It took Šeila around half an hour to explain the story to him and the way she’d market it, and as her finale she showed him the newspaper article “Self-Management Beyond Seven Mountains.” He was silent for maybe half a minute, looking down at them as if peering over eyeglasses, like a professor, even though he didn’t wear glasses, and then he burst out laughing and brayed like a donkey—his face even looked a little donkeyish.
After he caught his breath, he said, “You guys . . . You guys really are audacious!”
I watched this guy laugh in our faces. And no wonder.
He kept laughing. I couldn’t watch him, so I moved out of the Skype frame just as he said to Šeila, “One thing is for certain. You came to the right person.”
He grew serious, reverting to the character of an unfeeling man in a suit. He must have had a special talent for these transformations, because on the screen he now looked as expressionless as a computer simulation, and he reminded me of a member of Kraftwerk.
Then he wanted to see the turbine, so we were soon in the plant with our laptop—the people there looked at us askance. We had to interrupt Slavko, who was working on something. When we pointed the camera at the turbine, Malcolm said in an affected manner, “Ooh! This looks, I must say, far better than the usual variety of crap trotted out for me! Yes. Who would have thought? Perhaps we can start. This might just be it. . . .”
We’re not in our little bubble, I thought. We are stepping into a much larger bubble.
“What did you say it was called again? The Last Socialist Realist Artifact? Who came up with that?”
“Me,” said Šeila.
“Oh, you’re wonderful,” he said, showing his teeth and switching to the role of rascal again.
It won’t be long before this man starts hitting on her, and any minute now he’ll offer her a job, I thought.
We’d decided beforehand that we weren’t going to hold anything back—we’d tell him everything, because the story was the only thing that would entice him, as Šeila said. The whole story, even the Colonel.
We also told him about the turbine that was stuck at a port somewhere in the Maghreb.
This got him thinking.
“So there are two?”
“Yes. Probably,” I said. “There will be a hearing in their commercial court, but the date hasn’t yet been set. We didn’t rush it, because we didn’t know where we’d put it anyway. But if someone pressures them . . .”
“Hmm. I’ll have to think about all of this. Could this be our next big thing? We do need just one, I think. It wouldn’t do for another one to turn up later. We should be selling the last one, get it? If another one exists, tell them to drop it into the sea.”
“Perhaps they already have.”
“No ‘perhaps.’ We must be certain. And corroborate.”
“Okay. But if you folks from London threaten them, perhaps they’ll act more quickly.”
“Mhm. I just wanted to ask: Is there anybody there who’s involved in the project and is, actually, an artist?”
“I was thinking Tima might get involved somehow,” said Šeila.
“Of course, but . . . You know, I’m trying to picture the whole thing. The story we put together, the context. I have to picture the scene. . . . The exhibit, the coverage, the shock, the debates. . . . Clearly, it’s a product of collective effort, but . . . we need a name, a face. Art without an author, well, that would pass muster with young leftists, but we need someone to buy it. . . . We must add, attach something to it.”
“This whole backstory, there could—”
“Sure . . . All the stories need to be told . . . And the entrepreneur who initiated it, he is interesting, his fate . . . and the engineer. We have to commission their portraits, unusual portraits, from a painter on the rise. I’m just brainstorming. Their stories must be there. And the whole history behind it. We must have all of that. The turbine alone won’t be enough. We have to do more. An act, a performance, something. . . .”
Now we’ll be selling Oleg and Sobotka as a “story,” I thought. This is how far we’ve come.
This is our last resort, so how was I thinking this wouldn’t be prostitution?
Then it hit me: This was going to be disgusting. In my mind, I began apologizing to Oleg and Sobotka. I imagined Oleg’s face, and then I realized—he wouldn’t mind at all. I could almost hear him saying, Just take their money.
So, this jackass is looking for an artist. I wondered whether it would be stupid . . .
“Our chief engineer, Sobotka, he was a sculptor, too, for the fun of it,” I told Malcolm.
“He was? What did he make?”
“Weird sculptures made of iron.”
“Okay, much better than if they were made of wood and if they weren’t weird. . . . Go on. Describe them to me.”
“He welded all sorts of things. Car engines and ironware. Each sculpture has car headlights attached to it, asymmetrically. Some have more headlights, some fewer. Many of the headlights were broken in car wrecks. He got them at a garbage dump. It’s not clear what they are. Like creatures evolving from vehicles. Beaten-up creatures.”
“Really? Where are they?”
“N.”
“Are they rusty?”
“Well, kind of . . .”
“Could you drive there and show them to me?”
“I don’t think there is a wireless connection there.”
“Send me pictures, then.”
He continued talking to Šeila. Slavko soon tapped me on the shoulder and handed me a cell phone—it was Nedra.
“Slavko says you needed pictures?” asked Nedra.
Malcolm received them a few minutes later, a bit surprised at how organized we were.
In the end he said, “You’ve intrigued me. I’ll come with a photographer, a landscapist, Tima . . . Actually, with a whole team. We’ll document everything. The whole town. If the story is well-received, we’ll split the money from the sale fifty-fifty.”
That seemed like a lot to me.
