WOLF

The wolf is the night that has swallowed the sun.
The shards glint in its borderless eyes.

THERE IS A PAINTING ON THE COVER of a catalogue Tacita presents me from an exhibition that took place in Paris before I arrived. It has a circle of silvery-white shapes so thick I want to touch them. They are lit by another constellation entirely. It is calm, luminous, almost mystical. The bottom right corner reads in tight script, Lev Aleksandr Volkov. It is utterly unrelated to the rest of the works. They are compelling in a more lawless way, but this one painting stands alone. I trace my finger over the image and two words move across my brain like celluloid. They say, like the suck of a high edge that draws you closer, Choose me. I rip off the cover, fold it, and begin to carry it with me, like a magical egg, a prayer, a jewel.

The dinner party invitation arouses a feeling of apprehension. I have shed my childhood shyness, which was where a separateness had grown, silently, suddenly, like flowers that bloom in the night. My grandmother Queenie always said that it wasn’t that I was shy, it was that I needed to be found. With this group, I am aware that being a woman is harder. Tacita says some women can be treated as though they are disposable, merely promised by their looks. I wonder what it is that they wear to their parties, but in the end I wear the same white dress. I smooth my hair, conceal my accent, concentrate on overcoming my bookish French. But I am full of a wildness I haven’t known for so long. A wildness when out with my brothers in the forest, peeing against trees the way they did, without shame.

I walk into the dark pink air. Through the cemetery, past Baudelaire and de Maupassant, along the dusty gravel path that slips through the bright green centre of the Jardin du Luxembourg. I walk through the remote, quiet streets of Île Saint-Louis, and eventually to the tenth. I am excited about this new pleasure of company. I thought it would take away from my inner life, but instead it has begun to outline it sharply. Oddly when there is the possibility of its being exposed, it forces me to understand what it is. It makes me aware that I have never relied on other people to know who I am. But these people, all so unknowable, are what make entering into this more extraordinary. I want to take my time arriving because I want to hold this moment, really hold it, and turn it over. I feel the cool night on my skin, and the burn of my feet rubbing in my shoes. I pass by the stare of dark windows that will fill again with bread and flowers and charcuterie by morning. The velvet gleam that recedes as the lights come on along the banks of the river in the moored barges, the quiet lapping of water against their sides.

I first met some of the artists in the group at Brasserie Lipp with Tacita, where we wrote single words that formed odd conjunctions on folded paper and passed them to the next person. One of the artists poured whisky from a flask into my champagne glass. Cheaper, he said. Something gets read aloud that sounds like, The guillotine is a lovely bitch, lazy and carnal with winding blond hair, it sleeps with its heavily ordained tongue. Tacita and I collapse from drink and laughter. And I feel not that I am becoming one of the artists of the group, but that I am one already. I have such an odd feeling that it takes me a moment to notice what it is. For the first time I can remember, it is as though I belong. I am relieved of the knee-jerk reaction to rebel. Though oddly what they rebel against, the bourgeoisie—my entitled background, with its opulent house and tutors and nannies—is the very thing that allows me to have the confidence to participate. For the first time, the action of the mind is the only thing that counts.

When I finally arrive, Tacita grabs my hand and leads me in. I see many of the artists I know. There is a thick warmth of bodies, and music, perfume, and cigarette smoke. My eyes move toward the doorframe, where Istvan is speaking to someone I haven’t seen before. A man. Beautiful and filthy, like a fallen angel. I feel a flint of heat. Our eyes meet for a moment, nothing happens, but something passes through. I am handed a glass of very cold champagne, and eventually placed at the table between an anarchist and a revolutionary, their faces lit by candles. Across from me is Leni, an artist on a government grant to study rainbows. Initially there is an outlay of the sort of proper, rational food that human beings eat. A pot of soupe aux cèpes, haricots verts with marrons chaudes au beurre. Galettes rolled and stuffed with kirsch cream. Cockles in their shiny, gleaming little shells. Then Tacita winks at me as a hare stuffed with oysters is brought to the table. My plate is whisked away. Tacita by way of explanation declares, Ivory does not eat meat. She believes it is wrong to deprive animals of their life. Particularly when they are so difficult to chew. We then dine on what I believe to be tapioca Tacita has dyed black by cooking it in squid ink, which she serves on cracked ice with lemon as though we are eating dinner plates of caviar, like makeshift Tsars and Tsarinas. Scandal threatens to erupt at any moment.

