Gwen by Goldie Goldbloom

Author:Goldie Goldbloom
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fremantle Press
Published: 2017-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

JEUNE FILLE:

All through that first year she came to Paris in 1904, Gwen searched for the man who had been following her, the Jew. In crowds walking through the littered streets, crushed on the back steps of the omnibus, descending from the train battered by other people’s boxes, fighting for the best deals in the handkerchief department of the Bon Marché, she looked for his tallness, his long black curls, his hat made of beaver fur, but she never saw him. He had vanished completely.

She understood vanishing. Living in France felt as if she too had vanished from the world. Now, no one knew her. No one called her name or brought her a flower or sent her a letter. She didn’t understand the language and no one repeated their words for her. Men pushed past her to get on the omnibus and squeezed into the last seat seconds before she could. The concierge’s husband pretended he couldn’t see Gwen and constantly walked into her, steadying himself with brute hands on her bust.

The morning after Dorelia left, Gwen crept downstairs past midday, to get a little fresh air. She had an appointment with Rodin in the afternoon. There were Jews in the street, people who looked similar to the man she knew, but never exactly the same. Paris was swamped with Jews. There had been new pogroms throughout Europe. Even the Irish had to flee from Limerick and now survivors flooded the streets as they had done in London, chattering in Russian and Yiddish and German, despite disapproving stares. She peeped at these people from the doorstep. She wasn’t hungry. Not even a little. Then she went back upstairs to get her box of paints and her little easel. She returned to the Pletzl and painted the woman with the flower cart and the man with the bicycle and the bundles of wood next to the houses and the little children in their sailor suits and their hats made of newspaper. “I’ll paint whatever I want to paint,” she muttered savagely, over and over, stabbing the brush with each word. “No one can tell me how to be an artist!”

She wasn’t exactly sorry that she couldn’t find “her” Jew, but still, she wondered what had become of him. She wound the coil of his hair around the handle of her brush and stared down the alleys, always expecting to see him. She wondered, again and again, how to paint the fear she saw in the eyes of the men and the women and the children. She was angry that nothing she had seen in the Louvre had taught her how to paint pain. Nothing had taught her how to fill an eye with fear. And she wondered about that fear. When she looked in the mirror, there was something in her eyes too that looked like fear.

Many of the refugees had the curious flickering star over their hearts. Gwen had gone to the doctor several weeks earlier, hoping he’d say

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.