The Village Idiot

by Steve Stern

Genres: Historical Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

A wild, effervescent, absinthe-soaked novel that tells of the life of the extraordinary artist Chaim Soutine

Steve Stern’s astonishing new novel The Village Idiot begins on a glorious spring day in Paris 1917. Amid the carnage of World War I, some of the foremost artists of the age have chosen to stage a boat race.  At the head of the regatta is Amedeo Modigliani, seated regally in a bathtub pulled by a flock of canvasback ducks.  But unbeknownst to the competition, he has a secret advantage: his young friend, the immigrant painter Chaim Soutine, is hauling the tub from underwater.  Soutine, an unwashed, misfit artist (who incidentally can’t swim) has been persuaded by the Italian to don a ponderous diving suit and trudge along the floor of the river Seine.  Disoriented and confused by the artificial air in his helmet Chaim stumbles through the events of his past and future life.
 
It’s quite an extraordinary life.  From his impoverished beginnings in an East European shtetl to his equally destitute days in Paris during the Années Folles, the Crazy Years, from the Cinderella patronage of the American collector Albert Barnes, who raises him from poverty to international attention, to his perilous flight from the Nazi occupation of France, Chaim Soutine remains driven by his unrelenting passion to paint. 
 
To be sure, there are notable distractions, such as his unlikely friendship with Modigliani, who drags him from brothels to midnight felonies to a duel at dawn; there are the romances with remarkable women who compete with and sometimes salvage his obsession. But there is also, always on the horizon, the coming storm that threatens to sweep away Chaim and a generation of gifted Jewish refugees from a tradition that would outlaw their longing to make art.
 
Wildly inventive, as funny as it is heart-breaking, The Village Idiot is a luminous fever-dream of a novel, steeped in the heady atmosphere of a Paris that was the cultural capital of the universe, a place where anything seemed possible.

 

Read more

Release date: September 13, 2022

Publisher: Melville House

Print pages: 368

Sample

1

THERE ARE MANY TALES, mostly untrue, about the friendship between the artists Chaim Soutine and Amedeo Modigliani. My favorite involves a boat race. This was in 1917, when you could stand in the streets of Paris and feel the muffled percussion from the guns on the Western Front. German zeppelins were often seen overhead. The black-market price of a pack of Caporals or a couple of kilos of coal was extortionate; a pot-au-feu cost fifteen sous. At night the streetlamps were dimmed, the avenues empty, the shop windows X’d over with bomb tape. The cafés were closed before curfew and the galleries shuttered. What remittances the impoverished artists may have received from abroad were no longer crossing the border. They ate, when they ate, thin gruel at fly-by-night canteens. In the face of such general dreariness, the irrepressible Tuscan Modigliani, convinced that he knew just the thing to lift the spirits of the bohemian quarter, proposed a regatta.

The artists would construct their own vessels from scrounged materials, then race them in the Seine between the pont Louis-Philippe and the viaduc d’Austerlitz. The winner would receive the prize—a bottle of Château Lafite Rothschild filched from the cellar of the Café du Dôme—from the hands of the notorious Kiki, Queen of Montparnasse.

I can imagine the scene: painters and sculptors waiting to compete in their jerry-built boats on an afternoon the poet Max Jacob has declared the most glorious in the history of the world. The sunlight is unfiltered nectar; the soft-blowing April wind wears velvet gloves. The Fauves Vlaminck and Derain, however, are observing with disapproval the reflections of the Beaux Arts facades on the surface of the river: their prismatic shimmering is too much like an Impressionist palette. Moïse Kisling and Ossip Zadkine, both in uniform, are there on leave from the Front. Apollinaire is present as well, invalided with the injury to his outsized head that, along with the Spanish flu, will take his life on Armistice Day. Cyclists have abandoned their velós and booksellers closed their stalls along the quai des Célestins to watch the proceedings. Lovers on the banks disentwine and onlookers crowd the parapets of the pont Marie. The art dealer Zborowski, wishful as ever, is on the promenade collecting wagers and distributing receipts: the smart money is on Brancusi’s hand-carved scull The Flying Romanian.

