“No!” She hung up.
I cursed. Nothing for it, it really did look as if I would have to drive up there myself. Which was all I needed!
In a restaurant on the main square, I ordered a miserable tuna fish salad. Tourists all around me, children crowing, fathers thumbing through maps, mothers sticking forks into huge portions of cake. The waitress was young and not hideous, I called after her: too much oil in the salad, please take it away again. She’d be glad to, she said, but I’d have to pay for it anyway. But I’d eaten almost none of it, I said. That was my affair, she said. I asked to see the proprietor. She said he wouldn’t be there until the evening, but I could wait. As if I had nothing better to do, I said, and winked at her. I ate the salad, but when I wanted to pay my bill, it was a broad-shouldered colleague of hers who brought it. I left no tip.
I bought cigarettes and asked a young man for a light. We fell to talking: he was a student, visiting his parents during the vacation. What was he studying? Art history, he said, looking at me a little defensively. Very understandable, I said, particularly if one comes from here. What did I mean? I gestured toward the slope of the mountain. God? Hardly, I said, great painters made their homes here. He didn’t understand. Kaminski! He looked blank.
Did he really not know Kaminski? No, he didn’t. The last pupil of Matisse, champion of the classical . . . He didn’t concern himself with that sort of stuff, he interrupted me, his thing was contemporary art from the Alps. Full of exciting trends, you know, Gamraunig, and Göschl, of course, and Wagreiner. Who? Wagreiner, he said loudly, his face going pink. I didn’t know Wagreiner? Really? He was only painting now with milk and edible substances. Why, I asked. He nodded, he was hoping for that one. Nietzsche.
Anxiously, I took a step back. Was Wagreiner a Neodadaist? He shook his head. Or a performance artist? No, no, no. Had I really never even heard of Wagreiner? I shook my head. He muttered something I couldn’t catch and we eyed each other mistrustfully. Then we went our separate ways.
I went into the boardinghouse, packed my suitcase, and settled my bill. I would simply come back tomorrow, no reason to pay for a night when I wouldn’t be there. I nodded at the proprietress, threw away my cigarette, found the footpath, and started climbing. I didn’t need any taxi, it was easy for me now, even though I had the suitcase to carry, I was soon up at the signpost. Up the road, first bend, second bend, third bend, then the parking area. The BMW was still standing in front of the garden gate. I rang, Anna opened the door immediately.
“Nobody home?”
“Only him.”
“Why is the car still here?”
“She took the train.”
I looked her straight in the eyes. “I’ve come, because I forgot my bag.”
She nodded, went inside, and left the door open. I followed her.
“My sister called,” she said.
“Really!”
“She needs help.”
“If you want to go, I can stay with him.”
She inspected me for a few seconds. “That would be kind.”
“Think nothing of it.”
She smoothed her apron, bent down, and picked up a well-stuffed overnight case. She went to the door, hesitated, and looked at me questioningly.
“No worries!” I said softly.
She nodded, breathed audibly in and out, then closed the door behind her. Through the kitchen window I watched her as she walked across the parking area with small, heavy steps. The bag swung in her hand.
VI
I
STOOD IN THE HALL
, ears cocked. To my left was the front door, to my right the dining room, and straight ahead the staircase went up to the second floor. I cleared my throat, my voice echoing oddly in the silence.
I went into the dining room. The windows were closed, the air stale. A fly was banging against a pane. I carefully opened the top drawer of the chest of drawers: tablecloths, neatly folded. The next one: knives, forks, and spoons. The bottom one: twenty years’ worth of old magazines,
Life, Time, Paris-Match,
all jumbled together. The old wood resisted; I almost couldn’t close the drawers. I went back into the hall.
To my left were four doors. I opened the first: a little room with a bed, table, and chair, a TV, a picture of the Madonna and a photo of the young Marlon Brando. It must be Anna’s room. Behind the next door was the kitchen, the one after that was the room where I’d been received the day before. The last one opened onto a staircase going down.
I took my bag and groped for the light switch. A single bulb cast its dirty light onto wooden steps, which creaked, and their downward pitch was so steep that I had to hang on to the banister. I hit another switch, spotlights crackled as they sprang to life, and I squeezed my eyes tight shut. When I’d gotten used to the glare, I realized I was in the studio.
A windowless space, lit only by four spotlights. Whoever had worked here hadn’t needed any natural light. In the middle was an easel with a painting in its genesis; dozens of brushes were scattered over the floor. I bent down to feel them: all of them were dry. There was also a palette, the colors on it were hard as stone and cracked. I sucked in a mouthful of air: a normal cellar smell, a little damp, a faint odor of mothballs, no hint of paints or turpentine. Nobody had painted here for a long time.
The canvas on the easel was almost untouched, only three brushstrokes cut across its whiteness. They began in the same spot down on the left and then pulled apart, in the top right was a tiny field crosshatched in chalk. No sketching, nothing to indicate what should have grown out of this. As I stepped back, I noticed that I had four shadows, one from each spotlight, that cut across one another at my feet. Several large canvases, covered with sailcloth tarps, leaned against the wall.
