The Blind Accordionist Page 5
Some days are so slow I count the bricks in the walls, or measure the size of the room using units I have only in my mind. It is surprising that no two rooms in the gallery are exactly the same size. One day I returned home to find that I would be living alone. My small flat is still the same but has a hole in it like the discoloured space that remains on the gallery wall when a picture has been removed.
Another painting I love, though I cannot explain why, is the strangest picture in the Gallery of National Art. Many visitors walk directly past this picture, thinking it merely a blank canvas. It hangs in the landscape rooms, though it is not quite a landscape: It is a picture of nothing, if that is possible. It shows an enormous plain, not quite desert nor quite tundra, endlessly unfolding. Though empty, it pulls with the gravity of an enormous planet. I do not understand its composition, it is no banal trickery of the eye, no geometric cleverness, but it works with perception in such a way as to seem infinite, though of course I know that cannot possibly be so. Once, the gallery completely empty, I stood so close to this picture that I feared the touch of my breath would damage its paint, and I let it envelop me. The picture ceased to become space, and became time. It is inexplicable and vast, and that is why I love it so. The ghosts who frequent the gallery sometimes crowd around this picture, perhaps because it reminds them of where they live.
I am a Warder at the Gallery of National Art, and in my job, every day is like a recurring dream: always the same, and always different.
Visitors from abroad sometimes come to me and say it should not be the “Gallery of National Art” but the “National Gallery of Art,” and I tell them as politely as I can that they are mistaken. This is not a national gallery, but it does house national art. This gallery is a home to art that displays our nation. They call me a guard, these visitors, or they call me a guide, and I say I am not a guard or a guide but it is my job to do both of these things because I am a Warder at the Gallery of National Art.
The ghosts are heavy today, whereas sometimes months pass without one visiting at all.
In winter, I eat soup and black bread, in summer yoghurt and nuts, and I keep despair tightly sealed in a jar hidden at the back of the top shelf of the cupboard I rarely use. When I think of sadness, I think of the delicate cartoons in darkened Room 12, covered with a heavy felt blanket.
The works in the Gallery of National Art are not grouped along lines of chronology or artistic movement, I sometimes have to tell visitors, but into landscapes, portraits, and histories. There are pictures of the natural beauties and wonders of our country; there are pictures of the important people in the development of our nation; and there are pictures of the Battle of the River Slem, the Signing of the Treaty of Vla, the building of Liberation Bridge, and the opening of the gallery itself.
Even though it is not my job as a Warder at the Gallery of National Art to decide such things, based on my long contemplations and my admittedly infrequent exchanges with visitors to the gallery, I have sometimes wondered if there may be better ways to organise the pictures. I think the works should be gathered into rooms for circular, rectangular, and triangular pictures, perhaps, or those made by left- or right-handed artists, or rooms containing true and false works. Works painted by day, and those by night. The differences are subtle, but essential.
There are questions that are never asked of me, and sometimes I am grateful for this fact. Were I asked, for example, I would be obliged to tell anyone who wanted to know that the small but intricate landscape that hangs in Room 13, next to the famous painting called The Sea-Sprite, is not in fact by the artist named on its label but is actually a forgery, painted by a less well-known but no less interesting artist. The story of the forgery is more interesting than the story of the real painting, which I now believe hangs in the bedroom of a man who cares very little for it, but it is perhaps a story best left untold.
Since the day the man with threadbare hair attacked the statue of King Ata, I have felt less safe in my job. It is only on days like today, when I am asked a question that illuminates me, that I still feel confident that my work is precious.
More than the pictures, the thing I love most about being a Warder at the Gallery of National Art is the silence. Even on the rare days the gallery is crowded, there is always a silence so deep it cannot be disturbed. Over time, the silence has grown so dense that not even noisy schoolchildren or gaggles of tourists can disturb it. The silence always has a further fold that can be entered, thick with dust, a lovely carpet that covers the days. Even whispers are muted by the gallery’s silence, a silence so heavy it could slow time itself.
I am a Warder at the Gallery of National Art, and I am familiar with the Gallery’s many ghosts. I have spent years watching them pass through the halls. There are the painters who still want to change their paintings. There are those who were lost here, or had nowhere else to go. One I do not know: a small child who wanders the galleries. Some are like us, but smaller, while others are shadowy, never quite in focus, as if moving too quickly or too slowly for us to perceive.
The ghosts in the gallery come and go frequently, some with more or less bodily form, others totally invisible, merely manifesting as a strong smell. There it is now: Roast bacon. Pipe smoke. Cough medicine.
Some days, an ache dulls the small of my back, or my legs begin to twitch and I have to stand and pace the room slowly. Though this is uncomfortable, I am content because I know then that, yes, I am alive, and, yes, I do exist. Though I see the ghosts, I am not yet one of their number.
Some pictures in the gallery baffle me, no matter how many days I pass watching them. One such picture shows two people standing on opposing sides of a river. It is maybe the River Slem, which runs through our country. They face each other and regard each other carefully, but without recognition. It may be a history picture, but the people are not famous. One is much older than the other. I feel it is connected to the picture that hangs opposite, though I do not know how. This shows two villages, identical, but for the fact one nestles into the shade of a deep valley, while the other stands up on the hill above. Both are deserted.
