Bridal Chair (2 page)

“Very well,
Mamochka
. And you?”

“We were up early. Your father didn’t want to miss the first light. He is still working on the wedding studies.”

“Are they almost finished?” Ida asked. “You look tired but oh so beautiful.”

Bella wore a wide-sleeved, many-layered dress of sheer white organdy; white lilies crowned her dark hair, and pale blue circlets of kohl shadowed her eyes. The dress was familiar to Ida. Bella wore it often enough, posing as a bride beneath a wedding canopy and then as a corpse in a satin-lined casket. Marc never tired of painting her. Bella and Ida both, he claimed, were ideal models, born to his brush. They laughed at his claim, but there was pride in their melodic laughter. They were willing accomplices to the tyranny of his art, a tyranny that was occasionally arbitrary.

Ida remembered complaining to her father that he never asked her to pose in bridal finery, nor in the winding linen of a shroud, her mother’s frequent roles. Bella had looked at her warningly and Marc’s blue eyes glinted in anger.

“Foolish girl,” he had said. “Foolish Idotchka. I will not paint you like that because I don’t want to lose you. Not to death. Not to marriage. Not yet. Perhaps not ever.”

“But why do you paint
Mamochka
like that?” she had persisted mischievously.

“Ah, your
mamochka
, my Bella. I will never lose her. She is mine forever, in life and in death.”

Bella had turned pale then, as though frightened by the fierceness of his words.

Ida took note of that familiar pallor beneath her mother’s carefully rouged cheeks. It was, she knew, a mark of her fatigue, a precursor of the terrible headaches that too often assaulted her.

“I thought Papa planned to paint me this morning,” she said. “That would have given you a chance to rest.”

“He will paint you now,” Bella assured her. “He is full of ideas today.”

She smiled with subdued pride at the precocity of the elfin-faced artist with whom she had fallen in love when she was a teenager, no older than Ida.

Ida poured herself another cup of coffee as Marc sprang to his feet, strode across the garden, cut two sunflowers free of their long stalks, and placed a canvas on his easel. His renewed energy did not surprise her. Her father was a man who was refreshed by the briefest of naps, endlessly propelled by an explosion of fantastic visions. He had no time to lose, no time to waste. Reality and illusion collided, and the brilliance of his imagination impelled him to action.

“Are you ready, Ida?” he asked.

“Of course.”

Swiftly she glided into the garden, stood beneath the lemon tree, slipped out of her dress, and tossed it onto the grass. He held the sunflowers out to her.

“Stretch out beneath the tree. Just so. The flowers between your breasts.
Comme
ça.
One leg over the other. Yes. Like that. Just like that.”

His hands were deft as he arranged and rearranged her limbs, removed the ribbon from her hair, and draped her long, copper-colored hair over her shoulders. She remained silent as he squeezed the tubes of oil onto his palette, mingling blues and greens, vermilion and acid yellow, and then lifted his fine-haired sable brush and began to paint.

Bella draped Ida’s dress carefully over a chair as Katya beckoned to her. She hurried into the house but turned to look at her husband and her daughter, as though to memorize this sunlit moment of their togetherness.

Ida lay still as her father worked steadily, his avian features relaxed, a smile playing at his lips. It was safe to talk to him now, to ask him questions, to coax forth his laughter, and to tease out tales of his youth.

“What will you work on when I am away?” she asked.

“I think I will return to painting scenes of my village. My Vitebsk. Do you remember Vitebsk, Ida?”

She laughed. “
Papochka
, be serious. I was only four years old when we left Vitebsk. How could I remember?”

In her mind, Vitebsk was the fairy landscape of his paintings where he and her mother, poor boy and rich girl, had met, walked across the bridge that spanned the Western Dvina River, and fallen in love staring down at their own reflections. Vitebsk was a mystical hamlet where everyone, even the animals, spoke a Yiddish threaded with humor and sweetness.

It was Russia, she remembered in all its actuality, the Russia they had fled when she was six years old, a country of frightening enormity, grim and cold. That was the haunting dreamscape of her troubled sleep in which her parents’ hands gripped her own.

