Swan Song by Victoria C. Roskams
Hulda is jealous of her master's possession of Alma, or rather a lifelike replica of Alma made of swan skin and sofa stuffing.
I never meant for Kokoschka to kill Alma; only for him to relinquish her to me for ever. In the end, they came to the same thing. It is better that way. It is right that her body, lifeless or not, should rest with one who truly loves her. Kokoschka did not love Alma. He only drove himself mad for her. People think, because she looks out from dozens, no hundreds, of his paintings and sketches, that that shows he loved her.
The real Alma I never encountered; she was out of the picture some time before Kokoschka came to Dresden, to the doctor's house where I worked, to see out the period of his recuperation. As far as I was concerned, the real Alma was the one who arrived on the doorstep that frosty morning in 1919, limbs folded in on themselves in the cold confines of the ivory casket. I remember the morning well, the variations of shock on our faces - my master, the butler, and I - as we opened the casket and found her, embryonic, as if asleep. Kokoschka's face fell; I could not imagine why. As for myself, I began to imagine I was living in some old fairy story, which opens with the mysterious arrival of a swan who will be transformed, through love, into a woman. The butler, on the other hand, promptly fainted. He laid eyes for one second on her beauty, swooned, and fell. I confess I must have rolled my eyes a little at this. There is an age men reach, it seems, when they revert to the lovesick follies of youth. Perhaps some never really leave them behind.
Our swan maiden was soon established in the makeshift studio that the doctor had permitted Kokoschka, hoping that a calm dedication to painting might soothe the sounds of gunfire still howling between his ears. Yet he was distinctly agitated that morning, pacing up and down the studio, stopping now and then to dash some red, some pink, some brown, onto a canvas, taking aim with the tubes as though they were pistols.
"She is not right, Hulda," he said to me. "I gave the most meticulous instructions to her maker. I said that to touch her must be like really touching a woman - her flesh ought to yield in the same places, to become firm in the same places. I said she must have nails that can scratch against my skin; teeth that can really bite. I said to use the innards of an old sofa for her innards; to layer this with soft down, and then to apply the hair. Look -" he went to Alma, seated before the canvas, and lifted her arm - "she is made of swans' skin. Where she ought to have goose pimples and fine little hairs, she has - feathers."
I could not see his objection. To me, standing apart from canvas and sitter, Alma was entrancing, her head held aloft, her features noble yet delicate, overcome with a pallor that made one wish to bestow a warming touch on her. Kokoschka was touching her face now, but his hand was roving, critical, investigating: I could see he would never be able to put aside his dream of her and love her as she truly was. Yet I could not help noticing that, in spite of his disappointment with her, he was painting her already: I saw, in his rushing back and forth between the easel and the paints laid out on the table, her face begin to emerge from the colours on the canvas.
"It is only," he continued, more distracted now than agitated, "that I had wanted to dress her. You remember the lingerie I ordered from Paris?"
I nodded, recalling another arrival in a white box some weeks earlier. Like a parent expecting a child, Kokoschka had purchased clothes for Alma before she came. The butler and I had raised our eyebrows, but said nothing.
"I don't see how we will get her into it. Certainly not the dresses - imagine trying to pull a sleeve over those feathers!" He sighed. "I had not thought to paint her only in the nude, but it can't be helped." With a few deft movements, his brush marked out a small, swooping circle of white paint with a dot like an iris in the middle, a flash of dark pink. I could not see this as her breast: it remained for me an eye, looking out from the canvas in slight alarm. But for him, I was sure, the breast was merely looked at, not looking.
"Perhaps, sir," I ventured, "I could try to dress her - after you have finished painting her?"
Kokoschka shot a quick glance at me, his brow furrowed. "You could -?"
"My hands are not as rough as they look. I would be gentle with her."
After a pause, his expression relaxed. "Yes, you might try. I had thought - when I had her made - I had thought I might be the only one to touch her. As it was with Alma... but you might try. It is the thought of other men laying hands on her that I cannot abide. Don't you see? Those hands were made for me to hold; those lips answer to my touch alone; the small of her back is exactly the right size for my hand to rest in. Any man on earth ought to be able to tell, just from one look at her, that she is mine alone. But no -" his voice took on a decisive tone, "no one else will see her. I think that is best. The thought of subjecting her to the gaze of others! That is too awful to bear. No - I must take care of her. She must not be seen. It would only hurt her, and so hurt me."
With this, Kokoschka laid down his brush and reached a paint-spattered hand (for he used his fingers as much as the brush, if not more) to grasp a lock of Alma's hair - a thick, lustrous mass that might really have been hair - and ran his fingers and thumb over it. I glanced at the canvas and saw her, unmistakeable, though transformed through a wildness of colour and line into the frenzied image of his inner eye: a mixture of his first impressions of this new Alma and his treasured memories of the old one. I could not help thinking it ironic that he had insisted no one must see her, and yet, here he was, placing her image at the very centre of his art - excluding, in fact, all but her body from the frame, as if he wanted the viewer to have no place of recourse. Nowhere to look but at her: and yet she must not be seen.
Would I have hidden away such a beauty? I do not think so; it pained me sometimes to feel that my master treated her like a shameful secret, issuing hasty instructions to hide her when some guest paid a visit. But in those moments, when I would gather her soft whiteness into my arms and, with the greatest ease since she weighed so little, convey her to Kokoschka's rooms and secrete her in a closet, where I soon set up a little chair and blanket so that she would not have to lie limp on the floor; in those moments, I would take pleasure in keeping Alma to myself. I would look down into those marble-like eyes and feel that I was keeping her safe. This may have been at my master's command, it is true, but was it not also true that he was then obliged to greet his guest alone, unaccompanied, far from Alma's loveliness, while I was free to sit with her, holding her hand, teasing garments over her arms and head, making her yet more beautiful? I wondered if he ever wished he could appear in public with her on his arm, and feel the flush of pride that must surely overcome his anxieties about the prying eyes of strange men. But Kokoschka and Alma met only behind closed doors. She sat with him at the dinner table, her posture impeccable, her manners dignified; then, later, she would lie beside him in his bed, the two of them each as still as the other, like a pair of embarrassed teenage lovers. Under the covers, their bodies made the same outline. But it was I who had carefully pulled the straps of the brassiere over her arms and shoulders; I who had nudged, with the greatest discretion, a small slip of black lace over the mound of hair between her legs; I who had laid her in the bed.
