Chapter 11: Leopold's Art Lesson
Arp in Zagreb
Back in Zagreb, when Arp was still young, he put his energy into avoiding the Art Lesson to which Leopold was continually inviting him. He came and went from the house he lived in, with a family he rarely saw — he never knew if they were his parents or his children — and pursued what he considered to be his adult career, his art studies already behind him.
And yet the invitations, in the form of postcards, flyers, and, later, visits from lackeys and uniformed representatives, continued to proliferate. He was determined to avoid meeting whoever or whatever Leopold was — some fliers bore the etched head of a lion, others only a torso in a blue silk suit — though he could see his resolve diminishing. He no longer believed he could avoid it forever; only, as he put it to himself, hardly believing even this, “for as long as possible.”
And, indeed, it wasn’t possible for long. The last of his resistance evaporated when he “saw a man asleep in his garden.” He didn’t know who it was, or if the man was really asleep, or if it was strictly a man, but the sight threw him off of what he hadn’t known until then was his exceedingly precise morning routine.
One long moment spent looking out the window at that body in the rosebush behind the hedges was enough to render his home uninhabitable. All the walls became curtains and many, many bodies — male, female, child, adult — crashed together, their delicate sync thrown off, never to be restored.
When he put a hand on any shoulder to ask what the matter was, the face of a stranger loomed in on him and made it very clear that he was no longer welcome. Perhaps he never had been — perhaps none of these people had noticed him until now.
He went to what he still thought of as his room to pack his bag and, opening the closet, found nothing but a pile of Leopold fliers which, as in the old cartoons, flew out and buried him.
***
When he’d surfaced and stuffed his bag with these fliers, he set out into Zagreb resigned to the Lesson he likely should’ve consented to suffer long ago. When he would’ve had more strength to resist or to recover. He followed the map drawn on the back of the first flier he pulled from his bag, indifferent to whether other fliers would have directed him otherwise and, before long, he arrived at a concrete building with a low door and very, very high windows. So high it was hard to imagine what was behind all the solid concrete beneath them.
It occurred to him that he would never reemerge as soon as the doors opened and a miniature Leopold — a tiny, wet lion in a loose tuxedo — reached out to shake his hand. He let the paw envelop the fingers he held his pencil with — at this time, Arp worked as a draughtsman at an artillery firm headquartered south of the city — and nodded when asked if he was, “Ready to learn the Secret of Art.”
Blood pooled along his knuckles as he followed that pipsqueak down a lightless concrete hallway and into an office behind a sliding glass door, just before the hall narrowed and curved into a clearly off-limits area. He accepted a small cup of coffee on a porcelain saucer and sat in a velvet armchair across from a mahogany desk.
***
When Leopold finally arrived, filling the chair on the other side of the desk without revealing how he’d entered the room, he looked at Arp and said, “Only one of us can leave this place. You know that, yes?”
Arp nodded.
“Very well,” said Leopold, drawing something on the back of a card. “You may go. The way is open to you now. No one can block it.”
Leaving his coffee on the floor, Arp stood, not waiting to be offered a paw to shake, and went deeper into the building. He walked through eras and continents and under oceans, beneath wars and armistices, never certain if he was indoors or out, until he arrived at Berkshire and took up residence in another house where he was far more careful to follow the morning routine, unwilling to deviate for any reason until Spine turned up in his classroom one September and he saw that now it was his turn to teach this confident young man the Secret of Art.