PAINT THE WIND

Part One

Vienna

1895 – 1899 

Chapter One

The first time Andreas Brenner painted me, I was fifteen.

I sat in stillness, speaking not a word, my hands folded carefully like the schoolgirl I still was, and I watched him.  His brushstrokes on the canvas were like a caress; his eyes, studying my own, seemed to be searching for something more than shape or color or the length of my very dark lashes.  Later, much later, he told me that it was my soul he was seeking.  The genius in capturing a likeness that causes onlookers to say “But that is exactly how she looks!” is not in the angle of the cheekbone or the curve of the lower lip.  The true great portraitist knows that he must plunge below the surface of the flesh and paint from within.

But I knew none of that then.  As I said, I was a schoolgirl, my parents’ only daughter and subject to their wishes.  My father, the Greek merchant Kostas Sircos, was intent on making his mark on the Viennese society into which he had married.  On the walls of the elegant homes he had supplied with priceless antiquities, Persian carpets and Indian chests carved with peacocks and amaranth, my father noted the portraits: thin-lipped ancestors in powdered wigs; innocent children in impossible outfits frolicking with small dogs; plump, satisfied wives displaying a ruby brooch or sapphire earrings.

A portrait, my father decided, was one of those possessions that signaled status.  He commissioned Andreas Brenner on the advice of the opera singer Magdalena Viktor, a recent client.  She had been ecstatic with the results of the work by the young Brenner.  Although still in his twenties, Brenner had the sight and the hand of a much more experienced artist, she told my father.

Had my father listened carefully to the nuances of Madam Viktor’s praise, he might have recognized the danger of inviting the young artist to paint me.  Until the moment he walked into our home carrying his easel, a stretched and gessoed, canvas and a battered wooden box of oils, I had been a naïf, unaware and untouched.  I had not known hunger of any kind.  I did not know what it meant to be consumed by need.

Perhaps my father thought, as many fathers do, that I was still a child.  He was a shrewd businessman, and it may have suited him to hire Brenner because, despite his talent, his price was well below the older established portraitists in Vienna.  Whatever my father’s reasons, accidental or intended, his choice of Brenner to paint my portrait changed my life.

In the weeks leading up to his arrival my mother sorted and fussed through her wardrobe and mine (Brenner had been commissioned to paint us both on separate canvasses).  I have inherited my father’s black hair and olive-tinged complexion and my mother’s blue eyes.  “Aegean blue” is how my father described them the first time he met my mother, Marie-Therese Cronberg, at sunset on the steps of the temple at Sounion, where she had sprained her ankle in a fall and he, a young Greek in a linen suit, had carried her to safety.

“You must wear a dress the color of the Aegean,” my mother had decided as she rifled through my armoire, fingering the fine cloth that had adorned me on special occasions – Christmas Eve at my grandparents’ house on Elizabethstrasse, my confirmation, various excursions to matinee performances of the ballet and the opera.  But none was Aegean blue.  So, with my father’s blessing, we made an appointment with my grandmother’s dressmaker and set about the city on a hunt for silk the color of my eyes.  When we found it, my mother was ecstatic and I felt quite grown up to have so much attention paid to how I would appear in the portrait.  In retrospect, my parents could have spared the cost of the new dress and simply instructed Brenner to give whatever I was wearing in life the color blue in the painting.

My father, certainly, was no stranger to masking whatever was plain or ugly or unsatisfactory in reality and creating the illusion of beauty.  But it seemed important to my parents that the dress indeed be blue, and blue it was.

Overcome with self-importance, I was disappointed that the style of the dress did not match my vision of what a young girl would wear for her first portrait.  I was thinking John Singer Sargent’s Madame X and my parents were holding in their mind’s eye Mary Cassatt’s Francoise in Green.

The dress was demure, with long sleeves and a neckline that revealed only my collarbone.  I pouted and begged my mother for a more sophisticated dress; I even whispered to the dressmaker to cut the neckline lower; but neither of them would bend.

I didn’t want to be immortalized as a child, but had only a vague idea of how to portray myself as a woman.  As a result, I was uncomfortable and sullen when Brenner entered our home and set up his easel in our music room, where the northern light filtered through two tall windows.

He spoke only briefly to me, directing me to a chair he had positioned at an angle to the windows.  Once I was seated he studied me for a few moments and then approached me.

“Tilt your head slightly to the left, like this.”  And he reached for my chin with his hand.  His fingertips were rough, calloused and smelled of turpentine.  One of his nails was chipped and the skin on the hand that held his brushes was crazed with lines of color – magenta, burnt umber, cerulean.

My nose grew accustomed to the odors that permeated even the fibers of his shirt and the strands of his hair that fell across his forehead when he leaned toward me to adjust the collar of my dress or straighten my shoulders.

I was used to the robust affection of my father’s embrace—strong enough to carry my mother down the cliff of Sounion or lift me in one swoop onto a carousel horse at the Prater.  Brenner’s touch was at once both professional and intimate.  He did nothing that even raised an eyebrow from my mother, sitting with her embroidery in a corner of the room.  But each time he touched me it was as if he were a blind man confronted by the unfamiliar and tracing it with his fingertips to identify it.

And I found myself leaning into his touch, longing to be identified.  To be seen and interpreted by an artist is not the same as standing in front of a mirror and receiving its unfiltered reflection.  I was curious to learn who he was seeing.

