The Winter War (10 page)

He was just about to reply when the doorbell rang.

Helen shouted, ‘I'll get it!'

Max thought it might be Eva, but when the door opened, he heard an unfamiliar man's voice out in the hall. Max excused himself and left Laura and Matti to go and see who had arrived. He realised that the man was a stranger to him. He was unshaven, with dark hair and a foreign look about him. Maybe from India? Max couldn't hear what he and Helen were saying because of the noise from the party.

‘Can I help you?' asked Max.

Now Katriina came into the hall.

‘Are you Max Paul?' asked the man in English. His clothing was odd – he looked like a combination of an old-fashioned vagabond and someone who had put on a costume. A silk handkerchief stuck out of the breast pocket of his worn jacket.

‘Yes, that's right. Are we making too much noise? I can ask our guests to keep it down a bit. It's my sixtieth birthday, you see.'

‘No, that's not it. But I'm looking for your daughter, Eva. I understood that she would be here tonight.'

‘And you are?'

‘I'm her … friend. Russ.'

eleven

MALIK'S ATTRACTION TO EVA
began to cool after that evening when she frightened him with the pregnancy test. He demonstrated his waning interest over the following days by standing behind Laurie and leaning close as he showed a new-found eagerness to discuss the technical aspects of her paintings. Eva could see how his arm kept searching for a new position – looking as if it were getting close to the fastener on Laurie's very visible bra. Suddenly, the only reminder of Malik's presence in Eva's life were the white streaks of Ritalin inside her art books. During class he would lapse into harsh criticism, and nothing the students did seemed good enough. Ben, in particular, repeatedly heard that he was an incompetent bungler who ‘couldn't tell art from his fucking elbow'.

Eva had quickly made up her mind as she sat hunched on the toilet in her flat, with Malik right outside the door. She had no intention of telling him that the test was positive. The truth was, she was a little afraid of him.

She considered reporting him to the dean of the college for assault, but she realised that that would be a lie. She had been a willing participant in their affair. She had enjoyed it, enjoyed how it made her feel.

Instead, she began taking walks every day after college, until one day she found herself standing outside the gallery that belonged to Malik's wife. She had no idea how she'd ended up there. This was on a Thursday evening. It was already past seven, but the gallery seemed to be open, judging by the sign placed outside on the pavement.

The premises looked like an abandoned shop that someone had transformed into a venue for art. It was nothing like the spacious and minimalist galleries so prevalent in the East End.

Eva had always pictured Sarah and Malik's gallery as elitist and expensive. A place that was exclusive, in white and black, and intimidating. Not this Berlin-style do-it-yourself place in an abandoned building.

The wall facing the street was covered with graffiti, and the window was so dingy that it was hard to see inside.

A dark-haired, broad-shouldered woman in her forties was sitting on a stool behind a counter that looked as if it belonged in a hotel lobby. Her arms were covered with tattoos, which merely served to enhance the ordinariness of her features.

She nodded a greeting as Eva came in. ‘Just tell me if you have any questions. My name's Sarah, by the way.'

Eva gave her a wary smile and turned to walk around the room. Grey clouds had hovered over London all week, and the damp light seemed to seep through the window, filling the gallery space. It was not painted white, like most other galleries. Instead, it had the feel of a renovated warehouse, with a grey cement floor and patches of exposed brick on the walls.

From somewhere at the far end of the room Eva could hear a whining noise that seemed to be emanating from a work of art. Sarah had gone back to reading her book.

Was this really Malik's wife? Eva had imagined someone completely different – a chic Londoner with a strong presence and cold eyes, an excessively thin woman who knew all the right people and who could crush any opponent with her little finger. Considering how Malik had talked about Sarah, Eva had the impression that she was a terrifying person who wouldn't stand for any bullshit. But this woman was downright… motherly. And she didn't look the least bit chic. She was more like an ageing Goth, with her black-painted nails bitten to the quick and matted black hair.

Eva wandered around the gallery, looking at the artwork.

The overall theme seemed to be gender issues. The first piece, closest to the entrance, was some sort of insipid Pop Art painting in garish colours – there were allusions to Warhol, but the figures lacked impact. As a concept, it wasn't especially exciting, but from a technical viewpoint, it was well done. Eva saw from a sign on the wall that the paintings were the work of a local woman artist.

