PORTRAITS

HENRIETTE INSISTED THAT EVA SHOULD SIT FOR THE painter first. Such deference had become unusual, and Eva was suspicious; her older sister liked to make a strong impression, having gone so far as to faint in the doorway if a gentleman caller seemed worthy. A book was hidden under Henriette’s featherbed detailing how a lady might faint without trouble, without any damage to her dress or deportment. The book explained how drinking coffee made a young lady’s complexion sallow and that a very good antidote was buttermilk mixed with lavender slathered over the neck and face. Perhaps this was why Henriette also claimed to be too delicate for sunlight and seldom ventured out of doors so that when she did venture forth—to the Tiergarten, to Wannsee Lake—it was always something of an event. Henriette had plenty of suitors now, the most handsome of whom had been a Catholic, who was politely informed by Father that his elder daughter had long since been claimed by a distant cousin, a jeweler who lived in Prague. Eva thought it was both wrong and amusing of Father to create such an elaborate lie, and she’d assumed her sister would be outraged, but to Eva’s surprise, Henriette didn’t seem too bothered. Despite all her dramatics, she didn’t seem to be in any great hurry to find a match. When the suitors came to call, they usually found her in the parlor, laid out swanlike on the divan, just the way she sat then, watching the painter prepare his messy tins of paint for the very first time.

The painter was not a suitor. His name was Heinrich, like the great poet whom Uncle Alfred so admired, and his fine features invited further comparisons. But as Henriette pointed out before the painter arrived, the painter was not a Jew.

“Did you know that we are Jews?” Henriette asked rather archly, while Eva blushed, trying her best not to move her head.

“Yes of course I know you are Jewish.”

“How did you know?”

The painter did not smile. He continued painting. “It is merely an instinct.” Eva noticed how his mouth twisted then, how his amber eyebrows raised. Eva noticed how, though he was thin with bony hands and wrists, his broad shoulders made a straight T. “Tell me,” he asked, “have you any brothers? The house smells like flowers.”

“We have no brothers,” said Eva eagerly, “but we have an uncle. He used to live here.”

“You see,” explained Henriette, “Mother’s brother is a revolutionary. He lives in Paris now.” She sighed wearily, before peeling herself from the divan. “He is in exile.”

“Poor fellow,” said the painter. As he worked, Eva noticed how his mouth was not quite closed, as if he was concentrating too hard on his paint and canvas to notice anything as trivial as his own expression.

“Not at all,” said Henriette, striking a new pose on the divan, as if it were she and not Eva who was currently being painted. “He goes to all the best salons. He has a big, full beard and a wealthy wife. They used to meet in secret before they were married—in the forest—”

“They did no such thing,” said Eva.

“Please,” the painter said softly, “please continue to look at me.”

“In a mill,” Henriette continued. “An abandoned mill. He told me in confidence in a letter.”

“He did not,” said Eva.

“And now they live in Paris,” Henriette continued, undeterred. “They met Heine, you know.”

For a moment, the painter’s cool expression looked genuinely surprised. “Heine? And what do you know of Heinrich Heine?”

“I know plenty,” said Henriette. “We both do.”

The painter shook his head. “Forgive me,” he said, smiling, “but no.”

“‘I don’t know what it may signify that I am so sad,’” Eva softly began. “‘There’s an ancient tale that I can’t get out of my mind. The air is cool and the twilight is falling and the Rhine is flowing quietly by…’” The painter was watching her and not painting anymore. “Uncle Alfred sends us letters. Letters written expressly for us. Father used to read them of course, but now he just passes them along. And so you see…”

His eyes met hers for a prolonged moment, but she was instantly sure she’d imagined it. “Do you admire Heine?” he asked Eva.

“I do.”

“Uncle Alfred said that before Heine died, he was paralyzed and apparently in wretched pain but brilliant, just brilliant. Very wry, you know. Full of double entendres,” said Henriette. “I long to be in exile.”

“Oh hush,” said Eva, but she understood Henriette. Their Uncle Alfred’s letters were greatly anticipated, even more than Mother’s from Karlsbad. When, many years earlier, Uncle Alfred had gone to join the battles in the countryside (battles that amounted to what Father disdainfully described as “less than folly”), Mother cut the strings of the parlor piano and that was when Father first took a summerhouse in Karlsbad, with the hopes of Mother getting some rest. Among Father’s beliefs was the notion that Mother had doted too heavily on her younger brother and had not enough energy left to create her own home. When Mother cut the piano strings, she had screamed afterwards and it had sounded—according to Father—as if the front door was coming down, as if the soldiers had come looking for the entire family, eager for their blood. The revolution had moved from France to Germany, sweeping up young men, and like a summer storm it came and went and nothing looked particularly different in Germany except that Alfred was no longer there and Mother shifted her attention from her younger brother to playing the piano and taking the Kur.