Picasso’s contribution is The Neversink, a gaily painted Cubist contraption rocking dangerously in its berth, already on the verge of disproving its name. By contrast, the bark of Fernand Léger, on whose person you can still catch a whiff of the gas from Verdun, appears to be relatively seaworthy. So does Diego Rivera’s rubber dinghy (dubbed La Cacafuego), despite the heavy freight of its passenger. Tsuguharu Foujita’s Vixen, a flat-bottomed outrigger powered by a Singer sewing machine, rides the current with a tactical finesse. Maurice Utrillo has borrowed a porous coracle from a child. It founders directly upon launching so that the melancholy painter has to be fished out of the river with a grappling hook. A languid Raoul Dufy has entered a scow with a crenellated tower that will be truncated by the first bridge it passes under. Max Jacob has tarted up his punt to look like an argosy. There’s the wallowing Raft of the Medusa haphazardly piloted by the potted Russians Kikoïne and Krémègne. Modigliani himself is seated imperially in an enamel bathtub, his red cravat floating behind him in the breeze, the tub harnessed to a troika of canvasback ducks.

Utrillo’s mama, Suzanne Valadon—ex-acrobat and former mistress of, among others, Toulouse-Lautrec—is wearing a hat like a hanging garden. She puts twin pinkies to the corners of her lips and lets loose the shrill whistle that is the signal for the race to begin. Predictably, Brancusi’s scull shoots out ahead of the others, though for a time Foujita’s Vixen keeps pace with it. The Russians and Rivera ply their oars for all they’re worth, but it’s clear from the outset they’re no match for the front-runners. The sculptor Lipchitz relaxes in the stern of a barnacled fishing dory, while his wife shows herself remarkably adept at trimming the sail. But unfortunately, the wind offers little in the way of propulsion. The pug-faced writer Blaise Cendrars makes some headway in the driver’s seat of a Fiat runabout mounted on twin pontoons, but his single arm—the other was blown off during the attack at Champagne—restricts him to rowing in circles. Meanwhile, having been thus far neck and neck with The Flying Romanian, Foujita begins to fall behind, and so decides to ram Brancusi amidships with the prow of his boat. It’s at that point that Modigliani, making wonderfully steady progress in his duck-drawn tub, takes the lead. Cheers go up from the embankment as the handsome Italian, arms folded and smiling serenely, cruises upriver past the tip of the île Saint-Louis.

But Modi, as his friends call him, has a secret advantage. He’s had a vision, as when has he not? Between his consumption of absinthe, opium, and hashish, his days are a series of hallucinations only occasionally tainted by reality. This particular pipe dream involved a Viking longboat towed by swans, outdistancing in competition the inferior vessels of all the other artists-turned-mariners-for-a-day. In the end it had been easier to corral ducks than swans, and a smut-blighted bathtub was more readily available than the longboat. Then he confided in his young friend, the Litvak painter Soutine, his plan for ensuring his victory: To assist the ducks in propelling his vessel, a length of rope attached to the tub would be fastened at the other end to a deep-sea diver, who would haul it faithfully forward from the bottom of the Seine.

The always anxious Soutine was not unaccustomed to the Italyaner’s wild fancies, but this one took the knish. He’d yet to finish shaking his head over the absurdity of the scheme when Modi informed him that he would have the honor of being that diver harnessed to the tub.

“I can’t swim!” was his despairing response.

It wasn’t the first time he’d been inveigled by his friend into playing the part of his accomplice in some compromising circumstance. There was the night he’d accompanied Amedeo to a building site to steal blocks of limestone for his massive sculptures, the morning Modi had conscripted him into acting as his second in a farcical duel. And so on. Why, when Chaim wanted only to be left alone to paint his bruised fruit and dead animals, did he continue to allow the crazy Tuscan to entice him away from his easel? The answer was one he could not even admit to himself: that he adored his only friend this side of idolatry; and adoration, outside of art, was a thing that didn’t come naturally to Chaim Soutine.