She would not tell her father that she had vague and not so vague memories of their harrowing journey from Vitebsk to Moscow, where they slept on the hard, cold floor of the Moscow Jewish Theater. There he had created the sets for a production of the stories of Sholem Aleichem as her mother sewed the costumes and he painted the heavy fabrics as though they were canvases. She would not share her memory of their respite in the Jewish orphanage at Malakhovka where Marc taught art and Bella wept and she herself feared that she might one day share the fate of the pale, parentless children with whom she shared toys crafted of twigs and stones.

How cold she had been and how hungry. She shivered at the recollection, knowing she had not imagined that cold, that hunger, nor had she imagined the heat of her mother’s tears when she pressed her face to Ida’s as they lay together in the narrow bed allotted to the three of them. She could still taste the Comice pears plucked from a wild tree that briefly sated her and then caused her to vomit.

She had locked those frightening memories away, but they escaped as she slept and became that recurrent dream, of triumphant escape, an airborne journey into the golden warmth that drifted across her naked body as her father’s brush sailed so effortlessly across the canvas.

“Soon no one will remember Vitebsk,” he said sadly. “That is why I must paint it. My village. My home.”

Ida closed her eyes and thought of her father’s paintings of his vanished world. She listened as he spoke wistfully of the hamlet of his childhood, of his family, of his brother David, killed in the Crimea, of his beautiful sisters whose fates were unknown, of the sheltered graveyard where his parents were buried.

“Vitebsk.”

He intoned the name of the village, whispered it as in prayer.

She thought it strange that although he sketched the small synagogue where he had celebrated his bar mitzvah and painted bearded rabbis wrapped in prayer shawls and wearing phylacteries, he never went to synagogue, not even on the anniversaries of his parents’ deaths. She knew that he considered Jewish holidays to be an annoyance, although he reluctantly accompanied Bella and Ida to Passover seders at the home of Yaakov Rosenfeld, Bella’s brother, their only family in Paris. Although her father spoke affectionately of his sisters, he made no effort to discover their whereabouts. Such inconsistency puzzled her, but she dared not speak of it. Vitebsk and his childhood were the sacred territory of his past, the landscape of his imagination.

But there was no tenderness in his graphic re-creation of that landscape. Ida perceived violence and chaos in his phantasmagoric canvases on which barn animals leapt over rooftops, a green violinist perched precariously on a parapet, a graceful church spire towered over the tiny crouched homes of the Jews. His depiction of a milkmaid who pressed the udder of a cow improbably positioned in the head of a large-eyed goat frightened her although she knew that such canvases were coveted by the sophisticated collectors who haunted Parisian art galleries, that art critics analyzed them in turgid essays tracing their symbolism. She much preferred his paintings of her mother, especially the one he had painted when he and Bella were newly engaged, a whimsical rendering of himself as a lover, flying toward his beloved across a room, his arms laden with a gift of flowers. Thinking of that painting now, she smiled and imagined Michel flying toward her, a bouquet of edelweiss in his hands.

She sighed. The sun was hot and she longed to shift position. She did not want to hear about Vitebsk or listen yet again to stories of the grandparents she would never know, the aunts, uncles, and cousins she would never meet. She moved ever so slightly and one of the sunflowers slipped from the valley between her breasts onto the grass. She stretched her arm out to retrieve it. Marc shook his head warningly and waved his brush as though it was a baton and he a conductor summoning the crescendo that would conclude his visual symphony. Until then, all movement was forbidden to her.

He paused at last. “Good, my Ida. It is finished. Come look at what we have accomplished.”

She stood, stretched, and slipped into her dress. Still buttoning those tiny pearl buttons that she imagined Michel unfastening oh so slowly in a few days’ time, she approached the easel and smiled appreciatively. He had captured the soft golden tones of her sun-burnished skin, almost matching them to the hue of the fallen wide-petaled flower. He had painted her face in repose, her eyes closed, copper-colored lashes brushing her cheeks.

“But I wasn’t sleeping,” she protested.

“No. But you were dreaming.”

She did not ask how he had known that but watched as he removed the canvas from the easel, holding it carefully so that the fresh, glistening oil paint would not smear. Without looking back, his mind already racing toward his next project, he carried it into the shed that served as studio and storage area. She knew that within its dimness, he would prepare a fresh canvas while he listened to the news on his small radio. He had in recent months become obsessed with broadcasts from Germany, the rantings of Adolf Hitler.

