A Thousand Tiny Truths Read online

  “What is that?” More static.

  “I want to be a war artist. I want to draw battles and . . .”

  Over the phone I heard a distant rattling sound, then a quiet sigh. “I’m sorry, Marcel, the connection is awful. I can hardly hear you at all. Listen, I’ll be leaving Algiers in a few days’ time. I’ll call you when I reach Nigeria.”

  He sounded so flat, even then I could tell it wasn’t just the static.

  Years later, I would learn that Oliver had just returned from reporting from Kabylie, Algeria, a village destroyed by the French, homes flattened, children burned by napalm. It was one of the worst tragedies of the Algerian War. Oliver had written about a mother cradling the seared body of her daughter while her husband screamed at the sky.

  It’s painful for me to imagine Oliver in that burnt-down village, his mind ricocheting back to the Blitz, forcing him to relive the terror that had descended on his own childhood. Sometimes I wish he could have let out his anguish and joined that man screaming at the sky.

  The first modern war reporter was a Dutch painter by the name of Willem van de Velde. In 1653, van de Velde travelled in a small boat across choppy water to observe a naval battle between the Dutch and the English. He took notes, but mostly he made countless sketches, which he later developed into one enormous pen drawing and attached to his written report, presumably believing that images were as valuable as words.

  I was definitely going to be a war artist. Stasha had bought me a History of Art book by H.W. Janson and I spent hours looking for tips on how to depict battle. I studied Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, and Picasso’s Guernica.

  And then I came across a picture so horrible I almost threw up. It was a picture from Goya’s The Disasters of War series. The etching showed a man impaled on the branches of a tree through his rectum and shoulder blade. His arms were severed, and his face was twisted in agony.

  In an unsuccessful effort to drain that image of some of its power by sharing it, I lugged the book to school one morning and showed it to the two sisters, Hayley and Adele. Upset, the sisters told Miss Humphreys, our teacher. That afternoon, I was summoned to her office, but when I sat down, feeling my heart boxing in my chest, she simply closed the door, stretched out her long arms, and declared, “You and I are both art lovers, then.”

  To my amazement and delight, Miss Humphreys took my interest in art seriously. She kept me after school once a week to tutor me in art history from old books she had found at the antiquarian bookshops along Charing Cross Road. The books had missing pages and cracked spines and smelled of damp basements but they offered up new ways of seeing the world. It was in these books that I first discovered the snaky lines and strong contrast of Aubrey Beardsley; the grittiness of Käthe Kollwitz; Max Klinger’s lopsided perspective; Dürer’s scientific accuracy; Van Gogh’s truthful imperfections.

  The more I studied these books, worshipfully turning the pungent and brittle pages, one by one, the more excited I felt. But when I told Pippa about these special meetings, she was furious.

  “That teacher of yours has some nerve. Who does she think she is teaching something that can’t be taught?” It was Pippa’s opinion that true art was a mix of raw talent and streetwise ingenuity. “Those people who write those daft books don’t know what’s what.”

  She came to the school to pick me up one afternoon, a packet of crisps peeking out from her pocket, and when she saw me with Miss Humphreys, gave an indignant snort before turning away.

  “I’m sorry, Miss,” I whispered, feeling my face burning. “She’s a bit sensitive.”

  “Never mind,” she whispered back, smiling bravely as she nudged me off.

  I followed Pippa, fuming and humiliated. But Miss Humphreys had placed her hand on my shoulder and the warmth of it lingered. She had given me a Dover edition of The Disasters of War, which was safely tucked away inside my satchel. All I wanted at that moment was for her to call me back, open her shawl and steal me away.

  LATELY, I AWAKEN AT NIGHT to imagined noises. I hear a bus on the street and go to close the window, only to find it already closed. So I open the window and let the cold air enter the room until I am alert. After checking on Iris, I find myself unable to fall asleep so I lie in bed watching television or sketching or doing both.

