V.
He
had a place
to go which, by coincidence, Oleg had never referenced. Strysky Park was quiet
and somewhat lonely above the southern skirt of the old city, wooded like so
many parts of Kiev. Much was artificial, though, in the groomed swan pond and
faux castle ruins. By the middle of his third full day in the city, Yakov had
practiced his Tevye voice at a little clearing near the Rapunzel tower: he
envisioned a one-man act that would have the milkman pulling a small cart—lost,
as it were, on his route and bewildered by the grandeur of the city. “Flogging a dead horse won’t make it run any
faster,” he read, then looked up from the book and improvised lines to no
one in particular, “and by horse I mean myself, who is (as he speaks) more out
of life than the resident robotnik of this very milkcart”—throwing his head
back as if jerked by some bridle. “Yes, being lame from his labors is no
vacation, but see how cleverly the roles are reversed: he rests in his stable
and watches his dear Tevye toil, not even giving me the tips of his trade! And
pulling all day with eyes in the mud, I’ve managed to thoroughly lose my way
home.” Yakov flipped his book open to an earmarked page and read verbatim,
“You see the tears in
my eyes, Pan Sholem Aleichem, and yet must be thinking, how Tevye misses his
horse! But what makes you think it’s just my horse? I miss everything, there’s
not one thing it doesn’t grieve me to think of. I miss my horse, I miss my
village, I miss its elders, I miss its policeman, I miss the dachas of
Boiberik, the rich Jews of Yeupetz, I even miss Efrayim the Matchmaker, may the
cholera carry him off! When you get right down to it, he’s nothing but a
miserably poor Jew himself who’s out to make a living like the rest of us.
Don’t ask me what I’ll do in the Land of Israel if I get there safely, God
willing, but I do plan to visit Mother Rachel in her grave. I’ll pray there for
the daughters I’ll probably never see again, and think of him, too—I mean Efrayim
the Matchmaker—and of you, and of Jews everywhere. Here, let’s shake on that!
Be well, and have a good trip, and give my very best to any of our friends you
may happen to meet on your way.”
He clapped
the book shut and burrowed it into his long pants pocket, and mimed a renewed
grasp of the cart handles. “As for my journey today, well, it’s only to get
food to my noble lame horse, so tomorrow perhaps the rest of us creatures can
eat!”
“So where is your cap to receive
your earned alms?” an amused voice came from a bench behind him, and Yakov
pivoted in some surprise.
“Earned?” he tried to temper an
oncoming blush. “That was just reading…uh…a rudimentary rehearsal of…”
“You’re supposed to say: the cap
doesn’t come off of Tevye’s head. Tell them to toss what they will into your
cart—well, assuming the cart will be there for the catching.”
“Will you be my manager, then—with due
royalties befitting a manager?”
“I don’t know. Who would have to answer
to the passing policeman?”
“I haven’t gotten that far. At any
rate, I’ve lost my way, remember?”
They talked on the bench for a half
hour before she needed to go—back to work, she said, at the Picture Gallery.
“On Stefanyk Street. Do you know it?”
“No. I don’t know much here yet—I’m
quite literally off my beaten track.”
“It’s this way, through Khelnytsky
and Citadel parks—a hard trek up but easy down.” She stood and tugged at his
sleeve to join. “Don’t forget your horse cart!” They walked leisurely while she
explained that she took lunch breaks up here but always got a bad look from the
other women who watched the rooms at the museum, as their breaks were finished
in a fraction of time. “They’re resentful, most of them, that I’m the
director’s daughter, and that I’m only working to fill the summer hours.”
“You’re a student, then?”
“At the mathematics faculty—Papa
wants art history, but I don’t much care for that. I’m not sure I care much for
theorems and postulates, but at least I’m pretty good at all that, or so my
professors say. Are you studying here?”
“Unofficially, yes. Exactly what you
see.”
“Maybe you’d be good at art
history.”
“Well, I could use a job.”
“You’d probably have to dress up
like an old, grim lady!”
“But you’re not that.”
