Paul had been shocked, more than surprised, certainly, when he heard that she had described him as an extremist. He had always seen himself as moderate, the opposite of such people as those she had in mind. She had said, so he heard, that she was tired of his This has certainly gone far enough and his It is all over now. She had let it be known that she considered he lacked the gift of compromise. His solitary habits had made him earnest and unyielding. He did not mind admitting to romantic, but she had tossed her head at that. She had said that his liberalism was fanatic, as intolerable as it was intolerant. He thought this no more than a play on words, the sort of thing she had hoped people would repeat. Well, now look. An alarm had been ringing from the Prospect for at least an hour and no one had come. There were no cars. He had heard the crack of a pistol, or what he had thought a pistol, more than once. His telephone was dead. Someone had thrown a stone through Beloff’s window and the decent people simply crossed to the other side of the street. And the plume of smoke he had seen rising from the City, somewhere there, was now no longer visible only because the light was failing.

            Paul walked away from the window. He had become conscious of standing in a pool of light, like a man on a stage. He turned down the lamp and stepped across his narrow drawing room to make himself a drink. His hand was shaking. He held the glass to his eye and the level of his gin swayed as though he were standing on the deck of a ship. He put the drink down on the cabinet and returned to the window without it.

            She had said that he vacillated, rattling from one end to the other like a shuttle on a loom and that he mistook prevarication for a middle way, which he most certainly did not. Other people found him depressing, apparently. Something like a magnesium flare went up from the next street.

            He had been expecting a pupil, but surely he would not come now and he was unable to telephone him. He glanced at the materials ready on the desk and at the cup and ball prepared for a study, patiently awaiting the artist.

            The people who walked by in little groups sauntered, laughing loudly, probably in drink, and shouting what he could not hear, while those who walked singly walked quickly, head down. One chap all but ran, carrying what might have been a frame under his arm. Someone was walking beneath him where he could not be seen banging on every front door as he passed out of sheer impertinence. Paul did not feel quite safe in his own house. His pupil surely would not come now. It was early, but the winter dark had already fallen. The man running with the painting had made him think. Why paint a mediocre picture when you can steal a really good one? He pulled himself up. He did not know why he had thought that man a thief. He might have been saving that picture, not stealing it. Paul thought of Modesty in the Buhovac house.

            Modesty was a small picture and as some would have it, even a minor one, but it was lovely and in Paul’s opinion alone, it was Buhovac’s masterpiece.

            Paul only very infrequently deserved to be thought of as ambitious. When he was struck by the idea of a desired object, the expression on his face was pleasantly child-like and would change only slightly and become slightly less pleasant as he accommodated himself to what seemed inevitable to him, which is that he would never have that longed-for thing. He was aware of this quality in himself and he had decided to call it modesty.

            He could not deny that whatever else it might be, this unrest was exciting. Generally he felt that there was a barrier between himself and other people and now there was a breach in it. He was unsure whether he should allow the outside to flow through that breach to him or to make a sortie, to escape from himself. To put this another way, should he go to the Buhovac house and protect what was there, or, should he go to the house and bring Modesty back here? For safekeeping? That would not be stealing, even in a technical sense.

            A kingdom was being won or lost, but Paul cared only for art. She had said that he was not a real artist, that he drew like a schoolmaster, although he tied his cravat like a genius. Miller had called Paul an idiot at an inter-departmental meeting. Paul had confronted Miller with this at his assessment and he had not denied having said it, but he had explained that he had chosen to downplay Paul’s value so that he would not be poached away at this crucial time on some pointless secondment. Paul had chosen to believe this.

            Looking out of the window once more, having turned off his light, he could see that a group of boys had started a fire in the watchman’s brazier and were now rolling it down the middle of the street.

 ♧

On the several occasions that Paul had visited the Buhovac house, he had walked there from his own apartment, but he was now strangely uncertain of just how distant it was and how long it would take him to get there. There would surely be time to arrive before it officially closed although its hours of business, if they could be properly so called, rather depended on the whims and caprices of its almost self-confessedly eccentric curator. On almost all of Paul’s visits, this curator had been the house’s only other occupant. Appearing when least looked for, an usher of stealthy step.