I pulled the first tarp away and winced. Two eyes, a twisted mouth: a face, curiously distorted, like a reflection in flowing water. It was painted in bright colors, red lines pulled away from him like dying flames, his eyes as they observed me were questioning and cold. And although the style was unmistakable—the thin layer of color, the preference for red-yellow, which both Komenev and Mehring had written about—it looked utterly different from anything else of his I knew. I looked for his signature and didn’t find it. I reached for the next cloth; as soon as I touched it, it emitted a cloud of dust.
The same face, this time a little smaller, more of a ball, a slightly contemptuous smile playing in the corners of the mouth. On the next canvas there it was again, this time with the mouth stretched unnaturally wide, the eyebrows angled violently toward the nose. The forehead was creased into masklike folds, and individual hairs straggled thinly, like tears in paper. No beginnings of a neck, no body, just the detached head floating in empty space. I pulled away tarp after tarp, and the face was becoming more and more deformed: the chin stretched and lengthened, the colors became harsher, the forehead and ears grotesquely extended. But each time his eyes seemed more distant, indifferent, and, I pulled the tarp away, more filled with contempt. Now it was bulging outward as if in a funhouse mirror, had a Harlequin’s nose and puckered frown lines, on the next canvas—the tarp got caught, I tore it off by full force, dust swirled up, making me sneeze—it crumpled together, as if a puppeteer were clenching his fist. On the canvas after that it was a hint of itself, seen in a blur through driving snow—the remaining paintings were unfinished, just sketches with a few patches of color, a forehead here, a cheek there. In the corner, as if thrown away, lay a sketch block. I picked it up, wiped it off, and opened it. The same face, from above, from below, from every side, even once, like a mask, seen from inside. The sketches were done in charcoal, increasingly unsure, the lines became shaky and missed one another. Finally there was more of a thick patch of pure black. Tiny splinters of charcoal trickled down at me. The remaining pages were empty.
I set aside the sketch block and began to search the paintings for a signature or a date. In vain. I turned one of the canvases around to examine its wooden stretchers, and a shard of glass fell onto the floor. I picked it up with the tips of my fingers. There were more; the entire floor behind the pictures was carpeted in broken glass. I held the shard up to the spotlight and closed one eye: the light jumped a tiny distance, and its black housing bulged. The glass had been ground.
I got the camera out of my bag. A very good little Kodak, a Christmas present from Elke. The spotlights were so bright that I wouldn’t need either a tripod or a flash. A painting, the photo editor of the
Evening News
had explained to me, must be photographed head-on, to avoid any foreshortening of perspective, if it is to be usable for reproduction. I photographed each canvas twice and then, standing back up and propping myself against the wall, the easel, the brushes on the floor, the shards of glass. I kept clicking till the memory card was full. Then I put the camera back in the bag and began to cover the paintings again.
It was hard work, and the tarps kept on getting hooked on things. Where did I know this face from? I started to hurry: I didn’t know why, but I wanted to get out of here as quickly as possible. How in the world could it be familiar to me? I got to the last painting, met its contemptuous stare, and covered it up. I tiptoed to the door, switched off the light, and let out my breath involuntarily.
I stood in the hall again, ears cocked. The fly was still buzzing in the living room. “Hello?” Nobody answered. “Hello?” I went up to the second floor.
Two doors to the right, two to the left, one at the end of the landing. I began on the left. I knocked, waited for a moment, and opened the door.
It must be Miriam’s room. A bed, a TV set, bookshelves, and a Kaminski, one of the
Reflections
series:three mirrors—at their center a discarded duster, a shoe, and a pencil, arranged as a parody of a still life—that organized themselves into a perfect system of surfaces; if you looked at it out of the corner of your eye, it seemed to shimmer faintly. It must be worth a fortune. I looked in the cupboards, but they held nothing but clothes, shoes, hats, a few pairs of glasses, silk underwear. I let one of the pairs of panties slide slowly through my fingers; I’d never met a woman who wore silk underwear. The drawer of the night table was filled with boxes of medications: Baldrian, Valium, Benedorm, various kinds of sleeping pills and tranquilizers. The instruction leaflets would have made interesting reading, but I didn’t have time.
Next door was a bathroom. Pristine, smelling of cleaning stuff, there was a sponge, still damp, lying in the tub, and three perfume bottles in front of the mirror. One of them was Chanel. No shaver, so the old man must use another bathroom. How did blind people shave, anyway?
The door at the end of the passage led into an unaired room. The windows hadn’t been cleaned, the cupboards were bare, the bed wasn’t made: an unused guest room. A little spider sent a tremor across the web she’d spun over the windowsill. On the table was a pencil with an almost-worn-down eraser and teeth marks in the wood. I picked it up, rolled it between my fingers, put it back, and went out.
Only two more doors. I knocked on the first, waited, knocked again, and went in. A double bed, a table, and an armchair. An open door led to a small bathroom. The blinds were down, the ceiling light was on. In the armchair was Kaminski.
He seemed to be sleeping, his eyes were closed, he was wearing a silk dressing gown several sizes too large for him, with rolled-up sleeves. His hands didn’t reach the ends of the arms, the back of it rose high above his head, his feet dangled clear of the floor. His forehead twitched, he turned his head, opened and closed his eyes very quickly, and said, “Who’s that?”