  Tonight, I’m thinking about Goya and his Disasters of War again. What would he do if he were alive today? What would Goya have to say about our modern and abstract ways of killing? These questions are not purely rhetorical. Two days ago, Julian called from the Guardian to see if I would be interested in creating two eight-page comics for the newspaper responding to Tony Blair’s recent announcement that he would support the U.S. in widening the War on Terror to include actions against Iraq.

  “It doesn’t have to be a big, honking statement,” Julian said in his deadpan way. “Give me a day to think about it,” I said.

  For the rest of the morning, while Iris was out, I sat at my desk and stared at my hands. Then I called Oliver to see if he had any ideas for me.

  “I have a lot of ideas,” Oliver said. “Draw the unexploded cluster bomblets scattered around Afghanistan. They look like yellow soda cans and kids pick them up thinking they’re toys. Or draw the children in Iraq who are dying because they’ve been denied humanitarian supplies under the UN Security Council embargo. Or better yet, draw what can’t be drawn. Draw the nebulous. Draw Tony Blair’s metaphysical Weapons of Mass Destruction. Draw George W. Bush’s Axis of Evil. Draw the way these two simpletons are using the September 11 tragedy to increase their international power by cutting down those who challenge it.”

  The situations in Iraq and Afghanistan produce a bottomless fury in Oliver who cannot believe the British and U.S. governments are willing to repeat past mistakes at the cost of innocent lives. He is only somewhat reassured by opinion surveys showing that the British public, which overpoweringly supported American and British incursions in Afghanistan, is against military action in Iraq.

  As Oliver speaks his mind freely to me, I don’t know what surprises me more: that he addresses me as an adult or that I have become a grown man.

  I have said yes to Julian, even though I am fairly convinced of the futility of art as a protest. Mostly I have said yes because the last thing I drew for that paper was a roller coaster for a story about the death of fairgrounds and before that a portrait of Camilla Parker Bowles, and because now, in my fiftieth year, I am often haunted by thoughts of if I were to die tomorrow and I cannot let those two things stand as my final contribution.

  And then there is the matter of Iris. Trite as it may sound, the mere presence of a child has made me look inside myself.

  But still, tonight, unable to fall asleep, I face the question of what to draw. Everything about warfare these days feels sanitized and unreal.

  Before I got off the phone with Oliver, there was a brief silence.

  “Are things going well with Iris?” he asked.

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “I can help if you’d like. I did raise you, after all.”

  When I made no reply, he said, “How about Friday?”

  “Friday,” I repeated. “That might work.”

  SPLIT UP, DITCHED, DUMPED, BROKEN UP. How many words were there for the undoing of love? It was a sunny and warm Saturday morning in early December of 1962 when Kiyomi and her mother came to stay with us. Apparently Natsumi’s boyfriend Claudio had taken up with another woman. No one could believe it. He didn’t seem the kind of man to dart off. He had been devoted to Natsumi. He carried heavy camera equipment and had a slow, guru-like way of speaking that fooled everyone into believing he was more solid than he really was.

  In her grief and shock, Natsumi had turned to us.

  It worried me how abruptly a person’s life could go from good to terrible. Pippa tried to reassure me by saying that sometimes when a relationship ended it could actually break you open in a good way, make you more “spaciou
s,” or something like that, but when I watched Natsumi, it wasn’t space or openness I felt, it was emptiness—as if something vital inside her had dropped away. She walked around the flat like a nun, arms hugging her sides. Her heartbreak made her look pious. She shivered uncontrollably and borrowed layers and layers of extra clothing from Pippa and Stasha, still unable to get warm. Her eyes streamed with tears. It was hard to look at her or listen to the shakiness in her voice when she spoke.

  Kiyomi, meanwhile, was ignoring her mother’s sadness. She was moving around with great gusts of energy as if she had reached the edge of world-weariness and flipped over onto the other side. She was dancing and humming as if she didn’t have a care in the world. But her appearance told another story. Her nails needed paring, her face needed scrubbing, her tummy strained against her too-tight dress. Her hair looked and smelled terrible. The lesson I drew from observing her was that she, too, had an adult in her life who could get into a mood and turn into a completely different, undependable person. She clearly needed some backup care.