Kokoschka entrusted me with putting about the rumour that this new Alma was accompanying him to the opera, to soirées, to the coffee houses, like Olympia in the tale of Hoffmann. Indeed, I believe he wished, by the spread of this rumour, to be thought Romantic, mad for love in a way that proved he was an artist, because he was, like those fairytale heroes, so intent on the pursuit of an ideal beauty that he did not care whether those around him did not believe his beloved was real. The rumour was easily kept up - I had only to tell it to fellow servants whose masters and mistresses did not move in the same circles, so as to be sure that those who might see Kokoschka at the opera, alone, would not attempt to verify what they had heard with those who might see Kokoschka at the coffee house, alone. For he was always alone: the rumour was only a rumour. The only time Kokoschka and Alma appeared together was in his paintings.
These Kokoschka produced with an almost maniac speed and frequency, working with a zeal I had not seen since he had come to Dresden. "I paint so much because I have no child," he told me one day. I supposed, now, he did have one, of a kind. I knew that the old Alma, the real Alma, however you like to put it, had featured again and again in his work, much of which had travelled to Dresden with him. One painting, which he called 'Bride of the Wind', was mounted above the bed; in its centre, fugitives from the swirling storm of colour, were the interlocking lines of Kokoschka and Alma. Looking at it daily, I quickly began to feel that the painting's energy came not from the threat that the storm would swallow up the lovers, but from their heartbeats, which gave life to the whole composition, flinging the paint around them in droves. I could see that that was how Kokoschka thought of it: his love the centripetal force that created the world, and, too, the point to which all eyes are helplessly drawn. It was a nice idea, if as spurious as the rumours I was helping to spread about his eccentricities.
The curious thing was that his paintings of the new Alma looked hardly different to those of the old one. No viewer could have guessed, as I knew, that this Alma had to be propped on the chair at a very particular angle or else her torso would collapse in on itself; that her feet, when I held her aloft, made a clack-clack sound as they knocked against each other; that her opalescent skin was actually an inverted quilt, its feathers showing on the outside in silky profusion. None would have dared accuse her, any more than her predecessor at least, of seeming like an automaton under his gaze. They were exactly the same - and this was exactly what Kokoschka had wanted. The only difference was that he allowed himself, now that his dream of possession seemed to be materialising, greater licence in the visions he projected onto the canvases. In one, he sits beside her, a hand on her knee, opening wide her private parts, another hand pointing towards what ought not to be seen. She stares not out of the frame but into a middle distance that exists only for her, her face fixed in absolute submission. She is powerless to stop him showing the viewer what they really ought not to see. Some might say this is because she has no soul. But I know this is not so. I know better; I know my Alma.
It was not possible to keep at bay people's curiosity about Kokoschka's companion; before long I lost control of the rumours I was spreading, and we found visitors at the doorstep asking to see her. She began to receive invitations to pay social visits. This made my master more and more anxious; sketches of her flew out from under his hands with a now paranoiac velocity, but he kept her resolutely away from alien eyes, trusting only me. One day, however, the doctor who was overseeing his recovery heard tell of his public appearances with an extraordinarily beautiful woman at his side, and he asked Kokoschka if he might meet her. I do not know why my master agreed: but I am glad he did, for the little party we had that evening gave me my first sight of Alma's true soul.
We congregated at the fireside in the doctor's drawing room. I was to serve the cocoa and bring in various cakes and pastries from the kitchen, but once this was done, I was permitted to stay; and so we sat, the four of us, I on one armchair, the doctor on another, my master on a sofa with his arm around Alma, draped as if casually, but in truth, I knew, holding her upright from behind. He had not ben able to seat her properly on the sofa's cushion, and she was at risk of falling face-down, perhaps even tumbling headfirst onto the hearth. In spite of this, all of us were perfectly serene, and made light conversation as if the presence of this creature were the most ordinary thing in the world. I suspect Kokoschka kept up this pretence so that the doctor might be awed by the artist's wayward genius: a taunt in the face of the rational man of medicine. Myself, I had no wish to disrupt the scene, to alert anyone in any way to its oddness, because to remain thus was to look upon Alma's face, its pleasing, placid proportions, for longer. I do not know why the doctor colluded in the fantasy of the scene. In any case, he soon brought matters to a different pass when he stood up, clapped his hands against his thighs, and announced that we ought to have some music. He crossed to the piano in the corner of the room and began to play a transcription of a Lied I had heard somewhere before, some years ago. After a few, unsettled bars of introduction, he began to sing, and I recognised it as that unsteady, uncertain half-lament by Gustav Mahler, whose words run:
Playing and singing with his back to us, the doctor did not notice anything untoward. Indeed, when he came to face us and to ask what we might like to hear next, he betrayed no signs of recognition. But I - of course, I had not taken my eyes off Alma for the duration of the song, and so I saw it all, as did Kokoschka. I could not have been sure, at first, what was happening; in the song's first verse, as the melody meanders despairingly over familiar ground, all I could say for certain was that a flush was entering Alma's cheeks. To say that I became aware of another heartbeat in the room with us, the breath of another in the air, the just palpable twinges of a hand or a shoulder, might be put down to the strange feeling of outside presence that music often instils in us; but it was not that. It was Alma. As the doctor's voice swelled, rising and falling, rising again and falling again, her shoulders began to lift, so that Kokoschka's hand - until now so proprietorially placed - slipped off her. The bow-like lips opened, not with a wrench or a drop, but merely a natural parting, and she began - I could have sworn it - to make a soundless imitation of the words the doctor was singing. This seemed to cost her no effort; there was no evidence, as sometimes with singers (as, indeed, I noticed when I first heard the Kindertotenlieder), of the difficulty of paying attention to pitch, tone, breath, and words, all at once. Perhaps this was because she was making no sound. And yet the sight of her was so enthralling, went so directly to my senses, that it almost felt as if - impossibly - the doctor's singing were really coming from her.
