The Best of Electric Velocipede (32 page)

She reached into her handbag and pulled out a slightly dog-eared book in a stiff paper cover.

The Natural History of the Rusalka
, it said in bold red type on a salmon-pink background, by
Bedriska Hroznysova
. Bedriska, the Czech version of Friedericke . . . No wonder she preferred Frida.

But what kind of narcissist was she to carry her own book around in her handbag?

Somehow, she must have guessed the direction of my thoughts, because she started to blush a deep shade of crimson, from her throat to her cheeks.

“I know . . .” She laughed self-deprecatingly. “I always carry one around, when I go to the cinema. You never know when you might run into an admirer . . .” She held out the book, and strangely, I found I liked her all the more for the odd mixture of pride and diffidence that had taken hold of her.

Inside were columns of stylishly modern type, interspersed with reproductions of historical illustrations and footnotes. Only later did it dawn on me that the book was written in English, not the more predictable Czech or German. The woman was full of surprises.

“ ‘At dusk on a clear summer night,’ ” I read at random, “ ‘the rusalkas may sometimes be found running around under the stalks of the cornfields, causing the corn to wave. And when the moon is full, they climb out of the depths of the millpond onto the weed-choked frame of the miller’s wheel, jumping down into the water to play in the treacherous millstream with noisy cries of
kuku
. . .’ ”

I flipped a few pages.

“ ‘They dance in circles on the open riverbanks, leaving patches of trampled grass, and tempting young men to join them. But pity the man who allows himself to be seduced, for they will dance him to death; and woe betide anyone who so much as blunders into the bounds of the rusalkas’ ring the following morning for they will be dead in a week. In the eleventh century they were often associated with vampyres . . .’ ”

There was Max Schreck again.

“ ‘. . . for the rusalka, like the vampyre, through the promise of fleeting intoxication, tempts the virtuous young man or woman to certain death. It is not surprising, then, that the burial rites of the ancient Slavs, from the ninth century onwards, show many protections against the threat of revenants. The peculiar horror of the early Slavonic burials at Celakovice, and elsewhere—their bodies variously shackled, beheaded, pierced with stakes, weighed down with boulders, or buried face-down, so that the monster, on waking, digs itself further down into the earth—lies in our fear of losing control of our own bodies at the behest of an uncomprehending society, and in the suspicion that these particular “revenants” may have been operated on preventively while they were still alive. To say nothing of our uncertainty whether we, too, in those dim and dangerous times, might not have sold ourselves to the
rusalky
, and gladly, for no more than a few minutes’ ecstasy . . .’ ”

I felt myself blushing in turn, for the passion of the writing had shocked and excited me. It was almost too much to be granted such an intimate glimpse into the mind of stranger on a first encounter. Especially when she was sitting just across a small marble table.

I glanced up anxiously, to find that Frida was still watching me, a distant fire in her eyes, a strangely satisfied smile on her lips. I was sure she could see right through me. I felt naked.

“But what about you?” She asked, idly dipping her strong, writerly fingers into her wine-glass. “I have been monopolising the conversation perhaps . . .”

“Oh, I . . . that is . . .” I stuttered. “I really don’t know . . .” For the truth was that, having been brought so suddenly face to face with her achievements, I felt quite inadequate. Comparing myself to her—her drive, her focus, above all her precocious and undeniable talent—I felt like the worst kind of dilettante. My two little books of poetry . . . My superficial familiarity with the Paris art world . . . My no doubt undeserved reputation as one of the avant-garde’s favorite models . . . Where did that leave me? And she wrote brilliantly. Beautifully. Far better than I did, and English was not even her native language. How could I measure up to this mysterious, attractive, and above all, gifted woman?

But in the end I told her some more about New York and Paris. About taking absinthe with Luis Bunuel and oversize Havana Club cocktails with Hemingway, hashish with Jean Cocteau and tea with Janet Flanner. And after a while I even felt relaxed enough to tell her about my scarlet picnic in the Bois de Boulogne, where everything, including the bread, had been dyed red with a truly nauseating volume of cochineal, and which a roving reporter had placed on the front page of the
Daily Telegraph
, after several of the unwitting participants had been taken ill. Though I’ve always suspected this particular editorial decision owed more to the
Telegraph
’s prurient interest in my shaven-headed nuns, in their resplendent red cowls and their silver constructivist rosaries, than to any actual harm that had come to our victims.

