The O Henry Prize Stories 2005

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala Refuge in London

from Zoetrope

ALL THE people-the lodgers-in my aunt's boardinghouse had a history I had missed out on. I had been brought to England when I was two-“our little Englander,” they called me. I knew no other place, and I felt that this made me, in comparison with them, rather blank. Of course I liked speaking English as naturally as the girls at my school, and in other ways too being much the same. But I wasn’t, ever, quite like them, having grown up in this house of European emigres, all of them so different from the parents of my schoolfellows and carrying a past, a country or countries-a continent-distinct from the one in which they now found themselves.

They were not always the same lodgers. There was a quick turnover, for some of them prospered and moved, others had to make different arrangements when they could no longer come up with the rent. My aunt, with whom I lived in the basement, was a kind landlady, but beyond a certain point she could not afford to be generous. Also-for my sake, she said- she had to be more strictly moral than it was maybe in her nature to be. The circumstances of emigres are not so much bound by conventional morality as by the emotional refuge they manage to find with each other. There is always some looseness in these arrangements, odd marital and extramarital situations: for instance, Dr. Levicus, who had started off in one of the rooms with his wife to whom he had been married for thirty years, replaced her with a young lady of twenty, also a refugee but nowhere near his level of refinement. My aunt was prepared to wink at such behavior; she knew how difficult life could be. But she did give notice to Miss Wundt, who, having taken her room as a single lady, had different men coming out of it in the mornings and could often be heard screaming insults after them as they made their shamefaced way down the stairs.

But the Kohls were tolerated year after year, though they were not at all regular with the rent, or in their morals. They were not expected to be; they were artists. Kohl was a painter, and in pre-Hitler Germany he had been famous. His wife, Marta, said she had been an actress, also a dancer, though not famous in either capacity. They rented the two top rooms but lived in them more or less separately. One room was his, his studio; she also referred to hers as a studio, though she didn’t do anything artistic in there. She was much younger than he was and very attractive, a tiny redhead. It was unlikely that, if he had not been famous, she would ever have married someone so much older and so undistinguished in appearance. He was short and plump, also bald except for a fringe of hair at the back; he had an unattractive mustache that she called his toilet brush. He didn’t seem to care that lovers came to visit her in her room; when that happened, he shut the door of his and went on painting. He painted all the time, though I don’t think he sold anything during those years. I’m not sure what they lived on, probably on an allowance from some relief organization. For a time she had a job in the German section of the BBC, but she soon lost it. There were too many others far more competent and also more reliable than she, who found it impossible ever to be on time for anything.

Mann was another of our lodgers. His first name was Gustav, but no one ever called him anything except Mann. I disliked him. He was loud and boastful and took up more time in the second-floor bathroom we all had to share than anyone except Marta. Another reason I disliked him was that he was one of the men who spent time with Marta in her room, making Kohl shut the door of his. I had no such negative feelings about her other male visitors, but was as indifferent to them as Kohl seemed to be. He too was not indifferent to Mann. Whenever they met on the stairs, he said something insulting to him, which Mann received with good humor. “Okay, okay, my friend, take it easy,” he said, and even soothingly tapped his shoulder. Then Kohl cried, “Don’t touch me!” and jerked away from him. Once he stumbled and rolled down several steps, and Mann laughed. Mann also used to laugh whenever he passed me. I was sixteen at the time and not attractive, and he made me feel even less so by pretending that I was. “Charming,” he said, fingering the navy school tunic I wore and hated. It was my last two years at school-I felt I was too old for it, I wanted to get out, longing for what I thought of as a real world.

Those particular years are probably difficult for most girls, and it didn’t help that they happened to be the postwar ones in England, with drab food, drab climate, and clothes not only rationed but made of a thick standard material called “utility.” But that didn’t really matter; I wasn’t so much responsive to what was going on outside as to what was going on inside me. My surroundings were only a chrysalis for me to burst out of and become something else. Only what? I didn’t feel that I could ever be butterfly material, and whenever Mann looked at me and said his tongue-in-cheek “Charming,” it was obvious that this was also his opinion.

