Remember how you used to make the beach? Waves, umbrellas striped like candy, castles of sand, the sun blessing it all. You can go back there now, layer the paint in whatever colors you choose, thick as pudding. No one will so much as whisper the words “shooting” or “starvation.” They don’t care about such things over there. It’s all just pretzels and pop. Jaruska, you cannot stay in the basement of the church forever. The dust has begun to eat at your lungs. Soon there will be nothing left to do your breathing.
Why were the people of God always so condescending? Or were they just stupid? “Leave the tray,” Jaruska directs. She is not on a hunger strike. She simply refuses to stop the hairshirt reel of her memories, which their piety, wound like cotton batting around their brains, prevents them from understanding. She deserves to remember, she wants to remember, she accepts that she has been sentenced to recall:
She had arrived at the church with the bluster of a much younger artist, fueled by a fabulism that allowed her to tell a lie that fell with the sincerity of light through stained glass: “I can no longer fight Fascists.”
Jaruska had never tried to fight the Fascists. In truth, she tucked herself away in a sun-filled studio, cradling herself between social media confections and a view of the leafy park, where baggy tourists hunted scraps of shade. She spent her days making pretty paintings of beaches lit by sunset, selling enough to pay rent and a few summer weeks in Tenby, splashing and feasting on roasted clams. But that morning, she had watched from the window as a little boy devoured a soft pretzel in the park, his small hands tearing chunks of dough that he popped into his mouth, hopping from foot to foot, in a dance of joy so exuberant Jaruska could taste the salty delight. The sight filled her with a wistful desire to want again, to have a hunger of the soul. Over the years, she’d crowded her thoughts with so much of what she wished to avoid (corporate employment, flu, children) that her imagination no longer stretched toward what she wished to pursue. Horizons of desire had vanished, without so much as a farewell dream.
The church had always struck her as a place of drama, and it was just as good a place as any to start her search for passion. “Father, I would like to trade a mural for some chicken. And a little white wine,” she said, and then, for effect, she added a second lie:
“I have a heavenly vision.”
Her mind held no images of heaven or God, only a fluffy pleasantness that it did not try to grasp. She had no idea what she would paint. She knew that her mural would neither be lit by sunset, nor contain a bench. But as she looked around at the dark paintings in gilt frames, the gold-tipped statues of saints on pedestals, she found herself overcome by the fantasy of kneeling parishioners gazing at something that she created, a painting that they did not purchase for the long wall above their couch.
But the priest, a pragmatic spiritual shepherd, had sized up Jaruska’s strong arms and broad shoulders. He was unmoved by Jaruska’s expressed desire to escape war with Fascists. Pointing skyward, he said that instead of painting a mural, Jaruska could repair the pitiful church ceiling. A fund-raising dance in the upstairs meeting hall left it sagging and filled with cracks, its aging plaster broken by the modern music and pounding boots of a benefit concert.
“We damaged our precious church to make some money,” the priest explained. “You could say that we sold our desperate souls. Then again, we weren’t exactly the Venetians inviting Pink Floyd to give a free concert in the lagoon. We wanted to feed people, not make a fast buck,” he mused before returning to the business at hand. “You will need to protect the pews with a drop cloth, mix plaster, sand a little, paint a lot. Fix all of the damage, as if it had never happened. Do not try to make a statement; this is not Wenceslas Square! If you deliberately botch the job the way the Czechs did, it will not remind people of the devils who caused the damage. Fascist mentality forced us into fund raising, but these days, Fascists are subtler than communists. If you leave behind traces of damage to protest their policies, people will just assume that the craftsman was a hack. They won’t take away any political message. Cracks in ceilings do not translate as well as unpatched bullet holes. No one will look at our splotchy ceiling and think, ‘the rich caused this by controlling government that screws the poor, leaving them to fend for themselves.’”
Jaruska, who in preparing for the role of starving artist had skipped breakfast, found her thoughts drifting to crisp chicken and buttered biscuits. She did not dare admit that she never considered ceiling repair a political act. She had never thought about the restorers who intentionally left the Russian bullet holes in the National Museum. She had never even cared. Not her museum. Not her bullet holes. Not her message.
Her dreams, however, spoke as loudly as her stomach. The creaking of her bones and the struggle to suppress a grunt every time she bent down to tie her shoe reminded her that she had more days on earth behind her than ahead. Away from the stifling curation of her apartment, she allowed herself to wonder what it would be like to create something that did not end up on a yard sale table next to a ceramic donkey. She might want more than new carpet and an annual digging of her toes in sand. She might try to live on through a grand mural hanging. How wonderful to be seen, long after she had vanished. But Jaruska also recognized that she must reckon with the priest’s orders for the job, which boiled down to a simple calculus: smooth ceiling.