I had recounted it all before, of course, many more times than I cared to remember, and for a while I was afraid I might be boring her. But then I realized that this kind of “news” did not usually travel well between cities—indeed, there had been times when it had hardly seemed capable of making the short jump across the Seine—and Frida was clearly enjoying herself. So we arranged to meet the next afternoon, and we bid each other good night in a flurry of high spirits that carried me through the rest of the evening, like the dance of her wayward rusalkas. She seemed different, though, in the cold light of sobriety. Subdued. Haunted. Ill-at-ease. No longer the gay raconteuse. Almost as if she were suddenly afraid of me.

She was sitting in the Cafe Slovanka, on one of those short, busy streets by the river, where the trams dash past the site of the old pagan burial ground, up to the gloomy old townhouse, where Dr. Faust reputedly once sold his soul to the Devil. A journal I instantly recognized as
This Quarter
lay on the table in front of her, its spine cracked in a way that told me she must only recently have been working her way through the pictures. One hand was stretched out across the back of the chair to her left, tapping arrhythmically, while the other fiddled nervously with the rough edges of the magazine’s cover. Her face was dark and unreadable. Then she glanced up, and her expression changed to one of guilt and embarrassment, and I was dismayed to find myself responding in kind, like a tremulous schoolgirl.

But surely it could not be that edition?
—I caught myself thinking.
How had it got to Prague? And how had she found it so quickly?

But of course it was, and she turned it over to show me the documentary evidence of my misspent youth. All of sudden, my naked torso, in Lee Miller’s racy, black-and-white portrait, stared up at us from the sedate mahogany table-top of this stuffy haven of Central European gentility.

“Why did you not tell me you were famous?” she cried in a constricted voice, as I sat down heavily. “I had no idea . . . I did not realise . . .”

“Oh, I’d hardly call it fame.” I tried to be as dismissive as possible. “Infamy maybe . . . It’s nothing. It’s just something I did.”

“But the photo . . .” She stammered. “It is beautiful.
You
are beautiful.”

The sincerity with which she blurted this out was so guileless, I hardly knew how to respond.

“Really . . .” I paused, trying not to sound either insensitive or bumptious. “I was just in the right place at the right time. Your own photo in the same pages would be ten times prettier. Maybe twenty . . . Do you not have any similar photographers in Prague?”

“Well, yes, there is Drtikol . . .” She swallowed. “But I couldn’t . . . I could never . . . My parents . . .”

Her voice had started to rise, and for a moment I thought she was going to burst into a childish and distinctly unbecoming wail. But then, as if remembering where she was, she glanced at the surrounding tables—at the two fat ladies to our left, and the ascetic young man with what seemed to be a Czech edition of William B. Seabrook to our right—and continued almost in a whisper.

“Prague is too small.”

Her distraction seemed genuine enough, but all the same I couldn’t help wondering if she was using her family as an excuse, for I thought I detected an element of excitement under the surface of her apparent embarrassment. Was it possible that, in actual fact, the real reason she was flustered was because she had discovered there might be circumstances, under which she, too, would want to be naked for others? Or was it simply that she was so unused to receiving compliments?

“Come . . .” She said suddenly, regaining something of her old composure. “There is an exhibition I wanted to show you. Toyen, the Czech woman artist, has a private view this afternoon, and I think you would like her. The gallery is just around the corner . . .”

She led me to a modern, white-washed building, tacked onto a medieval water-tower on one of the islands in the river. There was already a crowd inside, milling around the stark, functionalist interior, which was hung with large, colorful canvasses.

I was expecting her to produce a ticket at the door, or at least some kind of invitation, but the major-domo simply waved her through with an obeisant bow. She was a deep one, was our Frida—evidently much better known around Prague than she liked to let on. No wonder she had started to worry what our neighbors in the cafe would think. A couple of ladies in the gallery smiled as they saw her, and Frida nodded in return, clearly right back in her element.

