A Mind of Winter (23 page)

I put this occurrence out of my mind and was reminded of it a few days later. Hours of scrabbling through notes for my essay had left me feeling more at sea than when I’d begun. I left the studio in a state of distress—not knowing how to proceed or whether I could entirely trust my senses.

We were in the midst of a heat wave. It was Wednesday; as far as I knew, Barnaby and I were the only guests at the house. I moved slowly down the darkened hallway: around me, sleeping servants, empty rooms. The hallway windows must have been fastened because I remember that even in my light voile dress, I was sweltering. I leaned against the wall and fanned myself with the straw hat I was carrying; the hot fluttering of air around my face was pleasing.

I became suddenly aware of the sound of voices drifting toward me in fragments from the other end of the corridor. I continued down the hall. Yes, they were coming from Oscar’s office. I stopped outside his door. Two voices—men—speaking in a foreign language, their voices so low I couldn’t make out what language it was. Harsh though, and guttural. It was then that I remembered the man with the chestnut hair I’d sighted through the half-open curtain of Oscar’s study. And only then that the memory of the man on the beach from earlier in the summer, that night of the terrible storm, flashed into my mind. There had been something imperious about him—I recalled how clearly I’d felt this—and now, hearing the throaty cadences coming from the other side of the door, I imagined it was the same man. Knowing how protective Oscar was of his evening hours, I couldn’t fathom why he’d receive anyone at this time, or why the men would be speaking in whispers. I trained my ear on their voices, trying to penetrate the meaning of those opaque words. A burst of shame—what was I doing eavesdropping like this?—made me turn. I was still clutching my straw hat, which now felt as absurd to the moment as a freshly caught fish. A little louder, now, first one voice, then the other.
German.
The men were speaking German. I had not known that Oscar spoke German.

The sound of a door handle turning: the inner door of Oscar’s study. I slipped off my shoes and hastened down the corridor. Whoever it was must have lingered a moment before opening the outer door as I had time to round the corner and start down the stairs without anybody appearing. The person who had left the room—the chestnut-haired man? Alone? Accompanied by Oscar?—must have used the back stairs and exited through the tradesman’s entrance.

I took the long way back. And though I was very soon on the other side of the house, well out of earshot of the service entrance, I imagined the sound of riding boots clicking on shiny stones, and a whooshing as made by a cloak through the air when a rider swings onto his mount.

I went on a quick walk before dinner along a path I did not usually take, which wound behind the house and away from the Sound: through the kitchen gardens, past rows of curly headed lettuce, a bushy green quadrant of turnips and carrots, vines heavy with beefsteak tomatoes, and into a shady orchard of apple and pear trees in full summer leaf. Beneath the trees, the fallen fruit collected in mounds. I watched a sparrow choose a shrunken brown pear and set about his fastidious pecking.

I noticed somebody on the far side of the orchard, sitting under a tree on a rock. It was Oscar, immersed in a book. I was again struck by how young he appeared, a fact one seemed to put aside when engaged with him. His gave the impression of being seasoned, a man surely into his forties, though his boyish, unlined face suggested a man not yet thirty. I drew back behind a tree so I would not be seen, and peered around the trunk to observe him; I’d never before seen him alone in the open, away from the house. I felt a pang of guilt for spying on him but also felt unable to move. The person not a hundred feet away, intently studying the page, was strange in that baffling way that somebody you know well can defy your assumptions about them. From our first meeting on the second-floor landing of Ellis Park, I had known there was an elliptical quality to Oscar, but this was something else entirely.

How can I explain?

Long ago, I’d noted the unusual effect Oscar had on his surroundings, and the way this would waver and change. He did not so much fill a room as empty it of extraneousness. In his presence, people and objects acquired a salience, a relationship to one another, an order that seemed harmonious and precise and at the same time ultimately random. There was something translucent about his being, though not the least ill-defined—as if he were a glass sculpture through which one could see the world.

