café des Artistes?'
The other was of Mischa looking much as he had when she first met him but a little less wild and dishevelled, standing next to a petite young woman with an hour-glass figure and heart-shaped face. Her face was tilted up towards his and crowned with a halo of dark hair set in neat, shining waves. She was leaning into him, encircling his waist with possessive arms.They were in a rural setting beside water and trees.The caption read:'With Elsa Montag, summer of 1968.'
Tony said, 'That was taken in the Prague Spring, in the halcyon days just before the Russian tanks rolled in. She's fixated on him but he's looking away from her, it's quite revealing, isn't it, in that half-accidental way you often get in photos? The original was very creased,but it'll touch up OK.'
He took the photo by the corner and laid it on the table.'They're an incongruous couple.Don't you think so?'
He is monitoring my reaction, Greer thought, conscious of the tape recorder working away on the table in the narrow gap between them. She picked up the photo. She knew Elsa's age to be twenty-four, but in this picture she looked more like an innocent schoolgirl. Her unguarded expression, the devotion and longing on her face struck Greer as almost shocking in their nakedness. Before everything ended in tears, perhaps well before anything had even happened between them, people would have worried about the emotional insecurity of this young woman.
She asked, without needing to feign interest or concern, 'Is this the only one you have of Elsa?'
'Greer, I was lucky to get even this one. She had destroyed everything to do with Mischa. His sister found this. It was in the pocket of an old duffle coat Mischa left behind, and Grete came across it when she passed the coat on to her son, Milos, after it had been hanging in a cupboard for a couple of years. She'd shoved it in the family album and forgotten all about it, until she brought the album out to show me. She was embarrassed to see it there actually. I had a helluva job getting it out of the album so I could photograph it.'
He grimaced. 'Had to resort to the biographer's party trick of pinching it in the end.' He noticed Greer's expression.'I mean borrowing it.Yeah,she was quite protective of her little brother, in spite of the enthusiastic disapproval regularly dished out.' He glanced at her.'I guess siblings are like that. Blood's thicker than water, right?'
She thought, what big eyes you have, Mister Wolf. The artfulness of those clear blue eyes was so transparent to her by now that she was surprised no one else had remarked on it. Mischa too was transparent to her much of the time, but never with artifice. He was still humming – now it sounded like 'Stormy Weather' – and wielding a screwdriver. He had his broad back to them, and even at this distance she could pick up his vibrations, his total immersion in the task at hand.
'What happened to Elsa?'
'After he cleared out? It was no picnic, to be honest. Young woman dumped by penniless, oddball artist she'd left her prominent husband for.'
He was being careful to sound neutral, even jocular, she noticed.
'Yes, I am aware of the background.'
'OK. Well, yeah, she disappeared for a while. No one knew exactly where she went.'
There was a thumping full stop here with a questioning intonation. He was seeking a response. Greer shook her head.
'When she turned up again she was in the throes of a pretty full-on breakdown.The first of many. Pavel refused to have her back. She worked sporadically, survived. Life was tough of course for everyone, everything either stagnated or went backwards after the Russians moved in.'
She thought he had finished with this, when he added, 'I think her diagnosis would be severe bipolar, these days. She's pretty screwed up mentally, as I see it.To put it mildly.'
Did he see his own mother as having been similarly screwed up by men?
'Did she ever marry again? Have another relationship?' Greer heard unwelcome notes in her voice, of anxiety and something else more unfamiliar. She collected herself. 'Did she – get over Mischa at all, eventually?'
'Did she put it behind her and move on? I guess not. She doesn't look anything like that picture now, I can tell you. She's a little old grey-haired lady, you wouldn't recognise her.There's a kind of fervent submissiveness about her, but maybe she always had that, you know?'
He was staring at the photograph, running his fingers through his blond-streaked hair, which stood on end like the bristles of a brush, in the currently fashionable manner. He must have put gel in it this morning to get it to behave like that, Greer thought irrelevantly.
'What I think is, it was like she came to the decision way back in 1969 that when she lost Mischa her life would be ruined.And she stuck by that decision,and it duly was.I think that happens with people sometimes, that relinquishing of responsibility for their fate, you know what I mean?'
Greer nodded. She knew exactly what he meant. She felt a tingling in her hands, and realised she had been digging her nails into the palms.
Then he surprised her: 'Your husband, Charlie McNicoll, on the other hand, was not like that. He reacted the opposite way. He made the decision he wasn't going to let his entire life be ruined by losing you, and it wasn't. He got over it just fine. Eventually.'
Now she did meet his eyes. It was as if she had been cast overboard to flounder in a choppy sea and someone, the least likely person, had thrown her a lifeline. She had to make an effort to stop herself from saying to him, from saying humbly: thank you for telling me that.
Mischa came over to them just then, having finished with his stretcher and displaying an example of that sixth sense Greer had always been convinced he possessed. He stood at her side with his arm draped across her shoulder in a reversed reflection of the image, nearly forty years old, that lay on the table in front of them.
Greer said sadly,'She was very pretty, Mischa.'
'Pretty and sweet. Far too sweet and a hundred miles too trusting for me. I needed a rude and bossy woman. Do you hear that, Tony?' He raised Greer's arm and kissed it from the elbow to the wrist. 'Don't look at those photos, they make me feel old and bad. I don't want them in the book,Tony.'
'Well, I'm always at you for some more modern ones where you're good and old.'
'They would be worse. Paintings can do the work much better. Let them tell the story.'
'That's quite true, isn't it, if you could only decipher them,' Tony said to Greer as Mischa sloped off with a backward grin in her direction. 'The art is the real autobiography of the artist. Did you know he left behind a whole bunch of paintings with Elsa? All his work up to that time. That was all he had to give her, I guess. He had no money.'
'Yes.What happened to them?'
'Well, that's the tragedy of it. If only she'd hung on to even one, but she didn't keep any of them, just gave them away or flogged them at the time for next to nothing. One does pop up very occasionally at auction, like these two here, but mostly they've disappeared off the radar.'
There were few surviving paintings from the third section,'Between Continents'.This covered Mischa's unproductive years, his haphazard, zigzagging journe
y to Vienna and eventually to Australia. But 'Chapter Four: The Australian Period, 1976–1981' had two rows of images. Greer recognised every one, even though she hadn't set eyes on the originals for more than twenty years.The majority of them, she saw, had remained in Australian hands.
'This group here,'Tony drew an arc around them in the air with his forefinger, 'are the pictures I'm using from the inaugural Melbourne exhibition, the Corbett Gallery show. I didn't manage to get everything: two I really wanted I haven't been able to track down. Nineteen seventy-nine, when you met, and 1980 were the first bumper crop.You can date the beginning of Mischa's real career as an artist from those years.'
He grinned at her. 'Must have been your ground-breaking influence, right? I flirted with a title for this chapter – 'Mischa Meets his Muse', but he vetoed it on two counts.A,it was tacky,and B,you'd never stand for it.'
'He was accurate on both counts,' Greer said absently.As he spoke Tony had been pulling out some new photographs from the folder. She watched his hands with a feeling of renewed disquiet as he began to put them up. His fingers were tapered, with well-tended nails. The nails looked unusually shiny for a man. She wondered if he could be wearing nail polish.
The first photo was a colour shot taken inside the Corbett Gallery showing a wall of Mischa's pictures. And there was Verity,standing with Mischa at the opening of his exhibition.Verity looked slim and refined in a conservative navy suit with a pleated skirt. She radiated pride, proprietorial pride. She had been to the hairdresser that morning. Greer recalled her own mental eye-roll at the sight of Verity's hair, newly auburn and newly permed into small immaculate curls.
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