So, with grave misgivings, he went along with Modi to meet his acquaintance—Modi had many acquaintances—in his cobbled-together rescue cabin near the pont Mirabeau. This was Gaston Babineaux, salvage diver and unlikely art lover, who brought up suicides and murder victims from the river for the prefecture of police. The grizzly old water dog agreed to the loan of his scaphandre de plongeur, the ponderous rubber suit with its copper helmet and weighted boots, in exchange for an original Modigliani. He even volunteered to keep abreast of the diver’s progress, following him along the embankment with the portable respirator. Then, seeing how Modi’s companion had begun to tremble, he assured him there was nothing to worry about, except maybe a phenomenon known as “the squeeze.”

“That’s when your air hose is punctured and the negative pressure sucks your flesh and soft tissues up into the helmet. There was this diver I knew got so much of himself sucked into his helmet they buried the helmet instead of a coffin.”

Seeing how Chaim had turned the green of moldy cheese, old Babineaux let go a guffaw that infected Modi as well. “Chaim,” he said, trying to control his laughter, “think of a knight donning his armor to go into battle.”

Thus did Chaim Soutine, late of the shtetl of Smilovitchi in the Russian Pale of Settlement, find himself toiling along the murky bed of the River Seine.

Many obstacles litter his path: wine bottles, suitcases, skeletal umbrellas, sculpted faces fallen from a bridge pier, artillery shells from previous centuries, a wheelchair—they come only briefly into focus in the turbid water, then fade away. The breathing gas pumped into his helmet from the surface supply tastes of disinfectant and smells like burnt hair. It’s delivered through a valve operated by gnashing his teeth, which releases the flow of the oxygen-helium mixture until his aching jaw has to let go. Then he panics a breathless few moments until he’s able to bite down again.

The diving costume to which he’s confined weighs eighty-six kilos; the heavy boots kick up clouds of silt as he forges doggedly forward. The rope round his waist, looped at its other end through a hole in Modi’s tub, further impedes his advance. The lead counterweight at his chest is shaped like a heart. How, wonders Chaim in his discomfiture, did I let the meshugah Italian talk me into this? Still, when not oppressed to near delirium by his immersion in this alien element, he experiences an occasional buoyancy that contradicts the fear. After all, Chaim is no stranger to claustrophobic confinement. Hadn’t he spent days penned in a chicken coop or locked in a dank coal cellar back in Smilovitchi? His punishment for having broken the Second Commandment by making pictures.

The old leather-faced plongeur had called the air hose “your umbilical,” and I like to think that, underwater, the painter might have entertained some unplumbed memory of being an infant again, suspended in amniotic impregnability. He might feel this despite the fierce dissent of his better instincts. Maybe he even remembers a tale he’d heard from his credulous mother about the Angel of Forgetfulness. He hates these bubbeh maysehs, these grandmother’s tales, by which the shtetl folk increase the already overcrowded population of their rural ghetto with meddling demons and angels. In this fable the angel that watches over the child in the womb provides a light by which it can see from one end of the world to the other. The prospect includes the entirety of its life to come. But as soon as it’s born the apprehensive angel tweaks the child under the nose so that it forgets everything.

What’s the point? wonders Chaim.

But suppose that in the scaphandre the artist, like the child in the womb, has available to him the whole of his past and future. His life unfolds before the glass of his viewport, flickering amid a school of minnows that are swallowed up in turn by a big fish with a mouth like a bullhorn. Perhaps it’s a function of the pressure on his brain of the tons of water above him and the artificial air in his helmet. Call it a species of rapture of the deep. But there it is now, the past—thinks Chaim, it should laugh with the lizards! What is there in the years that trailed behind him but hunger and ill use? And as for the future, he’s had dire enough intimations of it while studying the subjects for his still lifes.

