Prochownik's Dream (6 page)

She slipped her arm through his and they walked together through the crackling bush, as if they were strolling down Brunswick Street among the crowds. ‘You were always observing us,' she said. ‘Drawing and watching, that's what you used to do. You never stopped drawing and looking. You were so certain of your gift. So sure of what you were doing. You had no curiosity about the world. We couldn't believe it when you wrote and told us you'd given up drawing and painting. You turned everything into drawings in those days. Everything can be drawn, you used to say.'

‘I was quoting my dad. I only drew people. Nothing else.'

They walked on in silence.

‘Dad always said drawing is superior to painting. He never drew people. He never drew us, his sons or his wife. I think we were too precious for him to risk our likenesses.'

The magpies stood looking after them, heads on one side then on the other, considering, making a judgement.

•
He was sitting with his back against the trunk of a gum tree. She was drawing the group of pale gums in front of them, seated cross-legged in the shade of a wattle, her drawing block on her lap. She checked her subject, then touched her pencil to the paper. Beside her a half-empty glass of wine. The remains of the salad and chicken and the last of the bread were spread on the blue and white tea towel between them, the empty wine bottle on its side on the grass. She eased her back and set the pad and the pencil aside on the grass and reached for her wine.

‘Can I see?' he asked.

She passed the pad across to him. ‘When did you first know you were going to be an artist? I don't think I've ever heard you speak about how you came to it.'

‘This is good,' he said. ‘I can't do trees.' He handed the pad back to her. ‘Kirchner turned to landscape near the end. I might have a go at it one of these days.'

She looked at her drawing then set the pad aside. ‘Tell me. I want to know. You don't mind?'

‘It was my dad,' he said. ‘He used to have nightmares and couldn't sleep. He'd get up in the middle of the night and sit in the kitchen drawing and painting. It was his night world, his escape. Watercolours and gouaches. He taught himself. He'd paint these modest studies of the domestic items around us. Our stuff. Cups and saucepans. The kitchen chairs. Tea towels Mum had left drying over the stove. The bag of flour or box of cereal. You know? The tins on the shelf. He had dreamed of being an artist when he was a boy, but the war ended all that for him. With his art he was reclaiming something of his boyhood dreams out of that landscape of ruins, something of his innocence. I'd see the light under the door and I'd get up and come out to the kitchen and watch him. To me it was magic. I'd hold my breath. He wouldn't say anything, but he'd slip his arm around me and press me to his side and keep working, and I knew he was glad to have me there with him in the night. Just the two of us. It was a picture in his mind, the perfect picture, father and son safe together. For him it was the greatest blessing that I was interested in his art. Emotion was always close to the surface with my dad. He would weep and smile at me and wipe his eyes and I'd give him a cuddle. But he never talked a lot about himself. About what had happened. It was too much for him. I soon started doing drawings of my own. His stuff. Copying him. He never tried to teach me.
You don't teach drawing
, he used to say.
Drawing is something you learn by doing it. There's no other way
. We'd be there in the night together doing our drawing and painting and he'd tell me about the great artists he admired. Max Beckmann and Kirchner. It haunted him that Kirchner killed himself at the age of fifty-eight because he realised he was never going to be in the first rank of the artists of his day. The art and the struggles of these men to make sense of their lives fascinated him. And Giorgio Morandi, of course. He loved Morandi's solemn still-life etchings.

Those artists helped Dad sustain his belief in himself. With them he was never alone with his art. He loved them. He loved their passionate vulnerability and the tenderness of their work. He recognised himself in them.
The dream is to have made
sense of one's life at the end
, he used to say.
That is all
. He would whisper it:
To have made sense of it
. To me it was as if he had discovered the secret of existence. He would get their books out of the library and study them. Those self-portrait pencil drawings of Kirchner's that Kirchner did during the last weeks of his life. Those simple poignant line sketches of the man's features held him. He would stare at them for hours, lost in them, as if he were touching Kirchner's despair and sharing it with him. Dad made me see the point of art, showing me how Kirchner was groping his way towards a meaning in the reflection of his own features. It was beautiful. I loved it when he talked like that. He would pass his fingers over the reproductions of Kirchner's features in that book, and sometimes he would weep for the man. Dad believed art was something noble. Something with the power to lift humanity out of the factory and the prison. Which is where he worked, in a factory that was his prison.'