            Paul decided immediately on leaving his house, that he would not take the most direct route to the museum. The streets were unnerving. What a difference there was between walking these streets and spectating from the window. The difference between a man and his shadow. Here was frost and darkness. Paul turned up the collar of his third-best overcoat and folded it around his throat to hide his rather brilliant white shirt-front. He had discarded his tie. He confined himself to observing passers-by from the corner of his eye. Spirits were high and drink had been taken. Here at last was a triumph for people whose lives had been defeat after defeat. Paul decided that the jeers and the jibes were not for him. He made an erratic progress through this confederation of the pitiful and the sick. The narrow and the less well-lit invited.

            A street-car passed so overloaded with a cheering crowd that its floorboard had sunk and was scraping along the ground leaving a trail of blue and gold sparks, as though it were powered by a magical engine. Paul knew he was not the sort of man to travel by such means. In the square were throngs of soldiers, gesticulating in the light of fires and standing around clusters of armoured cars. He took a further, more circuitous diversion.

            He thought ahead, to the museum. He diverted himself with that familiar fantasy; if you could take home one painting from the collection, which one would it be? Modesty of course. Vlako Buhovac had lived in this house for all of his adult life. He had, in fact, been born there, but his father’s business had encountered financial difficulties and the family had moved out, largely while Vlako was in any case at school, when the house had been occupied by Buhovac père’s more prosperous and circumspect brothers, before the family moved back in shortly after Vlako graduated from the university. The house had always been cared for, but the district in which it stood had seen many changes of fortune.

            Buhovac’s reputation had almost always been that of a minor talent. A respectable living had been made. At one point his portrait style had hovered on the very edge of being fashionable and he might have made a wealthy man of himself if he had managed that more carefully. Some wilful fecklessness inherited from his father may have played a part there. He was not ambitious, but what he did, he did well. There was some agreement on that. His collaboration with Lichtsteiner, whose comic best-sellers he had illustrated, had brought him a different kind of fame. Lichtsteiner’s own reputation ebbed and flowed and the cheaper editions did not always carry the illustrations. They had published a magazine together, copies of which were sought after now and which could be consulted in the house in an almost complete run, but the two of them had probably suffered a loss from it at the time. There had been exhibitions in galleries, themselves largely long since disappeared, one of which had stood on the street where Paul now lived (again, catalogues could be consulted in the museum) but these had petered out before Buhovac’s death, like a geometric sequence in which the terms grew steadily further apart. Then there had been the memoir, written by his daughter, before their estrangement, in which a picture had been drawn of a sensuous and fun-loving father, rather beautifully written and which enjoyed a vogue independent of the painter’s own fame, which meant that some visitors to the museum, prompted by the memoir, found many of the paintings themselves something of a disappointment. The daughter also wrote two novels in which some suspicion of an ethereal portrait of the father lingered.

            Paul was not altogether sure whether he was in Buhovac’s street, or the one before it, when the incident took place. He was aware really only of the shadow of a man, looming out of the futureless darkness. A wrong shadow. Paul had been watching an elderly man standing with a small boy, probably his son, correcting his watch, perhaps, by the town hall clock and explaining something to the boy. Aroundabout there was a holiday uproar. What happened was that a young man stepped in front of Paul. What Paul noticed about him was that his trousers were too short for him, exposing his fragile-looking ankles. The young man, the yob, the lout, the hoodlum, butted Paul in the face, that is, struck Paul’s nose and mouth, hard, with his square white forehead. A loaf of cheap bread as hard as stone. The assailant’s head was a signet attempting to impress his boorish coat of arms on Paul’ soft, plastic, doughy face. Paul staggered forwards, bent over in the hope of protecting himself, incontinently dripping his bloody wax on the dark ground. He looked around from his crouched position for a policeman, like a little boy in the playground desperate for the teacher. There was none. He knew he was weeping. Paul was frightened, in shock, but also frightening, a wounded animal, a gigantic but fatally crippled insect. He tripped over himself. The youth may have shouted after him. He did not hear. Away, I have nothing to do with thee! He stumbled among the darkness he was casting on the ground in the direction of the museum. It was a refuge certainly now. The door was ajar when he arrived. He was concerned that the young man had pursued him and now worried that this was where he had come from. He closed the door without looking behind him and stood up, leaning against it. His gore flooded his shirt and poured into his mouth. He had no idea of the right thing to do. He shrugged off his overcoat and hung it on the peg, numbed and mortified.

