Kampot (cont'd)

 

‘Um…’ I looked into my tote bag full of art stuff, I’d bought out a couple of sheets of watercolour card to paint on
that day, ‘Yeah, I can, give you something, I think, sure’
‘Alright’
‘Hey, uh, where’s your accent from?’
‘Siberia’
‘Cool. Max…’ I offered the girl my hand.
‘Maia’ she replied as she shook it.
‘Nice name’
‘Thanks’ Maia replied with a slight laugh.
‘You want to just like, post up on one of these benches or something?’
‘Ok’
We went and sat on one of the benches.
‘I think it’s too cramped, kinda’ I said, ‘maybe if we went on the lawn instead’
‘Ok’
We went and sat on the patchy lawn, lining the promenade and I began to set up my tripod easel.
‘I wish I had my sketchpad with me, so that I could show you some of my stuff’ Maia said to me.
‘I could give you my phone, have you got like instagram or anything?’
‘I don’t do internet’
‘You don’t do internet?’ I replied with a slight laugh.
‘No, it—it isn’t for me, I shouldn’t think. I, try to avoid it’
‘Oh?’
‘I don’t know…’
‘But, I wish I had it with me… My sketchpad… I made this, rather interesting one last night’
‘Oh?’
‘It’s in my bag back in my hostel tho, on the otherside of the river’
‘Shit… That’d be a hike’
‘Yeah’
‘…You could, tell me about it…
Here…’ I then added as I handed Maia my spare piece of watercolour card, then mounted the other one before
me, on my easel, ‘I mean, yeah, what was it—a self-portrait? Or…?’
‘Kind of, I mean, isn’t everything?’
‘Yeah. Of course, I mean, you’re the one painting it, there’s always going to be a little of yourself in it…’
I began to set up all my other art things. I cut my sheet of regular cardboard that I’d been planning to use as a
pallette in half with a box cutter then handed half to Maia. ‘There you can use that as a pallette, whatever’ I said to her.
‘Ok’
‘And the brushes are here’ I then nodded at where I’d laid my brushes out before the bottom few inches of my
pringles tin, half full of water.
‘Ok.
…The drawing…’
‘Yeah?’
‘…there were five girls and women in it, all walking down this snow-lined wintery road at night, and this headlight,
so bright and arresting on them that it almost could’ve been a comet, was catching them, and there too in it were
some of the mechanics of the truck, the vast construct of man, very Otto Dix…’
‘Ah shit, you like Otto Dix? With all his stuff protesting the war…’
‘Yeah’
‘That the Nazi’s later wanted to burn’
‘That the Nazi’s did burn, sadly’
‘Yeah. And, what were you trying to say with it… Do you think?’
‘It’s a long story…’
‘Ok.
…I got time’

‘There perhaps is no clear way of knowing just what I was camouflaging amongst it… Tho, ultimately, as with my
father’s works it was, guided by truth, not nonsense, ultimately, behind the mechanices of it…’
‘Your father was an artist too?’
‘Mm’ Maia had started on her work by now. ‘…Yes, I remember when I was a girl’ she went on, ‘my father took me to an exhibition of aviation technology in Novosibirsk and as we stood before one of those big old Stalinist jets he said to me, ‘Painting, painting is now washed up Maia. I do wish you’d pack it in. Look at this beautiful machine.
Who will ever do anything better than that propellor? Tell me, can you do that?’ He didn’t understand’
‘Shit. I thought you said he was an artist?’
‘He was but he had, very firm ideas. ‘Oil painting has become history’ he’d say to me, ‘art will never be reconciled with the people’
‘…What does that mean exactly tho? I mean, with all due respect’
‘I don’t know, it made sense to him’
‘Yeah’
I began to start work on my painting of Maia. I remembered the Russian adult film actress who appeared in a film
once under that name. A horny thief tales video, in which the two balaclaved thieves would break into the girl’s
house to find her sleeping on a bed, and then arouse her to soon after begin making love to her.
And I remembered how pretty this Maia had been, and how similar she’d looked to one Marie Von Ruden, who I’d had something of an obsession with, several years back in Paris.
‘…I’m glad to be working in colour…’ Maia said.
‘Yeah?’
‘Colours in a work, are like, little decoys…’
‘Yeah?’