There is Satie playing, and a theatrically articulated dessert table comprising a pyramid of green figs that have been baked by the sun, crystallized apricots, translucent preserves, and macaroons in the improbable colours Istvan has described of Moscow architecture, mint, salmon, lemon yellow. And there are crates of Madiran wine that Istvan’s friend Hugo has brought up from the dusty, cowboy corner of France that smells like desert. The kind of coarse unfashionable wine that Tacita likes because it strikes you alive.

Ivory, says Tacita, introducing me to the man who was speaking to Istvan. This is Lev.

In my pocket, his drawing crackles.

He is dark, vivid, tall. Eyes so blue they are almost white. He runs his fingers through his black hair like rays, tangled and rough and cut short. This surprises me. I had always thought of Russians having eyes and hair and skin all of the same pale shade. His black wool suit is tight and his buttoned jacket abbreviated in the sleeves, as though it might be the suit of another man. He has a ripped piece of fabric knotted around his neck. I’ve never seen a man who looks like he does. He might be twice my age, though in truth, I cannot tell.

Ivory is a painter at the academy with me, Tacita tells Lev.

And?

And what?

What do you paint, Ivory? He says my name slowly, with difficulty, in French. It is not his first, or even second language.

What is in my mind.

What is in your mind?

The way he says this could also mean, What are you thinking about?

The forest.

Why forest? he says.

I am reminded that forest is the feminine gender in French. I like how he pronounces it, la forêt, as though a leaf just fluttered down. He doesn’t know what his voice is like.

I think it is a place in which everything desired and feared lives. I spent my childhood escaping to the woods that surrounded my house. I always felt safe there.

He laughs.

Later Tacita tells me about when Lev was a child in Ukraine. His father came from Siberia, his mother from the small Ukrainian village where they met. He saw her, from a distance, washing her family’s laundry. A line of white squares cutting across the blue sky. He saw her only twice, never up close. And then asked for her hand in marriage. Her father offered him a small dowry. Two thinning cows. Not much money. Lev’s father refused to bargain for more because he loved her.

Lev attended school for exactly two years. On one occasion, his teacher told him the class was getting some books and everyone was to bring thirty kreuzens. Lev’s father gave him the money, but because the books had not yet arrived, he held on to it. On the way home from school it was very cold, and he and his friends stopped at the neighbour’s, Mrs. Ruza’s, house to get warm. She had baked some buns, which they all ate hastily, so Lev gave her his thirty kreuzens. When Lev’s father found out that the money had been spent on buns, he was furious. He said, You have made your choice. You have eaten your books.

He was eight years old, Tacita continues, when his father took him out of school. He was conscripted to tend oxen in the forest with the other village boys. The forest was infested with wolves. There were eight boys, or holavari, head shepherds. At night he said they slept in the forest under the trees. They would light a big fire that they kept going all night to keep warm and to frighten away the wolves. One boy would return to the village to bring back supper for the group each night. This continued to be his regular routine for five years. Darkness, fire, yellow-eyed wolves. Istvan says this is what populated Lev’s dreams for years.

Tacita, do you know about those tsunami mushrooms that grow in Japanese caves? The ones that predict seismic activity?

I understand, Tacita nods, taking my hand and pulling us down to sit on the cold street curb, marking the gravity of this. Un choc amoureux, she says. The body is sacred, I. It rarely lies.

Holavari, I repeat to Tacita. It sounds like a knuckle brushing across an earbone. I wonder if he is resentful. If he hates animals because of this.

No, I, Tacita says. He thinks they are beautiful.

How can he say that?

He thinks they are beautiful because unlike us, they are naked on the inside too.

It is no surprise then, Lev’s reply.

Forests exist for their own reasons, he says to me, not ours. Beware of security, he warns. It is a false belief. It does not exist in nature.

