OWL

White mask of feathers like a sonata by Ravel,
faded chords of the underworld.

STARS THICKEN, GALVANIZING THE SKY. Night jewels in. We climb the stairs to Lev’s room.

He makes hot verveine. Often it is this or Armagnac or any number of other quarter-hour rituals.

I want to show you something.

He bangs a wooden stool from his studio on the floor in front of me. Sit, he says.

He has something in his hands. It is the fabric of a scarf. He ties it around my eyes. Blueblack filament, his smell touching my face. I like that he wants to show me something I cannot see.

I hear little clicks. A low rasping croak.

I smell turpentine as serene glimmers of sound wash over me, intoxicated, blood pounding, palms damp. Small, bleached messages from the world, silences interspersed. Sound that comes from such a singular plane it cancels everything else. In some way it is like a last word, a held note, but its resonance is something other than an instrument. It is a voice. There is nothing remotely intellectual about it, though it does not come from the heart either. Instead it is something profound from the outside, like rain or wind. The silences are uneven. They make you wait. And there is a moment in which the ear no longer attempts to hear. A sound is formed by something else, coming in as from a dream.

All that emotion and I can only find words to say, Where did you find this?

A man selling 78s by the river. He said that two hundred years ago, it was debated as to whether all owls hooted in the key of B flat—also the key of trumpets and French horns. There was a man who recorded animal sounds with a gramophone.

It is the sound of owls and other nocturnal truths. When the needle finds the first ring of the record, it signals night like a stone. I am stunned by the sudden feeling that I am happier than I have ever been. That I have found something I’ve not yet known from regular life. But it is a dangerous joy. It is similar to those dreams in which you feel so strong and jubilant that it is ruinous, because you know something horrible is about to happen. The sensation is immediately followed by one of equal but shattering gravity. I will never be this happy again.

How?

Lev’s hand detains my ankle. A hand that found a record, its flapping shape that maps my interior world.

Separation creates hunger. Fingers trace up my shin, slide across my hips, between my thighs. He kisses my mouth, my neck. My eyes slowly closing. The touch of his hands, the bones of his wrists. I feel his fingers, the power they contain. The touch of his tongue on my neck, his hand spreading wide under my back, tightening my body, gathering me into him. My mouth curves around him. Breathing slowed. And then I take him, my whole body toward him, our skin, our fingers, all the remote corners. Slow lasting waves of pleasure as though we are both encircled. Over and over again until we both fold into the darkness.

We are stunned awake by a bloodcurdling sound that is bone on wood. The knuckles of uniformed men in field-green who speak German, or is it Russian. In my half-sleep I wonder if it is not a horrible dream.

They come in the night, Lev has said. It demonstrates their power.

I try to suppress the choking that fills my throat until I cannot breathe. The water is too high. We are beyond our depth. Strings of words puncture the air like gunshots. Lev is pushed against the wall, the horrible, dull sound of a head hitting a hard object, a trickle of blood from under his eyebrow, each arm clamped with a square-knuckled hand. The men are large and with thick shoulders but Lev’s body is taller and tensile and somehow more unpredictable than theirs. It provokes gratuitous force where none is required. There is no time for any kind of exchange. He is barefoot. They throw his boots down the stairs with unnecessary aggression. I see rolls of fat at the backs of their shaven necks, red and fissured, like corned beef. Lev looks back at me as he is forced out, two doors at right angles to each other. A foreign look on his face. A look that changes everything. I have never seen him caught. It is a plea that binds us.

All my senses are tuned to a higher frequency. Silence hurts my ears. I have Lev’s blanket around my shoulders. The wool sharp against my bare skin. His presence strays over my body. I realize that I’ve never been in Lev’s studio without him. Studio visits are, even between us, by invitation only. Only he has the key. That I am here alone seems a breach of protocol. Its flaking plaster and weathered planks spattered with paint and glue, and torn paper in piles reflecting the gleaming chaos of his interior world. But in his absence, the space appears immense. A cold ungilded squalor.

It is only when he is gone that I understand how completely altering his presence is. He has always come and gone, the time slipping. We are sensually bound. Voluptuous hours. Our skin together. But, I tell myself, there would never be a way for this to be constant.

I light upon the paper that Ulyana gave to Lev. It has fallen on the floor. I feel shame at once for considering reading it. I wouldn’t know what it said, though no doubt it is not a harmless document. I swing open the iron door of the stove and gather the remaining unopened letters, taking them with me.

