‘I was wondering, please,’ she said, lifting her small case up to the counter, ‘if you could possibly offer advice on how best to print facsimiles of these.’
On closer inspection, the suitcase looked both as if it was made out of paper and as if it was the most expensive piece of luggage George had ever seen. She opened it, undoing small leather straps, and pulled out a stack of large card tiles, each roughly A5-sized and each one black, similar to some of the ones George used for his own book-cut creations.
She set five of them down, one by one, in front of George.
They were pictures, evidently her own work from the way she regarded them, that odd artist’s combination of shy and bold, so expectant of a reaction, good or bad. On one level, they were nothing more than pictures of beautiful things placed against the background of a card. But on further viewing, on a deeper look . . .
Good Lord.
One was a watermill, but nothing nearly so twee as ‘watermill’ suggested. A watermill that seemed to be almost turning from the brook that ran through it, a watermill that existed not in fancy but somewhere specific in the world, a real watermill, a true watermill, near which the great and terrible tragedies of life might have recently happened. And yet also merely a watermill, too, and pretty with it.
There was a dragon in the next one, partially Chinese in style but with the wings of European myth, caught in mid-flight, its eye staring back at the viewer in malevolent mischief. Like the watermill, it was on the border of kitsch, of the sort of tourist tat you could buy for next to nothing from a street vendor. But it didn’t cross that border. This dragon was the one those fake dragons dreamed of being, the meaty, heavy, living, breathing animal behind the myth. This dragon might bite you. This dragon might eat you.
The others were the same, so near easy vulgarity, yet so clearly not. A phoenix rising from the bud of a flower. A stampede of horses cascading down a hill. The cheek and neck of a woman looking away from the artist.
They should have looked cheap. They should have looked tacky and home-made. They should have looked like the worst kind of car boot sale rubbish, the work of a plump, hopeless woman with no other options than an early death by drink.
But these. These were breathtaking.
And what tumbled George’s heart, what made his stomach feel as if he’d swallowed a fluttering balloon, was that they weren’t drawings or carvings or paintings or watercolours.
They were cuttings. Each was made with what looked like slices of an impossible array of feathers.
‘These are . . .’ George said, unable to think of exactly what to say, so he simply said it again. ‘These are . . .’
‘They are not quite there yet, I know,’ Kumiko said. ‘They lack something. But they are mine.’
She seemed to hesitate in the face of George’s intense consideration of the pictures. He looked at them as if he were a kidnap victim and they were his long-sought ransom. He felt as if he was losing his balance, as if vertigo had given his ears a thump, and he raised his hands to steady himself on the counter.
‘Oh!’ Kumiko said, and he saw her smiling down at his left hand.
There was his own cutting, utterly dismal, painfully amateur in comparison, still gripped in the hand that had tried to hide it from Mehmet. He moved to hide it again, but her eyes were already on it, and they weren’t scornful, weren’t mocking.
They were delighted.
‘You’ve made a crane,’ she said.
She was from ‘all over’, she said when he asked her over dinner that night, and had been a sort of teacher. Overseas. In developing countries.
‘It sounds noble,’ she said. ‘I do not want it to sound like that. Like some great woman offering her services to poor, adoring unfortunates. Not at all. It was not like that. It was like . . .’
She trailed off, looking into the dark wood panelling that overpowered the ceilings and the walls. For reasons he couldn’t fathom, George had taken her to a self-consciously old-fashioned ‘English’ restaurant, such as men in morning suits might have eaten at anywhere from 1780 to 1965. A small sign above the door read ‘Est 1997’. He’d been surprised she’d accepted his invitation, surprised she’d been free at no notice whatsoever, but she said she was new to this place and not, at the moment, overflowing with friends.
She’d used that word. Overflowing.
‘The teaching,’ she said, furrowing her brow, ‘the interaction, I should say, was like a hello and a goodbye, all at once, every day. Do you know what I mean?’
‘Not even a little,’ George said. She spoke in an accent he couldn’t place. French? French/Russian? Spanish/Maltese? South African/Nepalese/Canadian? But also English, and possibly Japanese like her name but also neither or any, as if every place she may have travelled hadn’t wanted her to leave and insinuated itself into her voice as a way of forcing her to take it along. He could understand the feeling.
She laughed at him, but nicely. ‘I do not like talking of myself so much. Let it be enough that I have lived and changed and been changed. Just like everyone else.’
‘I can’t ever imagine you’d need changing.’
She pushed some roast beef around her plate without eating it. ‘I believe you mean what you say, George.’
‘That was too much. I’m sorry.’
‘And I believe that, too.’
She’d had a relationship, perhaps even a marriage, that had ended at some point, though it didn’t seem amicably so, like his had with Clare. She didn’t want to talk about that either. ‘The past is always filled with both joy and pain, which are private and perhaps not first date conversation.’
He’d been so pleased she’d called it a ‘first date’ that he missed several of her next sentences.
‘But you, now, George,’ she said. ‘You are not from here, are you?’
‘No,’ he said, surprised. ‘I’m–’
‘American.’ She leant back in her chair. ‘So you perhaps do not quite belong either, do you?’
She said she’d taken up the cuttings on her travels. Paints and brushes were too hard and too expensive to truck around from place to place, so she’d first started using local fabrics – batiks or weaves or whatever was to hand – and had moved, more or less by chance, to feathers, after coming across a market stall in Paramaribo or Vientiane or Quito or Shangri-La perhaps, that sold every colour of feather you could imagine and beyond, some concoctions so unlikely they hardly seemed to have come from an animal at all.