Jerusalem Maiden (33 page)

It was a simple line drawing, devoid of shadows, just the contour of her sitting by his kerosene stove, her back erect. She rolled up the paper. “Thank you very much.”

“You may look at one painting,” he said. “I hate them all.”

“Which one do you hate the most?”

He grimaced. “I'd murder them all if they weren't too contemptible for that.”

“That's the worms talking, not you.” Esther touched the frame of a large painting. “This one?”

He shrugged and faced the wall.

She turned the canvas and raised it to the light. It was a landscape done in reds and browns. The vivid colors leaped at her, violent and hauntingly beautiful. The houses and hills swayed, their distortions revealing his angst. The power of this uncouth and unkempt man's brush and the vibrant fury of his palette were astounding.

“You're an
eeluy
,” Esther whispered, aware that she had never used this scholarly title for anyone who wasn't a yeshiva student.

And she knew she would come again, to indulge in viewing one painting at a time.

W
hat could she tell Nathan? Her response to his letter was long overdue. How could she begin to explain that today she would send Cha'im to the nearest
mikveh
to bathe? That she arrived for the fourth time, bearing kosher ingredients to cook him a meal? That viewing just one painting—like the one she had seen last time, a still life of cheese that had turned green next to a loaf of bread and a bottle of red wine—was worth staying in Paris?

She had just set foot in Cha'im's room when he said, “Today, you paint.”

“Me?”

“I've seen your work.”

She put down her food basket. “At the Louvre?” The question sounded conceited to her own ears.

“Why would I drag this wretched body all over the Louvre? At Mlle Thibaux's.”

Esther swallowed. Mlle Thibaux knew many artists, but Esther had assumed that her teacher visited their ateliers. “You've been to Mlle Thibaux's home?”

“She teaches me French. I'll pay her with a painting.”

“She's done much better with my diction,” Esther said in French. “You should practice more.”

“
Nu?
”

“
Nu
what?”

“Why isn't this Jerusalem maiden working at her art?”

Her art. The words carried a shade of praise from an Expressionist who'd sold fifty-two paintings to one collector. “Paris doesn't need another Jewish artist,” she said in a light tone and marched to the stove. “But an
eeluy
needs someone to feed him.”

While boiling water for chicken soup, she watched Cha'im place a medium-sized canvas on an easel and mix pigments with linseed oil. A selection of brushes lay on a table stained with paint of every hue. Esther chopped carrots and celery and broke off parsley leaves. The noodles she would add at the end. While holding half a chicken over a candle to burn off its remaining feathers, she glanced toward Cha'im with anticipation. She would observe him at work while contributing to his health.

“When will the soup be ready?” he asked. “I'm hungry.”

“It must cook for over an hour. Have your egg in the meantime.”

He sat on his haunches, examining a canvas with a gloomy expression, like a sculptor waiting for the stone to tell him what shape it would take. As Pierre was probably doing several blocks away. Esther handed Cha'im an egg with holes punctured on both ends. “Suck it all through one hole and let the trapped air escape the other,” she ordered. “Your worms will leave you alone for a while.”

Cha'im stood up. “What will make me feel good is this,” he said, and stuck a brush in between her fingers. He held her by the shoulders with no sense of her
tzni'ut
and turned her around until she faced the blank canvas. “Get to work,” he commanded.

A tremor passed through her. The decision had been snatched away from her; the urge had found an unexpected ally. She could no longer object, as again, God had to break a path through her stubborn resistance. Esther flexed and contracted her fingers, then reached for cerulean blue.

I
t was still morning, and the attic roof hadn't yet trapped the heat. In the neighboring house, just a floor below hers, three girls sat on the floor and played a card game. As Esther picked up her large notepad to sketch the girls in the window, she gazed at the framed photograph of her own family set on her valise. The serious little faces the photographer had ordered not to smile looked straight at her. It had been hard for Gershon to sit still, and she had restrained him with her one free hand. Eliyahu had still been nursing then, and his compact weight had pressed into her lap. The seated Nathan was stiff and solemn, his palms resting on his knees, Dvora on his other side, her small hand on his arm.

