In the Forest of Forgetting

by Theodora Goss

  For the exhibit, I had been planning to paint an orchard in our village, with the village girls gathering apples. But I didn’t want to paint that any more. I didn’t want the people who saw my picture to go back to their apartments hoping we would have a good apple harvest, or thinking about the village girls’ legs. I wanted to paint a picture that would make them stare and whisper to each other, “What are we supposed to think?”

  That night, while Petru sat on his bed smoking Lucky Strikes, I told him, “That’s how I’m going to paint from now on.”

  He blew smoke in my direction. “You’re joking, right?”

  “Why should I be joking? Why shouldn’t I paint something real, something important?”

  He leaned back against the wall. “You should let me find you a ballerina. They’re astonishingly flexible. Now that’s an art worth practicing.” If he hadn’t been so much taller than me, I think I would have punched him.

  The next day, I began my Leda.

  That’s not quite accurate. The next day, I went to the Art School library. Most of the shelves were empty, and for the first time I wondered what they had once contained. But I needed ideas, and I didn’t know where else to begin. I walked through the R’s and took down a book on the Renaissance. On the first page was a picture of Leonardo’s flying machine. The writing beneath described what a great mechanic Leonardo had been, what a friend of the people. I flipped through the book out of habit, not thinking I would find anything useful. And then I saw Leda and the Swan. You know it, János: a plump girl with her arms around the swan, smiling slightly. It was all wrong. Whoever had painted it after a sketch by Leonardo must have made a mistake. Leonardo would never have painted something so calm, so passionless, as though Leda and the Swan were friends from school.

  It was at that moment, I think, that I began to see my Leda, a Leda for the modern age. In the next few weeks, I spent all my time working on the painting. I asked Anna to pose for me. She agreed, although she said the temperature in my room gave her goosebumps. It was getting cold, and the heating had never come on. But that was what I wanted: pale skin, almost blue at the tips of the fingers and under the eyes. I spent hours in the park, sketching the swans that still swam on the pond. For background, I relied on a sketch I had made of the hills above Szent Imre.

  One day, Petru said, “Show me your painting. If I’m going to live in the stink of turpentine, I might as well know what for.”

  I pulled off the cloth I used to cover the canvas. It was a white madness: the wings of the swan and the body of the girl intertwined, until even I could not tell where one began and the other ended. In the lower right hand corner was the girl’s pale face, her eyes wide with terror, her mouth parted in unexpected ecstasy. Her dark hair spread along the frozen ground, and above the sky was gray with the promise of snow.

  Petru stared at the painting, then said, “It will be the best thing submitted to the exhibit, but the Committee will never allow it to be shown.”

  “Why? If it’s as good as you say—”

  “Because it has no social value. And because it will make them all want to go home and masturbate.” With the stub of his cigarette, he lit another. “Make your life easier, István. Submit something else.”

  “No,” I said. “This is the best thing I’ve ever done.”

  He shrugged. “Go to the Devil in your own way, then. I’ve certainly chosen mine.”

  On the day of the exhibit, I was told to hang my Leda between a painting of a village girl gathering melons and the Brassó soccer team in their uniforms. The student who had painted the soccer team looked at my painting with raised eyebrows, but everyone was silent as the Committee members walked around the room, examining the paintings. They looked at the soccer team, then at my Leda, expressionless. They passed on to the melon gatherer, but the Chairman stayed behind a moment, looking at the painting, and then at me. The Committee members gathered in one corner of the room with the Director and whispered among themselves. Then the Director announced the paintings that would be displayed in the National Museum. The melon gatherer was among them. So was the soccer team. My Leda was not.

  Petru had told me to expect this. But somehow, I had thought, they would choose my painting, in spite of the standards. They were an Art Committee, after all. They should have seen that my Leda was better than any other painting in the room. My stomach felt empty, as thought I hadn’t eaten all day, but it was an emptiness that could not be filled with food.

  “István.” The Director stood next to me. “Chairman Molnár would like to see you after the judging is over. Go to the Café Bánffy. Listen carefully to what he tells you. You don’t want to disappoint your brother, do you?”

  I waited in the café for half an hour before the Chairman arrived. I sent the waiter away twice, too nervous to eat or drink. When the Chairman arrived, he sat down across from me at the table and ordered a vodka.

  “István Pál,” he said. “How old were you when your father died?”

  I looked at him, startled. “Eleven,” I said.

  He nodded. “I was sorry to hear about the automobile accident. He should have remarried after your mother’s cancer. Women are practical. They keep you from—” he leaned over, slapped my shoulder, and chuckled, “—from driving too fast, eh?”

  His vodka arrived, and he held the glass up in one hand, allowing the light to shine through it. “Today you did something stupid. You know that, don’t you?”

  I said nothing. What was I supposed to say?

  “I have something I would like to show you.” He drank his vodka in one mouthful. “Come, we will take my car.”

  I had never been inside a Mercedes before. It was more comfortable than my bed in the dormitory. I could almost have fallen asleep on the leather seats. We drove through Kolozsvár, and then through the countryside. Finally we came to a house that was almost as large as the School of Art, standing in the middle of a lawn so smooth it looked like a green canvas. So this is how Party members live, I thought.

