Author’s Note: “Lots of works of art, traditionally, have expected their consumers to play a particular role in their appreciation. I was interested in looking at the reactions to paintings of some more marginalized and unexpected readers and having a little fun with some of the more liminal states that this might involve. Various kinds of appreciation have always overlapped but I like the idea of looking into the gaps between these.”

Art

I WAS BECOMING THE KIND OF MAN who is always between things. Other people saw me like that I knew, and I was beginning to see it myself. I was between jobs, lovers, places to live. Even when I had a job, a girlfriend, an address, these situations were so obviously stopgaps that I still felt temporary and was regarded as such. I was on the way to somewhere else that felt like anywhere else. I was running out of things I wanted and accumulating things I wanted to avoid.

I had always thought that time was my friend. No matter how dull the day it could come only once, and it ticked away unfailingly second by second. Now even that was changing. I had thought of going home for a while, to my parents’ house, but my mother already had an unwelcome guest in the form of a tumor in her stomach, not to mention my borderline crazy father. Crazier than ever now with anxiety and guilt, anguish, and fright. Time was preparing a Chamber of Horrors for me there, and I was not keen to meet that evil halfway.

Some people, and this is a while ago, had thought I was an artist or was going to be one. I may have been of this opinion myself. It was not the case. Art had been a faith for me once and then a plan; now it seemed merely a theme. I had been a novice painter, an art student, an art history student, and now I worked in a museum with an art gallery, an administrative post, not my first of this nature. I had thought this kind of thing would be congenial, undemanding, like-minded company, and it was not badly paid. I was almost a civil servant. Trouble was, no one would talk to me. I was too undoubtedly transient. My presence was almost subliminal. My colleagues, if we have to call them that, often couldn’t see me; they were so sure I would not be there the next time they turned around. And to make it worse, I had tried to talk to them about art. That was the last thing that any of them had wanted to discuss, like it was a shameful secret. They as good as lived in an art gallery. They found me absurd. Now I knew they referred to me as The Aesthete when I wasn’t there, which I planned to be very soon.

So, I had a number of insoluble problems that I simply had to endure. I could take a holiday from them, though, go somewhere pleasant where there was no point in thinking about them for an interlude. I am, of course, talking about the pub. Friday after work, time for a drink. I was feeling unusually tired, but I generally perk up after a pint or two. I didn’t even avoid the place where they all went. I wasn’t shy, I didn’t mind being snubbed, I wasn’t embarrassed by it. When I walked in and saw just how empty the place was, however,—I had now been snubbed to the extent that everyone had gone somewhere else and not told me—I turned round to walk out again, until I saw the open door like the frame around a winter’s night, a wholly black picture. I imagined stepping down into a pool brimming with oil, a substance so opaque as to suggest that there was nothing there at all, and I thought that was what my mother was looking at, the door she would inevitably have to walk through, and I stepped up to the bar. 

I put my elbow on it and was soon taking my first taste. I think I understood why they wouldn’t talk to me about art, but I still hated them for it. I had known a woman once who had been brought up in Florence, and she resented living in what she thought of as a museum of Renaissance architecture instead of a city. I told her, We have art so that we will not die of the truth. That was the sort of thing that I said in those days. She didn’t look as impressed as I’d hoped she would. She didn’t look as though the truth would kill her either. Venice would be worse. I had never met anyone who lived in Venice. Did anyone? That Philistinism though, not so easy to forgive. I took a longer drink. A lot of it was brainless indifference, but chiefly it was boredom. The gallery’s collection of local artists and a few muddy minor works dubiously attributed to more significant painters did not speak to them, as those people did not speak to me. Each in his several worlds.

I was wondering how long I might stay, whether I should push off in search of some company, when I saw Colak sitting on his own and staring at an empty glass. This could have been a reason to leave as much as one to sit down with this known curmudgeon. Colak was one of our attendants—what I insisted on calling the guards, mischievously—the most senior of them, at least in the sense of being the oldest. He had a difficult accent, an even more difficult attitude, and definitely insufficient funds to drink all Friday night as he had started so early. He hadn’t seen me, or if he had, he offered no encouragement to come over. I could have looked the other way.