“I’m the director’s daughter. If I
stayed there forever, I’d look like them.” They strolled slowly down the hill and
stopped at the Stefanyk Library. “Across the street is the museum. This place
is nice, too, though the ladies here are just as grim.”
“All grim things have vanished
today. Thank you for the walk…”
“Yulia, I’m called. And You?”
“I am a stranger in a strange land—”
“Moses, or is that another piece of
Tevye’s narrative?”
“Both of those, yes, but you can
know me as Yakov.”
“Then I will.”
Park gates did not open until 6, and
sweepers would catch any drunk that the closing guards would, rather unlikely,
miss. By hopping the fence, Yakov would have to remain awake and evade
detection, and sort play off the sunrise and disappearing stars. The ground was
cold and damp, so he wasn’t tempted to lie down. He found the best place to
stay was behind the ice cream kiosk, which wouldn’t open until mid-morning at
least. There he also found a fifty kopek coin pressed into the soil; he gave a
wry smile at the sum total of his present fortunes. The chessboard on his
suitcase lent for potential bet-and-wins, but through his fleeting experience
around the city, he saw no such enterprises or public interest in the game. The
day would unfold in long uncertainties.
When Yulia did not show up for the
lunch hour, Yakov decided to take his chances as well as his life savings to
the museum, even though he wished in part not to see her there. He wondered
whether his suitcase would be an asset or obstacle to his plan, and decided to lug
it along as a safeguard. He practiced what he’d say to get in, and found it rather
natural not to lie: “I’ve come from Kiev, a student of the humanities… No, not just off the train, but I haven’t found
my long-term lodging yet—if may I check my suitcase in the cloakroom… My name
is Jürgen, and I hope my modest budget will
permit me the pleasure…” And indeed these lines ushered him past the
sympathetic cashier and up the stairs of the gallery.
The first rooms allowed no place to
sit down, so he suffered the need to stand and observe as much as could—he
could not afford to rush through the twenty-or-so rooms and be left with
nothing to do afterwards. When he came to a broad painting by Johann Baptist
Reiter, he smiled at the opportunity to sit at the opposite wall and study the
theme at length. ‘Joseph Sold into Egypt’ included all twelve brothers, halved
as it were by the central, glowing figure of the title character; there was no
Egyptian—the sale, it seemed, had not been made and perhaps this was a final filial
moment to consider all angles of their present and future. Benjamin looked
older than his full-blooded brother, perhaps because he, too, had come into the
world at cost. There was, of course, no hint of Jacob. Because he was now a
student—not merely acting as one—Yakov pursued this thought to a smaller
painting by Zigmunt Sidorwicz, whose title ‘Object Proof (Corpus Delicte)’
appeared bent to say too much, even though the ‘proof’ of the artist’s theme
required some ardent detective work. The eleven-year girl in the painting,
dressed as finely as her young mother, wasn’t asking at this point in the
scene, and perhaps her mute stare would have been just as frozen a day before, or
remain so a week later, or until she too had a palm-sized portrait of a dashing
man attired in an officer’s uniform. ‘He existed,’ the voice of the painting
seemed to say, ‘and truly is as central as this frame within a frame within a
frame…’
Yakov asked the guard, sitting at
the edge of her chair and not so grim, if many visitors looked long at this
painting. “Not as long as you,” she said.
“Do they study ‘Joseph Sold into
Egypt’?”
“That they do. Some of them.”
“Do they wonder where the father
is?”
“I don’t know.”
Between these rooms was a statue that
commanded Yakov’s attention, even if he had forced his feet to shuffle past it.
Now that he had indicated to the guard his interest in Reiter’s painting, he backtracked
to that room and gave the statue a further, passing stare. This retracing was
not perfunctory—he really wanted to look more deeply at the physiognomies of
Reuben, Levi, Dan, Asher… And, satisfying that, he turned to the room of Salvador
Albano’s marble sculpture and stopped. A nude figure about Yulia’s size and
shape balanced upon a pedestal, pulling at a rope that bound her wrists. She
was, by her title, a slave: intensely looking at an area perhaps two body-lengths
away (or one, if it hadn’t been for the pedestal). Her hair lay in a rough
attempt at a braid—the hempen manacles just enough to tantalize her
manipulation of things. Her body looked ready to spring free and defied any
frozen, naïve effect of one who might wonder, in luxury, about paternity or loyalty
or loss.
