Cassandra Voices

Tag: Sarah Johnson fiction writer

  • Winter When Thy Face is Hid

    I was so tired, Tuesday night. Don’t sleep well when I get that tired. I have obsessive dreams and wake up later than usual. And sleeping in always makes my head hurt. I was clumsy tired, where you bump into things; and getting into bed, I whacked it. The big clunky picture frame hanging over my headboard.

    I like the picture a lot. That’s why I put it there. Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow, it looks so cold and ancient, a somber blackish sky, intrepid hunters with their intrepid dogs, and the polder lakes below dotted by tiny skaters. On hot August nights I switch on the lamp, look at it, and feel cold enough to sleep.

    But Tuesday night, hanging there, that painting wasn’t a positive presence. I hit my head on it. Which hurt until I fell asleep. And in my sleep, how aware I was of this thing dangling! Over me. Waiting to drop, and in the process, dash my brains out. Quite a long time ago, while I was away from home, a wooden bracket, bearing a ceramic vase, tumbled on to my sleeping head, and that incident is probably what made me so preoccupied by the painting. Much later, in a dopey semi-consciousness, I began groping at the wall above my head, trying to protect myself from the picture’s pointy frame.

    Of course, I only managed to whack it again, so hard it swung wildly on the nail, and suddenly I was wide awake. Something cold had fallen on my neck.

    I pawed the wet substance off: crystalline, frigid, and unmistakable. Put some in my mouth. Snow. In a sealed bedroom. In May. Wallowing upright, I clutched the side of my neck where the last tiny flakes were with every instant turning to water, and reached for the lamp. In its gift of sight, I looked left, right, up, and down, finding no possible source for the little flurry, until I became aware of an icy draught behind my shoulders.

    Twisting round, I discovered, with a glee I only hope to feel again at Resurrection, that the draught was puffing out of the Brueghel picture.

    The inner edges of the frame were furred with hoarfrost, and on the carved outer face of the lower frame, slush fused into bright drops from the room’s warmth, remnants of the snow-flinging disturbance that had awakened me. I was now aware of a curious low, broken whistling that I mistook at first for wind. Then a sharp little bark undeceived me. It was in miniature, the far-off baying of those hunting dogs. The three dark figures of hunters, against white snow, moved with hampered steps, leaving profound footprints, to the brow of a steep foreground hill, and in their descent slowly disappeared, followed by their entire pack of restless dogs, whose howls and deep barks diminished. The party left only churned, dirty snow. My gaze sought other figures, distant peasants around a bonfire in the left mid-ground; they moved rhythmically, poking at the blaze, sometimes pausing to hold hands toward it. I could just hear their minute voices in sporadic, unintelligible exchanges, by leaning very near the frame. On the far-removed polder lakes, skaters rotated, flailed, traversed the slate-grey ice in total silence.

    My first wild yearning was to climb into it. This proved undoable: the cold breathing from the frame was so intense, it had me goose-fleshed in my underwear; and its frame was too small to admit me, unless I broke it. Somehow, I feared losing the whole scene if I did that. My second instinct was to tell some other human what was happening, make someone else believe it, so that I could. There was no second thought as to whom I would tell: my high-school art instructor, Dick Carey.

    Enthusiastic, but an astute reasoner, good-natured enough to answer the phone in the middle of the night, he was batty about the Flemish Masters, and also the man who had introduced me to Bruegel. I still had his number. Feeling for it in my jeans, I pulled my cell phone from a pocket.

    “Hello?” He didn’t sound sleepy at all. Probably up reading art criticism at this unearthly hour.

    “Hi, Mr. Carey?” (I’ll never have the gall to call him Dick.) “I’m sorry to disturb you so late. Something weird has happened. With a Bruegel painting.” There, now I had him. He didn’t interrupt me once as I described the phenomenon.

    “Mr. Carey, did this… I’m not pulling your leg. Have I ever pulled your leg before? Is this happening? Is this real?”

    I heard that little rumble in his chest. Anyone who’s ever been in his classes knows that that rumble means an avalanche is coming, an avalanche of rock-like reasoning and information. I held the phone tight to my head, feeling glad. And warmer.

    “You wonder if that can be happening. You’re not the only one of us who’s wondered! You’re questioning empirically what I’ve questioned in the abstract for decades. But you’re the only one still wondering. Listen. Bruegel was a realist, a representationalist. I’ve always respected them most, always will. Shakespeare said the purpose of art is to show reality to itself, “Hold up the very mirror,” of reality. He did it so well, his work is still blurring the line between representation and reality, people are still literally living his work in order to touch and understand life itself! Now, Bruegel… he’s a kind of Shakespeare, I’ve always maintained that. Not just because they were contemporaries. The work of a realist, listen, is to reproduce life, more accurately, and more accurately, and always more accurately. The mistake of art criticism is to suppose the process endless, with infinite space for improvement. But, technically, it has to be finite. That’s what I figured out. There is an end to that quest, anyone can see, the goal is reality itself. Now, if such huge strides can be made toward that goal, like the stride between say, late Medieval manuscript illuminations, and Bruegel, think about that contrast! Do you realize that the stride between Bruegel and reality itself, is smaller?”

