Chapter 63 The Boy Who Held the Keys

The trunk had come with him from the old lodgings years ago and had not been opened since the move, and it gave up its past the way trunks do, reluctantly, in the smell of camphor and old sizing: exhibition catalogues, a funeral wreath's ribbon, and at the bottom, wrapped in a 1958 newspaper from a city he had left at twenty-two, the photograph album of his apprenticeship. Weiss's studio photographed itself every spring, the old man seated at the centre like a magistrate among his easels, and Viktor turned the grey pages until he found the spring he wanted — the year of the sky — and there it all was, small and silver and exact: Weiss with his hands folded on his stick; the great north easel bearing a half-finished ceiling canvas; himself at twenty-four, sleeve rolled, mid-stroke, caught looking at nothing but the colour under his brush; and in the doorway to the lining room, slightly blurred because he had been moving even then, always moving, a thin youth in a work apron too large for him, holding a hoop of keys against his hip with one hand and a bucket of solvent rags with the other. Konrad. The name surfaced the way names do after forty years, whole, with its temperature attached. Weiss's sister had married a Czech and died young, and the son had been taken into the studio as a servant when the alternative was an institution, and everyone had understood without any rule being spoken that the boy would grind, stretch, clean, carry, and never, ever paint. He was not slow. That was the tragedy Weiss never tired of hinting at. Give him anything seen and he could give it back — a ceiling from memory after one ladder-climb, the sheen of a varnish he had watched dry once — a mirror with a heartbeat, Weiss called him, half fondly, entirely carefully, because mirrors that remember are dangerous in houses that keep secrets. What the boy could not do was begin. Shown ten paintings he could produce an eleventh indistinguishable from any of them, and shown nothing he could produce nothing at all, and so, by the cruel arithmetic of ateliers, he was pronounced without gift, and the pronouncement was entered in him like an engraving, and he swept the floors of genius for six years and was never once asked what he saw when he looked at what they made. Viktor sat with the album open on his knees through the short winter afternoon, reconstructing the boy the way he would reconstruct a damaged sitter, layer under layer. The keys, first: Konrad held the keys because he arrived first and left last, opening the lining room where the canvases were pasted to linen, locking the cabinet where the reference photographs lived, carrying the day's solvent rags down to the bucket — and the rags. Viktor's hands went cold around the album's edge. The rags. The afternoon of the sky, his one permitted improvisation, he had practised his margin script in the corner of the rag before daring the canvas — the family alphabet, drilled since childhood, strokes repeated to loosen the wrist — dozens of letters, the whole private grammar, worked into stained cloth. And at evening the rags went into Konrad's bucket, and Konrad went wherever boys go with buckets, and a mirror with a heartbeat, given a hundred repetitions of a secret script by the only hand alive that used it, would have needed nothing but patience and a lamplight to become its second reader. Nobody teaches a mirror. A mirror attends. He remembered — the memory arriving now with the specific dread of things noticed too late — the boy standing behind him at dusk, ostensibly waiting for the rag, watching the sky go onto the canvas with an attention that had embarrassed him at the time. Not the sky, he understood at last, fifty years overdue. The watcher had been studying him: where the eye leads the wrist, how hesitation looks from outside, the exact choreography of a hand composing. Viktor had been so young, and so full of his own ascent, that he had mistaken hunger for servility and memory for dullness, and had taught the most gifted copier in Europe how originals are born, free of charge, in the margins of an evening, and never once asked the boy his price. Otto telephoned at seven, from Vienna, voice thinner than the line it travelled. "Weiss kept a nephew, yes. The key-boy. I framed for the studio in those years; I remember him carrying stretchers taller than himself and never dropping one. After the old man died, the nephew stayed on in the building — tenants said a restorer worked there nights. Then nothing, years of nothing, and then, maybe twenty years ago, a man comes to my shop, orders stretchers, museum grade, pays in old banknotes, knows my joinery better than my apprentices do. Never a name. But painter — " the line crackled with the old man's breath, " — he ordered cedar, and he specified the depth of the rebate the way Weiss specified it, and the sizes he ordered first time, twenty years ago, were sixty-one by eighty-six. Museum grade. He has been stretching this particular canvas since before your exhibitions were a rumour. Whatever he is finishing, he began it when your grandfather's walls were still only stories collectors told each other in the dark." Viktor thanked him, rang off, and sat in the lamplight doing the arithmetic a teacher dreads. Two schools on earth laid craquelure stroke by stroke in sable — Weiss's, and the Line's — and Konrad had served the first as a servant and, somewhere in the silent decades, had found the second, learned its survival chemistry, its ovens, its hunger-proof grounds, and married the grammar to the chemistry the way his master had never permitted him to marry anything: completely, secretly, and for keeps. A student of both schools belonging to neither. A reader who had promoted himself to painter on the strength of one stolen alphabet and one unwatched afternoon, and who signed himself not with a name he had been denied but with the two tools of his promotion: the brush he had finally been given, and the key he had never surrendered. Nikolai found him there at midnight, album still open, and read the situation off the photograph in silence, the way the young read fluently what the old can only spell out. "You taught him," Nikolai said. It was not an accusation; it was worse. It was recognition. "I fed a mirror," Viktor said, "and mirrors keep everything." He closed the album, and his hands were steady, because the trade governs the hands first and grief afterward. "He wants me alone at dusk on a jetty, to divide the night between us. Very well. But I will go having understood the division he is actually proposing, which is not the night at all. It is authorship. Of the thirteenth name, of the walls, of the road itself — he means to settle, once and finally, whose hand the story carries." In the window the city kept its small lights going above the river, patient, unforthcoming, like lamps along a shore where something waits offshore. "And a man who has spent fifty years being nobody's hand intends to become everybody's author. Unless, Nikolai, somebody arrives at that jetty having read him more closely than he has read us."