The Restoration Artist (2 page)

T
HE BLUE
F
IAT RENTAL CAR CRESTED THE HILL.
Claudine was in the back seat with the maps and guidebook on her lap while Piero sat next to me in the front, scanning the valley through a pair of binoculars. I could see the road ahead twisting and turning in the dry, ochre-coloured hills before it emerged onto the plain where a distant village lay under the brilliant blue sky.

I steered onto the side of the road and applied the handbrake. “I’m not sure we’re heading in the right direction,” I said, glancing at Claudine. “That last turnoff could have been the one we were supposed to take. Can you see it on the map?” We were on the island of Cyprus, heading towards the north coast from Salamis, where we had been visiting the Roman ruins. Our destination was Agios Lazaros, an eleventh-century Byzantine chapel near the town of Pagratis.

A few years ago I had come across an old book on the art of perspective in one of the
bouquiniste
stalls that line the Quai de Montebello in the shadow of Notre Dame cathedral. One of the
illustrations caught my eye, a black and white photograph of a small chapel. The building’s proportions and its placement in the landscape struck me as an image of absolute perfection and harmony. A second photograph showed the interior of the chapel, where a fresco covered one wall. This had a majesty and serenity reminiscent of the work of Piero della Francesca.

I had cut out the two photographs and pinned them to the section of the studio wall where I kept various images that stimulated my eye and imagination—postcards, photos, pictures torn from magazines. I would often stand in front of the pictures lost in reverie, gazing at the church in its landscape, longing to be there, to experience that harmony and perfection.

That wish had finally been realized. The details were arranged through a travel agent on boulevard Beaumarchais, and we flew from Paris to Nicosia, where we picked up a rental car the following day and drove to our hotel in Famagusta on the east coast.

Now, Claudine set the guidebook aside and spread out the map. “I think we should go on a bit and see if there is a signpost.”

I put the car in motion again. “We can’t be that far away.”

At the next curve, as we motored down the incline, I noticed a white van parked on the side of the road. A man leaned against the door smoking a cigarette. I pulled alongside and rolled down the window.

“Pagratis?” I pointed to the road ahead.

The man answered in Greek. He was tall with a reddish beard, dressed in a uniform of light blue shirt and darker trousers. I couldn’t quite make out the insignia on his van.

“
Parlez-vous français
?” I asked. Then, “English?”

“English is better. You are going to Pagratis?”

“Are we headed in the right direction?”

The man bent and looked through the window at Piero then at Claudine in the back seat. “May I ask where you are coming from?”

“Famagusta,” I said.

“Are you Americans?”

“We’re from Paris.” I at first took the man to be a local policeman, but his accent sounded German.

He extended his hand. “Koos Vandermey. From Rotterdam. I’m here with the United Nations observer team.”

I shook the proffered hand. “This is my wife Claudine, and my son, Piero.”

“Right now is not the best time to visit Pagratis,” Koos Vandermey said. “There has been some trouble in that area.”

“What kind of trouble?” Claudine asked anxiously, leaning forward over the seat.

Vandermey gestured to the plain below. “Are you aware that there has been conflict around here between Greek and Turkish Cypriots?”

“I did read in the papers about it a while ago. But I thought the problems were being resolved,” I answered.

“Exactly what kind of trouble?” Claudine asked.

“A farm was burned nearby a week ago. We’ve had reports of arms being smuggled in—mortars and other explosives. It’s a tense situation at the moment.”

“Maybe we should go back, Leo,” Claudine said.

“Just a minute.” I addressed Vandermey again. “We want to visit the Agios Lazaros church. To look at the fresco.”

Vandermey nodded. “You shouldn’t have any problems there. But don’t stop in the town. And for God’s sake don’t drive too fast and run down anybody’s donkey or goat or you’ll never get out of here. Let me see your map.” He explained the route. “You have plenty of gasoline?”

“Almost a full tank. Thanks for your advice.”

As I drove off I glanced in the rear-view mirror and saw the man writing something down in a notebook, perhaps our licence number.

“I don’t think we should go on,” Claudine said, leaning again over the front seat.

“He said we wouldn’t have any trouble. We’ve come all this way—it would be a pity to go back now just because somebody’s farm got burned.”

