“Utterance?” Amalia said.
“I heard a really cool British actor say it in a movie. Sounds sophisticated. From now on, I’m not going to say anything, I’m going to utter.”
“Utter all you want, you still won’t make sense.”
“Right there is a hint of her stormy mood,” he told me. “She must have a flask she’s been nipping from.”
“What I said to Malcolm that day, Jonah, is that there’s a lot to learn about art. You need to train your eye. But when it comes to what it means, no stuffy expert in the world has a right to tell you what you should think about a painting. Art is subjective. Whatever comfort or delight you get from a painting is your business. What it says, it says to you. Too many experts make art political, ’cause they believe great artists have always held the same convictions as they themselves do. But the last thing art should be is political. Yuck. Double yuck. Keep your mind free. Trust your eye and heart.”
Malcolm said, “That’s what I told her, word for word. Amazing she could memorize it, considering how pickled she was that day.”
In his ungainly manner, he went to the velvet restraining rope that looped through the gallery from stanchion to stanchion, and he stood before a painting titled Wheatfields by Jacob van Ruisdael. Amalia and I joined him.
Sky filled two-thirds of the big canvas, some blue but most of it covered in masses of dark-gray clouds. The bottom third offered a vast landscape, deep shadows in the foreground, dark woods in the background, and in the middle a sunny patch of meadow through which a dirt road curved. A lone man and a woman with child walked the road. Beyond the trees, all but invisible, a shepherd herded sheep.
I said, “It makes me feel sad and happy at the same time. The people are so tiny and the world’s so big.”
“The people in Ruisdael’s landscapes are always tiny,” Amalia said. “Why do you think you feel both sad and happy?”
“Well, I don’t know. It’s like … they’re so tiny, they could be crushed like bugs. By lightning, you know, or anything. That’s sad.”
“Unless they’re bastards,” Malcolm said, “then good riddance.”
“My lovely brother, shut up,” Amalia said sweetly.
I continued, “But then all around them, it’s so beautiful, see, the sky and the woods and the meadow and everything. I feel happy for them being in such a beautiful place.” I looked up at Amalia, and she smiled, and I said, “Did that sound stupid?”
“Not at all, Jonah. We both know who’s king of stupid today.”
Malcolm said, “I will utter something in a minute or two, and it’ll be so clever, you’ll be devastated.”
We came next to a painting almost as beautiful as Girl with the Red Hat, but as I studied it, disquiet crept into me and soon evolved into fear that made me tremble.
63
When Dr. Jubal Mace-Maskil apparently escaped into the day without broadsiding another vehicle, Mrs. Nozawa returned to her office at the back of the dry-cleaning shop. After considering the friends to whom she might go for information, she put in a call to Irinka Vavilov. Irinka and her husband, Andrei, had been musicians with the Moscow symphony when, in late 1939, they had defected while on tour in Norway and within a year had made their way to the United States. Andrei had died a year earlier, but Irinka, now fifty-five, still taught music history at the university.
Irinka had learned origami from Setsuko Nozawa and was always happy to hear from her. She knew Jubal Mace-Maskil, and she thought he was a swine. When she had first come to the university, he had made bold passes at her at faculty parties, even when Andrei was in the same room, even when Jubal’s wife, Noreen, stood mere feet away.
He’d become more aggressive after his wife died in 1962, and then in just the last two years, he had taken on a whole new persona, fancying himself the Che Guevara of Charleston, Illinois, obviously indulging in recreational drugs that would eventually get him fired or, more likely, forced into early retirement. Some people said he’d started to come apart after Noreen died, haunted by the cruel nature of her death, but Irinka didn’t believe Jubal had a capacity for deep empathy, not even regarding his wife.