The Harbor Painting
The Harbor Painting
Mara Younes had four grams of ultramarine left in the world, and she was not going to waste it on a dead man’s sky.
She glanced toward the window as a matte-gray sedan rolled past on the street below, slow enough to be deliberate, not slow enough to be an accusation. It didn’t stop. It never stopped anymore. It only slowed, the way it had slowed past her studio twice already this week, just enough for whoever sat behind its tinted glass to remember the shape of her building, the hours her lamp stayed lit. She did not look up a second time. Looking up a second time was how you taught them you’d noticed.
The painting on her worktable was a minor Ottoman-era harbor scene, unsigned, water-damaged along the bottom third where some previous owner had let it lean against a radiator for thirty years. Under the raking light of her lamp she could see exactly where the pigment had failed: a ragged gray wound running from the horizon to the hull of a fishing boat, precisely the shape the sea used to be.
It had been six years since the color went out of the water. Long enough that most of her clients no longer asked her to restore it. They asked her to stabilize it instead to keep the gray from spreading, to varnish over the wound so it looked intentional, a fog, an impressionist’s fog, anything but what it actually was, which was a hole where a living thing used to be.
She mixed a gray-blue from bone char and titanium white, the closest legal approximation, and told herself it was enough.
Outside her studio window, the real Mediterranean did the same thing it had done every day since The Fade: it sat there, flat and pewter-colored, licking at the Corniche like something that had forgotten what water was for. Alexandria’s fishermen still went out. The fish had not changed. Only the light bouncing off the surface had stopped remembering how to be blue.
The client arrived at eleven, twenty minutes late, in a car with tinted windows and a driver who didn’t get out to open the door for him, which told Mara something about the kind of money he had old enough not to need the gesture, careful enough not to make it.
His name was Farid Zaki, and he owned, among other things, three hotels on the North Coast and a chain of pharmacies that had done extraordinarily well during the rationing years, for reasons Mara preferred not to think about too closely. He stood in her studio in a coat that cost more than her rent and looked at the harbor painting the way men like him looked at everything: as an asset first, an object second, and only very distantly, if at all, as a thing that had once meant something to somebody.
“You’ve done the sky,” he said. It wasn’t a compliment. It was an inventory.
“I’ve stabilized the sky,” Mara said. “There’s a difference.”
“Is there.” He leaned closer, close enough that she could smell his cologne, something expensive and faintly metallic, and tapped one manicured finger an inch from the canvas, never quite touching. “It looks finished to me.”
“It looks finished because I know what I’m doing. It isn’t restored. I can’t restore it there’s no legal supply of ultramarine deep enough to bring back a wound this size, and even if there were, the Ministry would flag the purchase before I got the vial home. What I did was mix a gray that reads as intentional. A collector who doesn’t know what he’s looking at will think it’s a fog effect. A collector who does know will understand exactly what happened to this painting, the same thing that happened to every painting from before The Fade with more than a thumbnail of sky in it.”
Zaki straightened. He did not look offended. Men like him were rarely offended by honesty when the honesty came wrapped in expertise; it was, if anything, its own form of reassurance proof he was paying for something real. “And which kind of collector do you imagine I am?”
“The kind who’s going to sell it within eighteen months,” Mara said, “to someone in Geneva who’s never seen the original palette and never will, and who’ll pay for the fog either way.”
He laughed, a short, genuine sound, and for a moment she almost liked him. “You’re wasted restoring dead men’s harbor scenes, Ms. Younes. You should be in acquisitions.”
“I like dead men’s harbor scenes,” Mara said. “They don’t negotiate.”
He paid her in full, in cash, the way all her serious clients did now that the Ministry had started flagging large transfers involving anyone with a restoration license not because restorers were suspected of anything specific, but because a woman who spent her days matching failed pigments to their nearest legal substitute was, by definition, someone who thought constantly about color she wasn’t supposed to have. Mara had stopped being offended by the assumption. It was, after all, entirely correct.
Her ration chip buzzed against her wrist as she was cleaning her brushes. Fourteen minutes of unrestricted color viewing left for the day, the display told her in flat gray digits, which was its own small, exhausted joke a chromatic ration announced in the one shade the announcement was allowed to use. She had already spent most of her allotment on the harbor painting, coaxing out its dying palette hair by hair, because someone somewhere in the Ministry of Chromatic Conservation had decided that art restorers needed higher daily quotas than the general public, on the theory that preserving the past was a kind of conservation in itself.
Mara didn’t believe that anymore. She thought the whole Ministry was just trying to make the hemorrhage feel like a policy instead of a wound, the same way she’d just made Farid Zaki’s harbor scene feel like a fog instead of a scar. It was, she sometimes thought, the only skill the last six years had actually taught the entire species: how to dress a wound up as a choice.
She capped the ultramarine four grams, sealed in a lead-lined vial no bigger than a fingertip, worth more on the black market than her apartment and locked it in the safe bolted beneath her worktable, and thought, as she did most days around this hour, that she should stop by Nab’s on the way home. Not to buy anything. Just to see what he’d heard.
