The Last Artist

The artist woke up in the morning and thought that he might be sick. Sometimes you wake up and think, "Something doesn’t feel right, something feels off. Maybe I’m sick." He opened only one eye; the other remained pressed against the pillow. That moment when it’s unclear how long you’ve slept—one hour or seven. It was early, and it was winter, when it’s still completely dark outside, and the blurred yellow-orange glow of streetlights spills through the windows. In the evening, this yellow-orange mixture from the lamps is pleasant, but in the morning… not so much.

The artist wanted to return to sleep again. It wasn’t that he’d had some wonderful dream—he just greedily wanted to snatch a few more hours from the yellow-orange light of night. He didn’t want to get up, turn on the light, and later, when leaving, turn off the light in the hallway. He didn’t want to go anywhere. He simply wanted to close his eyes again. And there once more, the old man in the green cloak with wings hunched over his back wandered along the shore of an azure ocean. In one hand, he carried a birdcage, and in the other, he held a fishing rod slung over his shoulder… It was no longer hot, but not yet cold, and the lazy sun of early autumn played with shadows and sounds among the feathers of the old man’s wings, carried by the breeze. Beside him, his dog walked calmly and lazily. Strangely, though, the dog was black. The dog’s coloring made it seem unfamiliar, and with that realization, an uncomfortable thought intruded into the artist’s mind: he had to go to dreary Warsaw, had to get up, pack, and press the button for the ground floor in the elevator, then sit in what was surely a freezing minibus. “I don’t like Warsaw,” flashed through his sleepy mind.

Just a moment before that winter, he hadn’t thought or guessed that there were refugee camps in the world, where there were social programs for integration with the locals, and other seemingly kind-hearted initiatives written by someone, somehow, for the benefit of depart-ees. Even a year ago, the artist would have laughed in the face of anyone who told him that this entire phantasmagoria would touch him personally. He would have twirled his finger near his temple—"You’re crazy!" But it turned out that life is a cheerful game, even if you’re howling from despair and sorrow, and all that awaits you is the universally familiar grandmother with her scythe—an outwardly gloomy show that must go on. And as a rule, those whom the show has never touched love to talk about how supposedly you can either find meaning or give purpose to this game—but no one really knows anything for sure.

He saw refugees for the first time that winter. They were docked at the Warsaw branch of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. They stood there, shuffling from foot to foot, muttering "Hyr-myrr" in their own languages… Nervously smoking cheap cigarettes—their mentality etched onto their faces like carvings in granite. Each one tried to cut in line, as if the reception desk had thrown out a stack of decisions, and whoever pushed through fastest would be granted refugee status! Polish officials squeezed through the crowd, but as if through something inanimate—they were used to it. A refugee is a refugee, and you need to get rid of them quickly because another refugee will arrive soon, file an asylum application, and then you’ll have to feed the poor soul, give them a room to sleep in, medical care… Meanwhile, your own "Panie" are dying in Warsaw’s underground tunnels! Sigh! But without refugees? Impossible! European subsidies, jobs, and this Polish “democracy” that everyone talks about so passionately, with smart whistles echoing in the spacious kitchen of a bureaucrat in Dolby Surround! You can’t do without all this. Absolutely not… It wouldn’t be European, and it wouldn’t even be Jewish, my dear friends, without those smelly, tired, grief-stricken, prematurely gray-haired depart-ees! As Polish folk wisdom says, without them, it would be neither here nor there, and it wouldn’t have hands or feet!

...He trudged through Warsaw with his wife toward the bus station. His wife pushed a stroller with their sleeping baby girl. Tired but happy—a young fairy from the department had told them that they would surely be granted political asylum. Of course. Very soon. And then that Polish bitch slyly asked, “Where do you live, hmm?”

The city was three hundred kilometers from Warsaw. The artist settled there with his family because fate had tossed them there. And fate had been kind. In this city, they met honest friends. These friends called themselves Christians. They told the artist and his wife to believe in God, saying that God was good. Their Christian friends offered them a place to stay until good ol’ God sorted everything out. So they stayed and waited.

They lived with a family of three. Tomek, the apartment owner, entertained the artist’s family by telling stories—or maybe parables—that invariably ended with some gentle, soft, and warm moral, like a fuzzy blanket. His wife, Danuta, spent most of her time in the kitchen, occupying nearly a third of it with her large frame, bustling around the stove while recounting the events of her life to the artist’s wife. Their son, Marcin, was calm and philosophical, like a boa constrictor, just beginning to reason correctly, as he believed, about earthly existence, relying on the Word of God, and strumming his thoughts on an electric guitar. Simplest simplicity—that was perhaps the most accurate description of their family. The artist noticed frequent pensiveness on Tomek’s face, always masked by a smile. Pleasant reflections. Everything else was laid out plainly on the table that Danuta set.

Tomek suggested applying for asylum because neither the artist nor his wife knew such a concept existed in the world—they had simply fled like characters in a hard-boiled spy thriller, and after escaping, they rested, looking lovingly at their newborn daughter, already born in Poland. Nearby was a sparse forest where they took walks with the stroller in silence. Silence, because every word led, like a zigzag, to an absolute unknown lurking ahead. How far ahead? After how many walks through this forest?.. An unknown that was silent and frightening, threatening to disrupt the fragile equilibrium.

“Beautiful sunset,” said the artist’s wife. “And such long shadows.”
“Yes, but it’s a bit chilly. Let’s go home. Well, sort of home,” he said with a smile.