  We were standing in the hallway one day when I finally worked up the nerve to say, “I was thinking that we could play a game. A hair game.”

  Minutes later, snip, snip, snip: cold scissors against my neck. Clefs of wet hair fell to the floor, sticking to the white tiles. When we were done we stood on tiptoes, shoulder to shoulder, looking in the mirror. Kiyomi touched her short fringe. I noticed that the skin along my new hairline looked extra nude.

  “It’s like private skin,” she said, touching the lighter stripe around my ear.

  I felt her breath on my neck, goose pimples forming on my arms.

  Kiyomi sat down on the edge of the bath while I cleaned up, sweeping my fingers across the cool sink basin.

  “I bet your mother was a real beauty,” she said, picking pieces of hair off her lap. “You’re lucky in a way that you don’t remember her. I met my father once and it was awful. He wasn’t what I wanted him to be at all. My mother never chooses the right man.”

  I looked at her in the mirror. “I thought you said you never met him.”

  She shrugged. “Well, I did. Once. He used to be a boxer and he had a flat face like a Persian cat. He asked if I wanted to see him with his teeth out. He kept losing his train of thought.”

  I shrugged.

  “My mother says that your mother is probably an artist and needs to be free.”

  I kept quiet, wishing she would change the subject.

  She walked over and drew small circles on the back of my neck with her finger.

  It felt nice.

  “Moggy,” she said.

  I smiled. “Yeah, moggy.”

  Kiyomi had taught me the word. Moggy, she said, was a slang word for “cat,” but it was also a name for mongrels. “I am a moggy,” she had said, “because dad is Scottish and mum is Japanese.” According to Kiyomi, moggies were half-ghost. “Moggies cannot walk down the street or into a room or watch a movie without looking for themselves.”

  When will I appear? was the question on the lips of most moggies.

  Was I a moggy if my mother was English and my father brown?

  “What work did you say your mum did again?” she asked as she ran the bath. Hot steam began filling the room. I looked in the mirror and watched her dip a hand into the bathwater to test the temperature.

  “She’s an airline stewardess for Air France.”

  “Oh. Really?”

  “Well, actually, Oliver says she’s gone to study with an American dance troupe.”

  Kiyomi looked at me and rolled her big brown eyes. The mirror had fogged up, so I placed my finger on the surface and drew a bird. I went back to my room to draw while Kiyomi soaked in the tub.

  When she was finished, she walked into the room wearing Stasha’s quilted silk bathrobe and asked to see a picture of my mother. She had a stubborn look on her face. She hadn’t towelled off properly and was dripping onto the floor. I knew she wasn’t going to let the subject drop.

  I wandered over to the desk and returned with the photograph I kept in my book.

  “It’s hard to see,” she said, holding it by the corner. “It’s too bright.”

  “I know.”

  “And her face, she’s looking down.”

  “I know.”

  “Don’t you have anything else?”

  “I’ve saved a few of her things,” I said, and reached under the bed and pulled out the toffee tin I used to store my mother’s things. I opened it, suddenly embarrassed by the measliness of its contents.

  Kiyomi looked inside, then back at the photo in her hand and shook her head.

  “I think we can do better.”

  She walked out of the room and returned a few minutes later carrying a pile of Stasha’s old magazines. She sat down and began tearing pages out, laying them in a row across the floor. When she was satisfied, she went and found a pair of scissors.

  We found my mother’s image among the dark-haired beauties that appeared in a travel feature on the Aegean islands; between ads on how to be more glamorous by smoking Regals and more beautiful by wearing Maybelline Ultra Lash mascara. My mother was Princess Margaret and Sophia Loren. She was Audrey Hepburn and Maria Callas.

  Kiyomi started snipping every time she found a convincing brunette.