  I followed him into the living room, whose walls were covered with paintings: farmers in front of their tractors, factories in fields of wheat, troops of Young Pioneers wearing red kerchiefs around their necks. Portraits of sports stars and Party members. The Chairman offered me a vodka and a Cuban cigar. I shook my head. The palms of my hands were sweating. I was in much more trouble than I had thought. At any moment, the Secret Police would come through the door and take me to prison.

  Instead, he led me into his office. “Sit there, István,” he said, pointing to a leather chair in front of his desk. I wondered how many cowhides a Party member was worth, and whether the higher up you were, the more you were given. The most important members, I thought, must live in leather houses.

  He walked behind the desk, to what looked like a cabinet with folding doors. He folded the doors back. “This is what I wanted to show you.” It was not a cabinet. Behind the doors was a painting.

  I saw a man with his back to the viewer, naked except for a helmet on his head and sandals on his feet. He seemed to be in a cave, or a crevice surrounded by rocks. He stood with his weight on one foot as though he had taken a step forward and then stopped. In one hand he held a short sword, in the other a circular shield. The shield reflected what stood behind him: the face of a woman. It must once have been beautiful, but it was now as pale and hard as stone. Around her head coiled thin green snakes, some already hissing at their reflection in the shield. The painting was remarkable. Not because of its technique, although its realism was so exact that I could see, on the hand holding the sword, a scar that ran up the back of the hand to the wrist. Not because of its color, although the gray-brown of the rocks, and the gray pallor of the man’s body, and the gray-green of the snakes with their red mouths had the intensity of colors in a dream. But because he stood there, his weight on one foot, expressing everything: that he was hungry, that he had traveled for months to experience this moment, that he wanted it to last, wanted to unders
tand the mysteries that lay behind Medusa’s eyes.

  “Good, isn’t it?” said the Chairman. “Almost makes me want to pinch that cheek.” He gestured toward the man’s buttocks. “Not the sort of thing the people should see, of course. Unhealthy. But it’s good, you have to agree it’s good.”

  “It’s the best thing I’ve ever seen.”

  He nodded. “I knew you would appreciate it. The Party Art Committee—what a joke. They know as much about art as a sausage.”

  “Who painted it?” I asked. Whoever had painted it would understand my Leda.

  “A Hungarian.” He took a sip of his vodka. “Támora Von Graff.”

  I shook my head. “Von Graff isn’t a Hungarian name.”

  “Her mother married a German. He was an industrialist, she was a countess with a castle in the Carpathians. The castle was taken in ‘46. That’s how we deal with Germans in Erdélyország. The Art Committee sent me to examine the paintings and decide whether they should be sent to the National Museum.” He gestured toward the painting with his cigar. “Most of them were harmless. But this one. It’s good all right, but not exactly—suitable.”

  “What happened to Támora Von Graff?”

  “Devil if I know. She studied painting in Paris, before the war. She’s probably still there, an old woman selling paintings to tourists and feeding stray cats.” He walked around the desk and put his hand on my shoulder. I hadn’t eaten lunch, and the smell of cigar smoke was nauseating. “Be careful, István. No more swans screwing good Erdélyi girls, all right? Especially not the daughter of the Director of High Schools.” I had assumed Anna’s father was a doctor or lawyer. “Next time, paint a busty village woman bending over her melons!” He laughed, and almost spilled vodka on the leather chair.

  That night, I looked through Les Fantaisistes, searching for Támora Von Graff. She would have been in Paris at about the right time, and she was painting in the same style. But none of the pictures were hers, and I couldn’t find her in the list of artists at the back of the book. Frustrated, I started flipping randomly through the pages. And suddenly, I saw her name in a paragraph about the Fantaisiste Antoine LeMaître, the painter of the Minotaur in the maze. It ended, “In his late twenties, LeMaître disappeared. Friends claimed he had left Paris with his mistress, the Hungarian Countess Támora Von Graff. It is unfortunate that the art world lost such a talented painter just when he was reaching the height of his powers.”

  When Petru came in, I asked him, “What do you know about Támora Von Graff?”

  “So you’re not in prison yet.” He sat down on his bed. “You know, they took away your Leda. I bet it ends up in some Party member’s house. They’re supposed to have secret rooms filled with decadent art.”

  I walked over to my desk. The sketches for my Leda were still lying in the drawer. I realized that my fists were clenched and my fingernails were cutting into the palms of my hands. “I asked about Támora von Graff.”

  “Why do you want to know?” He leaned back against the wall and pulled out a Playboy magazine, minus its cover, from under his pillow. “Look at Miss September. Do you think girls really have breasts like that in America?”

  “I’m curious.”

  He looked at me for a moment. “She had a studio in Prague for a while. She might have gone to Budapest after that. Who told you about Támora Von Graff?”

  “Does it matter?”

  He shook his Playboy at me. “Be careful, István. Unless you want to catch gonorrhea from prison guards.”

  That night, I took my sketches to Anna’s apartment. I didn’t want to leave them in the dormitory. She put them at the bottom of a box of spring clothes. “Stay for a drink, István,” she said. “I have some Tokay. A seamstress gave my father three bottles, so her son would do better in school.” I pulled on my coat and told her I wouldn’t be able to see her for a while.

