The Painted Kiss (12 page)

Kammer am Attersee
December 15, 1944

O
ur cottage is made of brick and roughly plastered and smells of the sea. Touch the facade and you’ll scrape your hand. Once it was brilliant white but time and neglect have turned it the dingy gray of wash water. It has a steep red tile roof that is shiny when it rains. Some of the tiles are broken now and moss is growing between the cracks. We used to have impatiens around the house and geraniums in all the window boxes, but now we just have moss. Moss and lichen and mushrooms.

A covered porch faces the lake. We used to eat breakfast there. Our nearest neighbors were past shouting distance away, but we could see them from the porch. The men waved as they untied their boats in the morning.

The downstairs includes only a small kitchen and a large parlor, which was all we needed since we spent most of our time out of doors. My mother furnished them with Indian muslins and chintz and japanned furniture. Even now the Meissen plates and Steuben figurines are still on the mantel. The piano is still in the corner, the score of
Liebestraume
open on the stand.

Up the narrow, slanting staircase, the bedrooms are low-ceilinged and oddly-shaped, but there are six of them, one after the other on a long hall. I suppose the unfortunate fisherman whose only son sold it to us thought he’d have a lot more children. We needed every one of them, since we always had guests. The bedrooms are bare now, whitewashed like little convent cells, the mattresses on the brass beds broken open by mice.

Next to the garden is a stand of birches my father planted to keep the wind off of the house. It was hot that summer, even up here, and my father’s face was purple and wet under his hat as he dug the holes. Some of the little saplings burned and died despite our assiduous watering, and one was struck by lightning a few years ago and had to be cut down, but a dozen are still here, thin and naked at this time of year, shedding their bark like psoriasis patients, shuddering and rattling like Gypsy carts.

I can barely remember a time when we didn’t come here. Until I was thirteen we rented the house from Mrs. Thyssen, a widow in town whose husband had disappeared on the lake and was presumed drowned. When she died we bought it from her son, who lived in Salzburg and hated the place. When we were small my sister Helene and I used to walk along the shore, searching for this lost fisherman. We thought his bones might wash up on shore, or at the very least, that his ghost might rise up out of the water on some foggy day. He was like our patron saint; we feared him a little, but he was also our friend. We wrote him messages, poems, on pieces of bark. We floated them like tiny keelboats and watched them waterlog and sink, imagining them dropping fathoms and fathoms until they reached him. We didn’t tell anyone about it. Papa would’ve thought it was morbid and frivolous and would have set us to work polishing the woodwork.

Amid the birch bark scrolls was always a good place to come and cry; the moss underneath them is dense and soft, the wind in the trees always blows a little mournfully.

The lake is long and gray like mercury spilled from a broken thermometer. It’s glacier fed and breathtakingly cold, even in summer. There aren’t many boats out today, only a few men fishing for carp with nets. The thin cirrus clouds are moving quickly past, toward Vienna. The dark cumulus clouds below them are moving almost as fast in the other direction. Across the lake in the village of Unterach the pastel houses are set into the hillsides like candies on gingerbread. A sound floats toward me, the sound of a finger on the rim of a glass: cowbells.

When I stand up my shoes sink into wet loam. I should have come directly from the house instead of wandering through the garden; from that direction there is a path made of broken tiles. My stockings will be stained. Even if I wash them myself Helene will shake her head and let me know that in the time I wasted ruining my stockings, I could’ve done five useful things. It’s a strange day when the little girl whose christening dress you made starts bossing you around.

From my elevation I think that the lake with its many docks looks like an orb with many ladders leading to the center, a Hieronymus Bosch drawing of hell. All of the docks look the same: slimy and wooden and decrepit. Our dock is no different. The only way I can tell it’s ours is that there is still a shred of red cloth tied to one of the posts. It’s one of Gustav’s kerchiefs, faded and filthy but somehow still there.

The boathouses, though, are all different. The summer people, people from the theater and the opera, have changing rooms and even kitchens for entertaining. They have little gazebos next to the water and clematis-covered pergolas. The locals have little sheds nailed together out of driftwood. We never thought of ourselves as summer people; our boathouse is as rickety as any local’s, painted marine blue. Inside we keep the rowboat and oars, a canoe, and some rubber tubes for floating. It’s been awhile since I’ve been inside, so I’m not sure if anything will still be there.

I pull the rowboat out by its stern. The white paint is curling and sticky like seaweed. There’s a scrape on the port side that I can see through to the sand. I can’t remember if it happened long ago and no one bothered to fix it, or whether someone has taken it out while we’ve been gone and torn it, but it doesn’t matter.

I gather some wood and pile it up on the driest sand I can find. The wood is damp and smokes when I light it, but it eventually ignites. The wind blows the mushroom-colored smoke right into my face. I have to pile the sand into a windbreak to keep my little blaze from sputtering out. In the boathouse is a tin can full of dried-up tar. I set it on top of the fire and hope that the tar will melt into something worth using. The boat is flipped over on the sand, awkward and helpless like a horseshoe crab on its back.

We used to have bonfires and roast sausages on sticks.

Helene appears behind me, wrapped in a gray shawl and a thick navy blue sweater that swallows her. With her pale faded skin she looks like a pen drawing, or a film. She can tell I’m scrutinizing her and wraps the shawl more tightly.

“That wood’s too wet to burn properly,” Helene says, shivering. “Wait until the weather clears to fix the boat.”

