The Art of Keeping Cool

by Janet Taylor Lisle

  “Come! Look! I paint the planes. Do you hear?”

  We listened, and heard the bombing still going on in the bay. “Yah?” Abel’s eyes widened and he leapt toward the canvas he was working on.

  “Bomb, here!” He made a movement with his brush that put an explosion of paint on the painting. “And here!” Another paint explosion. “And here, here, here!”

  He was using different shades of red and blue, sort of layering them together, and though the explosions he painted didn’t look like anything recognizable, I saw the power that went into them, the thick blue craters of paint his brush left behind.

  “That’s great!” Elliot told him. For the first time, I agreed.

  “Yah! Great!” Abel said. “I am great again!” He gave a scornful laugh. “In Germany, I am great, and kablam!” He exploded his brush against the canvas. “Is gone.”

  “You mean a bomb fell on your paintings?” I asked.

  “Bomb?” Abel glanced at me. “Not like this.” We listened to the navy pilots practicing over the bay.

  “Another bomb. Big. Smart. You don’t see at first. You think: Oh, this is nothing, it won’t catch me. Suddenly, you can’t do nothing. It starves you out, beats you out, comes after you. You hide. And still it comes. It finds what you paint before and this also it destroys. So there is nothing left. Just you. Then if you don’t leave, it will get that, too.”

  “So you left?” Elliot asked.

  “I get out,” Abel said, in a low voice. “For many, it is too late.”

  “Tell us,” Elliot said, and I could see it was something he’d asked before. “Please, Abel. Tell us what happened. We should know.”

  “You should NOT KNOW!” Abel said angrily. “Who should know such things? Not children.”

  “Yes, we should,” Elliot pleaded. “In case it happens again. Here, even. We should know when to leave.”

  When Elliot said this, Abel dropped his brush and ran his large, paint-smeared hands through his hair.

  “This is true,” he said, and sat down heavily where he was on the grass.

  11

  LISTENING TO ABEL was like watching him paint.

  “In old days, I have in Germany, many, many friends!” he bellowed. “We are young, poor, full with ideas!”

  Then he whispered: “Where are they now, these talented ones? Hiding, like me. Arrested. Or worse, dead.”

  He leapt up suddenly and threw his arms in the air: “What to do! How to fight? Everywhere is evil now!”

  He sat again, glaring into space while he made the next sentence in his mind.

  In this way, we learned how, long before the war, he left his family’s home in Berlin to go to an art school in the city of Frankfurt. There he met other young artists experimenting in ways he had never imagined possible. No longer was it good enough to draw, line by line, the simple appearance of things. Now one must learn to paint the invisible: hidden feelings and memories, terrors and passions, the submerged continents everyone knows are there but cannot speak about.

  He began his own experiments.

  “I wanted my paintings to roar!” he shouted to us. “To roar and . . . and . . . what is that called in the ocean?” he asked Elliot, nodding toward the naval practice runs.

  “Explosions? To explode?”

  “Yah, to explode. To make a big sound. But also to make silence. And quiet, like water dripping after a storm. A painting can do many things. It can make the eye hear.”

  In Germany, his work began to be noticed. Expressionist, it was called. He used paint straight from the tube. Pure colors. A tube of paint is like a stick of dynamite, he said. The surface of things is exploded. Inner landscapes are revealed.

  Younger painters came and lived near him. He gained a reputation, supported himself comfortably, though he was never rich. He lived in city apartments, moved about to Munich, to Dresden, to Paris for a year, then home to Frankfurt, where he was appointed to a professors post at the famous Art Academy.

  But a new political order was growing in Germany. The Nazi Party came to power in 1933. Hitler and his circle disliked the new art. It looked crazy they said, as if mental patients had painted it. Good art does not try to confuse people or disgust them. It is clear and vigorous, straightforward and beautiful, and provides the public with uplifting subjects, natural landscapes and scenes of normal life.