“Fifty-fifty, or no deal,” he said. “It’s the standard fee, pal. Standard. If it were anyone else, I’d charge even more for this kind of risk. But I see you need the money. I’d like to do something worthwhile.”
I said, “That was our story, too.”
“Wonderful,” said Malcolm. “It’s obviously catching.”
Then he lifted his finger and became conspicuously serious, saying, “But, to be clear—we’ll be splitting fifty-fifty a figure you wouldn’t dream of asking, let alone obtaining, on your own! These decorations and additions are okay in moderate amounts, but the turbine. . . . No, we don’t want the story to sound humanitarian. We’re selling this as art! Just so there’s no confusion, I’ll price the work so that there can be no doubt! You know, when you add a lot of zeros, it pays off.”
“All right,” I said. “Fifty-fifty art. What matters is that it’s not humanitarian.”
“No way! Please, don’t feel bad about this. That’s important. Take this as a magnificent bank robbery. Only someone who’s loaded could afford it anyway. Modesty is no virtue here. Trust me!”
He declared this as if he were Oleg’s twin, and it wouldn’t have surprised me at all if they were on the same sorts of drugs.
Yes, he will certainly offer Šeila a job and try to bang her as soon as I go around the corner. But this guy, unlike Oleg, is fucking with a condom, I thought.
Now we were there, in London, at an exhibition hall that used to be a factory.
The turbine was on display. It glittered in front of a red curtain. There were very few things in the world as appealing for camera flashes as this was.
Sobotka’s sculptures were there, too. Although they had a few rusty parts, they’d been cleaned so well that they were shining: polished ugly ducklings from his cottage yard.
&
nbsp; Large-format paintings also hung on the gallery’s walls.
One painting was titled The Arrival of the Investor. Rio, a young painter for whom Malcolm had high hopes, was asked to paint Oleg and Sobotka meeting for the first time. When he came to see the town, we met over a drink at the Blue Lagoon and I told him how it happened, unaware that he would ask me every day to retell this, perhaps because he noticed that my story was gradually developing and expanding. It could be said that I directed the scene for him, because he needed extras as well. However, in the log cabin bar outside town where we met Sobotka for the first time, on the second day of painting, Rio suddenly dropped his face into his hands, stopped working, approached me, and pleaded, “Please, don’t tell Malcolm what I’m going to ask you now.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t tell him it happened here. He wanted the original location . . . But, but, the place where we were on the first day is much better!”
“The Blue Lagoon?”
“Yes, yes. I immediately saw it there, immediately! Not here.”
“But that won’t be the truth.”
I’d begun to feel sorry for reality.
“I see it there. The disgusting glamour of the eighties, a local version of it, screwed up and shabby, Brooke Shields . . . and when I add all the faces scowling at me . . .”
I looked over at the workers who hadn’t been on Rio’s wavelength since the beginning, and even though they knew this was our last resort, I could see that the situation was humiliating for them. Yes, it’s possible they even hated him a little.
“And all these faces watching . . . And the investor enters and there he is, looking like Steve Jobs and Lenin merged into one; just imagine Jobs portrayed on a socialist realist canvas,” concluded Rio.
I actually liked this canvas of his—although he made the Blue Lagoon bar even gloomier than it actually was. Maybe I like it because I’d participated in it.
Next to it was a painting that depicted Sobotka leading the workers. A melancholic piece. Distant perspective, slightly angled: Sobotka and the workers walking toward the factory, the man with the black dog is nearby; fog, a sense of hush. The factory and the town can’t be seen. Sobotka and the workers are wearing garish orange vests, which they never actually wore, probably so a train or a crazy Ferrari wouldn’t run them down in the wasteland. The painting was at least twenty-three feet long, and the small group is in the middle of it. Sobotka is in the distance; he has a mustache like Lech Wałęsa’s, even though he didn’t wear one at the time. The painter, Fiona, talked to Slavko, and she told Šeila that Slavko’s English was something special: “I can see he knows it, but what he says seems like a different language.” She wanted to paint Slavko, but he objected.
The painting depicting Sobotka and the workers was given the title Self-Management Beyond Seven Mountains, which almost made me laugh. That journalist wasn’t exactly trying to help us, I thought, but the article, a scan of which was included in the exhibition booklet as well, was now a part of The Last Socialist Realist Artifact.
What a stretch, I thought and bit my tongue, because we didn’t have self-management at the factory, nor did self-management have anything to do with socialist realism. As far as I remembered, our art parted ways with the annoying Soviet doctrine of soc-realism back in the 1950s, just when workers’ self-management was first introduced.
Never mind, I thought, nobody here will believe this is an actual “socialist realist artifact,” but a play on meanings and a metaphor for “antiqueness.” The irony must have been apparent, and with a title like that, as I now saw, the turbine had become something else.
Right, they care about the metaphor, not the details. None of this matters to them: socialist realism, the failed stabs at socialism, the East, Communist regimes, all the newly capitalist countries. . . . They struggle with remembering their locations and names, let alone which ones were part of the Eastern Bloc and which ones weren’t. The moment Malcolm took this on I thought they couldn’t possibly care so much about us. There had to be something else to this, in placing industry in a museum, in this story of ruin. Because that’s what they’re talking about here, too: their industry is now half the size it used to be.