Kokoschka's eyes glazed over in wonder; my own, I suppose, may have been the same. When the tempest subsided, when the doctor's fingers slowed their pressing on the keys and finally stopped, the colour left Alma's cheeks, her mouth closed as peacefully as it had opened, and she sat gazing as before at the mantelpiece, hands folded in her lap. I watched as my master laid his hands over hers, a desperate clutching gesture that might have shown a desire to hold and cover her between her legs, or to feel, perhaps, some sign of blood flowing into those dainty fingers. I would not have held her like that: I wanted no further sign that she really was, inside and out, the wondrous beauty we believed her to be.
Of course I felt sorry for him. It would be hard to say which wounds he was more truly recovering from at that time: those of the war or those of his affair with Alma. But I would not have acted that way. What he did to her was not love: not in the beginning, middle, nor end. His recognition that she was alive did not prompt him to ask for her love in return for his, only to offer his own with more and more force.
That is the only way I can make sense of what I found him doing one morning, a few weeks after the incident of the doctor's song. Approaching Kokoschka'a room with a coffee tray, I heard a noise, certainly human, but unheard in this room until now: a series of staggering, laboured exhalations, with no real beginning nor end, just shuddering one into another. I cannot be blamed for opening the door, though with much more care than usual, pushing it only very slightly, setting down the tray in the corridor and slipping silently into the room. The bed faced the door; I could see 'Bride of the Wind' above the headboard, wearing an aspect of unprecedented stillness. For, below it, on the bed, Kokoschka's body was moving in puppet-like contortions, his hips seeming to plunge again and again into the folds of the quilt. But it was not the quilt. From my position in the doorway, I could just about see the repeated rise and fall of Alma's head on the pillow, staring upwards impassively, more storm-tossed - I began to realise - than her avatar in the painting. Kokoschka gasped; he panted; at one point, his arms buckled and his knees slipped, and he struggled to regain his position. He reached down with his hand and pulled his cock out of his pants; I suppose he might have liked her to do this for him, but her own hands lay limp, palms facing upwards, on either side of her body. Beads of sweat appeared on his forehead and I guessed he had been trying to make something happen for some time now.
It was when Kokoschka crept upwards to the pillow, bringing his cock closer to that pleasure-set face, that I thought of what to do, recalling, as I saw his pink flesh, a similar flush of pink I had recently seen. As quietly as in could, I hummed the opening bars of the Mahler Lied, approximating its uneasy swell of strings with my tongue and throat. Nothing happened; Kokoschka, hearing nothing, remained poised at Alma's head. I tried the opening bars again, louder this time. Now her eyes seemed to grow wider, as if in recognition of a forgotten duty; her mouth flew open, and she sang, in tones impossibly deep yet surpassingly beautiful:
At this, Kokoschka fell back in alarm. He turned away his head, as if he could not bear to even look at the vivid creature before him, and lay curled in a ball at her feet. Taking my opportunity, now that he was not looking, I stole into the room and stood by the bed. Still Alma sang, until she had exhausted the first verse, and landing on its final line, "they've just gone for a long walk," with cautious indecision, she gently shut her mouth. I drank it all in, sight and sound, like one dying of thirst. I whispered: "I am at your service body and soul - dispose of me."
I know that Kokoschka will have thought I was whispering to him. Since we had shared the discovery of Alma's soul that evening with the doctor, we had exchanged many private looks which I am sure my master took as evidence of my growing obsession with him, for who could not be obsessed with the tortured artist whose beautiful creature has really and truly come to life? But my looks, and my words, were for Alma alone, and I know she heard me. She kept answering my call. Again and again, I would hum those opening bars by Mahler, and she would answer me with those swan-like tones.
I took to doing it when I felt most need to remind Kokoschka that the girl he thought he was touching, caressing, fondling was a woman with a soul. I grew tired of the way his hand sat at the nape of her neck, wrenching her spine straight, so that she might look directly at the doctor or the butler, the only men she was permitted to be seen by. I grew tired of the way his other hand, in those moments, would creep, very slowly, while the conversation went on, towards her private area. All three men would continue to look at each other's faces as if nothing were out of the ordinary, occasionally glancing at Alma: but of course there seemed to be no cause for alarm, for her expression never changed. They might go on with their discussion as if she were barely there, as present as the sofa or the piano, or me.
At these moments, I would begin to hum under my breath, and watch as the colour suffused Alma's lily-white cheeks. Strange though it may sound, neither the doctor nor the butler ever seemed to notice my humming, and they did not bat an eyelid when Alma opened her mouth and poured forth her soul. It was as if we were, both of us, so imperceptible to them that even this impossible display, half mastery, half magic, passed them by. Only Kokoschka noticed. His eyes widened; his lower lip began to tremble; his hand shook and fell down her back, a collapse that sent both him and Alma into convulsions; he turned away. He always turned away, every time.
"Hulda, there is something curious about Alma," he began one day in the studio. She was doubly before us, propped on a stool and appearing on the canvas. "I do not know if - perhaps it is just my fancy -"
I waited for him to find the words. But he could not; he only plied the canvas with more and more paint, its thick splodges of red and pink turning to brown as he layered more and more paint on top, until the whole thing - as he kept beginning again, saying, "Do you ever think that," and, "Could it be possible," and, "Oh, it is surely only" - the whole thing became a mass of indiscriminate shades and textures, seeming almost to move, to ooze around the canvas as though each ounce of paint were vying for space within its four corners.
"Is there anything you wish me to do differently with her, sir?"
Kokoschka faced me, turning his back on Alma and the painting, and raised his eyes heavenwards. "Look at this painting, Hulda. What does it say to you?"