  Well, all right. Everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion. There is room for all kinds of art, all kinds of opinions in the world.

  Except with Hitler, there was to be only one room, Abel Hoffman told us. Very soon, he and his brutish regime began to eliminate the other rooms. How? This is how.

  A letter arrives from the new chairman of the art department. You are dismissed from your professorship at the Art Academy. The money for your post has been cut off. You must leave immediately, after ten years! Why? You have been judged an unfit artist, one of the degenerates who are trying to fool people, or corrupt them. When you go to interview for another teaching job, you are turned away. Your name is on a list. No one will hire you.

  You find work painting wall decorations in office buildings. Its demeaning and physically exhausting, but helps pay the bills. You work on your own art, too, but sell less and less.

  One night, a knock comes on the door. Its the police, Hitler’s dreaded Gestapo, accompanied by your landlord, wringing his hands.

  —Are you Hoffman?

  —Yes.

  —You must leave at once. This apartment is needed by the state.

  —But where can I go?

  —That’s your problem. What is this trash on the floor, your paintings?

  —Yes.

  —We must confiscate them.

  —Why?

  —We’re under orders.

  —But, where will you take them?

  —Well let you know.

  The paintings, your newest and best, are carried away. They disappear. No one will tell you where they are. You move in with a friend. Before long, you’re fired from your wall painting job. Why? You’re one of those blacklisted artists. Your employer has a business to protect. You are too risky.

  You are officially notified that your work has been declared “obscene” and anti-German in spirit. The government has ordered it removed from museums and public places. It cannot be sold. Dealers will be prosecuted. “But I paint nature!” you cry. “You have deformed nature,” comes the reply.

  One night, in the town square, a huge bonfire is lit for the enjoyment of the people. The fuel is books, furniture, musical manuscripts, Parisian hats, paintings, photographs, and masses of indistiguishable junk. In the fire, the painter catches sight of a pile of his canvases just beginning to ignite. There’s the one he painted in Dresden, of the bridge and the birds feeding below in the snow. He never wanted to sell it because it reminded him of himself that winter. Solitary, cold, his young followers pecking for crumbs nearby.

  The painter hurls himself toward the fire. He tries to rescue his work but is dragged back by several people in the crowd. Is he crazy? Does he want to kill himself? He stares at the flames in shock. The paint on his painting begins to melt and char. He turns away in tears, runs his hands through his hair. He can’t bear to watch.

  After this, the painter becomes more secretive about his art. He moves out of town to a nondescript house in the suburbs. He paints in the cellar, warns friends to come only after dark, talks to no one in the neighborhood. No one knows who or what he is.

  His ex-students drop in for visits. They’re young and angry and make plans to get around the stupid Nazi laws. They organize secret exhibitions, print underground articles and newspapers. The year is 1935 and it’s exciting at first. The painter’s cellar becomes subversively famous. Silently, the neighbors take note of the comings and goings.

  One evening, walking home from his job in a local canning factory, the painter is jumped and beaten by a gang of thugs. Get out of this neighborhood, they tell him. Degenerate artists are not wanted he
re. They smash his stomach and kidneys with their fists and slam his head over and over into a roadside curbstone. He vomits, passes out, and wakes up a few minutes later with a crowd of people around him. They have been told he is a drunk who has passed out on his way home from a bar.

  In fact, he stinks of liquor. Someone has poured a bottle of whiskey over him. Depraved pig, get out, this is a nice neighborhood, the crowd shrieks at him. He gets unsteadily to his feet and drags himself back to his cellar.

  The shock of the assault unhinges him. Some of his ex-students have been badly beaten as well. The meetings in the cellar stop. Eyes are everywhere. He’s afraid to go out and can no longer work in the canning factory. He’s plagued by nightmares. For the first time, he feels afraid for his life. With the help of friends, he moves to a new apartment in a new town.

