Marfa’s River

an excerpt: Marina Cramer

Brussels, 1955

Marfa can hear the man shouting as soon as she enters the stairwell at 17 Rue de Querelle. The house is old, its faded brick façade powdered with mortar dust. “The one with the green window frames, there,” the woman at the corner store had directed, taking a ruddy hand out of the pocket of her smock to gesture down the rain-washed street. “Tell them to put a number on it and finish painting the trim.” Marfa hears her mutter, “Immigrants,” as the shop door closes.

The first floor windows are tall, one freshly outlined in dark green paint, the other one peeling, the sill repaired with a strip of raw wood that stands out like a scar on a wounded soldier. Marfa shakes the thought away. The war's over, she tells herself. It's just a piece of wood.

The narrow stairs are unpainted but swept clean. The angry man's voice carries a pleading note that reminds her of her father. Only Papa didn't shout; his rage came in whispers, disguised as ordinary speech. On the third floor, the door stands open.

“Why are you here?”

Marfa starts to reply, but the man's back is turned. She can't see who he's talking to.

“Did I raise a son to be a delivery boy? Why do you think I run this studio if not for your benefit, your future?”

Marfa edges along the wall of the room, under the slanting ceiling held up at intervals by darkened roof beams. She thinks of leaving. The unfolding family drama makes her feel like an intruder, even though none of the people seated at long tables along the windows raise their heads from their work. Charles Aznavour croons a love song from a station tuned to Radio Luxemboug in the corner, his gravelly tenor an odd counterpoint to the confrontation in the room.

No, she decides. It's already late afternoon. After weeks of facing closed doors and regretful head-shaking, she's not leaving without making an effort. She's hungry. She waits.

The boy stands, she can now see, shoulders stooped, his jaw set in a hard line as if he's fighting back a reply. He is slightly plump, a full head shorter than his brawny father. “The Belgians will give you schooling,” the man continues. “You can study law, engineering, anything. You think I wanted to be a rug dealer? If only I'd had your opportunities, if there had been no war. What future is there in doodling with paints and notebooks?” He waves his arm in a arc. Marfa sees the boy cringe and step back. “Say something! Be a man for once.” The man drops his arm to his side, takes a cigarette from a wooden box on the sill, lights it and inhales deeply.

The boy pushes a lock of hair off his forehead. “You smoke too much.” He starts toward the door.

“Where are you going?”

“To finish the window, outside.”

“At least that's useful. Get the damn city beautification committee off my back. Goddamn socialists,” the man grumbles, then shouts at his son's retreating back, “But I could have a workman do it.”

Marfa moves aside to let the boy pass. He's older than she had first thought, but surely not more than eighteen, the age she had been when Hitler was defeated. His face is flushed, there's a hint of a tremor around his mouth and chin. But his gray-green eyes, when they lock with her brown ones, reveal no emotion.

“Why are you here?” It takes her a moment to realize the man is now addressing her.

“I...the work,” she stammers. “My friends Galina and Filip, they said you have work.”

“So they're gone, are they? To America.” He sighs. “That's where the future is. He had a good hand, Filip, a nice touch on the canvas. And Galina, a hard worker. What can you do?” His eyes are the color of seawater, the same as his son's but piercing, impatient, cold. “Speak up. I can't stand here talking all day.”

“I can clean, cook —“

“We don't need servants here. Can you paint, from a pattern?”

Marfa raises her chin, determined not to walk away with nothing. “I can learn,” she says. “Teach me.”

The man, Mehmet – everyone calls him Meti, or patron – has her sit at the end of the last table, next to a blonde woman whose waved hair reminds her of England's new Queen Elizabeth. “Chantal will show you what to do. Pay attention.” He lights another cigarette and stands looking down at the street, blowing smoke out the open window.

The room is warm. Marfa imagines it will be uncomfortable in the coming summer, wonders if there will be fans to dispel the paint fumes and the underlying smell of cotton canvas and glue. Now, the early evening breeze still carries a chill, a reminder of weather so severe the newspapers had claimed Winter 1955 was one for the history record books.

“Does he always yell so much?” Marfa whispers when Meti has seated himself at his desk in the far corner.

Chantal doesn't answer, then shoots her a sideways glance. “You get used to it. Here, you see this yellow flower? Watch.” She points to a section of the floral pattern propped up on a table easel in front of her canvas. “Count the squares and fill it in.” She dips her brush in yellow. The rose blooms under her hand.

Marfa is enchanted, eager to try. She takes the brush from Chantal, hesitates. “What if I make a mistake?”

“You can paint over it. Just make sure you see it before he does.”

The tables are covered with brown butcher paper stippled with paint drips under the canvas holes. All but two of the workers are women. Glancing down the three long tables, Marfa counts eleven people, each bent over the work. The only sound in the room is Meti shuffling papers on his desk, and the radio, where Edith Piaf lays her heart bare, regretting nothing. Rien de rien.