The pain of her children's absence was acute, focused. As Esther continued sketching the playing girls, she thought how, in the photograph, her own children's liveliness failed to come through in their letters. Gershon had most recently written “Shabbat,” and signed, “I misss yu. Gershon.” Dvora's penmanship was careful, her words dictated, closing each note with, “You are missed.” Her apathy stung. What had gone wrong with Esther's mothering? Had this headstrong child sensed in the womb that she catapulted her mother into a role she had never wished for? Nevertheless, motherhood was a way of no return, and Esther now missed Dvora as much as she did her sons, the ache as constant as an amputated limb.

Nathan's latest letter lay open on her bed, its language stiff, awaiting a response. In five weeks, Rosh Hashanah would descend upon them, he wrote. He had promised the children that he would be back by then and ordered Esther to head home too, with no further delay.

How could she? In her first week of painting, she had completed a street scene of Le Marais in the morning hours with its busy commerce, and had since started painting the same section of the street at dusk, when the residents reclaimed it. Her notepad was quickly filling with studies of Raysel in her parlor, Jeanne in the tile studio, the anti-Semitic storekeeper who had sold her the Picasso, and the glove reseller in her bare-walled kitchen. The long evening hours with the lingering daylight allowed her to sketch by her attic window or in a park.

She couldn't—wouldn't—plan her return. Not today. Today, she would plan only for tomorrow, with its canvas and paints. Esther put down the sketch pad and fetched her Book of Psalms from her valise, where she now kept it; her new fitted dresses had no pockets to accommodate it. She prayed with deliberation, to ascertain that God knew she meant every word. She asked not for forgiveness, not anymore, only for His patience until she fully comprehended His design for her. At least she had stopped fighting His will; she would return this afternoon to Cha'im's studio.

Hopefully, Cha'im would be in reasonably good spirits. Twice he had opened the door a crack and told her he had a woman with him. Both times she had left, embarrassed at having intruded, bewildered at the notion that men would copulate so freely, and curious about who would be a willing companion to such a filthy, pathetic man. Above all she had been disappointed at being robbed of her hours at the easel.

Now Esther stepped into the morning bustle of farmers' carts rolling and shoppers hunting for fresh produce. Hassidic children with sidelocks and long black coats congregated outside the yeshiva next to the bakery where she bought her daily food. This morning, she wouldn't be seeing Mlle Thibaux, for her former teacher was packing to spend these last weeks of summer in the country. She had invited Esther to join her to paint
en plein air
, but Esther had declined. If she left Paris, she wouldn't be able to walk past Saint-Sulpice Church, hear the
chink
of the chisel and glimpse the man perched on top. For ten days now, she had avoided Pierre, hiding from his view under the line of trees. He belonged to a gypsy woman who fondled his earlobe. Besides, she was a married woman, forever a Jerusalem Maiden. She was mad to dream of loving another man.

She headed toward Vincent's atelier as she now did many mornings. She needed more money for paints and canvases—and for Cha'im's food. Like a child mindless of the need to pay for things, Cha'im never offered to reimburse her for the groceries she brought. It was a fair payment, she figured, as Cha'im had given her back her life. In spite of the longing for her children, a large part of her was content. “
Adon Olam asher malach.
” She hummed the melodic hymn as she crossed the Seine. “
The Almighty
Lord that had ruled before any creature was formed
—”

T
he sun shone mercilessly through the large glass panes. Curled up on his mattress, Cha'im rocked in agony. Esther made him a glass of tea with honey and lemon.

“It's too hot for tea in this weather,” he whined. “What do you want from a poor Jew?”

“Sweating is good for you. It flushes the impurities out of your body.” She opened a window to let in fresh air that would dilute his odor. “Later, you go to the
mikveh
and get yourself a proper bath.”

He slurped his tea and walked to his easel.

“You see? You're feeling better.” She watched him paint the waiter in the café where she had first met him.

