Ikonnikov came down in the evenings. Stretched his numbed arms and legs, packed his wooden pipe with strong-smelling grassy dust, and smoked. Placed a clean canvas or piece of plywood on the easel. Yuzuf would hold his breath. There it was, it was starting.
Ilya Petrovich’s fat brush first made several long, sweeping strokes, cutting the future painting’s expanse into sections, then thickly covered the resulting pieces in various colors. The canvas now resembled an incomprehensible and untidy kaleidoscope, a rubbish heap. With careful touches of a thin brush, that disorderly accumulation of shapes suddenly acquired proportion and meaning so that vivid, distinct images that had initially hardly shown through now revealed themselves. This was “the window” swinging open.
Little boys in large black caps and torn trousers fished on the embankment of the River Seine, which was unknown to Yuzuf; half-naked female swimmers basked in the sun on the pearly stones of the Côte d’Azur; a sailboat sped along the big Neva, straight for the Vasilevsky Island spit; and bronze Graces spun in a round dance along the tree-lined paths at the deserted Oranienbaum. The places where those windows swung open dazzled Yuzuf. He would sit for hours, mesmerized, peering at the intertwined brush strokes, attentively listening to them, and sniffing. The distant world lying beyond the hills of the taiga was not so cold and forlorn after all. It smelled sharply of oil paint, but through that strong scent one could clearly sense the aroma of spring grass and warm stones and the wind and rotting leaves and freshly caught fish.
One time when Ilya Petrovich asked him what he would like to see in the next painting, Yuzuf responded without pondering. A cow. Ikonnikov coughed, tugged a bit at his long nose, and slapped his brush at the plywood a couple of times. A fat and affectionate creature with large eyes gazed at Yuzuf. It was soft to the touch and had horns like yellow commas over the top of its curly head. It was not scary.
Then Yuzuf requested a goat. Slap, slap! Alongside the cow there appeared a goat’s sharp snout with a funny little beard and white stubs of horns sticking out.
“A dog,” Yuzuf ordered. A dog appeared, panting after running, its pink tongue cheerily hanging out.
Yuzuf went silent. He had nothing else to wish for.
From that day on, Ilya Petrovich painted for Yuzuf. Churches and embankments, bridges and palaces were set aside. The time had come for toys, fruits and vegetables, clothing and shoes, household objects, and zoo animals.
Apple, lemon, watermelon, melon, and guavasteen. Potato, black radish, corn, eggplant, and tomato. There were various hats: this one’s called a top hat; that one’s a sombrero; and here’s a collapsible hat. There were gloves: men wear leather ones and only in autumn but women wear them year-round, lacy white ones to the theater and for visiting, mittens without fingers in cool weather, and fur ones in winter.
The world surged so much and so rapidly from worn canvases and fragments of plywood that it threatened to deluge Yuzuf. At night he dreamt of cats in splendid tutus and giraffes carrying tattered primers in yellow leather satchels; seals greedily munched at ice creams in strange cones; and striped tigers smashed at a large leather ball with their blunt muzzles. They were all woven from light, raised strokes and were thus a bit rough and angular, reflecting hundreds of delicious, strong-smelling specks of light when they were moved. Yuzuf would wake up excited, his head heavy, his ears burning, and the end of his nose cold, feeling as if the colors and images he had absorbed were overflowing his skull and bursting from inside. They needed to be released back out.
Later, he couldn’t remember exactly what he had drawn first. It somehow happened on its own when he began scratching scribbles on the floor with a pencil stub that was lying around. This brought him relief – his head cooled and felt lighter. The scribbles gradually crept toward the window, taking over the windowsill and part of a wall. One morning, he discovered a clean piece of plywood and a brush on the easel, as if they’d been prepared by someone and forgotten. He looked up and saw Ikonnikov lying under the ceiling, as usual, his nose in his agitational art, paying no attention to Yuzuf. He cautiously took the brush, poked at the palette, and drew it along the plywood, leaving a thick orange comet. And then another one. And another. That was the day he began painting with oils.
“Quelle date sommes-nous aujourd’hui?”
“Le premier juillet mille neuf cent trente-huit, madame.”
“Qu’est-ce que tu faisais aujourd’hui?”
“Je dessinais, madame.”
“Et encore?”
“Je dessinais seulement, madame.”
Yuzuf and Izabella are walking along the shore. He’s kicking pebbles with the toe of his shoe and they’re landing in the Angara with a plop; as always during lessons, Izabella is pacing sedately alongside him and one of the hands behind her back is holding a long birch switch.
“Tu dessinais quoi, Yuzuf?”
“A station and trains, lots of trains.” They haven’t gone over these words yet, so he answers in Russian. “First Ilya Petrovich drew them himself, then I did, after him.”
She stops, looks intently at him, and sketches on the ground with the switch: “Gare.”
“Gare means station,” she says.
Izabella always pronounces new words so calmly and distinctly that they etch themselves in Yuzuf’s memory. The slightly crooked letters traced on the damp earth stay right in front of him, even after the waves wash them away. Gare is train station. Billet is ticket. Quai is platform. Chemin is road. La destination is where you’re going. Voyageur is traveler. Partir is to leave. Revenir is to return. There are lots of new words today and he’ll need to memorize them before the next lesson.
“Here’s a saying for you about this topic,” says Izabella. “Partir, c’est mourir un peu. ‘To leave is to die a little.’”
Yuzuf already knows a lot of French sayings that are spirited and apt, about love and war, kings and sailors, sheep and fried eggs. But this one seems sad, as if it’s not French at all.
“Isn’t there a happier one?”
“Sorry, yes – I meant to give you a different one. How about this: Pour atteindre son but il ne faut qu’aller. ‘To get to one’s goal, one must get going.’”
Beautiful words. Yuzuf crouches and draws a finger along letters that are already half-dissolved in the waves that have lapped at the shore: “partir,” “revenir.” He wants to draw a tired person who’s wandering stubbornly, who’s been gnawing at his own lip, and is firmly squeezing a staff in his hand. He’s going somewhere far away, maybe to his destination or maybe back home. Izabella ruffles the front of Yuzuf’s hair and walks away from the shore, unexpectedly finishing the lesson earlier than usual.
Shortly thereafter, Volf Karlovich suspects that an interest in medicine has awakened in Yuzuf. He’d previously been indifferent to what was happening in the infirmary during the day and only ran there in the evenings because he needed to help his mother clean, but Yuzuf has suddenly begun frequenting the examination room, stealing in quietly behind Leibe, perching himself in the corner, sniffling and staring with huge eyes like his mother’s.
By this time, the infirmary has already expanded to two buildings stuffed with bunks, and Leibe has finally divided the space into male and female sections, separating out a tiny isolation ward for patients with infectious diseases, too. The examination room is located in its old spot by the window not far from the entrance and partitioned from the main room, initially by a curtain made of bast matting, now by a durable wooden screen. There’s a chair, a pine trestle bed for examining patients, and homemade shelves with instruments all laid out in a strict order. A table was added not long ago, too, and it immediately became Leibe’s favorite place. Now he sits at it when he’s maintaining his patient registry log; he had previously needed to settle himself sideways on the windowsill.