The Wisdom of Crocodiles

by Paul Hoffman

  ‘He was drawing a picture of you, you know.’

  Startled, Anne turned, and was faced by a middle-aged couple smiling at her. She feigned surprise. ‘Oh . . . really?’

  ‘It was very good,’ said the man.

  ‘Yes,’ the wife agreed. ‘It was just like you, and he did it so quickly.’

  ‘It was the spitting image of you.’

  Anne smiled as if mildly disappointed: what had easily come could be easily let go. ‘A pity I didn’t get to see it, though I’m not sure if I’d really want to.’

  ‘You should ask to look at it,’ said the man. ‘It was really like you.’

  ‘Oh well, he’s gone now,’ she said with regret and moved off in the direction of the man with the sketchpad. They looked after her, still smiling.

  She found herself looking for him, while also pretending to herself that she was not. There was no sign of him in the next gallery, nor in the one after that. He was gone. She turned, partly sorry she had missed him and partly relieved. And then there he was, three rooms away, about to disappear down a wide spiral staircase. She immediately followed, all sense of relief vanishing as soon as he reappeared. He was about fifty yards ahead of her, and by the time she reached the bottom of the stairs he had gone again. Either he had walked out into the crowded street and would now be lost, or had gone into the museum shop directly across from her.

  The rush to follow him had left her breathless, though she had not run at any stage. With one eye on the door of the shop, she searched her bag for a blue inhaler and squirted it twice into her mouth. Almost immediately the sandy rasp in her chest eased. She walked into the shop but could not see him, although there were many displays which might have hidden him. As she turned into the annexe of the shop she saw the black sketchpad. It was lying on a table next to a display of glossy art books. She looked around but couldn’t see him. She looked at the sketchpad for some time, reached out to touch it, then lost her nerve. She turned to leave, then changed her mind and, decisive at last, picked it up. The first drawing was a quick sketch of The Man With the Golden Helmet, which so impressed her that she almost forgot about her own picture. The second was a nude, with carefully drawn labia which made her heart pulse. And finally her own picture. Her eyes widened as she looked.

  ‘Excuse me.’

  Anne nearly dropped the book.

  ‘It’s mine. I’m always losing the damn thing.’ He clearly thought she was merely a good citizen and she quickly recovered herself. She was puzzled, and a little put out, that he did not seem to recognise her.

  ‘Um . . . look . . .’ She laughed, acknowledging her own embarrassment.

  He watched her with polite interest.

  ‘Were you . . . Some people told me you were drawing me in the gallery back there.’

  ‘Yes, I was,’ he said.

  ‘Can I see it?’

  ‘You mean see it again,’ he replied, smiling.

  ‘If you like,’ she said, smiling and looking him straight in the eye, refusing to be mocked.

  He examined her face as she studied her portrait, watching the tiny movements of her eyes and lips as she absorbed the care and attention with which he had put her down on paper.

  ‘It’s . . .’

  ‘Beautiful?’

  She laughed, the colour again flushing along her throat and face. ‘No, I don’t mean that.’

  ‘So you don’t think it’s any good?’

  ‘No, I don’t mean that either. It’s very . . . impressive. I just don’t think I look, well, this good.’

  ‘Several people said it looked exactly like you.’

  ‘I’m not beautiful,’ she said, staring directly at him, daring him to flatter her.

  ‘They didn’t say you were beautiful, they said it looked exactly like you.’

  She smiled at being teased.

  ‘Keep it,’ he said.

  ‘I couldn’t.’

  ‘All right then.’ He reached out to take it but she pulled it away. They both laughed. ‘On one condition.’

  She looked at him coolly, gaining a measure of control. ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’ve been given two tickets to a showing here next Tuesday at six. It should be interesting.’

  ‘And?’ she said, unwilling to make it too easy for him.

  ‘I wondered if you might like to come.’

  ‘What’s it a preview of?’

  ‘It’s an exhibition of fakes.’

  She laughed. ‘OK, I’ll see you then . . . here at the shop. I have to go.’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Anne Levels.’