I did not think it prudent to answer. Thankfully, he gave me little chance, pausing only for an exasperated exhale.
"That I am cured of my passion!" he exclaimed. "Do you see? I must have drawn and painted her a hundred times, and now - now this is all I see. It is because that restless passion has finally ceased steering my hand. Look at it - it is inanimate - it answers no longer to the hunger of my eyes and heart. For I look at her now -" he turned, his shoulders drooping; a note of despondency entered his voice - "and see nothing, feel nothing. I have longed for this day."
I would not have thought, to hear his voice, that the death of his love was a source of triumph for him. Indeed, I did not believe it. No; he was scared, knowing his Alma lived, and seeing that she loved another.
"We must celebrate," he went on, though I could detect no hint of celebration in his voice, "all the world must know that I am cured. They will see her and they will know. We will throw a party, Hulda."
"Of course, sir."
Was I wrong to collude with him in this? I may have been selfish in encouraging his belief that he was cured and must therefore display, before all the world, what they would surely recognise as an ongoing affliction; but my motivation lay in his declaring that we, and not just he, must throw the party. This was to be my chance, too. Kokoschka was not cured, but had turned away from Alma, leaving her to be with me at last. The guests would see us, together, no longer hidden behind our master, but living for love of each other.
I dressed her in the finest clothes I could find, clothes she had never yet worn, that Kokoschka had lavished on her when she first arrived and had forgotten about. I suppose he liked her better unclothed, but not I; it was I, after all, who took her every morning into the closet and selected what she would wear, even if it be only a plain white slip, pulling it over her head and gently patting it down. It was I, that late afternoon, who held up to the dying light a gown of richest scarlet and knew this was what she must wear. It was silk; it brought out a shine in her whiteness that I had never seen before, as if she were glowing with some inner light. I knew the guests would see it too.
We watched from the window in the closet as they arrived, various artists from Dresden, the doctor, friends of the doctor, mostly men attired unfussily in short black jackets, white shirts, and grey trousers. Kokoschka stood in the doorway, greeting each of them animatedly, striking them presumably as the very picture of good health. It was a testament to the great doctor's work: the shellshocked soldier was a great artist once again. As the sound of light piano music floated up to our refuge, I thought of the song that was really in Kokoschka's head, and how it had brought us to where we were now. Soon we would step out among the crowd; Kokoschka, I knew, could no longer even look at Alma; it would be for the others to see that she lived, and that she was mine.
I waited and waited to be called, knowing the party guests would be burning with curiosity to see the companion of Kokoschka's about whom they had heard so much; but no one disturbed our solitude. Perhaps it was my own burning with curiosity which precipitated the disaster. I only know that I felt it was right to show these men who were going about patting my master on the back, shaking the hand which had spent so many hours daubing blotches of paint onto vacant canvases which soon became Alma, that she was really here, a thing of living, moving beauty. I took one of her tiny white hands in mine, and with my other arm reached around her back and lifted her. The red silk caught the lights at the top of the staircase; all was a bright, shining miasma of red and gold. I knew then that they must all have seen us, though I could not see them, only advanced, hand in hand with my love, down the stairs and into the light.
A hand shot through the gold and she was gone. My Alma, so vivid, so glowing, was no longer at my side. I could not see what was happening, only a blur of dazed faces turning to look at me and then turning away again. Then I heard the front door shut with a thud: I knew it was really a knell. I ran to a window that overlooked the front courtyard, feverishly humming the Mahler tune, but it was too late. She could not hear me, deaf and dumb out there in the cold, looking helplessly into the crazed eyes of her master. Steadying her with one hand, he held a half-empty wine glass in the other; with a whirl of drunken abandon, he brought the glass crashing down on her head, sending spurts of red droplets onto the white ground. Alma's head lolled forward, the force of the blow having broken her delicate little neck. I sang and sang, but there was no way she could have heard me now. I do not know what the party guests made of it; perhaps they imagined I was singing her a funeral dirge. For, as we all stood watching from the window, Kokoschka took a swift glance at the now jagged shard of glass he was wielding, and with mad decision, swiped it through the air. Her neck could not take it, it was so small, so ornately stitched together. It gave in at the first blow. Her head slipped backwards and toppled to the ground, resting in a little pool of red wine. I stopped singing and began to scream.
I do not know what Kokoschka did next, nor how and when the guests dispersed. I did not see anything until early the next morning, when a couple of uniformed men appeared outside amidst the white, and stood over the patch of red. Their dark forms stood out, sharp and upright, against the soft mass of fabric and feathery sinew at their feet. I knew suddenly that they would make the wrong conclusion about the sorry scene: I must save her, must do this one last thing for her.
I rushed outside as one policeman said to the other: "I heard they're treating the war wounded here - maybe one of them escaped - they can be volatile, you know."
The other tutted. "I wonder who she was. Not bad to look at - not all that old. A shame."
"It is not how it looks," I said, kneeling on the frosty ground and lifting the body ever so slightly. "It is not human flesh. You see?" I gently pressed a hand on her stomach. "She is not made of human skin. She is a swan!"
They thought me mad, but I must save her.
"It was my master, Herr Kokoschka, who did this, last night, at a party. You see for yourself the shard from his wine glass! I will take care of the matter. He is no murderer; he is an artist."
One of the policemen nodded. The other brought out slowly: "Very well. We had to check. You see how this looks - most queer. Most queer indeed."
"Of course, of course. To tell you the truth, I will be leaving his service immediately - there is only so much eccentricity one can stand."
And I did tell the truth. As the policemen turned and left, I took Alma's head in my arms, bundled it inside my overcoat, and left the doctor's house and Kokoschka forever. I did not look back.
