Art in Nature Read online

  His workshop was old. It lay in a cellar, down a flight of stairs from the pavement, but it was quite large. He was never short of work. Alexander himself took responsibility for ornamentation in wood and for difficult upholstering. Simpler jobs he assigned to others. There were still some people who wanted hand-crafted decoration – there weren’t many, but they existed. They could be very particular about, say, the choice of wallpapers. Alexander gave them time. He conducted long, detailed discussions about the right background for period furniture. Occasionally he left the shop to attend auctions or to browse the best antique shops, and wherever he went, whether to buy or, with his silence, to reject, he was an honoured guest. The most beautiful pieces found their way to his apartment, a place very few people had visited. It lay on a quiet street in the southern part of the city. For twenty years, Alexander had shared the apartment with his friend Erik, and both men had the same respect for the lovely objects that time and Alexander’s insight had gathered around them.

  Sometimes Alexander would sit and read while at work. He read the classics, the French and the German among others, but primarily the Russian, which enchanted him with their heavy patience. They gave him a sense of the ineluctable constancy of things. With his thick eyebrows furrowed and his short, powerful body expressing concentration and voluntary solitude, he read during working hours and no one dared disturb him.

  When Alexander retired, he sold his workshop judiciously and after mature reflection. He took with him quite a number of product samples of various kinds – old-fashioned tassels and braiding, books of wallpapers and ornamentation. Most of it was quite dated, but it had a beauty few people could see. At about the same time, Erik retired from the bank. They put Alexander’s samples in a cupboard and drank champagne to celebrate their new freedom.

  It was difficult in the beginning. They weren’t used to spending their days together with nothing to do, and it all felt wrong. Erik’s eyes ached from watching television, and Alexander was most interested in Russian films. They bought a stereo and listened their way gropingly through piles of cassettes and LPs that they had purchased quite possibly because of an attractive jacket. Their friends Jani and Pekka gave them tips, and they admired the music but didn’t like it, at least not enough that they longed to hear it.

  “Turn it off,” Alexander said. “I can’t read.” But in fact he didn’t care about reading as much as he once had. Perhaps books had tantalized him only as a stolen luxury in the middle of a working day.

  “You’re not turning the pages,” Erik said. “Are you unhappy about something?” His voice was always the same – low, gentle, thoughtful. His strong eyeglasses reflected the light and hid the expression in his eyes.

  “No,” Alexander said. “I’m not unhappy. Leave it on if you want.”

  “No,” Erik said. “I don’t think I do.”

  Erik did the cleaning. He polished the furniture, and every morning he ran his vacuum over the rugs. The mornings were best. They threw open all the windows, and, while they drank their morning coffee and shared the newspaper, Erik planned lunch and dinner, sometimes asking Alexander for advice. Alexander would laugh and say, “You decide. Surprise me. I’ve never been disappointed.” Erik went to the shop on the corner or to the covered market, which was further away. Sometimes they’d have Jani and Pekka for supper and play the stereo. But there were always the long days.

  It was sometime in September that Alexander began work on the doll’s house. That is to say, he didn’t know it would become a doll’s house. He made a little oval table in mahogany with a carved base and then two Victorian chairs that he covered in red velvet.

  Erik said, “They’re tiny and yet completely accurate. I don’t understand how you do it. But we don’t know any children.”

  “What do you mean?” Alexander said.

  “I mean, what are you going to do with them?”

  “I just made them,” Alexander replied. “How about some coffee?”

  He made a cabinet with glass doors. He made an étagère with hand-carved knobs. The parlour table where he worked was covered with newspapers, and Erik vacuumed the rugs twice a day. Finally they agreed that Alexander would move his toys out to the kitchen. Every morning after coffee in the parlour, he went straight out to the kitchen and went to work. He made an upholstered sofa and a little bed of thin brass tubing with round knobs. There was a moment when he thought he’d let Erik make the mattress, but mattresses are precise and difficult things. Erik was all thumbs when it came to anything other than numbers and housekeeping. So Alexander said nothing and made the mattress himself.

