The Ghost Brush by Katherine Govier

Author:Katherine Govier [Govier, Katherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Fiction
ISBN: 9781554689910
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Published: 2010-06-01T04:00:00+00:00

9

A Little Bit Witch

AT THE FREER I HAD COVERED MY MOUTH with my bony hand, amused by the skirmishes amongst the experts. I floated out of the building and bellied up into the late-afternoon sky. I savoured the moment. Perhaps I would be discovered. Words had been uttered, words that could not be ignored. The “forgery” word, in the splendid halls of art history! And one man said it, albeit with a nervous look off to the side: “It’s a great story—she was a better artist than her father.”

I spread my colours. A fine sunset. Would recognition follow? Were they ready? And even—were we ready, my father and I?

From the auditorium they all went out and raised their glasses in a toast to end the symposium “To Hokusai!” they chimed. To the Old Man.

Not a whisper about me.

Their wine was bitter.

I spread a noxious fog over them all from Foggy Bottom to the Mall.

I drifted above it, my head lined and hollow as a paper lantern, my ears long and my teeth ancient, my hair black streaks from a dry brush running down my bony, ribbed back. A trail of smoke from my tobacco pipe marked my passage.

SEVERAL WEEKS LATER, I watched Rebecca at her desk. There was a drawing on a screen in front of her, of me and the Old Man in his last years. Hokusai is on his knees, bent over a paper on the floor (no low desk, no rice caddy, which in palmier times served as desk), his bottom in the air. His head is bald with a little fuzz; his face is pressed to his paper. He looks adorable and extremely nearsighted. I am behind and a little to the side. My face is sharp, down-turned, depressed. I lean on the stem of my pipe, my neck improbably crooked, looking depressed.

I came closer, breathing down her neck. What was this drawing? I had never seen it before. I knew of only two drawings of me in my lifetime, each by my father—one of just my face, the other of a more secret part than that. Where did this come from?

I breathed even closer to Rebecca’s nape. It looked like the work of Tsuyuki Kosho. I could recognize his style. A young disciple, he used to visit in those days, late in my father’s life. But when did he draw this? And why? And how did it get onto her screen? I thought Kosho liked me. Beware your friends. Which one would you trust to create your image for the ages?

Rebecca was hooked.

She had made a lot of pathetic excuses. It was too hard. She didn’t know anything (about women in Edo, the nineteenth century, the Dutch). She didn’t speak Japanese. She even said that if it was such a terrible time for women, thinking about it would be depressing. “It will be expensive and exhausting. I’ll be enslaved for years, and never relax until it is done.”

But that presence. It lingered. It intruded. She really had no choice.

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