‘They seduce the eye—like, beautiful lines in a poem’
‘That’s a nice way of putting it’
We continued to work, sharing the paints, my rag and brushes as we went.
And after a while Maia said to me, ‘Did you ever read any Kingsley Amis?’
‘No, I can’t say that I ever did.
I mean, I’m not a big reader. I mean, I wrote a few books, but like, if anything lends to writing well, it’s curtailing
how much you read, I should think.
I mean especially as so many books are just so much merde.
You just don’t want to pick up slovenly habbits of other assholes or fill your head up with nonsense right?’
‘…It’s a pity you don’t read Kingsley Amis. He’s very funny’
‘Oh yes?’
‘He was very close with his cat’
‘Huh. Very close with his cat? Well how about that…’
‘Yes, he had, a magnificent, long-haired, green-eyed, pure white cat called Sarah Snow…’
‘…You seem to know a lot about Kingsley Amis and his cat’
‘Well, he’s my favourite author. Ever since I was little’
‘Is that so?’
‘Yes. He would tell people at cocktail parties, where ever that she was a Hertfordhsire White—but I have seen the photos and she always looked to me, more like an old fashioned Angora’
‘So you think he was, what? Talking her up…?’
Maia gave me a look.
‘I mean, exaggerating, embellishing’
‘Yes. Definitely’
We continued to work.
‘…Like, many other cat owners, Kingsley always voiced strong reservations about people who do not keep house pets’
‘Shit’
‘I myself am, enough of a cat lover to be suspicious of a household that doesn’t keep a cat’
‘Yeah there’s always something a little odd about people who don’t, warm to them, isn’t there?

I mean we had a cat back home for a bit but she died’
‘I’m so sorry to hear that’
‘It’s ok’
‘…Yes, people can be funny, silly about their cats’
‘How so silly?’
‘Just fussing over them, talking to them. I’ll freely admit that I often talk to my Dounia’
‘That’s sweet’
‘Just—there’s no point, in having a cat and being, banal about it’
‘Sure’
‘Cats, by their very nature stimulate fantasy’
‘Yeah, for real’
‘We, weave fantasies about them. Where do they go at night? What have they seen? What, dark deeds of the
night have they been embroiled in?’
‘Well, that is the secret of Racknor Manor’
‘…If you have a sympathetic ear, Cat-English comes thru loud and clear. …Of course, the words are short and few, the accent, strange and strident too. And our side never gets a crack at any sort of answer back’
‘That’s sweet’
‘It’s not mine’
‘It’s not?’
‘No, Kingsley Amis’
‘Ah, I should have known’
‘Yes’
‘…Did you know in ancient Egypt the cat was known as the Maau, Mau-mai or Maon’
‘No, I did not know that’
‘Such, such magnificent creatues’
‘Yeah. Yeah…
They’re quite feminie perhaps, very graceful.
With no desire to sound lewd, I’m sure you’ve heard the slang about a certain part of a woman’s body, and… Her…’
I gestured a hand before me here, rather than state the obscenity out loud.
‘Yes, I have heard this slang’
I continued to work on my painting of Maia. ‘…You know it’s funny’ I said to her.
‘What’s that?’
‘You feel better when you paint, make art, do something. Don’t you…?’
‘…Sometimes’
‘…Happiness seems such a fickle thing at times, so closely linked to external stimuli, the vicissitudes of life,
but art can, it can really prove a balm to me. A place where, I can runaway from the world to…’
‘Yeah, yeah art can definitely help’
We both continued to paint. And after a little while I noticed that a Cambodian bootblack was polishing a fellow’s shoes on a bench on the otherside of the promenade. And I looked over at him and said to Maia, ‘Check it out…’
‘…There’s something very masculine about a man polishing his boots isn’t there?’
‘Yeah, only that guys getting his boots polished by someone else, but I see where you’re coming from’
‘…The only thing perhaps more masculine is a fellow making love to a woman, or a matador in the ring with a bull, a soldier laying down surpressing fire’
I laughed a little then said, ‘…A fellow playing rugby perhaps?’
‘Sure. Yes, this also.
…I remember myself as a child, watching my father polishing his boots in the kitchen and him telling me, ‘Really
Maia, it is sad but true, but you can’t really bring about anything new with art. I knew that already myself as a
child…’
‘He really said that to you?’

