My Nine Lives (24 page)

I was always excited after these excursions with Marta and her friends, and my aunt enjoyed hearing my descriptions of the café and its clientele, nodding in recognition of something she had once known. But Kohl frowned and told her, “You shouldn't let her go with them.”

“But it's so nice for her! Poor child, what chance does she have to go anywhere?”

“She's too young,” he said.

“Too young to go to a café?”

“Too young to go with people like that.”

“Oh people like that,” La Plume repeated dismissively in her “Everyone has to live” tone of voice.

As so often with this mild little man, he became a red fighting cock: “You don't know anything! None of you knows—what she was like, how she carried on. Every day was carnival for her—and how old was she? Sixteen, seventeen, and I, who was forty,
I
, Kohl, became her clown. She made me her carnival clown.”

“Yes yes, sit down.”

La Plume pressed him into a chair. She made tea for him, which he drank with his hands wrapped gratefully around the cup. It calmed him, changed the mood of his thoughts though not their subject. “What could I do? For years and years I had been alone, and poor—
poor!
And now people were coming to my studio, when I went into a café there were whispers, ‘It's Kohl, the artist Kohl.' So that was meat and drink for her, other people's whispers . . . But she was always laughing at me, making a fool of me. Even her cap
made a fool of me! This little striped monkey cap she wore riding on top of her hair . . . Her hair was red.”

“It's still red.”

“Nothing like it was!” He gulped tea, gulped heat. “I painted her, I wrote poetry for her, I slept with her, I couldn't get enough of her. I tell you, she was a flame to set people on fire.” He broke off, and pleaded with me, “Come and sit for me. Come tomorrow? After school? I'll wait for you. I'll have everything ready.”

That time I was glad to go. There was a stillness, a purity in his empty studio that I have never experienced in any other place; nor at any other time have I felt as serene as in the presence of this artist, drawing something out of me that I didn't know was there. But then Marta came in and stood behind him to comment on his drawing of me. He took off one of his slippers, which he always wore in the studio to save his feet, and threw it in her direction. It hit the door, which she had already shut behind her. But, as always with her intrusion, our peace was shattered.

All this was in my last two years at school—1946, 1947: after that, things began to change, and some of our lodgers left us to resume their former lives or to begin new ones elsewhere. Mann, for instance, went back to Germany—to East Germany, where he was welcomed by the remnants of his party and returned to an active life of rallies and international conferences. The lawyer started a new practice of his own, taking up cases of reparation for his fellow refugees, which made him rich and took him all over Europe. Their rooms remained empty; there were no more émigrés of the kind my aunt was used to, and she did not care for the other applicants who spoke in languages none of us understood. After
some years the landlord, wanting to convert the house into flats, offered her a sum of money to quit. I was by this time living in Cambridge, having won a scholarship to the University, and only stayed with her during my vacations. She took a little flat over some shops in north-west London and led a more restful, retired life, made possible by the monthly payments of refugee reparations the lawyer arranged for her.

He also offered to arrange such payments for Marta, but she was too disorganized to locate her birth certificate or any other of the requisite papers. She also seemed indifferent about it, as though other things mattered more. Before leaving, Mann had asked her to go with him, but first she laughed at him and then said he was getting on her nerves and pushed him out. A few postcards arrived from him, optimistic in tone and with idyllic views of a cathedral and a river, which my aunt found in the waste-paper basket and put up in her kitchen.

The lawyer married a widow who had been at school with him and had survived the war in Holland. He moved into her flat in Amsterdam but was often in London on business. While we were still in the house, he had begun to bring people to Kohl's studio, and these brought other people—gallery owners, collectors, dealers—so it was often a busy scene in there. The visitors walked around the drawings on the walls, and Kohl turned over the large canvases for them to see; since he had only two chairs, Marta carried some in from her room, and then she stood leaning against the doorpost, smoking and watching. No one took any notice of her, commenting among themselves or turning respectfully to Kohl, who as usual had little to say; but if Marta tried to explain something for him, he became irritated and told her to go away.