    I felt quivery and shaky, the more so because this thing behind my back was still exhaling below-zero air at me. “Why… Why is it happening to me?”

    “Ha! Because… If you were a Polynesian who’d never seen either snow or people in full clothes, would you believe Hunters in the Snow depicts something real? Probably not. Recognizing realism in art has a huge component of belief. Now you, you’ve lived with that painting for years, you say, and it’s become internalized with you, love is the first part of belief… and now, in a state of impaired consciousness, you encounter it again, and wham, your defenses are down, you believe, and Bruegel, the last person to believe it, finally has a successor, an understander, and his vision is seen.”

    “Th-thanks,” I breathed. “Mr. Carey… if you’ll excuse me, I want to be alone with it.”

    “I understand. Wish I was you. It’s alright. I’ll see Bruegel one day.”

    But when I was alone, I was afraid to turn around and face it again.

    Every waft of cold on my back was joy. How could this be! How marvelous!

    … But why was I so happy? What did this mean, for me, or anyone? A great barrier had been crossed. But what barrier? And was its crossing a good thing?

    What barrier, but that mankind had never been able to create before, only manipulate the already-created. Now a man with a marten-hair brush had removed a thought from his head, and look, the thought was real; not an imagined form transferred to preexisting objects, but the imagined objects, themselves, stood in the round.

    Previously, only God could do that.

    ‘Well, they used to say angels were the only rational creatures that fly, and now people can fly,’ I said to myself. ‘That was a good thing. And this is a good thing.’

    But this was a different thing.

    ‘A barrier is broken. The realists, in every form of art, have been trying to break it since time began. Now it’s broken, and… what does it mean? Are we any nearer to the fulfillment of every wish?’

    But wishes could be divided, I thought, into two types—wishes that were part of maintaining life in the body, and wishes for the thing that made life worthwhile. Wishes to live, and when alive, wishes for love. And no earthly love could ever meet all those wishes, that was why people became religious. And this thing behind me, spewing cold air, was not a direct path to the end of all wishes, but a round path going nowhere: because it did not go to the God they say is love, but bypassed him. Man could create.

    I pulled the blanket over my head, to protect myself from that kind of cold.

    I woke up late, and my head hurt from sleeping in. Behind me on the wall was a somber, dingy old print of a flat painting, with flyspecks on the snow. I grabbed the cell phone and looked through Recent Calls.

    No outgoing call to Dick Carey last night. Of course not. Carey had been dead five years.

    Te Deum Laudamus.

    Featured Image: Pieter Bruegel the Elder – Hunters in the Snow

  • Vendev’s Contest

    Taking advantage of their last night in the city, Boris and Semyon went to a theatre, something neither of them had done since childhood. But as luck would have it, at some point during the show, Boris’s wallet was stolen. He was upset, and more so when the police officers exchanged glances before giving him little hope of its recovery.

    “You see, Sir, we understand that Vendev was working the crowd last night, and Vendev can’t be caught. He is the cleverest thief who has ever operated in Belarus. Sometimes he works the same place for a week, but no one sees the slightest movement in the crowd when someone shouts ‘Stop thief!’ We’ve had dozens of reports and the leisure to compare them. He works alone and only in one place at a time, stealing a maximum of three wallets an hour. As for physical descriptions, he might be anything from a choirboy to Rurik the Varangian. All we know is his name…if that. His name is rumored about with a strange story of the reason that he steals…”

    The two men from Cosen were not comforted. Next morning, Boris couldn’t bring himself to take his train. Instead, he returned to the Pearl Theatre and sat on the terrace of an adjacent café. It was obvious he would not get his wallet back like that, so he must have been merely mourning it, like the simple-hearted fellow he was. A pure and harmless, even touching ritual. One which Semyon did not savor.

    Semyon was the cleverer of the two. Anyone could see that in a glance at those quicker eyes flickering from his expressive face. Impatient with Boris’s ruminative slowness, you could see him there licking and sniffing, as if smelling the humid soil back in Cosen. He was eager to get that train out of this larcenous, immoral town and begin the fall plowing. But Boris could not sense all the strange city things now tickling Semyon’s nose.

    The well-proportioned man in nondescript brown who sauntered out of the café had pleasant brown eyes, and seemed in his late twenties. Upon seeing Boris, he stared as if seeing an old friend, then strode to their table, taking a chair very near indeed to Semyon.

    “Good morning, my fine fellows! So seldom you get up from the farm! From the north, are we?”

    Semyon did not care to be so acutely read by a stranger, and stiffly replied, “From Cosen, Pán Stranger.” Though nearly on Semyon’s lap, the man addressed his conversation to Boris alone.

    “You are from Cosen! A sweet place, Cosen. But shabby. The manufacture? Why, nothing, Sir. Nothing at all!”

    Boris’s pride in Cosen was equal only to his ignorance of everywhere else. “It is not necessary for Cosen to manufacture,” he maintained loudly with a sweet, ingenuous smile. “Cosen is, as everyone knows, engaged in trade. And while Königsberg is boasted for its trade,” he compared his village to a great Baltic port with utter naivete, “A greater variety of food is eaten at all times of the year by people in Cosen than by those in Königsberg.”

