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right,” he said. He looked tired all of a sudden. “Stay that way, if you like. Do me a favor though, and look straight at your father and don’t move.”
    My father was not nearly as interesting as the artist and his drawing, so it was hard to keep looking at him. Klimt put a smock on over his jacket, which made him look like an apostle. He stood in front of the easel and chewed at the end of a pencil while he looked at me. It was hard not to fidget. I tried to smile prettily.
    “Do you normally smile?” he asked.
    “Not very much, sir,” I said.
    “Well, then, by all means don’t smile now,” he said. “Just a normal expression, please.”
    “How do I look, Papa?” I asked, wanting Klimt to hear me praised. Father set his paper aside and glanced over, but he barely seemed to see me. “Very fine,” he said. He tried to think of the highest praise he could bestow. “You look like your mother,” he said, which I knew wasn’t true. My mother was beautiful. She had glossy chestnut hair and a soft, round face. My father, his task accomplished, lifted his paper again and immediately fell asleep.
    Klimt didn’t have any paint, only some chalks lined up on a piece of wax paper. A glass of water was next to them. I wanted to ask him what they were for, but I had remembered my manners. He saw me looking at them.
    “I use the water to wet some of my lines,” he said. “It creates a different effect, as you will see.”
    He was looking at me so closely that I blushed. I hoped he wouldn’t notice, but I knew that was unlikely. No one had ever looked at me like that before. It made me want to crawl underneath the sofa.
    “Do you always spy out of the window at visitors?” he said. I noticed that the tendons in his wrist as he drew were as taut as the mainstay of a sail.
    “Excuse me?” I said, pretending I didn’t know what he was talking about.
    “When I rang the bell you were at the upstairs window.”
    “Was I?” I said. “I didn’t see you.” He stopped drawing a moment and grinned at me. Just then he reminded me of my friend Ulrike’s older brother, who liked to pull our hair and punch our shoulders and trip us at every opportunity.
    “What do you look at when you stare out of the window?”
    “People,” I said. “I like to look at what they are wearing, and the way they walk. Some people are fast and others sort of waddle, or hobble. I see some of the same people every day, and some days they look cheerful and other days not. Some days they’re alone and some days they’re with their families. It’s interesting.”
    “So you haven’t had all the personality trained out of you after all,” he said. He went back to work.
    “What do you want to be when you grow up?” he said next. He had figured out by now that I had trouble avoiding direct questions.
    “An actress,” I said. This time he didn’t grin. He kept his eyes on his paper. “Have you been to see many plays?” he said.
    I had to admit I hadn’t.
    “I don’t go often, but I know a lot of actresses,” he said. “Some of them model for me for extra money.”
    What I knew about actresses I had gleaned from the papers, and from watching the ones I recognized parade down the Mariahilferstrasse. They were always stylishly dressed, and carried themselves with such grace it was hard to imagine them needing extra money, though if their modeling involved what I was currently doing, it didn’t seem so bad.
    “They’re not as glamorous as you think,” he said as if he could read my mind. “They’re all right. Poor, most of them. It’s not an easy life, you know. You’re much better off here with your parents.”
    That made me angry. How did he know what it was like with my parents? But I wasn’t allowed to contradict an adult.
    “Sometime I’ll take you to the theater,” he said. “You’ll see.”
    Then he furrowed his brow and stopped drawing. He stepped back and looked at his paper for a minute, then went back. But he