I had shaken his hand once before and remembered being surprised at just how cold his grasp was. The other impression I got from him was that he was a drinker. His face looked purple in the gallery’s harsh light, with a shiny cracked glaze. In the pub he was greener. Several gold teeth. Some of my colleagues considered him altogether mad. He had a way when he was talking with you that was unique to himself, twisting his head around and looking high above you as though he had suddenly noticed something that could be seen through a hole in the ceiling. He would also make remarks, apparently unmotivated conversational stabs, the point of which was, to say the least, oblique. I didn’t mind this. I could see he was unusual, but I didn’t think Colak was mad. Not dangerously so, anyway. He smelled of dust, and he whistled too much. It occurred to me that if I went and sat down next to him on his bench and let my shoulders slump like his, we would be something out of Degas, though neither of us had the hats for it. 

I bought him one of what I was having and put it down beside his empty glass. He raised an eyebrow and winked at me. He said nothing, but he took a delicate sip. The sign of a man who knows how to make a drink last.

We sat there in silence until the landlord, I assume, turned off the music and a violinist began tuning up. He was obviously going to cruise the tables looking for tips. I knew that this happened sometimes. Colak and I exchanged weary glances. Actually, he was pretty good. He played Stardust then something else, then Girls Just Want To Have Fun. There were no girls in this pub so far as I could see because the violinist was right—they do just want to have fun. He wasn’t having a lot of luck with the tips, so he started on something a bit more gypsy, probably for his own satisfaction, and then something related to that but more sophisticated. I said, without really considering who I was talking to,

“I think that’s—”

“Bartók,” Colak completed my guess.

Then he told me, which I already knew, that Bartók had often incorporated gypsy airs into his own compositions. I bought him another drink on the strength of this. He performed a gesture, a dip of the head, a lift of the shoulder, which concisely conveyed the fact that he was grateful for this drink but also that he was not in a position to buy me one back. I didn’t care. I didn’t mind paying for a little Bartók chat. Besides, what else could I do, buy one for myself and let him watch me drink it? 

Colak said he was Ruthenian. He just came out with that. I have to say that he kept a straight face through all of what follows, and I remain largely unaware of the extent of his capacity for holding his drink and of his inclination to pull my leg. I had heard of Ruthenia. I thought maybe Andy Warhol’s family had emigrated from there, but I wasn’t sure about that. I thought it must have been one of those Balkan countries or ethnographic areas that had disappeared with the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire, melting like ice cubes at the bottom of a glass. Disappeared, but obviously still there. Like all of those places, even the Soviet Union now, they sound like ideas for countries rather than homes where you could actually have lived out your life. Anyway, I gave Colak the benefit of the doubt, and that was enough to start him talking, telling a story that he had apparently never told anyone before. 

In Ruthenia, before the war, he had been doing this same job, working as an attendant in the capital’s national art gallery. This was also part of the palace, the home of the royal family, and as such, only technically open to the public during the infrequent national holidays. Colak described it as a dignified late eighteenth-century building containing an indifferent collection of poorly curated work. Mostly bad pictures with a few minor masterpieces accidentally acquired by the scattershot collecting strategies of those royal family members who took the occasional unpredictable interest in such things. Nothing properly cleaned. Some of the better pictures may, in fact, have been copies, the originals sold off to pay the debts of dissipation.

I had thought for a moment that I was going to find myself sitting next to a claimant to the Ruthenian throne, but it was nothing as hackneyed as that. He had been in his position for a matter of months, long enough to get an idea of the collection and the ramshackle way in which it was cared for, when the Ruthenian revolution broke out. Colak forgave me for not having heard of the Ruthenian revolution because, as he said, it was almost immediately quashed, not through the intervention of Austrian cavalry but by the outbreak of the war. It was on page one for a day then Franz Ferdinand was shot. Was it even a revolution or merely a night of misrule? It was certainly at least the latter. The palace was invaded by rioters and, to some degree, looted. Oil paintings, frames firmly bolted to stone walls, were not obvious targets for casual theft, but the gallery was the scene of considerable revelry. The insurgents, perhaps, did not so much want to steal from the gallery, or to vandalize it, but to take charge of it. At any rate, things got out of hand when the brandy started to flow, as things will.

Colak found telling his story thirsty work, and I made several trips to the bar while he was doing it. I even inquired for Ruthenian brandy, that’s how implausible things were getting, and came back with the dregs of some evil green liquor that had been at the back of a shelf for a very long time. Undrinkable, but we drank it.

So, Colak and a couple of his fellow custodians, who had become fond of the collection and cared about it, ventured in holding their breath a day or maybe two days after the palace had been attacked. A number of the rebels were still in occupation, but they were not hostile, not unfriendly, mostly badly hungover. Colak and his friends had not turned up in uniform.