A fuzzy shape hovers beside another picture in this room, a dark portrait of a troubled, bear-like man, and I am the only one able to see it. I think it another ghost, and believe it to be the picture’s painter, forever stuck on a pentimento he will never be able to make. I see the ghosts of the future, too, sometimes: the ones who have not happened yet, but will.
Another picture I do not understand is a still life showing a table piled with lacemakers’ bobbins. There are so many of them, so intricate. The detail, the reels of thread untangling and retangling. It is so different to another baffling picture, the one that is called “The Blind Accordionist.” The picture has no official name, and no one knows why it is nicknamed so, as it shows nothing but an empty doorway leading into an interior space that is scarcely visible.
I had a surprise today: a man I recognised came into the gallery. This is not so surprising in itself, as I recognise many of our frequent visitors, but this man is not a frequent visitor. The reason I know this man is other. This man, older now, his unshaven chin hanging from his shrunken face and a felt cap on his head, is the man who forged the landscape painting in Room 13 and was complicit in consigning the original to the former lover of the man in whose bedroom it now hangs. I took the excuse of the regular break I am permitted to follow him as far as the room where his handiwork is displayed. He stood for a good while before the picture, grinning and muttering to himself, taking pleasure in his craft and, quite possibly, in his deception. I do not consider him a bad man, but wish he had put his talent to better use. I wonder about the man who tried to destroy the statue. He has never returned. I do not know what happened to him.
I was once asked if I had ever wanted to do anything else in my life, and I could not reply, because this is all I have ever done. I am not unsatisfied with my life. I think about my favourit
e picture in the gallery, the portrait who looks like me. I wonder if this was a self-portrait, and if the artist looked like me. I have never wanted to paint. I like looking. I am a Warder at the Gallery of National Art.
Only one picture in the Gallery of National Art scares me. It shows three forest wolves walking in a circle, each closely pursuing the other. One of them looks out at me. They have eaten of the darkness, these wolves, and they know me. Taken in time, they are trapped in the picture, and one day I fear they will escape.
In our history section, we have a picture of King Ata talking to a commoner. The king is in disguise, and the commoner is blind. Everyone knows the story, but it is not so familiar to foreign guests, who often walk past the picture. I like to wonder if one of them is a king in disguise, or that I might be a king, ready to give a revelation to a passerby, to condemn them to death, or hand them my crown. I think that I am not a Warder at the Gallery of National Art, but that I am every one of the people who has passed, is passing, or will pass through its halls.
Today has been as similar and as different as any day, but it has been one of the better ones. This evening as I was preparing to leave, an old woman came into the gallery and told me how she had held my hand, many years ago, and asked me a question that dazzled me, and to which I could not reply and to which I have never been able to find the answer.
When she spoke to me, I tried my best to reply but words failed, because I am unused to being asked such questions, because my head was full of the sad and angry man who attacked the statue, the person who once loved me, the pictures I love and fear most in this gallery, and all the ghosts who have come today. I could not speak because I was already off duty, because I am unused to speaking, because I am a Warder at the Gallery of National Art.
JENNY GREENTEETH
WERE YOU TO look at a map of the northeastern shore of Europe, and then look north from that shore, you might—if your eyes were strong enough—see a speck of green in the blue. And were you to find this speck, you would be forgiven for thinking it but a blemish, a drop of ink spilt by a former owner of the map, or a small mistake on the part of the cartographer or printer. But were you to look again, more carefully this time, you would see neither misprint nor stain, but an island.
A careless mapmaker may have ignored this island completely, believing such a tiny speck would not be missed by anyone, but exist it does—on a reputable map, at least, a dark green pinpoint amid the pale blue. And were you to take a boat there, over the cold, flat sea, it would no longer be a mere mark on paper, but would take body, become sheer physical heft, and seem vast: rock, grass, and soil extending as far as your eye could see before again becoming one with water, sky, and wind.
Of those few who lived on that island, some considered themselves Swedes, others Finns, others German, and some Pomeranian. Were they to argue, which they rarely did, they would have agreed that they were Baltic folk, more of the water than the land, knowing the sea connected rather than divided them from the countries that circled. Their island was so small, no nation would have risked much to claim it, and so its grass had been left to grow, its tides to rise and fall, its inhabitants to inhabit, and its rocks to slowly become sand, then slip back into the sea, as shall we all.
This is what Paul would have said were anyone to ask him, though few did, because the island people were taciturn, and Paul’s opportunities for conversation were limited because he lived alone and took his boat out for much of each day. He set out early and returned late to sell his catch or work on the never-ending maintenance of the boat and his house, making sure each was caulked, stable, and watertight. The sea was rising, he was convinced, or the land was sinking; it mattered little either way, and he would tell anyone this as he sold them sprat or flounder or plaice, or helped them, in turn, to tar a roof or keel, or ferry something from one end of the island to the other. Once this island had been part of the land, he’d say, but the sea had won, and they would listen to him, and nod, and say nothing, because everyone knew Paul was kind but strange, the only child of a German couple who’d moved here during the boom, then both died, one after the other, just as soon as the boy was able to take care of himself. Paul never thought of returning; for him, there was no return—he had grown up here, and this flat island was his home, and here he would stay, he told the postmaster, or Samuel with the cows, or the other boatmen, and they would listen and nod and scarcely believe him, for even though they all acknowledged that Paul knew the island like no one else, and the sea around it, and was a good man, he was not from here, and he was not nor ever would be really, truly one of them.
