BLACK SWAN

Each breath is the dark corner of an echo
and contains the energy of wind, like two
people whose paths are about to cross
and then don’t.

A DARK VERTICAL LINE divides the mist. I recognize his gait and watch his shadow move across the grass. He has such radiance, you forgive him anything.

First he cannot see me. I am white, clothes waving like a flag, hair in black gusts. My breathing is slowed, the taste of his coppery mouth on my tongue. His hands on my fingers. He says, You’re so cold. And puts them inside his shirt.

We climb a monument modelled after an ancient Roman temple. Lev prefers this strange park sculpted from the ruins of one of Napoleon’s gypsum quarries. Despite the careful curation of exotic plants, it cannot shake what lies below. A history of blood and industry. Battles and bodies and murder, though now beautiful flowers grow. The swans are black. Paris from up here looks small. The silver rooftops and the domes of Sacré-Coeur appear over the treetops. And unlike every other park in Paris, here you can sit on the grass.

Lev is part nocturnal animal. He leaves the studio at night and wanders for hours, walking though Place des Vosges, through the cemeteries, behind the Pantheon, exploring the old Paris. Only sometimes can I come.

There are wet-root smells soaking through fog. His eyes whiter. My eyes blacker. The grass cold under his hands, he opens his eyes to the dark sky. A farness that makes him near. His presence all over my body. Hands on my ribs, hipbones. His mouth on my throat. Stars falling on skin. Fingers in fingers. The parts of the moon that glimmer through. Warmth. Violence. Bones licked clean. The thing that happens to us. Its full pleasure beating through me, shaking me awake, head clear, mind stilled. Longing and abandonment skinned off to ripeness, a daze of rapture.

When I first made the lines, he says, hands underneath his head, I was actually thinking about the honesty of trees. I think of the Buddhist monks, being silent, sitting. Who does that better than trees? Our backs on the damp grass as we look up, the sky pierced with sharp black branches.

In Siberia, near the Tunguska River, he says, when I was a boy, I heard about what the villagers thought was the end of the world. Everything shook. There was a cracking sound like lightning, and then a column of blue light brighter than the sun. Windows broke hundreds of kilometres away. All the trees were on fire. Eighty million trees burned to the ground. It was so isolated there that no one came to investigate. He closes his eyes. Twenty years later someone came to look at the hole that was left. Thousands of square kilometres. He laughs. It was a comet. The largest one to ever hit the Earth. Almost no one died because of where it was. If it had exploded four hours later, it would have taken out the whole of Petersburg.

I’m trying to picture the size of that, the terror of the not-knowing. Living in a permanent stoop, waiting for some unnameable violence that might strike again and take you out for good. For twenty years, not knowing, when Lev turns to me.

You will like this, he says. The peasants said they could hear the trees hum long after the explosion.

I am about to say something, but see he is already some-where else.

Later he will show me all the thick white and pale grey shapes spaced symmetrically. The icy lyricism of his work makes me think that it is impossible to escape our geographies. I also know what it is to feel air so cold it burns. So cold that animals cannot be born. So cold that if you die, no one can bury you. An endless rhythm of cedars. The bleak north wind.

His work is intelligent and beautiful and unsentimental. I see how directly it comes from what he left behind. A realism in what most people call abstraction. Vicious cold, exhausting heat, relentless insects, black dust, everything covered in ice. By way of compensation, they are given an unending sky. Where he comes from has a heartless logic but it is also sublime. It exalts and destroys. As a result the people carry a humility that allows them to think majestically.

The Greeks, he says, knew that there were no perfect circles, straight lines, or equal spaces in nature. They had to create them.

I know he finds it impossible to put down the first mark, and this series of gratifying experiments has altered his mood.

Where did it come from? I say. A prick of jealousy. He has seen me hunched over working and reworking. Changing the way I work makes me anxious; with him it is the opposite. He is emboldened by it.

The error, he says, is thinking that you have a part to play in the process. You need to receive everything. Cling to nothing. His voice drawing a line, There is no halfway.

Our eyes meet for a moment.

You see what’s already inside you, I say.

You could tell me anything, and I would believe it. You have the eyes of a mystic, he says, putting his hands on either side of my face.

Though distant, he has the ability to establish deep communions. Why was he given over to me. Choose him. Do not choose him, I think. Blinking back the emotion.

There is something in these animals, I say, changing the subject. The ones I have been drawing. But I’m finding it hard to know what exactly is real.

We make our way down the hill, past the taverns with their overhead shutters closed, the windowledges of geraniums, pert and anxious in the cold. He stands at the door of Mme. Tissaud’s. I feel his mouth on the back of my neck. The only thing real is feeling, he says. I twist the key in the lock, and when I turn around he is gone.