The Woman Who Borrowed Memories: Selected Stories Read online

  Forgive me, you know I’m your friend, but I’m angry, and why should the whole gang come to the station to see you off, the dramatic last train to Petsamo, for heaven’s sake, I never had time to show you my list of questions, all the things your admirers have no clue about because they are so impractical!

  Did you hear those people standing there talking drivel about how awful it is when the train is about to leave but it doesn’t, and you’ve already said just about everything you have to say but still nothing at all. They’ve noticed that, yes indeed, but still they can’t express themselves!

  Your mother keeps calling. She sounds hurt.

  Do you think things will be so much better in America? You don’t speak even bad English.

  The super has delivered your laundry, do you really want it?

  Not one single person at the railroad station behaved naturally and not me either. I mean, I was quiet.

  When Eva Konikova leaves the continent there’s nothing more to say, ha ha. I’m sure you miss me.

  Your beloved friend

  P.S. And for that matter, think hard about why you left. Are you really sure why? I think you just use the war that’s coming as an excuse. You want to move on again, it’s your eternal need to drift—and of course to grieve endlessly about everything you’re giving up and want to be rid of. No?

  Now you’re playing Brave Pioneer. Sorry. I’ll write my first letter to you soon.

  You’re feeling free, aren’t you?

  Otherwise I can’t forgive you.

  Another day

  Now you’re on the ship.

  You said once that you feel like an albatross, and I thought that sounded a little too elegant, but now I understand better. It must be like flying a glider—just soaring out over the precipice and seeing the world beneath you. You know what Nietzsche wrote: I see the world beneath me, here the air is free and pure and the heart is filled with a happy malice. Or something like that. Intense, isn’t it?

  Your thirtieth birthday party was marvelous, a huge success. But why were you crying so hard afterward, you’re not so awfully old yet? And that stuff about not having accomplished anything—where would you find the time? You spend all your energy living. Didn’t it feel grand always being right in the middle of everything that happened to us, clearly right at the center? Everything that happened around you was either fantastic or tragic, our own sorrows and problems were awfully small compared to yours, we hardly dared take them seriously—but you explained nothing, you stayed in character and sailed overhead . . .

  Someday when I get to thirty, I’m going to take it really calmly, I think, and think of it as a milepost. There will be others. The most important will be having my own solo show.

  Now she is certainly out on the Atlantic.

  If she was here, I would ask straight out—which is more important when you get older and are trying to live a decent, honorable life, is it work or love? What’s life about? First I thought work, that is, making art, it’s the only thing that can justify your existence (although that does seems a little too intense). Then love, naturally. I could ask you if friendship is equally important, can they balance each other, melt into each other—if you know what I mean? We never got a chance to talk about it, because there were always so many friends around. And ambition, how do you deal with that?! Is it dangerous, or is it necessary to keep you from giving up just because the others are better? What if you’re trying to impress rather than express—oh never mind.

  It must be the same way with your photography.

  I’m preparing canvases. Have found a place where I can buy sugar sacks and flour sacks cheap, an old warehouse. My studio is full of clean white surfaces. They seem threatening somehow. I’ve prepared them to be a little less absorbent this time, more mineral oil.

  P.S. Living honorably, I mean with dignity—Samuli said once that the whole secret is to live with some kind of dignity. I didn’t understand. Now I think he meant something about standing behind your idea, your purpose, leaning on it and believing in it and never yielding. Never abandon your guiding principle, he said, that’s the only thing that’s really dangerous. Never go against your true nature.

  I assume he was talking about painting. He never talks about anything else.

  Do you know what he said about you when I ran into him on the street? He said, “She’s a brave girl but a little too impulsive. Say hello when you write to her.”

  Then that evening Tapsa came up and bless me if he didn’t also start preaching about the right way to live (but he wasn’t nearly so profound). He said, “You try to live rightly but I try to live richly. It’s like a meadow where I pick flowers right and left as the spirit takes me, but you walk straight across and come out the other side empty-handed because you haven’t found exactly the flower you wanted.” I started thinking about that of course, but all I said was something dismissive about simplistic symbolism and when has he ever seen me empty-handed? I can’t keep hold of everything that comes my way, but that has nothing to do with it. Last night I dreamed that I came to New York and you weren’t there, you weren’t anywhere. The streets were empty and horrible, the way they are in dreams. And suddenly I knew that you didn’t want me there at all, you had run away and didn’t want to know me!

  I’m mad at you.

  So long for now.

  A Tuesday

  Dear Eva,

  By now you must be there. I can picture your arrival. Everyone’s standing on deck, it’s cold and windy, you pass the Statue of Liberty but you don’t bother to photograph it, you wait, you hold your luggage as closely as you can—it could get lost in the terrible crowd, you never know. You hold your camera to your breast the whole time. You swarm ashore, are herded slowly ashore, sorted . . . The customs hall is enormous! It is bursting with relief, with terror and confusion!

