Authors: Marcus Sedgwick
The two Metzner brats are watching Addie from the corner of the yard, giggling at him. Their stupid little dog yaps every time the bat bangs against the carpet. Their mother will pay Addie a measly fifty groschen for his morning’s work, and without saying anything he’ll go and buy bread and sausage and a paper twist of tea, even though he needs paints. He’s painting autumn landscapes now because he’s almost run out of green.
The living room is also Addie’s studio. He paints at the little table, on old door panels usually, canvas when we can afford it, propped against the wall. It’s bad for his back, working like that. And the light from the small window isn’t good enough. It suffocates his colours, he says. Suffocation is a word Addie uses a lot. It’s one of the bees in his bonnet. He has lots of bees in his bonnet. It’s a hive.
“This isn’t a living room,” he’ll cry. “It’s a dying room! It’s crushing me!”
It’s very small, it’s true. And it’s the kitchen as well. When there’s washing drying by the fire there’s hardly room to move. But it’s all we can afford.
“I need space,” he says. “Space! Room to breathe! To create!”
That’s why he paints landscapes, I think. Big open spaces he can go into. It’s terrible for him that he has to paint them so small.
I used to ask him to paint me. I liked the idea of posing for him, of his eyes fixed on me. He has wonderful eyes, Addie. I once told him that he could be a stage hypnotist, like Mesmer. He smiled at that, and said, “Well, if I don’t make it as an artist perhaps I’ll give it a go.” He did try to paint me, once. I wore my blue dress and sat in the chair holding a book. After a long time I said, “Can I see?” And instead he let out this terrible groan and slashed black paint all over the picture.
He’ll never marry me. I’d like to be the mother of his children, but I know I won’t.
JUNE
Just when things were getting really desperate, Addie came home with money. Eleven whole schillings! And a bag containing a meat pie, potatoes and cabbage and five tubes of paint. Also a bottle of Riesling, which worried me a little because drink doesn’t agree with him. He was in a strange mood. Happy, because of the money and the paint, but also agitated. The work had come through his friend Werner the carter. Werner’s usual man had been taken sick, so he’d asked Addie to help him with a job. Which was clearing the house of a widow who had died, on Lindaustrasse. A Jewish lady.
I peeled the potatoes and chopped the cabbage while Addie sat on the chair and brooded. His silences have a darkness to them, so after a while I managed to get him talking about the job.
He said, “Werner had the keys to the house and when we went in I couldn’t believe my eyes. The hallway, the
hallway
, was bigger than this flat. The damned old Jewish bourgeoise had more room to park her umbrellas than we have to live in. Can you imagine that? Then there were two more floors and an attic and a cellar. She’d lived alone in all that space for more than fifteen years. The attic had windows that were full of light. Sucked in light. She’d kept a servant up there. I thought, I would die for such a space to paint in.”
I said, “Light the lamp, Addie.”
But he didn’t. He swigged some wine and pulled a face, swallowing it. The room grew darker.
He said, “All the quality stuff had already gone, of course. The furniture and everything. There were pale patches on the walls where paintings had been. I wondered if they’d been any good. Probably not. People like that, what do they know about art? Anyway, we filled the cart with what looked like dreck to me, but Werner was pleased enough. We drove it all to a dealer Werner does business with. Another Jew.”
Addie has a bit of a thing about Jews. A bee.
“The old rogue offered Werner thirty schillings for the lot. Werner laughed in his face. Then they argued the toss back and forth for what felt like an hour, the Yid waving his arms about and moaning that Werner was taking the food from his children’s mouths and so on. In the end he coughed up forty-two schillings like he was parting with a pound of his flesh. Werner gave me twenty, which was bloody decent of him, I thought.”
“He’s a good man,” I said.
Addie nodded. Then he stood up. “I’m going down to the baths,” he said. “I feel dirty.”
Addie has a thing about hygiene, too.
On Sundays, if the weather is good, Addie takes his paintings and his little postcard sketches to the Volksgarten. He hangs his paintings from the railings, like lots of other artists. He leaves the flat early, because there is always competition for the best places. Sometimes I go with him. I did today. Spring was turning into summer, and I knew that the flowers in the park would be opening to the sun and the trees would be dressed in fresh new shades of green. It would have been a perfect day if Addie had sold something.