Only sometimes, as I lie on the hard steel-frame bed in the modest room I have found for myself, I fancy I can hear a sound, clear and pure, issuing through the bundle of blankets in which Alma's head now rests. The room is still, I am silent, and yet there it is, hesitant at first, then swooping towards certainty:
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| Image generated with OpenAI |
The real Alma I never encountered; she was out of the picture some time before Kokoschka came to Dresden, to the doctor's house where I worked, to see out the period of his recuperation. As far as I was concerned, the real Alma was the one who arrived on the doorstep that frosty morning in 1919, limbs folded in on themselves in the cold confines of the ivory casket. I remember the morning well, the variations of shock on our faces - my master, the butler, and I - as we opened the casket and found her, embryonic, as if asleep. Kokoschka's face fell; I could not imagine why. As for myself, I began to imagine I was living in some old fairy story, which opens with the mysterious arrival of a swan who will be transformed, through love, into a woman. The butler, on the other hand, promptly fainted. He laid eyes for one second on her beauty, swooned, and fell. I confess I must have rolled my eyes a little at this. There is an age men reach, it seems, when they revert to the lovesick follies of youth. Perhaps some never really leave them behind.
Our swan maiden was soon established in the makeshift studio that the doctor had permitted Kokoschka, hoping that a calm dedication to painting might soothe the sounds of gunfire still howling between his ears. Yet he was distinctly agitated that morning, pacing up and down the studio, stopping now and then to dash some red, some pink, some brown, onto a canvas, taking aim with the tubes as though they were pistols.
"She is not right, Hulda," he said to me. "I gave the most meticulous instructions to her maker. I said that to touch her must be like really touching a woman - her flesh ought to yield in the same places, to become firm in the same places. I said she must have nails that can scratch against my skin; teeth that can really bite. I said to use the innards of an old sofa for her innards; to layer this with soft down, and then to apply the hair. Look -" he went to Alma, seated before the canvas, and lifted her arm - "she is made of swans' skin. Where she ought to have goose pimples and fine little hairs, she has - feathers."
I could not see his objection. To me, standing apart from canvas and sitter, Alma was entrancing, her head held aloft, her features noble yet delicate, overcome with a pallor that made one wish to bestow a warming touch on her. Kokoschka was touching her face now, but his hand was roving, critical, investigating: I could see he would never be able to put aside his dream of her and love her as she truly was. Yet I could not help noticing that, in spite of his disappointment with her, he was painting her already: I saw, in his rushing back and forth between the easel and the paints laid out on the table, her face begin to emerge from the colours on the canvas.
"It is only," he continued, more distracted now than agitated, "that I had wanted to dress her. You remember the lingerie I ordered from Paris?"
I nodded, recalling another arrival in a white box some weeks earlier. Like a parent expecting a child, Kokoschka had purchased clothes for Alma before she came. The butler and I had raised our eyebrows, but said nothing.
"I don't see how we will get her into it. Certainly not the dresses - imagine trying to pull a sleeve over those feathers!" He sighed. "I had not thought to paint her only in the nude, but it can't be helped." With a few deft movements, his brush marked out a small, swooping circle of white paint with a dot like an iris in the middle, a flash of dark pink. I could not see this as her breast: it remained for me an eye, looking out from the canvas in slight alarm. But for him, I was sure, the breast was merely looked at, not looking.
"Perhaps, sir," I ventured, "I could try to dress her - after you have finished painting her?"
Kokoschka shot a quick glance at me, his brow furrowed. "You could -?"
"My hands are not as rough as they look. I would be gentle with her."
After a pause, his expression relaxed. "Yes, you might try. I had thought - when I had her made - I had thought I might be the only one to touch her. As it was with Alma... but you might try. It is the thought of other men laying hands on her that I cannot abide. Don't you see? Those hands were made for me to hold; those lips answer to my touch alone; the small of her back is exactly the right size for my hand to rest in. Any man on earth ought to be able to tell, just from one look at her, that she is mine alone. But no -" his voice took on a decisive tone, "no one else will see her. I think that is best. The thought of subjecting her to the gaze of others! That is too awful to bear. No - I must take care of her. She must not be seen. It would only hurt her, and so hurt me."
With this, Kokoschka laid down his brush and reached a paint-spattered hand (for he used his fingers as much as the brush, if not more) to grasp a lock of Alma's hair - a thick, lustrous mass that might really have been hair - and ran his fingers and thumb over it. I glanced at the canvas and saw her, unmistakeable, though transformed through a wildness of colour and line into the frenzied image of his inner eye: a mixture of his first impressions of this new Alma and his treasured memories of the old one. I could not help thinking it ironic that he had insisted no one must see her, and yet, here he was, placing her image at the very centre of his art - excluding, in fact, all but her body from the frame, as if he wanted the viewer to have no place of recourse. Nowhere to look but at her: and yet she must not be seen.
Would I have hidden away such a beauty? I do not think so; it pained me sometimes to feel that my master treated her like a shameful secret, issuing hasty instructions to hide her when some guest paid a visit. But in those moments, when I would gather her soft whiteness into my arms and, with the greatest ease since she weighed so little, convey her to Kokoschka's rooms and secrete her in a closet, where I soon set up a little chair and blanket so that she would not have to lie limp on the floor; in those moments, I would take pleasure in keeping Alma to myself. I would look down into those marble-like eyes and feel that I was keeping her safe. This may have been at my master's command, it is true, but was it not also true that he was then obliged to greet his guest alone, unaccompanied, far from Alma's loveliness, while I was free to sit with her, holding her hand, teasing garments over her arms and head, making her yet more beautiful? I wondered if he ever wished he could appear in public with her on his arm, and feel the flush of pride that must surely overcome his anxieties about the prying eyes of strange men. But Kokoschka and Alma met only behind closed doors. She sat with him at the dinner table, her posture impeccable, her manners dignified; then, later, she would lie beside him in his bed, the two of them each as still as the other, like a pair of embarrassed teenage lovers. Under the covers, their bodies made the same outline. But it was I who had carefully pulled the straps of the brassiere over her arms and shoulders; I who had nudged, with the greatest discretion, a small slip of black lace over the mound of hair between her legs; I who had laid her in the bed.
