Still, a dull day in the fall, a day which had lost track of the sun and the importunate rendition of minutes and hours the sun dictates, and that configuration on Montmartre stood out in preternatural whiteness, the ceremonial specter of a peak, an abrupt Alp in the wrong direction. Walking home alone, the cold bearing in a dread weight of anxiety, the sense of something lost, passing people closely he passed them with wonder as though he'd seen no one in years, looking into every face as though hoping to recognize something there. Could the cold differentiate? aside from the change in clothing where the trees and the people reciprocate, the people suddenly came out muffled, and what trees there were stood forth in the mottled dishabille of discolored leaves. But even the streets, and the lights showing along the streets looked different, recalling nakedness in angular displeasure, summoning the fabled argument between the sun and the wind, distending the brief Rue Vivienne into the crowded desolation of Maximilianstrasse, the secure anonymity of childhood recalled by the fall of the year, and a Munich which had known spring and summer only in the irretrievable childhood of the Middle Ages, that hence, forward, there was no direction but down, no color but one darker, no sky but one more empty, no ground but that harder, no air but the cold. — Bitte?. Propriety faded, the level decorum of French roofs might break into the fibrous fakery of Italian and French rococo, an occasional tumor of nineteenth-century Renaissance sparked by the Byzantine eye behind the Allerheiligen-Hofkirche's Romanesque facade. As lonely, or more lonely (so they say one is in a crowd), the buildings in Munich's modern town stood away from each other in their differences, made up to extremes like guests at a Venetian masquerade, self-conscious perpetrations of assertive adolescence, well-traveled, almost wealthy, déracinés, they had gathered as transcripts of their seducers who were not known in this land, and stood now stricken in erect silence up and down the aisles of the avenues, surprised that those they had known in conglomerate childhood had also traveled, had also been seduced, and that, in this shocked instant, by lovers more beautiful than their own. Like paralyzed barbs of lightning, hooked crosses in the streets had portended holocaust; while alone indigenous, hermaphrodite host and doubly barren, the Frauenkirche disembosomed impartial welcome from twin and towering domes at which the others railed but could not supplant. Empty pavilions colonnaded on a hill across the river witnessed the afternoon pleasure of a child who had been called away, and left this glittering plaything for the wind to tear.
Now, he painted at night. In the afternoon he worked at restoring old pictures, or in sketching, a half-attended occupation which broke off with twilight, and Christiane went on her way uncurious, uninterested in the litter of papers bearing suggestion of the order of her bones and those arrangements of her features which she left behind, unmenaced by magic, unafraid, she walked toward the Gare Saint-Lazare, unhurried, seldom reached it (for it was no destination) before she was interrupted, and down again, spread again, indifferent to the resurrection which filled her and died; and the Gare Saint-Lazare, a railway station and so a beginning and an end, came forth on the evening vision, erect in testimony, and then (for what became of the man who was raised?) stood witness to a future which, like the past, was liable to no destination, and collected dirt in its fenestrated sores.
He painted at night, and often broke off in a fever at dawn, when the sun came like the light of recovery to the patient just past the crisis of fatal illness, and time the patient became lax, and stretched fingers of minutes and cold limbs of hours into the convalescent resurrection of the day.
The streets, when he came out, were filled with people recently washed and dressed, people for whom time was not continuum of disease but relentless repetition of consciousness and unconsciousness, unrelated as day and night, or black and white, evil and good, in independent alternation, like the life and death of insects.
This can happen: staying awake, the absolutes become confused, time the patient seen at full living length, in exhaustion. One afternoon he went to sleep, woke alone at twilight, believed he had slept the night through, lost it, here was dawn. He went out for coffee. The streets were full, but unevenly. There was a pall on every face, a gathering of remnants in suspicion of the end, a melancholia of things completed. Wyatt, haggard as he was, looked with such wild uncomprehending eyes on a day beginning so, that he attracted the attention of a policeman who stopped him.
— Où allez-vous done? — Chez moi. — Vos papiers s'il vous plaît. — Mon passeport? Je ne l'ai sur moi, c'est chez moi. — Où habitez vous? — Vingt-quatre rue de la Bourse. — Qu'est-ce que vous faites? — }e suis peintre. — Où done? — Chez moi. — Où habitez vous? — Mais. — Avez vous des moyens? — Oui. Wyatt reached into his pocket, took out what francs he had, showed the money. — Alors, said the policeman, — íl faut toujours en avoir sur soi, de 1'argent, vous savez. After a glass of coffee he climbed the stairs to his room. Someone was waiting in the dim light of the hall. As Wyatt approached the figure turned, put out a hand and murmured a greeting. — My name is Crémer, he said. — I met you last week, in the Muette Gallery. May I come in for a moment? He spoke precise English. Wyatt opened the door to his room, ordered and large, blank walls, a spacious north window. — You will be showing some of your pictures next week, I believe?
— Seven pictures, Wyatt said, making no effort to expose them.
— I am interested in your work.
— Oh, you've. seen it?
— No, no, hardly. But I see here (motioning toward the straight easel, where a canvas stood barely figured) — that it is interesting. I am writing the art column in La Macule. Crémer's cigarette, which he had not taken from his lips since he appeared, had gone out at about the length of a thumbnail. He looked rested, assured, hardly a likely visitor at dawn. — I shall probably review your pictures next week, he added after a pause which had left Wyatt smoothing the hair on the back of his head, his face confused.
— Oh, then… of course, you want to look at them now?
— Don't trouble yourself, Crémer said, walking off toward the window. — You are studying in Paris?
— No. I did in Munich.
— In Germany. That is too bad. Your style is German, then? German impressionism?
— No, no, not. quite different. Not so…
— Modern? German impressionism, modern?
— No, I mean, the style of the early Flemish…
— Van Eyck.
— But less.
— Less stern? Yes. Roger de la Pasture, perhaps?
— What?
— Van der Weyden, if you prefer. Crémer shrugged. He was standing with his back to the window. — In Germany.
— I did one picture in the manner of Memling, very much the manner of Memling. The teacher, the man I studied with, Herr Koppel, Herr Koppel compared it to David, Gheerardt David's painting The Flaying of the Unjust Judge.
— Memlinc, alors.
— But I lost it there, but… do you want to look at the work I've done here?
— Don't trouble. But I should like to write a good review for you.
— I hope you do. It could help me a great deal.
— Yes. Exactly. They stood in silence for almost a minute. — Will you sit down? Wyatt asked finally.
Crémer showed no sign of hearing him but a slight shrug. He half turned to the window and looked out. — You live in a very. clandestine neighborhood, for a painter? he murmured agreeably. In the darkening room the cigarette gone out. looked like a sore on his lip.