by Emilio Fraia
My parents lived in the countryside, and whenever they called I’d say that things were going well — my job, school. I’d tell them about mundane stuff, like when the microwave broke and I had to get it fixed. I made up a story about meeting a new guy, who was very smart and had a job. To be honest, I wanted to be able to tell my parents that I’d gone through a terrible breakup, that I’d dropped everything and was working with a famous director on a play — I mean, they wouldn’t have had a clue who he was, of course, but I’d explain that Klaus was a famous director, a visionary genius. I was just waiting for the right moment to say it. I came close several times. But the months passed and I said nothing. When it was all over, when the play debuted, I’d have my revenge, I thought. They’d tell me that I was right and forgive me for everything. I ordered a mint tea. My head felt detached from my body.
Klaus went on to tell me about this rousing scene, which, of course, was far from rousing, because what Klaus liked was anything but action. He liked what he called the lingering moments: the rain, dunking cookies in milk — that mustache dripping with milk was disgusting. And, of course, he liked lunatics and lost people.
One day, Klaus told me how, in horror stories, mysterious characters suddenly appear, wearing clothing from centuries past, as though they’d been asleep for years — or for eternity, which is one and the same — and then suddenly awoke and knocked at the door, hungry for blood.
That was exactly what would happen in our story, according to Klaus. One morning, a man would knock on Trunov’s door. Not at night but around midday — which, ultimately, I thought was a good idea, not at all clichéd, everything happening at the brightest hour of the day.
The man stands waiting in the doorway. He is a soldier. His face is grubby, and he doesn’t look more than thirty. What’s remarkable about him, Klaus said, as though he weren’t making the whole thing up then and there, is his white hair, a contrast with his youthful features, his thin, ruddy face. A handkerchief is tied around his left wrist, and he wears a dark uniform, patched at the knees. His tattered old coat, adorned with an insignia, looks to be the finest garment he owns. He might even be handsome, he said, if it weren’t for his overall look of exhaustion, the crisscrossing expression lines hardening his features. Are you Mr. Trunov, the painter? he asks.
Standing halfway between the door and the kettle on the fire, Trunov looks at the soldier, who waits behind a curtain of dust, backlit by the pale sunlight. He invites the soldier in. I have a request, the soldier says. I want you to put me in one of your paintings. Trunov takes a few steps back toward the fire and stays there for a while, looking at the flames, looking at the man. He warms his hands. He takes a sip of water from a shiny cup. He wipes his mouth on the sleeve of his dark sackcloth coat (this was a detail I’d researched, which Klaus was now using and, you’ve got to admit, it’s what gives the scene its charm). The soldier’s gaze hovers over the silver candlestick on the table, the clock on the wall with the picture of Peter the Great (me, again), and the stack of firewood, before landing once again on Trunov, whose answer takes a little too long to come (we’d have to fix that later).
Trunov thanks the man for his visit and his interest. He says that he can certainly paint him, but this is something new, it’s unusual for his subjects to approach him. He usually goes out in search of people willing to pose.
After a brief silence, and realizing that the soldier isn’t going to say anything more, Trunov asks him how he would like to be depicted.
Here Klaus said he’d imagined an elaborate and perfectly steady play of light. He wanted the moment of hesitation between Trunov’s question and the soldier’s reply to stand out, as if it were something solid and heavy, something we could feel. The soldier would stand there in silence, stare at Trunov, then say: in the midst of battle. Among my fellow officers. I’d like to be in a trench or on horseback carrying a flag. With the enemy fleet in the distance, the white batteries on the shore, the aqueducts, clouds of smoke, the wind in our faces. On the horizon, enemy fire.
The consciousness of solitude in danger, Klaus said. That’s the feeling we’ve got to strive for. Are you writing this down?
He stuck a piece of bread in his mouth and took a sip of milk.
I asked whether Trunov would agree to do the painting in the end.
