PB M&M

 PB M&M  

It was a Sunday like any other. Roz* had it in her hand; she’d brought it down from the top of the four-foot bookshelf in the back hallway, where she’d been dusting - the bright little reproduction in the worn tabletop frame, Bonnard’s lithograph of “House in the Courtyard. The shelves were mostly books I’d bought thinking I wouldn’t be afraid to read them when I got them home. Then, I got home, where I was more familiar with myself; I looked at the book I'd bought in that light; And cravenly unable to return it or still bleakly hopeful-against-hope, I put it on these back-hallway shelves largely out of my sight: Gibbon’s complete The Fall of the Roman Empire; J. M. Roberts’ History of Europe and History of the World; Eliade’s History of Religious Ideas (three volumes); The Golden Bough; Deirdre McCloskey’s Bourgeois Dignity - though I did begin that; KṚṢṆA : The Supreme Personality of the Godhead (The Books of the KṚṢṆA Trilogy) by His Divine Grace A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, a boxed set.

Bonnard’s courtyard mit Max und Moritz

     The reproduction looks itself to be cut from a book, then pasted on a piece of shirt cardboard and put into a frame that happened to be at hand: it’s not a perfect fit, but it’s a close-enough one. The reproduction is small, less than half the size of the original, but it is clear.** From outside the frame, we are looking through an open window at the apartment block opposite. Three of the eight windows we can see are shuttered, and in another three the curtains are drawn. A man stands in one upper-floor window: we can’t tell if he has his back to us or is looking out. Below him, a woman is shaking her dust, her dead skin cells off a small rug or a towel or a pillowcase into the white air.

“Do you know who did that?” Roz said. “I don’t mean Bonnard.” She is pointing to the lower right corner of the open window. At some point, when I was asleep or away, not paying attention in any case, someone had taken the picture out of the frame and India-inked the backs of Max and Moritz, peeping over the sill of the open window. “I never noticed it before,” Roz was saying.

     “I have my suspicions,” I said, “but no, I don’t know. It was a while ago though.”

     “I wonder what they were thinking,” Roz said.

     “Who, the defaçeur” - I made up a French word because I couldn’t think of an English one - “or the boys? In both cases, probably some prank.”

     “I meant whoever inked them in. But, the boys,” she said. “Who are they?”

     “I’m pretty sure they’re Max and Moritz from the German stories. If so, they’re probably thinking about how to disrupt the lives of the man above and the woman below him across the way.”

     “Why?”

     “You don’t know the stories, I guess.”

     “No,” she said.

She handed me the frame, turned, and sat in the chair across from me. I was half-sitting, half-reclined on the couch looking into a book but not reading it. I was trying to remember the stories.

     “Wilhelm Busch,” I said; it just popped into my mind. I still didn’t remember the stories all that well, but I thought I was right in saying that the characters, the boys, had no reasons for what they did but there was “reason” in the stories: the amoral pranksters came to a bad end, baked into bread then ground up into feed for ducks, lamented by none.

“I don’t remember the picture being in the back hall either,” Roz said.

     “But you must have dusted it a hundred times,” I said.

     “That many?” There was an edge of sarcasm in her voice.

When I bought the picture at a book and junk shop in Marion - near where Roz saw her sign - I had found a place for it on the top of the two shelves over my computer desk. On the bottom shelf are books: the Bible, a Complete Works of Shakespeare, Roget’s; a hymnbook, several dictionaries, and Hodges’ Harbrace College Handbook (twentieth edition, not Hodge on Romans!). On the top are pictures: Roz at about twelve between her parents; Moira, Hannah, and me at seven, four, and eleven; a crude but very effective drawing of a bearded preacher on fire pocket Junot Diaz** had made for me on the back of a church bulletin; and a display of what pretended to be ancient Roman coins, trapped in a plastic cuboid. When I put the Bonnard among them, I rearranged the shelf so the family pictures were on the left, the coins were in the middle, and Alfredo’s fiery Pentecostal preacher and Bonnard’s quiet courtyard were on the right. I remember trying to picture the invisible courtyard: what it would look like if we could see it: cobble-stoned, a dry fountain. I tried to imagine what the summer air smelled like. It looked like summer to me.

     “I moved it when I saw the addition,” I said. “As I said, that was quite a while ago.”

“Why did you keep it at all?” Roz said.

     “I don’t know,” I said. “I was wondering this morning why the small pleasures of life seem sometimes so much more than the great pleasures, and why it’s the same way with the hurts.”

     “Maybe you’ll find out,” she said. Her voice suggested action: If I did something about it, “made inquiries,” I might find out.

     “What?” I said.

     “Who actually did this,” she said, “and why.”

     “I think I know,” I said.

     “So you said,” she said. She stood up, took the frame from me. “But you could be mistaken.

     “For now, I’ll put this back,” she said.

08.19.19

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* Roz is the one that tries to live with me; for most the part she succeeds with great grace. Pocket Junot Diaz (Alfredo) is the son of Dominga, Roz’s son Bart’s inamorata. “All the links to Roz” is still under construction. For more on Alfredo, see here.

 ** The lithograph of 1898, “Some Aspects of Life in Paris, 4: House in the Courtyard” (Quelques Aspects de la Vie Parisienne: Maison Dans la Cour) is based on a drawing of three years earlier. The original is apparently ca. 14 x 10 inches (34.5 x 25.6 cm). The one I have is about 5 inches high.