“Chaim,” Amedeo once asked him, indicating the gutted hare hanging from a hook in his studio, “what do you see in its entrails?”

“What do you mean?” he replied.

“Can you read them like an oracle?”

Chaim harrumphed. “I see in them nothing but blood and kishkes,” he lied, because he sometimes perceived in them more than he wished to see.

He wishes the past had begun no earlier than an afternoon four years ago when he departed the third-class car at the Gare de l’Est. His first encounter with the pandemonium of the Parisian streets had unnerved him and caused him to duck back into the station, though there was no comfort in its milling crowd. Seeking sanctuary, he ignored the address in his pocket and accosted passersby with the single French phrase he’d learned, “Où est le Louvre?” Their answers were incomprehensible. But following some homing instinct, he schlepped his rope-strung suitcase through passages and arcades; he stumbled past mannequins in emporium windows, along an avenue of ivory-white houses with wrought-iron balconies that might have lined a boulevard in paradise—and there it was.

Understand, Soutine had never before been face-to-face with a masterpiece. He’d only seen cheap reproductions and faded plates in the books of the small academy library in Vilna. Now, in those baroque, quarter-mile-long corridors, he came upon, unannounced, Titian’s Entombment and El Greco’s writhing, attenuated Christ on the Cross; he approached without fanfare Rembrandt’s Bathsheba at Her Bath and—God help him!—the Dutchman’s magisterial Slaughtered Ox. He viewed Corot’s Lady in Blue, the cascading folds of whose gown made him forget even to look for the Mona Lisa; and a portrait in oil by Jean Fouquet of Charles VII, whose unhappy eyes penetrated his vitals like a cobbler’s awl. He felt he might be close to a seizure and hugged the walls, frightened of the uniformed guards staring suspiciously at the threadbare Jew. He wanted to hide in the privy until the museum closed, then haunt the galleries by himself all night long, or for eternity.

It was only by virtue of some cosmic error, Chaim decided, that the likes of him was allowed to enter such a place. Shaken to his toes from a surfeit of bliss, his ulcer flared, his left eyelid fluttered like an insect’s wing. He had upon him only the meager pin money donated by a sympathetic doctor in Vilna. Nevertheless, for the first time in his life he hailed a motor-cab and gave the driver the scrap of paper with the scrawled destination: 2 passage de Dantzig, Montparnasse. This was the address of la Ruche, the Beehive, the octagonal artists’ phalanstery fabricated out of a disassembled pavilion from the 1889 Universal Exposition. The same world’s fair for which the Eiffel Tower had been built. The eccentric structure, whose cupola towered above the surrounding rooftops, had been financed by the beneficent sculptor Alfred Boucher, who lived with his pet donkey in an outbuilding on the overgrown grounds. The Beehive itself housed a disorderly warren of studios thronged with a ragtag assortment of gifted immigrants who had swapped the poverty of inhospitable nations for the more romantic poverty of the City of Light.

No one there was especially happy to see Soutine. His reputation for being a temperamental nudzhe had preceded him among the Russians, some of whom had been his fellow students in Lithuania. They informed him that the swarming tenement was full up. The good-natured sculptor Miestchaninoff, however, agreed for some imaginary fee to share his studio, at least until the yokel from Smilovitchi was on his feet. A decade would pass before that was the case.

Fanatically private despite their close quarters, Chaim hung a burlap curtain over his designated corner of the wedge-shaped studio. It was a blind corner unilluminated by the tall windows that gave onto the roof of the Vaugirard slaughterhouse, whose stench pervaded the apartments night and day. (Its butchers, with an inherent disdain for artists, would raid the Beehive’s garden at night, lopping off the heads of sculptures with brickbats.) He painted in his long johns to preserve his only suit of clothes, itself already much the worse for wear. As always he worked in fits and starts, attacking the canvas during the fits like a berserker. In Vilna his teachers had tried to wean him from his unschooled early efforts. They’d humbled him with the examples of the Old Masters, stunned him into an apoplexy with images from Dürer and della Francesca. They hampered him with the rules of symmetry and linear perspective. Housebroken, he’d settled for attempting sober nature mortes in the manner of the Dutch, or two-dimensional, tempura portraits like those preserved on the walls of Byzantium. Still tentative during those first months in Paris, he painted in muted pigments: burnt sienna, yellow ocher, Van Dyke brown, and on audacious days a tincture of Prussian blue. But that was before he met Modigliani.

