ONE HOUR LATER, I woke with a start when a car backfired down in the street. I raised one hand to rub the sleep-creases from my face and realized I was still holding the ticket to Fleury’s gallery show.
I decided I would go. I had to get something to eat, anyway, and I didn’t feel like spending my first evening stuck by myself in the apartment.
The gallery was on the Rue des Archives. I asked directions from Madame La Roche, who was sitting on a collapsible metal chair in front of the apartment building, smoking a little pipe.
The streets were busy. I passed dozens of restaurants whose awnings sheltered the pavement. Hand-holding couples stopped to check menus. They leaned toward the chalkboards on which the specials were written. Soft light pooled on their faces. Diners were jammed elbow to elbow at small tables. Waiters with long white aprons and slicked-back hair navigated through them, trays raised above their heads. Smells of garlic and wine wafted into the street. Some places had beds of ice on which oysters and sea urchins and shrimp were laid out. I could smell the faint salty sweetness of fresh seafood. My stomach cramped with hunger. But I didn’t want to sit at a restaurant by myself. Not tonight, anyway. I figured I would wait until after I’d gone to the gallery show, then buy some bread and cheese and maybe some wine and head back to the Rue Descalzi.
The brightness of restaurant lights and streetlamps and the dark emptiness of shops that had closed down gave me the sensation of everything drifting about, unattached, rushing by in a flickering hallucination. Hunger and my tiredness and, it seemed, the boom of Pankratov’s voice still an echo someplace in my head all piled together to make my walking in the streets like walking in a dream. I’m finally here, I thought, and at the same time I expected to wake up at any minute and find myself back home, in the summer heat, my old dust-greasy table fan creaking around on the windowsill and blowing a feeble breeze over the block of ice I went out and bought each August night. I brought the ice back to my apartment wrapped in brown paper and set it in a large spaghetti bowl. I put the fan behind the bowl and turned it on. In the mornings, I would wash my face in the cold water from the melted ice. I used to wait for the sound of the fan to work its way into my sleep. I listened past the rumble of the city for that faint persistent sound, which would be proof this was a dream. When it didn’t happen, I breathed out a sigh from the bottom of my lungs.
The closer I got to the gallery, the more nervous I became. Fleury was right about these openings being work. I never did well at them, even though I knew they were a necessary part of the business. I felt a sickening sharpness in my guts, as if I had swallowed broken glass, whenever I thought about the fancy-dress slaughterhouse of art openings. At the last show of my own work, I arrived late, walked once around the room and then ducked out the back door. I was halfway to the train station before the gallery owner caught up with me and convinced me to come back.
Ten minutes, I thought to myself. Give it ten minutes and then leave, even if Fleury asks you to stay. Or five, even. Five minutes. I was locked in a reverse bidding war with an auctioneer inside my head.
I saw where the gallery was half a block before I came to it. People spilled out into the little side street, hugging glasses of champagne in one hand and cigarettes in the other. I listened to the hum of party talk. Everyone was smoking. A blue-gray cloud of tobacco hung in the still air of the street.
Five minutes, I thought. Two minutes. One minute.
Inside, the place was so dense with people and smoke that the paintings were almost impossible to see. The artist stood against the far wall, wedged in by two women and a man. They were talking with their faces so close to his that he could not raise his glass to his lips to take a drink. They waved their cigarettes dangerously close to him and his nervous smile twitched as he flinched back from the burning tips.
I saw Fleury. He dodged from group to group like a hummingbird gathering pollen. People who clearly did not know him were grasped by the hand or shoulder or sleeve and made to feel, somewhere in the barrage of niceties, that they ought to know to whom they were talking. He caught my eye and waved me over as if he were hailing a cab.
Grimly, I made my way toward him.
“I want you to meet someone very important,” said Fleury, in a voice too loud to go unnoticed by everyone who stood nearby. “This is Madame Pontier. Of the Musée Duarte.”
Madame Pontier was wearing a loden coat with big buttons down the front, as big as silver dollars. She was thin and distinguished-looking. The age lines in her face were scowling lines, cut deep into the angles of her cheeks.