Out onto the street with intense sun. I had thought it was still night. As though it should remain as dark as when the sound splintered through the door. Neither day nor night. But it is startlingly bright. The light shot onto my face makes me squint. A ripple of high-pitched pain shoots behind my eyes.

I ask a man, wearing a navy overcoat with flat metal buttons that flicker sunlight into my eyes, for the time, as though it would matter. He could say anything and I would believe him. Instead he stops and presses a coin into my palm. Blanketed, unfocused eyes. I realize he thinks I’ve asked for money. That I’m a beggar. This actually makes me laugh the kind of half-crazed laugh that is useful in that it stops me from crying.

I decide to walk north across the river, purposefully avoiding the plenary comfort of Mme. Tissaud, the wide smiling wrinkles around her eyes. I continue until I am up the hill, Belleville, and then to the park. I try not to look at the parts of this city, every sidewalk, every pane of every building. Instead, there is deafening squalling metal. Shuffling feet. Half-smoked cigarettes ground out with hate. Heavy overcoats weighing down skeletal shoulders. Hats stuck with feathers yanked from the backsides of extinct birds. Gun-hipped men. Thin-hearted women. Dirty-faced children never staying in school. Louse combs. Breathing, cracking sidewalks. Greasy handkerchiefs. Slanting wind. Spitboxes. Downtrodden men who open their trousers. Brown-streaked statues. Castrated newspapers behind clouded cracked glass.

I am walking so violently that drops of perspiration dampen my forehead, under my arms, and I am glad. I want purification. The sun is warm. Bad things don’t happen in the sun, I reassure myself. At the foot of the park I walk directly into a charcuterie and pocket a jar from its sparse shelves. It clinks against the centime and I realize I could have used the beggar money. I am sensible, even as a lunatic. I stop only when I reach the top of the rocky belvedere. It honours Sibyl, who wrote her prophecies on leaves and let the wind scatter them. On this bench Lev and I once came to each other as in a dream. He walks toward me and I marvel at the precision of his body and how his limbs seem to be catching the entire wheel of the moon. I breathe deeply. My mind stills.

Ivory. He is telling me about a new technique with ink that takes only a few seconds, each one a mise en acte, he says. Ephemeral. More about the way the act of making them is occurring. Everything left to chance. But he likes it because the fleeting moment he is creating exists strictly in the eye of the maker.

Of course, they are just inkblots, he says. But they are footprints to absence. The presence of absence. Unlike most people, he believes creation is about subtraction, not addition.

I unscrew the jar and scoop out the mustard with two bare fingers and swallow. Again. A ripping burn in my stomach. And then the vomiting starts. I lean over the rail, above the manmade lake. I want to jolt out of this sudden sorrow. That someone can just suddenly be gone. Always the simplest things are the hardest to grasp.

The park was just as I’d hoped. Balding gothic hills, cliffs and streams and exotic trees from the Orient that perform out of season. At night it has a dark energy, like how even gentle creatures can scare you after dark. I take the soft paths to find Lev on the cliffs above. Feeling the blood that moves underneath. I lie down, my face against the cold hard stone bench, so tired I can only think with my eyes closed.

I can tell from the look on their faces that Tacita and Istvan are frightened by how I come to them. This much I can see. But they remain calm, because someone must remain calm. They also do not judge, which means seeing in parts. Seeing in parts being worse than seeing nothing at all. There is solace in Tacita and Istvan’s apartment, its pale, bright rooms. The rows of Tacita’s objects, the Poulenc nocturne on the radio, the smell of food, all the human things that can wend away sorrow. Tacita cuts a thick slice of bread and hands me hot tea. I cannot eat. They are the ones who uncover the names of those to whom I need to write to plead for Lev’s release. The address of the camp where I can send provisions, art supplies, letters. Though in the end, everything will be met with nothing.

And when I return to my studio, Mme. Tissaud has left a hyacinth, its scent pressing through the room. There is a cream wool cape with white stripe embroidery. It is folded on my chair alongside two jars. One of dried cornflowers (blue) and the other of hawthorn berries (yellow). These offerings, found and homemade, come not out of a spirit of thrift, but of goodness. They are majestic and hopeful.

There is still a part of me that responds to the idea of creation. I force myself to grind and then mix pigments in the back sink late in the night, quietly so as not to wake Mme. Tissaud. I wipe the brushes, one after another, on a ripped piece of cloth. The water runs cold for whole minutes, it numbs my hands and escapes thinking. I take small glass jars and fill them. A drop of ox gall. Bright colours glimmering life back in. A slash of moon throws light onto the countertop. Everything gleaming like the new illuminated sphere of Earth ascending in the Hieronymus Bosch painting that I like, because along with destruction, it reveals new stages of existence. I gather everything in my arms and walk quietly up the wooden staircase. Each board creaking from all the people who have walked before.