“A dangerous man,” he muttered, although all their friends asserted that the mustachioed maniac would surely be thrust from power within weeks.

“Maniacs have great endurance,” he insisted. “Particularly evil homicidal maniacs.”

He gave voice, Ida knew, to his instinctive pessimism. Always he anticipated encroaching darkness. Threatening clouds hovered over even his brightest landscapes.

She sighed, relieved that she was free to study the leather-bound copy of
Eugene
Onegin
that Michel had sent her. He had urged her to memorize at least four of Pushkin’s quatrains. So far she had managed only one, but she was sure that Michel would forgive her. She would smile and he would forgive her anything. As would her father. As would her mother. Ida had great confidence in the power of her smile.

She lifted her arms skyward and felt a surge of happiness. It was glorious to be her parents’ daughter, glorious to be in the country as summer swept its way across field and meadow, gilding lavender and sunflowers, silvering the leaves of olive trees and the fronds of stately palms. It was glorious to know that as the days grew shorter, she and Michel would walk again through mountain glades hand in hand, at a distance from their too vigilant parents.

They had spoken of their dearly beloved and overly concerned mothers and fathers, haunted émigrés, enmeshed in their memories of the land they had fled, forever polishing their battered samovars, speaking Russian softly, studying sepia-tinted photos of relatives they would never see again. They were history’s orphans, her parents and Michel’s.

“My poor mother, my poor father,” Michel had murmured, lifting her hand to his lips as they lay sprawled across the grass, her head resting on his chest.

“And my poor mother. My poor father.” She echoed his words, matching sorrow for sorrow, thinking of her mother who wept as she filled copy book after copy book with graceful Yiddish script that recounted the vanished days of her pampered childhood, the byways of her beloved village. And of course there was her father, his brush as heavy with paint as his heart was heavy with sorrow. He raced after the past in dizzying strokes and wild bursts of color. She trembled as she thought of his stark etching of his father’s grave, the grave that he would never see.

Tears had streaked her cheeks and moistened Michel’s shirt. He had kissed her fingers one by one. They were children of exile both, offering each other the comfort of tenderness.

Suffused with those memories, she glanced toward the wild garden and saw her mother kneeling beside a bed of lavender, a basket of cherries on the grass beside her. Bella had changed into the loose cotton robe that Marc had bought for her in the Arab marketplace of Jerusalem. He had chosen it for the subtlety of its color, a melding of pale blues and greens achieved by skillful dying. Ida remembered how he had asked the Arab vendor for the secrets of his formula and the toothless merchant had shaken his head. He would no more share the secrets of his craft than Marc would share the mystery of his palette.

Bella stood and waved to Ida. The robe exposed her slender body, her small firm breasts, her narrow hips. Her mother’s fragility of form always startled Ida. When she was younger, she had often pondered the mystery of delicate Bella giving birth to a daughter as lusty and chubby as Ida, a naïveté that caused her to smile.

“Do you want help,
Maman
?” she called, setting aside the volume of Pushkin. She wandered through the tall grass toward her mother, who was adding clumps of the star-shaped azure flowers to her basket of cherries. “You’ve picked so much lavender,” she said reprovingly.

“Not that much. I need it for the fresh sachets I am making for your trunk. The scent will remind you of us.” Bella added yet another floral cluster, tucking it beneath the long-stemmed, ruby-colored fruit.

“Do you think I could so easily forget you?” Ida asked playfully, lifting the basket and inhaling the fragrance of the blossoms. She popped a cherry into her mouth and spat the pit onto the grass.

“When you unpack, scatter the sachets in your drawers and I’ll tie strings around some of them so that you can hang them in your wardrobe. And of course, I’ll make salts for your bath. Just toss them in when the water grows warm,” Bella advised.

“
Mamochka
, I’m not a child,” Ida protested, struggling to overcome her irritation. She would indulge her mother. She would soon be on her own, remote from her parents’ suffocating anxiety, their protective instructions. “I’m eighteen years old,” she continued. “I know how to unpack and guess what—I even know how to prepare my bath.”