“Isn’t that serious enough? Or does nothing else matter except that you want to make a painting?”

I shook my head.

“We always come second to your painting. I thought this was supposed to be a holiday. For all of us. Isn’t that why we came? Or was that just an excuse?” She sat back and folded her arms, glaring at me. When she was angry her grey eyes burned with a cold light. “In that case, you should have come alone.”

“It
is
a holiday,” I said. “For all of us. Don’t worry about the local politics. People have been arguing over this island for centuries.”

“What about the terrorists?”

“There aren’t any. This isn’t Algeria.”

Piero, who was scanning the landscape with his binoculars, said, “I like it here. I want to go to the church.” Lowering the glasses, he turned to his mother. “I want to paint too. Like Papa.”

I glanced at Claudine in the mirror and raised my eyebrows. I knew her judgment wouldn’t allow her to start an argument in which she sided against both of us.

“Fine,” Claudine said, raising her shoulders in a shrug. “Fine. But I want to be at the hotel in Famagusta in time to go for a swim this afternoon. And I want to eat in a good restaurant tonight, not at some kebab stand.”

“We can eat calamari!” Piero exclaimed.

“Not me. I want a first-class restaurant that serves lobster.” In a softer tone she added, “And champagne. Not that terrible retsina we had last night.”

I smiled at her in the mirror, glad at the change in her voice. “It’s a deal. Lobster and champagne.”

“And octopus,” Piero said. “It means eight arms.
Octo
.”

“And an eight-legged octopus,” I said.

Soon, Pagratis appeared, a poor town consisting of a few two-storey houses and a concrete building with a flag hanging over the entrance. The speed limit sign read “25.” I slowed the car, keeping an eye on the speedometer.

“There’s nobody here,” Piero said. The town seemed to be deserted.

Then, a group of men came into view, standing outside a café. They all turned to stare at the car as it passed. Their faces were unsmiling.

“Drive faster,” Claudine urged, shrinking away from the window, but I resisted the temptation to speed up. Piero twisted in his seat and watched the silent men through the back window until they were out of sight. Claudine kept her eyes straight ahead.

I let out a sigh of relief as we reached the edge of the town
and accelerated on the next stretch of pavement. The road ascended into the hills, now wooded with pine and cedar. I felt my mood lighten.

“The turn should be coming soon,” Claudine said after a while, her fingers marking the place on the map. “On the right.”

At the signpost I turned off onto an unpaved road that soon dwindled into a steep rutted track. The car bounced over the furrows, jostling us from side to side, making Piero giggle. I slowed and put the car into first gear as the engine strained up the incline.

Just as we reached the top of the ridge a herd of goats came scrambling over the crest, halting abruptly at the sight of the car. I braked quickly. The goats surveyed the car, waiting, then the front of the group parted to allow a large ram to come forward. As it approached, Piero rolled down his window, letting in the smell of dry dust and the clanking of the copper bell around the ram’s neck. No shepherd was in sight.

The ram came closer and raised its head to the window, regarding us with yellow eyes under long lashes. Piero extended a hand and touched one of the curved horns. The animal twisted its head and licked his fingers with a long pink tongue. With a laugh Piero jerked his hand back. At the sound of his voice the rest of the herd sauntered forward, their thick barnyard odour filling the interior of the car.

“Close your window, Piero,” Claudine said, wrinkling her nose.

She took off her sunhat and fanned her face. Her hair, which she wore cut short these days, stuck up from her head, giving her a gamine look. Glancing at her in the rear-view mirror, I felt a surge of tenderness.

I put the car in gear again, drove on to the crest of the ridge
and stopped. And there below us, in a hollow next to a grove of trees, stood Agios Lazaros. A thrill quivered through me. This was the place I had longed for.

Piero jumped from the car and ran down the slope, Claudine close behind him. His blue and white striped T-shirt and her pink dress were splashes of colour against the landscape. I got out and breathed in the clean smell of grass and a faint pine scent. Below me, the chapel nestled between the rolling hills and the olive trees, their outlines like black flames, and the building white against ochre and sienna.