  He made more and more furniture, more and more exquisite parlour furniture, kitchen furniture, verandah furniture, and, finally, old-fashioned furniture to store in the attic or hide away on a staircase. Alexander constructed all of it with the same loving care and attention. He made windows. French windows, attic windows, Carelian gingerbread windows, stupid ordinary windows – every sort. And doors. Complex or very simple doors, Wild-West doors, and classic Greek portals.

  Erik said, “I understand the furniture, but why are you making doors and windows? They don’t lead anywhere. And why can’t you clean up after yourself when you’re done?”

  “That’s an idea,” Alexander said. “I’ve got an idea.” And he left everything where it was and went into the parlour and turned on the stereo. “This is lovely music,” he said, but he wasn’t listening.

  “Turn it off!” Erik cried, and Alexander turned it off and went on thinking. He was imagining a house, the ultimate house. But he’d make no blueprints. The house would be allowed to grow however it wished, organically, room by room. The natural thing would be to start with the cellar. Alexander gathered materials. He went out to an abandoned stonemasonry at the edge of town and collected pretty shards of stone for the foundation. He assembled lumber – aspen, balsa, and pine – and he filled the kitchen cabinets with bottles and jars containing various glues, paints, and solvents. He was more and more in the way. Erik said the kitchen was not a hobby room, it was impossible to run the house without space to work in, and he didn’t want sawdust in the food. They agreed to divide the kitchen in two with a partition that reached almost to the ceiling. The window was on Erik’s side, but Alexander bought some powerful lighting. He also managed to manoeuvre a workbench into his cubicle. The kitchen cabinet on his side had to be emptied, and all its china was piled on improvised shelves in the kitchen. Alexander spent a long time arranging his tools lovingly in the cabinet, each tool easy to reach in its own appropriate place. He built the cellar and began on a miniature woodworking shop. In the middle of the wall dividing their kitchen, Alexander had built a little window, and from time to time he would look out and say, “Hi, what’s for lunch?” Or Erik would look in and say, “What are you making now?” And Alexander would carefully place the world’s smallest finishing plane in Erik’s hand to be admired and remarked upon.

  When finished, the miniature woodshop was very small, with a sloping roof. Alexander had built it with bleached wood and taken great pains to give it a window with dirty panes that were broken in just the right way. It had a tree stump for chopping wood and a workbench with tiny tools, each of them exact to the tiniest detail. He had never before felt such peace of mind. He liked the quiet. Sometimes the telephone would ring out in the apartment, as if in another world.

  “That was Jani and Pekka on the phone. We should have them to dinner sometime soon.”

  “Yes, of course,” Alexander answered. “As soon as I’ve finished the woodshop.” He sat up half of every night, having fun, never turning on the television. He ate too fast and went back to his cubby as quickly as he could. Erik bought new cassettes and turned up the volume louder and louder. When Alexander came into the bedroom at night, he was preoccupied and happy and fell asleep at once. Early in the morning, he was back at work. He took his coffee through the window.

  “But where are you?” Erik said. He pushed a cup of coffee and s
ome sandwiches across the windowsill. Alexander caught a glimpse of his troubled face and long nose, but his glasses turned his eyes to empty mirrors.

  “What did you say?” he asked.

  “Where are you? Where are you these days?”

  “On the second floor,” Alexander said. “I’m up in the kitchen. The trapdoor in the floor is really a challenge. It has to meet the cellar stairs.”

  “Of course,” said Erik.

  “What do you mean, ‘of course’? In that tone of voice.”

  Erik was silent. Then he said, “It was nothing. What does it look like, the trapdoor?”

  Alexander showed him. The trapdoor was laid in the kitchen floor with miniature hinges, while a thin chain prevented it from falling open. The stairway down to the cellar, meticulously mounted, disappeared in darkness.

  “It’s lovely,” Erik said. “Where did you get this doll’s house idea?”

