Chapter 8 Kazimir
Chapter Eight
KAZIMIR
He stands there with his fists clenched and his jaw locked and cadmium red drying on his skin, and he looks at me as though defiance is a language he invented and I am the first person illiterate enough to misunderstand it.
I wait.
Patience is the simplest weapon in any arsenal, and the one most people are too undisciplined to use.
A raised voice is a concession. A threat is a negotiation.
Silence---held, extended, stripped of all human warmth---is an absolute.
It offers nothing to push against. It gives defiance no surface on which to land.
The boy wants me to shout. I can see it in the set of his shoulders, the forward tilt of his weight. He has been managed by men who shout his entire life. His brother shouts. He has learned to absorb volume the way a punching bag absorbs fists---yielding just enough and bouncing back.
I do not shout. I have not raised my voice since 1997.
The studio holds its silence. The north light falls across the boy in a cool wash that turns the red paint on his arms into something vivid and terrible, and I observe him the way I have observed him since the moment he walked into my gallery wearing a stolen name and a stolen suit: with the focused attention of a man who has found something rare and is deciding how to handle it.
Ten seconds. Fifteen. His breathing changes. The defiance in his posture begins to curdle into something else---confusion blurring quickly into the specific anxiety of a person who has thrown a punch and connected with air.
I step forward. I take his wrist.
The same wrist I caught at the club. The bruise has faded to a greenish smear beneath the skin, and the paint covers it now---cadmium red over the yellow-green of healing, a colour combination that any painter would recognise as complementary.
His body, despite his best efforts, keeps arranging itself into compositions I find difficult to ignore.
He flinches. A sharp, involuntary contraction. His arm goes rigid. But he does not pull away.
"What are you---"
I walk him to the sink. It is a deep utility basin, stainless steel, mounted against the east wall beneath the shelving. I turn the tap with my free hand. The water runs cold for a moment, then warm, and I hold his wrist under the stream.
The cadmium red lifts from his skin in ribbons.
The water turns pink, then copper, then clear as the pigment washes away, and beneath it his forearm emerges---pale, freckled, the veins visible under the thin skin of the inner wrist. The bruise from the club is a smudge of colour on the bone, fading but present, a record of the last time I held him.
He stares at the water. At my hand on his wrist. At the paint dissolving between our skins.
"Let go of me."
I do not let go. I pick up the bar of soap from the basin's edge---a plain block, unperfumed, the kind I stock for cleaning brushes---and I work it across his knuckles.
His hands are extraordinary at close range.
Long fingers. Calloused pads. The thumbnail on his left hand is permanently stained with a blue so deep it has become part of the nail.
These are hands that have been used---not for violence, like mine, but for creation, which is its own kind of violence.
I wash each finger. Methodically. The soap cuts through the dried pigment in the creases of his joints, and I turn his hand under the water and clean the palm, the heel, the soft valley between the tendons.
His hand is shaking. His entire arm is shaking, a fine, constant vibration that runs from his shoulder to his fingertips.
"You act like a child," I say. My voice is level. My hands are steady. "You throw paint at a canvas, you leave the floor in ruins, and when asked to restore order, you sulk. This is the behaviour of a boy who has never been required to account for the space he occupies."
I switch to his other hand. He jerks it back. I catch it. My grip is firm but not punishing---the grip of a man holding an object that is valuable and prone to damaging itself.
"I will treat you like a child until you demonstrate otherwise."
His breathing is audible now. Fast, uneven, pushed through clenched teeth.
His face is turned away from me---chin down, jaw locked, the tendons in his neck standing out like cables.
He is not looking at the water. He is not looking at our hands.
He is looking at the far wall with the rigid, unfocused stare of a person enduring something they cannot name.
The intimacy is deliberate. This boy does not respond to force.
Force is a language he speaks fluently. His brother is force.
His world is force. He has been pushed and gripped and shouted at by violent men since he was old enough to remember, and he has survived by being the one who does not break.
Gentleness---controlled, unsolicited, applied without consent---is the one pressure he does not know how to absorb.