  ‘Steven Grlscz.’

  She looked puzzled for a moment, then her eyes opened wide. ‘You’re not the one who writes about stress?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, looking surprised.

  ‘I’ve read your work. It’s fascinating. What an amazing coincidence.’

  Steven agreed that it was, indeed, an amazing coincidence.

  ‘I sent you an invitation to come to a lecture I gave in January.’

  Now it was his turn. ‘The computer woman. I should have recognised . . . I know your reputation, of course.’ He looked awkward. ‘Now I’m embarrassed. But I swear I only got the invite just before I had to go away. I gave it to a friend who went along. He was very impressed. But bad manners – I should have written.’ She waved her hands, brushing away the apology. ‘Look, I have to go.’

  They shook hands and both smiled at the slight awkwardness of the gesture. Then she turned and walked towards the exit.

  He watched after her until his attention was caught by a couple in their thirties. The woman was reading a heavy art book, when her lover or husband came up behind her. He leant into her gently and with his left hand touched her almost imperceptibly on the side of her breast. Grlscz saw that the man barely realised what he was doing. She smiled, but delicately. It was not a sexual gesture, or if it was, it was desire rooted in the deepest, simplest tenderness. Then the man turned away to look at the bookshelves. Grlscz took out his diary and made a careful note.

  The existence of fakes certainly raised a lot of questions, thought Grlscz, most of them not very interesting; but the organisers of the exhibition, entitled FAKE?, had been too anxious to avoid a number of accusations, mostly that of being philistines. In doing so they had pleased the reviewers but disappointed him. The former approved of the museum for not satisfying the general distrust of the art world by its refusal to present the forger as the craftily successful version of the child-of-three or the monkey-let-loose-with-paintbrush whose efforts were universally held to ridicule the pretensions of artists and the assertions of critics. Grlscz grew bored in the end by the playful nature of the exhibition, the arch tone indicated by the question mark that followed the title.

  But he was particularly taken with a van Meegeren fake ‘Vermeer’. The forger was smart. This was no copy but an attempt to invent a hypothetical Vermeer style from the missing years of his career from which nothing much remained. In doing so he had avoided the difficulties of a direct comparison of form and style. Successful enough to have fooled the experts of the 1930s, he managed to sell Christ and the Adulteress to Hermann Goering. This dangerous act of cheek backfired when, after the war, van Meegeren was obliged to own up to his forgery as the only means of establishing that he was not a collaborator, a confession so ironic that Grlscz laughed and in doing so attracted Anne’s attention.

  She had arrived at six exactly and in the five minutes’ reacquaintance that followed it was clear that this punctuality was a sign of confidence. She had no fear of seeming too keen or any need to test his patience. Without formally agreeing to, they had slowly drifted apart. She was examining a nearby exhibit on the Cottingley Fairies when she heard his dry laugh and watched him, intrigued, as he became lost in thought.

  What had Goering felt before this painting? wondered Grlscz. Nothing but the pride of ownership, perhaps. Many would find it comforting to think so. What if, on looking at t
he slightly balding, thick-lipped Christ bestowing both life and dignity upon the kneeling woman it tearfully changed his sense of what it meant to hate and to forgive? Dabbing his flabby cheeks, Jews were still gassed, collaborators shot, but sometimes, perhaps, an erring secretary remained unshouted at, a malign subordinate found himself shunted to the Russian front rather than signing warrants of execution in a Polish town. And if he had discovered it was fake? Certainly he would have dried his eyes. But what was the status of those tears? Did a revision of the heart take place, rooting out the modest change in his idea of what it meant to behave badly? And even if it did, the secretary remained unbullied, the executions were still undone, the body was still frozen in a ditch somewhere along the road to Stalingrad.