Judging from the small crowd that had gathered around her, she was obviously a person of some importance, and Fleury was making the most of her presence at his gallery. She had a look on her face as if she had already been introduced to too many people this evening and could not stand it any more. Fleury kept her strategically placed in the center of the room, at the foot of three small steps that separated the front half of the gallery from the rear. Everyone who came to see the exhibit would either have to shake her hand or ignore her and she did not look like the kind of person who got ignored very often.
I offered her the same Egyptian mummy grin that she gave me.
“Madame Pontier,” said Fleury, “is what is called un expert auprès du tribunal. This means she can authenticate any painting, and if she puts her stamp on it, her word is law. Show him the stamp.”
“Do you really think this is necessary?” Madame Pontier’s voice made her seem at the point of total exhaustion.
“Make me happy!” said Fleury.
Madame Pontier reached into her pocket. Her hand was clenched into a fist when she pulled it out. Then she uncurled her fingers, revealing a small gold stamp with a base of jadelike stone. It was carved with some kind of seal and attached by a fine gold chain to a buttonhole of her jacket.
“Oh, is that really it?” asked a man in the group. He was tall and gaunt, with wavy hair plastered flat on his head with pomade. Sweat dappled the chest of his starched white shirt.
“It is.” Madame Pontier’s fist closed again around the seal.
“This is Monsieur Lebel,” Fleury introduced the man to me. “A connoisseur of important works of art, and owner of the Metropole Cabaret.”
“Yes. Oh.” Lebel grabbed my hand and stared right through me and immediately went back to ogling Madame Pontier.
The group of people seemed to close even more tightly around her, and I took the opportunity to step back. I was turning to leave when I found Fleury standing right beside me.
“Taking off?” he asked.
“Well, I think so. Yes.” I looked at my wrist, as if to check the time, but I realized I had left my watch back at the apartment.
“Have you had anything to eat?” he asked.
“No, actually,” I replied
“Come,” said Fleury. “Let me buy us dinner.”
“What about the show?” I asked.
He waved his head dismissively. “It’s winding down. I have an assistant who’ll take care of it. I always hate to be the last one to leave a party, even when it is my own.”
I was too tired and hungry to refuse.
“You didn’t happen to see Valya on your way over here, did you?” he asked.
I shook my head. “I’m sorry. No.”
“No matter,” he said quickly.
We walked out through the veils of smoke into the street.
As we moved down the Rue des Archives, Fleury took out a small handkerchief, folded it up and pressed it once against his forehead. This was the only sign that he had exerted himself physically. “How did you like the show?” he asked.
I admitted that I never felt comfortable at openings.
“It’s just as well,” he said. “Do you know what happens when I go from one gallery party to another, one café to the next, parading up and down the street to all the different openings and making sure I get in all the hellos that need to be said? What happens is that everybody starts to look the same. Everybody is afraid of the same things. Me included. It all just starts to merge together. If I focus on people or things, they just blur. It’s as if things exist only in fast motion. Everything rushing around. Everything new. And loud. And quite drunk most of the time.”
“That’s a different world from the one I’m used to,” I told him.
“You might think you’re not a part of the same world, but you are. You do the work that keeps it in motion. Without the work, the doing, all this just disappears. Am I right?”
“I guess,” I said.
“No guessing. That’s a fact.” Then a look came over his face as if he had said more than he wanted to. “What did you think of the paintings?” he asked, to change the subject.
I shrugged awkwardly. “I didn’t really get the chance, to be honest.” I was afraid he would turn us around and make us go back to the gallery.
Fleury shook his head wearily. “They were awful. The artist is the stepson of a gallery owner across town. A man to whom I owe some favors. He was the one who persuaded Madame Pontier to come. She is a big fish in these waters. That’s why I got the crowd. That and the fact that I was serving proper champagne, for a change. The work won’t sell, you know. None of it.” Fleury spoke as if he were making a decree. “Except perhaps to his relatives.”
I felt a pinch in my side when Fleury said this. Before my own work had started to sell, I had refused to let any of my relatives buy it. This, of course, made no sense to them and they took it to mean that I didn’t think they had any taste. They got annoyed about it and said their money was as good as anybody else’s, so I was made to explain that I couldn’t stand the thought of them subsidizing me. Even when they complained that subsidizing had nothing to do with it, I didn’t believe them and still wouldn’t sell them the work. Instead, I just gave it away.