A miraculous transformation took place as Cha'im's hand danced with astounding energy and daring, yet with precise brushstrokes. The vigor locked in this miserable little man was hard to fathom. In the riotous lines and roaring colors, the poor waiter Esther remembered as being frazzled seemed tormented. Cha'im's insight surprised her. Mlle Thibaux had explained that, unlike the Renaissance artists, who had striven for aesthetic perfection, Cha'im's genius lay in selecting a faulty character and then preserving the human dignity in spite of the subject's inherent shortcomings. That was why he led the emerging Expressionist movement. Leaders came with dubious traits, Esther thought; Moses had been a stutterer. In years to come, Cha'im might be remembered for having changed the course of Western artistic expression. And she had been a witness—if not an enabler—of this wonder.

She moved back to her canvas and studied the still-life composition set on the table. A minute later, she, too, was lost to the paints and canvas, Cha'im's force splashing through her fingers with the power of millions of little lines and dots.

“Light!” Cha'im grumbled after what seemed like only an hour.

Esther's trance broke, and she noticed that the late sun lingered on the horizon. She turned the light dial, but the three exposed bulbs cast a yellow tint on surfaces and threw shadows where the sun had previously lit. Esther moved her easel closer to the window to wring the last drops of natural light. Cha'im continued to work. While she dared not alter any detail of God's creation, he was unbound by its dictate. He saw the insides of things, even the souls of houses.

The door burst open, and Cha'im's landlord stormed in, yelling about three months in arrears. “Pay now, or I'll have you thrown out on your skinny ass. Now!”

“Take a painting,” Cha'im growled.

“What will I do with another one?” The man kicked at a nearby stretched canvas, and it fell with a clutter. “Cut it to pieces and feed it to my children?”

Esther hurried to pick up the fallen painting and dusted its corners. “I'll loan you what I have,” she told Cha'im in Yiddish, her voice trembling. Vincent had just paid her, but now she would have to dip into Nathan's coffer.

“Bless you. Ormaz will pay you back,” Cha'im said, referring to his agent.

After the landlord departed with what amounted to only one month's rent, Esther asked, “May I have the painting you were going to give him?”

Cha'im waved to the wet canvas. “You can have this one when I'm done. I hate it already.”

P
ink twilight washed the street when Esther emerged from the building, exhilaration making her want to fly. Even after waking at dawn and working all day at Vincent's and Cha'im's, she felt alive, her body more agile than it had been in years, and she wished she could skip in the street. In her satchel was a packet of breadcrumbs she would toss to the fish in the pond of Luxembourg Gardens. She would watch their mad race and imagine her children's delight were they with her. That would take her mind off Pierre.

The air was balmy, and summer students from the nearby Sorbonne walked hand in hand or in small groups.

Several steps away from the entrance to Cha'im's building, Pierre leaned against a poplar tree, smoking. Her heart gave a flip.

“Are you waiting for someone?” Esther asked. “For Cha'im?”

“I've figured out why you've been avoiding me.”

She lowered her head. In her mind's eye, she saw the gypsy lifting her skirt. In her head, she heard the woman's bold singing. “I have no right.”

He brought out a red rose from behind his back. “I'm sorry to have betrayed you.”

“What?”

“You're cross that I told Cha'im to ask my mother about your work.”

“Oh.”

“I meant well.” Pierre extended the rose toward her.

Esther took the flower and buried her nose in its fragrance to steal time, to stop the shaking that must have been visible. “Whenever you mentioned my art, it was in the past tense.”

“I imagined my mother was putting enough pressure on you.”

She smiled. “Thanks to you, Cha'im has made me start painting again.” No need to mention that God, not Pierre, had been the one to put Cha'im in her path.

He took a step forward. “He's shown me your new work. You're amazing, Esther.” Pierre's finger reached to the widow's peak in her hairline and traced a straight line down from her forehead, along the bridge of her nose, across her lips and onto her chin. As Esther held her breath it traveled down her neck to the high scoop of her dress, as if the artist, not the man, were studying her profile for a sculpture. The skin of his finger was rough, hardened by stone. She stood still, his closeness bringing that recurring quivering, the feel of his finger on her neckline more sensuous than a
yi'chud
.