Work Text:
"Can you come again tomorrow?" I ask as I wash my brushes. Schuldig stretches and finally reaches for his clothes.
"No, I told Silvia I'd see her. She wants me all week," he grins. "She wants what I've got."
I say nothing. The knowledge that he enjoys embarrassing me keeps me on guard enough to have the slightest warning that he has crept behind me, and then he is leaning on me, still naked.
"She wants me a lot more than you fucking do, you know. Maybe I should stay with her all the time."
"Poor Miss Lin," I say, thinking briefly of throwing her from a great height. He sniggers against my back, so I know my tone was not as mild as I'd aimed for. "If I could just finish washing these, perhaps you'd like to have some food?" He leaps back quickly and starts dressing, his smile when I turn is cheerful and not at all sly. I am still a little taken aback that he is enough of a boy to be distracted by the thought of dinner, given the general content and foulness of his speech, but I will use it to make him remember me fondly, I think. And to come back.
As it is, he doesn't return for two weeks, and at last I make the trip to the public house that many of the artists of the Rosenkreuz group frequent, in the hopes of tracking him down. The back room is filled with smoke, and I stand in the doorway a little uncertainly, unsure of my welcome. I have only been here twice before, and perhaps I am seen as standoffish or, and I quail inwardly at the idea, bourgeois. I fervently hope none of them have seen any of my hopelessly insipid watercolours.
"Crawford!"
Plekhanov waves me over and I obey, feeling almost as if I am drawn in against my will. He grabs up a bottle from the table in front of him and a glass, and pours a large measure of – whatever it is he is drinking. "Where have you been, man? Here."
"I've been working," I say, trying not to look too closely at the glass. I think someone else has used it before me. I take a sip and manage to swallow without coughing. Neat vodka. I have never drunk neat vodka before and now I'm faced with what seems to be a large water-glass full of it. I take another sip and pretend he is not laughing at me.
"Work is good," he says. "I too, am working on a new piece – would you look at the sketches? I will be moving on to make the clay model soon." He hands me a battered sketch book and I gratefully flip through it, the vodka abandoned for the moment on the table. Page after page is filled with drawings of abstract shapes, squat and powerful. I can already see how heavy and powerful they will be as sculptures, and do not need to be able to read the annotations in Russian to tell me they have something to do with violence.
"Does it depict the cruelty of the elite?"
Plekhanov's smile is genuinely amused, I am glad to see. "Now, that, Crawford is just a guess based on my homeland and what you have gleaned of the Rosenkreuz group's views, is it not? But still, very good."
"Some of these seem almost celebratory," I say, looking again at the sketches. It seems a shame to lose his approbation as soon as I have gained it, but surely I am not wrong, no matter what his politics are. The later images seem very self-satisfied, in their malevolent and massive lies on the page.
He shrugs. "Those in power are cruel because they can be, there are no restraints upon them, but they impose restraints on others. Those sketches are a slightly different idea for the piece – is the artist not himself elite, Crawford? Art is not to be restrained."
"Art isn't cruel," I say quickly.
"No? We show them life as it truly is – what is that if not cruelty, stripping away the comfortable illusions that hide the horrors beneath life's surface?"
"Art should show the beauty of life," I say, remembering my classes.
"Beauty! Schuldig said you fought in the war – you did, yes?"
He talks about me, I think, and then I find my hand is shaking as I reach for the glass. Plekhanov watches me in silence as he smokes, then,
"Me also. From the start until the Revolution. So much for the beauty of life, Crawford. The world needs our art – we will use our cruelty to a good end, I think."
When he tops up my glass I drink it down without drawing breath, and then wish I hadn't. The burning in my throat in at least better than my memories.
"I was hoping Schuldig would be here?" I say breathlessly, "I want him to pose for me."
"He and Lin went looking for food," Plekhanov says. "They'll be back. You and Lin can discuss sharing him," he laughs. "Though you may need to sweeten the deal, Lin is giving him something he wants. Ah, Crawford, such professional jealousy. Perhaps we should change the subject."
It is two hours later before Silvia Lin and Schuldig appear, during which time Plekanov and I confine ourselves to topics of the practicalities of our chosen media. He orders a large plate of tasteless and somewhat stale cheese sandwiches that help absorb the vodka, much to my relief. I am full of the bread and cheese, and feeling a little lightheaded when I think I feel a slight draught and look up in time to catch Schuldig about to rap me on the side of the head with his knuckles. His surprise spoiled, he merely grins and pulls over a chair.