 ♧

He might find a mirror and examine what felt like dreadful damage. If he could find a bathroom and surely there had to be one, he might wash himself pointlessly. He could take Modesty and leave and flee. The house was quiet behind the massive door, across which Paul now drew the heavy velvet draught-excluding curtain, but it was not silent. There was someone else in the house.

            That will be, thought Paul, the curator, for want of a better word. Paul had spoken at some length to this man on each of his visits to this infrequently visited museum and on each occasion the man had implicitly denied ever having seen Paul before. Once Paul had asked him to fetch the curator for him and the man had set off, turning on his heel, but had not returned.

            Paul moved towards the sound of the scraping chair. He stood very straight so as not to drip on Buhovac’s carpets. He was coming to himself. He noted, with some alarm, several blank spaces on the walls where paintings had until very recently hung, leaving behind only ineloquent silhouettes. Even so, the museum suited Paul; its lack of noise from outside, its light, its temperature; altogether its self-awareness of its difference from what was outside both usually and, especially, tonight. Paul relaxed a little. He was not badly hurt, he now reassured himself, even though he had lost what looked to him like a lot of blood. The museum did, like many old things, to put it blandly, make Paul sad. He lamented the time that had gone and he pitied the dead. It was a sombre place with an unfocused sorrow. But these were comfortable disquiets.

            There was a photograph, taken by Arbuthnot, of Buhovac in the hall. His massive pot of comically massive brushes, his dirty smock, his mad hair and his funny, protruding eyes. A circus clown, wishing to act the part of an artist, might have dressed as Buhovac had for this photograph. In truth, the painter had been a rather more elegant man than this. Elegance had not always been his friend. He was a painter who had made compromises. He had been a very efficient painter, with a fluency that approached elegance very nearly. Elegance is a compromise, thought Paul, because elegant is something that someone else has to consider you to be.

            He saw the curator sitting at a table at the end of the long room, rather like an exhibit himself. The curator saw Paul too, immediately stood up, bowed, so far as one could tell at this distance, and left the room, without any acknowledgement of the bloodiness of the apparition, via one of the museum’s many mysterious doors. This long room was perhaps the best in the house. Paul began to look at pictures. Some sensation was beginning to return to his face. Not an unalloyed pleasure.

            There were streetscapes to which he had never much attended and which now struck him for their dark angularity and narrow but affected palette as both remarkably like stage sets and also reminiscent of the anarchic streets outside tonight. Had Paul actually ever seen these gibbering prophecies? They might simply have been in store. The collection was revolved surprisingly often. Paul wanted to enjoy the colours here, the shapes and the spaces between shapes, but he was moved to a lack of generosity which he did not often feel. I may be a modest painter, but at least I make sense.

            Still life was more to his taste. Buhovac was known for that virtuoso technique for rendering the shining surface of an object. A craft really. He over-used it. Paul thought it now the sort of thing that impressed the non-painter. But, also, where was Modesty? A favourite still life subject had been Buhovac’s own cup and ball game. The wooden egg cup to which a balsa ball was attached by a string. The ball had to be tossed gently and caught on its downward curve, caused by the restraining string, with a stuttering gesture of the hand and arm, like a hiccough. Buhovac had been adept at this game and had played it endlessly. His daughter said so. Maybe you needed a painter’s arm to be really good at it. Buhovac’s own toy was in a cabinet somewhere. The still lifes presented unexaggerated objects. Left with their own drama.

            Paul admired the painter’s technique, but he wanted to see his dreams. He, himself, dreamed of painting something haunting, something unforgettable. He was finding it difficult to concentrate. He was worried about his teeth, which he dared not touch even with the tip of his tongue.