The effect was this: you were never quite sure whether Oscar was actually present at a gathering or not. You might turn to scan the room, expecting to see him leaning against the doorjamb, attentive and bemused, only to discover, having made a thorough search, that he was not to be found. Rattled, disappointed, you would feel as if someone you trusted had deliberately let you down. Then there was the opposite experience. Out with a group on a morning walk through the woods, knowing Oscar’s habit was to eat breakfast alone in his rooms, I would turn my head and catch sight of him a little ways behind on the curved path, moving in and out among the trees.

Removed from the context of the group, Oscar was different again. The wide-ranging beam of his social attentiveness would narrow to become acute, and yet also gentle.

The only way I can think to convey Oscar’s disconcertingly different auras is to compare them with the effect that differing light can have on the composition of a photograph. A landscape photographed on a sunny afternoon will of course differ from the same landscape photographed on a blustery evening (imagine spears of lightning or a darkening horizon), though the shape of the dead tree trunk against the shoulder of a mountain remains virtually the same in each exposure.

Until I stumbled upon Oscar sitting in the orchard engrossed in his book, I thought I’d had a pretty good grasp of his unusual, shifting nature. But there, in his mystifying solitude, I sensed a transformation of another order. Let me point you back to the example of the two photographs taken at different times of day. I draw your attention, now, to a third photograph. At first, you are puzzled; you have never seen a composition like this, though it is a strangeness you cannot identify. The same landscape scene, with a small house in the middle distance, a summer cottage perhaps, the retreat of someone who likes his peace.

The contours of the house are sharp and clear: they could not be better delineated. Every leaf on the trees surrounding the house and spreading unevenly toward the mountain is visible, even the veins standing out, which you know cannot be, given the scale of the picture. You scan the photograph for clues. What bubbles to consciousness is that in this picture, there is no sky. Moreover, you know, by intuition, that there is also an absence of air. And, while you know rationally that the photograph could not exist without it, you become convinced that what is most decisively missing here is light: no sun, no seepage of day through cloud, no candle or lantern or lamp, no flashbulb, not even the quivering, feather-tip flame of a match. It is impossible, but there it is: an earthly reality devoid of its most grounding ephemera—air and sky and light—a world buckled in on itself, though invisibly, lifedefying as a vacuum.

Truly, what would this look like? What would you see?

“The East,” Barnaby said.

I had come to Barnaby’s rooms several times, now that Simon was away. I reached for a cigarette.

“All of it?” I held the flame to the tip. “Numerous countries, hundreds of islands, you loved them all?”

“No,” Barnaby said. “But I did love Shanghai. Despite its cruelty. Or maybe because of it.”

“Cruelty.” I exhaled the smoke. “Do tell.”

Barnaby took a cigarette from my silver case and struck a match. If it was possible for him to look even more comfortable than usual, it was when he was about to embark on a story about his travels. Was I imagining it, or did his happiness deepen the further away the country of his recounted adventure?

Now, he described a late-night rickshaw ride through streets that were alive with activity: spice merchants preparing their stands for the morning, an old woman sorting dried herbs, a butcher stringing ducks by their necks upon rows of metal hooks. Beyond the commercial district, prostitutes gathered in little groups, wearing tight-fitting dresses, slit from calf to thigh. He described how he reached an alley near the bay, where the air was filled with the stench of rotting junks. The only light on the street came from the doorway of a narrow building, and this was where the rickshaw man, his shirt soaked with sweat, let Barnaby off. Inside, Han Shu, the proprietor, took Barnaby to a large room lined with carved mahogany benches, where opium smoke hung in such thick clouds that the people, some seated, others lying stretched out, seemed to him to be very far away. He told me how Han Shu scanned the room, pointed to the corner, called out something in Chinese. A slender woman dressed in an evening dress emerged from the fog of blue smoke. Strawberryblond hair framed her delicate features and she smiled, then handed Barnaby a pipe. She was an Englishwoman, and her name was Christine.

I flashed on that odd moment in the garden, when Oscar had looked at me as if I were someone else and called me Christine. Could it be a coincidence? The same name as the woman Barnaby professed to have known in Shanghai? Could Oscar and Barnaby possibly have known this same woman?

For a moment, Barnaby hesitated, casting at me a quizzical eye. “Funny,” he said. “It hadn’t occurred to me before.”