Now the next part is the start of what is really difficult to believe. I wasn’t sure what Colak was trying to tell me at first; he had not been so easy to understand even at the start of the evening. I thought perhaps there was something idiomatic or metaphorical I wasn’t really getting. He said that the rebels had fallen into the paintings.

The first man they spoke to was sitting in a painting as though the bottom of the frame had been a narrow bench, or he was a naughty boy sitting on a step. They thought, initially, that he had torn through the canvas, perhaps even broken through the wall, and was sitting in the cavity that he had made. But this was not so, not possible. I am remembering this from quite some time ago, and I am by no means sure that I can faithfully reproduce what Colak actually told me. This man was sitting in the picture, and it seemed to have closed around him. Closed around him like a healed wound, Colak said, whatever that might mean. The picture was a tall portrait of a man in casual hunting dress, but bewigged, holding a rifle and with a few liver-spotted hounds moving around his feet, the dogs the most lovingly painted features. A familiar period formula. The rebel had his elbows on his knees, his face in his hands, and was weeping torrentially. All they could get him to say was, “Hush the dogs, for God’s sake hush the dogs,” over and over. Needless to say, they could hear no dogs.

Colak was then called away by another man. This fellow was sitting on the floor still drinking from what appeared to be his personal supply of wine bottles, but one of his arms had disappeared, almost up to the shoulder in the flooded water meadow of a Rubenesque landscape as though he had put his arm into the water in the hope of fishing something out of it. The river was now flowing around his missing, or invisible, arm. Black and white cows were drinking in their desultory manner in the shallows caused by the flood. Painted walkers had moved away from the riverbank to avoid this inundation. The poor man’s shoulder and much of his chest were soaked, and there was a pool of water in which he was more or less sitting that did not bear investigation.

We had got to a point in Colak’s relation when it was clear to him that, in a manner of speaking, I was believing him, or at least that I seemed to be, so I was able to confer with him about what had happened, what fantastic thing. We agreed that the surface of the paintings had somehow become permeable, alive even. A barrier had been dissolved, the paintings had opened, and this had perhaps been made possible by the qualities of revolution, the onset of that terrible war, the assassination of a prince, the failure of an empire. And then this moment had passed, whatever had brought it about during that ill-considered bacchanal. The world had become molten, but then it had cooled and hardened again, as hard as glass. The window had closed. I had never previously been taken with the idea that fine art had much revolutionary potential. Now, here was a revolution characterized not by rivers of blood, parched ocean beds, and falling stars, a species of Apocalypse, but by tasteless practical jokes. We had another drink.

When I got back to him, Colak was saying that there were still a lot of people in the gallery. Some of these had passed out, but others were walking around and admiring the paintings, pointing out interesting or puzzling features to one another, some holding their own hands behind their backs as though very relaxed in imitation of the connoisseur or waiting to be handcuffed. Colak gave me a tour now of this grotesque exhibition. I think he may have been getting carried away, and he did appear to be enjoying himself. I wanted more, definitely. Young as I was, I had been longing for consolation, for something to persuade me that things were not exactly as they looked. I had been feeling that my best years were behind me already. Time drops on us all like a shadow. That’s a quotation. Like everything else. But now there were new things in the world.

A bench had been shifted so that its end was flush against another full-length portrait, this time of a young woman in a beautiful turquoise silk dress painted in the precioso style. A man was lying on this bench with his head and shoulders pressed into the canvas. You would have thought he had been beheaded, bloodlessly. Otherwise, you would have thought he had been attempting to look up the dress of this girl, possibly, in fact, a courtesan, one of the old Duke’s favorites, and the painting had healed around him once more, trapping him in this ludicrous and indecorous pose. Was he dead? Suffocated? Colak couldn’t say. He did say that the courtesan, her color heightened, wore a certain smile she had never worn before and, as a result, was now the subject of a far superior painting. Formerly the young woman, with an ostrich feather dyed blue in her preposterously ungainly hat, which looked like it might blow away at any moment, and inexpertly clutching an early form of guitar, had simply looked very, very bored.

Colak told me it was not possible to verify subtle changes to the paintings, for the gallery’s catalog, such as it was, contained written descriptions of a perfunctory nature and only the world’s major museums sold picture postcards in those days.

