Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

The marriage seemed from the beginning to be a thoroughly happy one, and there was only one noticeable change in Baranov, outside of a subtle, but growing tendency toward silence in company. He no longer painted nudes. Not one painting, not one sketch, not even a wash from the waist up, of the ripe, unclad female form, came from his studio. Confined once more entirely to the vegetable world, he seemed to have mastered a new understanding of the problems of the apple, the orange, and the pear. As edible as ever, a new dust seemed to be powdered over his work, a haunting and melancholy fragrance, as though the fruit he chose to paint came now from autumnal boughs, the last sweet bounty of the closing year, the final, nostalgic yield of trees and vines through whose dying leaves and frozen branches the cruel winds of winter were already moaning.

This new development in Baranov’s work was greeted with respectful praise by critics and public alike and examples of the new phase were hung in many museums and public places. Success did not change him, however. More silent than ever, he painted steadily, experimenting with beets and pumpkins in ever darker reds and yellows, going everywhere with his sallow and brilliant wife, listening with model attention night after night as she monopolized conversations in literary, artistic, political, educational, and industrial circles. Once, it is true, at the request of his wife, he went to one of her nurseries and started a painting of a group of children he saw there. He painted for about an hour, then put his brush down, tore the canvas in half and had it burned in the stove, and went into the men’s room, where he was reported sobbing uncontrollably. This story was not believed by anyone, as it was retailed by a young teacher who had crossed swords with Anna Kronsky and who was removed later at her instigation as unreliable. Whatever the truth of the matter was, Baranov returned to his studio and went back to his beets and pumpkins.

It was about this time that he took to painting at night, using the goose-neck lamp that Anna had brought with her as part of her dowry. They had their own apartment by now, as a result of their double importance, more than a mile away from the studio, and the sturdy though now slightly bent figure of the painter, trudging through the snow late at night, was a common sight on the almost deserted streets between his home and his studio. He became very secretive, locking his door at all times, and when friends asked him about his current work, he would merely smile vaguely and politely and change the subject. Anna, of course, never asked him about his work, as she was a very busy woman, and it was not until the opening of his one-man show, an affair attended by many of the intellectual élite of the government and the arts, that she saw for the first time the painting that had engaged her husband for the past many months.

It was a nude. But it was like no nude that Baranov had painted before. There was no touch of pink anywhere on the enormous and frightening canvas. The prevailing color was green, that green that lurks in the sky before cyclones and hurricanes, sallow, lurid, oppressive to the eye. The figure itself, of a slack-breasted and lank-haired woman with a wrinkled abdomen and stringy but somehow violent loins, was also done in mottled green, and the staring and demonic eyes under the dry brow were another shade of the dominant hue. The mouth, the most fearful feature of the work, was done in dead black and somehow gave the startling impression of howling speech, as though the painter had caught his model in a full flood of maniac oratory. The mouth seemed to fill the canvas, indeed the entire room, with a tumbling, morbid, glittering torrent of horrid rhetoric, and it was to be noticed that the viewers attempted, uneasily, to avoid, as much as possible, looking at that particular section of the work. The background, so different from Baranov’s usual arrangement of carefully painted, richly figured materials, was spume and wreckage, jagged stony ruins of temples and tenements against a green and charcoal sky. The only recognizable link with Baranov’s past work was a cherry tree in the right foreground. But the tree was stunted and uprooted; a green fungus ate at the branches; a thick and snakelike vine wound murderously around the suffering trunk, and minutely painted green worms munched among the unripe fruit. The entire effect was of madness, genius, energy, disaster, sorrow, and despair.

When Anna Kronsky Baranov entered the room, people were standing in muted groups, staring with horrid fascination at the new painting. “Great,” she heard Suvarnin, the critic for The Sickle , mutter. And, “Incredible,” whispered Levinoff, the painter, as she passed him.

Baranov himself was standing in a corner, shyly and excitedly accepting the awed congratulations of friends. Anna stared incredulously at the painting, then again at her husband, who, with his rosy complexion and pleasantly smiling, obedient face, looked not one whit different from the man she had known all these years. She started to go over to congratulate him, although the painting seemed very unlifelike to her, but she was intercepted by two men who ran a tractor factory in Rostov, and she became so interested in lecturing to them about tractor manufacture that she forgot to mention anything about the painting to Baranov until much later in the evening.

From time to time, various of the guests stole sidelong and speculative glances at Anna, especially when she happened to be standing in front of her husband’s masterpiece. Although Anna was conscious of their regard and also conscious of something vaguely disturbing in their eyes, she dismissed the feeling, since she was well-used by now to glances of varying intensity from her subordinates in the halls and offices of the nurseries under her command. The real reason for the hurried, measuring appraisals of the people in the gallery she never discovered and no one in the Soviet Union had the courage to apprise her of it. The wild and nightmare face that topped the terrible body of the green nude bore a family resemblance to Anna Kronsky that no amount of stylization on the part of the artist could erase. Sisters, twin souls, the painted and the living woman existed in a hideous relationship that escaped the notice of none. The only other person in Moscow who did not know that the artist had painted his wife’s portrait was the man who went home obediently each night with her. Ignorant and happy in his new glory, Sergei Baranov took his wife to the ballet that night to celebrate and later ordered three bottles of champagne at a café, most of which was drunk by the two tractor men from Rostov.

The week following the opening of the show marked the highpoint of Sergei Baranov’s early life. Feted, pointed out wherever he went, especially when accompanied by his wife, saluted in the press, urged to create murals to cover acres of walls, he swam in a bright stream of praise. The critic Suvarnin, who had barely acknowledged his greeting before this, even deigned to come to Baranov’s studio to interview him, and, breaking all precedent, appeared sober.

“Tell me,” said Suvarnin, squinting at Baranov through his pale, cold eyes, those eyes which had riddled holes in so many canvases before this, “tell me how a man who has only painted fruit before this comes to do such a painting.”

“Well,” said Baranov, who had recaptured some of his early loquacity and expansiveness in the past week, “well, it happened something like this. As you know, if you have seen any of my painting recently, my work has become more and more melancholy.”

Suvarnin nodded thoughtfully, agreeing.

“The palette became more and more subdued. Brown, dark brown, entered increasingly into the canvases. The fruit … well, the truth is, the fruit began to be withered, frostbitten, sad. I would come here to my studio and I would sit down and cry. For an hour. Two hours at a time. All by myself. I began to dream every night. Dreams of death, dreams of trains going out of stations, dreams of boats leaving me on the dock, in the rain, dreams of being buried alive and being sniffed at by dark brown foxes and other small animals …” Baranov spoke with lively animation, as a perfectly healthy man might describe symptoms of a dreadful disease which he has suffered and proudly conquered. “The worst dream, and one that I had over and over again, was that I was in a small room and it was crowded with women, only women. All the women could talk, but I couldn’t. I tried. I moved my lips. My tongue quivered between my teeth. The conversation around me filled the air deafeningly like locomotive whistles and French horns. And I could not make a sound. You have no idea how terrible this simple thing can be. It was like being committed each night to a new kind of awful prison. I began to fear going to bed. I would come and stare at the blank canvas on my easel, at the arrangement of potatoes and eggplants on which I intended to work, and I could not move my fingers to the brushes. An artist, as you know, must create out of his emotions. How could I transfer how I felt into the image of an eggplant, into potatoes? I felt I was lost. I felt I would never be able to paint again. I contemplated suicide.”