“You’d better go lie down.”
“No, listen, I promised Moishe I’d beat him at chess. What’s wrong with him, anyhow?”
“Rashes, edema.”
“He’s like me?”
Miriam shrugged. “He was fine till this year. Puberty triggered something. Not unusual with allergic symptoms.”
“What is allergy, anyhow?”
“Well, call it a failure of adaptation. Back home, people used to feed babies cows’ milk, from bottles. Some of the babies could adapt to it, but some got rashes, breathing trouble, colic. The cow’s key didn’t fit their metabolic lock. Well, New Zion’s protein keys don’t fit our locks; so we have to change our metabolism with the metas.”
“Would Moishe or I have been an allergic on Earth?”
“I don’t know. Prematures often are. Irving, he died, oh, twenty years ago, he was allergic to this terrible list of things on Earth, they should never have let him come, poor thing, he spends his life on Earth half suffocated and comes here and starves to death even on a quadruple dose of metas.”
“Aha,” said Genya, “you shouldn’t have given him metas at all. Just Zion mush.”
“Zion mush?” Only one of the native grains yielded enough to be worth harvesting, and it produced a gluey meal which could not be baked.
“I ate three bowls of it for lunch.”
“He lies around the hospital all day complaining,” Miriam said, “and then stuffs his belly with that slop. How can an artistic soul eat something that tastes like jellied bilge?”
“You feed it to your helpless child patients in your own hospital! I just ate the leftovers.”
“Oh, get along with you.”
“I am. I want to paint while the sun’s still up. On a piece of new paper, a whole piece of new paper ”
It had been a long day at the clinic, but there were no inpatients. She had sent Osip home last night in a cast with a good scolding for being so careless as to tip his tractor over, endangering not only his life but the tractor, which was even harder to replace. And young Moishe had gone back to the children’s house, though she didn’t like the way his rash kept coming back. And Rosie was over her asthma, and the Commander’s heart was doing as well as could be expected; so the ward was empty, except for her permanent inmate of the past two weeks, Genya.
He was sprawled out on his bed under the window, so lax and still that she had a moment of alarm; but his color was good, he breathed evenly, he was simply asleep,deeply asleep, the way people slept after a hard day in the fields, exhausted.
He had been painting. He had cleaned up the rags and brushes, he always cleaned up promptly and thoroughly, but the picture stood on his makeshift easel. Usually these days he was secretive about his paintings, hid them, since people had stopped admiring them. The Commander had murmured to her, “What ugly stuff, poor boy!” But she had heard young Moishe, watching Genya paint, say, “How do you do it, Genya, how do you make it so pretty?” and Genya answer, “Beauty’s in the eye, Moishe.”
Well, that was true, and she went closer to look at the painting in the dull afternoon light. Genya had painted the view out the big window of the ward. Nothing vague and half created this time: realistic, all too realistic. Hideously recognisable. There was the flat ridge of Ararat, the mud-colored trees and fields, the hazy sky, the storage barn and a corner of the school building in the foreground. Her eyes went from the painted scene to the real one. To spend hours, days, painting that! What a waste, what a waste.
It was hard on Genya, it was sad, the way he hid his paintings now, knowing that nobody would want to see them, except maybe a child like Moishe fascinated with the mere skill of the hand, the craftsman’s dexterity.
That night as Genya helped her straighten up the injection cabinets—he was a good deal of help around the infirmary these days—she said, “I like the picture you painted today.”
“I finished it today,” he corrected her. “Damn thing took all week. I’m just beginning to learn to see.”
“Can I put it up in the Living Room?”
He looked at her across a tray of hypodermic needles, his eyes quiet and a little quizzical. “In the Living Room? But that’s all pictures of Home.”
“It’s time maybe we had some pictures of our new home there.”
“A moral gesture, eh? Sure. If you like it.”
“I like it very much,” she lied blandly.“It isn’t bad,” he said. “I’ll do better, though, when I’ve learned how to fit myself to the pattern.”
“What pattern?”
“Well, you know, you have to look until you see the pattern, till it makes sense, and then you have to get that into your hand, too.” He made large, vague, shaping gestures with a bottle of absolute alcohol.
“Anybody who asks a painter a question in words deserves what they get, I guess,” said Miriam. “Babble, babble. You take the picture over tomorrow and put it up. Artists are so temperamental about where they get their pictures hung, and the lighting. Besides, it’s time you were getting out. A little. An hour or two a day. No more.”
“Can I eat dinner in the dining hall, then?”
“All right. It’ll keep Tina from coming here to keep you from being lonely and eating up all the infirmary rations. That girl eats like a vacuum pump. Listen, if you go out in the middle of the day, will you kindly take the trouble to wear a hat?”
“You think I’m right, then.”
“Right?”
“That it was sunstroke.”
“That was my diagnosis, if you will recall.”
“All right: but my addition was that I do better without metas.”
“I have no idea. You’ve got along fine before for weeks, and then poof, down again. Nothing whatever has been proved.”
“But a pattern has been established! I’ve lived a month without metas, and gained six pounds.”
“And edema of the head, Mr. Know It All?”
She saw him the next day sitting with Rachel, just before dinnertime, on the slope below the storage barn. Rachel had not come to see him in the infirmary. They sat side by side, very close together, motionless, not talking.
Miriam went on to the Living Room. A half hour there before dinner had become a habit with her lately. It seemed to rest her from the weariness of the day. But the room was less peaceful than usual this evening; the Commander was awake, and talking with Reine and Avram. “Well, where did it come from then?” he was saying in his heavy Italian accent—he had not learned Hebrew till he was forty, in the Transit Camp. “Who put it there?” Then seeing Miriam he greeted her as always with a grand cordiality of voice and gesture. “Ah, Doctor! Please, join us, come, solve our mystery for us. You know each picture in this room as well as I do. Where, do you think, and when did we acquire the new one? You see?”
It’s Genya’s, Miriam was about to say, when she saw the new,picture. It wasn’t Genya’s. It was a painting, all right, a landscape, but a landscape of the Earth: a wide valley, the fields green and green-gold, orchards coming into flower, the sweeping slope of a mountain in the distance, a tower, perhaps a castle or medieval farm building, in the foreground, and over all the pure, subtle, sunlit sky. It was a complex and happy painting, a celebration of the spring, an act of praise.
“How beautiful,” she said, her voice catching. “Didn’t you put it up, Avram?”
“Me? I can photograph, I can’t paint. Look at it, it’s no reproduction. Some kind of tempera or oils, see?”