Yes, of course, Klaus answered. That’s the event that will propel our story forward. He lowered his head with a sad look on his face. But Trunov will not accompany the soldier to the battlefield. He will do it differently. He’ll set the scene in the courtyard of a workshop. Civilians and soldiers will be summoned, with guns, in their best clothes. They’ll line up horses. At that moment, onstage, let’s have the soldier in a different kind of light. Soft and clean. This is important, Nadia, let’s do it like that, just like that.
I glanced at the clock on the wall, and it was past 11 a.m. The sidewalk at that hour was teeming with old folks. I had no idea where all those people came from. They arrived gradually, bundled up in thick coats, and soon there was a whole crowd. They were milling around, drinking coffee, wandering up and down the street. They seemed to have nowhere to go, so they stayed right there, like cats in the winter sun. I told Klaus that I had to go home. I hadn’t been to my apartment for three days, and I needed to get some rest.
The bus came quickly. On the way home, I thought about the motivations of the Russian soldier who wanted to be depicted in a war scene. Maybe he’d lost everything. Maybe he wanted to tell the story his way. I thought about how, in the end, Trunov still wouldn’t paint the war itself, since he’d decided on that idiotic staging.
I didn’t see Klaus for more than a week. During that time, I thought about my ex-boyfriend and got depressed. Deep down, I didn’t really like him. I kept trying to figure out if I really liked anyone. I liked Klaus, but that was different. I thought about the big picture, about my generation, crushed by another ten, fifteen years of paralysis. I thought about how I should have studied economics or, I don’t know, software development, artificial intelligence. At my age, I should have been inventing a new technological paradigm, building robots, making money. But no. I went back to the story I’d been writing. About the mysterious connection between a man and a woman.
Now the story took place not in Russia but in a dreary town on the southern coast of Brazil, a town with gusty mornings and white skies, with shops selling beachwear, floaties, Styrofoam boogie boards. Nadia, from the single lighted window, waves at Sasha. She’s in one of those squat, low-rise buildings slowly eroded by the salt air. Sasha, who is waiting in the courtyard, sees the apartment light go out. Then a door slams, and he hears footsteps on the stairs, at first distant, formless, with lulls between floors. The clatter of keys, the gate, and then Nadia approaching. She has a letter. She gives Sasha instructions. Propped against the little gate, he looks at Nadia. It’s always possible to go crazy when you’re alone at night. In the courtyard, Nadia feels like she’s being watched, and she could swear there’s a device in her chest, some sort of mechanism, going tick-tick-tick. She points to her chest. You know the story of the crocodile that swallowed the alarm clock? A leaden air descends on them — silence. Nadia glares at Sasha. He bows his head. She hands him the letter and turns around. Sasha hears the gate slam. He stands there for a moment, thinking about the debt, because Nadia, what little she said, insisted on this — a debt that Sasha will have to pay back sooner or later.
Nadia’s orders were for him to make his way to the pier in front of the Italian Club, drop the letter on the curb, and leave. And never look back. Like in a detective movie. The sea is smooth and glassy like a dish of milk, and at that hour no one else is by the water. Hulls bob up and down in the dark, the club’s neon sign blinks on. And off. On, off. Sasha wipes the sweat from his brow and sits on the curb. He fixes his gaze on the water. The next day he will have to obey Nadia again. And again, and again. Because he’s settling his debt, which he can’t unders
tand. One day you’ll remember, yes: when Nadia said that, her lip trembled.
I think deep down I wanted to believe that Sasha and Nadia could be friends, could stroll through a strange city together. But I couldn’t write it that way. This filled me with irreparable sadness. I glanced at the pathetic bookshelf in my living room, at the wooden bowl filled with pencils, paper clips, Post-its, a sushi-shaped eraser, a little plush monkey that had been a gift from my mom. I looked at the only picture hanging in my apartment, a tiny student apartment. It was a pitiful little landscape, with a big white mountain.