‘Toni. I've never heard you talk about any of this before. You change completely when you talk about your father. It's astonishing.'

He had never spoken in this way about his father. Not to anyone. He was surprised to have heard himself say these things, as if he had achieved a sudden clarity.

‘Did he ever show his work?'

‘No,' he said slowly. He was a little reluctant to continue. Perhaps he had already said enough.

‘Why not?' she persisted gently.

‘Art was a private thing with Dad. It wasn't the way it is for us. It wasn't something for outsiders to admire or for strangers to buy. Dad was building a temple with his art. A temple of our lives together. The intimate things of our daily use. To be a family was something deeply precious to him. The domestic realities. He never took any of it for granted. He never complained. The Dunlop factory was like his second prison. He was more familiar with prisons than he was with temples. Mum told me that when he was fourteen he was separated from the rest of his family and was transported to a labour camp in Poland. Then, after the war, he was in a refugee camp in England, which was where she met him. They both worked in England for ten years, then they had the chance to emigrate in the fifties and they came out here. That's when they had Roy. And then me, of course, but much later. Mum still says I was her surprise package. After a while I took it for granted I was going to be an artist when I grew up. Dad did too. It became our joint project. My future. We worked on it together. Drawing. Always drawing.' He fell silent, thinking back.

Marina watched him.

He looked at her and smiled. ‘I used to think I was going to build the temple of my father's dreams with my art. But it's not that easy, is it?'

‘No, it's not. It's not easy at all. You had that intensity about you when we first met you. I thought you were aloof.'

‘Keep drawing,' he said. ‘I like to watch you working.'

Marina resumed drawing the trees. After a while she paused and looked across at him. ‘Go on. Don't stop now. Tell me the rest. What happened to your father's pictures?'

‘In the mornings, when he'd left for his shift, Mum would gather up the previous night's batch of pictures and carefully put them between sheets of newspaper, then she stacked them flat in his old suitcase. That suitcase had travelled everywhere with him. She told us it was the one thing he had with him when he arrived in England. I guess someone had given it to him. They kept it under their bed—which is where his pictures still are. Mum let me have one of them.
They belong together
, she said.
He wouldn't want them scattered around the place.
I had it framed. It's hanging on the wall in the passage at home. It wasn't there when you and Robert came over for dinner that time. You can see it next time you come over.'

‘I'd love to see it.'

‘Dad painted the same things over and over.
It doesn't matter
how skilled you become
, he used to say,
you can never paint the same
thing twice. Look at the work of Morandi!
He'd tell me,
A thing will
always surprise you when you look at it again. There will always be something
new each time. And the more you look, the deeper the mystery, the deeper
the silence of the object of your contemplation.
Those were Dad's words to me.
Nothing in art is ever finished
, he'd say.
Everything is always a
work-in-progress. Even if you never go back to it. The artist is not interested
in completion, only in the work.
That was my dad.
The artist is not a
priest
, he warned me once, when he saw how seriously I was taking it.
Remember that! But the artist must have something of the priest's
irrational persistence. A faith that doesn't ask why but just
is
.
Art was my dad's answer to the cruelty and the ugliness of the world.'

She was silent a while, drawing, then she said, ‘You must miss him very much.'

‘I've never talked about him like this before.'

She looked at him. ‘I feel very privileged. Thank you.'

‘I don't know why, but it all seemed to be suddenly there for me to say.' She was a picture herself. The sketching block on her knees, her pale legs bare in the sunlight where her dress was rucked up. ‘Trees,' he said. ‘I remember you drawing those big old trees at your parents' place that time.'

‘The elms at Plovers. Yes. I've always loved to draw trees. They don't get fidgety sitting for you.' She looked around at the bush. ‘Isn't it beautiful? We're so lucky. What you just said was beautiful, too.'