We all attended the opening of his first show at a gallery in Jermyn Street. It was packed with fashionable people, ladies
with long English legs in the shiny nylons that had begun to arrive from America; the air was rich with an aroma of perfume and face powder, also of the cigars some of the men had been smoking before being asked to put them out. Marta wore an ankle-length, low-cut dress of emerald green silk; it matched her eyes but had a stain in front that the dry-cleaner had not been able to get out. She wandered around in a rather forlorn way and no one seemed to know that she was the artist's wife. Many pictures were sold, discreet little dots appearing beside them. After this show, another was held in Paris, and after a while Kohl decided to move to Zurich. The pictures that were still left in the house were packed up under his supervision, and again Marta stood leaning in the open doorway to watch, and again if she tried to say anything, he became irritated.

When all was packed up, he came into the kitchen with a present for me. As he walked down the stairs, Marta, who seemed to be aware of his every movement, leaned over the banister and gave a street-boy whistle to attract his attention. When he looked up, she called him vile names in several languages, so that by the time he reached us, his face and ears were suffused in red. Her voice penetrated to the kitchen, where he, always shy of vulgarity, pretended not to hear. Courtly and courteous, he presented me with one of the drawings of myself—but La Plume and I didn't even have time to thank him before Marta came whirling in. Instinctively, though not aware at that time of its value, I held my drawing close for protection.

She too was carrying a drawing; it was the one he had given her on her birthday. She held it under his nose: “Here, you ridiculous animal!” She tore it across—once, twice, three times—and threw the pieces on the floor. With a terrible cry, he crouched down to gather them up, while she tried to
prevent him by stamping her high-heeled shoes on his fingers. He didn't seem to notice, though when he got up, there was blood on his hands. La Plume, clasping her cheeks, shrieked at him, but he, concerned only that it should not stain the torn drawing, clutched the pieces fiercely to his breast. Marta was laughing now, as at a victory. “Children, children,” my aunt said, trying in her usual way to soothe tempers; but I did not feel that those two were children, or that there was anything childlike about their quarrel.

It was only when Marta had left us that he let go of the fragments of the drawing and laid them down on the table. “Let me see your hand,” La Plume said, but he impatiently wiped the blood off on his sleeve and concentrated on holding the drawing together. Although torn, it was still complete with nothing missing; he smiled down at it, first in relief, then in pure joy, and invited us to admire it with him—not Marta looking out of it with her insolent eyes but the work itself:
his,
his art.

He left the next day and I never met him again. I did see the drawing again: in spite of its damaged condition, some collector had bought it, and it was often reproduced in books of twentieth-century art and also in the book devoted to his work. Whatever we heard of Kohl himself was mostly through the lawyer, whom my aunt had engaged to recover some family property (she never got it). We learned that Kohl had rented a large studio in Zurich, in which he both lived and worked. He allowed his dealer to bring visitors but hardly seemed to notice them. He never attended any of his exhibitions, nor gave interviews to the art magazines who published articles about his work. He was always working, his only recreation an evening walk in a nearby park. He had a maid servant to cook and clean for him, a village girl fifteen or sixteen years old whom he often drew. The lawyer thought
he also slept with her. Otherwise there was only his work; during his few remaining years, he grudged every moment away from it. When he died, in 1955, his obituaries gave his age as sixty-four.

Marta stayed in the house till my aunt left, and after that she took a room elsewhere. She moved often, not always voluntarily. Once or twice she landed on La Plume's doorstep, having had to vacate her room in a hurry. She never said why, but my aunt guessed that it may have been for the same reason that she herself had had to give notice to Miss Wundt.