Yakov went past Sidorwicz and the edge-of-chair
guard, then into the next room, where he studied the eviction of a peasant
family: Our Lady of Kazan above their
open door, a broken sack of coins strewn on the floor—as bribe or insufficient
funds. Another guard, when asked, said she had heard a university guide’s
interpretation that the painter, Zheledowski, had in large championed the
communist cause with this work. The icon wouldn’t save the family any more than
their capital. Yakov moved on.
In a rather large room, strangely,
there was no guard, but on a far bench sat the only other visitor yet that
afternoon. Yakov surmised he was middle-aged, though his back was to the door
where Yakov silently entered. His legs were V-d apart, trembling spasmodically
as the heels of his shoes spurred the parquet floor. In front of his uplifted
head were two tall paintings of similar style: one with a nymph and another
with a faceless woman draped against some angled barrier. Thinking fast, Yakov
skulked back one room and whispered to the guard that another visitor was in
the throes of an ecstasy inappropriate to the environs. The guard swung her head
downward and shrugged. Yakov retreated closer to the entrance and whispered the
same thing to the first guard, who followed him to the threshold of the larger
room. “Can you do something?” she pleaded into Yakov’s ear. He considered the
situation and slowly nodded. Just as softly he asked, “May I borrow your badge,
please?” She unpinned it and placed it gratefully into his hand. As he attached
it to his shirt and walked towards the absorbed man, Yakov cast a sort of
prayer, vaguely cognizant of valleys of the shadows of death and such. Laments
were rife in life—the psalmist codifying the basic instinct to complain and
give over. Let go, if desperately clutching to the semblance of control we
know. “Let go,” he heard himself say, in no larger volume than he had just used
with the guards. He was now in front of the grimacing man, partially obscuring
the view that he had fixed for his licentious foray. “I’ll have to ask you to
leave, comrade.”
“You can’t do—”
“On behalf of this museum and all
things decent, I must… You see, children visit, as well as guests from many
cultures. I myself have the right to be free from your intentions. And you have
the right to conform to the expectations here.”
“Who are you, anyway? I’ve come to
this place regularly and have never been—”
“Both of us have said too much under
the circumstances. I’ll escort you this way, comrade.”
Years of setting circus apparatus,
wrangling limelit animals, and pushing through some madding crowds provided
Yakov a sinewy sense to his comportment. Even his limp, vaguely apparent and
far from being a handicap, lent ethos to his present, gentle grasp of the violator’s
shoulder as they shuffled past the witnessing guards and the ticket-taker, down
the staircase and into the foyer, where the doorman quizzically took the
recommendation to “see this comrade out, please.”
Then Yakov returned to the where the
dumbfounded women still stood, handed back the badge, and continued to look at the
artwork. He didn’t go back to the tall paintings, but spent some time in front
of ‘Jewish Funeral in the Town’ in the same big room, where he tried to
determine whether the impressionistic coffin was being shouldered up or down
the alley stairs, by equally impressionistic Hasidic men. The largest painting in
the room was Josef Brandt’s ‘Prayer in the Steppe’. Were they matins or
vespers, Yakov wondered. The garish red glow from the half sun on the horizon
seemed to sear into the icon on the side of a stagecoach, and Yakov’s mind went
back to the eviction—all art, he realized, could travel in capillary courses.
He spent halcyon time in front of a dozen more paintings in the next two rooms,
then came to the second sculpture on display, a Polish piece in bronze entitled
‘A Mother’s Kiss’. It was exactly what one would intuit, minus the dug out
interior behind their heads. The child was maybe four years old, clasping
wholly his mother’s neck and seizing her with wide open eyes; the mother, with
eyes closed and more seeing, kissed her boy’s forehead and all essence therein,
and Yakov began to cry. Subtly, of course, as there was no reason to; and, if
he thought, like Tevye, about how he might be authored, it wasn’t exactly what
one might call—
“Sir?” a gentleman spoke urbanely
from the far left of Yakov’s periphery. “Are you okay?”