I strolled down towards the church. The voices of Piero and Claudine drifted from the shade of the olive grove. The heavy wooden doors creaked and scraped across the stone floor as I entered. The dark interior had that particular cool mustiness of ancient stone, of time itself.

As my eyes adjusted, the door opened wider behind me and the elongated shadow of Piero fell across the floor. In the sudden increase of light, I saw the fresco covering the entire side wall.

I was unprepared for the splendour—the rich depths of the blues, the clarity of the whites, the intense reds, the lustre of the gold. But the theme I knew well.

The whole painting measured about ten feet high by twenty feet long and seemed remarkably well preserved for something so old, with only one high patch where the colour had flaked off to reveal bare plaster beneath. A haloed figure, obviously Christ, stood just to the left of centre, one hand raised towards an open grave at the lower right corner. I walked closer, and because the scene had been painted to life size, it was as if I stepped right into the painting, coming to rest on the edge of the open grave in the foreground.

“Who are those people, Papa?” Piero asked, tugging at my sleeve. “What are they doing?”

“It’s called
The Raising of Lazarus
, from a story in the Bible.”

“Why is that man covered in bandages?” Piero pointed to where two men were lifting the stone lid from the tomb, revealing a figure swathed in a burial cloth, an expression of profound astonishment on his features as daylight penetrated the shadows and fell upon his face.

“That is Lazarus,” I explained. “Jesus came to visit him but when he arrived he found that Lazarus had died. Lazarus’s family begged Jesus to bring him back from death, so Jesus told the men to uncover the tomb, and then he called Lazarus’s name. When Lazarus heard his name he woke up and came out of his grave into the world again.”

“And then what did he do?” Piero asked, his voice lowered to a whisper.

I pondered the question. One I’d never asked myself. “I don’t know. Nobody knows.” Realizing I had whispered too, I said in a normal tone, “It’s just a story.”

Piero moved nearer to the fresco and stood with his face close to that of Lazarus, peering at it intently. He stood with such silent concentration, almost as if he were listening, that I reached out gently and put a hand on his shoulder.

He took a few steps backward, looking at the figures, then turned and hurried out again into the daylight, leaving me alone with the painting. Tiny motes of dust hung in the shafts of light emanating from the window openings, and from outside came the murmur of doves cooing. The sounds, which should have been soothing, gave me a feeling of disquiet.

Moments later two piercing blasts from a whistle outside
broke the silence. I raised my head and listened. The whistle called again, summoning me. I left the painting and made my way to the door.

Halfway up the slope, Piero stood looking up to where Claudine waited just near the summit of the ridge. She was turned away, observing something out of sight. For a moment I felt I was still looking at a painting—two figures isolated in an elemental stillness, a mother and child in a landscape, looking or listening to something only they could perceive, that I would never see.

Piero blew the whistle again. Two notes, one rising, the second descending.

The whistle had been a gift from me. A couple of weeks earlier, on a visit to Jardin des Plantes, which was crowded with tourists and groups of school children, I had become separated from him. I’d been gazing at one of the statues along the walkway, and when I turned, the boy was gone. I rushed around in a panic, shouting his name, my heart gone cold with terror. It was probably only seconds later that a smiling Piero emerged from behind the plinth on which the statue stood. It was a game to him, but I had fallen to my knees and grabbed the boy into my embrace with such ferocity that Piero had patted me on the back, saying, “I’m here, Papa. I’m here.”

A few days later I had stopped to look into the window of one of the antiques stores along rue Saint-Paul. On a lower shelf I noticed a silver whistle of the kind that referees use in sporting events, but smaller and engraved with an intricate floral design. As coincidence would have it, the name of the manufacturer was also engraved on the surface—
Piero
.

“If you get lost again and can’t find me,” I told Piero when I presented it to him, “just blow on the whistle and I will come to you.”

He ran his finger over the engraving with a look of pleased amazement. But when he tested it and filled the apartment with piercing blasts, I covered my ears and retreated to the studio to escape the noise. A little later I become aware that the whistle was sounding two repeated notes, softly, the first a bit higher and briefer in pitch than the second, like a bird call. I realized that the sounds mimicked the syllables of my name—
Lee-oooh, Leee-oooh
. When I opened the studio door, Piero was standing at the other end of the hall with the whistle to his lips.