Kokoschka entrusted me with putting about the rumour that this new Alma was accompanying him to the opera, to soirées, to the coffee houses, like Olympia in the tale of Hoffmann. Indeed, I believe he wished, by the spread of this rumour, to be thought Romantic, mad for love in a way that proved he was an artist, because he was, like those fairytale heroes, so intent on the pursuit of an ideal beauty that he did not care whether those around him did not believe his beloved was real. The rumour was easily kept up - I had only to tell it to fellow servants whose masters and mistresses did not move in the same circles, so as to be sure that those who might see Kokoschka at the opera, alone, would not attempt to verify what they had heard with those who might see Kokoschka at the coffee house, alone. For he was always alone: the rumour was only a rumour. The only time Kokoschka and Alma appeared together was in his paintings.
These Kokoschka produced with an almost maniac speed and frequency, working with a zeal I had not seen since he had come to Dresden. "I paint so much because I have no child," he told me one day. I supposed, now, he did have one, of a kind. I knew that the old Alma, the real Alma, however you like to put it, had featured again and again in his work, much of which had travelled to Dresden with him. One painting, which he called 'Bride of the Wind', was mounted above the bed; in its centre, fugitives from the swirling storm of colour, were the interlocking lines of Kokoschka and Alma. Looking at it daily, I quickly began to feel that the painting's energy came not from the threat that the storm would swallow up the lovers, but from their heartbeats, which gave life to the whole composition, flinging the paint around them in droves. I could see that that was how Kokoschka thought of it: his love the centripetal force that created the world, and, too, the point to which all eyes are helplessly drawn. It was a nice idea, if as spurious as the rumours I was helping to spread about his eccentricities.
The curious thing was that his paintings of the new Alma looked hardly different to those of the old one. No viewer could have guessed, as I knew, that this Alma had to be propped on the chair at a very particular angle or else her torso would collapse in on itself; that her feet, when I held her aloft, made a clack-clack sound as they knocked against each other; that her opalescent skin was actually an inverted quilt, its feathers showing on the outside in silky profusion. None would have dared accuse her, any more than her predecessor at least, of seeming like an automaton under his gaze. They were exactly the same - and this was exactly what Kokoschka had wanted. The only difference was that he allowed himself, now that his dream of possession seemed to be materialising, greater licence in the visions he projected onto the canvases. In one, he sits beside her, a hand on her knee, opening wide her private parts, another hand pointing towards what ought not to be seen. She stares not out of the frame but into a middle distance that exists only for her, her face fixed in absolute submission. She is powerless to stop him showing the viewer what they really ought not to see. Some might say this is because she has no soul. But I know this is not so. I know better; I know my Alma.
It was not possible to keep at bay people's curiosity about Kokoschka's companion; before long I lost control of the rumours I was spreading, and we found visitors at the doorstep asking to see her. She began to receive invitations to pay social visits. This made my master more and more anxious; sketches of her flew out from under his hands with a now paranoiac velocity, but he kept her resolutely away from alien eyes, trusting only me. One day, however, the doctor who was overseeing his recovery heard tell of his public appearances with an extraordinarily beautiful woman at his side, and he asked Kokoschka if he might meet her. I do not know why my master agreed: but I am glad he did, for the little party we had that evening gave me my first sight of Alma's true soul.
We congregated at the fireside in the doctor's drawing room. I was to serve the cocoa and bring in various cakes and pastries from the kitchen, but once this was done, I was permitted to stay; and so we sat, the four of us, I on one armchair, the doctor on another, my master on a sofa with his arm around Alma, draped as if casually, but in truth, I knew, holding her upright from behind. He had not ben able to seat her properly on the sofa's cushion, and she was at risk of falling face-down, perhaps even tumbling headfirst onto the hearth. In spite of this, all of us were perfectly serene, and made light conversation as if the presence of this creature were the most ordinary thing in the world. I suspect Kokoschka kept up this pretence so that the doctor might be awed by the artist's wayward genius: a taunt in the face of the rational man of medicine. Myself, I had no wish to disrupt the scene, to alert anyone in any way to its oddness, because to remain thus was to look upon Alma's face, its pleasing, placid proportions, for longer. I do not know why the doctor colluded in the fantasy of the scene. In any case, he soon brought matters to a different pass when he stood up, clapped his hands against his thighs, and announced that we ought to have some music. He crossed to the piano in the corner of the room and began to play a transcription of a Lied I had heard somewhere before, some years ago. After a few, unsettled bars of introduction, he began to sing, and I recognised it as that unsteady, uncertain half-lament by Gustav Mahler, whose words run:
I often think that they have just stepped out
And that they will be coming home soon.
The day is fine, don't be worried,
They've just gone for a long walk.
Yes indeed, they have just stepped out,
And now they are making their way home.
Don't be worried, the day is fine.
They have simply made a journey to those hills.
They have just gone out ahead of us,
And they will not be coming home again.
We'll go to meet them on those hills,
In the sunlight, the day is fine
On those hills.
Playing and singing with his back to us, the doctor did not notice anything untoward. Indeed, when he came to face us and to ask what we might like to hear next, he betrayed no signs of recognition. But I - of course, I had not taken my eyes off Alma for the duration of the song, and so I saw it all, as did Kokoschka. I could not have been sure, at first, what was happening; in the song's first verse, as the melody meanders despairingly over familiar ground, all I could say for certain was that a flush was entering Alma's cheeks. To say that I became aware of another heartbeat in the room with us, the breath of another in the air, the just palpable twinges of a hand or a shoulder, might be put down to the strange feeling of outside presence that music often instils in us; but it was not that. It was Alma. As the doctor's voice swelled, rising and falling, rising again and falling again, her shoulders began to lift, so that Kokoschka's hand - until now so proprietorially placed - slipped off her. The bow-like lips opened, not with a wrench or a drop, but merely a natural parting, and she began - I could have sworn it - to make a soundless imitation of the words the doctor was singing. This seemed to cost her no effort; there was no evidence, as sometimes with singers (as, indeed, I noticed when I first heard the Kindertotenlieder), of the difficulty of paying attention to pitch, tone, breath, and words, all at once. Perhaps this was because she was making no sound. And yet the sight of her was so enthralling, went so directly to my senses, that it almost felt as if - impossibly - the doctor's singing were really coming from her.
