At first Josef didn’t believe her. She stared at him again, then turned toward the door. “I’ll go downstairs. You can only have an hour or so to get clear. When Mama wakens, I’ll keep her busy in the kitchen for as long as I can. If you’re still here by suppertime, well then, that’s your choice.” And she was gone.

Damned good of her, Josef thought. At least she was sporting. He wondered what he could manage to take, and what he’d have to leave. Once he’d left with only the clothes on his back and a few extras; now he had seven paintings in various stages of completion. The exuberance was at him again. He threw some belongings in his knapsack. Free again! Wandering the villages and the fairs—the outsider, with his canvases and paints! He started to hum. The sound vibrated satisfactorily through his teeth.

His travail and imprisonment were over. Aha! But even as his mouth hurt from grinning so broadly, he avoided looking at his paintings. He tried to pretend they weren’t there. And all the while he wondered: would he really leave? When he turned around and saw the paintings, would he be free to go? Of course he would. No one was keeping him, after all. He went on thinking and humming, because no matter how loudly he hummed, the thoughts wouldn’t go away. If no one was keeping him, then what was? What kind of a game was he playing with himself? Had Bianka unknowingly—or shrewdly—called his bluff?

Lord, what nonsense went through a man’s mind at times. Of course he was leaving. He was half-packed.

And he turned. His paintings stood there like living entities materializing out of paint and canvas. The sun and shadows within them now seemed more real than the sun and shadows within the room itself. He couldn’t leave them. And he couldn’t take them. Some were too wet; he didn’t dare roll them up; they’d crack and be ruined. For a moment he felt really frightened and more imprisoned than ever.

But what a great technical job he’d done on those tiles. He bent closer to the courtyard painting. The way he’d applied the coats of lacquers so that the transparent colors lay clearly one over the other, without muddying—

But suddenly it was as if the various layers of color somehow represented his own emotions. Not physically, but mentally he felt himself falling through the coats of lacquers, only in doing so he was falling from one emotion to another. The feelings had been opaque. Now they were so transparent that he saw them with childlike brilliance, but the dizzying physical sensation of falling through them remained, though he knew he was standing quite solidly on the floor.