‘The art on that wall changes every week. On Monday there'll be a new exhibit. You should come back then. It's going to be great,' said Sarah, who had noticed that she was looking at the paintings.

Eva nodded.

‘We want part of the gallery to have a low threshold so that young artists who might not have much experience get a chance to show their work.'

The main exhibit was devoted to an artist by the name of Claire Kelly. There was a photo of her in the catalogue that was lying on a table. She was a Londoner, born in 1972, who had ‘studied art in Bergen and Istanbul', and now lived ‘with her cat and her husband in Paris'.

The exhibit consisted of small sculptures, with rose-pink as the dominant colour. Eva thought it was a kitschy, nightmarish version of the sorts of things found in girls' bedrooms in the eighties: ponies and dolls, little animals made of plastic with wisps of hair sticking out. Kelly had placed the sculptures inside cloth-lined boxes with dim, porno-type lighting – grubby and stained, as if they represented a dark back room, an alleyway, or simply an image of poverty. They were like a miniature world in which everything that was nice had been mangled by a socialrealist filter, like crime scenes in a girl's bedroom.

There was something inexpressibly sad about this monument to lost innocence, and yet the work had humour. A little girl's dreams that had been confronted by a filthy reality, but that somehow also radiated a certain playfulness. Eva was reminded of something from her own childhood: those endless games that she'd played with Helen, how they'd sewn clothes for their Barbie dolls, how they'd sometimes visited friends and exchanged dolls with them. That unfamiliar smell of her friends' toys. The feel of the Barbie doll's hard sheen.

Another piece was a video installation in which Claire Kelly wore a full-body suit made of flesh-coloured rubber. It made her look like an air-filled, pregnant sex toy. This was where the whining sound was coming from.

About halfway through the forty-minute film the artist pulled out a rubber penis from between her legs, which she then proceeded to inflate with a pump she was holding in one hand, all the while grinding her hips towards the audience standing in front of her.

In another video, the artist wore a bridal gown over a bulging stomach, as if she were pregnant. She was standing next to a motorway, trying to thumb a ride.

It made Eva think about the last scene in Mike Nichols's film
The Graduate
, when the young couple runs out of the church. Except that here, it was a lone woman who was running away, with her little baby inside her womb.

At the end of the video Claire Kelly was sitting in the back of a bus, speaking directly into the camera, talking about men that she'd met and their personal stories. She counted them off, one by one: old boyfriends and several one-night stands, although she never mentioned their names, just rattling them off like letters of the alphabet; sometimes telling a lengthy story, sometimes keeping it brief. One man she'd been with was from the suburbs, and he'd told her about his childhood. When he was a teenager, he'd killed his older brother, and that transformed the story into something biblical. For a while Eva actually forgot where she was as she watched and listened; there was something hypnotic about the whole installation. At the same time, it felt very radical because it was a woman telling the stories, like a prison guard talking about her prisoners.

Eva remembered the glass of water they'd seen in their first class. Now she understood why it hadn't really appealed to her. There was no story. Nothing to latch on to, no narrative. In order for anyone to believe in an artist's illusory trick, the artist first had to establish a level of trust.

As she was leaving, Sarah glanced up from her book to give her a smile. ‘I hoped you liked it.'

‘Definitely,' said Eva, thinking what a strange comment that was. Malik had been telling them all autumn that the point was not to make art that people liked.

When she got home, Eva thought it would be best to start packing. Her plane left the following morning, with a layover in Frankfurt. Natalia was sitting in front of her computer in the kitchen, and she pointed towards Eva's room.

‘You've got a visitor. He seemed a bit scared of me, so I let him wait in your room.'

Natalia smiled. Eva gave her a surprised look. She had no desire to talk to Malik right now.

But it wasn't Malik. It was Russ. He was sitting on her bed, deeply immersed in a book about Dutch paintings, and he began talking without looking up.

‘I've never understood how they did it,' he said. ‘I mean, check this out.'

He held up the book to show Eva. She recognised it at once – a painting by Vermeer.

‘It's like the only instance in human history when evolution unquestionably moved backwards. Do you think Julian Schnabel could paint something like this? Do you think anyone could do it today?'