  “It’s not a doll’s house,” Alexander said immediately. “It’s a house.”

  “Who for?”

  “Just a house. Maybe for us. I’m building everything exactly the way I want it. I decide. The first and second storeys are by the sea. Then comes the parlour.”

  “Where?”

  Alexander laughed a little. “Somewhere in Germany. The attic will be in Paris. We’ll see.”

  Erik looked into the kitchen. “It has a wood stove.”

  “Of course. It’s prettier.”

  “Good lord,” Erik said. “I can’t imagine cooking on a wood stove. It’s impossible. Not when you’re used to a modern kitchen.”

  “You’ll get used to it,” Alexander said.

  He never swept his workshop. Wood curls and sawdust and stone dust lay like a thick fur rug on the floor, and he liked standing in this soft soil his work had created and letting it grow thicker and deeper around him. He trailed it over the rest of the apartment and Erik had to vacuum several times a day.

  When the kitchen ceiling was finished, Alexander began thinking about electric lights. The house should definitely have electricity. He bought materials, thin copper wire, fixtures, and flashlight batteries, and spent a lot of time wiring the first and second storeys. It was not a success. He had to remove the wiring in the kitchen ceiling, and he damaged the stairs in the process. Erik thought the house could be lit just as well from the outside.

  “Out of the question,” Alexander said. “This house has to glow, it has to live from the inside, don’t you see? We’re there inside, and other people walk by outside. But these batteries aren’t worth a damn. Or else there’s something wrong with the wiring.”

  In the end he called Jani. Jani had an electrician friend called Boy. Boy came and had a look. “You’ve got to get rid of all this junk,” he said. “It’s never going to work. You’re going to need a transformer on the bottom floor.” He explained in detail. They were absorbed in their electrical discussions all evening and went on planning during supper.

  “This will be a piece of cake,” Boy said. “You haven’t got a clue, but I’ll teach you. I’ll get it working. But you’re going to have to take up that middle floor again because of the wiring. You’re a wonderful carpenter, but you don’t know a damn thing about electricity.”

  Boy came back almost every evening. He often brought little table lamps, sconces, or a chandelier that he’d found in some hobby shop or toy store. He came straight from work in his jeans and trailed street dirt over the rugs, but Alexander didn’t seem to notice – he just admired whatever Boy had brought with him and listened gravely to his suggestions about improvements to the house.

  “You should realize”, Boy said, “that this house is going to be famous. But whatever you build, it’s the lighting that’s going to make it sing. Believe me.”

  Boy was a little, skinny fellow. He looked and moved a bit like a squirrel. He laughed often, showing his gums all the way to the roof of his mouth, and he clapped them both chummily on the back. Erik detested being clapped on the back, especially by such a small man wearing boots with high heels. When Boy came, the three of them would sit in the parlour and talk for a while, about whatever, about nothing, the way people do when they’re ready to leave but want to round things off to be polite. And then Alexander would stand up and say maybe they should get started and he’d go into his little cubbyhole with Boy. The tone of their voices changed, grew quieter and calmer, and the pauses grew longer. They stood and thought, considering some problematic detail in their construction project. From electrical, they had moved on to concern themselves with the uprights in a bay window and the construction of a spiral staircase. Out in the kitchen, Erik was preparing supper. The window to the cubby was closed on account of the sawdust, so he could only hear their voices, not what they were saying. But in their exchange of practical questions and suggestions, he could hear a quiet and complete harmony of purpose. Often these unheard, intermittent conversations were like breezes passing through foliage – strengthening, fading, stopping, then quickening again. From time to time, Boy would laugh, the way a person laughs when something finally fits.

  By December, Alexander had reached the parlour. He made French windows and put different colours of cellophane in the complex pattern of panes. Erik went into the cubicle and said, “About the cellar. I was cleaning the medicine cabinet and found some little bottles that are empty. We could put jam in them. You know, something we could colour red. And then cover them with paper and put on labels.”

