Sky filled two-thirds of the big canvas, some blue but most of it covered in masses of dark-gray clouds. The bottom third offered a vast landscape, deep shadows in the foreground, dark woods in the background, and in the middle a sunny patch of meadow through which a dirt road curved. A lone man and a woman with child walked the road. Beyond the trees, all but invisible, a shepherd herded sheep.
I said, “It makes me feel sad and happy at the same time. The people are so tiny and the world’s so big.”
“The people in Ruisdael’s landscapes are always tiny,” Amalia said. “Why do you think you feel both sad and happy?”
“Well, I don’t know. It’s like … they’re so tiny, they could be crushed like bugs. By lightning, you know, or anything. That’s sad.”
“Unless they’re bastards,” Malcolm said, “then good riddance.”
“My lovely brother, shut up,” Amalia said sweetly.
I continued, “But then all around them, it’s so beautiful, see, the sky and the woods and the meadow and everything. I feel happy for them being in such a beautiful place.” I looked up at Amalia, and she smiled, and I said, “Did that sound stupid?”
“Not at all, Jonah. We both know who’s king of stupid today.”
Malcolm said, “I will utter something in a minute or two, and it’ll be so clever, you’ll be devastated.”
We came next to a painting almost as beautiful as Girl with the Red Hat, but as I studied it, disquiet crept into me and soon evolved into fear that made me tremble.
63
When Dr. Jubal Mace-Maskil apparently escaped into the day without broadsiding another vehicle, Mrs. Nozawa returned to her office at the back of the dry-cleaning shop. After considering the friends to whom she might go for information, she put in a call to Irinka Vavilov. Irinka and her husband, Andrei, had been musicians with the Moscow symphony when, in late 1939, they had defected while on tour in Norway and within a year had made their way to the United States. Andrei had died a year earlier, but Irinka, now fifty-five, still taught music history at the university.
Irinka had learned origami from Setsuko Nozawa and was always happy to hear from her. She knew Jubal Mace-Maskil, and she thought he was a swine. When she had first come to the university, he had made bold passes at her at faculty parties, even when Andrei was in the same room, even when Jubal’s wife, Noreen, stood mere feet away.
He’d become more aggressive after his wife died in 1962, and then in just the last two years, he had taken on a whole new persona, fancying himself the Che Guevara of Charleston, Illinois, obviously indulging in recreational drugs that would eventually get him fired or, more likely, forced into early retirement. Some people said he’d started to come apart after Noreen died, haunted by the cruel nature of her death, but Irinka didn’t believe Jubal had a capacity for deep empathy, not even regarding his wife.
How did Noreen die? Quite horribly. She’d gone to Arizona to visit her brother and his family. One evening, after everyone else had gone to bed, she sat outside alone by the pool, enjoying the warm desert evening. The next morning, she couldn’t be found. Her rental car no longer stood in the driveway. Police located it in a shopping-center parking lot and discovered Noreen’s body in the trunk. She’d been tied hand and foot and then been beaten to death with a hammer. No one was ever charged with the crime.
Did Jubal have an ironclad alibi? What an odd question. Most people thought of him as an intellectual faker and a hopeless pig, but no one would ever think him capable of murder. He was too much of a wimp, utterly gutless. As it happened, the week Noreen went to Arizona, Jubal had been chairing a three-day conference titled “The Cold War: Necessity or Contrivance?” There were ninety-two attendees from universities in sixteen states. He had put the whole thing together; and he was present throughout. Even his late-night hours were no doubt accounted for, considering that there were many women at the conference, all familiar with Jubal’s carefully crafted image, but none familiar with his reality. In fact, Noreen was killed on the final night of the event, which concluded with a party that lasted until after one in the morning—by which time she had been snatched and dispatched in faraway Scottsdale.
By Mrs. Nozawa’s calculation, Lucas Drackman, he of exceptional integrity and brilliance, had been a member of the junior class when Dr. Mace-Maskil had become a widower. It would be interesting to know if Noreen’s life had been covered by a large insurance policy or if she had possessed substantial assets, separate from her husband’s, that had passed to him through her will.
Mrs. Nozawa hoped Mr. Tamazaki of the Daily News would not ask her to investigate those two intriguing questions. Although she had enjoyed this little adventure, she harbored no desire to give up her entrepreneurial endeavors to become a gumshoe, which could be a most depressing occupation.
When Mrs. Nozawa said good-bye to Irinka and hung up the phone, Toshiro Mifune put his enormous head in her lap, and she stroked behind his ears. She told him that he was a good boy, the best boy ever, and that the world would be an immeasurably better place if people were more like dogs. As Labrador retrievers went, Toshiro was on the large size, but when properly motivated, he could purr.
64
The painting that chilled me to the marrow was beautiful, and all these years later I regard it as a masterpiece. The artist, Carel Fabritius, a Dutchman, might have been a pupil of Rembrandt’s. At thirty-two, he was blown to bits, along with all but a few of his paintings, when the gunpowder plant at Delft exploded in 1654 and leveled a third of the city.
This painting, quite small, was called The Goldfinch. It is said to be the greatest painting of an avian subject in that entire century. The backdrop is a sunlit wall, and on the wall hangs a feeding box, perhaps ten inches by six, on which the little bird perches. The finch is restricted to the box by a fine-link chain attached to one of its feet, a chain at most two feet in length, allowing it to test its wings and fly only to change its position on the box, condemning it to a markedly more limited and miserable existence than that of a parakeet in a large cage.
The cruelty of the finch’s captivity, its keeper’s thoughtless denial of its winged nature, tortures your heart if you have a heart capable of being tortured. But the bird’s circumstances were only one reason that the painting chilled me. The attitude of the bird—alert, its head raised and turned toward the viewer (in the world of the painting, toward its keeper), something in its posture that said it could be restrained but never broken by restraint—suggested stoic suffering that, if I dwelt on it too long, would reduce me to tears.
The bird’s circumstances and attitude were still not entirely what so affected me. What started me trembling was its right eye. In the painting, the left eye was shaded, but in the right glimmered a liquid drop of light, a simple bit of mastery that convinced me that this painted bird could indeed see. Its stare was direct but more than merely direct. Ther
e was a depth to the eye, as if not only the bird looked through that eye at its keeper, but as if all of nature looked and saw and knew the extreme cruelty of this imprisonment.
No, not just that.
Suddenly I knew what the painting meant to me, and I thought I knew what it had meant to the painter. Many who believe in God also believe that He is not merely the creator of all nature but is in all of nature, that He is everywhere with us, in some way beyond our easy comprehension, that He is acutely aware and caring. In the right eye of the goldfinch, I saw the bird gazing at his keeper, all of nature gazing, too, but also through that moist and feeling eye, the Maker of the keeper watched. Watched and saw and loved the keeper for his potential, but mourned his cruelty. Love and sorrow informed that eye, and it regarded me as surely as it regarded the keeper of the bird, saw me and knew the good and bad of me, knew my courage but also my cowardice, knew the lies I had told. I might not have been able to put all this into words then, as a confused boy of ten, but I understood: Like the bird, I was chained, and the links in the chain were my lies, so that I was both bird and keeper, chained and endangered by my own actions.
Amalia realized that I was trembling violently. “Jonah, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I don’t know. Nothing. I’m okay.”
“You’re shaking like a leaf.”