Nabil El-Masry ran his business out of the back room of a shop that sold, ostensibly, restoration supplies brushes, varnishes, the dull legal browns and ochres that hadn’t gone anywhere, the boring colors that had survived The Fade the way certain species always survive an extinction event, by being too unremarkable to be worth consuming. Everyone in the trade called him Nab, and everyone in the trade knew, without ever quite saying it aloud, that the front room was not where the real business happened.
He was somewhere in his fifties, built like a man who had once done manual labor and had since let money do the labor for him, with a laugh that arrived a half-second before whatever he was about to say, as though he found his own upcoming sentence funnier than his audience possibly could. Mara had known him for four years, ever since a mutual client had mentioned, in the careful sideways way people mentioned these things, that Nab could occasionally locate small quantities of pigment that weren’t, strictly, supposed to exist anymore.
“Mara Younes.” He said her full name the way he always did, like an announcer introducing a boxer. “Come to buy something you can’t afford, or come to tell me you can’t afford something you didn’t buy?”
“Neither. I finished the Zaki job.”
“Ah.” Nab’s eyebrows went up, delighted. “The pharmacy king. How much did you gray-fog him for?”
“Enough.” She leaned against his counter, glancing, out of habit, at the shelf behind him where the legal stock sat in neat rows burnt sienna, raw umber, a whole taxonomy of browns that had survived by being beneath notice. “I need actual ultramarine. Legal quantity. For a museum consignment, not a private one they’ll want provenance.”
“Legal ultramarine.” Nab said the phrase the way another man might say unicorn tears. “You know what legal ultramarine costs now?”
“I know.”
“You know it’s cheaper to buy the illegal kind and just not get caught?”
“I know that too. I’m asking for the legal kind anyway.”
He studied her for a moment, and something in his face changed not suspicion exactly, more the particular attentiveness of a man recalibrating how much of a conversation he was actually going to have. “You’re careful lately. More careful than the Zaki job needs you to be.”
“I’m always careful.”
“You’re careful like someone who thinks somebody’s watching.” He said it lightly, still smiling, but his eyes had gone somewhere else, somewhere that had nothing to do with pigment prices. “You know, your husband used to get that same look. Right before The Fade. Careful in a way that wasn’t really about the thing he said he was being careful about.”
Mara went very still. In four years of buying and half-buying and pretending not to buy from Nabil El-Masry, he had never once mentioned Idris.
“You knew Idris?”
“I knew a lot of people who worked the research end of things, back when the research end of things still needed people like me.” Nab said it easily, turning to straighten a row of brushes that didn’t need straightening, not quite meeting her eyes. “Before it all became men in government cars and lawyers writing memos. There was a window maybe eight, nine months when nobody understood the crisis well enough to have made it official yet, and in that window, everybody needed things fast, off the books, no paperwork. Instruments. Reagents. Sometimes just information nobody wanted their name attached to requesting.”
“You never said anything. Four years, Nab.”
“You never asked.” He shrugged, and the shrug had weight to it, the specific weight of a man deciding, in real time, how much door to leave open. “And it wasn’t really my business to bring up a dead man to his widow over an invoice for burnt sienna.”
“He’s not confirmed dead,” Mara said, too quickly, the old reflex, the sentence she’d said so many times it had worn a groove in her mouth.
“No,” Nab agreed, and there was something careful in the way he agreed, something that made the hair on Mara’s arms rise very slightly. “No, I suppose he isn’t.”
She wanted, badly, to ask him what he meant by that whether it was simple courtesy, the reflexive kindness you extend to a grieving woman, or whether there was something underneath it, some fact he was holding the way he held everything in that back room, quietly, for the right buyer. But the bell over the shop door rang, a customer’s shadow falling across the front room, and Nab’s face resealed itself into its usual delighted, unbothered shape before she could decide.
“Come back Thursday,” he said, louder now, shopkeeper-voiced. “I’ll see what I can find on the ultramarine. Legally,” he added, with the half-second laugh, “if such a thing still means anything.”
Mara left with nothing in her hands and a great deal more in her chest than she’d walked in with, and did not, in the end, tell him that she hadn’t come about ultramarine at all that she’d come, the way she came most weeks, simply to sit for ten minutes in the one room in Alexandria where someone still occasionally said her husband’s name out loud, without flinching, as though he might yet walk back in through the door.
She picked Nour up from school at four, the way she did every day, and the walk home took them past the mural three streets over dolphins and waves and a child on a rock, all of it long since gone the color of wet cement, the city having never bothered repainting it, there being nothing left to repaint it with. Nour, seven years old, walked her usual half-step ahead, swinging Mara’s hand like a pendulum, chattering about a classmate’s argument over crayons that no longer contained a color anyone called blue.
Mara wasn’t really listening. She was thinking about the particular way Nab had said I suppose he isn’t, and about four grams of ultramarine locked in a safe worth more than her apartment, and about the fourteen minutes now closer to six still ticking down on the display at her wrist, counting out exactly how much of the world she was still allowed to see today before the rest of it went quietly, dutifully back to gray.
