Only the Dead Know Burbank

by Bradford Tatum

  “Sleep,” she said bending to pick up her earnings. “Austria soon.”

  CHAPTER 4

  It had just stopped raining when the train slowed into the station. I woke up in the adamant gray, hungry, still sluggish from the pastry sugar I had eaten the day before. My mother pulled me to my feet. Steam hissed past the window. Voices. Raised lights. The artist stood in the door of our compartment, staring at us with his mantis eyes, regretting his purchase perhaps, unreadable. There were shouts from the platform, long coats beneath double-headed eagles shouting names and numbers as the train emptied of its main occupants and the men mustered like marbles stacked in a child’s game. The artist turned. We were meant to follow.

  Weather threatened again, so we walked quickly up the Hietzinger Hauptstrasse. The houses rose up like monstrous bakers’ models, floors stacked one upon the other, burnt sugar soffits and lintels of bitter marzipan never meant to be eaten. Women passed us, their hair pulled so tightly into buns they looked like rabbits held by the ears ready for the axe. All with high collars and hard eyes that would skip like stones from the artist to my mother to me. This was Hietzing, in the thirteenth district of Vienna, fingerbowl of the Hapsburg court, where all the dirty linen was rinsed. A place where the shrubs were as well tended as bankers’ children, where quiet syphilis and pennyroyal abortions were portioned out by doctors who scoffed at Freud from Biedermeier night tables before the lights were snuffed out.

  He stopped in front of a house, a particularly malevolent neoclassical confection capped with a virulent growth of ivy that reached to the top casements. He knocked distractedly. He had no key. In fact, he carried no metal in his pockets, a residual from his several months in prison on a pornography charge. But we knew none of this then. The door was opened by a plain girl in a vertically striped dress. Her eyes were the faded blue of empty medicine bottles and they looked at us, fell, then were picked up again as she lifted to her toes to kiss her husband. She lowered her head as we passed. We stood in the clean foyer, arms tucked to our sides to take up less space, feeling profoundly, I think, like the luggage we were.

  False husband.

  Fake wife.

  And us a perfect addition to the blissful mockery.

  The hall we stood in was drunk with respectable smells, sharp furniture polish and smoky wood soap and another smell like pine spirits but muddier. The outgassing of oil paint as it cures. The counterpoint of their marriage was evident in all their effects. On the walls were his paintings. I knew it even then. Frank vaginas below blank stares. Then an heirloom candlestick discreetly gleaming. A portrait of his last affair, with a dead and yellowed infant at her breast. An exquisitely chased vase of tuberose. This simple pattern of extremes echoed through the entire house. Theirs was a relationship of unresolved fifths and syncopated thirds and I suppose modern for all that. I could understand what he saw in her, what a distant and treacherous shore called to him every night and the respectable anchor of teacups and spoons she provided. But what did she get? Houseguests he insisted on flaying to their quaking fundamentals? Perhaps he was a husband in more common ways. I had heard peasants coupling, heard the cries that were not from pain. But he seemed too frail for such exertions. Surely it was only his gaze that entered you.

  We were shown to the servants’ mess, to a big bowl of broth with spaetzle and black bread. When we finished, we were taken wordlessly up the back stairs to a small room with an iron bed and nothing else. We were to keep factory hours—that much was made clear by his wife. We would be required to be at her husband’s disposal for twelve hours a day during the week and eight on the weekends. Compensation would be meals, a bed in the studio, and a few kroners, which was far more than Klimt or his cronies paid, she told us. We were tired. Still hungry. And we agreed. We were meant to share the bed, sleep if we could, and be ready for work in the morning. But I didn’t sleep that night. I thought of the artist. His hands. His eyes. His morning-bird jerkiness that even then had become precious to me.

