Short Stories: Five Decades (67 page)

Flanagan laughed. “The efficiency expert. Look, Alexander, you ought to get out of this business. Take the advice of an older man. You ain’t got the temperament for it.”

“I’m going to give it to you,” Alex said stubbornly. “Remember what I said.”

“The general,” Flanagan laughed. “The terrible Greek.” He came over and hit Alex’s head back with the heel of his hand. “So long, Alexander.”

He left the room.

Sam came over and put his hand on Alex’s shoulder. “Take care of yourself, Alex,” he said. “You’ve been under a big strain.” And he followed Flanagan.

Alex sat for ten minutes, dry-eyed, in his chair. His nose was bleeding a little from Flanagan’s push. He sighed and got up and put his coat on. He bent and picked up the fifty-dollar bill and put it in his wallet. He slipped the empty pistol into his topcoat pocket and went out slowly into the warm June sunshine. He walked slowly the two blocks to Fort Greene Park and sat down panting on the first bench. He sat there reflectively for a few minutes, shaking his head sadly from time to time. Finally he took the gun out of his pocket, looked secretly around him, and dropped it into the waste can next to the bench. It fell with a soft dry plop on the papers in the can. He reached into the can and got out a discarded newspaper and turned to the Help Wanted section. He blinked his eyes in the glare of the sun off the newsprint and traced down the page with his finger to “Help Wanted, Boys.” He sat there in the warm June sunshine, with his topcoat on, making neat little checks with a pencil on the margin of the page.

The Green Nude

A
s a young man, Sergei Baranov, although he preferred painting large still lifes of red apples, green pears, and very orange oranges, joined the Red Army and did a mild amount of damage in several engagements against the Whites around Kiev. He was a sturdy, good-humored, dreamy youth who did not like to refuse anyone anything, and since all his friends were joining the Revolution he went along and served faithfully and cheerfully, eating the soldier’s black bread, sleeping on the soldier’s straw, pulling the trigger of his ancient rifle when the people around him ordered him to do so, advancing bravely when everyone else was advancing, and running in fear of his life when that seemed like the necessary thing to do. When the Revolution was over, he retired from the military, equipped with a modest decoration for an action at which he was not present, and took up quarters in Moscow and began once more to paint red apples, green pears, and very orange oranges. All his friends were enthusiastically convinced that the Revolution was an excellent thing, and Sergei, never one to strike out on his own, amiably and decorously concurred. The truth was that he was only really interested in his highly colored fruits and vegetables and when, in his studio or in the café which he frequented, discussions would start about Lenin and Trotsky or the new economic program, he would laugh his hearty and agreeable laugh and say, bashfully, “Eh, who knows? It is for the philosophers.” Besides, being a decorated hero of the Revolution and an artist to boot, he was treated well, and was assigned an excellent studio with a skylight and permitted heavy laborer’s rations. His paintings, too, were warmly approved by everyone, since he had the trick of making all his garden products seem marvelously edible. They sold without delay and his work was to be seen in the homes and offices of many quite-important officials of the new regime, warm and appetizing globs of color on the otherwise bleak and functional walls.

When, in 1923, he met and conquered an ample and beautiful young lady from Soviet Armenia, his painting took a new turn. He began to paint nudes. Since his technique remained the same, despite the change in subject matter, his success increased in leaps and bounds. As edible as ever, his paintings now combined the most satisfactory features of the orchard and the harem, and examples of his work, rosy, healthy, and very round, were much sought after by even more important officials of the regime.

He undoubtedly would have continued thus to this day, happily producing a succession of canvases of hearty, lightly clad, appetizing girls, alternating with piled heaps of oversized purple grapes and bananas, going from success to success, honor to honor, if he had not met, at a literary party, the woman who was finally to become his wife.

