Konrad and Alexandra (pdf) - Rolf Gross

covered with faded, dark-red plush, a simple table, and a washstand. There was hardly room
for an easel. A large window, overlooking the roofs and chimney pots of the quartier, was the
only luxury.
Akhmatova prepared tea on a small gas burner, while Amedeo pulled some paintings
from under the bed: a portrait of a young Pole and his wife, "my best friends," and an
unfinished nude: Akhmatova sitting in the plush red chair.
Their domestic arrangement, however transitory it might be, was touching. Over tea they
talked about Amedeo's many Eastern-European emigrant friends and St. Petersburg that he
longed to see.
Alexandra felt Amedeo’s painterly eyes resting on her again. And as if on cue,
Akhmatova asked whether Alexandra would pose for him.
Amedeo smiled with lowered eyes. "I would really like to paint you in the nude. You are
the most elegant lady who ever strayed into this dismal place of mine."
He said this with such charm and in presence of the woman he slept with, that
Alexandra felt completely taken by surprise. She looked questioningly at Akhmatova , who
shook her head. "Doctor Alexandra, don’t let my presence trouble you. You have seen me
without clothes!"
It is an arranged game, thought Alexandra, they plotted it before my arrival. But the two
were so without guile that Alexandra felt ridiculed.
She blushed. "I have never sat as a model for a painter. What do you want me to do?"
"You can undress behind the Japanese screen. I will give you a shawl to cover yourself,
and then I will make some fast charcoal sketches of you lying on the bed." He shrugged.
"Unfortunately there is no other place for you to lie down comfortably."
After a few moments of hesitation Alexandra disappeared behind the screen.
Akhmatova had turned away busying herself in the "kitchen." Amedeo threw her the shawl and
put a new canvas on the easel. When he turned around he was facing Alexandra in her full
beauty. She had discarded the shawl as a silly prop.
For a few seconds Amedeo stared at her, but then lowered his long eyelashes.
Alexandra flushed from head to toe.
She sat on the edge of the bed with her arms crossed over her breasts. Amedeo asked
her to lie on her right side with her back to him and her head turned towards him. She should
look past him out the window. He asked her to rearrange her left arm and to bend her left leg
over the right one.
Akhmatova brought her a cup of hot tea, sat in the chair, and looked at Alexandra with
the most serious expression. Amedeo disappeared behind his easel. He worked with incredible
speed. Occasionally he peered over the edge of the canvas to determine her proportions with a
short stick.
During this first session Alexandra could not think of anything but the three of them in
the small room, Akhmatova who earnestly watched the drawing emerge, and Amedeo who
scratched and screeched with his charcoal on the canvas. She felt as if his long hands were
caressing her body. She shivered. Akhmatova closed the window asking, whether she felt cold
and wanted the shawl. Alexandra assured her that she was perfectly all right. Akhmatova
smiled. "I too was not used to being looked at in such detail at first."
After a while Amedeo put down his charcoal and with blackened fingers turned the
canvas around. With a few deft strokes he had produced a beguiling sketch of her, catching
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