The O Henry Prize Stories 2005

of cushions, lampshades with tassels, and most of the year she kept her gas fire going day and night, careless of the shillings that it swallowed. There were no drawings or paintings-Kohl never gave her any-but a lot of photographs, mostly of herself having fun with friends, when she was much younger but also just as pretty.

On that afternoon, her birthday, she was very excited. She rushed to meet each new arrival and, snatching her present, began at once to unwrap it, shrieking. Apart from my aunt and myself, the guests were all men. She hadn’t invited any of our female lodgers, such as Miss Wundt (who was anyway under notice to move out), and these must have been skulking down in their rooms with the party stamping on top of them. Not all the men lived in our house. Some I didn’t know, though I might have seen them on the stairs on their visits to Marta, often carrying flowers. There was one very refined person, with long hair like an artist's rolling over his collar. He wasn’t an artist but had been a lawyer and now worked in a solicitor's office, not having a license to practice in England. Another, introduced as a Russian nobleman, bowed from the waist in a stately way but was soon very drunk, so that his bows became as stiff as those of a mechanical figure. The reason he could become so drunk was that there was a great deal of liquor brought by the more affluent guests who were not our lodgers: for instance, there was one man who, although also a refugee, had done very well in the wholesale garment business.

Trying to keep up with the rest of the party, I too drank more than I should have. When my aunt saw me refilling my glass, she shook her head and her finger at me. I pretended not to see this warning, but Mann drew attention to it: “Let the little one learn how the big people live!” he shouted. And to me he said, “You like it? Good, ah? Better than school! Just grow up and you’ll see how we eat and drink and do our etceteras!”

“Tcha, keep your big mouth shut,” La Plume told him, and he bent down to hug her, which she pretended not to like. He was obviously enjoying himself, making the most of the unaccustomed supply of liquor by drinking a lot of it. But he was not in the least drunk-I suppose his big size allowed him to absorb it more easily than others. Of course he was loud as usual, with a lot of bad jokes, but that was his style. He appeared to dominate the party as though he were its host; and Marta treated him like one, sending him here and there to fill vases and open bottles. If he didn’t do it well or fast enough, she called him a donkey.

The guests overflowed to the landing and through the open door into Kohl's studio. Some of them were looking at his paintings, making quite free with them. They even turned around those facing the wall, the big canvases he painted at night and never showed anyone. The lawyer with the long hair waved his delicate white fingers at them and interpreted their psychological significance. But where was Kohl? No one seemed to have noticed that he was missing. I became aware of his absence only when I saw the lawyer draw attention to a drawing of myself: “Here we see delight not in a particular person but in Youth with a capital Y.”

It was Marta who shouted, “What rubbish are you spouting there?… And where's Kohl, the idiot, leaving the place open for every donkey to come and give his opinion… Where is he? Why isn’t he at my party? Go and find him,” she ordered Mann, as though Kohl's absence were his fault.

Mann turned to me: “Do you know where he is?”

“How would she know?” Marta said.

“Of course she knows. She's Youth with a capital Y. She inspires him.”

If I had been just a little bit younger, I would have kicked his shins; anyway, I almost did. But Marta laughed: “Sneaking away from my party, isn’t that just like him. Go and find him if you know where he is,” she now ordered me. “Oh yes, and tell him where the hell is my present?”

I was glad to leave the party. It was irritating to see people go into Kohl's studio and freely comment on his paintings. The lawyer's explanation of my drawing had been like a violation, not of myself but of Kohl's work and of my share in it, however passive. And it was not Youth, it was I-I myself!-whom no one had ever cared to observe as Kohl did… I ran down the stairs furiously and then down the street and around the corner to the little park.

He was sitting on the bench beside the stream. He was holding a flat packet wrapped in some paper with designs on it that he must have drawn himself: an elephant holding a sprig of lilac, a hippo in a bathtub. When I asked him if it was for Marta, he nodded gloomily. I said, “She was asking for her present.” He got angry, his face and ears swelled red, so I said quickly, “It was a joke.”