‘Yes that, and much others like it’
‘Shit. Christ, I hope you won’t mind my saying, but he didn’t really do much to inspire your artistic spirit…’
‘Mm.
…I still remember our old home in Nizhniy in the vast icy frozen countryside… The elegant furnishings. Its lace
curtains, Persian carpets, imported French-style furniture. And the porcelian figures, before they were eventually
lost or sold off to settle debts. It all seemed—strangely suited to his unique personality somehow…’
‘Yeah. How so…?’
‘…Inside the house, he had the wide planks of the floor painted a strong cadmium yellow. It used to drive my
mother wild. ‘It is not beautiful Nikita’ I can hear her saying it even now, ‘It is not beautiful Nikita, it is not
beautiful’
‘It is not beautiful? It is not meant to be beautiful! Why should any artist do anything for, huh, just for beauty? No!
Painting is not meant to decorate apartments, to be pretty and fair and beautiful! It’s a weapon of revolution, a
weapon war!’
This all going on in passionate violent Russian of course…’
‘…Picasso…’
‘What’s that?’
‘That thing your father said, about… It sounds awfully a lot like a statement Picasso made shortly after completing Guernica’
‘Yes. That would make sense, he was one of daddy’s favorite artists’
‘…You know it’s funny…
If you’re father liked Picasso so much, that he would be well, so down on you and your painting…’
‘…It’s a long story. We had, something of a strange relationship…
…He had a certain scorn for the art of the past—to him it represented the infamy of a civilization that had
produced the horrors of Stalinism, of communism, of Vietnam, all that’
‘No, not Picasso. Picasso was against all that, there’s more to that quote but, I do not have an internet enable
phone so…’
Maia shrugged, ‘me neither’
‘Perhaps it is for the best… Information, a vast web of information and opinions. Who needs it?’
‘Not me’
‘Not me, either, my friend’
I continued to work, and after a little while I said to Maia, ‘…You were telling me about your father’s old house in
the countryside’
‘Oh, oh yeah’
‘…The yellow floorboards…’
‘…Mm’ she replied with a slight laugh, ‘…his distinct collection of little sculptures and artistic curiousities on all the
shelves, in all the cupboards…’
‘…Yeah?’
‘Yeah… Yeah… Yes, Daddy, just loved to receive presents and—from his friends and colleagues he often
shamelessly asked for them to bring him toys to add to his treasured childhood collection…’
‘Well, that’s kind of sweet’
‘…He displayed on a bookshelf a jar containing a fetus in formaldehyde, which he presented to visitors as Elena’s first still-born child. ‘The girl that could have been you’ He often joked to me’
‘Christ’
‘Larger than life Judas figures invaded patios and rooms. Gaudily painted papier-mache effiges, at times wound up, were sewn into the legs of his slacks, and blazers. And forever he would be smoking from his pipe, ranting and raving about, about the very nature of existance, of art, to anyone who would listen. I can still hear him even now, this all going on in fast impassioned Russian of course but…
‘It used to be the painters that were mad and picture-buyers clever— but now, now my girl, of course it is the
exact opposite; the painters are clever and the picture-buyers mad!
If you ask me, my girl, Christopher Columbus should have set out to discover America with a boatload of madmen!’
Always with those big grey clouds of pipe-smoke before his face.
…One evening he attached with thumbtacks, to one of the walls of our old house this big piece of corrugated

cardboard, on top of it with some wheat paste he then affixed one of his prints depicting me, nude, stark raving
mad, as a monster, essentially… Around it he then arranged ribbons, lace made from silver paper and faded
artificial dime-store leaves—or no, no, that wasn’t it, was it… No, he later confided to me that they’d came from an old out-of-fashion hat that Elena had thrown away…
‘You see!’ I recall him bellowing out to me as I stood before it with some of his friends, ‘more important than a
work of art itself is its effect!’
‘Yes papa’ I’d replied.
‘Art, art my dear can pass away, a picture can be destroyed. Franco, Stalin, the Reich, but what counts is the seed that it plants in a man’s mind. In this new period of my life Maia, Tolya’—yes, I’m quite certain he was there too, to lay witness to my humilation, ‘I wish to go back to visual basics. To eliminate the ego, the individual from my art’ all the while all his horrible pipe smoke coming towards us, ‘Here, soon’ Maia pointed at her forehead as she spoke, ‘the veil-like halo will begin to protrude, roughly from the great artist’s, the great polemic’s forehead. Ho ho ho.
