All Whom I Have Loved

46

Winter grew more bitter with every passing day, and we hardly left the house. Victor would come by in the afternoons, bringing provisions and some bottles of cognac, and would tell Father how interest in his pictures was mounting and that it was time to start planning a new exhibition. It isn't easy to deceive Father. There are times when he's completely firm in his feelings and does not hide his opinions. “This isn't the time for art,” he said.

“But there's the intelligentsia.”

“I can't see it.”

So now Father vented his anger — on the Jewish petite bourgeoisie, on anti-Semites, and on art critics of any ilk. To calm him, Victor took us out to a restaurant in the country. Here Father's rage subsided a little, and he talked about his childhood in the orphanage and his early exhibitions. The clouds passed over his face, and for a moment a youthful wonderment again shined in his eyes. His words flowed easily, and he didn't blame anyone. I saw Father as a young man borne from city to city on the shoulders of his admirers. The galleries in which his works are exhibited are full of people, and he's loved and admired by one and all.

Sometimes I thought that soon he'd go back to painting and that I saw signs of this. But I quickly learned that these signs were misleading. Father slept late and awakened angry — cursing, tearing up papers and tossing them into the fire. His face had changed over the past weeks: the anger had come to rest in his hands, and I was filled with fear that he'd strike someone again.

And, in fact, one evening when we were about to order dinner in a restaurant, the maître d' came up to us and asked us to move to a corner table. At first he claimed that the table had been reserved, but eventually he admitted that the other diners didn't want to sit near us, and he had to take their feelings into consideration.

“What defect do they find in us?” Father asked in a loud voice.

“I don't know.”

“Let them move to a corner and not us.”

“I insist that you move,” said the maître d', in a tone that drove Father crazy. Father got up and, without further ado, hit him. The man rallied quickly and sprang at Father, who brought him down with a single punch. The restau-rant's employees immediately gathered around and fell upon Father. Father took many blows and hit back, and he cursed in all the languages that he knew. Finally we found ourselves outside. Even now Victor did not lose his head. The incident amused him, and he threw himself into the snow, muttering and calling out, “Painters are strong, very strong; they know how to give as good as they get.” Father did not laugh but went on cursing. In the end we went to the tram on foot. The walk calmed Father down, and he sang Ruthenian songs that he had heard in his childhood from the women who worked at the orphanage. And all that evening at home he sang these mournful Ruthenian songs, as if his soul had found a temporary refuge in them.

And so March passed. Father did not paint and did not read; he did not even listen to the news on the radio. Victor did not hide from us the fact that anti-Semitism was on the rise. One evening several walls were plastered with vicious slogans, and more and more the radio was full of venomous propaganda.

“We'll move to France,” said Father.

“That's an idea,” agreed Victor.

It was as if we were in a cage. Sometimes it seemed that Father was about to cause a huge scene that would topple houses and start a great conflagration. Victor would talk to him quietly, as if to someone who was sick and needed to be soothed. In the meantime, the demons had fled the house. I, at any rate, did not see them. But perhaps they had not been expelled, but were instead hiding in the cracks, and would emerge in the spring from their hiding places. Perhaps they were afraid of Father's rage and did not dare provoke him.

Last night Father surprised me and said, “We haven't heard a word from Mother. She promised to come and she hasn't.”

“Mother promised to take me to the Carpathians,” I reminded him.

“It won't work out this year. We're close to the end of winter. The snow is melting.”

Later, Father told me that when he was young he had spent a month with a rich Jew who owned tracts of forests in the Carpathian Mountains. He had been hired to create paintings for the man's home, and he did begin to work, but when the rich man's wife saw the paintings, she clutched her head with both hands and shouted, “I don't want these paintings in my home — they depress me!” At first the husband tried to convince her that it was good art, showing her articles that praised Father's work, but it didn't help at all. So finally the rich man compensated Father with a substantial sum, and Father left. He told the story without bitterness, as if it were just a fleeting episode and not an unpleasant one.