We don't know what she lived on. Her clothes looked thin and worn; there were buttons missing from her little jacket and its fox-fur trimming was mangy. But she was always in high spirits and talked in her usual lively way. She tucked into the food my aunt prepared for her with all the gusto of someone who really needed it—but she never tried to borrow money from us. Once she asked me to take her to the cinema, not for the feature film but to see a newsreel she had been told about. When it came on, she nudged me—“Look look, that's him! Mann!” It was a shot of an international banquet, with speeches in a language I couldn't identify under giant portraits of leaders also unidentifiable. It may have been Mann—but many of the other delegates could also have been he, big and tall and cheering loudly as they raised and then drained their glasses in toasts to the speakers at the head table. She was convinced it was Mann—“The donkey,” she laughed. “Can you imagine—he wanted to marry me. What a lucky escape,” she congratulated herself. I had to leave, but now that the ticket had been paid for, she stayed on to see the feature film and to wait for the newsreel to come around again.

When Kohl died, it was reported in the newspapers that he had left the pictures remaining in his possession to a
museum in New York and the rest of his estate to his maid servant. The lawyer told Marta that, if she could produce her marriage certificate, she would have a strong case for challenging the will. But she had no marriage certificate any more than she had a birth certificate, nor could she remember where the marriage had been registered, or when, and in fact it seemed she couldn't remember if there had been any legal procedure at all. Whenever she spoke of Kohl, it was in the same way as she did of Mann: congratulating herself on a lucky escape. She loved recalling the occasion when she had torn up his drawing—“Did you see his
face
?” she said, amused and pleased with herself. It turned out that this drawing was the only piece of work he had ever given her—just as the drawing he had given me was only one of many I sat for. What about the poems that he had written to her, I asked. She tossed her hair, which was still red but now too red, a flag waved in defiance: “Who can remember every little scrap they once had? . . . Anyway, they were all a lot of rubbish. Other men have written much better poems to me.” She admitted not having kept those either; she had had to move so often, everything had just disappeared.

And then she herself disappeared, and no one knew what had happened to her. We went to ask at her last address, but the mention of her name caused the landlady to shut the door in our faces. Years, decades have passed, and in all this time there has been no trace of Marta. I have even stopped speculating about her, though when my aunt was still alive, we often did so, with conclusions that we did not like to suggest to each other. Marta may have been run over or collapsed in the street and been taken to a hospital and died there, with no one knowing who she was, whom to contact. She may have—who knows?—drowned herself in the Thames on some dark night, maybe tossing the red flag of her hair,
congratulating herself on having fooled everyone by never learning to swim.

I no longer live in London. Some years ago, I had some money trouble that finally, reluctantly led me to sell Kohl's drawing. The sum I got for it was astonishing; it not only relieved me of my difficulties but gave me a sort of private income for a few years. I felt free to go where I liked, and since I had no one else close to me after La Plume, I was free in every way. I decided to go to New York. I had heard that there was a museum with one whole room dedicated to Kohl's work, and I went there the day after my arrival. Then I could not keep away.

His drawings hung on one wall, while the paintings took up the rest of the room. The drawings were mostly of Marta, though some were of me, and of a few other girls my age, one of them probably his maid servant. Although there was no resemblance between us, what we had in common was a particular evanescent stage of youth; it must have been this that elicited his little gasps of joy, his murmurs of “
Sweet
” and these marvelous portraits. But when I saw myself on the wall of the museum, I had the same feeling I had had while sitting for him: that I was not just a type or a prototype for him, that it was not just any girl to whom he was responding, but me, myself.
I
was the person whom he had looked at so deeply and with such delight, and in a way that no one else had ever done before, or ever did again.

My decision to move to New York—and I have lived here ever since—may have been partly due, at least at first, to a desire to remain close to the museum displaying his work. But although I can't get enough of studying the drawings, I can rarely bring myself to look at the paintings. They are no longer meaningless—everyone now knows how to interpret those savage searing colors dripping off the canvas—but I
still try to avoid them, even turning my back on them, unable to face what he had faced, at night and in secret, through all the years we had known him. And I still can't understand how, at the same time as he was possessed by these visions of our destruction, he was also drawing (“
Sweet, sweet
”) what is displayed on the remaining wall: girls in bloom, flowers in May.