She looks at me eerily. I see something in her expression, a flash of lawlessness, almost of violence. I see the soul of the artist open briefly before me like a chasm and disclose its dark and pagan power.
I didn’t paint their eyes, she says. They came with their eyes like that. That is just how they are.
Outside the light is so strong that for a moment the world is all white, bleached of its content. I call the children. I try to summon them out of this emptiness. It is like the first stroke of the brush on a clean canvas: my voice, causative. In a minute they will come. I want them to. I want there to be something where now there is nothing.
Later, back in England, I often think of that place, of Hélène and her mother and the maison de jeux. Sometimes, though we have changed many things, our life at home takes on its old appearance of fixity and predetermination. I feel the old turbulence, the disunity with the actual. It is usually then, if I do remember her, that I will remember Hélène. I remember that I am not the victim of perception. I remember her air of combat, her awkwardness, her strange violent eyes. She recognized me, as I did her. Such moments are like paintings: they do not take much account of time. They pass straight through it. They sever its tangled fibers. They pass through the heart of an instant, on their way somewhere else.