Prochownik's Dream by Alex Miller Read Free Book Online Page B

reached for her wine.
    â€˜Can I see?’ he asked.
    She passed the pad across to him. ‘When did you first know you were going to be an artist? I don’t think I’ve ever heard you speak about how you came to it.’
    â€˜This is good,’ he said. ‘I can’t do trees.’ He handed the pad back to her. ‘Kirchner turned to landscape near the end. I might have a go at it one of these days.’
    She looked at her drawing then set the pad aside. ‘Tell me. I want to know. You don’t mind?’
    â€˜It was my dad,’ he said. ‘He used to have nightmares and couldn’t sleep. He’d get up in the middle of the night and sit in the kitchen drawing and painting. It was his night world, his escape. Watercolours and gouaches. He taught himself. He’d paint these modest studies of the domestic items around us. Our stuff. Cups and saucepans. The kitchen chairs. Tea towels Mum had left drying over the stove. The bag of flour or box of cereal. You know? The tins on the shelf. He had dreamed of being an artist when he was a boy, but the war ended all that for him. With his art he was reclaiming something of his boyhood dreams out of that landscape of ruins, something of his innocence. I’d see the light under the door and I’d get up and come out to the kitchen and watch him. To me it was magic. I’d hold my breath. He wouldn’t say anything, but he’d slip his arm around me and press me to his side and keep working, and I knew he was glad to have me there with him in the night. Just the two of us. It was a picture in his mind, the perfect picture, father and son safe together. For him it was the greatest blessing that I was interested in his art. Emotion was always close to the surface with my dad. He would weep and smile at me and wipe his eyes and I’d give him a cuddle. But he never talked a lot about himself. About what had happened. It was too much for him. I soon started doing drawings of my own. His stuff. Copying him. He never tried to teach me. You don’t teach drawing , he used to say. Drawing is something you learn by doing it. There’s no other way . We’d be there in the night together doing our drawing and painting and he’d tell me about the great artists he admired. Max Beckmann and Kirchner. It haunted him that Kirchner killed himself at the age of fifty-eight because he realised he was never going to be in the first rank of the artists of his day. The art and the struggles of these men to make sense of their lives fascinated him. And Giorgio Morandi, of course. He loved Morandi’s solemn still-life etchings.
    Those artists helped Dad sustain his belief in himself. With them he was never alone with his art. He loved them. He loved their passionate vulnerability and the tenderness of their work. He recognised himself in them. The dream is to have made sense of one’s life at the end , he used to say. That is all . He would whisper it: To have made sense of it . To me it was as if he had discovered the secret of existence. He would get their books out of the library and study them. Those self-portrait pencil drawings of Kirchner’s that Kirchner did during the last weeks of his life. Those simple poignant line sketches of the man’s features held him. He would stare at them for hours, lost in them, as if he were touching Kirchner’s despair and sharing it with him. Dad made me see the point of art, showing me how Kirchner was groping his way towards a meaning in the reflection of his own features. It was beautiful. I loved it when he talked like that. He would pass his fingers over the reproductions of Kirchner’s features in that book, and sometimes he would weep for the man. Dad believed art was something noble. Something with the power to lift humanity out of the factory and the prison. Which is where he worked, in a factory that was his prison.’
    â€˜Toni. I’ve never heard you