It had started to rain in mist so fine that I could barely feel it. The grayness that swirled through this watery air was like a failing of my sight, as if cataracts were gathering like smoke behind my eyes. I turned up the collar of my jacket and hugged it to my throat.
Fleury brought us to a restaurant called the Polidor on a street named Monsieur-le-Prince. Inside, the place was warm and crowded, with tables set together in rows and heavy pale green pillars holding up the roof.
Fleury waved at the waitress, who nodded hello. She was a large woman with long blond hair and a red velvet dress. Her face was soft and friendly and very pink. She was big all over, with the kind of body that Rubens might have painted.
Fleury and I squashed ourselves into a table by the wall. Fleury whispered to the waitress. She bowed down next to him to hear, her thick blond hair falling over his shoulders and her chest close to his face. When Fleury had finished whispering, the waitress laughed loudly and raked her nails gently down the back of his neck.
I didn’t ask what he had said to her.
A pitcher of red wine was brought. Its clay sides were cold and beaded with moisture. The tendons strained in Fleury’s wrists as he lifted the pitcher and filled our glasses.
“This is kind of you,” I said, but I made sure that he understood from the tone of my voice that I needed some kind of explanation about what he wanted.
Fleury set down the pitcher and gave me a smile, to show he didn’t mind my curiosity. “Pankratov speaks very highly of you,” he explained. “And I expect you know by now that he doesn’t speak highly of many people. Any man who is of interest to Pankratov is of interest to me.”
It occurred to me that one person Pankratov did not seem to be interested in was Fleury himself. “But Pankratov doesn’t know me,” I said.
Fleury shook his head. “He seems to know your work, at any rate.”
I explained to him about the Levasseur scholarship. I told him how much I had always wanted to come here.
He nodded slowly while I talked, at one point taking off his glasses and polishing them on his tie.
“And I don’t even know who these Levasseur people are,” I told him when I had finished the story.
“Nor I.” Fleury shook his head. “But who cares, as long as they’re paying, eh?”
“What should we order?” I asked, to change the subject.
“Whatever’s the special,” Fleury told me. He drained his glass and let his head fall back. I saw the wine pulse down his throat. He sighed noisily. Slowly, almost mechanically, he lowered his head until he was facing me again. “Now you must admit,” he said, “that this is more fun than working at home.”
“I admit it,” I said. “But I didn’t come to Paris just to have fun.”
“And let me guess. You feel shitty about enjoying it now.”
“Maybe later,” I said. I drank some wine. It was sharp in the corners of my mouth.
“So,” said Fleury, laying his hands flat on the table, “did you bring any work with you?”
I shook my head. “I wanted to start out fresh when I got here.”
The smile slipped lopsidedly from his face, like a fried egg sliding off a plate. “And do you have a dealer here in Paris?”
“Not yet,” I told him.
He raised his eyebrows, smile returning. “Well, that’s easily remedied.”
“I’d better get some work done first,” I said. I had planned out a series of a dozen paintings, to be based on my memories of Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island, where I’d lived all my life. I would give them the unreliability which memories take on. Objects would be painted deliberately out of scale—waves too big, houses too small, the colors strong and glaring, with some things left only as outlines. I didn’t want to tell Fleury any of this yet. “How long have you had your own gallery?” I asked him.
“Less than a year,” he replied. “Before that, I worked for the Galerie St. Edouard over on the Avenue Matignon. I had in mind that I would work as an apprentice for a few years, just to learn the ropes, then start up a gallery on my own. What I learned instead was that it would take a lot longer than my patience would endure.” He rummaged in his pocket for a cigarette and lit it with a wooden match which he struck against the heel of his shoe. He jammed the still-flaring match head against the end of his cigarette and puffed. “I was accused of being ambitious, although God knows why that should count against me. I remember the owner of the St. Edouard saying to me that I was a young man with ‘ideas above my station.’ Do you know, that’s the worst thing anybody ever said to me. But I tell you, they were doing me a favor.”