He gave me more examples, but his coherence and the intelligibility of his accent, not to mention my powers of recollection, had been seriously undermined by now. He said there was a clumsy copy of Goya’s firing squad, which seemed to have more dead bodies than had been the case. He tried to count them and couldn’t. He spoke about counting at one point during the evening, and it must have been here. He said that he still knew about numbers, at least knew the names of numbers, but he could not put them in order nor even imagine what order was. Knowing the names of the numbers was like knowing the names of animals or flowers. 

I wanted to ask my new friend if he was being entirely straight with me. After all, on the day of the revolution, if you had been a young man in his position, wouldn’t you? You would have gone in there, wouldn’t you, to protect what you had come to love, maybe to protect it by taking it home. I felt that I knew him well enough now, certainly I had bought him enough booze, to put this to him.

His accent thickened further, and he began to move his hands around the many glasses and bottles on our table, straightening things and setting the fallen back on their feet. Before this, he had been economical with his movements. And he began to talk about a little painting by Kandinsky, or in his manner, quite early, very beautiful, more phantasmagorical than geometrical, an oil of delicate color, pastel orange and a summer-sky blue, figures of great elegance, fluid intestinal swirls impossible to describe, altogether out of keeping with the staple portraits, landscapes, still lifes, and genre paintings of the collection as a whole. It was a fascinating riddle. You couldn’t look away from it, but that was all you could do. It accused your imagination. Intimidated it.

I knew then, in a way that I cannot say that I know now, that Colak, at some unspecified moment, had dared to put his head into that painting and that this explained everything about him that was not right.

He maundered on about fruit stolen from a still life. A leather bag of coins, its unknown and unspendable currency scattered across the gallery floor. A loaf of bread and a lemon unaccountably just there and which no one would touch. A dead hare. I thought he was avoiding my questions. I was asking about what had happened to the men. How were they relieved? Could they be? They could escape from these nightmares only if they woke up, but that was impossible as they were not asleep. They would open their eyes wide and try to blink themselves into wakefulness, or they would try to fall asleep in the hope of waking later once more in the sane world that they had formerly known. They might have died and remained attached to the paintings as three-dimensional memento mori sculptures. A skeleton looking up the skirt of a courtesan. Not bad. 

He told me of a man, all the invaders seem to have been men, who had lain down next to a naked Venus and turned into her body as though it were a great pink pillow. He seemed all right. Asleep. Perhaps she had looked after him. 

I asked him directly what had happened to the gallery and to its pictures, and he told me that the next day he had slipped over the border into the modern world, having saved what he could. I knew of the rumor that he had given something to the gallery in which we both now worked and that that had secured his permanent employment and other emoluments, despite his evident uselessness.

I had to pay a quick visit. It wasn’t that quick in the end, and I did disgrace myself to some degree. Anyway, when I came back, Colak was gone, and even the table had been cleared, and a young couple was sitting there holding hands. I had not imagined this whole thing. When I stepped outside, the cold hit me in the face like a bag of hammers.

I did see him again, in his usual place, not the next working day but in the week that followed. We never spoke about Ruthenia and all that business. He liked to sit where he could look at a neat little Gainsborough. A group of male musicians playing flutes. Full-length portrayals but small, as though the men were puppets. Maybe this picture had been Colak’s gift. The landscape behind the three men was a mere theatrical backdrop, not at all the real countryside. 

I amuse myself sometimes by pretending that painted figures might have escaped from the Ruthenian canvases and entered our world as angels and Greek gods used to do. They took a chance on giving up the privilege of immortality in dubious exchange for freedom and had been trying to find a place for themselves, to fit in, ever since. When Colak said he was from Ruthenia… And maybe the rebels, some of them, had entered the painted world entirely, not content to be half in and half out. They would be wandering there still like the isolated little figures in De Chirico’s deserted worlds, the only captives in a prison the size of a city. Troubling pictures, fantasies of underpopulation, the beginning, or, more likely, the end of things, private and solitary, as lonely as dreams. 

It soon came time for me to move on again and I left these questions behind me, as you do. 

♦

Robert Stone’s stories have been published in British, American, Asian, and Canadian magazines, including: 3:AM, Stand, Panurge, Eclectica, Confingo, Punt Volat, HCE, Wraparound South, Lunate, Decadent Review, the Nightjar chapbook series and elsewhere. His “micro-stories” have appeared in 5×5, Third Wednesday, Star 82, Ocotillo Review, deathcap. A story is included in Salt’s Best British Stories, 2020. He is a British author born in Wolverhampton, U.K. He has two children and lives with his partner in Ipswich. 

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