the drawing to me and took me in, not as the subject of his drawing but as an object of her appraisal. After quite a long pause, she returned to the drawing and extended her finger to point out something. “Don’t touch,” he hissed, but that only made her bring her finger closer to show him what she judged to be wrong. He pushed her hand aside roughly, which made her laugh. “You never could stand criticism,” she said, and walked away from him, sauntering around the room; if she found something tasty left on a plate, she ate it. He pretended to go on working, but I could feel his attention was more on her, and so was mine. She took her time before leaving, and even when she was half out of the door, she turned again and told me, “Don’t let him keep you sitting too long: once he starts, he doesn’t know when to stop.” It took a long time for him to get back into his concentration, and sometimes he couldn’t manage it at all and we had to stop for the day.
Once, when this happened, he asked me to go for a walk with him. I had noticed that he always took an afternoon walk and usually to the same place. This was a little park we had in the neighborhood-a very artificial little park, with small trees and a small wooden bridge built over a small stream rippling over some white stones. The place seemed dull to me-I was reading the Romantic poets for my Higher Secondary, and my taste was for wild landscapes and numinous presences. Now I saw that this park, which I despised, represented something very delightful to him. It was a spring day that first time I accompanied him, and I had never seen anyone so relish the smell of the first violets and their touch-he bent down to feel them-and the sound of starlings that had joyfully survived the winter. He made me take his arm, a gallant gesture that embarrassed me, and we paraded up and down the winding paths and under the trees that were not big enough to hide the sky. He said he loved everything that was young and fresh-here he pressed my arm a bit, tucked under his; when a blossom floated down and landed in my hair, he picked it out and said, “Ah,
After that first walk, he often asked me to go with him, but I usually refused. It embarrassed me to be seen arm in arm with him, a man who would be older than my father or my uncle, if I had had either one. He never tried to change my mind, but when I saw him walking by himself, he looked sad and lonely, so I went with him more often than I wanted to. It was a strange and entirely new sensation for me to see another person happy in my company when I myself had no such feeling at all. He was undoubtedly happy in that pathetic little park, listening to birds and smelling flowers, walking up and down with me, a sixteen-year-old, on his arm. But when we sat on the bench by the stream and he recited Baudelaire in French, I became wistful. I realized that the situation was, or should have been, romantic-if only
He began to invite me on other outings, such as his Sunday afternoon visits to galleries and museums. I went with him a few times but did not enjoy it, starting from the long tube ride where we sat side by side and I wanted people to think we were not together. Looking back now, all these years later, I see that it should have been regarded as a great privilege for me to see great paintings with an artist such as Kohl, who had once been famous (and would become so again). He kept me close beside him, standing in front of the paintings he had come to view, usually only two or three. He made no attempt to explain anything to me, only pointed at certain details that I wouldn’t have thought extraordinary-light falling on an apple, or a virgin's knee-and saying, “Ah, ah, ah,” with the same ecstasy as when he was working. Afterward he treated me to a cup of coffee. There were, at the time, only certain standard eating places in London that he could afford: dingy rooms with unfriendly elderly waitresses, especially depressing if it was raining outside, as it often was, and we had to remain uncomfortable in our wet coats and shoes. But he seemed to enjoy these occasions, even the bad coffee, and continued to sit there after the waitress had slapped down the bill in front of him. At last I had to tell him that my aunt would be worried if I came home too late. Then he regret- fully got up; and it was only at that last moment, when he was picking up the bill, that his hand brushed against mine very delicately, very shyly, and he smiled at me in the same way, delicate and shy.
The only times I really liked to be with him were in his studio when he was drawing me. All I saw out of his window was a patch of sky with some chimneys rearing up into it. When it got dark and he turned on the light, even that view disappeared. Then there was only the room itself, which had an iron bed, often unmade, and a wooden table full of drawings, and the pictures that he painted at night, showing the backs of the canvases, piled one against another on every available space of wall. The floor was bare and had paint splashed all over it. He had a one-burner gas ring, on which I don’t think he ever cooked; all I saw him eat was a herring or a fried egg sandwich bought at a corner shop. He seemed to be always at work, deeply immersed in it and immersing me with him. This was what I responded to-it was the first time I was in the presence of an artist practicing his art, and later, when I began to be a writer, I often thought of it, and it inspired me.
Our occupation with each other was entirely innocent, but it went on too long and perhaps too often, so that others began to take notice. My aunt, La Plume, would call up, “Don’t you have any homework?” or make excuses to send me on errands she didn’t need. When I came down, she would look at me in a shrewd way. Once she said, “You know, artists are not like the rest of us.” When I didn’t understand, or pretended not to, she said, “They don’t have the same morals.” To illustrate, she had some anecdote about herself and my mother, who had both been crazy about the opera and hung about the stage door in the hope of meeting the artists. Here she began to smile and forget about artists in general to tell me about a particular tenor. He had taken a liking to my mother, who looked more forward than she was, with her shingled hair and very short skirt showing a lot of silk stocking. He had invited the two girls to his flat. “His wife was there, and another woman we thought may have been another wife for him, you know, a mistress.” Her smile became a laugh, more pleasure than outrage, as she remembered the atmosphere, which was so different from their own home that they had an unspoken pact never to tell about their visits to the tenor's flat. In the end, they stopped going; there were too many unexplained relationships and too many quarrels, and what had seemed exciting to them at first was now unsettling. Shortly afterward both of them became engaged to their respective suitors-a bookkeeper and a teacher (my father). When she had finished this story, she said, “So you see,” but I didn’t see anything, especially not what it might have to do with me, who anyway had no suitor to fall back on.
Marta began to come in frequently and to stay longer than she used to. She perched on a stool just behind him, so that he could not see but could certainly feel her. And hear her-she talked all the time, criticizing his drawing, the state of his cheerless room, the cold that he seemed never to notice, except that in the worst weather he wore gloves with the fingers cut off. In the end he gave up-his concentration was long gone-and he threw his pencil aside and said, “But what do you want?”
She stretched her green eyes wide open at him: “Want? What could I possibly want from you, my poor Kohl?”
But once she answered, “I want to invite you to my birthday party.”
He cursed her birthday and her party and that made her open her eyes even wider, greener: “But don’t you remember? You used to
Birthdays were always made a fuss over, even for those lodgers whom no one liked much. I suppose that, in celebrating a day of birth as something special, everyone was trying to take the place of a lost family for everyone else. Usually these parties were held in our basement kitchen, which was the only room large enough-the rest of the house was cut up into individual small units for renting out. My aunt was known as a good sort and was the only one everyone could get on with; she was always willing for people to come down to her kitchen and tell her their troubles as though she had none of her own. For birthday parties she covered the grease stains and knife cuts on our big table with a cloth and made the bed she slept on look as much as possible like a sofa for guests to sit on. She arranged sausage slices on bread and baked a cake with margarine and eggs someone had got on the black market. Those who wanted liquor brought their own bottles, though she didn’t encourage too much drinking; it seemed to make people melancholy or quarrelsome and spoiled the general mood of celebration.
Marta's party was held not in our kitchen but in her room at the top of the house. Since this was too small to accommodate many people, she had persuaded Kohl to open his studio across the landing for additional space. Although the two rooms were identical in size, their appearances were very different. While his was strictly a workplace, with nothing homelike in it, hers was all home, all coziness. There were colorful rugs, curtains, heaps