  “Excellent!” Alexander exclaimed. “Great idea! You can use plaster. I’ll show you how to mix it.”

  Erik set to work on his jam jars on the kitchen counter. He did a fine job, and each time he finished a jar and had written a label, he would take it to the window and get it approved. Finally Alexander said that now they had enough jam jars, and when they went on coming he was irritated. “We’re in the middle of a really difficult bit right now,” he said. “We don’t have time for jam jars. Can’t you find something else to do?”

  Erik walked straight out of the kitchen and turned on the television in the parlour. It was a lecture about the metal industry. After a while, Alexander came after him and said that the cellar needed some apples. But not too many. They could probably be made from clay, but don’t make the clay too wet and hard to handle. Erik’s apples weren’t great, and neither were his cucumbers, bananas and melons. But when they’d been painted and piled out of the way behind the cellar stairs, it didn’t much matter.

  The house rose higher and higher. It had reached the attic, now, and had grown more and more fantastic. Alexander was in love, almost obsessed, with the thing he was trying to create. When he woke up in the morning, his first thought was The House, and he was instantly occupied with the solution to some problem of framing or a difficult staircase or the spire on a tower. Never before had he felt so light and free. Even his night thoughts, in the past often burdened with anxiety or self-reproach, had changed. He had only to close his eyes and walk into his house and see that everything was as it should be. In his imagination, critical faculties sharpened to their limit, he would walk attentively from room to room, up stairways, out onto balconies; he would examine every detail and see that each was completed and that the whole was astonishingly beautiful. He saw the tower that would ultimately rise above his work and crown it triumphantly. Sometimes at night he would get up, very quietly so as not to wake Erik, and sneak into the kitchen, into his cubby. He would turn on a flashlight, sit on a kitchen chair, and look. He’d shine the flashlight through one window after another as if it were moonshine or the beam of a lighthouse. Alexander was in the grip of a passion for perfection. He was not aware of how closely, how perilously, perfectionism and fanaticism are related.

  Erik was allowed to sand window frames and paint them white. Once he tried to hang wallpaper on a landing, but it wrinkled and had to be pulled off.

  When the elaborate attic storey began taking shape, The House was nearly two metres tall and would no longer fit in Alexander’s cu
bby. Alexander and Boy had a long talk and decided the only alternative was to empty the bedroom.

  “It’ll fit exactly,” Alexander said. “We can put the workbench under the window. And it won’t fit in the parlour.”

  “Which parlour?” Erik said. “Yours or mine?”

  “What’s your problem?” Alexander said. “What are you angry about? This is important. We’re about to start on the tower.” He borrowed two collapsible camp beds and put them in the hall. They lifted the big double bed in the bedroom and leaned it against the wall. The House was moved with infinite care and placed on a modelling stand with a revolving top. Now, in full daylight, The House changed character. The dreamlike quality was replaced by a bewildering impression of lifelikeness. The flat winter light filled every room. The pillars and the long balustrade on the open gallery threw pale grey shadows that were real, and the green, red and blue panes in the windows cast soft rainbows on the floor. Every detail, every article of furniture, became convincing, as if they had all stood in place for generations. Alexander rotated The House slowly on its platform.

  “And now,” he said, “now we’ve come to the attic. Now we build our tower.”

  Boy said, “The cupola won’t be easy. It’ll have to be asymmetrical. Otherwise we won’t have room for the tower and the new gallery.”

  “True,” said Alexander. “We’ve got our work cut out for us. Which room do you think we should make smaller?”

  “The bedroom. We’ll have to make it a lot smaller.”

  “That’s wrong!” Erik said. “Completely wrong. I don’t agree at all. The bedroom’s already too small, and the window’s too high!”

  “About the cupola,” Alexander went on. “You may be right that we could make it asymmetrical.”

  “Yes,” Boy said. “I mean, so we’ll have room for our gallery.” And they bent over the workbench and started sketching the tricky section of the roof.