He hadn’t been looking for a friend. He had even avoided his compatriots Kikoïne and Krémègne, with whom he’d studied and starved in Vilna. The electrifying air of Paris was a shock to his system after the prevailing gloom of the Russian Pale. Reclusive by nature, since arriving in the city Chaim had gone virtually to ground. He might have attained some fluency in the language of his somber pigments, but with other people he could be inarticulate to the point of moronic. Moreover, when not painting he was occupied with the business of survival. He’d spent the remainder of the Vilna doctor’s subsidy on a tutor who’d abandoned him with only the rudiments of a pidgin French he would never master. To assuage his lifelong hunger, he took odd jobs. He appeared for the sunrise shape-ups at the sites of public works, humped crates at the Gare Montparnasse, hoisted baskets of produce at les Halles. It was labor that aggravated the chronic inflammation of his intestines and left him disabled for days.

With the pittance he earned, he purchased the fruit, fish, and fowl that became the subjects of his compositions. He painted them with a watering mouth, convinced that his empty stomach heightened his concentration. Then ravenous, he would devour his subjects. On the evening he made the acquaintance of Modigliani, he was painting a brace of herrings dangling from a chianti bottle. He was involved in daubing a dollop of red to the neck of the sap-green bottle, a pale red the color of a robin’s breast with which he was dissatisfied. That’s when the curtain was yanked aside by Jacques Lipchitz, who whispered to Amedeo Modigliani, “The Litvak Soutine.”

They hadn’t known he was there. The two artists had come to visit Oscar Miestchaninoff, who was absent from his studio. They had poked about in the meantime, inspecting the sculptor’s sleek marble heads. Curious to see more, Lipchitz drew aside the hanging burlap to reveal the immigrant in his paint-dappled gatkes.

As Chaim, in his absorption, was oblivious to their presence, they stood there watching his rapt activity. “The shtot meshugenah, ‘the village idiot,’ they called him back in Hotzeplotz or wherever he comes from,” Lipchitz confided to the Italian. But when he started to drop the curtain, Modi grabbed it, still interested in observing the painter at work. Lipchitz looked from Modigliani to the grubby shtetl refugee, wondering what he was so fascinated by.

They might have turned and departed unnoticed had not the bluff Miestchaninoff hailed them upon entering his studio: “Landsmen!” At that Chaim turned from his easel and was outraged. He spat three times in anger at their trespass, and remembering his naked canvas, spun around to cover it with a sheet.

“We were just admiring your…offering?” said Modigliani, aiming a finger at the herrings, as if the fish rather than their rendering were the object of their espionage.

Chaim fumed. “You had no right!”

Modi stepped forward to introduce himself, calm in the face of the painter’s vexation, but not yet ready to be pacified, Chaim was slow to take his hand. Though he nevertheless accepted the offer of a cigarette; it was his policy never to refuse a handout. Then even as he bent to let the Italyaner light his Gitanes, he was struck by the man’s Sephardic beauty, which he seemed to recognize despite their never having met. Who hadn’t heard tales of the penniless prince of the carrefour Vavin?

He was everything that Chaim wasn’t. There was a thoroughbred elegance about him that the nap of his velvet jacket and the frayed edge of his cardinal-red scarf could not impugn. His dense shock of curling midnight hair was disheveled from having been tousled (one supposed) by a model or mistress. His faun’s eyes were at once teasing and tender. In his presence Chaim was keenly aware of the heavy lids of his own sloe-black eyes, the left one given to a nervous tic, the right half-hidden by a fringe of oily hair. His nose was a bulbous beetroot, his lips what the goyim called “nigger.” Hadn’t he entitled the single self-portrait he’d bothered to execute The Grotesque?

