“No,” said the Professor. “I don’t know what that is. It certainly isn’t drawing.” And with his pencil he made a lovely easy sketch of the model, alongside Mendel’s black, forbidding scrawl. It was a masterly thing and it baffled him, and humiliated him because the Professor moved on to the next pupil without another word. Not another line could Mendel draw that day. He sat staring at the Professor’s sketch and at his own drawing, which, while he had been doing it, had meant so much to him, and he still preferred his own. The Professor’s drawing had no meaning for him. He could not understand it, except that it was accurate. That he could see, but then his own was accurate too, and true to what he had seen. The light gave the model a distorted shoulder, and he had laboured to render that distortion, which the Professor had either ignored or had corrected.
Mendel cut out the Professor’s drawing and took it home and copied it over and over again, but still he could not understand it. He was in despair and told Golda he would never learn.
“I shall never learn to draw, and the Christian kops will all beat me,” he said.
“But they sent you to the school because you can draw. Didn’t Mr. Froitzheim say that you could draw!”
“The Professor looks at me with his gloomy face, like an undertaker asking for the body, and he says: ‘I mean to say, that isn’t drawing. It isn’t impressionism. I don’t know what it is.’”
“It can’t be a very good school,” said Golda.
“But it is. It is the only school. All the best painters have been there, and Mr. Froitzheim sent his own brother to it. The Professor says I shall never paint a picture if I don’t learn to draw, and I can’t do it, I can’t do it!”
To console himself he painted hard every evening and regarded the Detmold entirely as a place to which his duty condemned him—a place where he had to learn this strange wizardry called drawing, which he did not understand. He went there every day and never spoke to a soul, because he realized that his speech was different from that of the others, and he would not open his mouth until he could speak without betraying himself. He listened carefully to their pronunciation and intonation, and practised to himself in bed and as he walked through the streets.
So woeful were his attempts to emulate the Detmold style of drawing, that at last the Professor asked him if he was doing any work at home. To this Mendel replied eagerly that he was painting a portrait of his mother.
“Hum,” said the Professor. “May I see it?”