The Painting Read online

  After half-emptying his glass, Julius started talking again, his eyes once more trained on that patch of wall behind Anika’s head. She braced herself in her chair, feet planted firmly on the floor. ‘The morning of my mother’s birthday I watched her open the package,’ he said.

  It was clearly a struggle for him to speak. He swallowed noisily before continuing. ‘And that’s when I first saw the painting of the auburn-haired woman. I’ll never forget that day. When Mama looked at the canvas her face lit up. She seemed to glow like the woman in the painting. That’s when I realised that they looked a bit alike. Not in feature, you understand. The woman in the portrait was more classically beautiful than my mother. But their hair was similar. Mama wore her dark red hair piled on top of her head. It was thick and wavy and was always slipping out of its pins and threatening to tumble on to her shoulders.’

  What he said moved Anika deeply. Only when Julius wiped the back of his hand across his eyes did she realise that his cheeks were wet, and she found that her own eyes were filling with tears.

  ‘But it wasn’t just that,’ he said. ‘Appearances are only ever part of a story. Do you remember that question mark on the face of the woman in the portrait? She had that same defiant look that was often on my mother’s. I’ve sometimes thought since then that my mother knew what was to come and was challenging the future.’ He paused and after a few seconds he looked directly at her.

  At this point the assistant, James, reappeared at the door. ‘Your visitor’s back again,’ he said, his face severe. ‘He’s only got a few minutes and I promised you’d see him now.’

  ‘He’ll have to wait,’ Julius said.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Anika said when the assistant had gone. ‘There’s one more thing I wanted to ask, I hope you don’t mind. You said you’d tell me how the painting left your family. When was that?’

  ‘Didn’t you guess that, Anika? We had to leave the painting behind when we fled Vienna. And my mother died in Auschwitz, together with the rest of my family.’

  His words were a minefield between them and she longed to leap over it, to hug him, to tell him that she’d had no idea that this was how they’d lost the painting. How obtuse she’d been, for it was obvious that he was Jewish and she should have guessed that this was what had happened to his family. For a moment she didn’t know what to say, English words seemed to have suddenly deserted her. All she could manage was to spit out a phrase that was like an awkward lump of gristle in her mouth. ‘I am so s-s-sorry. I didn’t know that.’

  Julius continued, his voice low, ‘We left Vienna in 1938 and got as far as Prague. Of course, we’d left everything behind but at least we still had each other. Then in 1940 the situation got much worse for people like us. My parents managed to get me on to a Kindertransport to London. Emil was too young though. I was the only one of our family to get out.’

  Anika became aware of James standing outside the door again, glaring at her as if he wanted to bundle her out of the office, and she didn’t know how long he’d been standing there.

  Julius stood up and nodded at her, before taking her right hand. She felt that this sealed a pact between them. She put her left hand over his and might have hugged him if James hadn’t been standing so close. Julius said, his voice low, ‘Thank you for visiting me, Anika.’

  ‘Thank you for telling me about your mother, Mr Singer.’

  ‘Call me Julius. You and I are linked by the picture. I hope it can be traced.’

  * * *

  That night Anika had trouble sleeping. She turned on the radio and listened to the World Service. They were talking about Eastern Europe again. Economists were queuing up to offer advice to the former Soviet Bloc countries about how to clean up the shambles left by communist mismanagement. These countries need to take a swift and dramatic leap to private ownership and a market system, recommended a Harvard professor, so that financial instability can be avoided.

  The news item finished. Turning over in bed, Anika rolled into darkness, into an embracing sleep. Abruptly she was in the back of a police wagon with three or four faceless protesters. Her breathing was uneven and her legs trembling. Miklos was no longer with her. He must have got away. The bruise on her shoulder began to throb as the wagon bounced along an unpaved road in the dense forest. A thick mist swirled about the trees and formed tendrils that curled into the wagon through cracks around the door, around the windows. Tendrils that began to wrap themselves around her throat, around her chest, stifling her breath.