Sometimes she welcomed visitors. There was a dairy farm near the house where they were permitted to help milk cows, and though Eva had always been afraid of the rubbery teat and made Henriette pull it for her, she’d known what she was doing all the same; she preferred to watch. She watched the painter now and he was closing his eyes, as if he was resting or even praying. She watched him; she sat very still, but her mind raced in circles like the ivy growing in Mother’s garden where a noontime lunch was served, where trays were dropped and men brought ice and after lunch and dinner, guests stayed the night in the guesthouse; one was an Italian (Eva remembered him suddenly—he wore a jade green silk cravat) with a shy daughter called Lulu. Eva watched the painter’s long fingers and thought of how she and Henriette had explained to the girl how, in their language, “lulu” meant urinating.

“Don’t look so nervous, Evie,” Henriette said. “He doesn’t want to see your nervous face.”

“I’m not,” Eva hissed, “truly.”

The painter lifted his brush for a moment and smiled for the first time. His sullen mouth turned upward and his teeth peeked through as if he’d been trying to hide them. Although these teeth were not straight and were stained (Eva imagined his fingers rolling small cigarettes, the smoke curling up toward an equally discolored ceiling), this smile brightened his whole pale face, even his very light eyes. “What a fetching frock,” he told Eva, as if although he’d been painting her for over an hour, he had not noticed her until that moment.

“No,” Eva said, shaking her head, smoothing the pale gray fabric. “It’s ordinary.”

“She’s modest,” muttered Henriette, arranging a pillow on the divan.

But the painter continued to smile at Eva and her heart raced and somehow forced her to twirl her red hair ribbons around her stubby fingers until she could barely feel her fingertips. “Do you admire Heine?” she asked quietly.

“Yes, very much,” he said. “I admire how he answered to no one.”

“Oh so do I,” said Henriette. “I admire him deeply.”

Eva laughed and quickly covered her mouth, as she saw how serious Henriette’s face looked just then, as if she had no other concerns but those of the mind.

“Fingers,” the painter said sternly, forcing Eva’s hands to fly down to her lap, folding quickly one on top of the other. A breeze came through the door, lifting the fine hairs at the back of her neck. She found it nearly impossible to look straight ahead at the painter. His eyes were blue and not blue and they sat below a high forehead with paper-pale skin, which would have looked feminine but for the expanse of strong bone beneath it. His wrinkled coat looked as if it might never have been laundered. The ends of his hair were matted. He had already tracked soot on the Oriental—a black mark that she knew she’d look at in weeks to come and thrill at the memory of sitting so appallingly still. He became the very definition of afternoon, the center of the first dying light.

“Henriette, why don’t you play us something,” she said, or meant to say. She wasn’t sure her voice had gathered in her throat. She wasn’t entirely certain she had spoken until her sister answered coyly:

“Well, I don’t know…”

“If you do not mind,” the painter said, “I’d prefer the quiet. I generally do.”

“You don’t care for music?” Henriette said, sitting up with uncommon haste.

“No,” he said calmly, continuing to paint with his mouth slightly parted. “It is only that sometimes, when there is a breeze and I’m in a pleasant room, a feeling comes over me—it is difficult to explain—and I prefer the quiet.” He stopped painting for a moment and lowered his voice. “I become calm, very calm, and without it feeling forced. It is as if people are spirits—benevolent spirits—created for me to regard.”

“I understand,” said Eva, surprising no one more than herself.

“I don’t much feel like playing anyway,” said Henriette.

Eva did not even notice her sister’s pout. All she saw was how his hands carved the air as he’d attempted to make himself clear. “I understand exactly.”

Henriette sat up on the divan and gave a little cough. “If my sister prefers quiet sometimes, it is because she is simply too lazy to talk.”

“This I doubt,” the painter said, with a beguiling smile.

Eva returned the smile, before becoming flustered. “It must be nice,” she blurted, “to be paid for what you love to do.”

“How do you know I am being paid?”

“Well,” Eva said, “I only meant—”

“Must everything be about money?” he said flatly, returning to his canvas, his brushstrokes firm and deliberate.

“Whatever are you talking about?” Henriette laughed, reclining again. “Father is paying you. He commissioned you to do our portraits.”

He stopped painting once more and gripped his brush tightly with both hands. “How do you know that I didn’t see you, both of you, in the Tiergarten and decide: I’d like to paint those young ladies? Tell me that? How do you know it has anything whatever to do with money?”

“I,” Eva stammered, “I don’t know—not for certain, anyway.”

“That is correct.”

“You saw us?” Henriette questioned skeptically, but she reclined again, slowly.

“Maybe,” he said. “And maybe I do not take money from bankers unless I find the subject matter extremely worthwhile. Which is it, do you think?”

“You’re insulting our father,” said Eva.

“I am merely being honest,” he whispered, while looking Eva straight—too straight—on. She had never been looked at in such a way. She felt as if she were turning a kid glove inside out—the tight snug fingers one by one. “Now please,” he said softly, “your hands. Please keep them where they are.”