Conversation

At the very height of the flower-scattering season the Old Painter was busy at work in his studio, entirely alone. Facing him stood his easel, the old three-legged companion that had walked thousands of leagues at his side in search of some rare and beautiful place; it stood there without a word. On the paint-faded table, on cupboards left over from the days of Daqyanus, and along all four walls, one could see dozens of pictures, coloured and black and white, small and large, finished and unfinished: landscapes, studies, the faces of village women, of old men, and every sort of other object besides. The dull floor, littered with stretcher frames and dust-eaten jugs of clay and copper, gave notice that for a year or more nobody, neither woman nor man, had put a broom to the place.

The eyes of the master of the house, and of his friends, most of them of the same trade, had grown used to this disorder and were not troubled by it: they took such a state of things for an ordinary phenomenon. What mattered was that dozens of his pictures had been made in this very air and this very room, had graced exhibitions, and had now fallen to the corners of the country and to countries near and far. Collectors and inquisitive enthusiasts had bought a great many of his works as gifts. And now the Old Painter had clothed the long-standing wish of his heart in the garment of action: he had at last brought his own portrait to its end, and signed it. He stepped back a pace or two and looked with a searching eye at the various points of the work. Tilting his head now toward his right shoulder, now toward the left, he fixed his eyes on the picture from this angle and that. "Wrinkles too, God forgive me, turn out to suit a man." In the moments of shaving he had never paid them any attention. And now? The portrait stands on the easel, and he may look at it as long as his mood pleases, and count the traces of the creases, ordered like ornament. Each one of them a road, a secret, a clotted fragment of his life.

"So that's how it is, old man," said the Old Painter to the portrait, with what sounded like reproach and was in truth pride.

At that moment, unlooked for, through the casement window a bird came flying into the studio, quite at its ease and unafraid. It made one circuit of the ceiling and settled gracefully on the easel.

"You uninvited little bird! Where have you come from?"

"Where! Where! Where!"

A parrot. The painter knew it at once, and it repeated the word half-swallowed.

"Are you thirsty, you beautiful creature, or hungry? Do you know?"

"No! No! No!"

"What a ready tongue!" The astonished Painter sat down on the old soft chair.

The parrot flew up from its place, settled on the head of a nail in the wall and beat its wings. On the nail hung a large black abacus, its wires and wooden frame stoutly suspended.

"Please, don't you dare —" said the master of the studio, without shifting from his place.

"Dare! Dare! Dare!" cried the little bird, running its shining eyes around the room.

"Understood. I only meant — don't take offence. That is my father's abacus. May God receive him into His presence. All his life he fed us out of the reckoning and accounting of the farmers' work. It is sacred to me. It is the one best inheritance I took for myself, as a sign of remembrance. Everything else of theirs I divided among my sisters and my brother after our mother's passing. They are still young, and I am old. The goods of this world hold no meaning for me."

He drew a deep sigh.

Then with a small hammer he cracked a walnut, and without hurrying he crumbled the kernel with an old blunt knife, laid it in a saucer whose colour had faded and whose rim was chipped here and there, and pushed it toward the parrot.

"Take it, eat!"

The bird flew over as if it had understood, and gave a peck or two. It turned on the spot in several little hops, then went off on beating wings and settled on a white bust that had no head.

"You've found a fine place to plant your feet!" the Painter grumbled out his displeasure. "God is my witness, I knocked it over by accident and that beautiful head went to pieces. I wanted to put it together again, I saw it could not be done, and I let it alone."

"Alone! Alone! Alone!" the little bird pronounced.

"Who is alone, what is alone? You simple thing. The poor woman was lovely. Ah, how I loved her! From head to foot she was spring, the spring that scatters flowers. And all at once she lost the road. She left me and our three children and went. If a woman comes out without sense, never mind the house, the world burns.

"Sense! Sense! Sense!" the parrot raised its voice again.

"If she had had sense, would she have taken another man's hand? When I made that bust, her eyes and her face still had light in them; she was the mother of boys of nine and six and of my exquisite three-year-old girl. What it was that beguiled her, I do not know. I did not ask. Now and then I see her in the city; I know that lost woman at seventy metres, and I cross to the other side of the street, so that my eye should not fall on her eye and I should not have to wash my face three times. Thank God, it passed. Falling and getting up again, my children and I came to our full growth together. What days went by over our heads. Who is there to tell it all to? But can the stain be washed off a heart? Tell me yourself. Perhaps somebody wounded you too, or drove you out of your cage, and that is why you came flying here. Who knows?"

The parrot was walking up and down on the frame of the Old Painter's portrait.

"Face! Face! Face!" it said.

"Not a face. Furrows from top to bottom."

"Rows! Rows! Rows!" the parrot repeated.

Now it settled on another picture. That one was called The Music of Living. A strange business: three women of surpassingly beautiful body, naked as they were born, one of them with a dutar in her hand, apparently twined about one another, had come suspended into flight. Level with them a wind-footed horse of Khatlon wheeled about too, delighted, it seemed, by the fine bare bodies of the ladies.

"Bare! Bare! Bare!"

"Your eyes are blind. That is why you talk nonsense."

The door gave a creak and opened a little way. The Old Painter's daughter put her head in.

"Dada, hello. I heard your voice. Who are you talking with?"

"Oh, nothing. With myself, light of my eyes. With myself."