He spoke quickly, his words almost running together. “So I said to hell with it, and opened up my own gallery anyway. Borrowed from every friend and relative I could find. Found a place. Haven’t had a day off in months.” He sucked in a lungful of smoke, his lips popping quietly together as he pulled the cigarette from his mouth. “Don’t regret it. Not for a minute. Even if I have to listen to those people tell me they were right that I had ‘ideas above my station.’ At least I gave it a try.”
I knew those words must have kept him up nights, fuming at the insult. It reminded me of the time I overheard one of my old college friends joking that I could come and live in his basement any time I wanted to, to save me from freezing to death as a penniless artist. But from then on, I would have frozen to death rather than go live in that man’s basement. So I knew what Fleury was talking about. I didn’t doubt he would succeed. You can tell this about some people, that they will get what they want and are not just fooling themselves or anybody else. They have an instinctive sense of the balance of luck and skill and specificity of purpose that’s required. I hadn’t expected to like Fleury, and was surprised to find that I did. I was equally surprised that he seemed to like me as well.
“When you get some art together,” he told me, “you let me know. Maybe we’ll work together some day soon.”
“If Pankratov gives me any time to paint,” I said.
At the mention of Pankratov’s name, Fleury sighed and patted his hand against the back of his neck, as if the joints of his spine had come loose and he was tapping them back into place.
“What do you know about him?” I asked.
Fleury shrugged. “Not enough.” He stubbed out his cigarette, jabbing the butt into the ashtray until it crumbled apart. “Everybody in Paris has heard of the man. People are always talking about him at gallery functions precisely because he never comes to them. They’ve all got Pankratov stories of their own, most of them completely untrue, I suspect, but it gives us something to talk about. Look,” he said, “I don’t know what he said about me after I left the atelier today, but I rather doubt it was flattering. You make your own judgment. Will you do that? If we’re going to work together some day, and I hope we will, I’d rather you based your opinion on what you see than on what you hear. It is a question of trust, and should not be left up to strangers.”
As he spoke, I felt that never-trusting part of me peer out cautiously from behind its barricade of ribs and the tangled barbed wire of veins.
“You know,” said Fleury, “I have a hunch that now you’re here, you might decide to stay.”
“Why do you say that?” I asked.
“I can tell from the way you talk about Paris. You loved this city before you ever saw it. We all have dreams of how a place will be before we get there, and usually the dreams are much more lavish than the reality. You can’t help but end up disappointed. But Paris is the only place on earth where the reality is even more beautiful than the dream.” He nodded to show he was serious.
“I might fall in love with it if I had the time,” I told him, “but after the grant runs out, I can’t afford to stay here. I don’t have work papers, so the only kind of job I could get wouldn’t pay me enough to live off and get any painting done at the same time.”
“You might find a way,” he said. “You never know.”
Before Fleury mentioned the idea of staying, going home had seemed inevitable to me. Now the image of remaining here began to burn itself into my thoughts.
“Welcome to Paris,” said Fleury, pouring out more wine. “I think you have finally arrived.”
* * *
HEAVEN ON EARTH. THAT was how my father had described Paris in his letters home. He had come here as a soldier in 1918 and was killed at Belleau Wood. He died when I was only a few months old. My acquaintance with him began and ended with those letters, and the occasional anecdote told by my mother, when some sound or smell might catapult her back into the past.
I also had an Uncle Charlie, who had come to France before America entered the war and was a pilot for the French air corps. My uncle Charlie never came home after the armistice. He disappeared in 1926, in an attempt to fly the first nonstop flight across the Atlantic. I had pictures of my father and my uncle in their wool coats and puttee-wrapped legs, side by side in the city of heaven on earth. Ever since I was a child, their sepia-tinted ghosts had drawn me to this place.
For me, Paris became the only tangible link between my father and myself. It was not enough to hold on to the flimsy blades of paper which were his letters and to think that he had once held them in his own hands. And the blurred and fading picture was not enough. But if I could only get to Paris, I used to think, and be in the place where he had been, and fall in love with it the way he had fallen in love with it, then I might understand who he had been. Might know him in myself.
When people would say to me, “You look like your father,” or, “Your father used to do that,” or, “Your father would have liked that,” it was like being haunted. What troubled me wasn’t so much the physical resemblance. It was the traits of character, which I could not call my own because they had been his before me, even if I had never learned them from him. Instead, they had reached me like some echo of his voice inside my blood.