  Was he there to meet you, your uncle, was he nice? How did you recognize each other—a photograph, a flower in a buttonhole? I forgot to ask.

  And did you make new friends on the way over? You make friends so easily. But maybe they couldn’t think about anything except getting across, they couldn’t think about anything but themselves.

  But all of that has already happened.

  Everyone calls to ask if I’ve heard from you, which makes me feel sort of proud, you seem to have friends everywhere, at Artek, at the dairy store and the shop on the corner, at the post office, people on the stairs and on the street, everyone asks how Eva Konikova is doing, and I say just great, she’s conquering Manhattan! Everyone says the nicest things about you! A letter came from a “Klas”? The charwoman wanted to know what she’s to do with those ragged old rugs and I said, that’s OK, you keep them. Who should get the green bag that’s locked? Ada says hello. I don’t dare ask if she’s paid the rent for your guest room. She’s unfocused. Right now she’s painting lampshades. Her portrait has improved a bit. Had thought I’d give it to her, but maybe that’s not such a good idea. Anyway, all she can think about is running off to Sweden before the war breaks out.

  And I’m enclosing the list of Questions, now please be nice and help me sort out your junk and get it to the right places. Please?

  Your mother calls all the time.

  One thing comforts me. You’re going to find new friends over there, they just won’t be able to help liking you! But will they understand your work? For example, if Eva Konikova photographs skyscrapers in a snowstorm, will they realize that no one’s ever portrayed them before, not this way, never so overwhelmingly and convincingly? I know I’m not supposed to ask about your job—but anyway, will you get any chance at all to do your own work? Astound those Americans, make them see! For that matter, I don’t believe for a second that skyscrapers press you down, maybe they just lift the sky higher!

  Of course it’s wrong to write letters instead of waiting till I hear from you, so now I’m going to wait, and when you get a bunch of letters at the same time, you should do like the Englishman in the jungle—who read his
Times by date. Then you’ll know more precisely when I was being too hasty, for example, or that I can be sorry even before I’ve behaved badly, and that I can love being alone at the same time I’m feeling abandoned—so skip that stuff!

  And skip the stuff about not being able to work. I can’t work myself. And so what? (English translation: And so what?)

  Tove

  Dearest Eva,

  Boris came up and wanted to talk about you. He said you were his teacher. You could tell stories, he said, so that people hearing you could see everything as if they were there. “Sometimes the neighbors would pool their money for one movie ticket, that was back in St. Petersburg, and then when my sister came back, they’d be sitting there waiting and she’d relate the whole film from beginning to end. She knew every part, she’d do the children, she’d be the houses and the landscape!”

  “I know,” I said.

  “She took care of me,” Boris said. “Grandmother sent us out to find food in the backyards. It was exciting, and we both liked cats.”

  And then came the dramatic story about how those two children crossed the border in a snowstorm, and on the other side they waited for several days and just cried and cried (why do Russians always weep so dreadfully?), and then the funny story about how you took him to the doctor and said, “My little brother can’t talk, what should we do with him?” And the doctor asked what language you spoke at home, and you said Yiddish, Russian, French, and German, and he said let the boy make up his own mind! (That’s actually a very old story, you know.)

  Eva, as many languages as Boris can manage, you don’t need to worry that they’ll send him to the front.

  He wondered too if he ought to follow your lead and go to America, would that be better? What would Eva say?

  He said, “Here I know what I have, but how do I know what I might get?”

  Eva, you’ve had to make decisions for so many, give them a kick in the pants to get them to leave or else get them to stay, but right now you don’t have to worry about deciding. Give us time, please. And give yourself a long, long time.

  Everything here is unchanged. Everyone says roughly the same things about the war that’s coming but still doesn’t come.

  They say it takes months for a letter to get to America. But I write anyway.

  Tove

  Hi, it’s Sunday.

  Yesterday Ada came over and said that if I’m going to finish her portrait I’d better hurry up because she’s got a visa and a job in Stockholm. She sends her very best. So I took out the canvas and made it much better. I’ve emphasized the white coat with its bright flowers and made the background neutral and tried to capture a note of indolence and resigned calm in her face, you know, generations of suffering—but she said it looked like she was sick to her stomach. Ha ha.

  It was her laundry the super asked about, not yours at all.

  Once I got going, I took out your portrait too and livened up the background. Although you’re at rest, there can be no suggestion of indolence here, the viewer needs to feel that you could leap to your feet any second, ready for anything!

  I made the light from above a little colder. Maybe I can show it at Young Artists, if that exhibition even comes off. Everyone’s already gone.

  We wait.

  Maybe I’m fussing too much—no, too long—with this picture because I need to know what I want, or what I’ll maybe come to understand, and that can slowly kill a painting, don’t you think?

  Or am I just afraid of putting a new empty canvas on my easel?

  You know what Abrascha said about the portrait? “You can’t paint my sister in her petticoat!”

  Did you ever stop to think that nature morte means “dead nature”?