They shall, they shall compare me with Christ himself! With Christ himself— as the divine blossoming within the
blessed virgin mother! Ho ho ho. Look, look’ he then gestured to the crude depiction of me before us with his pipe,
‘behold, the flesh-colored protruding viel.
…And how these, these three wafting squares so resemble the flat surfaces of the snow in the abounding wastes around us!
It’s hard, it’s hard to quite fathom what young Maia is doing in this work… Besides hanging around rather
dejectedly and pointedly, lusting to the degree her fellow cyphers will allow’
‘He sounds like a, strange bird’
‘He, had his troubles but he loved me, ultimately in his own, queer sort of way… Well…
It was, too much for me tho, I was, still too young to process it all…’
‘How old were you at the time?’
’15, 16, that sort of age’
‘Ok’
I continued to work on my painting.
‘The vicissitude of life right?’ I said to Maia, ‘The wheel of fortune. Inconsistency is my very essence, says the
wheeI. Raise yourseIf up on my spokes if you wish, but don't compIain when you're pIunged back down.
At least in misfortune there isn’t a sense of stagnation perhaps. I think the most important thing is that a chap just keeps on moving. Keeps his hands busy. Tries not to fall too heavily, too far, headlong into the depths of thought, for no amount of thought can conjure up the little layer of perspiration above a lady’s upper lip say, not even in memory.
And what are they, men, just lost, waving around the worlds of strange kings, dukes from the far east, venerable
old Lords in furs and gaudy jewelery, riding astride the great alligators from the sprawling swamps that sometimes you’ll find yourself rowing over in your little canoe, just staring down at the great terrible silhouettes below… And somewhere, in those tangles, that layer of perspiration a red dress and a kiss you fell into for a moment, never for a minute guessing its dearth’
‘…Do you keep a dream journal?’ Maia asked me.
‘…Not like a dream journal but sometimes I’ll scribble things down in the middle of the night on bits of paper or tap them away into my phone’
‘Mm’
‘…Painting is something not to be realized as much as it’s to be felt somehow, isn’t it?’ Maia said to me.
‘I couldn’t have put it better myself.
It’s just, like, when you’re really, really into it…
I remember Frida Kahlo once painted a self-portrait where instead of a pallete she was holding her own heart…
The surrealists often tried to claim her as one of their own. But she herself said she was not one of them…’
‘Oh?’
‘She said that she never painted dreams, but her own reality’
‘Oh yes, I can see that’
‘…I can still remember the first painting I ever made, of one Marie Von Ruden. I wonder where it is now…? Beneath a stack of papers, ruined, disintegrated or in landfill? I wrote her, as a matter of fact awhile back to tell her that the book was finished—I wrote a book, and Robert, one of the main characters in it was based rather heavily on her—and perhaps not unsurprisingly she never got back to me. But I mean, what is a man, but a ghost in full colour?’
‘Mm’
‘Sometimes I just get the feeling like, ‘I’m going mad’ And then it’s like, if you live in a world that has no one in it,
you need something to occupy your time. But what was that thing, Mrs. Kahlo said, I am sick. I am broken. But I am happy to be alive, as long as I can paint.
Oh, would you listen to me rant…’
‘…You should have heard my father…’
‘Yeah?’
‘…Tho the recollections are by now worn smooth with repetition and selected only in a rather, capricious
manner— filtering out what hurts, combining the incidents that remain and then adapting them to whatever form
one wishes to remember…’
‘Distorted you mean…?’
‘…Or, I suppose memory composes its own truth… I have a rather, multi-faceted portrait of old pa, one might say…’
‘…Yeah…?’
‘Not quite the hero, not quite the villian…’
‘Horns from his head, wings from his shoulders…?’
‘Something like that, yeah. That’s a nice way of putting it maybe’
‘It’s from a song’
‘Ok. I just, I should think we, frequently sculpt out our most important figures in marble…’
‘Yeah…?’
‘…polishing them to excess until, frightened by their purity we draw away from them…
My father is, and ultimately, forever will remain a mystery to me’
‘Yeah’
‘…He’s still so near to me even now tho, that…
…All six or seven thousand personalities that he inhabited’ Maia laughed a little here.
