games, we laughed a lot, he teased my mother about buying all the food on the black market.
Between the two of us there was the same complicity. Neither of us looked away or took the slightest step back. We felt the same love: simply the circumstances had changed. The passeur had delivered his charge; the frontiers were crossed.
The years passed. The last time I ever saw him we drove all night with my friend Anant from London to Genève. Driving through a forest near Châtillon-sur-Seine, we heard Coltrane on the radio playing ‘My Favourite Things’. It was during this journey that Ken told me he was returning to New Zealand. He was then sixty-five. I didn’t ask him why because I didn’t want to hear him say: To die.
Instead I made believe that he would come back to Europe. To which he replied: The best thing there, John, down under, is the grass! There’s no grass as green anywhere else in the world. He said this forty years ago. I never knew exactly when or how he died.
In the Place Nowy, among the stolen hairdryers, the honey-bread with its candied orange peel, the woman who chain-smokes and hopes to sell dresses, Jagusia with her basket now almost empty, the black cherries that have to be sold and eaten quickly because they won’t last, the barrel of salted herring, the voice of Ewa Demarczyk on a CD singing one of her defiant songs, I suffer his death for the first time.
I do not even glance at where Ken is standing, for he will not be there. I walk alone, past the barber’s, past the soup kitchen, past the women sitting on their stools.
Something pulls me back to the pigeons. When I arrive a man turns towards me, and, as if guessing at my distress – is there another country in the world more accustomed to coming to terms with that emotion? – he hands me, without smiling, the carrier pigeon he is holding.
Its feathers feel slightly damp – like satin. The small ones on its breast have a parting in the middle, as on an owl. It weighs nothing for its size. I hold him against my chest.
I LEFT THE Place Nowy, and found, after asking two passers-by, the bankomat. From there I returned to the pension in Miodowa Street and lay down on the bed. It was very hot, hot with the uncertain heat of the eastern plains. Now I could weep. Later I shut my eyes and imagined shuffling a pack of cards.
I SOMETIMES HAVE a dream in which I am my present age, with grown-up children and newspaper editors on the telephone, yet nevertheless have to leave and pass nine months of the year in the school where I was sent as a boy. In the dream, I think of these months as a regrettable exile, but it never occurs to me to refuse to go. In life, I ran away from that school when I was sixteen. The war was on and I went to London. Between the air-raid sirens and amid the debris of bombing I had a single idea: I wanted to draw naked women. All day long.
I was enrolled in an art school – there was not a lot of competition; nearly everyone over eighteen was in the services – and I drew in the daytime and I drew in the evenings. There was an exceptional teacher in the school at the time, an elderly painter, a refugee from fascism named Bernard Meninsky. He said very little and his breath smelt of dill pickles. On the same imperial-sized sheet of paper (paper was rationed; we had two sheets a day), beside my clumsy, unstudied, impetuous drawing, Bernard Meninsky would boldly draw a part of the model’s body in such a way as to make clearer its endlessly subtle structure and movement. After he had gone, I would spend the next ten minutes, dumbfounded, looking from his drawing to the model and vice versa.
Thus I learnt to question with my eyes the mystery of anatomy and of love, whilst outside in the night sky, I heard the RAF fighters crossing the city to intercept the German bombers before they reached the coast. The ankle of the foot on which her weight was posed was vertically under the dimple of her neck … directly vertical.
When I was in Istanbul recently, I asked my friends if they could arrange for me to meet the writer Latife Tekin. I had read a few translated extracts from two novels she had written about life in the shantytowns on the edge of the city. And the little I had read deeply impressed me with its imagination and authenticity. She herself must have been brought up in a shantytown. My friends arranged a dinner and Latife came. I do not speak Turkish, so naturally they offered to interpret. She was sitting beside me. Something made me tell my friends – no, don’t bother, we’ll manage somehow.
The two of us looked at each other with some suspicion. In another life I might have been an elderly police superintendent interrogating a pretty, shifty, fierce woman of thirty repeatedly picked up for larceny. In fact, in this our only life, we were both storytellers without a word in common. All we had were our observations, our habits of narration, our Aesopian sadness. Suspicion gave way to shyness.
I took out a notebook and did a drawing of myself as one of her readers. She drew a boat upside down to show she couldn’t draw. I turned the paper around so it was the right way up. She made a drawing to show that her drawn boats always sank. I said there were birds at the bottom of the sea. She said there was an anchor in the sky. (Like everybody else at the table we were drinking raki.) Then she told me a story about the municipal bulldozers destroying the houses built in the night on the city’s edge. I told her about an old woman who lived in a van. The more we drew, the quicker we understood. In the end we were laughing at our speed – even when the stories were monstrous or sad. She took a walnut and, dividing it in two, held it up to say: halves of the same brain! Then somebody put on some Bektasi music and all the guests began to dance.
In the summer of 1916, Picasso drew on a page of a medium-sized sketchbook the torso of a nude woman. It is neither one of his invented figures – it hasn’t enough bravura; nor is it a figure drawn from life – it hasn’t enough of the idiosyncrasy of the immediate.
The face of the woman is unrecognisable, for the head is scarcely indicated. However, the torso is a kind of face. It has a familiar expression. A face of love, become hesitant or sad. The drawing is distinct in feeling from others in the sketchbook. The other drawings play rough games with Cubist or neo-classical devices, some looking back on the previous still life period, others preparing for the Harlequin themes he would take up the following year when he did the décor for the ballet Parade. The torso of the woman is very fragile.
Usually Picasso drew with such verve and directness that every scribble reminds you of the act of drawing and of the pleasure of that act. It is this that makes his drawings insolent. Even the weeping faces of the Guernica period or the skulls he drew during the German Occupation possess an insolence. They know no servitude. The act of drawing them is triumphant.
The drawing in question is an exception. Half drawn – for Picasso didn’t continue on it for long – half woman, half vase, half seen as by Ingres, half seen as by a child, the apparition of the figure counts for far more than the act of drawing. It is she, not the draughtsman, who insists, insists by her very tentativeness.
My hunch is that in Picasso’s imagination this drawing belonged to Eva Gouel. She had died only six months earlier of tuberculosis. They had lived together – Eva and Picasso – for four years. Into his famous Cubist still lifes he has inserted and painted her name, transforming austere canvases into love letters. JOLIE EVA. Now she was dead and he was living alone. The image lies on the paper as in a memory.
This hesitant torso has come from another floor of experience, has come in the middle of a sleepless night and still retains
