What? I listened in amazement. Had I misheard? I bent forward and put the phone to my other ear. No, I hadn’t.
“Do you find that funny?”
I was in such a rage I banged my knee on the bedside table. “Yes, that’s what I said. Out of that prison.” I went to the window. The sun was low behind roofs, turrets, and antennae. “Prison! If you don’t stop laughing I’m going to hang up. Do you hear? If you don’t . . .”
I hit the disconnect button.
Throwing the phone away, I started pacing, so angry I could hardly breathe. I rubbed my knee. It wasn’t smart to have simply broken off the conversation like that. I thumped the table, bent over, and gradually felt my rage drain away. I waited. But to my surprise, she didn’t call back.
Actually, it had gone well. She didn’t take me seriously, so she wouldn’t take any drastic measures. No matter what she’d found funny, I’d obviously said the right thing. Once again, I just had this gift for it.
I looked in the mirror. Perhaps he’d been right. No bald spot, of course, but a barely perceptibly receding hairline, that made my face look rounder, older, and a little paler. I wasn’t so young anymore. I stood up. My jacket didn’t hang well, either. I raised my hand and let it drop again, my mirror image tentatively did the same. Or wasn’t it the fault of the jacket? There was something off-balance in the way I held myself, that I’d never noticed before.
Don’t make a big thing of it!
Of what, for God’s sake?
Maybe you still have a chance.
No, I had spent too much time behind the steering wheel, I was simply overtired. What were they all implying? I shook my head, looked at myself in the mirror, then hastily looked away again. What in the world were they all implying?
IX
“P
ERSPECTIVE IS A TECHNIQUE
of abstraction, a convention of the Quattrocento that we have accustomed ourselves to. Light has to pass through many lenses before we consider a picture to be realistic. Reality has never looked anything like a photograph.”
“No?” I said, suppressing a yawn. We were sitting in the dining car of an express train. Kaminski was wearing his glasses, his stick was propped beside him, and the dressing gown was rolled up in a plastic bag in the luggage rack. The tape recorder was switched on, and lying on the table. He had eaten soup, two main courses, and a dessert, and was now on his coffee; I had cut up his meat for him and made a futile attempt to remind him of his diet. He was in an expansive mood and full of good cheer; he’d been talking for two hours straight.
“Reality changes with every glance, at every second. Perspective is an assemblage of rules that tries to trap all this chaos onto one flat surface. No more, no less.”
“Oh yes?” I was hungry: in contrast to him, all I’d eaten was an inedible salad, dry leaves in a greasy dressing, and when I’d complained, all the waiter did was sigh. The recorder clicked, the end of another tape, I put a new one in. He had really succeeded this whole time in saying absolutely nothing that was usable.
“Truth is to be found, if anywhere, in atmosphere. That’s to say, in color rather than in drawing, and absolutely never in deep perspective. Did your professor never tell you that?”
“No, no.” I hadn’t the foggiest idea. My memories of university were hazy at best: pointless discussions in seminar rooms, pale fellow students who were terrified of the lecturers, the smell of stale food in the cafeteria, and someone always asking you to sign a petition. Once I’d had to deliver an essay on Degas. Degas? I couldn’t think of a single thing to say, so I copied it all out of the encyclopedia. After two semesters I got the job at the advertising agency, thanks to my uncle, shortly after that the job of art critic on the local newspaper came free, and my application was successful. I got things right from the start: some beginners tried to make a name for themselves by writing savage takedowns, but that wasn’t the way things worked. It was much better always and in everything to have exactly the same opinions as your colleagues and attend all the openings to network. It wasn’t long before I was writing for several magazines, which allowed me to give up my job.
“Nobody has ever drawn better than Michelangelo, nobody could draw like him. But color didn’t mean much to him. Look at the Sistine Chapel: it really wasn’t clear to him that colors . . . tell us something about the world too. Are you taping this?”
“Every word.”
“You know that I experimented with the techniques of the Old Masters. There was a period when I even prepared all my own colors. I learned to distinguish pigments by their smell. If you practice, you can even mix them without making a mistake. So I could see better than my assistant with his two sharp eyes.”
Two men sat down at the next table. “It comes down to the four
P
s,” said one of them. “Price, Promotion, Positioning, Product.”
“Look out the window!” said Kaminski. He leaned back and rubbed his forehead; again I was struck by how large his hands were. The skin was cracked, there were scarred welts around his knuckles: the hands of a laborer. “I take it there are hills and meadows and the occasional village. Am I right?”
I smiled. “More or less.”
“Is the sun shining?”
“Yes.” It was raining cats and dogs. And for the last half hour I had seen nothing but crowded streets, warehouses, and factory chimneys. No hills or meadows, and not a village to be had.