I finish the second hand. I turn off the tap. I release him.
He pulls his hands to his chest and holds them there, wet, clean, the skin flushed pink from the warm water. He is breathing like he has been running. His eyes, when they finally meet mine, are bright and furious and glazed with something he will never admit to.
I hand him a clean rag from the shelf. White cotton. Folded.
"The floor," I say.
* * *
He cleans the floor.
It takes considerable time. The paint has splattered in arcs and pools across the raw concrete, and some of it has begun to set in the porous surface.
He works on his hands and knees with the rag and a jar of turpentine, scrubbing in tight circles, and the smell of the solvent fills the studio with a sharp, medicinal bite.
I stand at the worktable. I do not sit. Sitting would suggest comfort, a relaxation of attention. I remain standing, arms folded, and I watch him work.
He does not speak. This is, I suspect, the longest the boy has gone without talking since he learned the skill.
The silence is its own kind of discipline---not one I imposed, but one he is imposing on himself.
He is refusing to give me the satisfaction of his voice, his wit, the manic, chaotic energy that spills out of him in conversation.
He has decided that silence is the only weapon left to him.
It is an intelligent decision. It is also futile. Silence, for a person like Rory Kavanagh, is a coat worn over a fire. The heat will find its way out.
I watch his hands. Even scrubbing a floor, they move with an unconscious grace---the wrist rotating, the fingers adjusting pressure, the rag folded and refolded to find a clean surface.
There is no wasted motion. His body understands economy in a way his personality does not, and this contradiction is the most interesting thing about him.
The floor clears. Section by section, the concrete returns to its original grey.
His footprints disappear. The handprints on the worktable are wiped away.
The smear on the wall---the one made by a brush held in a hand that was furious and free---is the last to go.
He pauses before it. His rag hovers over the mark.
For a moment, I think he might refuse again.
He wipes it clean.
He stands. He drops the rag on the worktable. His face is flushed. His jaw is set so hard I can see the muscles bunching beneath the skin. His eyes meet mine with a hatred so pure it is almost an aesthetic experience.
"Good," I say.
The word does something to him. A micro-flinch---involuntary, immediate, gone before a slower observer would catch it.
The flinch of a person who has just been praised by someone they despise and felt, against every conscious intention, a flicker of response to it.
The body's betrayal. The nervous system's refusal to align with the mind's position.
He felt it. I saw it. He knows I saw it. The knowledge passes between us in a silence that is no longer empty.
"Yuri will bring dinner to your quarters," I say. "Afterward, the terrace is available to you for one hour. Supervised. You may have fresh air, and you may look at the sky, which I am told is useful for people who create things."
He says nothing.
"In the morning, you will return to this studio. There will be a brief on the worktable. The first commission. You will study it, and you will not touch a brush until you understand every element of what is being asked of you. Is this clear?"
"Crystal." The word comes through his teeth like something bitten off.
"Then we understand each other."
I leave the studio. I close the door. Behind it, I hear the boy exhale---a long, unsteady breath, the kind that follows the release of a pressure held too long.
My hands are damp. I dry them on a handkerchief as I walk down the corridor, and I note, with a precision that irritates me, that the skin of his inner wrist was softer than I expected, and that the observation has lodged itself in a part of my mind that I would prefer remained unoccupied.
* * *
The Consortium calls at the worst possible hour, which is their preferred hour, because men who control thirty percent of a continent's shadow economy do not observe the courtesy of timing.
I take the call in my study. The room is dark except for the desk lamp and the glow of the security monitors, which show me the hallway, the gallery, the terrace, and the boy's quarters, where Rory Kavanagh is currently sitting on the edge of his bed with a plate of food that he has not touched and a glass of water that he has.
The voice on the line is Mikhail Sorokin. Deputy chair of the Consortium's financial committee. A bureaucrat in a criminal's suit. He speaks Russian with the flat vowels of a Muscovite who went to school in Geneva and returned with the accent sanded off.
"The Registry scan is scheduled for March," he says. "The three flagged works must be replaced before then. Where are we?"
"The replacement process is underway."