"Haven't seen you for a while. Hey, Silvia, Crawford's here."
"Mr Crawford, how nice," Silvia Lin says, resting her hand briefly on my shoulder as I try to rise, and sitting opposite me. "Is your work going well?"
"I've hit a difficulty," I say, feeling the vodka wash away the pleasantries with which I'd meant to begin, "I don't have a life model, he seems to have run away."
"I didn't know I was a fucking dog on a leash," Schuldig says, his eyes narrowing. "If you think you can just whistle for me –"
"Schuldig," Miss Lin says and he, to my surprise, subsides. "No one thinks anything of the sort, Mr Crawford is just anxious about his work!"
"Yes," I say, as she fits a cigarette into a holder, "I need to work on the main figure – you did say you'd be a week, and it's been two." Miss Lin and Plekhanov exchange looks; I turn my face to Schuldig so I don't have to see them laugh at me. He casts his eyes to heaven and adopts a very sulky expression, as if he has been caught in an obligation he would rather not honour, then steals my glass of vodka. I am extremely glad to see it go.
"Maybe next week," he mutters.
Plekhanov searches round then shrugs and offers me his own glass; I refuse as politely as I can. "I told you, Crawford," he says, "Lin here is giving him something he wants."
Schuldig looks up slyly, pleased now that the opportunity to torment me has arisen. "What treat would you give me?" he says archly, leaning over in such a way that surely he must mean to – I shift my position and his hand comes down on thin air rather than my thigh, and he must catch himself quickly or overbalance. "That wasn't nice," he says in annoyance and ignores me, like an offended cat.
"I need to work on the minor figures for a while, why don't you pose for Mr Crawford?" Miss Lin says.
"Why don't I pose for Sergei?"
"My work is all abstract."
"What can I get from working for him?" Schuldig says, leaning towards her, his tone as innocent as if he is a completely different person. Payment, I think. "I've learnt so much from you, Silvia, and I know you have so much more to teach me." He sits back again and smiles beatifically at whatever is showing on my face.
Miss Lin reaches out with the hand holding the cigarette in its holder and touches my hand lightly with her fingertips. "Mr Crawford, I have been teaching him to draw." She raises the cigarette holder to her lips and draws the smoke in, smiling at me. I am a little confused by the gentleness of her tone; perhaps at a moment when my attention was on Schuldig, Plekhanov told her we had been speaking of the war.
"Oh," I say, and, "May I see your sketches?"
"No," he says, and blushes. I decide it is no more than a trick of the light. "They're private. Fuck it, Silvia –"
"You'll have to stop being shy sometime. Go away and practice. Drive Mr Crawford out of his mind for a while, and let me get some work done."
I know suddenly how to follow Plekhanov's advice and sweeten the offer. "Would you like to know about working in oils?" Schuldig looks at me warily. "How to mix colours, how to paint with them?"
"Red and yellow makes orange, blue and yellow makes green – everyone knows that," he says.
"More than that. Much more."
He wants to say no, I can see him wavering; wanting, for sheer perversity to tell me, in the foulest of language that he is tired of me, tired of this nonsense of standing motionless while his image is made fantastical on canvas. I can see also that he wants what I have offered, that the same wild creature I saw the previous summer by the canal, confusing me with his foul tongue and his educated knowledge of myth can perhaps be tamed with the offer of longed-for treasure. I – and Miss Lin, I concede – can give him art, and add to the strange and confusing mix that he is.
"You needn't expect me to clean up after you," he says, and I realise he is saying yes.
"Tomorrow, then?" I say, tension leaving my shoulders all at once.
He shrugs. "Not too early. We're going to stay here now, aren't we?"
"Of course you are," Plekhanov says to me. "You don't come to see us enough, it will do you good to meet other people. There are some poets coming tonight – very fine. You will enjoy them."
"Do you speak Russian, Mr Crawford?" Miss Lin asks, and laughs when I shake my head. "Never mind, neither do I – just look like you're listening and follow Sergei's lead for when to applaud."
"Shit," Schuldig says, "you'd better start buying me drinks right now, Crawford. I can't get through a night of poetry fucking sober."
I am still unconvinced that he is old enough to be served in a public house, but he is coming back to pose for me and I do not care about anything else. I hand him a ten-shilling note and watch his eyes widen slightly before he runs to the bar.
"I hope you don't expect to see any change," Miss Lin says wryly. "He has a habit of forgetting."
I smile benignly at the world. He is coming back to pose for me, and ten shillings and revolutionary poetry are a very small price to pay.