Eva
It is not her job to judge. Her job is simply to document what she finds in the archive and record her observations. She has been told this, more than once. She must maintain her objectivity.
Her pencil hovers over the words, ready to draw a line through them.
To comply, conform, succumb. She should find a way to hide this argument beneath something more palatable.
She’s done it before, many times, and managed to get published.
But over the past few years – let’s round it up to a decade – she’s been reluctant to please.
‘Fuck it,’ she says, under her breath, and she draws a circle around the words instead.
She presses so hard it marks the page beneath.
Rage. There’s no place for it in scholarship, but lately it overwhelms her.
She sits back, breathes deep, closes her eyes and unclenches her jaw.
She counts: one, two, three. She tries to remember the serenity prayer but stumbles.
She breathes out. She is not here for the men. They have had enough words written about them. She turns to a blank page in her notebook and looks at the archive box, half empty. Just eighteen drawings and an envelope of sketches – which apparently add nothing of value.
She takes a closer look at Iso’s picture of men, not yet diagnosed.
It was drawn in 1919 and she considers the watercoloured players on stage.
They look like they are bowing. The show had ended like the war, but the artist has sketched in row after row of empty heads.
They belong to men whose heads were not empty, whose war would never end, Eva thinks. Not ever.
She puts the gloves back on and runs a finger under the lower edge of the drawing, just as she did the day before. This time she knows what is hidden beneath.
Woman Stretching.
Eva writes it on the blank page of her notebook and immediately feels the rage slip away.
It is a good title for this sketch, Eva thinks.
Adequately descriptive. But she is wondering when it was drawn, where it was drawn, whether the artist even remembered it was there when she began her drawing of men, not yet diagnosed.
She is wondering who the woman might be.
She picks up her pencil and tries to describe what she can see.
It is a woman, sitting on her haunches, stretching her back.
She is facing away from the artist and there is the impression of a spine, slightly extended, with the head thrown back.
There is the edge of a heavy breast with the hint of a nipple, then the line of her body sweeps down into a narrow waist before swelling.
There is a bend at the hip and knee and a foot is tucked beneath an ample buttock.
The buttock is dimpled by small pencil marks (Eva is pleased by this detail).
A few tangled lines suggest a plait of hair, unravelling.
It is a nude, but even as a study it seems incomplete – three quarters of a woman. The furthest edge of her body is indistinct, just a fragile line that begins but does not end. As if the artist was interrupted.
Eva reads what she has written. She goes back and forth between her words and the lines the artist has drawn.
The heavy breast, the curve of a buttock, the line of a spine extended.
She worries that she is spending too much time on this picture, that it may not have even been sketched during the war and should be put aside entirely.
But Eva has thought of little else since she saw it and is not inclined to put it aside.
She is certain it belongs to the artist, but it is so different from her other work before or during the war. It is a nude, for one, but there is something else. It is sensual and it is intimate.
The head is thrown back.