“It’s caught now,” I say, poking my smoky blaze with a tree branch and trying not to cough.

“It’s too cold to go out on the lake anyway.”

“It’ll take a while for the tar to dry,” I say. Maybe by then the wind will have calmed.

“We’ll get Heitzmann to do it next week,” she says. She clips each word off ruthlessly, the way she does when she’s irritated. It makes me more determined.

“I don’t see why it matters to you if I take all afternoon,” I say, knowing what her answer will be.

“There’s plenty to do inside, and in the garden.”

“We’ve got all the time in the world,” I say. “If we don’t weed today, we can weed tomorrow. If we don’t bleach the floors today, we can bleach them tomorrow. Or the next day. Or next week. Why does it matter?”

“You’re infantile,” she says, disgusted, and leaves me to my smoldering fire.

Of course the tar refuses to melt into anything approaching a liquid. My patch is lumpy and uneven and Heitzmann will have to take it off and do another, but I don’t care. Even the smell of burning tar is more pleasant than being stuck inside the house. I sit on the hull of the boat and watch the fire.

At half past two she comes back again with a cheese sandwich.

“You forgot lunch,” she says. I’m surprisingly hungry. It must be the wind.

“A package came,” she says. I don’t say anything because my mouth is full and whatever it is, she can deal with it.

“I think you should come up to the house and open it,” she says. Her hands are shaking. It frightens me a little. Is something wrong?

“Who is it from?” I say. I’m still poking at the fire but it’s gone out for good.

“Come up,” she says.

We walk single file up the path to the house, Helene in front. The lichen on the stones is slippery and a startlingly bright orange color. Crocuses, I think. In the spring we’ll need crocuses. I wonder if Heitzmann’s wife has any bulbs.

Helene stumbles and catches herself with her left hand.

“Let me see,” I say. She shows me the scrape and I kiss it and say, “Good thing we brought the gauze bandages.” Her blood is on my lip.

“Maybe Heitzmann can put in some sort of handrail for this path when he’s here next,” says Helene.

“Why don’t you just hire him to carry us up and down?” I say, angry at her because I, too, have been thinking of all of the things I need him to do. “Doesn’t the poor man have enough children?”

It turns out there isn’t one package, but several collected on the sitting room floor. Helene sits me in a chair and brings them to me one by one, like it’s my birthday. Then she sits on the stool in front of me, expectantly. I sever the twine and slice open the brown paper wrapping. Inside is a Chinese skirt from my textile collection. Its iridescent embroidery shimmers in the fussy room like an exotic bird.

“I thought Herta was going to sell these,” I said. “We need the money.”

“Who wants an antique skirt right now?” Helene says. “We’d be throwing it away.”

“The damp air will rot it,” I said, smoothing the skirt’s pleats. Then I imagine Helene in the salon, that terrible time when we were taking everything down, pulling things out for me and keeping them hidden until I really needed them. Then the tears start to fall, my mask cracked like pottery fired too hot. I try to keep them quiet, and Helene aids me by looking out the window at the lake.

“It almost broke my heart,” she says, “seeing you on the train with your one little bag. So I had Herta send them.” Herta was our last head seamstress. Then, because we couldn’t bear to part with her, she was our housekeeper. Now she is taking care of our apartment while we’re away.

“Thank you,” I say, and try to smile. “You’re sweet.”

There are several more boxes and we take turns opening them. There are two beaten silver boxes full of rings and necklaces; a jewel-encrusted hand mirror; four awkward looking wooden dolls carrying mesh umbrellas; the silver chalice that Josef Hoffmann made; a wooden box filled with packets of our silk dress labels. It’s the dress labels that finally break Helene; they say Flöge Sisters on them.

“I know it’s weak and self-indulgent to care, but I loved the salon so much,” she sobs. “It was so beautiful.” I try to stifle the mental image of the gray felt carpets and Wiener Werkstätte cabinets.

“Maybe we should wear them on our lapels like name tags,” I say.

At the bottom of the second box is a letter from Herta. She writes that some soldiers came in a truck and took all of the paintings away. Carl Moll was with them. He told her that he was taking them to a secret warehouse for safekeeping. Our apartment building might be bombed, and they were too precious to lose. They were our national treasure, our patrimony.

“They’re probably hanging in his apartment right now,” Helene says.

“Then if we lose they’ll get blown up,” I say. “He lives across from the Hofburg.”

That night we wear bonnets to bed like children playing dress-up: red, white, and gold linen, embroidered with tulips and roses. We drape our mirrors with transparent scarves. On the mantel we place two tiny pairs of brocade shoes that had belonged to a Chinese empress. It is impossible to imagine a grown woman walking in them. Perhaps she was carried everywhere. I try to imagine her: tiny, graceful, black-haired, in a silk-satin robe embroidered with lotuses and butterflies, her crippled feet ostentatiously displayed, the most beautiful part of all.

“Maybe St. Nicholas will come and fill them,” says Helene.

I dream of Gustav again. He’s rowing the boat in the center of the lake, swiftly, his powerful arms throwing up buckets of water with each stroke. Where am I? I’m swimming alongside. He’s whistling as he rows, as he used to do, but for some reason I’m worried. Then he lets the boat ride.

“We’re here,” he says. Then he stands in the boat and dives off of the side. I wait for him to come up. The lake is a hundred meters deep in the middle. I think about poor Thyssen. I dive for him, but he’s nowhere around me. In a panic, I dive and dive until I wake up, out of breath and clammy with sweat.