Tourquai (11 page)

3.5

A
nna Lynx was sitting on the very edge of a hard couch, feeling uncomfortable. A cup of tea was on the table in front of her, and normally the aroma of jasmine would have soothed her nerves. Cow Hellwig was sitting in the armchair across from her, staring. From out in the kitchen Anna could hear fresh tea water boiling. She did not know what she should say.

Cow Hellwig had called right before the Evening Storm and asked whether Anna could come over to her place. It wouldn’t take more than an hour. Despite the fact that Anna was tired, dazed after the experience at the junkyard, she answered yes. She called her mom and asked if she could keep Todd company a little while.

Mom was old at this point, and she couldn’t manage more than an hour on her own with her intense cubcub. The last five years had been hard on her; she was not made to live alone.

The Chauffeurs had fetched Anna’s dad many years too early. In most cases stuffed animals managed to get old and worn before the day the Chauffeurs showed up in their red pickup. No one knew where the old animals were taken, or what awaited them there. The church, of course, supplied its answers, the Proclamations spoke of a magnificent paradise, but Anna’s mom was no more than moderately religious. They fetched Dad at the office; the lawyers in the adjacent rooms had carefully closed their doors as the Chauffeurs brutally carried him away. Despite the fact that Anna had not been there personally and seen it happen, this scene recurred often in her nightmares. And afterward it was as though Mom slowly withered away, the energy ran out of her, and now Anna was almost as much a mother to her own mom as she was to Todd.

What a fool she’d
been, she thought now. She had run over to Cow in solidarity, in the belief that Cow had finally listened to reason.

Anna felt so strongly about this issue. During her entire adult life she had seen males get their way at the expense of females. She was not dogmatic, not a fanatical zealot of equality. She knew and acknowledged that the care-taking instincts that marked so many of her actions would be called “maternal” if anyone were to put a label on them. She was even trying to bring up Falcon Ècu. But she was proud of that. She wanted to be a good mom, just as she wanted to be an attractive female. What she refused to accept was that these instincts—motherliness and vanity—should reduce her in the eyes of the patriarchy. No one looked down on a careerist or a materialist, if they were male. The personal consequences of the need for affirmation were always taken in dead earnest, as long as it concerned males. And Anna refused to let herself be treated degradingly due to feminine characteristics that the factory had filled her with in some way when she was sewn together. She often spoke about this with her girlfriends, and Cow Hellwig had always been one of her most ardent sympathizers.

Anna had bounded up the stairs to Cow, rung the doorbell, and it had been . . . him . . . who had opened.

“The crazy lynx is here now!” he had called in to the apartment, then disappeared into the living room as Anna was taking off her coat.

Now she was sitting across from the married couple, on the edge of the couch, doing her best to avoid . . . his . . . gaze. She raised the teacup and sipped the tea.

“Anna,” said Cow, “I saw no other way than to invite you over. So we can work this out.”

“Work what out?”

“Well, whatever there is to be worked out. You just can’t let your constables go around arresting Simon simply because . . . you’ve imagined something.”

“C’mon, imagined something . . . ?”

“Yes. There has to be something.”

Was she joking? But this was not a jocular presentation, and in the cow’s eyes Anna read a sincere lack of understanding that shocked her.

“But . . . but . . .” she stammered. “But everything we said the other evening . . . ?”

“I still don’t understand,” said Cow. “What does that have to do with Simon? When you said I should move in with you . . . I thought you were joking!”

“But you were the one who said that,” said Anna, flabbergasted. “You said it yourself. That you were thinking about taking that job at the Ministry of Finance, but that . . . he . . . said that it was too far to drive the whole way down to Amberville every day.”

The silence in the Hellwig family’s living room was deafening.

“You had me arrested because I thought it was too far to drive down to Amberville?” Simon asked at last.

Anna did not reply.

“Well, she’s just
sick
,” he said, turning to his wife.

“It sounds completely crazy, Anna,” Cow agreed. “Do you mean that’s the reason for all this? You can’t mean that. There’s something else, isn’t there?”

