Post by anniemal on Sept 8, 2010 18:28:53 GMT -5
This was new.
Normally it was Leon lurking behind the easel, clutching a stick of charcoal in one clammy hand, using the flimsy premise of attending a life drawing class to satisfy his own voyeuristic urges…
Ok, maybe he was being overly harsh on himself – he went to life drawing classes to improve his art rather than to ogle naked bodies, not least because they got some seriously dodgy looking people to model. But pre-show jitters, if you could call it that, were kicking in and he was inclined to believe every single one of the people sitting in that circle of easels was an utter pervert and he was about to go and sit naked in front of them. The precise reasons he had decided to do this had got a little hazy, drowned out by the butterflies which were currently trying to escape his stomach via his mouth. He just knew he needed to know what it was like to be the one sitting there, empty handed, vacant and vulnerable. Maybe then he’d be able to feed some of that into the next drawing. At the moment they felt too clinical, he was just drawing the person because they were there, not because he felt any there was anything particularly interesting about them. Not that that stopped him going, because it was nice to quietly go and draw somewhere where he didn’t know anyone. Leon got on well with the other student on his course but it was hard to have much peace when surrounded by a bunch of people who kept jostling and making oblique references to Adolf Hitler. Not racist slurs or anything, all light hearted and joking. Besides, he was used to it because it was like a kind of institutionalised Tourettes, the minute people were around a German they couldn’t help but make insinuations about Nazis. So he couldn’t blame them, but in a way it felt hostile, like they were saying ‘You can’t escape it. You may have moved away, and got a bit of an American accent. But you still say w’s funny sometimes, and you can’t pretend you’re anything other than you are. You can’t pretend you’re not German, and that this isn’t part of your past. We all know.’
Or maybe he was just being paranoid. The side effects of that national subconscious guilt that meant so many of his peers were ferociously left wing anti-fascists. Even Leon, who was nowhere near in touch enough with the real world to even be able to spell politics – or politicks as he thought it was –had been on a couple of protests.
So the anonymity helped. It definitely helped now he was standing behind a screen listening to the genteel mumbling of the class as he pulled off his jumper and dropped his jeans. He pulled on the gown and stepped out from behind the screen. It was an evening class, but even if it had been the middle of the day the only light would have come from the warm, orangey glow of the lamps. The class was in the one of the basement rooms of the university and the lack of windows Leon had barely given a thought to previously now caused his heart to give a brief grateful flutter.
Forcing himself to relax, fairly unsuccessfully, he stepped up onto the low podium and shrugged off his gown.
Canon: Narcissus and Goldmund
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