  But here, somehow, the Gestapo knows him, is on the look-out for him. He cannot buy art supplies, meet people, go anywhere, without being watched. At unexpected times during the day or night, Gestapo agents arrive at his apartment. They search for paintings and even check to see if his brushes are wet.

  One evening, he is arrested and taken to Gestapo headquarters. He has been denounced for making comments critical of the government. Who is the informer? Another painter, a colleague, someone he thought he could trust. Fortunately, after a long interrogation, the charges are dropped for lack of evidence.

  The painter goes home exhausted. He thinks angrily: Turned in by a colleague! How could he have done it? Then his anger fades. He knows how. Everyone is afraid. No one is trustworthy when fear rules a house.

  During the next two years, the painter works as a street sweeper, a flower delivery man, and a dishwasher in a restaurant, but is fired from each of these jobs for illness. His health is beginning to fail.

  With his landlords permission, he paints at night in an unheated bathroom at the back of the house, using watercolors to avoid the smell of oil paint. But he dares sell nothing. The police are watching, waiting for him to make a move so they can arrest him again.

  He does not have enough food and faints on the street one winter day.

  Two well-known Expressionist artists, friends of his, have committed suicide, he hears. Another has been deported to a concentration camp. The daily outrages committed against the Jews sicken him. A friend tells him: leave Germany before it’s too late. Worse is coming. We are going to war.

  He is penniless. Where can he go?

  One day, he collapses in an outdoor market and ends up in the hospital. His heart has gone bad. While he is hospitalized, his landlord and family are arrested and deported to a concentration camp, for what it’s never clear. The house, with all the painter’s possessions inside, is boarded up.

  A former student who is in town, comes to see him in his hospital room and is shocked to find his old teacher in such a weakened state. Get yourself out of here before it’s too late, he says. If they arrest you again, you won’t last a month. He hands over his own train ticket for Geneva. The student will buy another ticket in third class, and accompany him. There are people in Switzerland who can help get the painter out. To Spain. From there, he can get a boat to America, the student says.

  America! How can I go there? I don’t speak any English, the painter cries.

  He goes the next day, telling no one, leaving everything, even his secret watercolors, which lie under a floorboard in the cold bathroom. He sets out with only the clothes on his back, just in time, he finds out later.

  Gestapo agents searching his old rented room have found letters linking him to an anti-government organization, exactly what they need to throw him into the camps. Arriving at the hospital to make his arrest, the agents find his bed empty.

  “They missed you by a day,” a friend writes from Germany several months later. “I wept with joy when they told me you had gone.” It is his old colleague, the one who had turned him in.

  • • •

  Abel Hoffman stopped. He’d been talking for a long time. The sun was lower; its rays had ebbed as quietly as tide water across the field. Now only the top half of the trees on the other side were lit. There, perched on one branch, I saw Abel’s loyal hawk keeping watch, his fierce, hooked beak turned a bit to one side.

  At some time unnoticed, the bombing in the bay had come to an end, and as Abel’s voice broke off, a strange crater of silence opened around us. Abel’s face wore a dazed look, as if telling his story had made him live it again and he wasn’t sure that this time he had come out alive. After a little while, he got to his feet. When he’d walked off a ways, he turned back and gazed at me.

  I looked away fast. I had no doubt by then that he knew I’d told on him being in the field. His story about the double-crossing colleague in Germany put me on notice that he’d dealt with spineless types like me before. I was pretty sure now he hadn’t been spying, and I went hot with shame. When I looked again, though, he was examining his bomb painting. To Elliot, he said:

  “You take this one. It is the best.”

  “You mean, this painting?” Elliot asked in amazement.

  “Take it to home. Today. Two can carry.”

  “But Abel, why? It’s much safer here. Anyway, I have no place to put it,” Elliot protested. The painting was very large, six feet by six feet.

  “Please,” he said. “I wish to give to you some gift.”

  “We could put it in the barn,” I said.

  “We’d have to hide it,” Elliot objected.