  An instant later, she was in a cold and windowless cell that stank of cigarette smoke and stale sweat. Unforgiving lighting illuminated the room. There was that grey man, sitting opposite her, the same one as before. Grey-faced, grey-haired, grey-uniformed, this man peppered her with questions. He smirked as she stumbled through replies that were always the wrong ones. Smirked as she struggled against the straps that were holding her down.

  After a while, he grew fed up with her. He lit another cigarette. While he sucked hard at it, she stared at the cement floor with its gutter and drainage outlet. There would be worse to come; she knew there would be. She had to be strong. Too soon, she felt a movement in the air as he leaned towards her and seized her left hand. Turning it over, he exposed the underside of her wrist. She pressed her lips tightly together. She would not shout as he stubbed out the burning cigarette on her white skin, she would not. But, oh, that smell! Never ever would she forget that smell.

  Fighting against the constraints and slippery with sweat, she forced herself awake and out of the tangle of bedclothes. It was that old dream, that recurring nightmare that she might never be rid of. Panting as hard as if she’d been running a race, it took her a few moments to realise where she was.

  Slowly her breathing became less ragged. Shivering, she crept on to the landing. The sound of gentle snoring came from Tabilla’s bedroom. She crept down the staircase, clutching at the bannister and avoiding the treads that squeaked. When she turned on the kitchen light a cockroach scuttled across the floor; a shiny repulsive thing that she couldn’t cope with, not in the middle of the night, though the spray was in the broom cupboard and there was a shoe by the back door that she could have thwacked it with. Instead she let it run under the kitchen sink.

  The can of Milo in the pantry was nearly empty and she made a hot drink with what was left. The back garden was bathed in shades of bluish-grey, the shrubs faintly illuminated by a crescent moon that looked sharp and dangerous. In the few moments that she stood by the back door, draining her mug, the moon was stationary. But as soon as she went upstairs it would resume its progress. It would continue cutting through the dark velvet of the sky.

  The wailing of a fire engine from Victoria Road made her jump. In just a few hours she’d be leaving Sydney. Her thoughts were all muddled, longing and apprehension warring against each other. She yearned to see her family, to put her arms around them, to feel the security and warmth of their love, to see her home. Yet at the same time she didn’t want to think about what she might discover there.

  Ever since hearing Julius’s story she’d felt confused and unsettled. Julius’s revelation had been a shock to her, but once he’d told her what had happened to his family, events started to slot into place. The Singers had escaped from Vienna at the time of the Anschluss. They’d left the Rocheteau behind. It would have been looted by the Nazis and somehow made its way to Budapest. What had happened to the painting after that, before Tomas had acquired it, was a mystery, but one that she hoped to solve.

  It was strange how quickly the mind adjusted without you really noticing. After the Rocheteau was stolen last March, she’d desperately wanted it back but as the months passed by she’d resigned herself to never seeing it again. And once she’d learned this afternoon that it had belonged to Julius’s family, she’d known that the painting was rightly his. This thought had become not a sad thing but a relief. A
washing of the hands.

  But though her hands felt clean, she wasn’t too sure about Nyenye’s and Tomas’s. She felt sick at heart about what she might discover in Budapest. It could blow her family apart. She would have to take things slowly, very slowly. One question at a time.

  PART IV

  Budapest, December 1989

  Chapter 24

  At the top of the Budapest funicular, Anika and her mother alighted into a biting wind. Above them, the sky, whipped clear of clouds, was a cold harsh blue. Walking on Castle Hill, on the Buda side of the Danube River, was Anika’s mother’s idea: a good brisk walk would prepare Anika for sleep tonight. This had made Anika smile: walking was her mother’s solution for everything. It was as if the interminable plane ride and transitions through too many time zones hadn’t already been preparation enough.

  The winter sunlight slanted off the glazed walls of the funicular station. Below them, the Széchenyi Chain Bridge led from Buda across to Pest, the flat land on the other side of the river. Pest was where Anika’s parents lived, a thirty-minute walk away, in an apartment on the third floor of a late-nineteenth century building that had seen better days. Paint fading, stucco crumbling off the walls, gutters leaking; it was one of the many shabby neo-Baroque apartment blocks constructed around central courtyards.