Modigliani graciously invited Soutine to join them for aperitifs. “I’ve had a loan today from my rainy-day patron Guillaume. The drinks are on me.”

Still reluctant to let go of his umbrage, Chaim couldn’t help but feel flattered at being included. No one in recent memory had requested his company. Grudgingly he conceded that his work was in any case kaput for the night.

“I was going out anyway,” he lied, and began to pull on his filthy pants over his filthy long johns. He snuffed out the spirit lamp and followed the rakish Italian through the little regiment of carved busts and torsos.

Lipchitz and Miestchaninoff, however, begged off. Jacques remembered that he had a wife and the pie-faced Oscar a rare commission to complete. So it was left to Modi to introduce the unfledged immigrant to the city after dark.

“Come, Soutine,” he said, “without hope, we live in desire.”

It was an enticement Chaim would hear various versions of in the coming months and years. But while he resolved each time to resist the Italian’s calls to waywardness, he nearly always responded like one in thrall to some hypnotic suggestion.

Whereas Chaim was inclined to keep to the shadows, Modi strolled the evening streets as if, despite his insolvency, they belonged to him. Nothing belonged to Chaim and he disliked drawing attention to that fact. Modigliani, on the other hand, nodded to every shopkeeper sweeping a doorstep or sommelier raising a café awning. He blew a kiss to an aging streetwalker and merrily kicked a stray dog. He sniffed the air, discerned “an ill wind abroad in the soft night air, or is that your bouquet, Soutine?” Because Chaim had an aversion to bathing, fearing the science of municipal plumbing, primitive though it was at la Ruche. But before he could respond to the perceived insult, his companion had begun to recite a poem.

“‘À l’aurore, armés d’une ardente patience, nous entrerons aux splendides villes!’ Do you know Rimbaud, Soutine? I’ll loan you a volume.”

Nostalgic tonight, Modi had it in mind to revisit his former haunt of the Butte Montmartre. It was a long walk, since a hackney fare was out of the question, across the river and up the boulevard de Clichy past the gaudy shrine of the Moulin Rouge. Above Pigalle the steep streets narrowed and the storied quarter still retained pockets of rusticity: here a grape arbor, there a windmill, a lurid apache bar, an open-air guinguette. Along the way Modi played the part of cicerone, invoking the names of luminaries—Lautrec, Bruant, Jane Avril—who had consecrated the music halls and ateliers of the Belle Époque. He pointed out the caged window from which Gérard de Nerval had hanged himself and a condemned house Modi had himself once squatted in. He recalled the banquet for Henri Rousseau hosted by Picasso at the rambling folly of his Bateau Lavoir. There the Douanier, enthroned and wielding the scepter of his violin, presided over a bacchanal that included the entire roster of Bohemia. And Modigliani, late and uninvited, claimed to have crashed the affair just after his arrival in Paris.

“I personally intercepted the drops of wax dripping from a Japanese lantern onto the floppy cap of Monsieur Rousseau.”

The two artists fetched up in a seamy tavern called le Lapin Blessé, a humbler cousin of the celebrated Lapin Agile farther up the hill. They took a table at the rear of the premises, its surface imprinted with rings from generations of overflowed cups. Above them hung a red-shaded lamp, behind them a wall plastered with sensational newspaper clippings from the previous century. Modi ordered a bottle of wine and, after swilling the lion’s share, another. He continued regaling his companion with gleanings from his literary heroes, declaiming lines from Dante and D’Annunzio; he repeated Rimbaud’s famous shibboleth, which he’d adopted as his own: “Le dérèglement de tous les sens!” and listed the ways he’d found to put that concept into practice.