  We followed the light, chasing the thin rays across the worn wooden floor from dawn until the last leaning beam, standing, crouching, kneeling, leaning, unfurled on the bed or floor, willing our muscles past their spasms, evening our breath to endure yet another hour of scrutiny. All the while his eyes never left us. He worked in a fashion apparently discovered by Rodin, a way to blow the channel between the optic chasm and the hand, where the eyes never left the model, and the hand laid down a firm indelible line from mere trust. Rodin’s motive may have been as simple as lust, his eyes never wanting to miss a single play of light on such soft and ample female flesh, but there was nothing so warm at work here. Our artist’s gaze was that of the surgeon, the vivisectionist. We were not people but rather objects that defined space, a delineated mass radiating a single contiguous line that he quickly translated with blind gesture. He sat on a low milking stool, a stack of blank sheets balanced on his knees, a quiver of pencils at his thin ankles. He worked incredibly fast. Finished drawings drifted to the floor in some furious autumn, littering the planks beneath his shoes in a silent but volatile soil.

  Breakfast was weak tea and a biscuit, perhaps a piece of cold sausage, left on a tray on the floor near where we slept. We would awaken and hear him chewing in the corner, already crouched on his stool, eating the same cold food as us. That first morning I was innocent to his expectations. I swallowed quickly when I noticed him and then stood in my rumpled clothes, my arms swinging slowly in their sockets, trying to inspire. He simply stared. It was then that my mother stood, smirked, and pulled her camisole over her head. She was clear of her bloomers and bending to unroll her stockings when he shot an arresting hand into the air.

  “That,” he said.

  My mother froze, pulled her stocking to the swell of her thigh, and looked up. His pencil began to move and she froze again. In mere seconds it was over. I moved to pull my own shirt off but he waved me down, his gaze taut on my mother. I sat on the bed, still dressed, angry and bested. I had been slow, had failed to please, and now he would be farther away from me than ever.

  With the waning of the winter light our hours grew shorter. Some days we didn’t work at all, just huddled in blankets, idling, while he sat on the floor with trampled tubes of gouache and jars of colored water, irrigating stacks of drawings with washes of unlikely hues. I loved to watch him work, loved to see his brush fill to dripping with some violent orange and see it seep to the pencil-thin boundary of me.

  But my mother grew restless. The few times he did want her services she was stiff and quick or she hardly moved at all. Then one morning he brought a young man into the studio. He was thin and dark and unshaven, a street-worn twin of the artist himself. He stood by the windows, deeply shadowed by the weak winter light, staring into the street he had just left, perhaps amazed by his new perspective, while the artist molded the stale linen on the bed. He motioned for my mother and whispered something to her. Her expression was blank, only her fingers moved, the meat of her thumb rubbing the opposing pad of her index finger. What he wanted would cost him. The artist jerked his head and she flopped on the bed. The young man followed and they made love in shattered stills until the light was lost. All I could do was watch.

  We were constantly naked by this time, never knowing when we would be needed. The young man had arrived early and began to remove his coat when the artist’s wife appeared at the door and motioned to me. She had a robe with her. She draped it over me and led me from the room and shut the door. I didn’t want to leave. I was angry the stranger had replaced me. But there was something else adding to my reticence. Something about him that lingered sharply. Something in the skin surrounding his eyes, a blue tightness that veiled his stare and made me think of Volker Kemp.

  “You may call me Frau Schiele,” she said. She did not ask my name. I was led downstairs and introduced to several men in bankers’ collars and dark coats. They were passing sheets of the artist’s work among themselves. Their voices would rise as they turn
ed the sheets in their fingers, exclaiming about the tyranny of tea spouts and how the design of bed linens was fertile ground for a revolution.

  “No, no, Herr Moll! There must be shades of the eternal in the tines of that fish fork!”

  Many words were spent debating the proper balance of negative space in wallpaper patterns. It was explained to me they were part of a movement called the Succession. I wanted to hear more, to understand how stylized daisies could free a man’s soul. But the artist’s wife pulled me into a deep curtsy and showed me to the back parlor. She set me in a comfortable chair and gave me a large bright book with pictures. After months of the raw veracity of the artist’s images, the pictures seemed childish and false. I didn’t need to be excluded from what was going on at the top of those stairs. I could have found some way to fit into the frame. So what if they touched me and opened me? The artist would see me and I would be safe. Under his gaze I would be as safe as if smothered in goose down.

  I was never to sleep in that upstairs room again.

  My mother had won. Her bigger body, her fuller breasts, the accommodation of all her hollows had defeated me. I slept on a bed made for me near the stove. I took my breakfast now where we had begun, at the servants’ table, usually with one of the picture books Frau Schiele was so fond of giving me. I would stare at the round heads of the animals standing upright like humans, their snouts smeared into unnatural smiles, and try to imagine them without their ridiculous clothes, truncated legs splayed, tongues lolling, vying for the artist’s attention and immortality.