Anna Kronsky was one of those sharp-featured and overpoweringly energetic women that the liberation of women from the nursery and kitchen has turned loose on the male world. Angular, voracious, and clever, with a tongue like an iron clapper in a new bell, racked by indigestion and a deep contempt for the male sex, she was the sort of woman who in this country would run a store or report wars for the Luce publications. As one of her friends said of her, in attempting to put his finger on the exact difference between Anna and her more gentle contemporaries, “Anna does not make up her face when she goes out in the morning—she hones it.”

In Moscow, at the time Sergei met her, she had gravitated inexorably into the education system. With twenty-three day nurseries for the children of working parents under her supervision, and a staff of over five hundred cowed men and women, she had already made her mark on the new population of the growing state. The children under her care were known as the cleanest and most precocious in the Soviet Union, and it was not until 1938 that a routine survey of neurotic diseases disclosed the fact that the graduates of Anna Kronsky’s immaculate creches led all other population groups of the nation by three to one in absolute nervous breakdowns.

In a necessarily incomplete study, prepared by a thoughtful Artillery Colonel during a slow month on the Southern front in 1944, the estimate was made that the ministrations of Anna Kronsky to the rising generation had cost the Red Army more manpower than a full armored brigade of the Nazi 9th Army. However, the study was accepted with a grain of salt by the Colonel’s superiors, since his OGPU dossier revealed that he had been the lover of Miss Kronsky between the dates of August third and August seventh, 1922, and had sent into headquarters a fervent request for transfer to Archangel on August eighth of the same year.

It was this lady, who, flanked by a heroic poet and an aging test-pilot, set her eyes on the sturdy Baranov as he came through the door, and, in one moment of iron speculation, made the decision that was to transform the painter’s life. Her carborundum eyes glittering, she crossed the room, introduced herself to her prey, ignored the beautiful girl from Soviet Armenia who had come with Baranov, and started the necessary process which resulted three months later in marriage. Just what it was that made Baranov so immediately attractive to her, none of her friends could decide. Perhaps she saw, in the painter’s simple docility and good-humored health, evidence of a fine digestion and an uncomplicated nervous system, excellent attributes for the husband of a busy lady executive who came home each night jangled and worried with the day’s thousand cares. Whatever the reasons, Anna left no escape possible for Sergei. He had a tearful scene with his beloved Soviet Armenian, painted one last, pink, fruity nude, and helped carry the poor girl’s meager belongings to the new room Anna had managed to find for her in a slum section three-quarters of an hour away from the center of town. Then Anna moved in, bringing with her a new bedspread, three packing cases of pamphlets and reports, and a large goose-neck lamp.

The marriage seemed from the beginning to be a thoroughly happy one, and there was only one noticeable change in Baranov, outside of a subtle, but growing tendency toward silence in company. He no longer painted nudes. Not one painting, not one sketch, not even a wash from the waist up, of the ripe, unclad female form, came from his studio. Confined once more entirely to the vegetable world, he seemed to have mastered a new understanding of the problems of the apple, the orange, and the pear. As edible as ever, a new dust seemed to be powdered over his work, a haunting and melancholy fragrance, as though the fruit he chose to paint came now from autumnal boughs, the last sweet bounty of the closing year, the final, nostalgic yield of trees and vines through whose dying leaves and frozen branches the cruel winds of winter were already moaning.

This new development in Baranov’s work was greeted with respectful praise by critics and public alike and examples of the new phase were hung in many museums and public places. Success did not change him, however. More silent than ever, he painted steadily, experimenting with beets and pumpkins in ever darker reds and yellows, going everywhere with his sallow and brilliant wife, listening with model attention night after night as she monopolized conversations in literary, artistic, political, educational, and industrial circles. Once, it is true, at the request of his wife, he went to one of her nurseries and started a painting of a group of children he saw there. He painted for about an hour, then put his brush down, tore the canvas in half and had it burned in the stove, and went into the men’s room, where he was reported sobbing uncontrollably. This story was not believed by anyone, as it was retailed by a young teacher who had crossed swords with Anna Kronsky and who was removed later at her instigation as unreliable. Whatever the truth of the matter was, Baranov returned to his studio and went back to his beets and pumpkins.

