with a kind of hushed reverence.
“You’re communist?” I ask, recalling her description of Papa’s work.
“I detest labels,” she replies coolly. “I’d say socialist, really, though there’s nothing wrong with communism as an ideal.”
Thinking of the stories I’ve read about Russia, I shudder. “It’s anarchy. They destroy businesses and overthrow leaders. They murdered the czar’s whole family, even the children.”
“That’s the problem with Germans,” one of the men scoffs derisively. “No stomach for reform. As Lenin says, revolution will never come to Berlin because the Germans would want to queue up for it.”
“It’s a shame that social change has to be accomplished by such violent means,” Krysia says before I can respond to the insult. “Though the previous rulers were hardly saints. Really the ideas behind communism of equal contributions and distributions are good. But they’re being corrupted for power just like any other ideology.”
One of the men snorts. “Bah! The socialists are too weak to act on their principles. We can sit around here talking all night and it will do nothing. We need to do something.”
“Raoul …” Krysia says, and there is an undercurrent of warning to her voice. “We should go,” she adds abruptly.
I’ve offended her, I fret. But the gathering has begun to break up, and around us everyone is gathering their coats and reaching for their pockets for a few loose francs. I picture guiltily Papa’s allowance money folded neatly in my purse. Should I offer to pay? Only Modigliani sits motionless. “Am I to accept another drawing from you?” Ignatz asks him chidingly. I notice then that the wall behind the bar is covered with artwork, framed paintings and hastily pinned sketches to pay for food and drink. The artist does not answer, but stares into the distance, his eyes heavy lidded.
“You’ll see him home?” Krysia asks Ignatz, then turns to me without waiting for a response. “Spirits help the creative soul to a point,” she says in a low voice, as we make our way through the main room of the café. The crowd has ceded to the curfew, leaving beer bottles and overflowing ashtrays in their wake. “And then they destroy it.”
“Monsieur Modigliani, will he be all right?”
She nods. “Stein will kick him out at some point. Otherwise a good number of them would stay all night—these days, it’s cheaper than heating their flats.”
“So many artists. I’d heard of such things, but I had no idea….”
“They suffered during the war like everyone else with lack of food and money. But now they’re trying to recapture the lost time, the frenzy of life. And art is such a solitary business. Coming together like this gives them a sense of companionship. Though with all of the drinking and such, it’s a marvel they get any work done at all.”
Outside the night is icy. “What did that man, Raoul, I believe you called him, mean about ‘doing something’?”
She hesitates. “Nothing. They all like to talk big when they drink. What could a few artists do, anyway? It’s just that the way the peace conference is being conducted, it will still only be justice for some, a gift from the powerful if they choose to be beneficent. But true freedom is innate—given not by man but from God herself.” My jaw drops slightly at Krysia’s reference to God as a female.
Krysia hails a taxi and holds the door for me. I slide across the seat to make room for her. She does not get in, but starts to hand the driver some bills. “My flat is nearby,” she explains.
“I have money,” I say.
“Well, get home safely. And Deo is right. You should figure out what you want to do.”
“Do?”
“With your life. Self-determination isn’t just some abstract political notion, intended for the masses. Each of us must decide whom she will be, what we want for ourselves.” I had not thought about it in such a manner. “You’re not bored,” she observes. “You’re restless. Bored suggests a lack of interest in the world around you. But you drink in everything and can’t get enough. The world has come to Paris and you’re at the center of it all,” she adds. “The question now is what you do with it.”
I see myself then as undefined, a lump of clay. “But I’m just an observer.” In that moment, I grasp my own frustration—I am tired of just watching things play out in front of me like a performance on a stage. I want to take part.
“Why?” she demanded. “Why not allow yourself even for a minute to step outside the box into which you were born?”
“My father. And there are other reasons. My fiancé was wounded….” I falter, swept by the urge to tell Krysia how I feel about Stefan.
“We all have pasts.” Her tongue seems loosened by the alcohol and I think she might say something about her mysterious errand to the park. “There’s a new world being born,” she observes. “We each might as well make what we want of it.”
I look up at the dark slate of gray sky above, picturing the kitchen boy from the Orient, the one who was fighting for his country’s independence among the dirty dishes and food scraps. If he was not daunted in his quest, then how could I be? I hadn’t until this very moment seen the opportunity in all of the change, rules and norms discarded.
“Make Paris your own,” she exhorts again. “Do something, write something, take a class. You are young and unattached, at least for the moment.” I hold my breath, waiting for her to ask about my fiancé, but she continues. “You’re in one of the world’s greatest cities at the dawn of the modern age. You have resources, wits, talent. There’s no greater sin than to waste all of that. Find your destiny.” Before I can ask her how, she turns and disappears into the night.
3
I sit in the stillness of the study, the room dim but for the pale light that filters in, silhouetting the windowpane. Beyond the lattice of dark wood, the robin’s-egg-blue sky is laced with soft white clouds. A rolling wave of slate-gray domes and spires spills endlessly across the horizon, poking out from the haze that shrouds the city like a wreath. Bells chime unseen in the distance.
I wrap my hands around the too-hot cup of tea that sits before me on the table, then release it again and gaze down at the front page of yesterday’s Le Journal. The early mornings have always been mine. Papa loves to work long into the night, a lone lamp at the desk pooling yellow on the papers below. As a child, I often fell asleep to the sweet smell of pipe smoke, the sound of his pen scratching on the paper a familiar lullaby.
I eye the letter I’d started writing to Stefan the previous evening. I had written to him regularly when we were in En gland, of course. But I have not put pen to paper since our arrival in Paris simply because I did not know what to say about the fact that I had come here instead of going home.
I reread my words. I attended the welcome reception for Wilson and it was quite the affair … I crumple the piece of paper and throw it in the wastebasket. I feel foolish talking of parties and Paris while he lies wounded in a hospital bed. Why had I not returned to Berlin straightaway to be with him? Stefan is so loyal. Once, when I was laid up with a sprained ankle, he faithfully brought me my school assignments each afternoon and carried my completed work back to school each morning for
