STARLING

Wings across the star field,
across the crescent moon, closing the evening.

THE LINEN THREAD FINDS the holes Mme. Tissaud has measured and punctured with the awl. She works on an order of two dozen volumes bound in white that will eventually dwell in the smoking room of one of her clients while I also sew.

Why white? I ask her.

His name is Angel. He is from Latin America and grew up with the white libraries there. They are vellum or alum-tawed bindings, not the tanned leather that we are used to here. She describes the tanners who sell her leather—toothless, criminal eyes, hairless up to their elbows from their arms in the chemical baths—as arrested characters. Un sale métier.

Some of the leather is tanned with brains, she tells me, not looking up.

That is grisly.

She shrugs. It is the fattiest organ.

What will Angel use these for?

We go to the things we know from childhood, she offers up as explanation, needle between her teeth. South America, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East are mostly white. Libraries covered in frost. Northern Europe’s libraries are mainly brown, she says. It is the white libraries that have far less deterioration.

It makes me think of Archangel, the medieval Russian city near the White Sea where Lev has told me his father came from. Where deterioration does not occur in real time. Lev says that, as with the rest of Russia, Stalin is destroying their churches. Archangel’s was dismantled by some of the men whose own grandfathers had built it. Pride in the shining domes now beaten with sledgehammers and then burned to the ground. The priest taken out and shot. Fire is so complete. Gleaming golden domes, and the sublime bells, once treated as living things, believed to be not a note, or a chord, but the voice of God. Lev said they smashed the bells and melted them into a tractor that gleamed gold along the dusty tracts of land.

I try to explain this to Mme. Tissaud. For someone who stands in darkness, Lev’s ability to bring such beauty and jubilance seems a feat of alchemy. But his complexity startles.

In other words, says Mme. Tissaud, a real Russian.

I bristle at such generalizations, but with Mme. Tissaud, it is different. She eyes my hands. I know what she thinks. She thinks, How dangerously inhabited she is. I am sewing buttons onto Lev’s coat. The needle stabs at the ends of my fingers. He didn’t ask for this. I know that he will meet a woman in this coat. And though I feel no neutrality in this, I am complicit.

We stitch in silence, drinking our café crèmes that Mme. Tissaud prepared on her hotplate at the back of the atelier, with its smell of matches and violet lozenges. She takes theatrically loud slurps from her mug, letting the liquid sputter through her lips. This, from her, is endearing. The front windows are still warm with sun, though the grey looms.

Mother found my contact with nature almost carnal. Now Lev is the wilderness, only this one is hard going.

Mme. Tissaud gazes at the window growing moist as the darkness begins to fall and says quietly, Entre chien et loup.

Pardon?

The time when night moves in, entre chien et loup. Haven’t you heard that expression before?

Why between dog and wolf?

The uncertain light, where you cannot distinguish one from the other, she says, going back to stitching. The shift from domestic to wild.

Though she carries with her a very cultivated set of beliefs like Mother, the way they are decanted is far less aggressive. With her it is all feeling.

Cocotte?

Yes.

Please be careful.

Of what?

Of him.

These words leave a small scalded space between us.

She makes these concise delicate prophecies. Ones that, despite her not wanting them to, become true.

In the evening, Tacita and I meet at the café where Istvan and the other artists are. She shows me a song sheet, starling feathers, and three miniature spoons she found in a rubbish bin, though she is unsure how she’ll use them.

Group them together in one of your boxes. Call it Game.

This is why you have been called upon to contribute to the publication—the only woman. You are always so sure. Like a man. Or a cliché of one.

What is the word for cliché in English?

There are some words that cannot be translated.

Why is that?

I don’t know. There are just some points when a translator knows when to stop. Like cliché.

I cannot think of a single one other than that.

Avant-garde. Blasé. Coup. I could go on.

Of course. I always forget that you are a translator.

Was a translator, she says, tilted smile.

Anyway, I don’t know if “like a man” is quite right, Tas. That some of these men we conspire and create art with, these men interested in invention and uncharted realms, still uphold such dated conventions. Is this what you are referring to?

I think you grew up unaware that you were meant to consider yourself inferior. You have always been fully formed. It’s given you the confidence that most of us have yet to completely inhabit.

I’ve never thought about it.

See!

Well, that isn’t entirely true. Remember when I asked why we don’t study any women artists?

I remember. The instructor said, Because there aren’t any. The room went silent. And then you said that there have always been female artists, but since females have been considered inferior animals, we don’t know too much about them. Everyone laughed. He didn’t like it. It’s the kind of misstep you are only allowed once. I think it was the first time that he didn’t know what to say.

But he did say. He sent me out for disrupting the class.

I remember what you looked like, she laughs. You looked like you wanted to stab him with a knife.

Well, normally I am rather quiet.

Really, I? she says, raising an eyebrow. What about Félix? Istvan told me that when some of you were in his studio, he turned to you and gave you a handful of centimes and asked you to get him cigarettes.

All I did was look around the room and see that I was the only woman. I said no.

Istvan told me what you said. You said, Bloody well get them yourself.

I see a flash of dark, like a crow’s wing. I know that Lev is in the room. I have lost count since the last time I heard his voice. When we met in the night at Parc des Buttes Chaumont and he told me that in my white I looked like his dream. I appeared, illuminated, licking icing off a knife. He says my white fills an empty space, it is both a cure for isolation and a mystical pronouncement.