The priest sought only building repair. Jaruska surveyed the church, silently praying for a solution that would allow her both to satisfy the priest and to fulfill her own worldly desires. She told the priest none of this, however, and instead asked where the sink was and when the chicken would be carved. Then she left to gather her tools.
On the first day, Jaruska climbed her wooden ladder and scrubbed away candle soot. She used a wire brush that she dipped into a metal bucket, its handle clanging each time as if she might wake the world from rusty sleep. She mixed plaster, hauled it up, and filled every crack until the ceiling was as smooth as paper. More than enough to pass the priest’s inspection. But it was also a canvas, beckoning her to another kind of life, if she dared.
Jaruska stretched her back and bent her neck, which crackled like a campfire. Touching the cool plaster, she fashioned a leg and five tiny toes against the ceiling, followed by another leg and toes, and then a plump, navel-less belly that sat under supple, rounded shoulders, and finally a sweet moon face framed by ringlets. An angel emerged in innocent glory, more seductive than a clumsy puppy. Jaruska wanted to kiss it. She descended from the scaffold and looked up at what she had created, washed by a wave of remorse as she realized she had allowed herself to become deadened to this particular joy.
Jaruska gazed up at the plaster child she had given birth to, and climbed back up to resume her work. With inspired alacrity, she created dozens more of the angels. They danced across his plaster sky: fat-cheeked babies with round limbs and brimstone smiles, skipping, hugging, strumming lyres, and tumbling about the heavens. Each dollop of plaster added another player to her celestial band of laughing, dreaming, rollicking, plump creatures of the clouds. Her heaven would be as crowded as gondolas in June and a thousand times more glorious.
Despite the joy of this frenzied activity, Jaruska suffered physically. No position or arrangement of scaffolding alleviated the ache of arms outstretched, of a neck forever bent heavenward, of plaster drips in her lashes. She pressed on, easing her pain with thoughts of Michelangelo. Unlike Michelangelo, she did not have the Pope nagging at her. There was much to be said about being free from patronage, even if it meant a little less wine. Jaruska lost herself mixing plaster, arranging limbs, and choosing expressions, happy not to think about the world outside.
One afternoon, as Jaruska shaped cloud swirls with her putty knife, a silver string dropped from the ceiling. With a slight pop of the plaster, a beaming cherub emerged and wriggled down the string until it dangled in front of her. Jaruska was so startled that she dropped her phone onto the hard marble floor, where it shattered with bone-crunching clarity.
Jaruska blinked at the angel. It blinked back.
"Buongiorno," Jaruska said, expecting the angel to reply because everyone, even the Germans, knows that angels are Italian. The angel did not say a word. Jaruska tried four other languages, including her native Czech, but the cherub remained mute.
After offering every greeting she could think of, Jaruska worried that she was hallucinating. But if she had invented this implausible being, why would she conjure something that did not speak to her? She could only conclude that this chubby angel truly lived. Jaruska tickled the cherub's plump toes. It clambered up its silver string and disappeared. Jaruska wondered if she had frightened the angel or if it was teasing her. Maybe it was trying to comprehend this new world; divine creatures were not necessarily all-knowing. That night, when she retired to her apartment, he changed her affirmation to an avowal: "I will hear the angel speak."
In the morning, Jaruska climbed the scaffolding with creaking stiffness. As she lay on her back pressing dimples into the supple knees of new cherubs, the silent one returned.
"What do you want from me?" she shouted. Her question bounced off Jesus on the gilded crucifix.
The cherub raised its eyebrows. Jaruska examined it. She could not help but admire the smoothness of its skin and the delicacy of its nose, which she herself had made. "You are my creation. I command you to speak!" In a fit of pique, Jaruska climbed down, and grabbing the wooden stick she used to stir paint, held it in the flame of a tall holy candle until it lit. Clutching the burning stick, she climbed back and waved the torch at the angel's wings until they singed.
The cherub sighed and opened its round mouth as the fire cast a mischievous light into its eyes. “Guten tag.”
Jaruska gasped.
The angel blew out the candle and pressed a plump finger against the small pouch of Jaruska’s belly. “You are well fed."
An airy warmth filled Jaruska's chest, as if her heart had turned into a popover. “What are you doing here?”
The angel smiled. “You first.”