“No. No joke. This is her character: to take and take, if she could she would suck the marrow from a man's soul. From my soul… Who's there with her? All of them? That one with the long hair and lisping like a woman? He thinks he knows about art but all he knows is how to lick her feet.”

It was a lovely summer night, as light as if it were still dusk. How wonderful it was to have these long days after our gloomy winter: to sit outdoors, to enjoy a breeze even though it was still a little cool. It sent a slight shiver over the stream and flickered the remnant of light reflected in the water. During the day two swans glided there, placed by the municipality, but now they must have been asleep and instead there were two stars on the surface of the sky, still pale, though later they would come into their own and become shining jewels, diamonds. There was fragrance from a lilac bush. I would have liked to have a lover sitting beside me instead of Kohl, so angry from thinking of Marta.

I said, “Is it true you used to write a poem for her on her birthday?”

“She remembers, ha?” His anger seemed to fade, maybe he was smiling a bit under that ugly mustache brush. “Yes, I wrote poems, not one, not only on her birthday, but a flood. A flood of poems… It's the only way, you see, to relieve the pressure. On the heart; the pressure on the heart.”

I recognized what he said, having felt that pressure, though in an unspecified form. So far I didn’t quite know what it was about, or even whether it was painful or extremely pleasant.

“Is he there-that Mann? What a beast. When he's on the stairs, there is a smell, like a beast in rut. Musth they call it. You don’t know what that means.” I knew very well but didn’t say so, for he was wiping his mouth, as though it had been dirtied by these words or by his having spoken them.

“Here, you give it to her.” He thrust his packet at me. “She’ll get no more presents from me and no more poems and no more nothing. All that was for a different person… I’ll show you.”

He snatched the packet back, his hands trembled in undoing the knot; but he handled it carefully to avoid tearing the paper, which he-and so far he alone-knew to be valuable. Then he folded it back, revealing the contents. It was a drawing of Marta. He looked from it to me, almost teasing: “You don’t even recognize her.” He held it out to me, not letting me touch it.

The lampposts in the park were designed to resemble toadstools, and the light they shed was not strong enough to overcome what was still left of the day. So it was by a mixture of electric and early evening light that I first saw this drawing of Marta. It was dated 1931, that is, she must have been fifteen years younger when he painted it. Still, I certainly would have recognized her.

“Look at her,” he said, though holding it up for himself rather than for me. “Look at her eyes: not the same person at all.”

But they were the same eyes. It was a pencil drawing, but you could tell their color was green. Green, and glinting-with daring, hunger, even greed, or passion as greed. At that time I couldn’t formulate any of that, but I did recognize that green glint as typically Marta. And her small cheeky nose; and her hair-even in the drawing one could tell it was red. He had drawn a few loose strands of it flitting against her cheek, the way he always did mine. Just the edges of her small, pointed teeth were showing and a tip of tongue between them: roguish, eager, challenging, the way she still was. But her cheeks were more rounded than they were now, and also her mouth had a less knowing expression, as if at that time it hadn’t yet tasted as much as it had in the intervening years.

He covered the drawing again, taking care of it and of its wrapping. He was sunk in thoughts that did not seem to include me; and when he had finished tying the string, he failed to give the packet back to me but kept holding it in his lap. I reminded him that we had to leave, since they would soon be locking up the park for the night.

When we got to the gate, it had been locked. It was not difficult for me to find a foothold and to vault over, avoiding the row of spikes on top. He remained hesitating on the other side, clutching his drawing. I showed him where the foothold was and asked him to pass the drawing to me through the bars. He didn’t want to do either but had no choice. With me helping him, he managed to get over, but at the last moment the back of his pants got caught on one of the spikes. The first thing he did when we were reunited was to relieve me of the drawing; the second was to stretch backward to see the rip in his pants. I lied that it was hardly visible; anyway, it was dark by now, and if we met people on the road, they would hardly bother about his torn seat. Nevertheless, he made me walk behind to shield him; every time we passed a lamppost he looked back at me anxiously: “Does it show?”