“Now It’s the Women’s Turn”

“Now It’s the Women’s Turn” is the title of the vast painting Rabo Karabekian reveals to Circe Berman in the final movement of their friendship. At its center is a green valley populated by 5,219 people, which Rabo identifies as the place where he was when the sun rose on the day the Second World War ended in Europe. The work turns that remembered moment into a detailed, crowded landscape, and its title directs attention to women exposed to the consequences of war. Too large to discard easily, it also leaves open who will decide its future.

The Painting and Its Setting

The painting presents a springtime valley viewed from its rim. Rabo and Circe stand near the middle of the work, with thirty-two feet of painting extending on either side. He has counted the figures: 5,219 people are on the rim or below. The largest is no bigger than a cigarette, the smallest a flyspeck. Farmhouses and the ruins of a medieval watchtower mark the landscape; its realism is so precise that Circe thinks it could be a photograph.

The panorama does not offer an uncomplicated pastoral refuge. At either end, a farmhouse is closed up like a fort, its gates shut and animals gathered inside. Rabo has made a schematic cut through the ground to expose the cellars, in the manner of a natural-history display showing what lies beneath an animal’s burrow. This cross-section reveals women sheltering below among beets, potatoes, and turnips, trying to delay the threat of rape that the history of wars in the area has taught them to expect. The outwardly beautiful valley therefore contains both the scale of a community and the structures of fear that shape its survival.

The Title and the War

Circe asks whether the painting has a title when she rejoins Rabo in the middle. He confirms that it does, and names it “Now It’s the Women’s Turn.” The phrase gives the scene a blunt, gendered emphasis: the painting’s exposed women are not incidental figures in a general picture of war, but central to its account of what war does and to whom its violence is passed.

A Japanese major near the ruined watchtower complicates the scene. Circe notices him among the tiny figures; Rabo identifies him by the gold star and two brown stripes on the cuff of his left sleeve, and notes that he still carries his sword and would rather die than surrender it. When Circe asks why Rabo has placed him there, Rabo explains that young soldiers, sent out with their parents’ hope that they would amount to something, killed everyone the major had known and loved. Rabo imagines the man seeing Rabo in uniform and calling him “Swine!,” “Pig!,” and “Murderer!” This imagined accusation ties the painting’s Japanese soldier to Rabo’s own military identity, and prevents his remembered scene of war’s end from becoming a simple image of release or victory.

Memory and Disclosure

The painting’s date and place come through conversation rather than a caption. Circe first sees the valley without knowing where it is; Rabo tells her that it is where he was when the sun came up on the day the war ended in Europe. The delayed explanation makes the act of showing the painting a disclosure: Circe is not merely viewing a landscape but being admitted to a visual record of a moment Rabo has carried with him.

That memory belongs to a veteran who lost his left eye while commanding an Army Engineers platoon near the end of the war. His unit consisted of artists assigned camouflage work, though in Luxembourg they were fighting as ordinary infantry. Later, Rabo recalls being unconscious when captured and waking in a German military hospital; he describes the wound as having healed quickly. The painting’s remembered setting thus stands against the later knowledge of his wartime capture and injury without reducing the valley to a military report. Its intimate scale of thousands of minute people holds the aftermath in view, while the title identifies a particular human cost within it.

Scale, Interpretation, and Legacy

Circe asks what will eventually become of the painting. Rabo’s answers range from a private museum in Lubbock, Texas, where most of Dan Gregory’s paintings are held, to a place behind what he jokes might be the world’s longest bar. In the latter possibility, customers would climb onto the bar to see what was happening in the picture, knocking over glasses and stepping on complimentary hors d’oeuvres. The joke draws attention to the mismatch between the work’s immense size and the ordinary, unsuitable spaces in which it might be displayed; it also leaves its reception uncertain rather than promising it a settled artistic home.

Rabo finally says that the decision will belong to his two sons, Terry and Henri. That future is significant because he has already described his failure as Dorothy’s husband and the resulting estrangement of his sons, who no longer speak to him and have legally taken their stepfather’s surname. His answer entrusts the painting’s fate to the very family relationship marked by separation. The work therefore ends not with a claim that its meaning or place is secured, but with an inheritance still awaiting judgment: a vast picture of people caught in war, handed forward to sons whose connection to their father has been broken.