Kokoschka's eyes glazed over in wonder; my own, I suppose, may have been the same. When the tempest subsided, when the doctor's fingers slowed their pressing on the keys and finally stopped, the colour left Alma's cheeks, her mouth closed as peacefully as it had opened, and she sat gazing as before at the mantelpiece, hands folded in her lap. I watched as my master laid his hands over hers, a desperate clutching gesture that might have shown a desire to hold and cover her between her legs, or to feel, perhaps, some sign of blood flowing into those dainty fingers. I would not have held her like that: I wanted no further sign that she really was, inside and out, the wondrous beauty we believed her to be.
Of course I felt sorry for him. It would be hard to say which wounds he was more truly recovering from at that time: those of the war or those of his affair with Alma. But I would not have acted that way. What he did to her was not love: not in the beginning, middle, nor end. His recognition that she was alive did not prompt him to ask for her love in return for his, only to offer his own with more and more force.
That is the only way I can make sense of what I found him doing one morning, a few weeks after the incident of the doctor's song. Approaching Kokoschka'a room with a coffee tray, I heard a noise, certainly human, but unheard in this room until now: a series of staggering, laboured exhalations, with no real beginning nor end, just shuddering one into another. I cannot be blamed for opening the door, though with much more care than usual, pushing it only very slightly, setting down the tray in the corridor and slipping silently into the room. The bed faced the door; I could see 'Bride of the Wind' above the headboard, wearing an aspect of unprecedented stillness. For, below it, on the bed, Kokoschka's body was moving in puppet-like contortions, his hips seeming to plunge again and again into the folds of the quilt. But it was not the quilt. From my position in the doorway, I could just about see the repeated rise and fall of Alma's head on the pillow, staring upwards impassively, more storm-tossed - I began to realise - than her avatar in the painting. Kokoschka gasped; he panted; at one point, his arms buckled and his knees slipped, and he struggled to regain his position. He reached down with his hand and pulled his cock out of his pants; I suppose he might have liked her to do this for him, but her own hands lay limp, palms facing upwards, on either side of her body. Beads of sweat appeared on his forehead and I guessed he had been trying to make something happen for some time now.
It was when Kokoschka crept upwards to the pillow, bringing his cock closer to that pleasure-set face, that I thought of what to do, recalling, as I saw his pink flesh, a similar flush of pink I had recently seen. As quietly as in could, I hummed the opening bars of the Mahler Lied, approximating its uneasy swell of strings with my tongue and throat. Nothing happened; Kokoschka, hearing nothing, remained poised at Alma's head. I tried the opening bars again, louder this time. Now her eyes seemed to grow wider, as if in recognition of a forgotten duty; her mouth flew open, and she sang, in tones impossibly deep yet surpassingly beautiful:
I often think that they have just stepped out
And that they will be coming home soon...
At this, Kokoschka fell back in alarm. He turned away his head, as if he could not bear to even look at the vivid creature before him, and lay curled in a ball at her feet. Taking my opportunity, now that he was not looking, I stole into the room and stood by the bed. Still Alma sang, until she had exhausted the first verse, and landing on its final line, "they've just gone for a long walk," with cautious indecision, she gently shut her mouth. I drank it all in, sight and sound, like one dying of thirst. I whispered: "I am at your service body and soul - dispose of me."
I know that Kokoschka will have thought I was whispering to him. Since we had shared the discovery of Alma's soul that evening with the doctor, we had exchanged many private looks which I am sure my master took as evidence of my growing obsession with him, for who could not be obsessed with the tortured artist whose beautiful creature has really and truly come to life? But my looks, and my words, were for Alma alone, and I know she heard me. She kept answering my call. Again and again, I would hum those opening bars by Mahler, and she would answer me with those swan-like tones.
I took to doing it when I felt most need to remind Kokoschka that the girl he thought he was touching, caressing, fondling was a woman with a soul. I grew tired of the way his hand sat at the nape of her neck, wrenching her spine straight, so that she might look directly at the doctor or the butler, the only men she was permitted to be seen by. I grew tired of the way his other hand, in those moments, would creep, very slowly, while the conversation went on, towards her private area. All three men would continue to look at each other's faces as if nothing were out of the ordinary, occasionally glancing at Alma: but of course there seemed to be no cause for alarm, for her expression never changed. They might go on with their discussion as if she were barely there, as present as the sofa or the piano, or me.
At these moments, I would begin to hum under my breath, and watch as the colour suffused Alma's lily-white cheeks. Strange though it may sound, neither the doctor nor the butler ever seemed to notice my humming, and they did not bat an eyelid when Alma opened her mouth and poured forth her soul. It was as if we were, both of us, so imperceptible to them that even this impossible display, half mastery, half magic, passed them by. Only Kokoschka noticed. His eyes widened; his lower lip began to tremble; his hand shook and fell down her back, a collapse that sent both him and Alma into convulsions; he turned away. He always turned away, every time.
"Hulda, there is something curious about Alma," he began one day in the studio. She was doubly before us, propped on a stool and appearing on the canvas. "I do not know if - perhaps it is just my fancy -"
I waited for him to find the words. But he could not; he only plied the canvas with more and more paint, its thick splodges of red and pink turning to brown as he layered more and more paint on top, until the whole thing - as he kept beginning again, saying, "Do you ever think that," and, "Could it be possible," and, "Oh, it is surely only" - the whole thing became a mass of indiscriminate shades and textures, seeming almost to move, to ooze around the canvas as though each ounce of paint were vying for space within its four corners.
"Is there anything you wish me to do differently with her, sir?"
Kokoschka faced me, turning his back on Alma and the painting, and raised his eyes heavenwards. "Look at this painting, Hulda. What does it say to you?"