Her name was Lilia. She had slightly Eastern features with huge gray-blue eyes. Slim and delicate, she walked to his left and saw his smile. The left side of it. The right side remained motionless, as if lost in its own thoughts. It wasn’t a smile—it was a smirk, crooked in profile. She didn’t notice. He tried not to show her that he had become inwardly gloomy over the past few months, though he occasionally forgot to suppress it. His gloominess was deeper inside, somewhere very deep, and he tried not to let it show on his face. But the forced smile came out crooked and ironic, and he lowered his head, realizing that such a smile couldn’t bring joy to those around him—it might even plant a vague suspicion of hypocrisy in people’s minds. He was hypocritical with this outward lack of sadness, choosing the lesser of two evils. He understood that he was only adding poison to the uneasy premonition of something bad. And often, with irony, he thought about the strange symbiosis of the bad and the unknown.

“Tomek probably won’t be able to support us for long, so we need to think about what to do,” he said quietly. And added, “There’s supposedly a refugee camp near Warsaw. Tomek already checked.” “Yes,” Lilia exhaled almost inaudibly.

Both of them cautiously tried to think, having been taught by life’s gentle lessons that hope is the mother of all fools, that the worst was already behind them, and surely a glimmer of light would appear ahead—the kind promised by a benevolent God to all who believe in Him. They didn’t speak aloud about how, upon arriving in Poland, they had run out of money and learned what hunger truly meant—not metaphorically, but literally and tangibly—where even a piece of bread could become an object of immense desire. They got through it. Before their escape, the artist’s grandmother had given his wife a gold ring with a ruby, though she never met Lilia. The grandmother could no longer walk due to the ravages of Mr. Parkinson. The ring was brought by the grandfather, who moved only by sheer force of will. This once enormous and strong grandfather of the artist had withered away from the cancer consuming him. He would soon die, following his wife shortly after, as befits a true officer—fulfilling all his final duties to her and not leaving her alone in death. And so, the ring saved them, shimmering and finding its rest in a Polish pawnshop—for the price of twenty loaves of bread. To their surprise, their daughter, who endured these hardships while nestled inside Lilia, was born healthy but cried with some dissatisfaction.

He asks himself why all this happened to them, still calling himself an artist, though the cursed refugee ordeal forever robbed him of any desire to paint. He sees billions of faces, as if half-listening to the question, then quickly growing dull and tuning into something else—stereo, news, neighbors…

This is the most devilishly difficult question: why? He didn’t know the answer. Perhaps the old man with the birdcage, wandering along the ocean shore, knew. But they felt like they were riding in a black cart along a well-worn track in some underground dungeon, where, no matter how hard you looked, the track remained invisible.

And as he drifted off to sleep, he somehow thought about people who endured torture in concentration camps, who died in wars… Many remained crippled for the rest of their lives, and he pitied them, consoling himself with the thought that their situation wasn’t nearly as terrifying and that everything would surely turn out fine because God is indeed good and kind, even if unseen by human eyes. And even if He doesn’t exist, it’s still better to believe that He does.

They attended a Polish non-Catholic church, where things felt lighter, where the air smelled of hope, and all difficulties seemed to dissolve for an hour and a half. There, they saw people who, without overthinking, simply believed in all the good and bright things that would happen specifically to them—if not in this life, then surely in the next. And it seemed to work out that way—some received blessings, others patiently waited. The artist, always curious and extremely skeptical, testing every theory a hundred times, understood one thing with a corner of his mind—it doesn’t matter whether it’s all true. It must become their truth if he wants to live. And so, he repeated to himself that he believed in the good and kind God—and he did believe. He even read the Bible twice. Skepticism, like medicine, had its therapeutic effects and side effects. And one day, the always cheerful Tomek told him that believing in God isn’t the most important thing. What matters is whether you trust God. He explained it very simply, as he always did when explaining anything related to biblical stories—as simple as two times two:

“Ask anyone on the street,” Tomek said, “and almost everyone will tell you they definitely believe in God and then go about their business. But if you trust God, you’ll try to act as He advises us to in the Bible, and thus you won’t rush off to commit sinful deeds… So this point is more important.”

A gust of wind tore through outside, and the artist suddenly thought that the wind must have made some agreement with the trees to blow off the yellowing leaves, which perhaps burdened them. And that he wasn’t really an artist at all—just… an observer.

He went into their small room to embrace her, to fall asleep with her, slipping into another reality, escaping the dreary show of hopes and expectations. When the lights went out, this world began to dissolve and lose its outlines. The perfect, fatal compatibility in the darkness of the night was like an invisible eternal seal binding him and Lilia, confirming the unseen lines of some pact lasting at least a lifetime. And it wasn’t so important what happened during the day, since there was the night connecting their bodies and souls lost in capitalist Europe. Their nights were smooth like seawater under surface tension. Only the mood of the water’s surface changed, shifting from calm to storms and tsunamis. In the impenetrable black pearl depths of the sea, they had nothing left to desire. The strange thing was that there were no repetitions. Each night was unique, special. And knowing this, they weren’t particularly surprised by all these waves—they simply smiled happily as they drifted off into their own dreams.

P.S. The novel was begun in 2001 and set aside for continuation and revisions in better times, which I hope will come for our family after moving. If you have any feedback, comments, or suggestions for publication, please let me know.

- With gratitude for your attention, Anatoli Gostev (Junior)