And it’s not that the industry is outdated, I thought, it’s in flux, the workers are far off in a global fog, and from there they have no power to voice demands for labor conditions. The workers in the West can’t voice demands the way they used to, either. It’s not the industry that’s gone, it’s the power of the labor force. Yes, this is also the story of the West, though they’ll tell it as if it applies only to us.
Interested in socialist realism, my ass. They care only about themselves. We are merely an alibi for sad, perhaps poetic self-irony. It’s easier for them to swallow if the irony is ours.
And our story, I thought, is so fucking twisted in every respect, with these hopeful workers . . . whereas Oleg was moving capital, and we would probably have vanished from the town as soon as we finished the Colonel’s order. I understand it now, but I’m keeping quiet about that, too. So, instead of a showpiece of socialist realism, we could have stood here as a showpiece of globalism and the free market; but they probably weren’t prepared to exhibit such an exemplar of self-irony.
This has been a stretch since day one, said Oleg’s voice to me in my head, but just take their money.
Erol. This image was apparently created digitally, and then enhanced here and there with conspicuously dripping colors. Erol in work overalls, his hand resting on the shoulder of a smiling, black-haired woman whose black shirt read: Walk the Line. With his other arm he’s leaning on a heavy yellow drill plunged into asphalt which, upon closer examination, contains elements of a weapon. As if this were based on a photograph; as if the woman wanted to have her picture taken with a worker. Although I somehow doubted that such a photograph existed. A glittery pattern coated everything like snakeskin, but different. Wavy. Like a spinal X-ray, as if you’d taken part of the X-ray with the spine on it, reproduced it, and arranged many of these spinal X-rays, one next to another, in a veil of vertebrae.
Erol. So where is he? At one point I had the impression that Šeila had an inkling. I asked her, only once this time, and she said she knew nothing. Yet here he now was, on display.
Hell, all this is disgusting.
Many large-format photographs were shown in the foyer, I knew, to convey the framework of the story. A panorama of the town. The iron bridge. The rundown housing. The little square with the Haiduci restaurant. The coppersmith’s and the slipper maker’s. The Blue Lagoon. Several photographs of the factory. Sobotka’s yard, when his sculptures were still there. A special cargo truck with the turbine crossing a bridge.
The photographs all looked like they were taken at rainy dawn.
In the main exhibition hall there was also a painting, at first glance in old-fashioned style, a pseudo-statesmanlike portrait against a dark background, of the Colonel missing an ear, one side of his head bloody. So we’ve also recorded this victory, I thought. I doubt this will find a buyer.
I hadn’t known what would happen after we publicly revealed the story of the Colonel. Malcolm claimed we were safe, and if anyone tried to prosecute us, he would involve a bunch of journalists, and the story would be publicized internationally.
“It’s not worth it to them, chasing after artists,” he said with a smile, but also with a tinge of sadness in his eyes over the fact that they wouldn’t prosecute us, because I noticed he had already started imagining that this would definitely make us famous.
Earlier, I’d discussed the matter with one of Oleg’s lawyers. “They’ll probably say you didn’t go out of your way to battle terrorism,” he laughed. “Maybe the secret services will notice you, that I can’t know. . . . But legally, as far as I understand, you planned to sell the turbine to the Colonel, but you didn’t.”
“We failed,” I said.
He laughed. “Well, sometimes you’d like to commit an international crime, but you can’t pull it off. No problemo. Give me a call when you do.”
Tima designed a huge 1983 calendar. It was like a car calendar but with the turbine instead of the cars. Lipša was in the picture with the turbine, leaning with her back against the rotor as if against a wall, staring at the lens as if asking whether they were done yet. Only her pregnant belly was uncovered. It looked glamorous yet troubling. At least to me it was.
On all the posters, the artist of The Last Socialist Realist Artifact was officially called Sobotka & Co.
In the front row, on behalf of the artist, sat Šeila, Branoš, and me.
I imagined Oleg watching us, because I knew he’d laugh, to himself, and to the world. This is why I missed him, because laughter wasn’t coming easily to me. I was tense. I didn’t know if this was because I was afraid it was pointless, or because it was happening. I was haunted by the idea of humiliation. Maybe what we were doing was an audacious act, a great bank robbery, as Malcolm put it, but we were still on display here as people in defeat, the ones they’ll place in their museum or private collection as an act of triumph. Will this represent for them the triumph of capitalism, the West, or even triumph over industry and workers? The lucidity of our “art project” must be that we merged all this into one. I am left with the kind of solace Oleg would feel; at least we screwed them good. But his laughter wasn’t coming to me, all the thoughts left me uneasily dizzy.
Through the dizziness I perceive the whole charade, this hall, us. I know what’s happening next. It would be the picture, brutal.
We agreed to everything, I thought. Everyone agreed to everything. The whole world agreed to everything, and nobody had anything to say against us. But, sometimes you get this feeling . . . you wish you could step up onto the stage and stop the show.
I looked behind me. There were about two hundred people there. A select crowd, I bet.
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