Justine (11 page)

But then it was time for Randi to go, because the next day she had the morning shift. In the entryway everyone's breasts got squeezed together, and suddenly my hands reached out and stroked up Randi's body to reach the domes from below. They were firm, they were yielding, they were heavy, they were warm. The face over the breasts became white, white turning red. Then Randi ripped her breasts from my hands and said goodbye and good night.

“Why should you stand there groping her breasts?” Ane asked after the door had been slammed. “You think they're disgusting, right.”

“They were enormous,” I said. “They were simply enormous. They were pure art.”

N
ot too long after the dinner with Randi, Ane returned giddy from a weekend trip to London. They'd been traveling together, they'd visited boutiques and cafes, “and Randi has got us an exhibit at her clinic's art society,” she said.

It had been a long time since Ane had exhibited anything, and she thought it might be fun to do a small show with some drawings or paintings at Randi's workplace.

“It's an art society, Ane,” I said.

“Yeah, so what?” she asked.

“So it's not serious, that's all.”

“I'm well aware of that,” said Ane. “But if we get to paint some paintings and we make a little money in the process, who cares?”

“I'm not a painter.”

“So? You'll paint anyway. You probably learned loads of stuff from your grandfather.”

“But has Randi seen any of your paintings?”

“No.”

“Then how does she know that they'd like to hang them?”

“Come on, Justine, let's just do it for shits and grins. Let's make some money for once?” Ane said.

I said: “Yes. Yes, let's do it. Let's have some fun.” I'd also like to be close to Grandpa, after all. Or what was left of him.

A
round the same time, Vita was working on a monument to a dead physicist. Her idea was to give his groundbreaking theories three dimensional form, so they'd unfold and intertwine into a single mirror-smooth object. In addition to that project she'd received another commission, a decoration for the Holmen Operahuset.

“How great that we're both so busy,” she said. “Shouldn't you figure out what you're doing for your X-Room exhibition soon?”

“It's fine,” I said. “I have all the time I'll need.”

Vita continued working on her drawing; she looked like cells in a state of controlled reproduction.

“I've been thinking about it,” she said, “shouldn't you just keep working with that sculptural idea? You have such a refined spatial sense. I still kick myself for not buying your ice floes that time. But I just didn't know where I was going to put them.”

“I didn't have the space either. That's why I gave them away.”

“So you've said.”

“They look good where they're at now.”

“You could just give it a try, you know,” she said. “You could always go back to what you usually do after that. No one is saying you have to do sculpture all the time.”

“I'd rather do this,” I said. “I have an idea for something I want to try out.”

Suddenly, I was extremely grateful to Ane for coming with Randi's offer.

W
e decided we'd paint together out in the garden and not spend a krone on supplies. We still had Grandpa's big box of colors, after all. Some of the tubes were dried out, but most were usable as they lay in rainbow array with Grandpa's large fingerprints on the lids and labels. We also found his old pallet hiding behind a bookcase. Ane used a glass scraper to get the paint off. She was wearing one of the smocks that could still close around her belly. As she sweated the paint flew like bits of lint around her.

We painted and painted. Ane painted still lifes and the organisms leaped from the canvas. She found her themes in the garden. Even though it was only approaching spring with snowdrops and winter aconite, everything in Ane's paintings overgrew itself. Apple trees blossomed, stamens became long tongues and petals swelled to sails.

I sketched my themes with Grandpa's charcoals. The sketch, Grandpa used to say, the sketch is not just a prelude, it's the actual skeleton, supple and full of energy and immediacy. What you cover it with is ooze, and it's a helluva job to transform that ooze into flesh in order to get down to the skeleton again.

I saw the painting's skeleton there before me and prepared the pallet with zinc white and ocher and umber. The base was a composition of cold and warm tones, just as I'd been taught. Then came the shadows and highlights and layer after layer of nuances. And then came the longdrawn decomposition, the honing and the tightening.

V
ita stopped by and looked over our shoulders, she chatted and was content. Ane suggested that she join the exhibit with some small sized objects, something that would fit the architecture. Vita thought that sounded exciting. Randi also came by. She thought Ane's paintings were insanely beautiful, she said, and she was looking forward to showing them to the other people at work.

Ane's paintings would hang first and then mine. At the opening Ane sold every single one. It was a Friday afternoon just before closing, the art society's president gave a speech and toasted Ane for her unbelievably animate pictures. Ane thanked him. She had on a light purple dress and red Mao shoes with a big colorful scarf wrapped around her hair. With her little belly, she resembled one of her own paintings. Drinks and praise circulated, and then began the sale of the paintings. Right off the president reserved three paintings for himself, and the rest went quickly. Red dots appeared, soon the twenty small paintings' future pathways out into the world were framed.

The following month it was my turn to hang paintings, but now I was in the middle of something else and had forgotten that I was Grandpa the Painter. My house and garden had been transformed into a working studio where the settlement for the X-Room was taking shape.

Ane was upset. She didn't know how she was going to tell to Randi that I didn't want to exhibit after all. I didn't know how I should explain to Ane that I'd just wanted to be Grandpa, and that I felt I'd succeeded for a small instant, and that that was enough in itself; I never wanted to be something other or different than the me I now once was. Ane was upset that she was the reason that the clinic's walls would remain empty. I suggested that she should keep her own paintings on display, but she didn't want to. So I went ahead and hung the pictures.

Vita went to the opening. She wanted to see the clinic and its particular architecture. I thought: Hell, this is a snoozefest, no one understands the paintings, not even me. They weren't especially good. I sold two to the art society's president, but he was almost obliged to purchase them.