It was about this time that he took to painting at night, using the goose-neck lamp that Anna had brought with her as part of her dowry. They had their own apartment by now, as a result of their double importance, more than a mile away from the studio, and the sturdy though now slightly bent figure of the painter, trudging through the snow late at night, was a common sight on the almost deserted streets between his home and his studio. He became very secretive, locking his door at all times, and when friends asked him about his current work, he would merely smile vaguely and politely and change the subject. Anna, of course, never asked him about his work, as she was a very busy woman, and it was not until the opening of his one-man show, an affair attended by many of the intellectual élite of the government and the arts, that she saw for the first time the painting that had engaged her husband for the past many months.

It was a nude. But it was like no nude that Baranov had painted before. There was no touch of pink anywhere on the enormous and frightening canvas. The prevailing color was green, that green that lurks in the sky before cyclones and hurricanes, sallow, lurid, oppressive to the eye. The figure itself, of a slack-breasted and lank-haired woman with a wrinkled abdomen and stringy but somehow violent loins, was also done in mottled green, and the staring and demonic eyes under the dry brow were another shade of the dominant hue. The mouth, the most fearful feature of the work, was done in dead black and somehow gave the startling impression of howling speech, as though the painter had caught his model in a full flood of maniac oratory. The mouth seemed to fill the canvas, indeed the entire room, with a tumbling, morbid, glittering torrent of horrid rhetoric, and it was to be noticed that the viewers attempted, uneasily, to avoid, as much as possible, looking at that particular section of the work. The background, so different from Baranov’s usual arrangement of carefully painted, richly figured materials, was spume and wreckage, jagged stony ruins of temples and tenements against a green and charcoal sky. The only recognizable link with Baranov’s past work was a cherry tree in the right foreground. But the tree was stunted and uprooted; a green fungus ate at the branches; a thick and snakelike vine wound murderously around the suffering trunk, and minutely painted green worms munched among the unripe fruit. The entire effect was of madness, genius, energy, disaster, sorrow, and despair.

When Anna Kronsky Baranov entered the room, people were standing in muted groups, staring with horrid fascination at the new painting. “Great,” she heard Suvarnin, the critic for
The Sickle
, mutter. And, “Incredible,” whispered Levinoff, the painter, as she passed him.

Baranov himself was standing in a corner, shyly and excitedly accepting the awed congratulations of friends. Anna stared incredulously at the painting, then again at her husband, who, with his rosy complexion and pleasantly smiling, obedient face, looked not one whit different from the man she had known all these years. She started to go over to congratulate him, although the painting seemed very unlifelike to her, but she was intercepted by two men who ran a tractor factory in Rostov, and she became so interested in lecturing to them about tractor manufacture that she forgot to mention anything about the painting to Baranov until much later in the evening.

From time to time, various of the guests stole sidelong and speculative glances at Anna, especially when she happened to be standing in front of her husband’s masterpiece. Although Anna was conscious of their regard and also conscious of something vaguely disturbing in their eyes, she dismissed the feeling, since she was well-used by now to glances of varying intensity from her subordinates in the halls and offices of the nurseries under her command. The real reason for the hurried, measuring appraisals of the people in the gallery she never discovered and no one in the Soviet Union had the courage to apprise her of it. The wild and nightmare face that topped the terrible body of the green nude bore a family resemblance to Anna Kronsky that no amount of stylization on the part of the artist could erase. Sisters, twin souls, the painted and the living woman existed in a hideous relationship that escaped the notice of none. The only other person in Moscow who did not know that the artist had painted his wife’s portrait was the man who went home obediently each night with her. Ignorant and happy in his new glory, Sergei Baranov took his wife to the ballet that night to celebrate and later ordered three bottles of champagne at a café, most of which was drunk by the two tractor men from Rostov.