I looked to Paris for the answers. It would be my bridge between the present and the past. It would give me peace of mind, just as the painting did when it was going well. Sometimes I think I started painting precisely because I knew that my father had not been a painter. So I could call it my own.
That may have been what got me started, but what kept me at it was beyond me. It wasn’t until I had given up trying to figure it out that I realized I wasn’t supposed to know. If the answer had been clear, I would never had needed to paint. And if I ever did figure it out, I might never need to paint again. I decided it was not my job to know. It was only my job to do the painting.
During my first days in the city, I found myself wondering again and again if my father and my uncle Charlie had seen what I was seeing now. Not the great monuments or famous buildings but the small anonymous things. A crack in the sidewalk which was shaped like a crescent moon on the Rue de Rivoli. A certain dapple-trunked tree growing in the Tuileries Gardens. A chip in the blue enamel of a street sign on the Rue Solferino. It chased away the loneliness, as I grew used to my new surroundings.
I learned the precise stab of the key into the lock of my apartment, the setting of my shoe against the door and the flick of the brass knob to open it. The musty smell of the place that rushed into my lungs soon became familiar. The noises of people living on my floor—pots clunking in sinks, the swish of flushing toilets, softly played gramophone music—all merged into a different kind of silence. I put away the metronome.
There was something hypnotic about the idea of working at the atelier. Never far from my thoughts was the knowledge that outside Pankratov’s studio, we were regarded with suspicion and sarcasm by those who saw no future in painting. It was a relief to find myself in the company of people who shared the same necessary stubbornness of vision. Even if painting was the only thing we had in common, that was enough.
By the end of the first week, I had become not only a student of the atelier but a student of Balard and Marie-Claire as well. I watched the way they worked.
Balard never sat on his stool while he drew. Instead, he stood back from his easel, drawing with his arm outstretched. He used thick wedges of compressed charcoal, pressing hard against the paper and drawing quickly, with great flourishes of his free hand and strange whistling and grunting sounds. Over the course of the day, he would get charcoal smudges halfway up his arms and all over his face, so that he looked like a man who had been in a fire.
Marie-Claire used delicate strands of vine charcoal. In contrast to Balard, she moved slowly and carefully around the paper, often closing one eye and measuring distances with her thumb, rather than trusting her instincts. She tilted back and forth on her stool, looking at her work from different angles. Sometimes she just sat there, staring at it, hands resting in her lap, as if overcome by daydreams. I liked her drawings. They were deceptively simple, as much about what she left out as what she put on the page. She worked so close to her easel that she seemed to be trying to hide her drawing from anyone who might be looking on. Pankratov often scolded her for overemphasizing the faces in her sketching. She would listen patiently to Pankratov, and then go right back to working on the face, as if she couldn’t help herself. She stuck to the middle of the page, leaving huge white borders, and drew dozens of lines where one would have been enough. The lines were all of equal pressure, fuzzy like the contrails of high-flying aeroplanes.
I could tell I’d had more formal training than Balard or Marie-Claire, but this didn’t mean that Pankratov was any easier on me. I worked hard to gain his approval, which he gave in such small and obscure doses that it took me a while before I could tell when he was pleased and when he wasn’t. When he gave his critiques, he would speak for a long time, often in raging monologues, using strange imagery, which he apparently translated directly out of Russian. It was as if he were trying to read words that scrolled before his eyes too quickly for him to decipher or to understand what he was saying. It had been a long time since I had let anyone rule my days the way this man did now.
So far, I’d seen nothing to convince me of his genius. I found none of his paintings at the galleries or museums. I’d even rummaged through old auction catalogues at the bouquinistes, the dealers who run the little green bookstands bolted to the stone walls bordering the Seine. There was no trace of the art of Alexander Pankratov.