  The next day, I left for Budapest. My ticket was cheap enough, but paying the conductor not to ask for my travel papers took more money than I had expected. There were two people in the train compartment with me, an old man who looked like a mechanic, with stained hands, and a student with a rucksack reading a Fodor’s guide. As we approached the border, the old man began to make himself a sandwich, taking bread out of a paper bag, spreading lard on it, then pickles. I had bought coffee at the train station for breakfast, and I must have looked hungry, because he gave me the end of his loaf.

  “Look at these foreigners,” he said, waving his knife toward the student. “He probably thinks this is the land of ghosts and vampires!”

  The student looked up from his reading. “Excuse me?” he said in English.

  “The grandfather is talking about your guidebook,” I answered.

  “Hey, you speak American!” he said. “That’s great. Are you going to Budapest? Maybe you can show me around the city.”

  The old man snorted. “What is he, Frenchie, Italian?”

  “American,” I said.

  “Damn all Americans. If it wasn’t for the Treaty of Trianon, I tell you . . .”

  And he did, until we reached Budapest. I shrugged at the American and stared out the window, at fields of sunflowers. The flowers were already dry, and their heads hung stiff and brown.

  I can hear dishes clattering in the café below. It’s time to meet Antoine. I’ll finish writing later. János, I’m finally going to meet her.

  János Pál let the paper drop to the desk and put his head in his hands. He stayed like that for several minutes, until the candle, which had burned level with the top of its holder, began to flicker. He raised his head and stared at it, as though it might contain some extraordinary meaning. Then he took another candle, his last but one, out of the drawer, lit it from the flame, and stuck it on the already-melted wax. He reached into the drawer again, pulled out the tobacco box, and opened the lid. In it were photographs. A man with a fishing pole beside a young boy holding a fish, both smiling into the camera. The same man with his mouth open, as though in the middle of a conversation, beside a painting of a train that ran across the sky, its tracks laid along clouds. This photograph was torn and taped together in one corner, as though someone had decided to destroy it and then changed his mind. Two boys sitting next to each other on a riverbank, the younger putting out his tongue and pretending to punch the older. János sighed and passed his hand over his mustache, then relit his pipe, which had gone out some time ago, and picked up the next sheet of paper.

  János, I’ve spoken with her. Finally, after weeks of searching through art galleries, of sneers from old men in tweed coats and young women in black turtleneck sweaters. Once, I thought a man in a gallery on Váci Street gave me a strange look, but he said he’d never heard of Támora Von Graff. Finally, I started asking the artists who sit on the Fisherman’s Bastion, sketching tourists for deutschmarks or dollars. I thought of joining them and making some extra money. But I remembered my Leda, and the thought of sketching fat Germans or Americans in Mickey Mouse t-shirts made me sick.

  My money began to run out, and I knew I could no longer afford even this hotel, with its stained mattress and its ring of mold around the shower stall. I restricted myself to poppy seed rolls for breakfast and paprikás for lunch, with coffee to fill in the gaps. But my wallet kept getting thinner, until I had just enough money to pay for the train back to Kolozsvár.

  Why am I dwelling on this? Everything is different now. Yesterday morning I was sitting in the café, feeling sick from hunger. The only other man in the café was sitting behind his newspaper, and I noticed without interest that the Soviet Party Chairman was meeting with the American President again. Then I noticed something else: his hand. It had a scar across the back, running up to the wrist.

  If I hadn’t been searching through art galleries for a month, if I hadn’t been sleeping in a room where I could hear mice behind the walls, if I hadn’t been so hungry, I would never have said to him, “Excuse me, do you know Támora Von Graff?”

  He lowered the
newspaper. He was older than I had expected, with cropped white hair and wrinkles under his eyes, but I recognized him even though she had painted Perseus from behind. “Támora is a good friend of mine. Are you an admirer?” He held out his hand, fingertips gray from newspaper ink. “My name is Antoine LeMaître.”

  Trying not to stammer, I told him I was an art student in Kolozsvár, where I had seen one of her paintings. I mentioned Les Fantaisistes.

  “Really? Then perhaps you’ve seen one of my paintings as well.” His mouth twisted into a pained smile. “They are not so well known, nowadays. But you must meet Támora. She collects young artists, like you.”

  He could not introduce me to her right way. “Támora enjoys her—seclusion,” he said. But he promised to meet me the next day and introduce me to her if she would allow it. That was when I told him about my money problems, and about you. “Write to this brother of yours,” he said. “Fortunately, I’m going to Erdélyország next week. I can take the letter for you. In the meantime, don’t worry about money. Buy yourself a good meal, István. Now that we’ve met, I know everything will work out.”

  After he left, I bought myself a glass of wine and two pieces of sour cherry strudel. Finally, I thought, I have something to celebrate.

  This morning, as we agreed, I went down to the café. I was too nervous to eat. I sat, drinking coffee and looking at yesterday’s paper, probably the same one Antoine had left. The American President had a fish on his tie, and pollution was getting worse in the Danube.