  One morning, I slammed the book in frustration. I raised the book to throw it when my hand was stilled. The artist’s wife took the book from me gently and placed it closed on the table.

  “That’s not how we treat books,” she said. “If you don’t like the pictures perhaps I can get you another.”

  Her stifled affection must have needed an outlet, for these were the first really civil words she had said to me. I told her I didn’t like the books, any books. They were too full of gibberish. She smiled. “You can’t read,” she said. “Of course they seem like gibberish.” I must have blushed, for she told me not to be embarrassed. Reading was simple once one knew how. She left and came back with a thin book with large pages filled with bright pictures of common things. There was scribbling next to each image.

  “My mother taught me with this,” she said, flipping the pages with the tips of her pale fingers. “It’s very simple.”

  Cup. Table. Floor. Spoon.

  This is how the days passed. Like an explorer with his telescope slowly twisting a foreign vista into focus. Soon the scribbles had meaning. Then held more interest than the pictures. She taught me rhymes and we would chant these over tea, sometimes completely forgetting to drink from our cups before they grew cold.

  The artist was finally married. We were not invited to the ceremony and heard no details of it upon their return to the house. Real life was beginning to inform their lives and we were still only on the fringes of the real.

  We saw less and less of the artist and my mother.

  As a tonic against his absence, Frau Schiele would take me out on fair days. She had a pink-and-cream crepe dress made for me for these occasions that was too stiff to bend in. I would trail behind her on the Hauptstrasse, gazing happily at the other trussed-up mothers and children who passed us. She showed me the summer palace and the big park with the little white hut that looked like it was made of spun sugar.

  “That’s where the waltzes come from,” she said.

  We ate flavored ices and fed pastry crumbs to the ducks on the banks of the Danube. One day she took me into a shop where pens and writing paper were sold and told me to pick something. I assumed she was going to teach me to draw.

  “No,” she said. “Proper young ladies must learn to write with proper ink. Pick what is comfortable and we’ll get started.”

  The house smelled heavily of wet oil paint when we returned, and the wife must have taken this for a good sign for she hummed gaily to herself as we headed for the kitchen. She made me change into my ordinary clothes, now faded and sweet-smelling after so many washings. She untied the parcel and fitted the nib to the pen. Then she unscrewed a pot of ink and smoothed a fresh sheet of practice paper to the top of the table.

  “Let’s begin with your name,” she said, tipping the pen toward me.

  I refused to take it. In my village it was common practice not to name bastards. It kept us neatly in the realm of things, of that which could be handled or altered according to use. Names gave things a soul.

  “I don’t have a name,” I said, looking at the blank page.

  The wife seemed confused. “Surely you’ve been called something.”

  I remembered Volker, in heat, had spit a common noun at me once that in my language was Mädchen, which meant simply “girl.” I told the wife this. Her face darkened. This was the kettle calling itself kettle, the fork answering to fork. I stared back, my heart pumping in my ears, thinking I had somehow offended her. She cleared her throat and, spritely once again, said, “Maddy’s a pretty name.” I might have gotten a soul that day.

  I HAD HEARD THREE CHRISTMASES FROM THE DARK EGRESS OF THE stairwell, the distant mirth and ringing china of three sets of birthdays when I woke up one morning with a slight cough. Frau Schiele used my new name when she told me to stay in bed while she went to the chemist’s. As soon as she left, my mother strolled into the kitchen. She was wearing a thin silk kimono, a gift from the artist, and it clung to her greedily. She plopped herself on my bed and grabbed me.

  “Who gave you that name?” she asked coldly.

  “It’s mine now,” I answered, trying to break free from her.

  “She’s given you quite a few nice things.”

  “A few.” I could feel the pain begin to rise in my wrist from the pressure of her touch.

  “And now you feel special. A regular lady.”

  “She’ll be back soon,” I said.

  “You were better off before. Names only trap you.”

  “Let me go.” I wiggled hard and managed to break free.

