Chapter 20 Final Brushstroke

The joining of the three sections took eleven nights, and those eleven nights became, in the private calendar of that winter, a season with its own weather. Seams had to be marched across like borders in reverse, brick course matched to brick course until the mortar lines ran continuous and the eye found nothing to report where the sections met. Tonal drift was the enemy: two months of lamp hours had aged one section's varnish half a shade against another, and the difference, invisible separately, shouted at every junction. Viktor corrected with glazes thin as breath, half a stroke at a time, checking each pass under the densitometer the way scribes check a psalm against its master copy. By the ninth night the wall stood whole on the rack, fortress meeting fortress across three canvases with no frontier left anywhere in it, and he sat down on the model's chair and let his hands shake for a minute, professionally, the way they had earned. The last passages went in like signatures collected at the end of a long treaty. The row of dark studs along the northeastern parapet received their final values, neither sharpened nor softened, faithful still to their ambiguity. The tar lines of some unfinished roof repair crossed the inner courtyard at their stubborn angles. Shadows of the gate arches deepened by a single glaze to match the sun's testimony. Then he ran the verification sweep entire, frame by frame, reference beside copy, numbers against numbers, and the instrument reported agreement so complete that he felt briefly cheated, having braced for some discrepancy worthy of the subject's grandeur and been offered instead the plain perfection of craft. Even the celluloid annotations agreed, though nobody would ever grade them but himself. The final brushstroke arrived without ceremony, which is the way such things always arrive. It fell to the smallest figure on the parade square, a sentry whose face measured less than a grain of rice, standing where the photograph placed him among forty other grain-sized citizens. Viktor mixed a dot of warmth, thinned almost to nothing, and touched it to the sentry's throat, a pulse of living colour no larger than a period, visible to nobody who did not already know to look. Then came the veil of retouching varnish, laid with the fan blender in four slow passes, north light confirming each pass before the next was risked. When the last sheen closed over the last passage, he opened the window despite the frost, wide enough for one breath of outdoor air, and let the finished thing meet actual daylight once, unfiltered by glass or lamp, the way a father lifts an infant to a doorway before christening. The paint survived its audience with the weather. He latched the window and banked the lamps. What remained was the strangest hour of the year. Doctrine instructed him to do nothing further: disassembly, transport, delivery, all awaited instruction from the only channel entitled to give it, and instructions, given the season's temperature, could be weeks away. So the wall simply existed, whole and finished and unwatched except by the man who had made it, occupying the studio the way an altar occupies a deconsecrated church. He sat opposite it on the models' chair with bread and tea like a spouse sitting up with a feverish child, and inventoried what he saw without mercy. A fortress, rendered brick by brick, window by window, from testimony gathered by a machine that never slept; three months of his life converted into evidence; the most honest picture ever painted of a place that existed chiefly by not being looked into. Somewhere west, thirty-six exposures of its elder brothers were already crossing frontiers inside strangers' coats. This one would follow when told. Tonight it was merely true, and he sat in the truth of it until the tea went cold, which for a man of his profession amounted to prayer. Unease assembled itself gradually, out of components too small to arrest individually. The dogs beyond the river started up after midnight and kept starting again, in that broken chorus that means something is walking where nothing usually walks. The tram along the embankment passed twice at an interval wrong by four minutes, and he knew the timetable the way he knew his brush inventory, without consulting it. Once, distinctly, footsteps paused below the bakery shutter, two seconds, three, then moved on with exaggerated casualness, the acoustic signature of someone giving himself permission to keep going. Viktor noted each item, filed each item, and kept working, because the alternative to working was opening the nine centimetres of window sash, and the season had taught him exactly what the view outside cost now. He cleaned brushes that wanted no cleaning. He put every tool in its assigned place with the thoroughness of a man leaving a room forever, then laughed at himself quietly for the superstition, and stayed. At half past three the staircase spoke. The fourth step, which announced weight and had announced only the landlord's in a decade, creaked twice, quick, then slow, the rhythm of a man climbing fast and then remembering he needed to climb carefully. No knock followed, and none was expected; the handler had entered a hundred rooms of Viktor's life without once needing a door answered, though never, in all those years, this particular door. The latch gave to a hand that fumbled it, which was wrong, everything about that was wrong, and the doorway filled with a shape that resolved too slowly into the familiar coat. The coat was dark along the left shoulder, dark in the wet way. One hand pressed flat against the frame, holding the doorway up as much as holding onto it. The other hand extended a folded paper, edge-stained, toward the middle of the room, toward the lamplight, toward him. Viktor crossed the studio faster than doctrine, faster than thought, catching most of the man's weight and negotiating the rest onto the models' chair while the paper pressed itself into his palm with a strength wildly out of proportion to anything else remaining in the donor. Words were attempted, one of them possibly a street name, possibly an apology; none completed themselves. Blood found the floorboard seams with the unhurried thoroughness of water finding cellars. In the lamp's stutter the room performed its inventory of horrors calmly, and behind the two of them, finished, whole, freshly veiled, the wall watched everything with all the windows it owned, and not one of them was lit. ---