There were so many people taking their afternoon stroll! And so many carriages that the boulevard was a rocking sea of horses’ heads. The whole length of the railings alongside the park was hung with pictures, like a mad carpet. That’s the trouble, of course. Addie’s thoughtful little paintings get lost among the lurid sunsets, the garish portraits, the sentimental pictures of dewy-eyed dogs and children in frilly frocks. He needs to paint on big canvases. Huge canvases. But he sits there on his little folding stool, too proud to ask for recognition. It breaks my heart.
A man walking alone stopped and peered at one of Addie’s pictures. One of my favourites. It’s a house perched on the edge of a precipice. It looks as though it might fall in, but somehow you know that it won’t, that it has the strength to cling on for ever. You see it in the distance, through the trunks of trees, as if you had made a long journey to reach it and feared that it might not be there. There is a light in one of the windows. The colours are mostly violet and ochre, because they were almost all that Addie had left when he painted it.
The man said, “Where did you paint this, Mein Herr?”
Addie doesn’t usually give his pictures titles.
“In poverty,” Addie said.
The man smiled. “So it is an imaginary scene?”
Addie looked down at his broken shoes. I was worried what he might say.
He said, “Of course. Everything that is truly good is imaginary.”
The man nodded, as if he agreed. But then he leaned down and touched Addie on the shoulder. Addie flinched. He doesn’t like to be touched.
The man said, “You paint well, but I happen to disagree with you. Imagination is highly suspect. Reality is what is beautiful. But we are blind to it because it is familiar. Don’t you think it is the task, the duty, of the artist to make reality strange? To refresh the way we see it?”
Addie shrugged. He looked uncomfortable. He has strong views about art, and they differed from this man’s. But he was reluctant to argue with a potential buyer.
He said, “The task of the artist is to pay the damned rent.”
The man smiled again. “True. But the artist volunteers for other responsibilities, does he not? He shows his work and says, ‘Here, see through new eyes.’ For example, the trees in your painting are silver birches. But you have given their bark a lilac colour. Now, when I look at birches in the evening, I shall perhaps find that colour in them. Thus, you will have made a change in my way of seeing, which is a change to my life. A small one, perhaps, but a change nonetheless.”
Addie, for the first time since I’d known him, was stuck for words.
He was saved by a commotion. An outbreak of shouting and cheering, a crush of people onto the pavement. I was shoved back against the railings by the throng and I only just managed to save my hat. A troop of the Imperial Cavalry had clattered onto the Heldenplatz. My view was blocked by the press of bodies. All I could see, in glimpses between heads and shoulders, was the faces of the troopers, stern and identical below the peaks of their crested helmets, the pennants flying from their lances, the heads of their horses tossing. I found it hard to breathe. Not because of the crowding. It was as if the air had all been sucked away, as if the people all around had inhaled at once and left nothing for me. I could feel their excitement drowning me as real as water.
There is a desire for war, which I share but do not understand.
Addie had climbed onto his little stool so as to see over the crowd. He won’t admit it, but he is shorter than I am. I looked up at his face and saw the thrill in it. His blue eyes bright as stars.
When the cavalry had passed by, the man who had perhaps considered buying Addie’s painting had disappeared.
“Where’d he go?” I said.
“Who?”
“That man. The one who liked your painting.”
Addie looked at me as though I was speaking a foreign language.
He shrugged. “To hell with him,” he said. “Did you see the Imperials? Weren’t they magnificent?”
JULY
Werner’s twenty schillings didn’t last long. By the end of June we were hard up once again. Addie couldn’t find much work. Besides, he’s been spending more and more time at meetings of what he calls “the group”. When he comes home he spends hours, sometimes half the night, writing furiously in the cheap notebooks he used to do sketches in. When he’s writing he talks and argues with himself as if I’m not there.
I’m sure that he is a genius. I’m sure that one day he will be really famous. But, in the meantime, we have to eat.