‘Yeah’
‘In my quest for the truth, I struggled against him and, against even myself, perhaps most of all …’
‘Yeah’
‘…He seems to have wanted to invent his own fantasy, his own myth or legend’
‘…For instance?’
‘…For instance his birthdate and birthplace that he told me, everyone, I later found out was a lie. He would, he
would recount stories to me with so many changes drawn from his imagination that they would be entirely
different from reality.
He, suffered greatly thruout his life and died young, far too young, but he spoke both directly and at times in a
rather codified manner to me thru his art. I tried to search for clues on, who he, who he really was from his friends, contemporaries, others in the artworld but all the information they gave me was so—so flat, so two dimensional, oh Nikitia, greatly enjoyed life, he was happy, clever, lively, always ready for fun.
Or; he smoked too much and drank to excess—was a bisexual for most of his life and a full blown homosexual in
only his later years, he was unfaithful to his wife with the same frequency she evidently was to him.
School girl gossip and lies, bitter, bold faced lies and I perhaps should have expected no better from, them. Daddy
was no fairy, of that I am certain’
‘Nah, sure, of course not’
‘He built for himself a personal world, separate from all that, speculation and heresy. He was, a Godly man, a good man’
‘Of course’
‘And in that strange, queer, personal world of his he, he produced far more paintings than I had, than any of us
had, at first imagined. And many, many of them were of me’
‘Yeah’
‘…One thing I remember him saying to me, on one of his better, more, lucid days, when I was younger was, ‘Know,
young Maia, that any time spent painting is never wasted, as the more work, the more honing you put into your

work the better it’ll look. There is always, always a way around whatever wall you may encounter in your work.
Look for it, look for it, my dear and you shall find it—or perhaps it shall find you’
‘That’s wonderful’
‘And I never forgot it. It’s like, when you’re working with oils, there’s no way back with them, but just deeper and
deeper in, and to stop is to fall into despair, that great emptiness of modern life and some of the more, callous
people one may encounter in it’
‘Yeah’
‘He wanted to respond, in his own sort of way, to the changes brought about in the modern world, and in his work
I was always the constant, a flower in a trench.
He was, a very, peculiar man, he thought to best undertake his work he had to surround himself with, what he
called a wall of silence. His art became more and more erudite and inscurtable—a kind of, nerve-wracking IQ test for artists and art historians, and a near, total enigma to the general public. They called it, ‘hard to understand, yet, too strange to be meaningless’
I saw him at a show once, pacing about the room, with his pipe in hand, explaining a piece to three enraptured,
gorgeous young women… ‘This little birdcage is filled with sugar lumps—but, you see, the sugar lumps are made of marble and when you lift it you are surprised by the unexpected weight—the thermometer is to register the
temperature of the marble…’
Nonsense, nonsense to anyone except perhaps me. You see it suggested weight, promised sweetness, and missed warmth.
…I went up to him and said, ‘Daddy, what happened to those two lovely ones you made of me, last fall?’
‘I smashed them’
‘Oh, you smashed them?
Yes, I smashed them both in half over my knee. There was nothing in either them but lust’
‘Oh’
‘I painted you with a great big earth-worm like head for chrissakes. That’s either genius, or fucking retarded’
I cried all night that night on the train back home to St Petersberg. I felt like I’d surrended myself to a dream, some great limbo, bordering on all consuming despair. Back in my drafty little single bedroom apartment, I painted and painted. I remembered my daddy’s words as I worked; I was an artist before I was born. I was driven and lashed onward by powerful forces, driven to create like a God, command like a king, work like a slave…’
I remembered him with always his pipe in his mouth, phlegmatic, mocking, cold, an arguer… And I painted him
such, entirely from memory, without even needing a photograph for reference. Lord knows I’d seen him almost
nightly in my dreams since I was a child.
Then in a later work I saw him in an entirely different light, loving, sympathetic, warm, encouraging…
To paint, to truly paint is to give yourself over entirely to a dream which may very well destroy you…
Yet, the triumph over the blank, half-finished canvas is far greater than the triumph over any man.
As it is the triumph over the demon inside oneself; the ghost like whispers of those who are gone.
