perform their ablutions. Theo, armed with his notebooks and charcoals, managed to persuade most of the men to allow him to sketch them while drying themselves, some taking the sketch in exchange for a cigarette, but never for cash, at his insistence.
One late summer afternoon, Theo and Dariusz posed theatrically at the top of the Eiffel Tower as they pointed out landmarks over the shimmering roofs of Paris, the wind catching their hats. Eva, snatching Dariusz’s precious camera, squeezed off a shot of the men. It developed perfectly and she pinned it to the cracked and faded mirror on her battered dresser in her room. The other pictures, now creased and faded, were of Henk and Aga, and of her deceased parents, Maria and Pytoir, with Eva as a grim-faced toddler. Below them was a picture of a smiling Jonas. Every morning when applying her make-up, she would touch the photograph tenderly and reminisce.
Eva’s idea of heaven was getting lost in the numerous bookstores around the city, wrapped in her trusty blue raincoat, when the men were off drinking. Theo, walking in the footsteps of his hero Toulouse Lautrec, would frequent the bordellos, restaurants and his drinking haunts that peppered the city.
By night they would gather at the Cafe Procope on Rue Buci with their French counterparts, the hours spent discussing cinema, philosophy and politics over simple food and carafes of wine. Eva had to grasp the language quickly as the debates got heated and found she could, becoming more often than not the referee.
Theo, perhaps caught up in the zeitgeist, announced he was a Communist, content with his bohemian lot and, as a reflection, his art became more de-structured and free-flowing. He stopped using colour, developing a tonal two and three tone style. Refusing to purchase picture frames, he set up a scrap wood stall along the Pont Notre-Dame with the sketches pinned and fluttering in the breeze.
He squandered his allowance from his father in reckless abandon. Purchasing a bicycle, he travelled around the city, his long thin legs pumping the pedals in determination, his free arm clutching his materials. For her birthday he bought Eva a camera, a simple box brownie, and she thrived on travelling around the city alone by foot, bus and metro, capturing it. Dariusz had built a dark room in the apartment and he allowed her time to learn how to develop pictures in between his projects. Theo had paid for all of the wood from his father's allowance, helping Dariusz to haul the lumber up the flights of rickety stairs and hammering the whole thing together. The apartment’s window remained open most of the time after that owing to the smell of the processing chemicals.
Eva's wanderings gave her a new fulfilment, making her aware of not only her own beauty but the beauty of the city and its people. She would buy all her of dresses from the flea markets and slowly she began to eat again, filling out and regaining her superb figure. The summer nights were balmy and the bright lights of the city somehow soothing. She truly loved Paris, loved being anonymous amid its streets. Theo would smile appreciatively, charcoal poised over paper as she undressed when Dariusz was out of the apartment haunting a cinema somewhere.
Theo would sit at the cafes sketching the passing population, waiters, waitresses and patrons. Among his drawings was a quick free-flowing sketch of Samuel Beckett who one evening sat and discussed the films and style of Sergi Eisenstein with the group. Eva’s English helped the Pole expand on his theories with the Irishman despite the time lag between the effusive Dariusz and the measured responses of Beckett. With Theo’s quick execution, Beckett appeared all twisted and bent like a crow dashing across the page. He told them he’d be back, but was departing for Germany to report on the rise and the abuses that the new Reich was perpetrating. Kissing Eva’s hand gallantly, Beckett asked her to visit Ireland sometime. Smiling back warmly, she promised she would.
Eva loved to photograph the twilight, a time of the day when the darkness around her vision seemed the most bearable, where the shadows blended rather than clashed with the available light. Beside Daruisz's reels of film, hung Eva’s first images of the city; the carousels of Sacre Coeur, the city's bridges, and the museums, all captured in a moment in black and white. Sometimes she would photograph an empty street, or a square just after a rain shower. She captured the storefront lights glistening on the ground, reflected back on the puddles. She photographed the mausoleums of Pere Lachaise, wandering amid the graves allowing her thoughts to drift firstly to her parents, then to her happy childhood, and then to Jonas. When alone, she believed Jonas was near, his presence almost within touching distance, a finger-tip away. The feeling would go as quickly as it had appeared, but while it was there she felt his presence as a guardian angel.