“My senses are deregled already enough,” Chaim had muttered. He hadn’t meant to interrupt, but Modi paused long enough in his running monologue to chuckle, light a cigarette, and call attention to Chaim’s runny nose.

Chaim duteously wiped the snot on the back of his hand. While gratified to have been taken up by the loquacious Italian, he was becoming eager to get back to his precious solitude. It was clear to him, despite the brief span of their acquaintance, that Modigliani had constant need of a gallery to play to; he must be always in the act of cultivating his legend: le peintre maudit, a homonym he set much store by. Even now, in the company of a soap-dodging greenhorn whom he had no call to impress, he was performing.

“I’m Apollo when I work,” he declared, uncorking a small vial of ether that he poured into his wine, “Dionysus when I’m away from my chisels and paints,” quaffing the glass and offering the dregs to his companion, who declined.

“Begging your pardon,” submitted Chaim, amazed at his own presumption, “but it’s a difference between to live and to work?”

Modi ignored him, rattling on about the sanctified enterprise of his art: that it was closer to le vrai, the real, than the world itself as it appeared to the unawakened soul. “When I make a portrait, it’s more like the model than the model is like herself. Do you paint nudes, Soutine? Oh, the ladies, what a nuisance they can be with their false modesty! I have to throw a sheet over their cast-off underclothes so that my studio won’t look like a boudoir. You know, Courbet claimed that he could give in his nudes all the character of Paris…”Coughing fruitily, he turned to gaze toward a window that overlooked the Hill of Martyrs, named for a decapitated saint whose severed head continued to preach. At the foot of the hill the lamplit city was spread out like a drunken spider’s web.

Not wishing to disturb Amedeo’s meditation, Chaim nevertheless made so bold as to murmur an ambition of his own. “I want to show all that is Paris in the carcass of an ox.” But it wasn’t true; he cared nothing for the essence of Paris. And when the day came that he could afford to bring a whole bovine carcass back to his studio, it wouldn’t be Paris he painted but the ox itself: the ox c’est lui.

Having apparently heard him, Modi turned back toward Chaim and seemed to wait for him to continue. The immigrant squirmed in his seat, uncomfortable under anyone’s stare; his flat features didn’t bear close scrutiny. But Modigliani had fixed him with his vitreous, dun-brown eyes, and Chaim, who never gave freely of himself, felt called upon to contribute another two centimes.

“There was in Smilovitchi eleven of us children,” he offered, “twelve if you counted my papa, who was himself a child. Like the rest of us he was always hungry, and would pick from our kasha the gribenes, the cracklings. My mama would see this and pass to him her plate, so she often went without. But”—he was thoughtful—”I don’t remember I ever expressed to her gratitude.”

Leaning forward, Modi placed his elbows on the table and propped his dimpled chin on his fists. “Where does it come from, Soutine?”

“Where comes from what?”

“The itch to paint. When did it infect you?” For Modi himself, born under the bright Tuscan sun, was an heir to cultural aristocracy, Spinoza an ancestor on his mother’s side. The family had encouraged his artistic pursuit. But this lumpish Litvak had stumbled out of a howling wilderness that never heard of sfumato or Claude Monet.

“From bedbugs I get the itch,” grumbled Chaim, actually reaching into his half-buttoned shirt to scratch his chest. He was becoming increasingly uncomfortable under the Italian’s regard. It was as if Amedeo perceived something in him that Chaim preferred not to see in himself. Resenting this excess of consideration, he came to a conclusion of his own and suddenly blurted, “I don’t need to make from your kind of murdering yourself a romance! My own art will murder me soon enough.” Then he waited for Modigliani to get up and storm out of that flyblown joint, after which they would become estranged, as he’d estranged so many others.

But Modi, short-tempered as he so often was and likely to take offense at much less, only offered reflectively, “That’s the difference between me and you, Chaim. May I call you Chaim?” Chaim marveled that he hadn’t already. “I keep my torments out of my art. I save them for when I’m drunk or in love. Whereas you—I saw it at a glance—you smear them into your paintings like hot grease on an open sore.”

