In the Forest by Edna O’Brien Read Free Book Online Page B

I felt a bit sorry for him because he looked so lonely, a loner in life. I took his hand then and I said I did something awful, ‘I went to the pigs’ and he got up then and went out.
    I heard he was over in a caravan site by the lake for a few months and next thing he stole a priest’s clothes and a priest’s collar and made his way to England. He wasn’t long there before he struck again. There was a picture of him in the paper, with the priest’s outfit, mugging an old woman at a bus stop. After that, the odd letter was from places with Her Majesty’s name on the top of the stationery. That was the first time I heard mention of voices, voices telling him to be a desperado, to earn for himself the name and state of outlaw.

Froideur
    They are in Otto’s studio, a loft full of clutter, old floor lamps, picture frames, cane chairs waiting to be restrung, sofas to be upholstered and a motor cycle from his tearaway days. A collection of china dolls on a high ledge look out at them with beady, unblinking, compassionless eyes and from the rafters old pots and pans, ceramic jugs and the pink baby chair with its abacus of beads from Otto’s babyhood. Witnesses to his wayward and wandering life.
    Otto is carpenter, stonemason, weaver, ladies’ man and bohemian all in one.
    Each week Eily comes to paint with him and over time she has heard fragments of his peripatetic life, born in a bunker in Berlin as the city was about to fall, an adoring mother who worked in a night club to rear him, weaned on whiskey, gaudy cellars, the bittersweet songs of love and disillusion, a world of women, bon-bons, prostitutes and later on, actresses to whom he gave fans or shawls, waking up next to a ravaged face each morning and always inside his head and in his urgent hands the powerful painting that was waiting to get painted. But he had deferred it and put it into life instead. Many a morning, he has paced and with a childlike simplicity spoken to her of his torment, but on this morning he is in a sulk and has not yet saluted her. ‘Say it.’
    ‘I do not wish my little woman to go away.’
    ‘It’s only a few miles down the road.’
    ‘You shouldn’t have left here . . . this is our valley . . . our Montmartre.’
    ‘I had to ... my lease was up . ..’
    ‘Your house is not happy . . . it’s gloomy.’
    ‘Don’t say that . . . it’s costing me all I have and haven’t.’
    ‘For your whippersnapper, Sven . . . Prince Hamlet of the byways.’
    ‘The local people like him, they respect him, they call him the Scholar.’
    ‘You are a free soul.’
    ‘So is he.’
    ‘Not like you . . . you give off an aura . . . even the dogs in the street know that.’
    ‘We’ll still be friends Otto . . . always.’
    ‘Always. What is always ... go ... go to your shack with its no bath and no lavatory and no Otto to come across the fields to of an evening and smoke and have a drink and conjure Chagall’s floating angels circling above our valley . . .’
    ‘I’m happy . . . don’t you want me to be happy?’ ‘No, nein, niet.’
    ‘What can I do?’
    ‘Let me paint you.’
    ‘OK.’
    ‘Nude.’
    ‘OK.’
    ‘A triptych . . . first nude, the young Eily, vibrant, hungry, her burning hair . . . next she is older ... a little belly on her . . . mother of three in a chemise and last a pilgrim woman going up a winding road.’
    ‘Why are you so against him?’
    ‘Question . . . how come Otto has not been allowed to make love to the little Madonna?’
    ‘Because ... it ... wasn’t . . . the right chemistry.’
    ‘I see. You will tell me next that you have discovered love . . . you will tell me there is no other love like it ... never was, never will be ... the stroke of his hand and you are electrified . . . you think a thought and he finishes it ... you will tell me you have just discovered love and I will tell you you have just discovered disappointment. It is all illusion, fantasy, chimera.’ ‘Why are you so against