  “I won’t keep you, Maddy.” The name sounded false and dirty in her mouth. “She can have you for what little she has left.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Haven’t you noticed? She hasn’t much time. Neither of them do.” She smiled and squeezed my arms. “It will be just us soon enough.”

  I watched the artist’s wife closely in those following weeks. When she lifted a teacup to her lips, did she leave a final sip for the ferryman? Did crows refuse to scatter at her approach? She still liked to take me to the outdoor concerts and we went frequently. News from the front was bad. The lawns around the band shell were peppered with young soldiers propped up in wheelchairs, rushed into old age. The ones who could stand applauded at all the wrong places. The others screamed at every cymbal crash. They were wheeled away like broken toys by plain nurses whose charges could no longer appreciate a pretty face. But I still loved to hear the music, to wear my stiff little dress and pretend there was only this shallow beauty in my life.

  We were seated close to the orchestra one Sunday. The musicians had just begun to play “Roses from the South.” I was probing a back molar with a tongue still cold from a flavored ice when the tooth suddenly gave away. I tasted blood and looked up to the artist’s wife. She stood and coughed to clear our path. When we were at a discreet distance, her gaze fell to my gloved hand, the tips stained now with the browning blood, a small pearly kernel in my palm. She gently pushed the ice to my lips and told me to take as much into my mouth as I could. The raw socket ached, the ice too cold to offer comfort. I was afraid to drop my tooth, thinking it could be used in a charm against me, so I gripped it as best I could in my covered hands. It seemed a shame to leave, but my gloves were now soiled and no longer fit for public.

  When we came through the front door, my mother was sitting on the landing steps, her kimono loose at the breast. I was
n’t happy to see her. But still there was a pull, a feeling that I owed her something. I held my tooth out to her. “Look,” I said. She snatched it from my open hand. Seeing the ball of ice straining in my cheek, she ordered me to spit. I looked to the artist’s wife, who still stood next to me. She seemed distant, curious as to what I might do. I spit the pink ice in my mother’s hand before I could think. My mother got to her knees and rummaged around beneath the stairs. Frau Schiele slipped her hand into mine. When my mother faced us again, she had a lacy ball of spiderweb in her fingers. She tipped my jaw open and, looking defiantly at the other woman, stuffed the filthy ball into the raw socket in my jaw. She packed it deeply with the tip of her little finger. The pain ebbed immediately. I was afraid to probe the dusty clot that roiled my gut but soothed so quickly. What was I to do? The artist’s wife had seen this shameful, primitive doctoring, and back came the dirt floor of my grandfather’s hut. I shivered in the frilly dress not fit for me, not fit for anyone like me, and felt the tears brim in my eyes.

  “Take that filthy thing out of your mouth,” the wife said gently. She held her white hand below my lip like a silver bowl. I loved her then, the artist’s wife. And hated myself for feeling so. I dropped the red tangle into her palm and watched her fingers close around it, making it disappear. My mother merely smiled, saying nothing.

  WE WERE PLAYING TWO-HANDED SCHAFKOPF IN THE MORNING COOL OF the kitchen. The chill of fall was in the air and the stove coals were banked red but offered only a weak heat. I was trying to remember the card values, aces-eleven, over-three, under-two, the tens unchanged. Trumps were too few in the thirty-two-card deck. There had been arguing earlier from the floor above. The artist and my mother had not reconciled. I played an ace. The artist’s wife coughed. When she laid her trump on the table, her card was dappled with tiny flecks of red. She looked at me wide-eyed. For that moment, we were equal. Two children staring at one another in white horror. Then she was doubled by waves of coughing so wet and violent she sprayed the bib of my dress. A throatful of blood splashed to the table, soaking the deck, obliterating the suits. She shuddered and pulled for breath, but none would catch in her filling lungs. I screamed for the artist. He rushed into the kitchen, half-dressed. My mother was not far behind him. She watched from the threshold as he bent to lift his wife, his thin back buckling like a whittled truss straining to contain a collapsing roof. The wife wheezed hard, her eyes flaring white. His long fingers played deftly over the tight laces of her corset and then leaped to catch the paring knife my mother tossed him. He sawed at the laces. They popped like the support cables of a failing bridge and he caught her as she spilled to the ground. He screamed for a doctor, snared now in her panic and unable to leave her.