There is more wine. The conversation reaches the vaulted ceilings of Istvan and Tacita’s apartment. The anarchist says we must explode social order to transform life itself. The revolutionary wipes the corners of his mouth and smiles. His teeth are purple. Revolutionary-speak turns into theatre. We go around the table. Tacita blindly takes a book off the shelf. She disappears into the kitchen for three-quarters of an hour and re-emerges with Rimbaud’s Les Illuminations baked in honey, encrusted with poppy seeds and small blue cornflowers suspended in circles of chèvre dipped in flowering rosemary. I procure an omelette with hair, cut from the beard of a dinner guest who had taken too much eau de vie and snores on the couch. When he wakes, we serve it to him on a white china plate. Ursula, a patroness in a gentleman’s dinner jacket who speaks in perfectly pitched images, finds a typewriter, places it on the table, and types what she says later is the sixth Brandenburg Concerto. The harpsichord solo, we are shown, is in red. Lev then orders us to be silent. We are. Everything stops for a moment. The clattering of forks and knives and crystal glasses, chairs creaking, coughing, the striking of matches, even the paper leaves outside. It is almost funny for a moment, but then it begins to feel profound. His eyes are mirthful but in a deadly serious, funereal tone he says, Listen.

Listen to the sound of night falling.

Tacita tells me what I missed when I left. That the dainty pranks were upstaged by a giant, depressive but prolific artist named Félix, who, full of wine and out of ideas, unzipped his trousers and took out his immense occupant, laying it on his dinner plate.

Everyone laughed. The ladies did not faint, she says. They merely wondered at its pink, heavy idleness.

I am filled with unexpected joy and too much wine, and everything is starting to feel like a torpid, slow-motion game, like the pastis-dazed old men who play boules under the plane trees with knotted roots in the breadwarm sun of Provence. The decibels melting as I weave through the tangles of guests to get my coat. Lev and I knock arms in the front hall, when I’m reaching for my gloves. I kiss Tacita and Istvan, four times, and Lev offers to walk me back to Mme. Tissaud’s. I don’t remember my feet on the cobbled stones, or the edges of curbs.

He tells me, his voice in sharp pieces lost in an automobile engine that skids by, that he is leaving early in the morning. Obligations.

What?

It is something he cannot discuss.

We walk beside each other. My chest is burning. The city is lidded and a shiny-wet silver, rain-washed pavements that smell of petrol and chestnuts. I feel protected, emboldened, by the wine.

I remain distanced, polite. He tells me of his work, but I find it impossible to reconcile this tractable low voice with the violence of ideas that comes from him. He talks about his paintings. His cheekbones sharp, like a flicker of fire, possibly from hunger, and I am caught off guard. I say something about the beauty of the city. How it asks you to fall in love with it. He says the light is an invitation to devotion. But he says he is bored by beauty alone. He takes nothing from the outside. It’s all coming from inside, he says. I am just the amusement of the forces that are born and die in me. He has an exuberance undercut with a kind of detachment. Something in his physicality, in his line of questioning that induces panic. The panic makes me suddenly feel so alive I could jump out of my own skin. It’s as though he asks me to follow him, and then leaves me there to find my own way out. I love his words, the durability of them. My mind concocting desires around them. He says he likes the way I held Tacita’s scissors. With grace and violence. He takes in my quietness. I see how stillness holds him.

I concentrate on the stones underfoot, and then the black wool trousers, the tight-fitting suit. I notice the outline of his body. His fingers as he buttons his jacket and turns up its collar. His gaze is startling when he turns toward me, his eyes like electricity. He asks things of me, not allowing me the shelter of my own mind. He inquires about my art, what interests me. I don’t have the language to explain myself. No one has ever really asked me anything. I have always hidden. Listened to others. And why is this what I prefer? The silence began as something I practised, meant to be protective, but now it is something impossible to stop. It distresses me to think there are things, regular things I might be incapable of.

What about you? he asks. In the following silence, I hear the tink of the streetlamp filaments turn on, like delicate splinters of glass.

I am attracted to people who need help, I think. Not sure if I’ve actually said it aloud.

He turns to me. His face the map of a lost country, like the ones Tacita finds hidden and beautiful in an invisible city that overlays the one we are in.

Maybe it is you, he says, who needs help.