He stood up.

She was startled. ‘You're not going?'

He grinned. ‘I need to take a walk.'

‘Oh.'

He walked off some way into the timber and took a leak. The wind had died and, on an impulse, he kept walking, drawn into the warm aromatic stillness of the bush, picturingMarina back in the glade under the wattles alone, doing her drawing; the scene of their own private
déjeuner sur l'herbe
. Sharing with her his memories of his father had made her seem more real to him. In the telling he had recaptured something of the intensity of those early years, his passionate hopes for his art and for his father's dream. Teresa would be fiercely jealous if she knew he had shared something like this with Marina. He had not meant to, but had just found himself suddenly able to talk to her. He stopped and looked around. He and Andy would have loved this place when they were boys. Marina was right, it was a truant's island. A place for escapees. Full of little hillocks and hollows and hidden glades where the hunter could hide or approach the enemy's camp unseen. A pulsing of bullets through the leaves and the felled bodies lay twitching on the grass. Step in and finish them off. The
coup de grâce
. . . He realised he had no idea which was the way back. He was amused at the notion of being bushed in this island remnant of wild Australia in the middle of the city. It was an uncanny feeling of being suddenly alone. A loss of direction. An absence of familiar reference. A white-eyed crow observed him from a nearby tree, the malevolence of the opportunist in the bird's eye.

He walked on, feeling stimulated and excited by the talk. He was restless now to be doing something. A few minutes later he topped a low rise and she was there below him, lying in the broken shadows of the wattle tree on the bleached grass. He stood on the rise among the trees looking down on her. She was a stranger, really. They had never been close, not as he and Robert had. She was lying on her side in the silver wattle's overhang, her straw hat under her head. Her left leg drawn up under her, her right leg thrust out, the sandal fallen from her foot. Her sketching block and denim bag abandoned on the grass beside her. The blue and white tea towel with the two plates, chicken bones and scraps of lettuce. The empty wine bottle and two glasses on their sides on the grass catching the sunlight. The bright orange plastic float with the keys to the island.

He made his way down into the hollow.

The heat of the afternoon and the wine had felled her. He stood admiring her and wondering about her, his eye drawn to the back of her knee in the cast shadows of the wattle's foliage, a dimple in her bare flesh where ligament and muscle were linked in tension to the bone beneath the skin. With care he stepped to her side. It was the cautious action of someone who did not wish to be discovered. He stood above her, the body of the woman lying on the grass. Robert's wife sleeping in the sun at his feet. After a moment he leaned to pick up her sketching pad and pencil case. He carried them back to the gum tree and sat with his back against its trunk. He recognised the pencil case. It was the one she had carried during his holiday with Robert at her parents' house at Mount Macedon all those years ago. He had been in his first year at art school then, and a little awed by the grand manner of Marina's parents, the ample style of their lives, the imposing gabled front of their enormous old house with its tall chimneys rising from twelve acres of winter garden, hundred-year-old laurels and a ground mist of bluebells. The red-brick bulk of the house and its gardens set against a rising woodland of leafless elms and oaks. He remembered making a drawing of Marina one afternoon while she was sleeping off a migraine on an old-fashioned cane chaise longue in the conservatory.

For some reason, he and Marina had been alone in the house that afternoon. Perhaps Robert had been taken by Marina's mother to visit an ‘interesting' neighbour. Migraine seemed to him then to have been Marina's excuse for avoiding doing things she did not want to do; her excuse for staying quietly out of the main game, just as her return to Melbourne now was a retreat from similar demands. But perhaps the migraines had been real, too, for she had emerged from them grey-faced and washed out, purple half-moons under her eyes, her gaze glassy and absent. As he had passed the conservatory that day he had seen that the shutters were half-closed across the tall windows. The figure of a woman lying on the cane chaise longue asleep, her form a tonal arrangement among deep shadows. He had paused at the door—then, as now, the unobserved voyeur—and had decided to take her likeness.