“Good morning, is it Sunday already?” Patricia asked from the doorway, smiling ironically, adding, “But it’s not me you’ve come to see, is it?” She turned away a little too brusquely and said, “Radhika’s gone … I don’t know where. She’s gone someplace.”
And she smiled in a melancholy fashion, as if it bothered her that she knew very little of what others were up to, of the activity of the others.
She opened the garden gate to let him through. Vadim came in and thought: the same bird on the mulberry tree! And her hair, like a sandstorm! He observed the painter out of the corner of his eye: the wind spreads her hair wide. Patricia looked at him quizzically; she ushered him into the house, then led him down the stairs, which creaked, and to the left … and, there they were, in her studio. The windows, tall and close to the ceiling, barely allowed one to imagine that one was in the middle of nature. It was like …
“… like the Café Idiot!” he exclaimed.
“What café?”
“The Idiot.”
“From Dostoevsky?”
“Yes, the café in Saint Petersburg that is named after the novel. That’s where I saw you for the first time.”
“Me? Are you sure? I don’t remember.”
“The café is also located in the basement, and its windows are close to the street.”
“Ah, yes! And there’s a trio of musicians that plays there!”
“No, that’s the Literary Café.”
“Ah, I’ve got it. You must mean that dark little café, which looks like it has a permanent layer of dust over it; it’s lit with candles, as if it was from the nineteenth century … it’s on the Moika canal! Do you go there? There’s an odd atmosphere … as if you can only go there if you want to contemplate the meaning of life and death, if you need to murder someone or commit suicide. I can see why you like going there. You … oh, yes, for sure!”
The painter smiled at him, and then looked down at his lips. Then looked … here and there … Like a bee, Vadim thought, although he wasn’t exactly sure why a bee.
“In Petersburg, you know …,” Patricia said without knowing what she was saying. Quickly she looked back to where she was looking before, into his eyes. Then she stopped herself. “But you must be getting bored!”
Vadim didn’t know where to look first. The pictures on the walls, hanging next to each other, the sculptures, the books, the paintings … Get bored? Impossible! Ah, here, on this shelf, she has placed his stones, the ones he picked up yesterday on the beach! They looked different in her studio than when they were being washed by the waves. They had been transformed into works of art, as if Patricia’s hand had shaped them. Vadim picked up a stone, and felt that it was no longer just a stone that he had picked up on the beach the day before and left next to the dog house. It was a valuable object, a work by Patricia, carrying her signature.
“You’re getting bored … Radhika isn’t here …,” she said.
He looked at her. She appeared to be saying it seriously.
“Why do you think I come here several times a week, what do you make of that? Why do I want to write a book about your paintings? Why do I read haikus and write the poems I like the most in a notebook?”
He turned to the painting of white petunias with a red edge to hide his excitement.
“You don’t come to see Radhika?”
She came closer to see his face. Was she going to examine his eyes again?
Patricia added, “So why do you come and see us?”
“Think for a moment. Or read it in my eyes, like you did the other day!” Vadim smiled.
“I know. You want to speak in Russian, and with me you can do that.”
“And your pictures, do you think they mean nothing to me? Don’t you know that I want to write a book about you?”
She looked confused. Maybe she didn’t believe him.
Vadim looked at the fire of her hair. Why was he talking about her pictures, now him too? He felt like touching her hair, he felt an irresistible desire to caress it with his fingers. Right then. To embrace her. There, in her studio. In her chapel. Embrace her, and then let whatever had to happen, happen. Then, imperceptibly, a silence imposed itself between them once again. But today it was different … The silence was … like a companion. Like a conspirator.
Now is the moment. Let’s not break the silence.
Now!
“This is my latest picture. I started work on it a week ago.”
The picture: a man and a woman. They were not part of the erotic series. A large picture. Vadim couldn’t see the woman’s face, she was turning toward the man; he was looking at the wall. On the wall, there was a photograph of a woman with long earrings.
With difficulty, as she looked at the picture, Patricia said, “Do you think that love is important? That it is essential in life?”
Now! Embrace her! But, instead of doing that, he realized with horror that he was moving away from her, one step, two, and now he had separated himself from her entirely and was looking at some books on a shelf.
Patricia said in a thin voice, “Come, yes, come to me …”
“You have Dostoevsky’s The Idiot,” Vadim said as if he hadn’t heard her voice, although there was nothing he wanted more than to be with her.
Patricia said in an even lower voice, “Just for a moment, just because …”
Bam!
They were interrupted by the slamming of a door, at the entrance. Patricia didn’t finish her sentence. Instead of doing so, in a loud voice and with a forced jollity, she said, “Well, as you can see, your Radhika is back. You’ll be happy now, right?”
Vadim turned completely around to face her, with an expression of desire on his face. He took a step toward her, and another.
She didn’t understand him. She said, also with false joy, “Yes, that is how I should paint you!”
Painting! Always painting and nothing else! Could she really not think about anything else?”
And there was Radhika, standing in the doorway; her white, shapeless dress hung on her like a sack.
“Hi there!” she said, in her nasal voice. He looked at her; those long lashes, as if in that moment her baggy, unfeminine dress had fallen from her shoulders and hips. The wild cat stretched herself.