Pankratov required us to be at the atelier by 7:30 A.M., but as that time came and went Pankratov himself would be sitting across the street in a café called the Dimitri. It was like a thousand other cafés in Paris, each one chosen as a regular haunt by a group that never amounted to more than fifty or sixty. The café was too small to hold even half this number, so they came at different times, some to talk and some with the need to stay silent and apart but not alone. The Dimitri had a small blue awning that ran the length of its front. Unlike most others, which were announced as Café this-or-that, this awning just said, Dimitri. Four frosted panes of glass made up the front window. The menu of the day was written in soap on the window nearest the door. Out on the sidewalk, there was room for only one table. Pedestrians had to step into the gutter to pass by. The sidewalk was on an angle, so the owner had built a large wooden wedge on which to set the table and make it level. The chairs were flimsy metal with slatted wooden seats and backs.
I quickly learned that you couldn’t underestimate the importance of a neighborhood café in the lives of the people who used it. The choosing of the café was a delicate and personal affair, and it was very important for the café not to appear to be trying too hard to attract its customers. This was not like back in America, where the more lights and flashy signs you put out, the more likely it was that people would stop to see what all the fuss was about. There was a big diner that opened up near where I used to live. It was called the Liberty Diner. It had a sign out front with an eagle on it and the eagle was carrying a menu in its claws. Under the eagle was a big clock with the numbers done in the popular chunky style, the fake shadow of each letter painted just behind it. The owners put a slogan under the clock which lit up at night. It said: TIME TO DINE. Local kids were always shooting out the letter N with slingshots, so it usually read, TIME TO DIE. I got superstitious about it and wouldn’t go in there.
Even as seven-thirty became eight o’clock, Pankratov would be sitting at his corner table in the Dimitri. He would be smoking exactly half a cigarette, having sliced it in two with a wood-handled Opinel knife and struck a blue-tipped match on the buckle of his belt. He ordered a demitasse, which was served in a cup so small it looked as if it had been stolen from a doll’s house. Before he drank it, he would set a sugar lump between his cheek and gum, the way people used chewing tobacco back home. The coffee was followed by a cup of steamed milk. While Pankratov drank the milk, he chewed on a single date that the café owner placed by itself on a small white plate beside him. When he had smoked his half-cigarette down to the point at which it might burn the prints off his fingers, he would raise an ashtray up to his face and quietly spit into it. Then he would roll the end of the cigarette in the spit until it was extinguished. Either this little gesture continually went unnoticed by the others in the café, or they had seen it so many times they no longer cared to watch. I wondered why he did this, rather than simply squashing the butt dead among the ashes. I couldn’t just go up and ask him. It seemed to me you couldn’t do a thing like that with Pankratov. It was his private world, and not to be visited by anyone but him. He seemed to possess some mighty secret, the knowledge of which had absolved him from participating in the life the rest of us were living.
I knew this much about his habits because one morning I went to the Dimitri before he got there and sat at the far end of the café. I hid behind a newspaper, waiting for him.
The Dimitri was larger on the inside than the four skinny windows made it seem. The furnishings were a strange mixture of Arabian rugs, Russian tea samovars, crossed Cossack swords on the walls and a single white képi, hung above the oval mirror at the bar. Here, you could buy a drink made from mint that had been packed into a glass and doused with sweet green tea. Or coffee made with goat’s milk. There were few other concessions to the outside world. No music of the kind that filled other cafés, the endless warbled croonings of Edith Piaf. At the Dimitri, there was only the rustle of papers kept on wooden rods and stored each day on a rack. No special furniture. Plain, zinc-topped tables with iron legs and chairs with tightly woven wicker seats. The bar was plated with copper, scrubbed clean with lemon juice and bicarbonate of soda, which added to the pleasant smell of the café.
The owner was named Ivan Konovalchik. He ran the Dimitri from 6:30 A.M. until midnight, and then slept on top of the bar, laid out like a corpse at a wake, hands folded on his chest. He wasn’t a large man, but he was formidable. He wore the uniform of most Paris waiters, a short black coat with wide lapels, almost like a chopped-down tuxedo, and a low-cut waistcoat with big pockets in which he kept his change. Around his waist, he wore a long white apron that stretched to the top of his shoes. His short-spiked hair had gone gray, but his eyebrows were still dark. His hands were thick and it was clear from the white flecks of scarring that a long time ago he had worked with them in jobs that gouged and pinched and cut. He had been, he told me, a Foreign Legionnaire in the Moroccan Sahara in the twenties, and before that he was an officer in the Imperial Russian Cavalry. Just like Pankratov, he said.