“I wondered once whether one could paint a train journey. The whole journey, not just a single snapshot.”
“Our focus groups,” said the man at the next table loudly, “report that the texture has improved, as has the taste!” I took the precaution of pushing the tape recorder closer to Kaminski. If the guy over there didn’t quiet down, he’d be the only thing you could hear on the tape.
“I often thought about it,” said Kaminski, “after I had to stop. How does a painting deal with time? Back then I was thinking about the journey between Paris and Lyon. You’d have to paint it the way you see it in your memory—
compressed.
”
“We haven’t talked about your marriage yet, Manuel.”
He frowned.
“We haven’t . . .” I tried again.
“Please do not address me by my first name. I am older than you are and I am accustomed to different manners.”
“The million-dollar question,” brayed the man at the next table, “is, will the European markets react differently?”
I turned around. He was in his early thirties, and his jacket hung badly. He was pale and his sparse hair was combed over his head. Exactly the kind of person I couldn’t stand.
“The million-dollar question!” he brayed again, and then saw me looking at him. “What?”
“Keep your voice down,” I said.
“I am keeping it down!”
“Then try a little further down!” I turned back again.
“It would have to be a large canvas,” Kaminski was saying, “and although nothing seems to be clear, everyone who’s ever made that trip should be able to recognize it. Back then, I thought I could pull it off.”
“And then there’s the question of location,” brayed the man at the next table. “I ask, what are the priorities? And they have no idea!”
I turned around and looked at him.
“Are you looking at me?” he asked.
“No!” I said.
“Arrogant bastard!”
“Clown!”
“I won’t take that,” he said and stood up.
“Maybe you’ll have to.” I got to my feet too, and realized that he was a lot bigger than I was. Conversation in the carriage stopped.
“Sit down,” said Kaminski in a voice I didn’t recognize.
The man, suddenly unsure of himself, stepped forward and then back again. He looked at the other man at his table, then at Kaminski. He fingered his brow. Then he sat down.
“Very good!” I said. “That was . . .”
“You too!”
I sat down at once. I stared at him, my heart thumping.
He leaned back, stroking the coffee cup. “It’s exactly one o’clock and I have to lie down.”
“I know.” I closed my eyes for a moment. What had frightened me so much? “We’ll be at the apartment very soon.”
“I want a hotel.”
Then pay for one, I wanted to say, but managed not to. This morning I’d had to pick up the hotel charges again, along with his room service. While I was giving Mr. Wegenfeld my credit card, I remembered Kaminski’s bank statement. This mean little old man who was traveling, sleeping, and eating at my expense still had more money than I would ever earn.
“We’re staying privately, with a . . . with me. A large apartment, very comfortable. You’ll like it.”
“I want a hotel.”
“You’ll like it!” Elke wouldn’t be back till tomorrow afternoon, we’d be gone by then, she probably wouldn’t even notice. Pacified, I noticed that the ape at the next table was now talking quietly. I’d really put the fear of God into him.
“Give me a cigarette!” said Kaminski.
“You’re not supposed to smoke.”
“Whatever speeds things up is fine by me. You too, no? Painting, I wanted to say, is all about problem solving, just like in science.” I gave him a cigarette and he lit it with a trembling hand. What had he said—me too? Had he guessed something?
“For example, I wanted to do a series of self-portraits, but not using my reflection in a mirror or photos, just drawing on the image I had of myself. Nobody has any idea what they really look like, we have completely false pictures of ourselves. Normally you try to even things out, using whatever you can. But if you do the opposite, if you intentionally paint this false picture, as accurately as possible, in every detail, with every characteristic trait . . . !” He banged on the table. “A portrait that isn’t a portrait! Can you imagine such a thing? But nothing came of it.”
“You tried.”
“How do you know that?”
“I—I’m assuming.”
“Yes, I tried. But then my eyes . . . or maybe it wasn’t my eyes, maybe it just wasn’t going well. You have to know when you’re defeated. Miriam burned them.”
“Excuse me?”
“I asked her to.” He laid his head back, blew smoke straight up in the air. “Since then I haven’t set foot in the studio.”
“I believe you!”
“There’s no reason to be sad. Because that’s what everything’s about: your estimate of your own talent. When I was young and hadn’t yet painted anything useful . . . I doubt if you can imagine it. I locked myself up for a week . . .”
“Five days.”
“I don’t care, five days, to think. I knew that I hadn’t yet produced anything that mattered. Nobody can help with stuff like this.” He groped for an ashtray. “I didn’t just need a good idea. They’re a dime a dozen. I had to find what kind of painter I could become. A way out of mediocrity.”