It was different with Kohl. I often sat for him while he drew me. Unable to afford a model, he had already drawn most of the people in the house, including my aunt. She had looked at her portrait with round eyes and her hand before her mouth in only partly amused distress: “No- really?” she said. But it really was she, not perhaps as she was meant to be-as, in more hopeful years, she had expected to be-but how she had become, after the war, after survival, after hard domestic work she was not born to, and the habitual shortage of money that was also unexpected. It was my aunt who had brought me to England, more or less tearing me out of my mother's arms, promising her that she would soon be reunited with me. This never happened: after the age of two, I never again saw my mother, nor my father, nor any other relative. Only my aunt-her name was Elsa, but I called her La Plume (from my French lesson-“La Plume de ma Tante”). She was nearly fifty at the time; some nights I saw her asleep on her bed in a kitchen alcove-her heavy red swollen face, her graying hair bedraggled on a pillow, her mouth open and emitting the groans she must have suppressed during the day. It was this person whom she did not recognize in Kohl's drawing of her.

I was always ready to sit for my portrait. Once I was home from school, I had nowhere else to go. I didn’t share many of the interests of my classmates, nor was I involved in their intense relationships, which were mostly with each other. When I was invited to their homes, I found them smaller than mine, more cramped in every way. They lived in semidetached or row houses, with rectangular stretches of gardens at the backs where their fathers dug and grew vegetables on their days off from their jobs as postmen or bus conductors. Only one family lived in each house, whereas ours swarmed with people, each one carrying a distinct history, usually the load of a ruined past. The unruly lives of our lodgers were reflected in the state of our back garden. It was wildly overgrown, for no one knew how to mow the grass, even if we had had anything to mow it with; buried within its rough tangle lay the pieces of a broken statue, which had been there ever since we moved in. Ours was one of the few tall old houses left that had not been pulled down in the reconstruction of the neighborhood in the thirties, or bombed during the war. Its pinnacle was Kohl's studio on the top floor, and when I sat for him, I felt myself to be detached from and floating above the tiled roofs of the little English villas among which our boardinghouse had come to anchor.

Kohl worked through the night, painting huge canvases in oil that one saw only in glimpses, for he either covered them with cloth or turned them to face the walls. These paintings were not interesting to me-in fact, I thought they were awful: great slashing wounds of color, completely meaningless, like someone else's nightmare or the deepest depths of a subconscious mind. But when he drew me, it was always in the day. He perched close to me, knee to knee, holding a pad on his lap and drawing on it in pencil or charcoal. While he was working, Kohl was always happy, almost ecstatic. He and his hand were effortlessly united in one fluid action over the paper onto which he was transferring me. He smiled, he hummed, he whispered a little to himself, blissfully, and when his eyes darted toward me, that blissful smile remained. “Ah, sweet” he breathed, now at his drawing, now at me. I too felt blissful; no one had ever looked at me or murmured over me in such a way; and although I had of course no sentiment for him-this small, paunchy, middle-aged man-at such moments I did feel a bond with him, not so much as between two persons but as something coming alive between us. There was always movement in the house, noise: doors, voices, footsteps, so many people were living in it. But we there at the top felt entirely alone and bound to each other in his art.

The one person who ever disturbed us was his wife, Marta-and she was not only a disturbance but a disruption into our silence, or an eruption into it. Although they were living separately in their separate rooms, she entered his as of right, its rightful mistress. Without a glance at me, she went straight to look over his shoulder at the drawing: she stood there, taking it in. I felt the instrument in his hand stumble in its effortless motion. There was a change of mood in everything except Marta, who kept standing behind him, looking, judging. She had one little hand on her hip, which was slightly thrust forward in a challenging way. Her glinting green eyes darted from