“Me,” I said. “Zollner. I forgot my bag. Anna had to go to her sister, and asked me if I could stay, no problem, and . . . I just wanted to let you know. In case you need anything.”
“And what would I need?” he said calmly. “Fat cow.”
I wondered if I’d heard him right.
“Fat cow,” he said again. “And she can’t cook either. How much did you pay?”
“I don’t know what you mean. But if you have time for a conversation . . .”
“Were you in the cellar?”
“In the cellar?”
He tapped his nose. “You can smell it.”
“In which cellar?”
“She knows we can’t throw her out. It’s impossible to find good help up here.”
“Should I . . . switch off the light?”
“The light?” He frowned. “No, no. Pure habit, no.”
Maybe he’d taken another pill? I pulled the tape recorder out of my bag, switched it on, and set it on the floor.
“What was that?” he asked.
It would be best to come straight to the point. “Tell me about Matisse!”
He said nothing. I would like to have seen his eyes, but he’d obviously trained himself to keep them shut whenever he wasn’t wearing his glasses. “That house in Nice. I thought: That’s how I’d like to live one day. What year are we in?”
“I’m sorry?”
“I know you were in the cellar. What year?”
I told him.
He rubbed his face. I looked at his legs. Two woolly slippers dangled in the air, a hairless, white shin, that of a child, was exposed.
“Where are we?”
“In your house,” I said slowly.
“So tell me how much you paid the fat cow!”
“I’ll be back later.” He drew breath, I left the room quickly and shut the door. It wasn’t going to be easy! I would give him a few minutes so that he could collect himself.
I opened the last door and had finally found the office. A desk with a computer, a revolving chair, file cabinets, supplies, piles of paper. I sat down and put my head in my hands. The sun was already low, in the distance the gondola of a funicular climbed the side of a mountain, glittered as it caught a sunbeam, then disappeared over a patch of forest. I could hear crashing and banging from next door; I listened but nothing came of it.
I had to proceed systematically. This was Miriam’s workplace, her father probably hadn’t been here in years. First I would go through all papers that were lying open, then I would work my way through the desk drawers from bottom to top, then the cupboards, from left to right. I could be very tidy when I had to.
Most of it was financial records. Bank statements and deposit receipts, involving much less money than I would have thought. Contracts with gallerists: Bogovic had gotten forty percent to begin with, then it came down to thirty, remarkably little, whoever had done the negotiating with him back then had done a good job. Records for private medical insurance—fairly expensive—plus life insurance, for Miriam, oddly enough, but not for that much money. I turned on the computer, it chattered itself into action and asked for the password. I tried
Miriam, Manuel, Adrienne, Papa, Mama, hello,
and
password,
but none of them worked. Crossly, I shut it down again.
Now for the letters: carbon copies of endless correspondence with gallerists about prices, sales, transport of individual paintings, the rights for prints, postcards, illustrated books. Most of the letters were from Miriam, a few had been dictated and signed by her father, only the oldest of them were in his own handwriting: negotiations, proposals, demands, even requests from before he was famous. Back then his handwriting was a scrawl, the lines sloped off to the right, the dots on his
i
’s were all over the place. Carbon copies of various responses to journalists:
My father is not and never was a representational painter, because he thinks the concept is meaningless, either every painting is representational or none is, and that’s all there is to say on the subject.
A few letters from Clure and other friends: arrangements to meet, short replies, birthday greetings, and, in a careful pile, Professor Mehring’s Christmas cards. Invitations to lecture at universities; as far as I knew, he never gave lectures, obviously he’d turned them all down. And the photocopy of a curious card to Claes Oldenburg: Kaminski was thanking him for his help, but regretted he had to admit that he thought Oldenburg’s art—
Forgive my candor, but in our business friendly lies are the only sin
—was worthless nonsense. Underneath everything else, on the bottom of the last drawer, I found a thick leather portfolio, closed with a little lock. I tried without success to unlock it with the letter opener, then set it aside for later.
I looked at the time: I had to be quick. No letters to Dominik Silva, to Adrienne, to Therese? I heard an engine and took an uneasy look out of the window. A car had stopped downstairs. Clure got out, looked around, took a couple of steps toward Kaminski’s house, then turned aside, I let my breath out, and he opened his own garden gate. Next door I could hear Kaminski’s dry cough.
I got to the cupboards. I leafed through fat document files, copies of insurance stuff, copies of land registers, he had bought a piece of land in the south of France ten years ago and sold it again at a loss. Copies of trial documents from a court case against a gallerist, who had sold paintings from his early Symbolist period. Also old sketchbooks with detailed drawings of the lines of reflected light between various mirrors: I calculated what they must be worth and struggled for a few seconds against the impulse to pocket one of them. I was on the last cupboard already: old bills, copies of the last eight years’ tax returns; I would have loved to go through them, but there wasn’t time. Hoping for secret compartments or false bottoms, I tapped the rear walls. I lay down on the floor and peered under the cupboards. Then I got up on the chair and took a look on top of them.