The Autumn Castle (2 page)

“What’s it called?” she asked him.

“
Urban Autumn,
” he said, dropping her hair. “You really like it?”

“Of course.”

Jude stood back and smiled at the painting. “Today’s the first day of fall,” he said. “It’s kind of a tribute.”

“First day of fall?”

“On the pagan calendar, according to Gerda. Except she calls it autumn.”

“Perhaps that explains why I’m feeling so odd. Summer’s gone, winter’s on its way.”

He turned to her, concern crossing his face. “What’s the matter? You sound kind of melancholy.”

She sighed. “I am melancholy. Don’t know why.”

“Is your back giving you trouble?” His hand dropped to the small of her back and pressed it gently. This was the locus of
the chronic pain that—unbelievably—she was still not used to after so many years.

“No more than usual.” She thought about the twinges she’d felt while talking about her parents’ accident.

“Nothing else bothering you?”

There was, but she could barely articulate it. Fuzzy memories of her childhood, a recurring half-remembrance about a crow
she had seen once, a fluttering buzzing anxiety lacing everything, a breath caught perpetually in her throat. “I don’t think
so. I guess being back here reminds me of . . . happier times.”

He smiled and folded her into his arms and she tried to take solace in his beating heart—

He doesn’t love you as much as you love him.

—and to put aside all her irrational feelings.

“Hey, love pigeons!”

Jude released Christine and she turned to the door of the studio. Gerda stood there, shaking her head so her blond dreadlocks
bounced around her shoulders. “You guys are always smooching.”

“Can’t help ourselves,” Jude said, shrugging.

“We’re on our way out,” Gerda said. “Coming?”

“Who’s ‘we’?” Christine asked.

“All of us. Me, Pete, Fabiyan. Shall we make it a Hotel Mandy-Z outing?”

“Yeah, cool,” Jude said, “just don’t ask Mandy.”

Gerda giggled; nobody genuinely liked their wealthy benefactor. “If we run into him downstairs in the gallery we won’t have
much of a chance of losing him. Coming now?”

“No, give me a half-hour to get cleaned up.” Jude indicated his shirt, which was splattered with brown paint.

“We’ll be at Super Jazz on Chausseestrasse. It’s just been voted the smokiest club in Europe.”

“I’ll bring my gas mask,” Christine joked.

“Yeah, yeah, I’ll convert you yet, Miss Starlight,” Gerda said. “You can’t be the only person in the hotel who doesn’t smoke.”
With a cheery wave she disappeared. Jude had turned back to his painting.

“I want to give it another fifteen minutes,” he said, picking up his brush. His eyes were taking on a distracted gaze.

“I’ll wait upstairs.” She’d lost him; until he came back from wherever it was in his head he went when he was painting, he
was no longer hers. She glanced at him as she left the studio: his right shoulder was flexed, his hair fell over his eye as
he touched the brush delicately, carefully to the canvas. As long as he was happy, his painting was a mistress Christine was
prepared to tolerate.

Two hours had passed before they arrived at Super Jazz, and by then the others were all drunk. Mandy was not with them, to
Christine’s relief. She found Immanuel Zweigler the most loathsome being she had ever met. He was a tall, corpulent man with
pinkish skin and pale watery eyes. He dyed his hair black, but ginger roots peeked through, conspiring with his ginger eyebrows
to give him away. He usually smelled of the heavy incense he burned in his upstairs rooms, where he also wandered around naked
and didn’t care who came to the door; Gerda had already reported popping in to borrow coffee and getting an eyeful she’d never
forget. But it was none of these things—his appearance or his habits—that Christine despised. It was some other ineffable
malignancy that washed off him, some calculating miserliness or inhuman detachment, that made her lean away whenever he spoke
to her.

“Drink for you?” This was Fabiyan, the Belarusian sculptor who lived across the hall from them. He had to yell over the band
playing loud Miles Davis in the corner. Jude slid onto the sofa next to Gerda, and Christine took the seat opposite.

“Beck’s,” Christine said.