“But . . . I don’t get it,” said Anna. “This is exactly what we’ve been talking about all these years. This is what it’s about. It’s not big things, this is the way oppression looks. Getting you to abstain from a job, from a career, by hinting. Threatening, but only indirectly. In practice
this is what it’s about
. I thought that—”

Anna fell silent. She realized that she was still holding the teacup, and she carefully set it down on the table. She was ashamed. She tried to remember what had triggered all this, why she had been so sure that Cow Hellwig must be liberated from her . . . Simon. But she couldn’t think of it. The redness rose in her face. She got up from the couch.

“Anna, there must—” Cow began.

“Forgive me,” said Anna Lynx.

And like so many times before when her protective instincts had taken over and forced logic and common sense from her brain, she knew she’d gone too far. She took a few steps toward the hall.

“Forgive me,” she repeated.

And then she fled. It would be months before she dared call Cow Hellwig again.

Igor Panda 3

A
wide, black Volga Deluxe came driving at high speed along salt and pepper Bardowicker Strasse. The sun was still high in the clear blue sky, and even though the lunch rush was over, numerous stuffed animals were still moving about on the streets.

The black car did not veer for anyone.

It passed the Radio Building at high speed, and slipped past the red lights on Konviktstrasse even though it could have stopped for yellow. A hundred yards or so farther east the car pulled up along the sidewalk. The tires screeched against the asphalt as the driver put on the brakes. Igor Panda turned the engine off, and it was obvious that he did not intend to park in a more orderly manner than this.

He threw open the door and got out. He was holding the black attaché case in his paw and entered the gallery with rapid steps.

“Igor!” Arthur Rhinoceros called out, getting up from his chair.

Arthur had been working at Gallery Panda for six months. He got no compensation for taking care of the gallery, but thanks to the job he had somewhere to hang out, and he could truthfully tell his friends he was working in the art business. He was still studying art history during the day, but there were few mandatory lectures, and taking care of the gallery at the same time worked out. Apart from openings, they did not get very many visitors.

“Don’t think I was sitting there sleeping!”

But Igor Panda paid no attention to Arthur.

Panda rushed furiously past the simple, low reception counter and on into his office. He slammed the door behind him.

Wide awake, Arthur stood looking after him. The weather was hard to determine and Arthur had no idea if he had only dozed off or if he’d been sleeping for several hours.

With his hoof, he scratched the curved white horn in the middle of his muzzle that kept others from mistaking him for a donkey or a horse.

Right now Gallery Panda was showing a young, talented badger who worked with photography and collage. Across from the reception desk hung one of the larger pieces, an enormous enlargement of a money clip in which a birch leaf was pinned. The leaf was bright green, everything else was in black-and-white, and why Arthur Rhinoceros disliked that particular picture so much he could not explain. Perhaps the motif was so simple, and the result so successful, making Arthur’s own artistic attempts stand out as forced and overburdened? He painted at night, but no one was allowed to see what he did. He was not ready for criticism yet. If he ever would be.

He was basically a good-hearted rhino, but like many others in the field, he had an envious side. That side could rejoice in the fact that since the opening—and the sympathetic reviews—there had been no more than a dozen visitors to the badger’s exhibition. Of this dozen, five had asked for a price list, and of these five, only a single animal had made a lowball offer on one of the larger collages, an offer that the artist firmly refused.

In a few words: even if the badger was talented, even if he had his own opening at Gallery Panda, he had sold no more pictures than Arthur.

If life as an artist was hard, life as an art dealer did not seem any easier. Igor Panda was Hummingbird Esperanza-Santiago’s dealer, everyone knew that, and it afforded Panda a certain amount of reflected glory. Unfortunately it did not give him any other salable artists to exhibit. On the contrary, Igor seemed to have an unfailing ability to sign technical mediocrities whose work couldn’t be hung in ordinary homes. Like the young badger.

Arthur sighed. Hummingbird Esperanza-Santiago was something completely special. She had not exhibited in more than ten years. Her demands on herself were high. Arthur saw her as a role model.

“Forgive me if I’m
disturbing you,” said the rhinoceros as he opened the door to Igor’s office.