            Almost all of the paintings were described on handwritten paper plaques stuck on the wall near to them. These did not say things that were usual in museums. “It is very easy to underestimate his domestic still lifes and atmospheric landscapes,” for instance. A favourite had been, “landscapes which show that Nature is very beautiful and completely hopeless. Quite detailed, in the English manner. Look at that butterfly!” Paul looked for this plaque every time that he came here, but he had found it only once and had come to doubt that he had not made it up himself.

            A trick of the painter’s which Paul had adopted, was to take the still out of still life by introducing an element of instability. Arrangements of fruit so teetering and unbalanced on a table with an obvious slope, as we could see from the level of the water in a half-filled wine glass. The water very beautifully and economically painted, as though it were swaying.

            There were some, but not very many, portraits. The best of that work of course would have been sold, during Buhovac’s life time. Some of those portraits, Paul thought, would now be on the walls of houses in this city which were currently on fire. In sympathy with these burning faces, Paul’s own throbbed with a steel pulse. He felt it as a pin-cushion in which splinters of bone had been stuck instead of needles. Paul did not favour the revolution, but, outside, nothing that he loved was being broken down or torn apart.

            This museum was not like others, even other house-of-the-artist museums. Nothing was for sale here; no books, no postcards. This was the home as Vlako had left it when he died, more or less. So, the furniture, good, bad and very bad was all still here. The beds were made up. There was a kitchen, where Paul had once found the curator eating a sandwich, drinking a cup of tea and doing his best not to look indignant at this visitor’s presumption. As noted, there were some display cabinets; brushes, his palette, scrubbed clean, his wife’s thin gold wedding ring, the cup and ball.

            When Paul got to the end of the long room he looked over the table where the old man had been sitting. There were drawing materials; paper, pens and pencils and an unfinished drawing, a copy of one of Vlako’s cup and ball sketches, which was also on the table. A little crude, a little over-wrought, but really remarkably well done. The work of the old man? If so, he was an artist, within his limits. Paul was disappointed that the curator had looked disapprovingly at him, so he had thought, before his peremptory exit. He looked, as the employees of museums sometimes will, as though he doubted the honesty of Paul’s intentions.

            He remembered what he had noticed once before, an oblique resemblance between the old man’s profile and some of the minor family portraits tucked away in dusty corners. The daughter had evidently taken the better things. It was just possible that the curator had been an actual servant of the family during Vlako’s life, or the son of that servant, and been used by the painter as a ready-to-hand model. He actually looked like Vlako’s father, painted several times and drawn more often, whom he might have come to resemble as happened with pets and their owners. Perhaps a poor relation?

            Paul had once seen the old man nodding in a hard chair by the wall with his head just framed by the low-hung painting behind him, as though he were part of the composition, or as if he were dreaming of it.

            Paul was now brought up short by a full length portrait he had definitely never seen before, until he quickly realized that it was a mirror and that he was looking at his own gruesome reflection. He looked like a tortured man. The mirror itself was not in such a lovely condition; it had lost amounts of its silver and Paul looked pocked with decay on top of all else; badly in need of some tender restoration. He wondered what she would say and felt sure that she would laugh when he told her he had been butted in the face, if he should choose to tell her that, what he could hardly call his bitter struggle.

            He guessed something about the mirror which was easy to guess for those who knew the character of the house and he was quite right. It was also a door. He pulled at the little wooden knob which was its discreet handle and which he only now noticed, although he could have reached for it without looking. The door opened and his horrible reflection swung away from him as if he had turned now really quickly and caught his shadow mocking him. He had first seen the curator like this, standing in the frame of an open door and so had taken him for a painting.

            Paul was not surprised, on closing the mirror behind him, that it looked very much like a cupboard door from the other side. He was now at the foot of a set of steep and awkward stairs. They did not look much used. He began to climb them, making a noise like a man chopping frozen logs with a blunt axe.