“Giving the people an image of heaven.” As if to demonstrate her skill, Jaruska took out her spirit level and held it up to the ceiling.
“Everyone offers images of heaven. They sell well.”
Jaruska rested the level on her ladder. “Yes,” she admitted, clearing her throat. She did not want to be ashamed of making art that allowed her to live, but she was.
The angel continued. “It’s a wonderful way of not looking at what is right under our feet.”
Jaruska tightened her grip on the ladder. “I don’t look away. I fill life with images: red begonias, seagulls, lanterns in twilight.”
“Of course.” The cherub smiled. “What do you want?”
“To be known.”
“Why?”
“Isn’t that what everybody wants?”
“People buy seven million Flash burgers every day. That doesn’t make the burgers desirable.”
“I want to be seen.”
“I am seeing you now. People see you every day.”
Jaruska scooped some plaster and began fashioning another cherub. She felt very hot.
The cherub slid closer. “Give that one a moustache.”
Jaruska stopped. “Angels in heaven don’t have moustaches.”
“Not all angels live in heaven. Tell me about your fame.”
“This is my chance. This ceiling, in this church, with these angels. They will transform me into something greater than a graying painter in a charming garret. Something that will last for generations.”
“It might go viral.” The cherub’s innocent eyes rolled toward heaven.
“Is it too much to want some part of me to last beyond the lousy eighty years I get on earth?”
“It’s seventy-nine years in Czechia; a less if you move to Slovakia. But no, it’s not too much to want. Are you seeking fame or immortality?”
“Aren’t they the same?”
“On a cosmic scale, earthly immortality lasts a few moments, but where I come from,” the angel waved its arms like a tilting windmill, pointing in all directions, “immortality has no style, has no calendar. It is eternal.”
“I want both. Fame here and an afterlife…there.”
“You sound like a Roman emperor.”
Jaruska laughed. “Tell that to my cat.”
“I’ll tell you a story instead: Once upon a time, in Ancient Rome, there lived a very savvy leader of the Republic, who had been consolidating his imperial power. Some of his subjects adored him, some hated him; everyone feared him. Suddenly he died. Years later, the Roman Senate voted on whether or not he should become a god. He won the vote! Just like that, he became a god who had a temple dedicated to him, priests devoted to his worship and sacrificial rites performed in his honor. On his special day, every year, a calf was slaughtered. People prayed to him, invoked him, made appeals to him for centuries after he died. So you could say he got both: a lot of fame here, to be sure, and, according to the Roman Senate, eternal afterlife.
“Who was it?”
“Julius Caesar.”
“He was assassinated.”
“Yes. And the move to deify him started a trend. After that, every time an emperor died, the Senate voted to decide if he should become a god or not. Sometimes wives got in on the action and were deified, too. Godliness for everyone.”
“What does this have to do with me?”
“The moral is: Don’t worry about who worships you here. They may turn out to be as ridiculous as the Roman Senate.”
“Easy for you to say.”
“I’ll make you a deal: come back tomorrow, follow my instructions, and you may have a shot.”
“A shot at what?”
“Life.”
“Afterlife? Immortal life?”
“Life. Full stop.”
That night, despite a belly filled with chicken and soave, Jaruska did not sleep well. The cryptic utterances of the angel had taunted her with a complex riddle that she could neither solve nor ignore. She had been thinking that her art would save her, but now she was not so sure. As soon as dawn breathed its pink wisps across the sky, she ran to the church to be comforted by the beauty of her handiwork: untroubled, child-like figures. Free and full of life, they would transport people to another world, every single one of them sprung from her mind, born from her fingertips, ready for adoration. Her legacy.
As if Jaruska’s exuberant satisfaction had triggered a silent alarm, the angel re-appeared and slid down its silver thread carrying a tiny axe. “We have much to do.”
“I have finished my masterpieces. I will wipe them off so they are ready for their Sunday mass debut.”
The cherub shook its head. “They’re not right. You have to change all of them. Except me.”
“Are you jealous? This isn’t a competition. I’m not going to crown one of you Most Beautiful. Even if I offered an Angel Congeniality prize, you would not win it,” Jaruska laughed.
The angel frowned. “I’m not joking.”
Jaruska’s hands trembled. “They’re perfect. Why would I want to alter any of them?”
The angel took Jaruska’s face in its small hands. “They have to become less darling.”
“Ridiculous.” She folded his arms. But something began gnawing at her ankles, something she knew had been there for a very long while, eggs laid under her skin.