They had come during the boom, his parents, some thirty or forty years back, no one remembered exactly when, and time slipped by so strangely on the island that counting years seemed a pointless occupation. A German poet had visited and written a poem about the almost-sunset of midsummer, the strange light and the sound of gulls, and the island had become briefly famous, though it was said the poet had been haughty, and was more known for a ribald limerick he’d also written while visiting about how a woman from the island would never marry because she smelled of fish, but it hadn’t mattered, it had been enough, the tourists had begun to arrive, shiploads of them at the peak of the boom, mostly green-looking from the journey, no matter how calm the sea, and they were loaded onto a cart, covered in blankets and furs, the richer ones, then taken into the town, which had begun to grow in the deepwater cove on the more sheltered western coast. Post began to arrive regularly on an official yellow-and-blue-painted boat, a postmaster was installed, postcards were sold. A widow let out her superfluous rooms, and soon the Widow’s House became known as the island’s only hotel, even after the widow herself died. Its dining room grew famous for its stockfish broth. A ferry company opened a weekly route in the summer, twice-monthly during the winter. There had been talk of a Kurhaus, and some Germans had come, and made plans, and dug foundations, and even constructed part of the first floor, but no more. It was said that a war had got in the way, or something, but no one on the island knew much of it. Little touched them, apart from the wind.
Some days, when the weather would not let him take his boat out, Paul made anxious circuits of the coast on foot, looking for an inlet where the water was calmer or a higher point from where he would have vantage to see farther into the sky, and spot a distant break in the clouds, which predicted later calm. He often passed the quarter-built spa hotel, its never-used iron balustrade rusting in the salty wind. They had chosen the wrong location, he told people: Even though it was convenient for the harbour, this eastern coast was too exposed, its long shores of pebble and sand mere proxy for water and wind. Better to have chosen the other side of the island, gnarled and rocky, one of the low cliffs where the land had reared up out of the water as if a dog snarling at the waves, and tamed and becalmed it.
At the southern tip, thick grass grew as far as the sea itself, the fields becoming the sea, reaching back for the mainland to which they had once been joined. Cows wandered the shore, some belonging to Samuel, others to anyone who would milk them. The opposite point was a flinty arrowhead pointing due north, a long outcrop where a man could stand and watch the sky turn green.
All this, supposed Paul aloud, to himself if no one else were around, was what attracted the artists who had continued to come in their dribs and drabs even when the boom had died away, all this earth, water, air, light. Sometimes he’d watch them, setting up easels on the shore and finding themselves surprised by a sudden tide and having to up sticks and run before the water took them, or sitting under a tree with a large sketchbook perched on their knees, some with oils, some watercolours, others nothing but charcoal. He always wanted to see what they were doing, so he asked politely. Some would bat him away, but others were happy to share, so he’d look at their poorly rendered seas and watery skies, the endless pictures of the long barns and low houses that seemed to fascinate them so. They came in clumps, little groups that
sometimes stuck together and other times dispersed. They usually stayed in one of the houses they painted, a house that became known as the Colony. They never stayed long, though. A month, two, three at the most. Paul had asked one, once, if she were planning to stay, and the woman said no, because even though the days here in the middle of the summer seemed to last as long as the summer itself, the light was too particular, too strange, and the water, she said, well, the water would freeze your bones, no matter what the season. It was true, Paul agreed, though he knew that these were precisely two of the reasons why he so wished to stay here.
They asked him, sometimes, to carry their things for them, their easels and canvases and oversized sketchbooks and boxes of pencils and paints, their bags and blankets and baskets of sandwiches and bottles of wine. Tracks across the island were few, and on a calm summer day, it was far easier to load everything into Paul’s boat and ferry them from one spot to another. Usually Paul would do this for a group of them, and then take the painters, too, and sometimes their companions as well, should they wish to come, even a dog, perhaps, the load of them making a merry crew, but once it happened that a single man asked him for help.
Ellis, he said when Paul asked his name, and Paul said that was a strange name, and the man said, yes, it was a strange name. I was named for my mother, he said, it was her surname, and they gave it to me. She was English, so I suppose I’m part English, too, and perhaps that’s why I talk strange. Paul soon discovered that the man didn’t talk much at all, strange or not, though he found himself immediately at comfort with the man’s silence as they loaded a bag and an easel onto the boat and pushed off into the water. Ellis seemed to know where he was going even though he said he’d never visited the island before. He stood at the prow, pointing directions and asking questions about the land. Always the land, never the sea. They eventually moored at a point toward the north of the island, not at the famous spit that Paul had assumed Ellis had wanted but a bland point farther in, where nothing but low fields rolled away as far as the western coast. No barns, no houses, no cows, even.