            All up the stairway were charming little paintings in makeshift frames that again were new to him. He stopped often. The blood was drying on his face. It came off under his nails like flakes of paint. Many heads of children. Not a characteristic Buhovac subject, but there were precedents. And there were flowers. A bee orchid. A great common poppy, papaver, lushly red, its petals on the point of falling, which then became a fireside chair, roasting red, with its anthers a curled black cat, violet-eyed.

            The hallway was panelled and confronting a blank panel at the top of the stairs, Paul felt sure it must be another door. From the other side of it, quite high up, he could hear a scratching or scrabbling that might be considered a scurrying and a hiss. For no good reason he thought of a bat, perhaps trapped in an unexpected blind of this maze-like building. Then he thought of that young man who had hurt him earlier. Had he followed him into this treasure house, this pharaoh’s tomb? Paul might sneak back down those preposterous stairs, every step reporting like a firecracker, but he could see that bloody yob striding through the lurid streets with Modesty under his arm. He approached the panel as quietly as possible. The scratching had stopped, the hissing was softer, perceptibly restrained. He pulled aside the panel and stood before a horrified young man, frightened and horrible himself, like the startled ghost of Vlako Buhovac. Paul touched his ten finger tips to the young man’s chest and flicked him away as you would wave away a wasp from a glass of champagne. He had not thought that he had such power at his fingers’ ends.

            He had once seen an old man slip at the top of the icy town hall steps while carrying a bundle of sticks, a faggot, as the country people still did. He quickly rolled to the side, as though he were used to such accidents, and fell only a step or two, but the faggot fell the length of the whole stone staircase, bouncing higher as it accelerated. It might have been a  facsimile of the man, a simulacrum sacrificed in his stead. The bouncing was cheerful, jolly, but you could not help but think of sapless bones, the shattered life. Paul remembered this as the youth rolled down the wooden stairs. They had both, very briefly, been standing at the top of them. Now Paul stood there alone.

            The youth lay with his limbs so disposed that no living man could bear, surely. One snapped ankle. There was a cupboard at the end of this short corridor. Paul walked up to it, opened its door, and stepped inside, like a man thinking to hide in a hollow tree.

 ♧

Paul was not surprised to see the old man in this small room, sitting at his desk covered with paper and pencils and playing cup and ball with many undeterred failures. Paul took a chair beside him and the curator stopped playing his game and looked at his face.

“It’s the unhealing wound that counts.”

He put down his toy and picked up a pencil. He brought the point close to his eye, put the pencil down and picked up another and continued to draw without examining its point. The drawing was barely begun, but Paul could see that it would be the portrait of a child, a little girl. The pencil flickered around the curls of her hair as she tossed her head.

“A picture is a modest revolution; the gentle evocation of a change within one’s self.”

Paul picked up some of the papers from the table. His hands were not so clean and he could feel rather than hear the old man tut.

“Vlako wanted to return to this house, to consume what remained of his life in peace. That is all he wanted.”

Paul was rather irritated by this talk of peace. How can you talk like that when blood, my blood in small quantities, but in particular, is running in the streets?

“These things sometimes lack coherence,” Paul said.

The curator tutted once more, as though Paul had simply left a thumb print where he should not,

“Coherence is over-rated. Keep drawing.”

Paul took one of the pencils and pulled a blank sheet towards him. He made a mark. He began to copy the old man copying.

            Paul was diverted by the notion that he could simply stay here now, doing this, and never walk through that door and into those streets again. He might become the curator of Vlako Buhovac’s old house. This old man might come to harm on those traitorous stairs. He smiled and some of the dried blood cracked, pulling smartly the little hairs at the corner of his mouth.

“When you paint, you must make use of, make sure of, that part of your mind which dreams.”

The curator’s drawings were rather good, Paul thought. He had a peculiar way of holding his pencil, waving it away from himself as though it were a wand, or as if he were stirring a soup. He was an unrecognised artist of a kind.

“It is not the cold and hardships I mind, but this so long three years away from my mother.”

He looked over at what Paul was doing and tutted almost silently again.

  “Keep drawing,” he said.

 ♧

September 7, 2024