CHAPTER FIVE

It was on one of his walks that he first came across it. It occupied an entire stretch of a huge vertical wall and despite the strong presence of graffiti in the city walls, this one stood out more than anything else. It was nothing but a song in tribute of Charlie Parker. It sounded more like a nursery rhyme. White lines of paint ran through in their own abudance of curls to almost reveal a melody underneath that absurd song. But like always as it is with a nursery rhyme, the basics were strong. And that was what the alto sax was all about. Marcus first saw a series of them in a music shop, lined besides each other with varying shades of a golden tinge.

Is Art really nothing but a medium of expression?

It had been an year since he had quit working at the bridge. For an year, he had done nothing but sit around in that torn down attic of his, reading up on basically anything that he got his hands to. He started with Baudelaire, Proust and ran through the cinemas of Jean Luc Godard. The absurdity in his existence almost resonated in the works of art that he had begun to absorb around him now. As the silence around him grew with each passing day, he embraced poetry for the sheer strength that it gave him. Words had acquired a meaning and depth of their own.

And what a joy it was to play with them. The dance of their rhymes conjured up a million different universes!Music gave life and form to those universes that he used to tread upon with leisure. Melody enveloped the words and created a fluid state of form creating one big hypnotic river of sound.

Ironically, the traveler is always the one who enjoys the journey. To the others, it is nothing but a mere test of endurance.

Chapter 4

Over a period of time, Marcus quit his daytime job and began working as a caricature artist at the bridge. . With bent backs, beggars would crouch along the grand bridge adorned with white satin scarves on their necks to protect themselves from the icy winds which ran through the city during the winter. On a quite silent day, when for a moment silence would be accentuated and heard with utmost clarity, you could hear the guy with the harp would play the first melody for the day.
Looking down below from the bridge, one could see that the waters had frozen over the lakes and the rivers seem placid. The sunlight reflected sharply and gave a glint of golden hue though this frozen surface to the surroundings for its albeit brief appearance during the day. The changing of the seasons had bought about an almost angelic respect for the sun. He realized it was not just him, but also with the great stage he shared on this bridge. These were the people who celebrated life, in the midst of a never ending bridge that seemed to bustle with a great energy of its own. There were jesters abound, who would come with their melancholic faces at the break of dawn, and at the first advent of the morn, would sit on their rumpled jackets to change into their uniforms. These uniforms, their own symbol of joy were the perfect masks to show the almost symbiotic relationship that exists between melancholy and jest.

It surely must not be the portrait, he thought.

But for all his logical explainations, Marcus still could never get the sense of comfort that exists in a state of denial. He just could not forget the gaze of the artist as he patiently waited day after day in the café, his meager lunch completed with a bottle of whisky.. Of what remained of the artist and his whereabouts he just didn’t know. But somehow, somewhere, through that haunting portrait, he had left behind in him the remnants of an artist’s gaze.
It could not be the liveliness of the colours that existed despite their contrast in the picture which struck him. Nor could it be how peaceful black and white looked to each other, almost seamlessly blended in a single canvas.

How could it be? How could a single picture almost change a state of being?

These sudden spurts of irrational thought, which almost became a source of joy to him could not be just the handiwork of a man who he hardly knew. Never. For all Marcus knew, he was just a penniless artist who visited the café for his meager lunch and a small cup of whisky.

And what of art? Art has never captured a human being. It was a rather foolish thought and an inhuman one at that.

CHAPTER 3

As time started to proceed with its own gentle pace, Markus sensed that this gift had indeed turned into a quivering restlessness in him from within. With each passing day, Marcus began to draw images out of his mind on paper, and looked for ways to express it frantically. He had begun to realize that maybe this could indeed be an emotion too strong to be captured even in a metaphor. In his free time, he would sit by the window in the evenings and write almost vigorously, reproducing each thought as it come, untarnished by judgment onto paper. On some days, he would draw. His hands would take a lot of time to adjust, but adjust they would, to the rhythms in his mind and how it was meant to be captured. In irregular shapes or otherwise.
After an hour, he would proceed and take his customary evening walk along the Rijn observing the sun set along the river. His walks would be much to his satisfaction, not too long to measure and not too short to forget. In a city that was bustling with golden spires and a thousand passages that he really didn’t know about, Marcus relished and took each lesser known road with a newfound gusto. His steps would rustle among the leaves with greater ferocity, taking with it a distant enchanting melody in its stride. He would walk tirelessly across these passages and pass through the mazes and some courtyards to end his walk right at the first tower which signaled the beginning of the bridge.
The bridge divided the city into the old and the new to the familiar, but to Marcus it seemed to divide itself into the lands of the known and the unknown. Like any great city among the world, this city had its own stories which ran through its river, the Rijn in an almost hypnotic flow of their own. All Marcus would do was sit at the bridge and live these stories of the city through the reflections which he saw in the waters as they would be enhanced by the twilight setting in due to the sunset.
Somewhere at the back of his place, in his study table, were those rumpled pieces of paper waiting to be examined.