Eva was still standing in the doorway.

‘Hi,' she said.

Russ put the book down. The first and only time they had spent any time together outside of class, he had taken her to a dreary pub near Liverpool Street Station. The place was dark even in the middle of the day, and it seemed to suffer from a lack of oxygen.

Eva liked Russ. He appeared to have a real sense of integrity, and he didn't care for Malik. But she found his negative attitude hard to take. During that first pub visit, the only thing he'd talked about was how the London art world was a vicious circle in which nobody cared about anything except status and money. He'd asked her hardly anything about her life.

Now he was sitting cross-legged on her bed, and Eva noticed that he hadn't taken off his shoes.

‘Do you want something to drink?' she asked.

‘Sure. Thanks. Do you have any beer?'

‘I'll see what I can find.'

Eva went back to the kitchen, where Natalia was still working at her computer.

‘Weird guy. Is he a friend of yours?'

‘I guess you could say that. But I don't know him very well.'

‘He seems nicer than Malik. He doesn't look like the type who would hog the shower for two hours every morning.'

Natalia had been extremely critical of Malik. She claimed that he'd pawed through her things in the bathroom and that he sometimes left his dirty underwear on the floor next to the shower.

Eva went over to the fridge and took out a beer. She went back to her room and handed it to Russ.

‘Thanks,' he said.

‘So,' she said. ‘What brings you here?'

‘Nothing special. I just happened to be in the neighbourhood.'

His moustache somehow made him look even more like a schoolboy.

‘And you decided to drop by?'

‘Exactly.'

After that, neither of them seemed to have anything more to say, and Eva thought that might actually be good, maybe even pleasant. She had no idea why Russ had turned up at her flat, but since he had, there wasn't much she could do about it.

‘What do you think about our course?' she finally said.

Russ was silent for a moment. He seemed to be pondering the question. Then he said, ‘All that stuff about sitting around and discussing each other's work … I don't believe in it. That whole “crit” approach. I don't think it means anything. You know? We should be working, instead of talking. Like those Occupy people. At least they're doing something that makes sense, something that has an impact in the world. Not making some stupid piece of art that gets displayed in a gallery and then hung on a wall in the home of some pampered upper-middleclass family.'

Eva sat down next to him on the bed. ‘I'm sure my father loves the Occupy movement. He's always complaining that young people today no longer believe in change.'

‘But that's the thing – maybe we don't. I don't know who those people are, but they do seem to believe in something.'

‘At least they believe in the possibility of not paying any rent.'

Eva immediately regretted this last remark. She regretted sounding so caustic, resorting to the sarcasm that was typical of her whole generation – except Russ, for some reason.

‘I'm sick of everybody thinking only of themselves. I want to have a sense of belonging. The art world is so oriented towards the individual. But it hasn't always been that way.'

‘Now you sound like Malik,' said Eva, and then regretted that remark too.

‘Are you kidding? He's the biggest idiot of them all! There's nobody in England who cares more about himself. His ego is so huge that you could orbit around it. And the sickest part of all – what's so ironic – is that he hasn't had a show of his own work in fifteen years.'

Eva realised that Russ was right, but she didn't let on that she agreed. Instead, she tried to say something nice.

‘Well, at least you have a clear idea of what you want to paint. I still don't know what I'm going to show when the six weeks are up.'

Eva looked at him with an expression that might have revealed an unintended tenderness, because Russ leaned forward to kiss her. She felt his moustache brush her lips, and it tickled so much that she pulled away, and without thinking she put out her hands to push him against the wall. She heard a loud thud as his head struck the cement wall, at the very spot where Malik had slammed his fist a week ago.

‘Sorry! I didn't mean to do that. I was just so surprised.'

Russ put his hand on the back of his head, and his face flushed bright red.

‘Does it hurt?'

He didn't answer, just gave her a miserable look.

Eva was just about to say something else – explain her behaviour, anything – when he got up from her bed and picked up his bag.

‘So, are you coming to college tomorrow?' he asked.

She looked up at him. He was still holding his head.

‘I'm afraid not. I'll be away for a few days. I'm going to Finland. It's my dad's birthday.'