“I’ve been to the Vilanova jail. There’s a case there … An alcoholic girl who’s on drugs, and she’s a kleptomaniac. They picked her up in a drugstore when she was putting some perfumed soap in her pocket. Then, in her bag, they found a load of little objects that hadn’t been paid for. They’ve put her in jail, heaven only knows when she’s going to be tried … Later, she’ll spend a few months in prison, and then they’ll let her go and then they’ll arrest her again … I’m trying to get her out of there so I can look after her and have her in my association for abused women. But what am I talking about! Neither of you are interested one little bit in any of this,” she looked at Vadim with undisguised animosity. “You move about in your world of little flowers and butterflies and birdies and dreams … Life is elsewhere!”
Then, with lightning in her eyes, she went away.
They could hear the shower being turned on.
Vadim examined a canvas that depicted a blade of grass. Just a blade of grass in July and the white, burning sky. He looked at the blade and imagined Radhika in the shower; standing up, in the bathtub, with her white, transparent panties, checking if the water is cold enough. Now she looks at herself in the mirror and feels her breasts, then feels sad and takes off her white panties. She hangs them on a little hook on the wall, stands under the jet of cold water and turns her face up to the ceiling, like the nomads in the desert when they find an oasis and give thanks to Allah.
But that was just a moment of excitement. The white panties and the cocoa-colored body left Vadim cold, once again.
They were still there, certainly, but only tucked away in a corner of his imagination. His mind was concentrated now on a blade of grass.
Vadim realized that two processes were taking place inside him at the same time and he told himself, perhaps with a certain lack of logic, that the ancient Chinese had a single word that referred as much to thought as to feeling. And they were right, he thought: it’s one and the same thing, one is part of the other.
“The blade isn’t finished yet,” Patricia’s voice interrupted his reverie, “I started it … well, in fact a very short time ago. What do you think of it?”
“What do I think of it?” he said. “This:
A dragonfly
wishes to rest
on a blade of grass.
The blade, however,
does not let him.”
“Are you talking about this blade of grass? So where’s the dragonfly?”
“You are the blade.”
“A dragonfly wishes to rest on a blade of grass. I don’t understand. Which dragonfly won’t I allow to rest, if I’m the blade?”
“Me.”
This time it was Vadim’s voice that seemed as thin as a cobweb. No, as a blade … he thought. Patricia’s, on the other hand, echoed sonorously, like a ship’s siren, like the toll of a bell, like the voice of a priest in the church when he pronounces his verdict to the bride and groom, “Till death do you part.”
In her mind’s eye, she saw, once again, the image of the tea and of the cups on the living-room table: Vadim summons her to tea, picks up a green fig and raises it to her lips. No, the fig is blue; and it is so sweet … mmmm … now Patricia was smiling, too.
Now or never, Vadim ordered himself; but instead of action, from his mouth, once more, came only words, words, words.
“Why did you paint a blade of grass, precisely?”
“It’s the most delicate thing I’ve found in nature. After this, the only thing left would be to paint a cobweb, which is even more fragile.”
“And a dragonfly. A dragonfly and a blade of grass; could there be anything finer?” Vadim said, and he insisted to himself: Now’s the time! Take her by the shoulders, and then …
What is it that stops me going up to her? The admiration I feel for her as a painter?
Nonsense! he answered himself.
The story of the dragonfly and the blade of grass … went through Patricia’s mind … wasn’t it the other way around? Wasn’t she the dragonfly and he the blade that wouldn’t accept her? Suddenly, she felt rejected and scorned, precisely now, when she had the feeling that the aversion she felt for men was falling away from her like leaves off a maple tree in autumn. How unlucky you are, Patricia thought, full of self-pity. Then she spoke quickly to Vadim, to make him understand that if she was interested in him, it was for professional reasons only, “I invited you to my studio because I wanted to paint your face. I was interested in the expression you had just a moment ago. But now I don’t find it so interesting. Shall we go up and see Radhika? Anyhow, soon a Dutchman from Maastricht is coming to see me to talk about a new exhibition.”
Vadim looked alternately at Patricia’s face and at the picture of the blade of grass. He saw how the blade in the painting trembled, shaken by the wind; in the end the blade snapped. Vadim looked at it, eyes agape: how could it snap if it was fragile but flexible? But so it was: it was dead.
He turned to look at Patricia: an expression that was both offended and inaccessible was engraved on her face. What happened? he asked himself. What in God’s name has happened to us? Then, he remembered that he had woken up that morning with the image of the red turban of Ali Baba, who led the procession of his forty thieves with their white turbans, and that he had been looking forward so very much to seeing his Ali Baba, that he had answered the e-mail before he’d finished reading it … when he thought about all this, it seemed impossible that this woman would now throw him out using her professional obligations as an excuse. Why, just a while ago, just a tiny moment ago, she said love was the most important thing in the world … And not very long ago she had brushed her fingers over his cheek, he still felt them there …
He looked at her. No, none of that had taken place. The only important thing in her life was the Dutchman from Maastricht. Painting. Paintings. I paint. I have painted. I will paint. I will always paint, and I will only paint. He felt a burst of self-pity. He had to leave. His father needed him. At work they needed him.