“Beck’s!” Gerda exclaimed as Fabiyan went to the bar. “You’re so predictable.”

“I’m living in the capital of Germany,” Christine responded. “It’s only right I should drink German beer.”

“Berlin’s not the capital of Germany,” Gerda said, waving her cigarette effusively, “it’s the capital of the world.”

Every year in summer, four new artists took up residence at Hotel Mandy-Z for their twelve-month Zweigler Fellowships. This
year they were Jude Honeychurch, New York’s hottest young thing with a paintbrush, fresh from an immensely successful West
Chelsea exhibition; Gerda Ekman, an ebullient Swede who worked in metal and stone; Pete Searles, a nineteen-year-old Australian
who put together bizarre video and multimedia installations that required warnings about epilepsy; and Fabiyan Maranovich,
first time out of Belarus where he had spent his life working as an electrician. Christine had a soft spot for Fabiyan especially.
He had conscientiously learned German before taking up his fellowship, only to find that English was the linguistic currency
at Hotel Mandy-Z. He was picking it up quickly, but sometimes Christine had to translate for him into German. Not that her
German was faultless, but she had lived here briefly in the seventies with her parents and a refresher course taken over the
spring left her with a better grasp than the rest.

“So,” Gerda said to Jude, snaking her arm around his shoulders, “I like your painting. Nearly finished, is it?”

“Nearly.”

“You must be so proud of him, Christine,” Gerda said, smiling her Cheshire-cat smile.

“Yes, I am.”

Fabiyan leaned down and handed Christine a beer. She sipped it gratefully, then rested it on the scarred table. If she were
to be totally honest, she didn’t think much of anybody’s art in the hotel. All those abstract, impenetrable shapes and images.
It baffled her far more than it delighted her. But she was perfectly willing to admit she wasn’t an expert and she hadn’t
the faintest idea about what artists felt or intended, even after four years with Jude.

Pete, who sat next to her, pointed at her beer and said, “Did you know that Germans drink around 127 liters of beer per person
per year?”

“No, I did not know that.” Christine smiled. She was discovering that Pete had an endless store of facts and figures. He had
been lauded as a genius since he was twelve, and perhaps that meant he had never outgrown some of his adolescent obsessions.

“It’s topped only by the Czechs, who drink 160 liters.”

“What’s that in pints, Pete?” Jude asked.

Pete looked skyward briefly, did the math, then returned with, “About 336.”

Jude doubled over with laughter, deep lines arrowing out from his eyes. She loved his smile, the gorgeous changeability of
his expression. His face settled smooth again as he got serious about the business of lighting a cigarette.

“I don’t know how many liters they piss every day though,” Pete added in a solemn tone.

Gerda, as she did so often, looked at Pete with an expression bordering on alarm. She hadn’t caught the rhythms of his humor
yet. Jude glanced across at Christine and winked; she felt herself smile and blush like a teenager. She downed more beer and
began to shed the day’s despondency.

The first band finished and the second came on—Duke Ellington in thick German accents. Christine grew drunk but Gerda was
always drunker. Sometime around two a.m., while Pete, Jude, and Fabiyan were making enthusiastic conversation with Sparky,
the club owner, Gerda pulled Christine down next to her on the sofa.

“Here, here,” she said, trying to shove a lit cigarette in Christine’s mouth.

“No, really. I’ll be sick.”

“You’re the luckiest girl in the world,” Gerda said, reaching for her drink and missing by at least six inches. “Oops.”

“Yeah, I know.” Christine and Gerda had had this conversation before. Gerda had a big crush on Jude, but then, Gerda had a
big crush on every second man she met.

“He’s so beautiful. Why couldn’t he turn up on my doorstep?” Then Gerda laughed, because that was exactly how Christine had
met Jude. He had been sitting on the stairs in front of her West Twenty-third Street home, trying to read a badly drawn map
directing him to a gallery party.

“Don’t despair. You and Garth might work things out,” Christine said.