It is one saying to the world, you said that I couldn’t or that it wouldn’t be of much consequence if I did, but here it
is, I did it, I did it, and it matters, if to no else but me, it damn well matters’
‘…Yeah, I mean, I suppose it’s no coincidence that Van Gogh underlined his name in a lot of his works’
‘Yeah, but just, painting, total freedom of expression, a man being, entirely free to be himself, say exactly what is
in his, her heart, and just, the hell with anyone who may disapprove of it or it may measure short for, well, it can
lend one such joy that she wishes she could be immortal and carry on doing it till the end of time, witness the very
last setting of the sun’
‘Yeah’
‘…And so it went for however long, anytime I was not painting I felt liable to be hating everyone, everything and
wanting to die. My artistic profile and vision turned out to be ultimately too simple and narrow to contain the vital
force of old Pa. Money was running low and I felt like it was all slowly creaking to an end.
I could not, understand him at all—at times he seemed to support and even outright cause terrible misfortune in
his, our lives in order to fall headlong into heartbreaking circumstances that might so stimulate his work. But still
all that was interspersed with childhood images of him walking along the Karađorđeva in the setting sun, elegant
and colourful, before his first trip for Europe and the States. ‘Daddy please can I come with you’ I remember
begging him at the time, ‘please daddy don’t leave me alone with that old battle axe’

‘No, I can’t, it’ll just be me this time, my sweet, I’m afraid. But don’t worry child, I’ll be back before you can say
potato’
‘Potato’
‘Well, maybe not that fast, but pretty soon ok?’
‘Yes papa’
…And from there, to when I was 26 and first got the news, and began my frantic search for him, a journey which
took me from sumptuous mansions to derelicted abandoned old hospitals, tombs and mausoleums… The people I
asked and interviewed… Him still deeply engraved in their then treasured remembrances…
One telling me of how the very last time they had made love it had been raining out—his very own daughter this,
you understand—and of how she remembered how he’d always loved the rain, used to like walking thru it with her
without an umbrella, as it freshened their faces, washed away the dust from the paving stones of the street, kept
reality out of focus, blurred life’s hard edges.
…From the bed they’d shared he could see out into their garden, the stairway, the reflection pool. And he had
several times painted her with it as a background’
‘Yeah’
‘It had been, a week of pure kindness, of pure, pure kindness, before the fever, the madness set in, she had told me,
before his condition grew very bad, very feverish.
She took me to the room they’d shared and I saw the clay pots embedded in the outside wall, where the doves
nested in the warmer weather. In this bed, she told to me, he lay, burning with fever, weak and nauseous.
…Apparently, the afternoon, before he died, he woke up and was rather incoherent, not very well rested. He’d
wanted to see his daughter, apparently asked after her. They gave him another sedative and he said that he was
feeling very well then, not in pain at all.
‘At about eight o’clock the next morning I left my room and went to his bed’ the old bag had told me, ‘His eyes were
open, staring and looking toward one side. One of his arms was hanging out of the bed. I touched him, then felt for
his pulse but it was gone, I put his arm back in the bed, and gently set down his eyelids. Myself and Mister Petrov
picked him up from the bed, and he was still flexible, cold but soft. There was no rigor mortis. I had laid out other
people before and after a few hours it was impossible to even move their arms, but with your papa, not such.
Mister Petrov helped me dress him and then do his hair… I am so sorry’
And that is how I found out. That is how I found out.
I heard that every man who saw him there after felt as if he’d grown old, was aged suddenly and immediately by
the sight of such a thing…
I immediately returned home, picked my things back up from old José I’d left them with, brushed off his usual
advances, and took back up my old dorm room.
I felt like I was, in Stalingrad something… Deteriorating supplies, turps— brushes held with the wobbling bristle-
heads, refixed with wire. Potential doom to befall me at any moment… Fear was all around me and painting
seemed to be the only thing I damn well had left. The wolves felt like they were well and truly closing in. Tho I
knew that, as long as I did not set down my brush, I might be able to keep them at bay for just a little while longer.
My father had left me nothing in his will, and I wasn’t selling much and money was as ever an issue.
Tho one afternoon while I was exploring some old abandoned buildings, I stumbled on a cache of large primed
canvases—perhaps it was some old soviet-era abandoned campus or high school, I don’t know. And I carried as
many as I could back to my apartment that first day, and the following day I came back for the rest. It proved a
terrific boon for me. I found an elderly lady in my apartment block who offered to sit for me, for a few hundred
rubles, each day. I finished five large paintings of her, and one of a lovely looking female chess player I found in an
old chess periodical. It was a black and white photo but I added the colour by my imagination alone.