The next week, I went back to my meetings with Klaus. When I got to his apartment, the door was ajar. A song wafted from inside, some tune from the seventies that I couldn’t identify. Klaus was waiting for me, smoking, a map open on the kitchen table. He looked even thinner than usual, as if he hadn’t slept in days. He showed me on the map where Sevastopol was. I told him that I knew where Sevastopol was. He ignored me and kept pointing at the map. Sevastopol is a port, he said. It’s a funny name. This is the Black Sea. Minerals make the water dark. It’s what they call an inland sea, because it’s surrounded by the mainland. It’s connected to the Atlantic by various stretches of water, but, if you look at the map this way, the sea looks like a big hole. Or, rather, a drain, in the middle of the map, where the whole world will get flushed away.
Klaus ran his hands over the map, unrolling it across the table. And this is the world, he said, and laughed.
I heard the click of the turntable in the living room; the record had ended. Klaus sat down. He said he had something to tell me. I expected the worst. He was silent. Then, as if he’d suddenly swerved around a bump in the road, he started talking about the blond guy. He said he’d run into him a few days ago, at a friend’s birthday party, in a nightclub downtown. When the booze had all been drunk, the party had migrated to a bar. Then another. Klaus had followed him all night. When he got the chance, he talked about the play. We were very drunk. I ruined everything, he said, laughing in a way I’ll never forget. He’s no longer on the project. We’ll have to find another actor. Klaus laughed again. He laughed and seemed to be crying, too.
Suddenly I realized that Klaus had aged since we first began meeting. The wrinkles, the white roots in his thinning hair. He looked fragile, weak, his eyes hazy, coated in a gooey yellow film. He’d been drinking too much. He always drank. But it had got worse. There was something inscrutable about him, that was my feeling — a tumultuous heart, in which nothing was clear-cut.
To break the silence, I asked about Trunov, whether Klaus had worked on the play in the past few days. Barely, he replied. To tell you the truth, Trunov has taken a lot out of me. He shook his head as he said this, and winked at me, a sad, almost involuntary wink, as though he were seeking some kind of accomplice in his sadness.
Trying to cheer him up, I told him that I’d managed to get someone to look into the theatre’s wiring. He’ll take care of everything. He’ll paint the stage, too. The lighting will be perfect. It’s gonna work out. I don’t think the stage is small. It’s the ideal size.
I opened my backpack and pulled out a stack of printed paper held together by a rubber band, with notes in the margins. These are suggestions, I said. I’d like you to read it. I thought a lot about Trunov, our story. It’s going to be a great play. I pushed the pages toward Klaus. He held them limply, then set them down on top of the map, just above that city with the funny name.
What I had in mind was that Trunov wouldn’t be able to paint the picture.
He’d assemble the fake battle scene. But he wouldn’t be able to do it. He’d throw out several attempts. And, instead of the battle scene, he’d paint another scene, something quiet, a simple portrait of the soldier in his tattered uniform, the one he wore the day he appeared on Trunov’s doorstep asking to be painted. The soldier would be standing in front of a staging post, his face unexpectedly lit up by a crooked smile.
Trunov takes his time with this painting. He wants everything to be perfect. The days go by. But, before he can finish the painting, he is surprised by news of the soldier’s death. A bomb in the trenches. It happened quickly, the way death often does.
Trunov mourns the young man’s death and sets the painting aside, unfinished. The frosts come and time passes and everything ends and begins again. Summer arrives and, with it, the end of the war. The soldier’s portrait will be lost for decades, until the mid-nineteen-sixties, when it’s discovered accidentally by a collector, in an antique shop in Siracusa, Italy. A series of investigations confirm that it is indeed a work by the Russian painter Bogdan Trunov. And only at the end of our play do we find out that this collector, a lonely man with gray eyes, is the narrator.
We debuted two months later. The play was a flop. Everything sounded fake. The script didn’t work. Nothing worked.
The actor Klaus picked, another strapping, angel-faced young man fresh out of some crummy drama school, was dumb as a post. He couldn’t understand a word he was saying. The actor who played the soldier was a little better, but he wasn’t convincing, either. The lighting was great until halfway through the show, when everything went haywire. My parents made the trip into the city, and at the end of the performance I think they just felt sorry for me, because my dad took out his wallet and handed me two hundred reals. Don’t forget to eat right, dear.