Since that night, I have been hiding in the ordinariness of my days. Absorbed but uncertain, like the morning after a dreamless night. I spend time illustrating, stitching. These things that occupy the hands but not the mind. Like Mme. Tissaud, who when not binding books is knitting. All the knitting. All those women who incessantly click their needles on the benches in the Jardin Luxembourg. I think some women knit because doing something with their hands means they are doing something with their lives. But not Mme. Tissaud. She makes things out of zeal.

I am possessed but do not possess. I have submitted myself to this, with all its risks and cruelties. None of the single sentences and kindness of Mme. Tissaud or the inspiring sistership of Tacita can save me. I have brought it on myself. I haven’t had a choice in the matter, though if I did, it would still be the same. I cannot get far enough or near enough. Everything depends on Lev, whether I see him or whether I don’t. Each day the world larger/larger then smaller/smaller.

I’ve taken on a few commissions from the antiquarian book collector for biological illustrations of birds despite Lev’s dismissal of such work. Mme. Tissaud lent me a copy of Audubon’s Birds of America for reference. She tells me his project began by attempting to paint a bird a day. I see that he has used coloured pastels and layer upon layer of watercolouring to add softness to feathers, which is useful for the owls and herons I am drawing. I learn that herons have three-metre wingspans but weigh only a few pounds because they are mostly feather and large hollow bones. They move slowly but can strike like lightning. They are both optimistic and awkward. Under each coloured plate Audubon writes, Drawn from nature. I learn this means that he shot the birds. He killed them for pleasure and then took them home to stuff them and prop them into rigid poses by filling them with armatures of wire. There are no heads drawn back at majestic angles. The larger birds are contorted because he needed to fit them to the size of the page. It explains why you can look and look but what you are seeing is not really a bird. Where is the bird? Each illustration carries the weight of Lev’s disapproval. He believes in submitting to your art, regardless of hunger, rent, or other practical matters. I realize that sometimes I am a bit afraid of him.

Lev. I turn his name over silently. It sounds so close to love, though I’m possibly the only one living in a language inside which this is true. There is this feeling, a feeling of the bone-deep exhaustion of translation. Would something occur differently with Lev and me if we could communicate using the language we spoke in childhood?

I can see him speaking to people I’ve never met. He holds their eyes. Everyone wants to be near him, not just women. Despite this, he is encircled in a kind of untouchable loneliness that I understand, so deep it goes underground. Like rainbows, Leni, who I met at Tacita and Istvan’s dinner party, has explained. They are actually round, only we don’t see the full circle because the horizon gets in the way.

We pour wine. Leni tells us that she is being made to pay back her grant money, even though, living frugally, she has spent almost all of it. Most of the time she is in libraries, clicking down the metal stairs with her documents. She has also been ordered to return to Germany. She confides to us that she won’t. Our glasses clink in solidarity, but I can tell from Tacita’s eyes that she is thinking the same thing I am.

It is no different with Lev. Threatening letters have come from Russia.

He made an installation, a complete departure from his usual work. It was a reanimation of a Russian folk tale. A grubby doll without clothes, encased in glass, slowly drowning in wheat, which he called Untitled (Murder by Hunger). He said, How do you tell about Stalin’s imposed starvation, which killed millions in an attempt to extinguish the Ukrainian independence movement, though miraculously, nobody outside seems to know? The Holodomor. Extermination by hunger. Aimed at the Ukrainian peasantry. How to tell about how they were destroyed? Stalin’s men say people were so hungry they ate their own children. The Soviets falsified everything and banned all discussion of it. Lev’s installation went directly against the party. And though Lev values only art that generates feeling rather than art created from religion or politics, this once, he cannot resist defying his own edict. Dictators decide anything. They are reanimators, he says. Under Stalin’s rule the Church of the Nativity became a holding pen for circus lions, the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour the world’s largest open-air swimming pool.

He has been under a watchful eye. They demand his return. But Lev says he will never go back. To where? Where he is from in Ukraine, everyone is now forced to speak Russian. They are told what to read, what to think. Entire histories altered. He finds this pretense of believing in an age of community repellent. What kind of community lets the individual perish? He lets people call him a Russian and doesn’t correct them. His mind refusing blood. Refusing slaughter. Glassed-in and rigid as winter. He ignores the strings of Cyrillic, with its ligatures and clustered consonants, and drops them into the iron stove in his studio, setting them alight. Whump.

They are almost beautiful to me because the shapes against the thick white paper take the form of abstract geometry, not threats. He doesn’t read them anymore. I see the unopened envelopes in the cold ash, powdered silver and propped like tombstones.

The swan-necked dancer kisses him and slips something into his pocket with her long fingers, but he does not pause in his conversation, which gives an odd intimacy to her gesture. Her shoes are high, she sways on heels sharp enough to stab anything underfoot. Tacita knows I am elsewhere. Under siege, I become quiet. I think, Do not show your arrow. None of this has been rash impulse. My very way of being has, whether I want it or not, prepared me for this, this singular devotion. First in the woods, then drawing. I can grow quiet in something, isolation canting me in deeper. The ability to shut out distraction and furrow into my purest form. Tacita can get me talking, and telling her makes everything seem less severe. She can get me out of my head, diverting the feeling that everything rests on the pleasure of the one moment I am with him.

Leni has returned with a large pichet of beer and three glasses and pours. The liquid foams and rises, streaming down the side of my glass. As I look for something to stop it, there is the dunk of a man’s finger. Lev. He grins, saying it works every time. He leans down and kisses me decorously. His tongue grazes my lips, though no one can tell.

It is not possible to be grateful without showing it. I look up, collared light, whiteblue eyes, and I know what he thinks. He thinks, Didn’t I just see you? And I think, How different your time is from mine.