In my room, I place a prepared board on the wooden lip of my easel. I dip the brush Lev gave me, tapered and sable—it pulls the paint more than all my brushes combined—and begin the silent work. Quick precise strokes. Almost like drawing at first. Then I thin the mixture, add salt and poppy oil. Something clouded and living happens between my careful composition. I let it come. Time vanishing inside the work. As in childhood. Time stalls, then speeds up, never in the right order. I take another smaller brush adding deep red. Translation is the most difficult. The space between what you carry in your mind and what you can put down. I know right away if it is working. But not by eye. When we walk by a Vermeer or Velázquez, I tell Tacita that when I get a burning feeling in my chest, I know that what I’m looking at is good.

I can’t decide what colour it needs. I think of Lev always urging me to put on paint.

But you can’t just end a painting by suddenly throwing something at it.

Why not?

And then it surprises me. Despite the anguish, I enter the space like a new year, pronouncedly, full of belief. I realize that with Lev my solitariness had been violated. Everything takes on new shape, and for a moment, I find my pitch. The painting is working, I am barely mixing, using the crude pure colour from the tubes, layering. Only one touch of black in the yellow makes an electric green that I need. It gives the painting weight and form. Blueblack bodies of trees have a new layer of soft grey. Colour becomes an armature buried under colour. It connects these elements that have no necessary relation in the world, a moment of beauty wrested from fear. But there is a danger in that beauty can also disguise the truth.

I’ve just learned that Lev’s last name, Volkov, means wolf in Russian.

Of course it does, says Tacita. And we all know that no one can tame a wolf, she jokes, as we sit in Jardin des Plantes, days before.

But he lives in a city. Shouldn’t he now be domesticated? I say, reaching across for her pack of cigarettes. Perhaps more like a dog?

Even dogs are recently wild, cherie. They are stoic creatures. They show only one sliver of what’s really going on with them.

I take Tacita into the zoo. All this glass having replaced the bars. They have created a living tableau of animals, shielding us from their disagreeable odours. It looks more like a fine art museum.

Tas, I think we should alter it all.

How?

Well, they contrive to exploit. Placing large animals in the centre. Surrounding them with lawns of small animals to make them seem larger and more exotic than they are.

A tableau of a different scale.

An altered symphony. Turn the insignificant voices into first violins, I say. As when Millet painted The Gleaners. To everyone, they were just worn-down peasants, scrambling for the fallout after the harvest, the lowest rung of society. People said they looked as if they were painted with the earth they were sowing. He gave them the attention and size of a religious, mythical painting. He painted them as royalty. Those peasants contained the knowledge of weather and land and living, and also of misery, but were utterly invisible to society. And how the bourgeoisie hated that painting, most likely because it made them feel shame.

What are you suggesting?

Your animal portraits, and my sound transcriptions. We can put image and text together. Hang images beside writings. I could construct the animal sounds into languages, with symbols and whole alphabets. We could break down all the formal elements, these inherited conventions that don’t speak to us. We could get to the heart through eyes and ears. Make something outside of existing order. Almost spiritual.

She closes her eyes in thought.

Tas, don’t you sometimes wonder why for centuries all art, paintings, music, has been produced for the indoors? Maybe that’s why I always liked the cellist-with-birds concert. I would like to go to a gallery where they make you leave. Take the south door, walk six steps, follow the sidewalk until you see a path in the courtyard. If you haven’t been in a forest for a long time, stop. Listen. You’d pick up irate curses, the occasional drunken shout, some poor bird struggling to have its voice heard and then it could slip through the green and back to your paintings.

It could be like an undersong to the paintings and alphabets, she says. We could take something, like a Stravinsky rhythm, and use that structure to fill it with your pitches and then make part of the whole experience be an act of framing.

But there should be an element of disturbing rather than completely comforting people.

She nods. It could be a museum of sound, the art in the experience of it. How Duchamp always says, non-retinal. Maybe I abandon my paintings entirely. It could be for the ear-minded. We could write out instructions. Like a star chart. But I wonder, how would we convey the sounds? Recording equipment is scarce. I have only ever found one ruined cylinder, she says, holding her cigarette to her lips.

Maybe we could instruct the people at the gallery to make the sounds, I say.

She stubs out her cigarette and straightens, looking at me, her whole comportment almost heraldic, saying slowly and purposefully, Yes.