Garth was Gerda’s husband back in Stockholm. He had refused to come with her to Berlin. Gerda was shaking her head. “No, never.
You just keep your eye on Jude, Miss Starlight. I’ll steal him the first opportunity I get.”

“You’d better not. I don’t know where I’d find another one just like him.”

Gerda waved her hand dismissively. “Impossible, of course. He’d never look at another woman.”

Christine knew this was true. Her silly jealousies had so often been directed at a paintbrush, never at a person. But it was
nice to hear someone else say it. “Do you think so?”

“Darling, he’s always got his hands all over you. He never lets you out of his sight. It’s damn frustrating. Look at my tits,
they’re wonderful—not like your tiny little things—but he’s never looked at them once.”

Christine laughed loudly, then said, “Well, thank you for being so reassuring. You know, he’s so gorgeous, and with the age
difference and all . . .”

Gerda scoffed. “Three years? It’s nothing. He’s twenty-eight, not eighteen. But don’t worry . . . if I ever see another woman
making a move on him, I’ll do everything in my power to keep her away. Lie, cheat, steal, whatever.”

“That’s very sweet,” Christine said, giving her a squeeze.

Gerda lit another cigarette. “So, what’s up with you lately, Miss Starlight? You seem a bit blue. It’s not just the pain in
your back, is it?”

Christine shook her head, her eyes darting off to locate Jude. He was on the other side of the room, a cigarette jammed between
his lips, drawing a shape in the air with his hands for Sparky, who laughed enormously.

“What’s it all about? Not Jude?”

“No, not Jude.” Christine shrugged. “Autumn, I guess. Gray skies, winter coming.”

“Bullshit. It’s more than that.”

She tore her eyes away from Jude and met Gerda’s gaze. “It’s weird, Gerda. Just the last few days I’ve been feeling on edge.
Like something’s about to happen. And I keep having these flashes of old memories, things I haven’t thought about in years.”

“Like what? Stuff to do with your parents?”

“No, actually. You know we lived here in the seventies, but not here, not in the East. Berlin was still divided. We had a
big house out at Zehlendorf. My best friend was the English girl who lived next door. A cute little redhead. I keep thinking
about her, and then the memory gets all caught up with something else which I can’t put my finger on. Something to do with
a crow I saw once . . .” She trailed off, realizing what she said made no sense.

“A crow?”

“Yeah, I know it sounds nuts.”

“No, not at all. What was her name? The little girl?”

“Miranda. Her father was an English soldier, Colonel Frith. But nobody ever called her Miranda; we always called her Little
May.”

“What else?” Gerda prompted. “Just these memories, this feeling of anxiety?”

Christine reached for her near-empty beer bottle, and swished the contents around halfheartedly. “She was murdered,” she said.

“Really?”

“Abducted from her bedroom one night. God knows what awful things she . . . They never found her.”

“That’s sad.”

“Yeah.”

“So it’s no wonder it gives you a bad feeling to think of her.”

“I guess so.” She drained her glass. “Only, it’s not just an ordinary bad feeling. It’s dread, and it’s half-remembrance,
and it’s a weird foreboding about that bird and trying to remember where I saw it.”

Gerda snapped her fingers, her eyes round and bright. “A ghost!” she said. “Christine, maybe Little May is haunting you.”

“Huh?” Christine adjusted her frame of reference quickly. Gerda had a strong interest in spirits and crystals and psychic
powers, and conversations with her often took this turn.

“Yes, it makes sense. She died all those years ago, when you were here as a child. Maybe she’s been wandering on the earthly
plane all this time, and now you’re back she’s attached herself to you.”

“I don’t know, Gerda. I’m more likely to think it’s a change-of- seasons melancholy.”

Gerda shrugged. “Believe what you like. Do you want another drink?”

Christine looked at her empty beer, then nodded. “Yeah, a big one.”

She watched Gerda go to the bar. The band was still playing, Jude was still talking in the corner, the air was blue and thick
with smoke and conversation. But she felt lonely and isolated and strangely afraid, and it had something to do with a twenty-five-year-old
blurred memory of black wings.