Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

“Ruined,” she said clearly, with no sign of hoarseness, as the eight o’clock factory whistles sounded outside, “we are completely ruined. And for what? For an idiotic, senseless daub that no one can make head or tail of! A man wants to be a painter. All right! It is childish—but all right, I do not complain. A man wants to paint apples. Silly? All right. But apples can be understood. Apples do not have political implications. Apples do not turn into bombshells. But this … this naked witch … Why? Why have you done this to me? Why?”

Dumbly, Baranov leaned against the pillows, staring at his wife.

“Come,” Anna called. “Come, you must have something to say. You can’t sit without speaking forever. Say something. Say one word.”

“Anna,” Baranov said brokenly, “Anna … please …” He hesitated. He wanted to say, “Anna, I love you,” but he thought better of it.

“Well,” Anna demanded. “Well?”

“Anna,” Baranov said, “let us have hope. Maybe it will all blow over.”

Anna glared at him coldly. “Nothing,” she said, “nothing blows over in Moscow.”

Then she got dressed and went out to the penal camp to report to her new job in the kitchen there.

Anna’s prediction proved only too well founded. Attacks which made Suvarnin’s article seem like an unrestrained paean of praise by comparison were loosed on him in newspapers and magazines all over the Soviet Union. The New Masses , in New York City, which had never before mentioned his name, printed, opposite a full page pen and ink drawing of Stalin by Klopoyev, a heated diatribe which called him, among other things, a “traitor to the working class of the world, a lecher after Western fleshpots, a Park Avenue sensationalist, a man who would be at home drawing cartoons for The New Yorker .” In a follow-up article, a writer who later joined the Catholic Church and went to work for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer preparing scenarios for a dog star used the Baranov case to point out that Michael Angelo had been the first proponent of Socialist-realism. In Moscow, a painters’ congress, led by the fiery Klopoyev, dropped Baranov from the Painters’ Union by the customary vote of 578 to nothing. On one morning, between the hours of ten and twelve, every painting of Baranov’s disappeared from every wall in Russia on which they had been hanging. Baranov’s studio, which he had held for ten years, was taken from him and given to a man who drew signs for the Moscow subway. Two large plainclothesmen appeared and followed Baranov day and night for three months. His mail was always late and always opened. Anna Kronsky discovered a dictaphone under the sink in the kitchen in which she now worked. Old friends crossed over to the other side of the street when they spotted Baranov in the distance and he no longer found it possible to get tickets for the ballet or the theater. A woman he had never seen before claimed that he was the father of her illegitimate child and when the case came to trial he lost and was ordered to pay 90 rubles a week for her support and only barely avoided being sent to a work-camp.

Sensing which way the wind was blowing, Baranov put an old camel’s brush and the goose-neck lamp into a bag, and haggard and thin, with Anna at his side, fled the country.

Six months later, in the summer of 1929, Baranov and Anna were established in Berlin. The climate of the German capital at that time was most propitious for artists, and Baranov, who had set to work industriously painting oranges, lemons, and apples, in his early edible style, enjoyed an immediate success. “We will be very happy here,” Anna prophesied, correctly. “You will paint only fruits and vegetables. You will use dark colors very sparingly. You will avoid nudes and political implications. You will keep your mouth shut and permit me to do all the talking.”

Baranov was only too happy to obey these simple and salutary injunctions. Aside from a certain vagueness of outline, a kind of subtle mist, which seemed to arise from the artist’s subconscious hesitancy to come out too definitely on any subject, even the exact location of a lemon on a tablecloth, his work compared very favorably with the first canvases he had done when he returned from the Revolution. He prospered. His cheeks filled out and grew rosy again and he developed a little paunch. He took a small chalet for the summer in Bavaria and rented a superb studio near the Tiergarten. He learned to sit in rathskellers and drink Munich beer and say, with a hearty laugh, when politics was discussed, as it often was in those days, “Eh, who knows? That is for the philosophers.”

When Suvarnin, who had slid from official suspicion to official ostracism in Moscow, as a result of his first, unpublished tribute to Baranov, appeared in Berlin, looking somewhat the worse for wear, Baranov generously took him in and let the critic live in the spare room under the studio, even managing a warm, reminiscent chuckle when Suvarnin told him that the green nude had the most conspicuous place in a new museum for decadent art in Leningrad.

Anna found herself a position as a physical-training instructress in one of the new organizations for young women that were springing up at the time and soon became noted for the vigor of her programs. She turned out battalions of iron-thewed females with enormous hips who could march eighteen hours a day through plowed country and who could, bare-handed, disarm strong men equipped with rifles and bayonets. When Hitler came to power, she was called into the government and given command of the entire women’s training program for Prussia and Saxony. Much later, the Bureau of Statistics for the Women’s Motherhood-and-National-Honor-Front put out a report disclosing that the graduates of Anna’s classes led all other Germans in incidence of miscarriage and death in childbirth seven to one, but by that time, of course, the Baranovs had left the country.

Between 1933 and 1937, the life the Baranovs led was very much as it had been in the good days in Moscow. Baranov painted steadily, and his ripe fruit was hung on many famous walls, including, it was said, the Fuehrer’s private gas-proof bomb shelter under the Chancellery, where it considerably brightened the otherwise rather austere atmosphere. Much in demand socially because of Anna’s prominence and Baranov’s good humor, the couple attended a constant round of parties, at which Anna, as usual, monopolized the conversation, holding forth at great length and with her famous clarity and sharpness on such matters as military tactics, steel production, diplomacy, and the upbringing of children.

It was during this period, friends later recalled, that Baranov seemed to grow more and more silent. At parties, he would stand near Anna, listening attentively, munching on grapes and almonds, answering questions with absent-minded monosyllables. He began to fall off in weight, too, and his eyes had the look about them of a man who slept poorly and had bad dreams. He began to paint at night, locking his door, pulling down the blinds, his studio lit by the functional glare of the goose-neck lamp.

It came as a complete surprise, both to Anna and the Baranovs’ friends, when the green nude was discovered. Suvarnin, who had seen both the original and the Berlin canvas, has said that, if possible, the second was even better than the first, although the main figure was, in conception at least, almost identical in the two paintings. “The anguish,” said Suvarnin, who at that time was employed by the government as a roving critic of official architecture, a post, he sensibly figured, in which errors of judgment could not be as spectacular and dangerous as those that might be made in the field of easel painting, “the anguish by now in the painting seemed intolerable. It was heroic, gigantic, god-size. Baranov had plunged to the sub-cellars of despair. [Perhaps it was because I knew of Baranov’s nightmares, particularly the one in which he could not say a word in a roomful of conversing women, that I got so strong an impression that this was all humanity, locked in dumbness, protesting, wordlessly and hopelessly, against the tragic predicament of life.] I liked especially the nice new touch of the dwarf hermaphrodite nude, done in pink, being nosed in the left foreground by a brace of small dark brown animals.”