Eva began to pin her photographs around the apartment using them to cover damp patches or unsightly stains. Both Dariusz and Theo agreed she had a good eye for a picture. Her favourite image was of a mature Madame who ran a local bordello, Yvette.
Eva had struck up a conversation with her one night in a cafe in Montmartre. She had an iron frailty about her that drew Eva. Yvette was buxom, with lush black hair pinned up as best as the pins could do, and modestly attired in tasteful shades of purple and black. Her eyes were green and knowing. She warmed to Eva immediately and agreed to be photographed. The photograph showed Yvette sitting at a table in a cafe looking out onto the street, a cigarette in an ashtray and a half empty coffee cup before her. Somehow Eva had caught the vibrant light in her green eyes as she smiled.
She introduced Eva to absinthe. Sometimes when alone with the photograph of Jonas, Eva drank it to numb herself when the memories of his death overwhelmed her.
Sometimes Madame Yvette would join the discussion group as they smoked and drank, open about her profession and taking Eva under her wing. She watched Eva and the almost chemical effect she had on men. The raucous debates that took place were mostly about their simply trying to impress her. Yvette wondered why Eva wasn’t harnessing this power and using it to her ends,
‘In this life, Eva, our youth, beauty and intelligence are sometimes all we have. In this world, men may make all the decisions, yet we have to bend them to our will. We only have so long before our bloom begins to fade and their attention starts to wander,’
Eva would learn in time to take this advice on board. Yvette had a rare quality. She genuinely liked and understood men and loved being a woman. She had a lover, a married man, and she was content to exist in the shadows. She was also discreet; her lover was a high ranking official in the government and was inclined to talk about what he did just to impress her. It was a useful power to have, she told Eva,
‘Men! Their flies and their mouths they never keep closed in the presence of beauty. Use it Eva, and if they get too rough. .’ Yvette produced a small wicked mother-of-pearl handle stiletto from her boot, ‘cut them.’
Theo, Eva, Dariusz and the students immersed themselves in the Paris film scene, spending long stretches in the cinemas sipping from hidden flasks of brandy and whiskey. This was followed by meals, wine and debates into the early hours. Eva and Yvette began to appear in Dariusz’s projects. Devising the scene, he would produce a measuring tape and measure out the distance between the camera and subject. He would spend hours adjusting the lights borrowed from a small amateur theatre nearby to create the mood required. Returning each time to his camera perched on its tripod and peering into the viewfinder, he would grunt or laugh depending on his mood. Everything about Dariusz was measured, carefully thought out and purposely executed. In some instances a three-minute short would take three days to film at eight hour stretches.
During these long spells, Yvette would tell Eva about her life and her adventures, occasionally returning to her bordello to ensure everything was running like clockwork. Once Dariusz was satisfied with everything required for the scene, he would shout ‘Action!’ and Eva and Yvette would perform his carefully composed script. Then he would shoot footage of other things — animals, cars, trains, close-ups of a facial feature, random objects — and splice the various reels together, disappearing for days in his darkroom. In the student cinemas around the city, he would run his final pieces and then the whole ensemble would discuss their merits or flaws.
Theo and Dariusz took French lovers, drawing and filming them, moving onto the next one once the initial passion burned out. They told Eva they were living for the moment, without regret, without worry, never thinking of tomorrow; enjoying now. Eva found their hedonism amusing, as even when seducing women they were still competing against each other, trying to get the upper hand.
Theo would show Eva the charcoal drawings of the girls he was involved with, looking for a reaction. She would simply smile or shrug indifferently, remarking whether or not the piece was simply good or bad. This would irk him and he’d put the piece away with a grunt, making Eva smile to herself. Occasionally they would sleep together in a familiar companionable intimacy when the brandy or absinthe took hold.
During the summer, they took the train to Marseilles, the Mediterranean weather turning their skins brown. Theo had acquired a straw panama hat; Dariusz, aware of the bald patch evolving at the back of his head, wore a felt trilby. He would sit at the coffee houses with the North African aromas drifting over him, sweating, reading or writing in a white vest, his trilby tilted against the sun.
They stayed in a run-down but clean hotel managed by an Arab who would bow every time Theo and Eva passed the front desk. As in Paris, Eva had a room to herself, the men sharing the room beside her. Her room had a