So, two days ago, in the afternoon, while Addie was out, I tidied myself up a bit and went down to the cafe quarter. A man propositioned me and I went with him into the little alleyway behind Schwartzer’s. With the money he gave me I bought a thick slice of pork belly and some potatoes. I came home and was peeling the spuds when someone knocked on the door. The only person who knocks on our door is the landlord when he wants the rent. I stayed silent, hoping he would go away, but I knew he wouldn’t. So I dried my hands and arranged my face and opened up.
It wasn’t the landlord. It was a smiling man in a beautiful pale grey suit. I was so surprised I couldn’t speak. He took his hat off and I saw that it was the man from the park, the one who had talked to Addie about his picture before the cavalry came by and I’d lost my breath.
He didn’t seem to recognize me, though, because he said, “I was told that Herr Hitler lives here. Is that correct?”
I told him yes, it was, but that Addie wasn’t in. He seemed very disappointed. It was awkward, this stranger standing there. I didn’t know what else to say. Then the stairs began to creak and someone coughed, climbing up. The visitor looked over his shoulder. “Might I come in for a moment?”
I could hardly refuse, could I?
In our wretched little flat he was like a fallen angel or something. But he looked around as though he was pleased with everything. He went over to where Addie’s finished or abandoned paintings were propped against the wall and leaned to study them. I had nothing to offer him. Nothing that he would have wanted, anyway.
He straightened up and took a little silver case from his waistcoat pocket. It flipped open as if by magic and he took out a card.
He gave it to me and said, “I should be grateful if you would give Herr Hitler my compliments and ask if he would be so kind as to call upon me at this address. Any morning this week would be suitable. Or next week, if he is busy.”
I nodded and said, “Thank you,” which was stupid. He smiled.
At the door he turned. “Oh, and ask him if he would bring with him his charming little landscape with the lilac birches. You know the one I mean?”
When Addie came home, I told him about the visit and gave him Doctor Solomon Etzmann’s card. He looked at it for a whole minute.
“This man was
here
? A rich Jew was
here
? You let him in?”
“I didn’t know he was a Jew, Addie. He was just the man who talked to you at the Volksgarten. He seemed very nice.”
“God in heaven. What the hell did he want?”
NOVEMBER
He wanted to save us. He really was an angel. So much has happened! I hardly know where to start.
Addie refused to go at first. It took me almost a week to persuade him. He can be very stubborn. But poverty wins all arguments, as my mother used to say. So he went, and when he came back he was glowing.
“He bought the picture! Look!”
Addie put the banknotes on the table like a miracle. I think I cried, I can’t remember. And then he told me that Doctor Etzmann had commissioned him –
commissioned
him! – to do a painting of his country house. Addie is really good at houses. Did I say that already? Anyway, Doctor Etzmann’s house was near Waidhofen something-or-other. Addie had to wait until September, because that was when the trees had the best colour. That was all right, though, because the money for the birches painting kept us going until then.
So off Addie went with his palette and brushes as soon as the leaves started to turn. I thought he might ask me to go with him, but I suppose he decided I might be a distraction. He was gone a whole month. The money ran out – Addie had spent a lot of it on paint – and it was hard for me to make ends meet.
Anyway, he came back looking really well. A bit sunburned. And he’d put a bit of weight on, which suited him. Doctor Etzmann had really liked the painting, and had invited his neighbours to look at it, and three of them had asked Addie to paint their houses, too. Herr Steiner’s in the spring, and Herr Popper’s and someone else’s in the summer. But they’d all given Addie what he called “a retainer”, and Herr Steiner had bought a small landscape, so we had lots of money!
The best thing is that we have a nice new place to live. Addie told Doctor Etzmann that his eyes were failing in the shit hole (he actually used those words) we were living in. And, within a month, Doctor Sol (which is what I call him now, because it makes him laugh) had found us an apartment in the artisan quarter. The stairs are a bit of a climb, but it’s worth it because one of the rooms has a huge north-facing window and the light pours in through it. And when I lug the shopping up, the first thing I see is Addie at his easel turning that light into the special things that only he can see.