Shadows of Berlin полностью

“And once the truth is revealed, Eema? I will be hated and despised. I’ll have no husband nor home. I’ll lose everything I have and be shunned, an outcast. The police will find me sleeping in rags on a park bench with newspapers for a blanket and take me away.” Her eyes are filling with tears. “And what’s worse is I’ll deserve it all.”

Of course. My selfish child. Always thinking of herself, poor thing, her eema says, but not as an indictment. More like a sad, simple little fact. You believe the monstrosity belongs to you alone? You’re wrong, tsigele.

A sob breaks over Rachel. “You don’t know what I did, Eema. You don’t know the crime I committed.”

I don’t care about crimes, Daughter. You’re not listening. Your ears are blocked by your own self-­pity. Look at that canvas, Rokhl. Look at it! Do you have the slightest conception of how I long for one more hour—­one more moment—­when I could touch a brush to my palette and paint even a single stroke? To feel the strength of that? But art is for the living, not the dead. So stand up and live, child. Your paintbrush is a weapon! Use it! Defend yourself against yourself.

Rachel liberates the easel from the hallway closet. The Woolsey standing floor easel, collapsed and stowed behind the vacuum. The tarp is there too, a shop tarp from a factory floor, saved from Aaron’s days slaving for his uncle in the leather goods workshop, already stained with tanning solution before she stained it further with paint, though it still smells of both. The rusty tin of turpentine is under the sink, but her oil paints, her brushes, those are harder to find, till finally she remembers.

She must muscle out various boxes full of clothes and board games from Aaron’s childhood, the lamps that came from Webster Avenue but need rewiring. The dusty debris that’s too much trouble to pitch. Would her mother-­in-­law be upset if they threw out the tarnished brass floor lamp with the lion crest? Probably not, but why risk it? She shoves aside a box marked KIDS’ BOOKS: AARON and finds it. The scuffed and paint-­stained Winsor & Newton painter’s box. Inside are the crusty tubes of oils, the bundle of wooden-­handled brushes, the paint-­stained palette and palette knives, the broad brushes for priming. They’re all waiting for her. The smell rises into her nostrils like an ancient perfume released from a pharoah’s vault.

The canvas she bought at Lee’s Art Shop is already primed, but she still lays down a dry-­brush underpainting of umber followed by the Dead Layer. La couche morte. She mixes it generously at the center of the palette. Then she must sit back. Oils require patience. They require a geological approach to time and art. Each layer must be permitted to crust and then harden, so she sits back and watches the color fix. She is still sitting on the sofa, wearing one of Aaron’s old dress shirts as a smock, already blotted with paint, her hands already stained, her brushes soaking in turp, when the key turns in the lock. The door opens, and she hears Aaron before she sees him. “Holy mackerel, you spill the silver polish or something? It stinks in here.”

And that’s how it starts.

Aaron has always encouraged her to do what makes her happy, as long as maybe it doesn’t smell up the place. Or as long as it doesn’t interfere too much with eating a meal. Going out for a movie maybe. You know, everyday life. As long as they can still live everyday life, then it’s fine, but really the smell, criminy.

“Open a window for cryin’ out loud,” he says. “Forget that all the heat will go right out the fucking windows. How can a person breathe, huh?”

“Paint. Smells.” That’s her reply.

“I guess that on that particular point, we agree,” her husband tells her. Aaron slumps onto the sofa with an exhale of breath. They have not been doing so well since the birth of the Weinstock child. Most times, under daily pressures, something simply feels detached between them. Other times, though, it’s a kind of stewing impatience, or even anger that heats up for an instant and then simmers away into silence. But now her husband looks bleached.