“Look,” she said, pointing at a young woman in a suit, with her hair slicked back like a boy’s. “There’s the artist. And there” —she added with a moue of distaste— “is that potato-headed idiot of a husband she takes with her everywhere . . .”

“But she’s hardly more than a girl,” I protested unthinkingly. “How can she possibly have painted enough to fill a whole gallery at her age?”

Frida laughed. “She’s two years older than me. Twenty-nine. And she’s been working for the best part of a decade. You’d be amazed at how much you can produce in ten years, if you really set your mind to it . . .”

And there we had it. I was slow and lazy.

I looked again at Toyen—at her slicked-back hair and her deeply shadowed eyes—her androgynous manner, and the way it was contradicted by her unmistakably female figure—and decided there was something quite mysterious about her. A sense of immanence in the way her mere presence seemed to illuminate the gallery around her. A luminosity. A sheen. A lustre at the back of her eyes, and a rotundity to her spirit . . . She seemed as ripe with the seeds of unexpressed artistic forms—as heavy with reverie—as a pomegranate.

And then I spied the fat man from the previous night—Nezval, as I would later learn to call him—standing to one side in another of his rumpled suits, staring at Toyen hungrily, as if he would like to swallow her whole. So he felt it, too. That fecundity.

It was all there in her canvasses. Superficially, of course, there was something of the surrealist about her, but she was quite unlike anyone I had seen in Paris. She had a plasticity of form—a fullness of color, an integrity of vision—that somehow succeeded in conveying a feeling of great depth, both physical and psychological. There were none of de Chirico’s nightmare colonnades or Dali’s calculated elisions here. Her paintings were, rather, inhabited by organic forms—by the uncanny womb-like creatures of her spectral forests, and by sea shores full of coded eroticism—by the blue-and-orange honeycombs of her tropical coral reefs, and by giant white eggs laid bare on the red sands of the Gobi. Her compositions seemed to have grown spontaneously out of the mulch of her unconscious by bringing together a variety of natural features—rock formations, tree stumps, mushrooms, owls, meadowsweet—and transforming them, like the Welsh goddess Blodeuwedd, into a living entity.

There was something intensely feminine about all this. As if my own womb had been pinned out for everyone to see, with an umbrella and a sewing machine, on the operating table of her oversize canvasses. I felt instinctively that this was what Frida might look like inside, if I were to dissect her.

Frida must have sensed my excitement because she sidled up to me now and asked, “Do you like her?”

“Oh, yes,” I replied, my heart still full of translucent indigo waters and strangely mutated lobsters, my eyes full of stars and starfish. “She’s fabulous.”

“Of or pertaining to fable . . .” Frida laughed. “An apt description . . .”

She led me over to a particularly imposing piece called
Morning
, its colors bright and sparkling as Monarch butterflies, its indeterminate forms ridged and suggestive as oysters.

“Do you know what I like about her most?” she asked, gesturing at the wall in front of her. “It’s the way she constructs her canvasses in layers . . . Layers of paint . . . Layers of images and blankness . . . Layers of found objects and meanings . . . She’s like an archaeologist in reverse, piling on the strata, until her intentions emerge into the light, like Neolithic hand axes pulled up out of the ground by a medieval ploughshare . . . Like ancient cycads weathered out of the Old Red Sandstone by the spontaneous action of air and water . . . Like jelly hedgehogs plucked out of the leaf litter by curious bands of passing children . . . And yet, despite their complexity, her pictures somehow never acquire the artificiality of so many of her colleagues’. There is always a transparency about her. As if her canvasses are acts of divination, and not just paintings. As if, through the rituals of her art, she is able to recover lost fragments of myth and folklore—forgotten dreams and beliefs, antique fears and obeisances—out of the depths of our collective unconscious . . .”

Like you, I wanted to say. For what were her own studies, if not acts of reclaiming? Her admiration for Toyen was clearly that of one Sibyl for another. But instead, for no very good reason, I was suddenly reminded of the film we had seen the previous evening. Its visionary quality.

“Like Murnau and his vampires?” I asked on impulse. I think I was just as surprised by what had come out of my mouth as she was.