“Smile just a little, Maya,” my mother prompted me from the corner.  “This isn’t the dentist.”

But I was still resentful about the dress and besides, thought that smiling was for children, enticed by the promise of an ice cream if they behave.  I wasn’t eager to smile for my mother.

If Andreas Brenner had asked me to smile, however, I would have complied in an instant.  But he did not.  In fact, at my mother’s remark, he caught my eye with his and shook his head in a gesture so subtle it was clearly meant only for me—a secret passed between us in plain sight.  From that point on I trusted him to see me not as a child to be coaxed but as a young woman meeting his gaze as an equal.

That first morning was exhausting.  Sitting still for any length of time has never been my habit.  When we visited my father’s parents on the island of Skiathos I ran barefoot on the beach, stopping only to pick up a wave-polished stone or a shard of amber-hued conch shell.  I climbed pine-covered hills with my father, thrusting my walking stick into the dusty earth.  Even in Vienna, I preferred to walk to school rather than take the trolley, and was happiest in the kitchen with our cook Gertraud, my braids pinned around my head, my sleeves rolled up and a mound of dough on a marble slab awaiting my vigorous pounding.

I was far from the kitchen and the beach in our music room, stiff in my chair.  But then Brenner asked me, “Where would you most like to be right now?  Don’t answer me out loud; just go there in your head.”

I nodded in understanding and chose my summers in Greece.  Other Viennese daughters might have images of the Botanical Garden or the Danube to entertain them while they sat staring at a spot on the wallpaper.  But only I had the stone houses of Skiathos with their whitewashed stoops and bougainvillea climbing over blue doorways; the olive trees in my grandfather’s orchard, bent from centuries of clinging to the hillsides; the harbor teeming with vessels; the dockside raucous with tavernas spilling onto the sidewalks and serving ouzo and crisply fried anchovies.

Brenner seemed to approve of my choice of reverie, because he nodded and threw himself once again into transferring what he saw onto his waiting canvas.

When the session was over he covered the canvas with a cloth.  I wanted a glimpse, but he refused.  An unfinished work should not be viewed prematurely, he told us.  It led to disappointment or false expectations.  Later, he reassured us, we would have time to absorb what he had created.  He asked my mother if there were a cupboard where the canvas could be stored under lock and key, and she led him to one in the hallway.

I was disappointed, my vanity unsatisfied, my curiosity thwarted.  I was impatient for Brenner to return.

Each morning I devoured my brӧtchen and coffee in the kitchen, not waiting to breakfast with my parents, and then spent an hour dressing for Brenner.  That is how I came to think of it.  Not dressing for my portrait, but for him.  Something happened to me when I entered the music room and he was waiting at the easel.  At times he was industrious, blending colors from the white metal tubes in his box.  But just as often I would find him perched on the red wooden stool my mother had had brought up from the basement, his arms folded across his chest, and staring at—no, studying—the face on the canvas that he would not let me see.

At those moments I waited quietly in the doorway, a part of me respecting the artist at work and not wishing to disturb; but another part studying his face as intently as he did mine.  I was looking for something—a glimmer of admiration for my unusual beauty; a sign that he was waiting for me with as much anticipation as I counted the hours until he reappeared.

When he looked up and saw me, he held my gaze, swallowing me whole, measuring the flesh-and-blood face standing before him with the one on the canvas.  He nodded—in greeting or in agreement that the two images coincided wasn’t always clear.  Was he pleased to see me, or pleased that his work was achieving its end?

I took my accustomed place and basked for the next two hours in his attention.  He seemed to be attuned to my thoughts.  When my energy flagged he sensed it in my posture or my wandering eye and called me back to the present with a joke or the suggestion of a sip of tea.  If a hair was astray and distracting, he approached and smoothed it away.  His touch, at first soothing, interesting, now made me flinch—not from pain or displeasure, but from an excitement that I’d never before experienced.  His finger grazed my ear as he tucked the curl behind it and I felt the touch reverberate throughout my body.

I wondered when he looked at me if he could see what was unfolding within me, the discovery I was making of how it felt to be seen—truly seen—by a man.  It wasn’t uncomfortable, but it was something I wished to keep hidden—f rom my mother definitely, but also from him.

I didn’t think of it as forbidden, but it was not something I wished to share.  It was too new, too fragile, too precious.

But it suffused me, warmed me in ways Brenner must have seen.  When he suggested once again that I go in my mind to where I truly wanted to be, I did not go to Skiathos.  I went, instead, into his arms.

I sat for Brenner every morning of my entire fall school holiday.  In the afternoons, when I normally would have been sipping hot chocolate and gossiping with my girlfriends at Café Sacher, reveling in our freedom from algebra and Latin and the rigid expectations of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Sion, I sat instead in the music room and watched Brenner as he painted my mother.

“You don’t have to stay,” my mother assured me.

“It’s fine,” I told her.  “Sister Marie assigned us a book to read over Ferien.  It’s a quiet time to get it finished.”

So I paged through the task, barely comprehending what I was reading.  Instead, I studied Brenner when he wasn’t focused on me.  The second afternoon I tucked a few sheets of sketching paper into my book and, while my mother assumed I was conscientiously taking notes, I roughed out in soft charcoal the lines and planes of what had become for me such a compelling face.

Later that night I tacked the drawing to the side of my night table so that with my head on my pillow and my face turned toward it, it was exactly in my line of sight and the last thing I saw before I drifted off to sleep.