Most of the women wear kerchiefs over their hair, tied at the nape of the neck; three wear the Muslim scarf. Some have high cheekbones and that cautious look she recognizes as distinctly Slavic. She's not sure she's pleased about the prospect of speaking with them in her own language, if lapsing into Russian or Ukrainian might lead to revelations about the past she has kept buried for years. The two men are in round cloth caps – the kind she has seen on fruit vendors at the weekly bazaar. The rest appear to be European, Belgians, she guesses from the confident way they hold their bodies, one leg crossed over the other. At home.

When daylight begins to fade, Meti turns on the lights above the work tables, a string of bare bulbs along the windows. Several people shift position to avoid working in their own shadow.

“Serge,” Chantal calls out when the boy re-enters the room. “Give me a fresh piece. She —” she tips her head in Marfa's direction, “— she can finish this one.”

Serge places the blank canvas next to Marfa's nearly completed one. “Use the same design,” he tells Chantal. “We can always sell more roses.” Chantal pencils her initials on the bottom edge, turns the canvas over and starts filling in foliage in the upper left corner. She paints rapidly, as if from memory, humming a little tune Marfa recognizes as an advertising ditty for face cream.

Serge stands behind Marfa's shoulder, watching her move the brush with painstaking concentration. Marfa flushes red but keeps working, raising her eyes only to study the pattern she is copying. “Look, here.” He leans forward and points at the rose she has just finished. Marfa catches a whiff of cologne, a hint of hair oil; the aroma is pleasing, masculine and boyish. “It's darker in the center, where the petals meet. Give me the brush.”

He spreads a dab of yellow paint on the edge of the butcher paper, adds a single drop of red and stirs it around to make a deeper shade, a kind of pale orange tinged with pink. “Use this for the heart.” The rose comes alive, taking on depth under her careful strokes. She looks up at him, delighted.

“Good,” Serge says. His eyes look soft, but he does not return her smile. “You'll have to work faster, though.”

Meti, still at his desk, his shirt sleeves rolled up to the elbows, is reading the newspaper. Serge flips through some finished canvases stacked on a cabinet near the door, slips a dozen or so into a leather portfolio. “I'll take these to Grand' Place in the morning, to the needlework shop,” he tells his father, and leaves. Meti acknowledges with a wave of his hand. The tension in the room is gone; Marfa suspects the scene she witnessed is a regular occurrence, part of the push-pull of their family reality.

At 6:55, the alarm clock on Meti's desk clangs. All work stops. Chantal covers the paint pots, shows Marfa how to clean the brushes. Everyone files out, carrying small baskets or dinner pails, talking, laughing.

Marfa stops at the desk, not sure what is expected of her. Meti puts down his newspaper. “We paint Monday through Thursday. I pay on Thursday evening. It's piecework, so you'll have to pick up the pace if you want to earn any money. The one you finished goes to Chantal, for training you.”

It's only Tuesday. She nods and tightens her muscles, hoping he can't hear her stomach rumbling. But of course he does.

“You people,” he sighs. He gives her a little money. “Be here at seven. Don't be late.”

I took the money. Hadn't I worked for it? My hand held the brush that finished that canvas, even if someone else could have done it faster or better. Consider the cost, then take what is offered: every refugee knows this. If there is to be a price for his generosity ...well, I'm not as green as I look.

We, the survivors, we all have stories. The details may be different but the essence is the same. What recourse do women have against the urgent needs of men? Whether by pleading or by force makes little difference. Those who have not suffered judge us; they underestimate the value of a clean bed, food without worms or mold, a child to love.

Pride is a luxury only martyrs can afford. They hold their principles and starve, secure in their moral superiority while we, the fallen, move from day to day in what passes for life. Which is better? I don't know.

Their broad faces tell me some of the women are likely to be from Russia. The middle-aged one with the haunted look is positively Ukrainian. The way she wears her hair, parted in the middle and pulled into a tight bun, reminds me of my Auntie Safronia. When she walked past me, her basket smelled of the dark homemade bread she brings for her dinner, heavy and yeasty, just like the loaves we baked in the backyard oven once a week, back in the good times. Before the hunger. The times we didn't know were good until they were over and there was nothing to eat. We came to fear the grain collectors, who emptied our storehouses and cellars and took our livestock, more than the devil himself.

I was a girl then, more than twenty years ago. People said, how dreadful it must be for our country if even here, with the richest black soil on earth, there is nothing to eat. We thought surely everyone is suffering like us. When there was time for thinking; when we weren't burying our babies in little pine coffins, two or three to a grave.

In the Nazi labor camp, where I met Galina, I asked her if she remembered the famine. “Famine?” she said. “No. In the 30s? Not in Yalta. We lived on rations, but we didn't starve. What I remember is Red Army officers and their families strolling the avenues, swimming in the Black Sea. Anyway, I was small. My parents protected me.” I was small, too. But hunger – the kind that consumes your brain like fire, that twists your guts into knots that crying only makes tighter – that is not easily forgotten. When people look at you with the eyes of a corpse, understanding nothing, and children suck their sleeves in desperation. Forget?

Today, with Meti's money, I can buy bread and milk. My room is paid until the end of the week. I'll walk home tonight and if I'm careful, there will be a few coins left for trolley fare tomorrow.