I made, one of Ms. Yen, from the Vietnamese restaurant who I took the photo of on my old film camera and
dreamed and dreamed of, one of Mark ‘Duggo’ Douglas, the sad looking Gachet-esque almost chap, that I saw in
the dinner that evening, and snapped the photo of, who’s eyes welled up as he told me of his imminent flight back
to his native Australia where he might have family waiting.
And I made one of the couple from that old, half torn down film poster I saw on the Alameda on my trip in search

of papa, with the woman in it looking so sad and lovely, with her distant gaze as the fellow, kissed her so
desperately, as if he never wanted to kiss another woman again for the rest of his life…
And me just sitting working, working in the metre odd space at the end of my bed, working by candle light when
the power was out, and listening to the sound of the heavy rain outside, drinking whiskey, with water mostly, and
seltzer if I could get it’
‘Ah’
‘One after the other after the other. Not wanting it, but wanting it, if that makes any sense at all…
Not wanting to get totally sloshed and drowsy and to be unable to work, but finding it hard to say no once you
were started and the bottle was right there, and you knew how cold it would be without the whiskey in your
blood…
And one too I suppose just wanting to drink all this damn noise away...
To finish as much as you could on that one pull— to get ready to, to do something, to go somewhere, anywhere.
Put yourself in some position where you might, become one of them somehow.
And then I made love to a man again and it bought me in 40 dollars, or 45 perhaps if one accounts for the drinks
we enjoyed in the bar, down the road.
The love making was, pleasant enough, in his dark room, all the usual sighs and utterances and immemorial
logistics of it…
…It’s a terrible thing to know, that you paint better when you’re drunk. Terribly bad knowledge for a chap’s liver.
I’d been tight ever night, for however long since I’d heard the noise about daddy.
Shut up in my room, trying to paint photos, my shoes, myself before the mirror all the time. I just wanted to finish
all the half-finished attempts I had on the boil then walk around outside with my paints, look for natural scenes to
work on, people who might sit for me in cafes, where ever’
‘Do you know Manet?’
‘Of course’
‘The bar at the folies bergere’
‘Of course’
‘…In painting, there is only one true thing; instantly paint what you see; when you’ve got it, you’ll know, when you
haven’t you begin again, all the rest is humbug’
‘Ha’
‘I don’t know… There’s a, certain strange intersect between the visceral and the cerebral isn’t there? Like, I can tell
you what love is, what fear is, what joy is, what, working on a painting, say, is, but without actually feeling it;
seeing say a fin dart by as you tread water far out in some bay… It’s all just words, before you say, hear the
Mukhabarat knocking on your door…
Then immediately you will know.
And how can I convey with words, the beauty of a child, of a woman, of a rose?
I suppose, as Manet said, there is only to put brush to wood, to canvas, to just slap any old damn thing on and get
started.
And no thought will draw a chap any closer to that, it has to be in the wrist, the hand. And then once you’ve put in
a good, however long and you’re really, really in it, it can be like, a gentle dismount from the tightrope of modern
life; just, too passive and meek, no good— too eager, too much; the churning of things going wrong—supposing,
supposing a man feels doubt, right? Confusion, pain, and he says things that are born from that, or doesn’t say
much cause he’s too fucked-up inside to try, well people will wish to distance themselves from him and supposing
a man feels peace, and mirth and self-confidence and all the things he says are born from that state, then people
will warm to him— does not but deaf sea make the man, or...? And then for a fellow to go to a canvas, with just
whatever is in his heart, for it to reflect his soul as a mirror, entirely bereft of judgement. It is kind of liberating,
n’est pas?
And one just keeps putting one brush stroke after another, and to take a blank piece of word, and turn that into a man trying to convey the ineffable, what that does to a person’s soul, well it can only be seen on the wood, it

doesn’t operate on a cerebral plane, but a visceral one, and when you see it you will know. You take one look at
some paintings, and you can tell it was made by a man who loved the girl who was sitting for him.
…That and Guernica y’know? That’s the other end of the specturm, that is like saying, that is what happens when
you murder men from the sky.
You, callous murderers, what have you done?’
‘Yeah’
‘I don’t know’
I looked up from my painting at Maia and she was smiling at me and she looked very beautiful.