Free The Forger by Paul Watkins Page B

you doing?” she asked. Without waiting for me to reply, she got up and walked over to my easel. “You just erased me!”
    “It’s not about you,” I told her. “Not any more. It started out being about you but now it’s only about the painting.”
    “Why get me to stand there at all?”
    “If you hadn’t moved, I wouldn’t have known it was better this way. It’s nothing personal,” I said.
    “It seems personal to me.” She couldn’t decide whether to be amused or indignant. “I only wanted to sit down for a minute. I didn’t realize there would be a penalty.”
    Now I smiled at her. “I didn’t know you had a sense of humor.”
    “One of several things you don’t know, Alley-Fax. And now that you know something about me, let me ask you something about yourself.”
    I glanced up. Here we go, I thought.
    Valya smiled, knowing that we understood each other probably better than we wanted to. “Why have you ditched all your friends? You used to be such a social butterfly. Now you just hole up and paint as if you’re possessed or something.”
    I sighed and set down the brush, which was what she had wanted me to do from the start. I considered giving her some sarcastic answer that would allow us to change the subject, but I decided I would speak plainly instead, to find the honest words as much for myself as for her. “It’s how I make sense of the world.” I took up the brush again. “I don’t always paint because I like it. Sometimes I don’t like it. Sometimes it’s too hard to like what I’m doing.”
    “So why do it at all?”
    “Because it isn’t on a balance of liking and not liking. I am driven to do it. I need to do this. And when I am done with it, and I stand back and see what has been made, then I understand why I paint.”
    “If it’s any good, that is.”
    “No. Good or not. When I stand back from the work, I see what pushes me on.”
    “A fat lot of good that does your friends,” she said, and shook her head pityingly in my direction.
    Just then, I pitied her too. As far as she was concerned, I spent my life being hounded by demons from one frenzy of work to another. But in my mind, I felt as if I were constantly trying to unravel some kind of puzzle that was greater than myself. No one painting would do this. Perhaps even all of the paintings put together would not be able to reveal it. But sometimes, in the midst of the work, I felt myself brush up against the source of some great mystery. Once you have felt that, I wanted to tell her, then you feel sorry for anyone who does not know what they are built to do, and who is not driven on to do it. I wanted to explain this to Valya, but I could tell her mind was closed now, so instead I asked her, “Why sit in his chair if it’s so uncomfortable?”
    This got her all worked up again. “Because he’s so damned precious about it! He thinks more of it than you or me or anyone else. This stupid thing of wood and canvas. When he came to Paris, it was all he brought with him.”
    I tried to keep my thoughts far away in the wintry light of the painting, in the thick liquid sweep of the brush across the canvas and the hypnotic reek of linseed oil and varnish.
    “Do you know the difference between a White Russian and a Red Russian?” Valya wanted to talk. “The Reds are the Communists,” she explained.
    “Yes, I know,” I said.
    “And the Whites were against the Communist Revolution. You know. Fighting for the Tsar. Well, Pankratov was a White Russian. That’s what his belt buckle stands for. The royal crest of the Romanovs. It’s the only thing left of his old uniform and he’s too cheap to go out and buy himself a proper belt.”
    “Pankratov doesn’t strike me as an aristocrat.”
    She shrugged. “He’s not. He just had the bad luck to have been drafted before the Revolution and got sent to some outpost by the side of a lake on the Finnish border. Up in the Arctic. Some place where the sun never set in the summer