“You have no real choice.” The angel reached up and chipped off the foot of the closest cherub.
Jaruska screamed as if her own limb had been broken. “Stop!” The angel sighed, then reached for the leg. Jaruska stretched towards the cherub, swatting madly as the ladder swayed, but missed. The cherub scrambled across the ceiling, leaping from cherub to cherub, hacking off bits as it went. Jaruska threw every tool in the box at the angel, but the small creature was too nimble and too quick for the ladder-bound painter, who swore in between gulps of breath.
“Why are you doing this?” Jaruska demanded. She scratched at her skin.
“Saving you. It gives me no pleasure, but clearly if left to your own devices you will never arrive. The world does not need any more pretty. We are choking on pretty.”
“I want beauty.”
“These are not beautiful.”
“Oh please. Not that old chestnut again.”
The angel pointed. “Start there. Chip away at the flesh. Emaciate it.”
The angel’s words, delivered, Jaruska imagined, with the harmony of the spheres, unmoored her. The angels had begun to resemble her bench paintings in another form. This work—with the exception of the churl who was now goading her—did not speak. What does one do with understanding that one does not want? Couldn’t she tuck it away, in a cigar box under her bench, to be opened by a stranger long after her death? She felt the eggs in her skin begin to crack.
Jaruska felt that she had reversed position with the tiny creature. She wondered if soon her own bones would become as malleable as fresh plaster. She did not want to be remade, and yet, here she was, on the edge of becoming what she might have always been. Was that what it meant to grow old? To have reached the destiny of oneself?
“Go on,” the cherub coaxed. “There is nothing else you can do.”
Jaruska took a tentative chip at one of the angels with her chisel. She felt a sharp pain in her own ribs.
“Go on,” the cherub commanded. Slowly, Jaruska began reworking the other cherubs. She reshaped a torso to reveal the ribs, moving to the arms, until they became thin and frail, and then she worked the legs until they matched the arms. She began to lose the sense of her own body.
The angel appraised the piteous sight. “Now the faces.”
With her chisel, Jaruska tapped away until cheeks sank, and faces became gaunt. The plump cherub disappeared, and in its place stood an exhausted child. The angel gestured towards the other cherubs across the ceiling.
“When you finish the bodies, remove the instruments.”
As Jaruska surveyed her work, she remembered what she had buried: a photograph of a starving child crawling in the sand while a patient vulture watched and waited. The photographer took his own young life, unable to carry the burden of bearing witness. What were her precious cherubs by comparison?
In tears, Jaruska complied. She replaced mandolins with empty pans. The cherub followed her, moving from figure to figure, adding bruises and sores. She wiped the joy from their eyes, hardened their small mouths. She had seen these images in the world around her and now here they were, emerging from her own hand. She continued, side by side, with her own creation, transforming the heavenly into the earthbound. She had ceased to protest. By the end of the day, they had made the angels of the heavens into children of the world.
The angel slid down its string and reached toward Jaruska. Its smooth, plump perfection stood in stark contrast to the bodies that surrounded them.
Exhausted and trembling, Jaruska asked, “Is this enough?”
The angel brushed plaster from Jaruska’s cheek and kissed her forehead. Its lips felt like tiny cool jewels against Jaruska’s feverish skin. “It is never enough,” it said, handing Jaruska a chisel. “Finish.”
For the first time in her life, Jaruska Kapek found herself obligated to act without choice, a burden heavier than the endless possibility she once resented. She took the chisel and aimed the first blow at the cherub’s neck. She chipped away until the cherub’s perfect ringlets fell and its limbs grew frail and emaciated. She sanded until its luminous skin pocked and relinquished its luster. She struck again at the cherub so that its eyes receded into hollows, and then, finally with a flicker, their fierce light went out. Jaruska stood on her scaffolding, alone in the candled silence of the church.
She wiped her hands on her overalls and climbed down. She had finally acted out the complicity of her own life. She did not know where to go. She tried to recall how the angel looked in the beginning, but she could no more summon those details than she could hear the sound of her grandmother’s voice. And yet she knew they both were there, somewhere inside of her.
Jaruska had taken her last look at the ceiling when the door opened. The priest shuffled in, his cassock and black soles crackling whispers across the wreckage. Gazing up, he took in the weary line of small, worn figures following one after another across the ceiling and the blue-eyed Jesus on the crucifix, unmoved. Nodding, he turned to the back closet and retrieved a metal dustpan, which he handed to Jaruska. And then he began to sweep, each morsel of plaster whispering to the soul that wanted to be born.
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