  “Well, we could. There’s a ton of stuff in there no one ever bothers with.”

  “Why are you giving it to me?” Elliot asked Abel suspiciously. “You’re not thinking of leaving, are you?”

  “No, no. I think of staying,” Abel assured him. “How can I leave?” He grinned and glanced over his shoulder.

  We followed his eyes toward his two sheds packed tight with new paintings, his boat-studio moored in the field. It did seem impossible that he could go anywhere. The huge paintings alone would need a railroad boxcar to carry them, and we knew that Abel would never leave without them.

  Elliot looked relieved. “I was afraid you might have decided to go,” he said. “You know, without telling anyone, like in Germany.”

  “No, no.” The painter shook his head. “No more. I am tired and . . .” he pressed his hand against his chest, “I feel not so good sometimes. For now, I stay.”

  Elliot nodded. “Your watercolor paintings might still be there under the floorboards. Maybe when the war is over you’ll go back and find them.”

  “Maybe.” Abel shrugged.

  “And your other paintings in the museums. The Nazis couldn’t burn everything, could they?”

  “Now there is bombs,” Abel said. “From the sky. In cities, many many bombs.”

  It was true. I thought how my father might be dropping a bomb that very minute headed for a building holding Abel’s paintings. From the sky who could tell a museum from a weapons factory?

  Maybe Abel was thinking that, too. He was staring again at his painting.

  “Please, you take it,” he urged Elliot. “Take it today.”

  “All right,” Elliot agreed this time. “I’ll take very good care of it.”

  “This I know,” Abel said. “This I am sure. You ask why?” He turned to me. “This person, your cousin, is a painter. I know his heart. Inside him, I see. He paints good work someday. Not now. First he must learn. And work. Later, he is good. It is in his heart.”

  Elliot stared at the ground while Abel spoke. Afterwards, he walked away pretending to take an interest in Abel’s hawk. I saw his eyes widening and narrowing, widening and narrowing at the hawk, who looked curiously back with an unblinking gaze.

  A little while later we set out for home, carrying the painting upright between us. The canvas was still wet in places from the paint Abel had flung on that day. Rather than walk through the woods, we went a longer way across fields toward the bay, and by a back route along the shoreline. No one was around to see
us, and though a few bugs flew into the wet paint, and Elliot tripped once and dropped his side in some tall grass, we came up behind the barn with Abel’s painting still in one piece.

  We leaned it against the outside wall, and went in for supper. Later, when it began to get dark, we took it around through the barn doors and hauled it to a high hayloft where no one else was likely to go.

  “Stand it up. I’m going to stay and look at it,” Elliot said, as I was about to lay the painting on the floor.

  “Haven’t you seen it enough by now?”

  Elliot shook his head.

  I climbed back down the ladder and waited, hoping he’d come. Outside, I heard my mother arrive home with Aunt Nan, and go in the house to pick up Carolyn. She came out and called for me, but I didn’t want to go home yet, so I kept quiet. At last they went on without me.

  When the barn got too dark to see more than vague shapes, I lit a kerosene lamp that was hanging on one of the old horse stalls, but Elliot still didn’t come. Finally, I shouted up:

  “Elliot, what are you doing?”

  There was no answer.

  “Elliot, I know why Abel gave you the painting. Don’t you want to know?”

  Silence . . . except from somewhere in the rafters, a snap and flutter of wings. Barn swallows, settling in for the night.

  “Elliot!”

  I heard him coming down, step by careful step. He got to the bottom and faced me.

  “Abel’s afraid, that’s why he gave it to you,” I said. “He’s scared he’s running out of time.”

  “You mean his heart?”

  “Not that. Didn’t you listen to what he said? Everything that happened to him in Germany is happening all over again here.”

  “It isn’t the same.”

  “Why isn’t it? He’s getting beaten up. He’s getting arrested. He’s a magnet for trouble, just like he was there.”