brothel would not be portrayed like this!”
made of Murano glass — we did what every second tourist does in Venice. In fact, one should perform crazy things in Venice, not buy chandeliers. Sitting in our small hotel room and inspecting the octopus-looking chandelier, we despised ourselves for being so petty bourgeois. I fell asleep and was unaware that the artist Stenko took the chandelier, that robbed us of all our euros, out of the room and sunk it in the Grand Canal. So, this is the way of Toma Stenko, whom I know a little. Who every so often trespasses the ‘limits of common sense’. This is what I learned about the geography teacher Glafira Mikhailovna Serebryakova and why Toma Stenko portrays her in the nude, or, to use Prince Abalmek’s words, ‘displays the female sexual characteristics’. There will be a lot of her portraits at the London exhibition: Glafira on a Stripy Deckchair, Glafira among the Big-Eyed Fish, Glafira and Her Hubby Vanechka, Whom She Loved but He was Unfaithful to Her. Toma says that the geography teacher was a most decent and pious woman, but why did she utter such an obscene phrase, which is almost incomprehensible: “Even big ships sink in the c@nt”. When she was a little girl, Toma could not imagine how big ships may sink in such a tiny area (she stood in front of the mirror). This phrase took her aback and it was reflected in her paintings — in many nude portraits of her geography teacher. They were the nudes of her young days, of her aged between 30 and 40, and of her period of Rubens’s fleshy curves.
Toma erupted unexpectedly, in her customary exuberant way. She took hold of the big kitchen knife — that one, which she held when she ran after me, yelling, “Why aren’t you a Faulkner or a Marquez!” While pursuing the Madagascan’s guests she yelled, “All these portraits are just nudes! This is my cherished Glafira Mikhailovna Serebryakova, the mother of my mother, the most decent geography teacher, and in no way is she a whore from a soldiers’ brothel!” That night we were transferring the pictures from the fourth floor up to our apartment on the seventh. It was already morning when our children Chanur and Gema went to sleep. Toma fell asleep, too. But I laid awake. I recalled the town of Pennabilli in the mountains of Italy, where we both were invited to visit the school run by Tonino Guerra. Along with us, six people were invited: Rustam Khamdamov, Paola Volkova, Georgi Danelia, Vera Sumenova, Andrei Khrzhanovsky, and Anton Lange. Invited to give master classes, to drink white and red Italian wines, to contemplate landscapes which before us were admired by Raffaello Santi and Michelangelo Buonarroti. These genius’ houses are located in close vicinity to Pennabilli where lived Lora Yablochkina and Tonino Guerra, the writer, poet, playwright, the scriptwriter of Amarcord, And the Ship Sails On and many more masterpieces of the world cinema. After staying two weeks in Pennabilli, Toma and I escaped to Venice. In the city of Casanova, Titian, Goldoni, Bellini and Brodsky we bought a chandelier
54
Made with FlippingBook - Online magazine maker