Glancing self-consciously, Yakov
swallowed and uttered, “quite fine.”
“I’m glad for it,” the gentleman said,
and approached with a practiced savior faire. “I am the director of this museum—Pyotr
Nemcenov—and I have been made aware of your citizenship exploits—”
Yakov thought quickly, as he had
done before, and elected not to speak too soon, but also not to let slip the
inertia that arguably comes from answered prayer. “I am a student of the
humanities,” he began to say, “from Kiev. I haven’t found my long-term… chance
to study further… in L’vyiv, but this day—this remarkable museum—has been—”
“Your visit to us has been remarkable. Simply said, Comrade, uh—”
“Jürgen.”
“Yuri, is it?”
Yakov flit the possibility, then
pronounced more clearly: “Jürgen.
My father was of German heritage.”
“Comrade Jürgen—well! Simply said, you have fixed a fault that has
occasionally reared its ugly head, challenging the needs of our total
operational security. I think you know what I mean, and I thank you for your aplomb.”
The director smiled at the sound of his congratulation and waited a moment for
Yakov to take it in.
“Thank you, Director—I really hadn’t
expected any kind of recognition, as I was simply acting on instinct—”
“Exactly, dear Jürgen, which delights me more than if you were acting on
orders. My hired guards—don’t get me wrong—relayed by their instinct what they have had difficulty doing in the line of
their orders: this indulgent man has been, to say the least, a tricky problem
here—he’s rare, he’s of some repute, and he cares not at all about those he
deems inferior. Lenin might have qualified him as counter-revolutionary, and
(off the record) if we were fully realized as a state, I’d pronounce likewise.
But who am I? Merely a lover of art! And some may say he’s likewise! My service
to the state is to be director of such art, and his, we may extrapolate, is to
take what we provide into his own vortex as director of something else. And by
saying this, Jürgen, I mean to exonerate you from any
ramifications but also to remind you of how intertwined we all, as servants to
the state, really are… Do you understand what I am saying?”
Yakov, in a practiced sense, thought
rapidly and responded, “clearly, Director.”
Since neither spoke for a half
minute, the moment seemed to have suitably passed. But each of them knew,
intuitively, that more was at stake. Yakov calculated in silence and newfound
prayer; Pyotr kept his level eye and finally broached this prospect: “we could
use a guard like you—especially, if I recall you saying, you’re a student of
art?”
“A student of the humanities—”
“All the better: you mean by that
the study of us all!” Pyotr chuckled.
“More or less. I mean literature
first and foremost, but yes, that probably means ‘of us all’.”
“Could I offer you a job here, as
guard to begin with?”
“I mostly need a place to stay—a job
would be welcome, as well.”
“Then consider it done, Jürgen. I have need for new watchmen as the fall season
approaches. This won’t hamper your study commitment in.. did you say,.. Kiev?”
“Not in the least, as I’m taking
leave from that place.”
“Then come to my office, Jürgen, to settle the details.”
“Thank you, sir,” and the details
were settled.
The third lunch break into his new
job, Yakov trudged up the hill to Strysky Park as he had the days before,
hoping to explain things to Yulia. He had barely seen her on her varying
shifts, but recognized her disguised scowl when, to her surprise, one of the
veteran guards took him on a training tour. She evaded any introduction to
Yakov, while her peers—even the grimmer ones—were positively atwitter. Men
worked in the floors below, where many thousands of pieces of art were archived
or part of a restoration process; to have a man on their floor meant to have
more to think about. And Yulia hated sharing that thought. “Why did you go
behind my back to impress my father?” she blurted before he knew she was there.
“Why did you embarrass me by parading like a peacock?”