“What hadn’t occurred to you?”

“You remind me of her. And yet, the two of you couldn’t be more different. Opposites, in fact.”

“Barnaby, you’re not making any sense.”

“It’s as if one of you is the negative, and the other the photographic print.”

“Heavens—I’m not sure which I’d rather be. Mysterious and transparent, or two-dimensional but well-defined.”

Barnaby offered no rejoinder; he seemed lost in some complicated thought, as if puzzling something out.

“Barnaby,” I prodded gently, my interest piqued. “You were telling me about Christine.”

“Yes. Christine.”

Whatever it was that had momentarily unsettled him seemed to vanish; Barnaby glided right back into his story. He talked for some time about her, and I found myself feeling more and more uncomfortable. Not jealousy—I still suffered those curdled depths when on occasion I would torture myself with thoughts of Simon and his first (his only?) great love. No, this was something else.

It was one thing to make a story of a panther, even of poor Charlie, who had himself made a narrative of his own life. But making a story out of Christine’s life seemed another matter. I listened closely. There was a
beginning
and a
middle,
and now Barnaby was moving into the part that would be the
end.
It involved Christine’s terrible decline—and then, something about her disappearing, but the details kept eluding me, slipping through my fingers like sand. As for Barnaby, I’d never seen him so engrossed.

The story ended as I knew it would: Christine desperate, Barnaby as savior.

“I looked everywhere for her. In all the seedier dens, where they offer a lower grade of smoke. The rooms were twice as crowded—almost all Chinese. Foreigners didn’t go to those places much. I only had to mention that I was looking for an Englishwoman, and someone would remember her. But I kept missing her—once, by no more than an hour. Finally, she showed up on my doorstep. I scarcely recognized her. Opium can suck the life out of you, if you let it.”

I rose, refilled Barnaby’s glass, then emptied the crystal decanter into my own. “So it wasn’t the whole of the Far East you loved,” I said. “It was a woman. Christine.”

“I’m not sure I’d put it that way.” Barnaby’s voice was serious, but I could see mischief in his eyes. We drew on our cigarettes, exhaled long trails of white smoke.

I walked to the window.

“I see,” I said, drawing aside the blue drape and looking out at the black stretch of lawn. “So that’s what you like to do. Save people.”

Another broken night. Sleep, I knew, would not come now. I rose, glanced with a pang at Simon’s empty side of the bed, and dressed. I’d been working too long on this project; it had been foolhardy to take on the essay for the catalog.

Frayed by tiredness, though my legs felt strong, I moved down the stairs noiselessly, two at a time. The basement studio was the last place I wanted to be. I headed toward the kitchen for a glass of milk.

I was sick of the work. I had begun to think of abandoning the project altogether. An image reared up in my mind: a woman photographer in a jeep, crammed in among a group of American GIs, bouncing along a narrow paved road. The driver turns onto a dirt path, the jeep careens. They all jam together; a soldier lets out a whoop. The woman holds her camera on her lap, tightening her grip each time the jeep hits a bump. The men are alive with chatter, excited to have a female companion. It is a fresh sunny day. The war is over, though an observer would sense, in the giddiness and the fragile edge to the banter, that this is not yet a reality the group can entirely believe. Of one thing, though, the men, to a person, feel certain: they are the liberators of Europe.

When they drive through the gates, the assemblage turns silent. They are out of the jeep now, scattered about the raked-dirt quadrangle. A white open sky emits an incantatory glow. The woman looks around her for some time. She sees everything, but what she photographs is the commandant’s body. He lies in the center of the square, facedown in a threeday-old slick of blood crusted and cracked as dried mud. Two officers talk to each other in low voices. This she photographs as well. They are discussing the fact that the enlisted men don’t want to remove the body: that they want it to remain where the recently freed prisoners left it. The officers are considering the practicalities: maggots, the threat of disease, the stench of rotting flesh.

I was not there, I did not see this. One of my exhibition collaborators described it to me. Neither of these photographs was among the ones she sent me; perhaps they were part of the group she destroyed. It made no difference. I saw them all, the pictures she gave me and those she just told me about. I don’t know which imposed themselves more cruelly.