    Semyon fidgeted uneasily, increasingly sure that the stranger was not smiling so broadly with Boris, but at him.

    “And you caught the show last night,” continued the young man in a fashion which was nothing short of uncanny. “How did you like it? What sort of performance?”

    “Oh, Madame Yelisaveta Can-Shay,” returned Boris, smiling to Slavicly mangle her name in what he considered a rendering both cultivated and French. “She does all sorts of things. First she acted a skeet,” he tried to say ‘skit,’ “Which I did not understand at all, but Semyon, there, found it funny. Then she danced with a little dog, looking exactly like a priest’s beard on legs…”

    “Madame, or the dog?” offered the young man, causing Boris an attack of laughter that rattled the table.c

    “And then, behind a screen, she moved puppets which looked like tiny people. And talked for them! She didn’t sound a bit like herself. It was miraculous! Afterwards, the theatre director himself walked out on stage, in a splendid suit, looking like a bridegroom! He thanked her, and we clapped like mad. Semyon and I, I mean, for the others were so shy. These city people! And the director seemed to want an encore very much, so I shouted ‘Encore!’ I was the only one, so it was very fortunate I was there, or the director and Panny Can-shay might have felt so badly. She sang Encore for us, which is a song. And that was all.”

    The young man seemed simply overcome by this gallantry towards Madame Canché, and rose to embrace Boris. For the first time since his arrival, Semyon could move his left arm.

    “But it was all dreadful and we should never have come,” said Semyon bitterly, while the young man showed no more partiality for the previous seat set against his ribs, and sat equidistant between the men, “Because Boris’s wallet was stolen and the police don’t think it will be recovered.”

    “Stolen by Vendev!” exclaimed the young man with enthusiasm, leaning forward with brightened eyes. “He was in the Pearl last night. I read it in the paper. By reports, he took six wallets and a lady’s Lyon silk handbag.”

    “The scoundrel!” cried Semyon, his thin knees involuntarily jerking.

    To which the young man sighed deeply. “Do you know nothing of Vendev?”

    “Oh, the police told us everything.” Perhaps it was that note of childish arrogance in Semyon’s voice, but the young man’s full attention, once all Boris’s, was now his. “They say no one ever sees him, that he takes three wallets an hour, that he looks like a choirboy or Rurik the Vavavian, and something odd about him paying a debt to God.”

    “That’s it!” The young man slapped the table. “That’s Vendev. Listen. You mustn’t call him a scoundrel. It’s the strangest story. Many years ago, Vendev, who was an honest man then, made a bet with God. He expected to win, but lost. Don’t ask me what the bet was, because I don’t know. He had to pay the debt with stolen money. Perhaps because he was too poor. Perhaps those were the terms of his penance. He became the finest of pickpockets, and labors year after year, straining to pay his debt and be free. To be an honest man once again. That is Vendev.”

    The young man looked keenly round on his audience, especially Semyon, waiting to see if either pure-hearted Christian peasant would contest the vile theology and viler blasphemy of the tale. But Boris stared, full of wonder and…good land! There were tears in his eyes! While Semyon’s inexpertly controlled face clearly betrayed that though he found the story revolting, Semyon was afraid to criticize a city gentleman’s morals for fear of being called ignorant and out-of-step with the times. The young man’s smile widened in triumph, and as timid Semyon smiled back despite ignorance of the joke, the young man seemed about to be reduced to helpless laughter!

    Then it happened: Semyon’s hand had been automatically seeking his wallet every quarter of an hour for the past eleven, and did so now. It crawled over the rusty woolen vest like an eager crab to caress his pocket, and froze in disbelieving horror before it felt again, fumbling and pinching. A look like death by poison spread over Semyon’s lined face. The young man appeared to see nothing and twitched Boris’s lapel playfully, asking whether he were married. Semyon’s face had grown hard, his stare on the young man’s back like that of a hunter at a fearsome but cornered bear.

    But the young man knew that Semyon’s ideas of how to deal with a thief were as hard, as rigid and formulaic, as his stare. The young man crossed his legs comfortably and laughed when Boris said that yes he was, praise the Lord, married. A thief must know, better than anyone, the little signs that betray a man, for he has more to lose, and Vendev knew that Semyon, even if he could manage to conceive of a thief who did not immediately dart away, was incapable of calling ‘Stop Thief!’ on a sitting man. He would be equally incapable of announcing a thief with any other cry than the time-honored ‘Stop Thief!’ Just as he was incapable of buttoning down his waistcoat in the new fashion, but felt compelled to button it up to his chin. Vendev knew that for as long as he, Vendev, sat on the chair, he was as safe as if in France, and that he could sit in a chair indefinitely. Whereas if the two hardworking farmers tried to sit on chairs in broad daylight, on a weekday, for more than an hour, they would either die or explode.

    Vendev took out a cigarette, which he then lit and enjoyed at leisure, savoring that first bouquet of smoke, a conscience that had been trained not to bother him, and the pleasant weight of Semyon’s wallet. Won the gentleman’s way. In a contest of wits.