The Dimitri was named after a famous café in Morocco, a Legionnaire’s café in a place called Mogador. This explained the trappings, and the Arabs who spent their mornings at the bar and the old Legionnaires with their elephant-hide skin burned permanently red from sun and drink and fear, as if the red dust of the Sahara lay in a fine and gritty layer beneath their translucent flesh. Even though the Arabs and these Legionnaires had been at war, both sides clung to this place. They didn’t speak much. They greeted each other with the words Leh Bess, which Ivan told me was Moroccan for “No Harm” or “I mean you no harm.” Considering how much harm they once had done each other, Ivan explained to me, it seemed like the right thing to say. The Arabs and the Legionnaires kept to their separate tables but seemed to need each other’s company. There was something here, in the name and the particular date-sweetened bitterness of the coffee and the mint tea, that made more sense to them than the life of Paris thundering past outside the door.
There were many rumors about Ivan Konovalchik. He had acquired them like limpets on the hull of a boat. The relics he hung upon his walls were only talismans that let you know how much it was you would never know about him. One story was that he had been to America, but when I asked him about this, he gave a curious reply.
“If I went there,” he said dreamily, “I don’t remember it.”
“Do you mean you went there as a child?” I asked.
“No.” He shook his head.
It occurred to me that Ivan probably was the kind of man who could forget such a thing.
“Halifax.” He said the word as if to feel it in his mouth.
“Yes?” I replied.
“Halifax,” he said again. “That is a common name in America?”
“Not too common, I guess.” I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“And perhaps you have a relative named Charles. Charlie. Perhaps.”
My head jerked up. “That’s my uncle!” My voice was loud with surprise. “Do you know him?”
“I met him a long time ago.” Ivan began polishing a glass, holding it up to the light. “Probably not the same person.”
“My uncle was a pilot. An American who flew for the French.”
“Ah, well,” said Ivan. “Then it is him after all.”
“He disappeared after the war,” I said.
“Yes.” He spoke as if he were talking in his sleep. “I think we all disappeared around that time.”
I could get no more out of him and felt the frustration of having come very close to something, then suddenly finding myself as far away as ever.
At last Pankratov arrived, dressed in the thigh-length canvas coat he always wore. It was a gray-green color, with two flapped pockets at the waist and dull gray buttons up the front. The buttonholes had worn out and were clumsily restitched in black thread. The collar had frayed, as had the cuffs. It was a garment that should long ago have been put out of its misery, but Pankratov seemed determined to wear the thing until it turned to vapor and drifted away from his body, leaving the buttons to rattle across the floor. He didn’t take the coat off, as if he feared someone would steal it. He smoked his half-cigarette, which he took from a black and orange box labeled “Impériale.” He drank his doll’s portion of coffee, strained through the whiteness of his teeth and the dissolving sugar cube. He ate one fat and crinkled date, then spat and extinguished his cigarette. Finally, he set two coins on the table and lifted his chair as he stood, so that it would not drag across the floor. “Shokran,” he said to Ivan.
“Shokran, effendi,” replied Ivan Konovalchik, without looking up.
Pankratov started out across the road toward his atelier.
I left a moment later, and raced up the stairs, not catching up to him until just before he reached the open door of the studio. Inside, it was completely silent. Everyone was watching us. Valya turned in her chair, breaking from her naked statue pose, and surveyed us critically.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” I mumbled as I tried to move past him into the room.
“Monsieur Halifax,” he said, not letting me go by.
“Yes, sir,” I answered, breathing hard from the climb.
“You would make an incompetent spy.”
I was quiet for a moment. “All good spies appear incompetent,” I said.
Pankratov’s eyes opened for a moment, raising the thick visor of his eyebrows. “Yeess,” he said quietly, “and if someone would employ you as a spy, you might have an excuse for your incompetence.” He jerked his head, ordering me inside.
I sat down at my easel.
“Begin to draw!” His voice had the power to jolt all other thoughts from my head.
I set up my paper and began to draw Valya.