I did not think it prudent to answer. Thankfully, he gave me little chance, pausing only for an exasperated exhale.
"That I am cured of my passion!" he exclaimed. "Do you see? I must have drawn and painted her a hundred times, and now - now this is all I see. It is because that restless passion has finally ceased steering my hand. Look at it - it is inanimate - it answers no longer to the hunger of my eyes and heart. For I look at her now -" he turned, his shoulders drooping; a note of despondency entered his voice - "and see nothing, feel nothing. I have longed for this day."
I would not have thought, to hear his voice, that the death of his love was a source of triumph for him. Indeed, I did not believe it. No; he was scared, knowing his Alma lived, and seeing that she loved another.
"We must celebrate," he went on, though I could detect no hint of celebration in his voice, "all the world must know that I am cured. They will see her and they will know. We will throw a party, Hulda."
"Of course, sir."
Was I wrong to collude with him in this? I may have been selfish in encouraging his belief that he was cured and must therefore display, before all the world, what they would surely recognise as an ongoing affliction; but my motivation lay in his declaring that we, and not just he, must throw the party. This was to be my chance, too. Kokoschka was not cured, but had turned away from Alma, leaving her to be with me at last. The guests would see us, together, no longer hidden behind our master, but living for love of each other.
I dressed her in the finest clothes I could find, clothes she had never yet worn, that Kokoschka had lavished on her when she first arrived and had forgotten about. I suppose he liked her better unclothed, but not I; it was I, after all, who took her every morning into the closet and selected what she would wear, even if it be only a plain white slip, pulling it over her head and gently patting it down. It was I, that late afternoon, who held up to the dying light a gown of richest scarlet and knew this was what she must wear. It was silk; it brought out a shine in her whiteness that I had never seen before, as if she were glowing with some inner light. I knew the guests would see it too.
We watched from the window in the closet as they arrived, various artists from Dresden, the doctor, friends of the doctor, mostly men attired unfussily in short black jackets, white shirts, and grey trousers. Kokoschka stood in the doorway, greeting each of them animatedly, striking them presumably as the very picture of good health. It was a testament to the great doctor's work: the shellshocked soldier was a great artist once again. As the sound of light piano music floated up to our refuge, I thought of the song that was really in Kokoschka's head, and how it had brought us to where we were now. Soon we would step out among the crowd; Kokoschka, I knew, could no longer even look at Alma; it would be for the others to see that she lived, and that she was mine.
I waited and waited to be called, knowing the party guests would be burning with curiosity to see the companion of Kokoschka's about whom they had heard so much; but no one disturbed our solitude. Perhaps it was my own burning with curiosity which precipitated the disaster. I only know that I felt it was right to show these men who were going about patting my master on the back, shaking the hand which had spent so many hours daubing blotches of paint onto vacant canvases which soon became Alma, that she was really here, a thing of living, moving beauty. I took one of her tiny white hands in mine, and with my other arm reached around her back and lifted her. The red silk caught the lights at the top of the staircase; all was a bright, shining miasma of red and gold. I knew then that they must all have seen us, though I could not see them, only advanced, hand in hand with my love, down the stairs and into the light.
A hand shot through the gold and she was gone. My Alma, so vivid, so glowing, was no longer at my side. I could not see what was happening, only a blur of dazed faces turning to look at me and then turning away again. Then I heard the front door shut with a thud: I knew it was really a knell. I ran to a window that overlooked the front courtyard, feverishly humming the Mahler tune, but it was too late. She could not hear me, deaf and dumb out there in the cold, looking helplessly into the crazed eyes of her master. Steadying her with one hand, he held a half-empty wine glass in the other; with a whirl of drunken abandon, he brought the glass crashing down on her head, sending spurts of red droplets onto the white ground. Alma's head lolled forward, the force of the blow having broken her delicate little neck. I sang and sang, but there was no way she could have heard me now. I do not know what the party guests made of it; perhaps they imagined I was singing her a funeral dirge. For, as we all stood watching from the window, Kokoschka took a swift glance at the now jagged shard of glass he was wielding, and with mad decision, swiped it through the air. Her neck could not take it, it was so small, so ornately stitched together. It gave in at the first blow. Her head slipped backwards and toppled to the ground, resting in a little pool of red wine. I stopped singing and began to scream.
I do not know what Kokoschka did next, nor how and when the guests dispersed. I did not see anything until early the next morning, when a couple of uniformed men appeared outside amidst the white, and stood over the patch of red. Their dark forms stood out, sharp and upright, against the soft mass of fabric and feathery sinew at their feet. I knew suddenly that they would make the wrong conclusion about the sorry scene: I must save her, must do this one last thing for her.
I rushed outside as one policeman said to the other: "I heard they're treating the war wounded here - maybe one of them escaped - they can be volatile, you know."
The other tutted. "I wonder who she was. Not bad to look at - not all that old. A shame."
"It is not how it looks," I said, kneeling on the frosty ground and lifting the body ever so slightly. "It is not human flesh. You see?" I gently pressed a hand on her stomach. "She is not made of human skin. She is a swan!"
They thought me mad, but I must save her.
"It was my master, Herr Kokoschka, who did this, last night, at a party. You see for yourself the shard from his wine glass! I will take care of the matter. He is no murderer; he is an artist."
One of the policemen nodded. The other brought out slowly: "Very well. We had to check. You see how this looks - most queer. Most queer indeed."
"Of course, of course. To tell you the truth, I will be leaving his service immediately - there is only so much eccentricity one can stand."
And I did tell the truth. As the policemen turned and left, I took Alma's head in my arms, bundled it inside my overcoat, and left the doctor's house and Kokoschka forever. I did not look back.
Only sometimes, as I lie on the hard steel-frame bed in the modest room I have found for myself, I fancy I can hear a sound, clear and pure, issuing through the bundle of blankets in which Alma's head now rests. The room is still, I am silent, and yet there it is, hesitant at first, then swooping towards certainty:
The day is fine, don't be worried,
They've just gone for a long walk.
Yes indeed...
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