The exhibit hung for two weeks until Ane came home and repeated what Randi had said, what I already knew anyway, that no one understood the pictures. If only they'd been attractive or in some other way agreeable to look at. I went out and took them down one Monday afternoon. The woman behind the counter got a strange look on her face when I began cutting the lines.

“There's been a misunderstanding,” I said. “I'm really sorry.”

I
n her armoire, a blue armoire she never came and collected, there were three photographs. I inherited it from Grandpa, a farmhand's armoire with a large red poppy on the door that hung askew, it didn't close tight. In one of the pictures she was small, she was sitting on the handlebars of a bike, Grandpa's, with a bonnet and round cheeks. In another picture she was young, fifteen years old, I think, with a fine hairdo, the kind they wore back then. In the last picture she was together with my father, they'd just gotten married, my father, my mother, my father looking handsome in his suit, she in a very short dress and knee-high boots, they looked so happy and in love, and they were, Grandpa said, so in love, inseparable. She was the most beautiful girl in the whole wide world.

When I stood to the side and studied my reflection in a second mirror, I thought that our noses were similar, we both had that kind of long, straight nose, and there was also a certain something about the mouth. “Yes, of course you're beautiful,” Dad said, “you look just like yourself.” The boy's body I inherited from him, the oversized feet, and also the hands, not too big, but bigger than the others', and the broad shoulders, those were his as well, he said, my father.

I sat inside the armoire with Mom, and her cheeks were bright red in the pictures; there was also a likeness about the eyes, the way they slanted down toward our ears. Whatever she was inside, that's what she was inside the armoire. If I stretched my arms out, I could touch around me everywhere and the world on all sides, see me, see me in the dark, and she touched me with her pupils, fondled and touched, “it's fine, everything is good in here, I exist, therefore you exist,” “why aren't you in here then, out there, where are you?” “it doesn't matter, everything already is,” “you need to be here now, inside, not outside,” “I'm here,” “where?”, “here inside you,” “but I don't want you like that,” “it's already like that, my sweet, there's nothing to be done,” “but I want you here.”

“I
s it true what he says, that my mother was drunk the entire time, why was she like that, and was it really like that?” Grandpa dropped the bag, egg whites splattered across the floor, yolk too, yellow on the ground, “oh, for fuck's sake,” he said, “nothing to be done about it, so what did he say, your father?” “just forget it, he didn't say anything, it doesn't matter,” “no, what did he say, he said your mother was drunk, that she was drunk the whole time, is that what he said?” “just forget it, I didn't mean anything by it, I was just talking to myself, it's not important,” “yes, it's important, and now you tell me exactly what he said, you tell me right now,” “no, Grandpa, stop, ow, that hurts, let me go, I said it was nothing, let me go, I'll yell for Dad,” “go ahead and shout for the S. O. B, but by Satan you'd better shout loud, he doesn't know how to help, anyway, if you think that, if there's something he can't figure out, the idiot, it's how to help a woman in need, no, my girl, I tell you what, you can't count on him, he's only out to save his own skin, that's all he's ever done, by God, argh, the big ass, what did I ever do to deserve such an impossible son-in-law, gah, for fuck's sake!”

G
randma was dead, she died quietly and peacefully, nothing to be done, that's how it should be; it was also for the best, she hadn't been doing well. She was buried next to the church. My mother was supposed to come, but never showed, nothing to be done, no one had really expected it, I wasn't doing too well, my stomach was tense somehow, but in a way I was also doing okay, even though I'd like to have seen her, it was nice that she wasn't there, nothing to manage. I was with my father, I said that we'd better hurry up, yes, we'd better, it was getting late, we arrived just as the doors were closing, the music was audible out on the steps. Dad opened the door to the church, there weren't many people inside, just a bunch of empty pews, though way up at the front there were a couple of people after all; I couldn't find Grandpa. Dad said that we should sit in the back, so we sat on a long pew in the corner right beneath the candles, the light dripped, down the stick, down the wood. On the pew in front of us there was no candle, but a small flower instead, and so they alternated, candle, flower, candle, flower, candle, flower, candle, flower, all the way up to Grandpa who was sitting way up front, I'd caught sight of him, his hair stuck up over the pew back, it was him, no mistaking it. The music stopped, no one was singing along anyway, aside from the priest and Grandpa and a couple of the others, I didn't know who they were. The priest began his sermon, loud in the church, Grandpa's head lifted, he turned around and looked back at me, his face said: Come up here. My father had folded his hands, he didn't see Grandpa, or perhaps he did, I don't know, but he looked at me and said: You can go up there, I'm staying put. He said it with his eyes and jerked his head toward the casket in the aisle in front of the priest, white with flowers on top, light red roses, I believe. I couldn't stand up, no matter, suddenly the whole thing was over, and then I could stand and walk down the aisle toward the door, we waited outside, Grandpa emerged with the casket along with a couple of other men. We were also in a hurry, we were going to the swimming pool, but we said goodbye to Grandpa, small beside the casket, she was within, no doubt, with hands folded across her chest, isn't that how they lie? Folded hands and closed eyes, just like she used to sit in the chair back home watching things unseen or TV, and she'd fallen asleep in that chair, Grandpa had found her, but by then it was too late, he'd been down in the basement, it was over, nothing to be done, and that was also for the best. Grandpa didn't cry, but in some way he was probably sorry. The casket was enormous! Hauled away in a trailer with windows so we could see the roses lying on the cover, a ribbon and a wreath, and then the car drove away, Dad clapped Grandpa on the shoulder: It'll be okay, you'll see, the best that could happen, how great that she should just happen to fall asleep like that, so quick and painless. How did he know it was painless? No clue, but Grandpa looked as if he wasn't listening, he just sank together and became a point on the gravel path.