“Out of mediocrity,” I repeated.
“Do you know the story of Bodhidarma’s pupil?”
“Who?”
“Bodhidarma was an Indian sage in China. Somebody wanted to become his pupil and was turned away. So he followed him. Silent, submissive, year after year. In vain. One day his despair overcame him, he planted himself in Bodhidarma’s path and cried, ‘Master, I have nothing.’ Bodhidarma answered, ‘Throw it away!’” Kaminski stubbed out his cigarette. “And that’s when he found enlightenment.”
“I don’t get it. If he had nothing left, why . . .”
“During that week I got my first gray hairs. When I went out again, I had the first sketches for the
Reflections.
It was still a long time before the first good picture, but that was no longer the problem.” He was silent for a moment. “I’m not one of the greats. I’m not Velázquez or Goya or Rembrandt. But sometimes I was pretty good. And that’s not nothing. And it was because of those five days.”
“I’ll quote that.”
“You shouldn’t quote it, Zollner, you should pay attention to it!” Once again I had the feeling that he could see me. “Everything important has to be reached in sudden leaps.”
I signaled to the waiter and asked for the check. Leaps or no leaps, this time I wasn’t going to pay for him.
“Excuse me,” he said, reached for his stick, and stood up. “No, I can manage.” He went past me, taking little steps, bumped into a table, apologized, bumped into the waiter, apologized again, and disappeared into the toilet. The waiter set down the check in front of me.
“Just a moment!” I said.
We waited. The houses increased, their windows reflected the gray of the sky, cars made traffic jams on the street, the rain grew heavier. The waiter said he didn’t have all day.
“A moment!”
An airplane rose from the nearby airport and was swallowed by the clouds. The two men at the next table gave me filthy looks and left. Outside I saw the main street, the illuminated sign of a department store, and a fountain despondently dribbling water.
“So?” asked the waiter.
Wordlessly I handed him my credit card. A plane made its blinking descent, more and more tracks started coming together, the waiter returned and said my card was blocked. Not possible, I said, try again. He said he wasn’t an idiot. I said I wasn’t so sure about that. He stared down at me, rubbed his chin, and said nothing. But the train was already braking and I had no time for an argument. I threw down some cash and grabbed the change. As I was getting to my feet, Kaminski came out of the toilet.
I picked up both bags, mine and the one with his dressing gown, took him by the elbow, and led him to the door. I yanked it open, suppressed the impulse to push him out, jumped down onto the platform, and helped him gently off the train.
“I want to lie down.”
“At once. We take the subway and . . .”
“No.”
“Why?”
“I’ve never been on one and I’m not starting now.”
“It’s not far. A taxi’s expensive.”
“Not that expensive.” He dragged me along the jam-packed platform, avoiding people with remarkable skill; he stepped into the street as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and raised his hand. A taxi stopped, the driver got out and helped him into the passenger seat. I got in in front, my throat dry with anger, and gave the address.
“Why the rain?” said Kaminski pensively. “It’s always raining here. I think it’s the ugliest country in the world.”
I threw the driver a nervous look. He was fat, with a big mustache, and looked pretty strong.
“Except for Belgium,” said Kaminski.
“Were you in Belgium?”
“God forbid. Would you pay? I have no change.”
“I thought you had no money at all.”
“Exactly.”
“I’ve paid for everything else!”
“Very generous of you. I have to lie down.”
We stopped, the driver looked at me, and because I felt awkward, I paid him. I climbed out, the rain lashed my face. Kaminski slid out, I held on to him tight, his stick clattered onto the ground; when I picked it up, it was dripping wet. The marble in the entrance hall bounced the noise of our footsteps back at us, then the elevator whisked us silently upstairs. For a moment I panicked that Elke could have changed the locks. But my key still worked.
I opened the door and listened: not a sound. Two days’ worth of mail lay under the mail slot. I coughed loudly, listened again. Nothing. We were alone.
“I don’t know if I’m getting this right,” said Kaminski, “but I have a feeling that we’ve found our way into your past, not mine.”
I led him to the guest room. The bed was freshly made. “Needs air.” I opened the window. “Medicines.” I lined them up on the night table. “Pajamas.”
“The pajamas are in the suitcase and the suitcase is in the car.”
“And the car?”
I didn’t reply.
“Ah,” he said, “well. Leave me alone.”
In the living room my two suitcases were standing, fully packed. So she’d really done it! I went out into the hall and picked up the mail: bills, advertisements, two envelopes addressed to Elke, one from one of her boring friends, the other from a Walter Munzinger. I tore it open and read it, but it was only a customer of her agency, very formal, very correct, must be some other Walter.