photographs, she was the fourth in a series.
Giving the place a good cleaning job was even more revelatory. Women had blown through Emil’s studio like a series of storm fronts. Hairpins here. A single crumpled stocking there. Shoe liners. An empty lipstick. Pink feathers off some long-lost costume. Cheap sunglasses. Mismatched cooking utensils. Lubricants. Blood testers. And, of course, the photographs. The women doing the photographs had been the ones investing real effort.
“I feel good today,” Emil declared, as well he should. “I’m going to create a new piece just for you, Maya. A piece to capture your unique qualities. Your generosity. Your goodness.”
“I’m not your clay vessel, you know.”
“Of course you are, my dear! We are all clay vessels. Why contradict Scripture?” Emil chuckled merrily and started pounding clay.
Maya found her way downtown and rescued her luggage from the storage locker. Klaudia’s backpack and garment bag were gone. Klaudia had left her a note. In Deutsch. Maya couldn’t read Deutsch, of course, but to judge by the angular scrawl and the forest of exclamation points, Klaudia had been furious.
Maya found a public netsite. She plugged in her camera and wired her photos to Therese at the shop. Then she had lunch.
When she had finished dutifully nourishing herself, she called the shop in Munchen.
“Where are you?” said Therese.
“I’m still in Praha. How is Klaudia?”
“She’s back. Mad. Worried. Hung over. Humiliated. You’re not being helpful, Maya.”
“I picked up a guy.”
“That’s exactly what I thought.… When will you be back?”
Maya shook her head. “Therese, if I don’t look after this one, he’s going to throw himself out the window.”
Therese laughed. “Have you lost your mind? That’s the oldest art-boy scam in the book. Show some sense and get back right away. I’ve brought in a lot of new stock.”
“Therese …” She sighed. “You were right. The Tete is a scene. I’m very taken with these artifice people. They’re going to teach me to be vivid. I’m not coming back to Munchen.”
Therese was silent.
“Therese, did you see my photos?”
“The photos are not bad,” Therese said. “I think maybe I can use the photos.”
“They’re awful. But I’m going to take lessons. In photography, in spex work. I’m going to get better. I’m going to get better equipment and I’m going to really work in artifice. I’m going to make myself into one of these people.”
“You’re not happy here at the shop, darling?”
“I don’t want to be happy, Therese. There’s not enough of me to be happy. I’m not my own woman yet, I have to learn to be more like myself. These artifice people, I think they can help me. They have my kind of hunger.”
“You sound very certain very suddenly. What changed your mind for you? One night in bed with some man? Why don’t you get on the train and come back here? Trains are very easy.”
“I can send you lots of photos, if you want them. But I can’t go back to the shop.”
“If you don’t come back to Munchen, I’ll have to get someone else. There won’t be a welcome for you anymore.”
“Get someone else, Therese.”
“My poor little Maya! Always so ambitious. And artifice people are so chic.” Therese sighed. “Cleverness doesn’t make them nice people, you know. You’re very innocent, and they could hurt you.”
“If I wanted safe and nice, I’d have stayed in California. My life is risk. I’m an illegal. I’m on the drift, the wanderjahr. You were very good to me, but Munchen’s not my home. I had to leave sometime. You knew that.”
“I knew that,” Therese acknowledged. She lowered her voice. “But still: you owe me. Don’t you owe me?”
“That’s true. I owe you.”
“I fed you, and I clothed you, and I sheltered you, and I never turned you in. That was a lot, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. It was a lot.”
“I’m going to ask you for a big favor in return, darling. Someday.”
“Anything.”
“You’ll have to be very discreet for me.”
“I can be discreet,” she promised. “I can specialize in discreet.”
“When the time comes, you’ll know. Just remember that you owe me. And try to be careful.
Though he couldn’t be bothered to feed himself properly, Emil very much liked to eat. With a woman in reach, he complained bitterly if not methodically fed, as if this were some fracture in the bedrock of the universe.
Emil had a little money. He was too confused to properly manage the funds he had acquired; there were half-drained little cashcards stuffed in nooks and crannies all over his studio. So Maya went shopping for them, and began eating with more regularity and determination than she ever had before. Czech medical chow, such as noki. Chutovky. Knedliky. Kasha, and goulash. It was solid and enticing food and it made her cheerful and energetic.
Once Emil was properly fed, he generally became lively. It was sweet to be Emil’s lover, because he was never blase. Whenever he ran his agile and dexterous hands across her flesh, there was always an element of shocked discovery to his caress. Sex made him all surprised and pleased and reverent and grateful.
Emil became very productive under this hearty regimen. He kept firing up his kiln. The kiln wasn’t a microwave exactly, it was a specialized potter’s resonator. Like most modern gadgetry, Emil’s kiln was foolproof, very clean, extremely quick, and altogether eerie. He’d pull out a freshly zapped pot with a monster pair of padded tongs. The irradiated clay would give a ghastly crystalline shriek as it hit the air and began to cool. The pot would gush heat like a fireplace brick. The whole studio would steam up and get very cozy. Maya would saunter around in slippers and an untied bathrobe, naked under her diamond necklace. Hair almost long enough to fuss with now. It was rather stiff and scruffy hair, but the speed of its growth was impressive.
If he liked the way the work had turned out, he would throw her on the bed to celebrate. If he didn’t like it, she would throw him on the bed to console him. Then they would tiptoe down the hall and wedge into a hot bath together. When they were clean they would eat something. They spoke English together, and a little guttural Czestina in Emil’s more intimate moments. Life was very simple and direct.
Emil hated time stolen from his work. From Emil’s subjective point of view, any day spent in keeping up life’s little infrastructures was a small eternity lost forever. With a permanent magic supply of groceries and electric power, Emil would have slumped into solipsism.
It was impossible to manage Emil in the morning, because he was always so startled and intrigued by her unexpected presence in his household. However, after a week, a certain visceral familiarity with her seemed to be seeping into Emil below the level of his conscious awareness. He seemed less surprised by her intimate knowledge of his desires and routines, and he became more trusting, more amenable to suggestion.
One evening she sent him out to buy new underwear and get himself a proper haircut, carefully noting the shops to be visited and the exact items and services to be purchased. She wrote them down on a cashcard and strung the card on a little chain around his neck.
“Why not tattoo it on my arm?”
“That’s very funny, Emil. Get going.”
She felt much better without him underfoot. Maybe it was that steady and nourishing diet, maybe it was the unceasing intensity of their relationship, but she was very restless today. Irritable, almost ready to come out of her skin. She felt as if she needed to be contained somehow, and dressed in tights and a sweater.
There was a knock at the door. She assumed it was Emil’s dealer, an obscure gallery owner named Schwartz who dropped by every couple of days looking for product, but it wasn’t. It was a portly Czech woman in a powder blue civil-support uniform. She carried a valise.
“
Maya quickly tucked the bird-nest translator into her ear, a reflexive habit by now. “How do you do. Do you