He knew that he would get told off. He scratched his horn, bearing in silence the harangues about what a closed door meant. When Panda had let out the worst of it, Arthur cleared his throat.

“The sky’s starting to get foggy,” he said. “And today was the day you were going to visit Hummingbird . . .”

Panda fell silent. He remembered.

“Then why the hell haven’t you said anything?” he shouted.

“I—”

“Were you sitting there sleeping again?” Panda screamed.

“I—”

“How the hell do you find reliable employees!” the black-and-white bear finally spewed out as he scraped together a few things from the desk and tossed them into an attaché case. Then he ran out to the street and threw himself into the large, black car.

Hummingbird Esperanza-Santiago lived outside
the city.

To the north, east, and south, dense forest surrounded Mollisan Town. To the west, on the other hand, was a pleasantly rolling landscape all the way to the coast and Hillevie, the place where the more well-to-do animals spent their vacations. The road there—you could take the train from Central Station in Amberville if you didn’t have a car—was bordered by cultivated fields and vast country estates. There were also some settlements not belonging to any of the farms, isolated houses in beautifully blossoming groves and meadows.

Calculated from the city line, where Western Avenue turned into a country road, Hummingbird Esperanza-Santiago lived two hours outside the city. The last few miles you were forced to drive on the narrow paths that the farmers used to get from one field to another. Igor Panda’s wide Volga Deluxe was not built for such terrain. The rains had gouged deep holes in the narrow roads, the shock absorbers labored, and Panda was swearing.

It was only after having visited Esperanza-Santiago ten or so times that Panda knew the way. The artist’s house was embedded in a kind of transplanted grove of old, heavy oaks. When Igor got a little closer, he could see the narrow, low house with its typical grass roof, dark blue exterior, and white windows and doors. The house looked abandoned. Despite a garden that blossomed and blazed, signs of decay were visible even at a distance. A few window shutters were hanging on their last hinge, others were missing completely. There was a hole in the grass roof so large that Panda saw it from the last side road, and the closer he got, the more holes he discovered. The exterior was deteriorated from the wind, the paint had peeled in some places, and Igor thought the whole thing was depressing. Why did Esperanza-Santiago choose this life when she didn’t need to?

Carefully he drove the whole way up to the little yard. As usual he had to force his way through the army of red hollyhocks standing at attention in front of the well, and just as he got to the hyacinth beds the door opened.

Out came a duck.

Under its wing the duck was carrying a folded easel and with its other wing was lugging a massive suitcase spattered with paint.

“Stop!” said Panda.

The duck stopped, looking compliantly at Igor.

“I have to hurry,” he said. “I have to get home. Mama is already wondering where I—”

“What are you doing here?” Panda demanded.

“I’ve just been getting some help . . . that is . . . Miss Esperanza-Santiago has—”

“ ‘Miss’?” Panda cried out without restraining his fury. “Did you call her ‘Miss’?”

“Yes . . . I did,” the terrified young duck stammered. He realized that he had given the wrong answer, but not in what way.

With a careless motion Igor Panda shoved the duck off the front stoop, going straight into the run-down house. He looked angrily around in the semidarkness. Hummingbird was standing over at the sink, rinsing brushes. She was the smallest stuffed animal he knew; she hardly came up to his waist. She was light blue, with a long, narrow beak and large, sincere eyes.

“Hello?” he called.

Igor was so angry he was about to explode. At the same time all he could do was to carefully—extremely carefully—try to get Esperanza-Santiago to understand that what she had just done was wrong.

“Igor?” asked Hummingbird, looking up from her work.

There was no electricity in the house. The light that came in through the door was blinding the artist, and all she saw was a dark silhouette.

“It’s me,” Igor Panda answered. “We did agree to meet today, didn’t we?”

“I’d completely forgotten! Igor, forgive me. I haven’t even put on any coffee.”

“That’s no problem, I—”

“I’ll get it ready . . .”

She hurried over to the stove, where she started putting wood into the oven door to make a fire. With a heavy sigh, Igor sat down at the kitchen table. He was careful, knowing the chairs were ramshackle and treacherous.

