Monument Maker, page 43
Of course I thought about the portrait of the young man in the pyjama top, a portrait that I still hadn’t come across but one that waited for me, deliberately, in the future. Although the content of my days up ahead, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, remained vague—the future I had been given was the future up ahead, my gift for prophecy medium-term—I was able to say with certainty, or near-certainty, more appropriately, that the painting I had claimed to reveal in Mariella’s parlour, the painting of the young man in the pyjama top, was actually a self-portrait, though I hadn’t said so at the time, in order not to force the hand of chance, a self-portrait in the style of Chagall, even, and that it too functioned as a marker in time, as a flag on the moon, even, though more impossible still, a flag in the future, yet still there were things that I couldn’t say, things that I was unsure of, of the fate of the young man with the pyjama top, of his disappearance from my own life, of the circumstances of the painting of the picture, although I was fully aware of the circumstances of its discovery, which was not, as I had claimed, amongst the paintings of otherworldly ectoplasm and deep-sea creatures that Mariella had painted as part of her spiritualist group, rather it waited for me in a curiosity shop in the Plaka area of Athens in the dying years of the 1940s.
I had been taking an afternoon’s stroll around Plaka, occasionally sitting down to a coffee or a glass of wine, most of which were provided for free by the gracious and occasionally terrified landlords and restaurateurs who would hurry me to a shady corner in the back of the room in order not to put off the rest of the customers with my face like a soft-boiled egg, when I came upon a shop that I was never able to find again, a shop the size of a long walk-in cupboard that was filled to the ceiling with old green filing cabinets, hat stands, toys, cups and plates, and with paintings hung along the wall and piled up on the floor.
The paintings were the usual garbage, a mix of amateur studies and mass-produced tat, two bright foxes staring out of a green earthen den, a sad horse in a field, a bowl of fruit, the Acropolis, inevitably, beach scenes, seascapes, but there amongst them, luminous, in a box beneath a table, was my young friend from the years of the war, my cellmate in his striped pyjamas, right on cue. I asked the proprietor where he had acquired the painting, if he knew anything about the artist, but he shrugged and said he had no idea, that he got all of his stuff through house clearances, which of course made me suspect that my young friend had died alone in a house in Athens, in the dying years of the 1940s, he had survived the war only to die alone, survived to paint his own portrait and then, as if in a dream, to deliver it to me, who, in turn, would deliver it back to him, in his past.
Why had I not told him the truth about the painting and our remarkable rendezvous in years to come? I had merely set the seed. I pictured him in his garret, in his lonely attic room, coming to the realisation that it was he himself who had painted the picture I had prophesied in our years together in the prison, that there was an aspect of destiny that had fallen into his own hands, and also, I confess, I lied about the painting because I didn’t want it to seem as if he was dead, as if he would ever die, and I set it up, in a way, to make it seem that perhaps someone had painted him, that he had merited that, somehow, but also to say that he was remembered and to leave open the possibility, perhaps, of some kind of afterlife, of some kind of communication from the dead, as if Mariella herself had channelled the young man, as if he had never truly disappeared, and of course, to make it real, to anchor it in reality, I placed the painting facing the wall, amongst Mariella’s paintings of the “denizens of the aire,” her “sidereal visions,” that’s how she described them, and like a magician presenting “the big reveal,” the very words, the very words that The Surgeon had used to describe the revelation of my new face, I turned the painting around, as I had predicted I would, as if to an invisible camera, as if to a rapt audience, though truly I was the only person in the room, and felt myself part of a chain of events fixed forever in heaven’s unchanging heart.
Soon after the young man’s vision of the church of Marc Chagall on the moon, he was moved to another cell. Actually, it wasn’t a cell but rather the abandoned stables that had been opened to take an overflow of prisoners. My own cell became a little more commodious, we now only had to sleep three abreast, but it became more dangerous with the arrival of a crook named Malodie with the stupid, wide-open face of an overgrown child, who immediately established a vicious hierarchy in which, inevitably, I was somewhere near the bottom, due to the state of my features.
I realised that in order to secure my own safety I would be forced to institute something dramatic, a scene of wild unpredictable violence, and so one evening, as he lay with his arms around his charge, an Italian boy of barely seventeen years, I fell upon him in a frenzy and bit a hole in his neck. Guards were called, and we were both removed and beaten in front of each other. Malodie called me a monster, the beast, he cried, the beast, but I knew I had made my point. From that day on he avoided me, and I was sent to the stables myself after a brief period in solitary confinement, a dark windowless room that confused night and day and that resulted in an uncanny feeling of being able to levitate, a feeling that prefigured my dream on the operating table where I had hung suspended above the ruins of the prison itself. I became aware of my potential to horrify because after all, without a mirror, and only the pain of your own wounds to guide you, it is easy to forget the appalling visage you present to the world, and with my certainty of the gift of a new face up ahead I decided to make the most of what I now thought of as a temporary mask, an aberration with which I would institute my own heinous hierarchy.
I’m going to act cracked, I told the young man in the pyjama top when I was returned to the stables, we can blame it on the solitary, I told him, but it’s time to make the most of my temporary features. Although the nights were even colder in the stables than they were in the cells, due to the flimsy wooden roof that was badly splintered, it allowed a spectacular view of the night sky, and so night came to seem as a double blessing, as we occupied the wee small hours by naming stars and constellations and enjoying the benediction of the planets. Sometimes the moon was so bright that it would illuminate the entire room and I would look around and realise that no one was sleeping, that everyone was flat on their back, bathed in its light, lost in its simple mystery, looking up.
The moon is the church of Marc Chagall, the young man said to me one night, that’s why there’s no point in painting anything on it but the moon itself. He seemed satisfied with this and then he went to sleep.
By day I would often spy my nemesis, as I had come to regard him, sly Malodie, at some distance in the courtyard, his young charge by his side, his neck wrapped in heavy bandages where I had done the deed, his eyes fixed on mine in a kind of revulsion, always orbiting me and the young man at a precise distance, so much so that I began to believe that there was between the two of us some kind of fixed fate or relationship, one that had somehow eluded me in my plotting of the future, some strange tributary that ran off from the main course of my life, but a key one nonetheless, even as it refused navigation from so far off. Indeed, as I looked at the two of them, sly Malodie and his young charge, it occurred to me that they were a malevolent reflection of myself and the boy, and not only that but a taunting of my powers, my ability to see what was up ahead. Then what of us? the pair of them seemed to ask me, a pair of vagrants that not only had the power to unnerve me by day but that had taken up residence in the mansion of my dreams, even, where previously I would travel in my mind as a necessary restorative, the same mansion where I kept my love imprisoned under lock and key and where I would now encounter these two as inexplicable trespassers, eyeing me from the stairs, seated on twin chairs at the far end of the empty dining room, stood behind a hedge at the bottom of the garden, only sly Malodie’s eyes, those eyes of revulsion, visible above the phantom green foliage, illuminated as if, once more, in back of the scene, lay a dream of the moon.