She came only in the mornings and left as soon as she could. She was always on time, striding in, eyes fixed on the platform where she would take her place. She walked across to a set of brass coat pegs screwed haphazardly into the wall and began to undress. She shed her clothing with an angry sensuality, letting the coat slide from her shoulders and catching it before it hit the floor. She kicked off her rope-soled shoes, heel against toe, heel against toe, then undid the fiddly buttons on her shirt with less patience than the job required. Her hips swung slightly as she let her skirt fall to the floor, then bent her legs down to pick it up, holding her upper body straight.
Valya was harshly beautiful. She had an intolerant crookedness to her lips, and usually wore her hair tied back severely in a ponytail. I watched the way her skin pressed against the wooden seat and the way she drew her legs together, covering one set of toes with the other. The pale curve of her hips and the way they slid into the narrows of her waist sometimes forced me to lower my head, in case she read the thoughts inside my eyes.
Pankratov never brought the thunder of his voice to bear on her. She seemed beyond any harsh words that he could muster.
I found I could not distill Valya into the lines and shadows and planes of light that would allow me to draw her correctly. I could see her only as a whole, and it was as if my pencil could find no place to start on the snow field of the sketching page. I was always relieved when we turned to other subjects, hauling out the paints and mixing boards, brushes stuck in the belt of my smock like the knives of a Japanese chef.
We would begin our sketches of the shivering Valya the moment she sat down in her chair on the stage. Mornings were always cold in the atelier, before the sun had reached into the room. We kept our coats on, long scarves looped around our necks. The undersides of my coat sleeves were shiny black like a tramp’s from wearing it as I drew with charcoal in those early mornings.
The moment Pankratov arrived, he would tell Valya to sit or stand a certain way, or he would walk over to his junkpile of props—broken umbrellas with the silk domes in shreds like the tattered wings of ravens, baskets of eggshells and various animal bones. They were bleached and dry and drank the moisture from my fingers when I picked them up. He would hand one of these to Valya and make her pose with it. Like a marionette without strings, she obeyed.
After a while, we gave up sketching before Pankratov’s arrival. Whatever work we were doing at the time he walked in would be brushed aside and ignored, the paper wasted, and a few more centimes lost from my too-small bank account. Even though we weren’t drawing, Valya still undressed and sat down on her chair. She rarely joined in our conversations. Sometimes she smiled at one of Balard’s one-liner jokes. Or she would groan in agreement if Marie-Claire did one of her imitations of the way Pankratov critiqued her paintings. Mostly Valya just sat there, as if the two-foot height of the stage had placed her out of the range of any friendship she could find at lower elevations.
Valya offered no explanation as to why she sat there naked when she didn’t have to. It seemed to be some kind of punishment she’d chosen for herself. One day, I went ahead and asked why she undressed before Pankratov arrived. Immediately the room went silent, as if I had just rolled a hand grenade across the floor. Slowly, almost wearily, Valya turned to face me. “Did you say something?” she asked.
“We’re not drawing,” I said, as if that would explain everything.
“No,” she said slowly, as if talking to an idiot who could at any moment become violent.
“And we don’t draw until he shows up,” I said, my courage beginning to fail me.
She let her head fall back a little, without releasing me from her gaze. “I’m paid by the hour,” she said.
“But why do you have to take your clothes off now?” I asked.
“Do you mind that my clothes are off?”
Balard laughed behind his easel. I heard the clunk and switch of his lighter as he lit himself a cigarette.
“It’s not that,” I said.
“If I just come in here and sit down,” she explained, “Pankratov can say I’m not working. That I haven’t started yet. But if I strip like this, it’s work. And my work starts when I get here, not when he gets here.” The wind batted up against the windows and Valya shivered. She folded her arms across her chest.
I raised my hands and let them fall again in a gesture of surrender. “Fine,” I said.
“No,” she snapped. “It is not fine. To hell with all artists and to hell with me for spending time with them.”
I opened my mouth, ready to ask—So why are you here? What power does that crazy Russian have over you?
But there was no more talk between us, because Pankratov had arrived. He stood in the doorway, nostrils flared from the effort of climbing the stairs. His bright eyes swept across us like the beacon of a lighthouse. “Begin to draw!” he shouted, with a voice of such authority that it was as if he held in his command the actual rotation of the earth.