  The wind, channelled through the narrow streets of Castle Hill, found freedom in the cobbled area around the funicular station. It fretted at the coats of the few hardy people alighting there, tourists mostly, and filled the air with dust.

  ‘It’s lovely having you here,’ Anika’s mother said. She was wearing her favourite brown overcoat that she’d had for at least a decade and around her neck the blue and red silk scarf that Anika had bought for her before she left Sydney. That silk scarf would be inadequate for these temperatures, Anika realised; it would have been more practical to have bought her a woollen scarf instead.

  Anika took her mother’s arm as they turned into a side street that was slightly more sheltered. Mama had put on too much make-up for her homecoming and, though Anika found this touching, the colours were garish: the eye shadow too green, the lips too orange. She was lovelier without it, Anika thought, with her high cheekbones and intense green eyes, her turned-up nose and long upper lip. Suddenly guilty at these disparaging thoughts, her heart filled with love and other emotions that she couldn’t immediately put her finger on. Perhaps it was a touch of regret mixed with trepidation. Regret that she’d missed chunks of her mother’s life. Trepidation about what the future would bring.

  A football tapped its way along the pavement towards them, controlled by a towheaded boy of eleven or twelve. He didn’t notice them, so intent was he on bouncing the ball in front of him. He would be dreaming of being selected on the team, dreaming of playing for his school, dreaming of playing for Hungary. This boy might have been Miklos some years ago, Anika thought: that mindless rhythmic bouncing, that ferocious concentration. Miklos, completing a PhD at the University of Szeged, was very busy, he’d told her on the phone that morning when he’d rung to welcome her not long after she reached her parents’ apartment, but he would be home soon.

  While they were battling the breeze, Anika’s mother wanted to know all about her job and the course; she asked rapid-fire questions that Anika tried to answer clearly. ‘And the climate too, Anika, it is surely too hot for you? Maybe you’ll come home now we’re no longer a Soviet satellite.’

  ‘I’ll see, Mama.’ Her voice was non-committal. ‘I love it in Australia and I have to finish my degree.’

  At this moment the wistful notes of a cello began to filter through the morning air. Her mother tightened her grip on Anika’s arm but she didn’t need prompting to stop in front of a large bay window. Inside was a spacious living room filled with empty armchairs. On an upright chair in the middle of the room a young woman sat, her dark hair falling across her face, sunlight slanting on to the mellow wood of the cello that she supported between her legs. She was wearing an orange dress and an expression of fierce concentration. At once an image flashed into Anika’s mind of one of the paintings in Nyenye’s flat – the picture of a woman in a cobalt blue dress playing the cello. The woman in the room finished her piece and flexed her wrist.

  ‘Beautiful,’ Mama breathed, squeezing Anika’s arm as they moved on. As her hair whipped across her face, Anika saw the few white hairs that were mingled with the dark brown.

  Although autumn was long gone there were still a few scraps of leaves blowing about, rustled up as if from nowhere. The cellist began to play again, a melancholy refrain that faded as they descended the hill, down cobbled streets of the old town. Perhaps it was the sadness of the music or maybe it was the memory of Nyenye’s painting of the cellist in the cobalt blue dress that made Anika think of the stolen Rocheteau. She still hadn’t told her parents of its loss and she wasn’t looking forward to doing so. To crowd out this prospect, she deliberately conjured up the walls of Nyenye’s flat. All those glowing paintings began spinning in her head like in a kaleidoscope, until suddenly she felt dizzy. Where did they come from? What was going to happen to them and what were they hanging there for? No one ever looked at them, no one knew about them except for the family. Abruptly she asked her mother, ‘What are you going to do about those paintings?’

  Mama gave a start. ‘What paintings?’

  ‘The ones hanging in Nyenye’s flat. If Nyenye sold a painting or two you could all afford to visit me in Australia.’