Yakov scratched whatever small beard
he had shaved off in these days of employment. He didn’t smile, but felt
relieved that she had broken her silence. He waited for her to say something
else, and when she didn’t, he slid into the side of the bench that she had
turned her back on. “I’ve missed you,” he finally offered. “And I’ve missed
what it means to let fate be guided by faith.”
She listened to the details of the
night he had left Oleg’s flat, the morning in this very park, the contemplation
that on fifty kopeks and a chess board he’d try to gamble his way back to
Samarkand for lack of anywhere else to go. Yulia turned to him in confusion:
“Who are you anyway in this homeless condition? What did you do? Why are you
pulling me into…”
Yakov raised his eyebrows. “Into?”
“Into your life story, because I’m
falling for you if you can’t tell!”
“I can’t. I mean, I am, too—if that
is—”
“O God, Yakov, we’re going to be
late, and Daddy will be suspicious and the hags will hate me more and—”
“You go ahead first—I’ll take the
heat for being late.”
“Be here after 8 tonight, and walk
me to your home.”
“You mean Samarkand?”
At last she smiled, and kissed him, and
rushed down the hill. “Seven-thirty, then,” she called, and he closed his eyes
to keep it all in.
They didn’t exactly elope; they made
believe, though, flirtingly close to Pyotr’s knowledge. He rarely visited the
exhibition halls of his own museum, so had no real idea how his daughter and
newest employee intersected their shifts through the day. Other guards could
see their sometime shamelessness—not that they held hands or frolicked to the
shadier rooms. They stayed to their posts, mainly, and when visitors were few
they gravitated to a certain piece of art and talked. “How does your father justify
so many religious themes? How does he get by?” he asked her as they looked over
Tadueuz Ajdukiewicz’ ‘Prayer in the Desert’.
“I don’t know. Why don’t you ask
him?”
“And does this one with its Sudanese
Muslims serve a sort of ballast for the ‘Prayer in the Steppe’ next door?”
“Are you still praying about me?”
“Are you?”
“I’m learning to. Maybe that’s what
these pictures were meant to do.”
“I mean they’re all over this place
if you think about it: there’s Leopolski’s ‘Praying Jew’—granted, not such a
remarkable picture but well painted—and that ‘Funeral in the Town’—”
“Do you think they’re praying in
that one?”
“Someone probably… that the coffin
doesn’t drop.”
“I’ve seen that happen, by the way.”
“A coffin dropping?”
“A man slipping at the gravesite as
the other pallbearers were negotiating the position—it was raining, the mud was
uncooperative…”
“And so he fell all the way in?”
“No, but he lingered at the edge as
if he had time to think about it. Meanwhile, the pallbearers strained against
the weight and their own lack of footing—don’t laugh, it was my mother’s dear
uncle!”
“Not laughing, just musing.”
“About my great uncle?”
“About the equipoise one has to keep,
even in such circumstances.”
“You mean the way a person walks a
tightrope, like you described last night?”
“What I described was child’s play.
But yes, I suppose there is some of that in the most serious of occasions. That
is what art does, I’m starting to think: depict the hardest human scenarios in
the strokes of very practiced doodlers.”
“Shall I tell that to Daddy? He
might promote you to a guide! Just in time for the gradeschool visits!”
“Tell your daddy that I love you.”
“No. Joking aside, he’d banish you
and bind me to this prison of prayer paintings forever. Don’t let him know
that.”
“See, that’s what I meant last
night: I’ve spellbound many an audience with tumbles and scares, yet nothing
about the acts I performed were honest-to-goodness risks. There was nobody I
loved at stake. Well, that sounds rather inhuman—I mean that…”
“…that you’ll walk through fire but
not say anything to Daddy.”
“That I’ll remain a disciple of this
‘prison of prayer’, as you say.”
“And I’ll do math problems, right?”
“We’ll have most interesting kids…”
“Of course we will—they will be born
and bred among the swans at Strysky Park!”
“I’ve
known worse launches in life.” Yakov continued to muse. “But perhaps never
better.”
[a projected four more chapters to come]