  We imagined reunions. There would be a tapping at the door. My mother would fly to London on a single-engine jet and whisk me away to a private island called Meera Meera, explaining in a fit of remorse why we had been kept apart, why she had never written. She would walk in with soft swinging hips and talk like a movie star or a Soviet spy. Kiyomi invented things she might say. She drew a hobo stick with a bundle on Sophia Loren’s shoulder, then added a winding path. The upside to being orphaned was that there were options, stories to pick and choose.

  I dreamt well that night.

  A week later, Claudio showed up unannounced, pleading for Natsumi and Kiyomi to return to him. Kiyomi’s face was full of skepticism but Natsumi wasted no time packing up. She shoved a crumpled mass of clothes into a paper bag. She told Kiyomi to get dressed, gave Pippa and Stasha quick pecks on the cheek, and picked up her coat while Claudio waited outside on the front step.

  “I don’t want to go,” said Kiyomi.

  “Hiyaku,” Natsumi commanded in Japanese. “Put your coat on.”

  “I’m not cold. I want to stay.”

  “Ima.”

  “But.”

  “No ‘buts.’ Ima!”

  Natsumi walked out of the flat and joined Claudio out front, while Kiyomi hurried to keep up.

  “Thank you!” Natsumi shouted as they walked down the path.

  Pippa, Stasha and I stood at the door and watched them go. I wondered how long it would take Kiyomi to forgive Claudio—maybe hours, maybe never. I knew it could be both. I knew a child’s heart could mend and break, mend and break, healing in a temporary way. When she looked back at us, we all waved.

  “I suppose it’s none of our business,” Stasha said.

  I HAVE JUST BEEN INFORMED by Iris that her mother has been dating. There have been MOPs (Men of Potential) and HAMs (Handsome Asian Men), but no one permanent, nothing serious. (“Just two cats, a guinea pig, goldfish . . .” all being cared for, evidently, by a Brooklyn neighbour.) For the past hour we have been half-watching a depressing French movie called Ponette about a four-year-old girl who is trying to cope with the death of her mother. Iris picked it out randomly at the video store. For most of its plot Ponette has been bawling her eyes out, not knowing what to do. I have been feeling alternately bored and alarmed by her inexhaustible emotions. I keep wondering what the filmmaker did to make such a little girl cry on cue like this.

  Iris has been talking the entire time. Occasionally she looks at the screen and knits her brows. “Do you know that my mother has never been married?” she says, vaguely troubled.

  I think about this for a moment. I feel a bit sick. “It’s not too late,” I say, clicking off the movie.

/>   “Maybe.” She looks at me, considering. “What about you? Were you ever in love? Is there anyone you wanted to marry?”

  “Pass that pile over here. What other films did we rent?” The queasy feeling isn’t going away. Who are these men Kiyomi has been dating, what do they look like, what are their names?

  “Hey, mister. I asked you a question.”

  “There was one person.”

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you know where she is?”

  I shake my head.

  “She just disappeared?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Well, what was she like? Was she pretty? Smart?”

  “Both.”

  “But you let her slip away.”

  “Yes.”

  There have been several girlfriends over the years, but nothing consequential.

  The most serious was Camille. She ran a small press specializing in children’s books, had sensuous arching eyebrows, and always seemed to be the happiest person in any room, the one you looked at first. She had a thing for modernist design and a bright, uncluttered flat that made me feel grubby and disorganized the moment I walked through the door. The dinners she prepared were always adventurous, multi-course affairs. The sex was taut and athletic and often accompanied by music, everything from Fela Kuti to Gustav Mahler. “An indisputable catch. Totally undeserved,” said Julian, who found her utterly beautiful.

  When my mother died last year, I sat on Camille’s bed and cried. She held me and I pretended to be consoled while all I could think was that the woman comforting me belonged to an alien world, a place entirely devoid of anxiety and difficulty.

  Then one day last October, two months after my mother’s burial, a letter from Kiyomi arrived in the mail. It was a simple condolence letter, but that night as I stood beside Camille’s mobile fold-out kitchen counter, staring at a pretty salmon appetizer she had prepared, I was overcome by a sense of fraudulence. I knew at that instant we couldn’t continue.