  It never felt this way before. But now, suddenly, imagine blue dominant, a blue teapot, maybe, and these apples and the unavoidable drapery, all of it as usual, completely as usual, and suddenly all of it’s unnecessary! Eva, the most important things have become unnecessary! They’ve made it into another world—no, we’ve allowed it to become a different world, where we no longer belong. Of course it’s always been hard to paint, but now there’s simply no point, and all because of the war!

  Hi,

  The autumn exhibition has been called off. Also Young Artists and Hörhammer’s competition and Art Week. In addition to Garm, I’ve done work for Astra, the Christmas Star, and Swedish Soil, where I do one political drawing a week.

  Where are you, why don’t you write?!

  I had a large rubber intarsia approved in sketch, but now the directors are blaming the times. They’re all doing it, whether they sell rotten mushrooms that the woods are full of or they want a painting for a seven-story corporate palace.

  People talk of nothing but war.

  I have hopes of selling a large Åland painting at the Art Salon, the one on Robert Street. The salon takes twenty percent.

  One day I was painting by the harbor and various blockheads came up and said, “Miss, you ought to go home and make babies instead, because there’s going to be a war any day now.”

  Didn’t get the grant. I suspect they think I’m rich from illustrations. Or else they simply don’t like my paintings.

  Sometimes I think that everything I’ve done so far is crap, completely worthless and utterly irrelevant. I need to move to larger, calmer surfaces and less drawing. Certain days everything just stands still, it’s as if I had never painted before. They say that such periods usually mean that you’re making progress, that you’re about to take a big leap forward. I don’t believe it!

  Everything just stands still, you just sit there in your own piss.

  I ponder this by choice and by duty, and I get nowhere. And I’m suspicious of ambition, deeply!

  Koni, my paintings aren’t good, but they get better with every exhibition, anyway a little better, maybe, and that’s all I care about. They say I paint too much with my brain, how can they know that my heart wants to break every time, and for that matter it seems to me most of those spontaneous geniuses paint with their stomachs!

  And just wait till I show my self-portrait with the lynx-fur wrap!

  It feels odd writing letters that don’t arrive, and then when they do arrive everything is different, not true anymore.

  And I get sort of seduced into using words that are too big.

  And if those letters arrive after all, a whole clutch of them, then I’m not at all sure she’ll be happy with them, maybe she’ll be annoyed that I miss her, perhaps she simply hasn’t had time to miss us?

  Yes, of course. And then all at once she has to put together a letter that narrates and comforts and asks questions, and she’s just plain tired. Leave her alone.

  I’ll wait a bit. Or not send them. But that letter about your arrival in New York I will send, because it’s good. I have to tell you that no one wants to have parties anymore.

  Konikova enters. Tableau! She pauses for a conscious moment in the door, we observe her and know that now there will be a party. She puts the wine and the pierogi on the table, she claps her hands and laughs! No one has a mouth as big or as cheerful.

  How did you have time for us? How could you afford to squander yourself so carelessly, you made us try to do the same as best we could, and we flung out all our secrets like flowers and it was all free, free with no bad conscience, and I can’t understand how it all happened!

  Now, when we sometimes get together, we’re almost embarrassed.

  It’s your fault!

  Good morning!

  Tapsa told me he ran after a girl halfway down Alexander Street because he thought it was you (dumb). He says he’s bored after all your lofty political discussions.

  And just let me say once and for all that I listened to more than enough of them, with all the Social Responsibility and the Social Consciousness and the Great Masses, and I might as well say straight out that I don’t believe in art with a political message, I believe in l’art pour l’art and that’s all there is to it!

&n
bsp; Tapsa says I’m an art snob and my painting is asocial. Is a nature morte with apples asocial!? What about Cézanne’s apples, the very Essence of Apple, the definitive perception?!

  Tapsa says that Dalí paints only for himself. Who else should he paint for? That’s what I want to know. While you’re working, you don’t think about other people, you can’t! I think every canvas—

  nature morte, landscape, whatever—is, at its core, a self-portrait.

  I mean, take your photographs. I know your pictures, snapshots of tenderness and cruelty, of everything imaginable, but every one of them is in some way a picture of yourself, isn’t that right?

  It has nothing to do with advocacy, neither one way nor the other, your pictures are convincing because they’re genuine, they don’t show anything other than the way it is.

  Why do you always talk so much?

  Work should be quiet. We work in such different ways. You get an image of the moment, of what’s happening right now and never again. I work very slowly—but tell me now, don’t we see very much the same way? Don’t we?

  Tapsa sends massive greetings, Samuli too. I’m a little proud of the fact that it’s always me they ask to say hello.

  Hope I’ve annoyed you.

  So long for now,

  Tove

  P.S. Sorry, I probably shouldn’t have been so long-winded.

  Koni,

  I’ve been thinking about solitude. Maybe I’ve never experienced it for real, just small bits of feeling alone, like when something gets turned down or someone important goes away—or, even worse, when I can’t work.