“I met a duck on the way in,” he began.

Hummingbird was in search of a saucepan in the cupboard and hummed an acknowledgment. Through the window above the kitchen counter the daylight fell in and the transom painted a shadow cross over the little bird body.

“I thought we’d talked about that,” Igor continued. “The energy you can devote to painting you should prioritize for your own work.”

“Oh, I’m working,” the hummingbird informed him.

She had found a chipped saucepan, and she filled it with water that she ladled up from a bucket standing next to the stove. Was it rainwater? Hummingbird sometimes complained that the well had gone dry. Whatever, thought Panda, if she boils the water there shouldn’t be any danger.

“I know you don’t like me taking in pupils,” Hummingbird continued in a gentle tone, “but I have to answer to someone who is even more important than you, Igor.”

Hummingbird Esperanza-Santiago was talking about Magnus, our Lord. The artist was deeply religious, and her relationship to the spiritual world in general, and Magnus in particular, was complicated, as well as deeply anxiety-ridden.

“You’re not going to be able to do much for your pupils if you don’t have food on the table for yourself,” Igor answered quietly. “You have to develop yourself to be able to develop someone else.”

“It’s nice of you to want to help,” said Hummingbird.

The water was starting to boil and she put in the coffee.

“My friend,” Igor continued, somewhat more insistently, “it’s more than three years since you completed anything. You have to stop . . . it’s not the case that your creations are less . . . magnificent now, yet . . . it’s about fundamental . . . we’re talking about survival.”

“Yours or mine?” asked Hummingbird, but immediately regretted it. “Igor, forgive me. I know you wish me well. I have nothing to complain about. I have my pupils. They bring food along and . . . the things I need. You’re friendly and pay my bills down at the store. And I’m . . . working. Even if it’s . . . hard.”

As far as Igor knew, Hummingbird had not been in Mollisan Town for many years. She lived on her little plot, calling down to the store to order food and necessities, which they drove up to the house once a week. And she agonized in front of her easel. Sometimes she would show him the canvases she was working on. There were a number of pieces, all of which were magnificent, amazing, at least as good if not better than anything she had shown before.

Still, she was dissatisfied.

“There are critics who are harder to convince than you, Igor, my friend,” she would say.

He knew that once again she was referring to our Lord Magnus. He knew that Hummingbird devoted endless amounts of time at night—and for that matter during the day as well—to discussing her artistic creations with Magnus. On a few occasions Panda had unintentionally been a witness to one of Hummingbird’s long, complaining monologues, and thereby gained an unexpected key to the artist’s spiritual life. She was so filled with guilt, so filled with shame, that Panda, who could tolerate most things, could hardly bear to keep listening.

Still, he did.

It was clear that the hummingbird did not feel she deserved either success or talent. She painted for His sake, but satisfying Him was nearly impossible. If she exerted herself to the breaking point in the form of technique and expectations, she was putting on airs. If she held back her ambitions and instead tried to find the simplest possible expression, it was unworthy.

Igor Panda, who had dealt with many artists over the years, realized that as long as Hummingbird Esperanza-Santiago continued to “fail,” this granted her a certain satisfaction. For a guilt-ridden stuffed animal of Esperanza-Santiago’s type, defeat was one of the few bright spots in existence. It also explained why she chose to live the way she did, why she refused herself comforts or a social life, and why she was not interested in the money that was within reach if she would be more productive.

“But it’s not time there’s a shortage of, Igor,” she would say. “It’s talent.”

And she devoted hours to trying to prove the opposite.

They drank their coffee in darkness at the kitchen table. They talked about the sorts of things that have nothing to do with art. Panda tried to keep the conversation light and flowing. It was impossible to pressure her. No threat was worse than the inner demands that constantly threatened to blow her apart.

Jake Golden Retriever had shown up a few years ago when the situation was about to degenerate. Igor Panda had been six months behind on rent for the gallery and owed money to all the city’s banks and loan sharks. The golden retriever seemed to be a stuffed animal without background or context, but his forgeries were brilliant. Suddenly Hummingbird’s eccentricities became fruitful.