The artist’s earnestness was finally more than Chaim could endure. “What torments?” he exclaimed. “I am all the time a happy man!”

At that, though he tried to stifle it, Modi gave himself up to uproarious laughter. He took hold of one of Soutine’s hands (as tapered and delicate as his face was coarse) as if grasping a lifeline. “Myself,” he said when he’d caught his breath, “I’d rather be secure in my misery than risk being happy. Sans blague,” he proclaimed, “happiness is an angel with a serious face.” Then, always prepared to raise another glass at the slightest excuse, he added, “Let’s drink to happiness!” and shouted for the barman to bring them absinthe ordinaire.

The burly taverner shambled forward from behind the bar carrying a tray containing a slender azure bottle of the clear elixir. The tray also held a pitcher of water along with two reservoir glasses, a bowl of sugar cubes, and a small slotted silver spoon.

Modi rubbed his hands in anticipation. “Have you had the grand wormwood, Chaim?”

Chaim’s familiarity with spirits had been limited to the cheap bar mitzvah schnapps and vinegary wines of the Russian Pale; later on he’d learned to scarf a leftover eau-de-vie from the tables along the boulevard Raspail. But absinthe had so far remained a myth. Modi explained that it had been outlawed in the more respectable establishments, among which, judging from the sideways caps and wrist tattoos of its clientele, the Lapin Blessé was not. Then he began, with a precision that belied his advanced state of intoxication, to enact the ceremony of preparing “the green fairy.”

“After the first glass you see things as you wish they were,” he intoned, “after the second, things as they are not; then finally you see things as they are—a celestial nightmare!”

Modi uncapped the bottle and filled the two glasses, sliding one toward Chaim. He poured water from the porcelain pitcher into them both, turning the clear liquid to a misty jade. He placed a cube of sugar on the spatulate spoon, dipped the spoon into the drink, and lifted it out again. Then he took a match from his pocket, struck it on the table, and lit the sugar, which burned with a lambent blue-green flame. Once the sugar was caramelized, he again dipped the spoon into the absinthe, where the flame spread to engulf the surface of the drink. He poured more water into his glass, dousing the flames, and took a sip. He closed his eyes, opened them, startling Chaim with their incandescence, then passed him the spoon and said, “Now you.”

His left eyelid in full flutter, Chaim attempted to follow suit. He managed despite shaky hands to ignite the sugar and dip it in his drink, which flared like a torch. Gasping, he reached for the pitcher to drown the blaze, knocking over the glass in the process. The flames traveled along with the spilled liquid across the width of the wooden tabletop, leaping from the table to touch off the old newspapers that covered the wall. The artists watched spellbound as a paper boasting the headline j’accuse! shaded from coffee brown to chrome orange before curling into a gobbet of red combustion. In a matter of seconds, the entire wall of that spit-and-sawdust saloon was a billowing trellis of flame. The handful of rough customers were on their feet and making in a body for the door. Chaim and Modi were among them, though not before they’d witnessed the barman snap out of his paralysis and charge the conflagration. Furiously he attempted to smother the flames with his apron, but the apron itself caught fire. This sent the man into a Saint Vitus’s dance whose frantic flapping only succeeded in fanning the blaze. So swiftly did the flames spread about the walls, dropping incendiary blossoms from the ceiling onto the tables below, that it seemed as if the boîte had been all along a tinderbox waiting to be lit. Windows shattered, labels on bottles blistered and peeled before the bottles themselves burst like shrapnel. The whole place had become an inferno and the barkeep, helpless to mitigate the disaster, fled into the street outside with the rest of his patrons.

It took the fire brigade the better part of an hour to negotiate the switchback lanes of the quarter. By the time they arrived—steam issuing from the brass pumper and the nostrils of the heavy horses that pulled it—le Lapin Blessé was a smoldering mound of cinders and ash. ...