Chapter Two

CHAPTER TWO
He remembered the first time what it was like to step into a foreign country and smell the air within. The air he sensed was fresh, though different. Outside the airport, the wind almost whooshed and howled around upon his arrival, as he took a taxi in that storm on an otherwise bright day to the city that was to be home for him, Leiden.
It was around the first few trips that Marcus began to take a trip around this city, that he realized that this was a city that was meant to explored and treaded on foot. He had begun to get a strange sense of familiarity with the sound of footsteps that echoed each time he took these long walks around the city to head back home. It were these sounds that frightened him when he heard them for the first time, almost breaking him out of the lull that the silence of a foreign place bestows upon strangers. Pretty soon, the footsteps had acquired a meaning of their own and symbolized his first flirtations with the sense of sound which acquired greater depths in time to come. Footsteps. Brisk ones, made with the hooves of wooden shoes, camouflaged in the green moss of the pathways of cobbled stone that lined up this beautiful city. A city that had its own way of dealing with the fickle nature of time.
By day, Markus worked as a waiter at the local café beside the Neuwe Rijn. The café was a quaint little place situated along the famous Dutch countryside. The waters of the river Rijn just ran next through it, shaping their way through the most exquisite engineering creation of man one could see, the canals. The sun , through its brief intermittent appearance during the short days, would blaze in its full glory around the city. The swans would come out with their long graceful necks to feel the heat of the summer in their eyes. Right before the café, the Centraal straat ran through the nerve of the city and was in many ways a mosaic for all that was going on in this little town of his. The young students would walk with quick and huge steps with their rucksacks and backpacks behind them. They would either be present in droves with their quirks filling the air and the utter hopelessness of youth in their eyes. The old would walk in coats stretched to their knees, their steps measured and wise.
His normal activities would include serving drinks and the menu to these young men and women alike. The ability to carry a pleasant conversation with a dash of politeness thrown it were some of the things that helped him in this profession and Marcus had both of them in equal measure. Day after day, he would be an audience to some stories of a blooming romance between a newlywed couple who would be frequent visitors at the café. On some days, he would be parley to the frustrations of the artist who lived in the studio across the street. His studio had the bare essentials and always had two canvases in the window which faced the café. Inevitably, one would be a blank canvas and the other would contain his work of art for the day proudly exhibited at the end of the day. These days however, the artist would turn up at his table and over a cup of black coffee, he would share his languish at the money that his creation commanded in the markets.
Over the past few days however, Marcus had missed the presence of the artist sitting around dreamily on the wooden chairs outside the café and brooding endlessly in the sunlight. He hadn’t shown up for quite some many days and as always , there were two potraits lined up his almost barren studio. One was untouched as ever, and showed a sheet of white while the other showed some extremely contrasting colours. Since nobody had shown up on that day, Marcus had gone around and had a chance to get a closer look at the potraits.

The room looked too empty even by Marcus’s standards of what he thought the studio looked like. The sunlight blazed through one of the windows in the day and the absolute darkness in the room lent the studio an almost mysterious hue. The two potraits illuminated this hue by their contrasts. One was as blank as ever, with not a dot in it to stain it wit a mark of creation. The other , however was one of resplendent beauty. It had all the colours imaginable and the image appeared to be highly abstract in its form. In fact, Marcus could not say whether it looked like an image in the first place. It was a weird mesh of all the colours he could think of, but the only lasting impression it left on Marcus’s mind was a great ball of fire, of tremendous luminosity.