  ‘We don’t talk about those paintings.’

  ‘But things have changed. I thought they were only there because they were by Hungarian artists and their paintings couldn’t be taken out of the country. If you need the money, surely they can now be sold on the international market?’

  ‘You’ll have to ask your grandmother about the paintings.’ Mama’s voice was taut.

  ‘Ask Nyenye?’

  ‘Yes, Nyenye. Those pictures are nothing to do with me.’

  ‘But they’re by Hungarian artists, aren’t they?’

  ‘I don’t know. Your Nyenye and Nagyapa bought those.’

  ‘But you do know about Hungarian artists.’ Mama had always seemed well informed about the history of Hungarian art, especially of the late eighteenth and the nineteenth century. Not erudite like Daniel and his ilk but knowing enough to recognise a painter’s style and era without reading the small print.

  ‘I can like something without being an expert on it.’ She turned away from Anika, who was unsure if she really did want to lean her elbows on the balustrade that looked over the Danube River, or if this was an excuse to drop her arm.

  Below them, the yellowy green waters of the river surged between the substantial stone pillars of the suspension bridge. The wind, whistling through tree branches, formed an accompaniment to the metallic buzz of the Trabants puttering along the road by the water. Always Anika found this river sobering. It connected people and regions that history had shown might well be irreconcilable. It had been life-taker and life-giver. A theatre of war. A graveyard. A demarcation between East and West.

  Towards the north, on the Pest side of the river, she noticed that the Parliament buildings were under renovation, scaffolding climbing up the side of the dome. Beyond this was Kossuth Square, and nearby were the copper-green cupola and twin spires of St Stephen’s Basilica. To the right of this and a few blocks further away from the river, her father would be busying himself in the butcher’s shop, not all that far from her parents’ apartment in Erzsébetváros. Though he and Mama had met Anika at the airport that morning, he’d decided to go back to work for a few hours. He could not imagine that his assistants would do the job as well as he could. They could not tell you about every animal that he bought: where it came from, what it ate and what age it lived to. And they were not always mindful of his edict – that every cut of meat was the best cut, and that what really mattered was
the purpose of the cut.

  After a few minutes Mama started to shiver again, and they carried on walking down the hill, Mama with her hands sunk deep into her pockets, her handbag banging against her hip with each stride. The streets were dirtier than Anika remembered. There were scraps of rubbish blowing about – paper and bits of plastic – and they had to watch where to put their feet to avoid the dog turds. Underpinning Anika’s exhaustion was a vague sense of disappointment. She’d been looking forward to this homecoming for so long, with yearning as well as with apprehension. For too long; perhaps nothing would live up to her expectations. Everything was changing, including her, and for a moment she longed for Boggabri Street.

  ‘Let’s have a hot drink. I’m freezing,’ Mama said when they reached a coffee shop. The interior was warm and lined with dark panelling to shoulder height. Above that, a row of mirrors reflected light in a thousand images from a handful of art deco wall fittings. There was only one vacant table, towards the back of the café. Mama sat on the worn leather banquette and Anika sat opposite her, on an awkwardly curved wooden chair.

  ‘Did you ever know Uncle Tomas?’ Anika asked after the hot chocolate, and the strudel they were to share, had arrived.

  ‘No, I was only ten when he died.’ After a couple of sips of her drink, Mama look revived, and spots of colour returned to her cheeks. She said, ‘My mother and I were living in the countryside then. Ask your father about your Uncle Tomas. It’s natural that you want to find out more about him. I expect Tabilla has spoken of him a lot.’

  ‘She hardly ever mentions him. And when she does, she gets very sad.’

  ‘Your Nyenye will also appreciate it if you ask her about him,’ Mama said, shrugging off her overcoat. ‘There are so few people left who knew him. Most of her friends and Tomas’s escaped Budapest at the time of the Revolution. Your father adored his big brother. I wish I’d met him. I’ve never met Tabilla either. Apart from on the phone, if you can call that a meeting.’