During the month the play ran, the audiences who used to come to the squat to see gigs and poetry slams — poems with positive messages that spoke of love and trauma, loss and abuse, strength and overcoming — simply evaporated. We weren’t able to renew the contract with the folks who ran the cultural program there, and we buried the story of our play.
On the last night, after the performance, I went with Klaus to a trattoria in Bixiga. I was devastated. He was tired but seemed happy. He ordered a glass of wine and a milanesa. I ordered the gnocchi. We barely said a word about the play. Klaus quickly got drunk and started talking as if he’d never stop. At one point, he began to tell a story about Giacometti, the sculptor, a story I found eerie and sad. In 1914, he said, when Giacometti was just thirteen, he sculpted a head, the first head he ever did from observation. His brother was the model. It all turned out fine. But, fifty years later, he spent nearly a month in his studio trying to recreate that first head, the same head, same size. But he couldn’t do it. It never came out the way it had the first time. Suddenly, everything was a mess. If he looked at the head from far away, he saw a sphere. If he looked at it up close, it was something much more complex. If he looked straight on, he forgot the profile. If he looked at the profile, he forgot the face. Too many levels.
As Klaus spoke, I listened to a man who was singing and playing a Casio keyboard. One of the songs was about an emergenza d’amore. “And I will carry you/ In my pockets wherever I go/ Like a coin, an amulet/ That I will cradle in my hands.” I sat there listening, my eyes red from the wine. The room seemed to ripple, with its twinkly lights and photos of actors and actresses (Marcello Mastroianni, Sophia Loren) and colorful ribbons dangling from the ceiling. When the song ended and lifeless applause sprang sporadically from around the room, Klaus said that he was leaving. That was how he said it: I’m leaving. I didn’t understand what he meant. Leaving to go where? He was drunk. He apologized to me. He tried to look me in the eye. Will you forgive me, Nadia? I can’t stay. I hope you understand. I can’t stay any longer.
Even today I can’t explain it. Goodbyes are like that, quick, and we never know when they’ll actually happen.
That night I left the restaurant and walked to the Brigadeiro metro stop. It was cold, and the city looked like a giant space station, a forgotten corner in the vastness of the heavens.
I remember, when I got to the station, taking a while to find my metro card in my bag. Then I put my headphones on. I went down the escalator. It was late; there was hardly anybody on the platform. Sitting on a bench was a dirty homeless man. He moaned; the corners of his
mouth stretched to show his teeth. The man was hunched over, trying to keep himself warm. He looked at the ground and rocked gently back and forth. I opened my backpack and pulled out an old sweatshirt. I placed it on his lap, feeling a little ridiculous.
Soon my train arrived. That night, I stayed up writing almost until morning. Once again, the story began with Nadia waving from the single lighted window, at the top of a low-rise building. But I changed just about everything else. Instead of Moscow or a seaside town, the story was now set in the city of São Paulo, in a sufficiently distant future. There were no more secret letters. Nadia and Sasha were older, too.
Sasha stood waiting in the building’s courtyard. He was just dropping by to visit Nadia. They were friends who hadn’t seen each other for a long time, or maybe they had once been a couple. She said that she liked living on the top floor, in the highest apartment. The building used to be taller, she said. Many years ago, during the siege, a bomb took off the top. A Chinese tailor lived on the ground floor and took refuge there — he couldn’t leave. Today, the tailor’s family owned the building and rented out the apartments; the price was low and the street secluded.
Sasha and Nadia walked down the block to a sort of bar with a big window, on the top floor of another building. At first it appeared to be a residential building; there was no sign, and no noise could be heard from the street. In the dark, they climbed the stairs, turned down a corridor. A door opened. They entered a smoky room with a bar and people drinking and talking so quietly that you couldn’t tell whether they were real people or just projected images. The window looked out on an overpass and a compact cluster of buildings and lights. There was a red ball in the sky. Nadia told Sasha about a trip she’d taken many years ago, when she was still a child, to the house of some friends of her parents. It was the first time she’d ever left the walled side of the city. Everything was new. When she arrived, she was given gifts: a doll, a seashell, a music box. She’d never seen anything like it.