  Every owner of a discovered fake, he thought, and everyone who looked at it believing it was not must subsequently account for being moved. That there was a difference between the forger and the artist and what they made, he was sure, but what perplexed him was not only where to draw the line, but what kind of line it should be. Sincerity would seem to be the key. The artist had to mean it; in order to be beautiful it must be true. Fraudulence was what the forger painted with – for money or revenge or just for kicks. He filled the aching human need for things we shouldn’t want, like status, or which don’t exist, like magic. Hence Goering and his ‘Vermeer’, and mermaids made of monkeys spliced to fish. It seemed clear enough; it’s all a question of intent. But status and magic are the stuff of art. How many painters got money for art which pleased Renaissance gangsters whose only interest was to celebrate their ownership? How many Masters did the same, fooling their patrons with the truth but still got paid? Da Vinci painting a fat Italian banker’s tart makes something amazing, only for four hundred years of reverence and an unnameable price to turn it into a special kind of forgery. How many gimcrack deceptions followed the salty tracks of Goering’s tears and moved their gulls in ways that could not be erased by ridicule or shame at being conned? At the root of it all, magic: the perverse alchemy of the human heart trumping up something genuine from something counterfeit, generating something fraudulent from something true. No wonder I’m so fucking desperate, thought Grlscz.

  Anne joined him and asked why he had been laughing while looking at the fake Vermeer, and he explained as they walked around the rest of the exhibits. They stopped here and there, discussing or looking in silence at the curiosities. She listened as it became clear that his was more than just a passing interest in forgeries.

  ‘Does it really matter?’ she asked. ‘I mean, auction houses and investors have such an interest in what’s genuine for one reason: money. This is all good fun,’ she said, gesturing around the room, ‘but if you collect borderline cases in anything and present them with enough glee and exclude whatever contradicts it, then of course it seems to call everything into question. My mother used to do that whenever she wanted to demoralise me for one reason or another. She’d list all the things in me that were spiteful, or selfish, or whatever quality in me she felt ought to be brought to my attention, and she’d make me feel that’s what I was. I mean, she was good at it, she only used what was true. They were real instances of my genuine spite or selfishness, but she could spin an entire personality out of two or three examples. Sorry, you don’t want to know about my mother.’

  Oh, but I do, he thought.

  Without either issuing an invitation they found themselves outside the museum looking for somewhere decent to eat, finally deciding on the Café des Amis in St Martin’s Lane.

  During the walk and the first drink he learnt the basic facts: where she was born, brought up, her age, that she was divorced. They quickly moved on to jobs. ‘So,’ she said, ‘what are you working on now?’

  He sighed with genuine irritation. ‘I’m trying to solve a real pig,’ he said, with feeling. ‘Do you know much about tomography?’

  ‘Nothing really . . . to do with computerised X-rays, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’ve been hired to sort out a . . . well, it’s a bit more than a problem. I’m a consultant for a company which has been working for years on a three-dimensional X-ray system – Tomography by Unitary Particle Computerisation, TUPC for short . . . more popularly held to stand for: Totally Useless Pile of Crap.’

  He kept it short since he was keen to avoid talking too much about work until he knew her better, and she was equally ready to drop the subject.

  The food arrived and Anne began with the appetite of someone who hadn’t eaten all day. He was nervous and started to talk about the exhibition to cover up the fact that he was barely touching his food. She picked up readily on what he had to say. ‘I mean, it’s all about things that can’t be reproduced . . . and I was thinking that exact copies are second nature to what I do. You know, I wonder if there’s something important about that, I mean . . . revealing about the difference between what computers are in their nature and what people are like. I was just . . .’ She paused and he sensed a mind grappling with something tricky and taking pleasure from doing so. She smiled. ‘OK, imagine a perfect forger. He can copy everything you could observe – brushwork, ways of seeing light, signatures, everything; right canvas, right chemically constituted paints and the right ways of ageing them exactly. Then you get it examined by the perfect critic and get a perfect scientist to go along. Everything they trust to help them discover if a painting is a forgery is copied perfectly, so nothing observable distinguishes real from fake. Even if the forger tells them which is which, they’ll just have to take his word for it. But then, of course, even the forger can’t tell. So tell me – is it real or is it fake?’

  He felt it would be wise to engage with this, that she wanted a challenge. This, he thought, is what interests this woman. ‘So what?’ he said. ‘I can’t see it matters. If it’s as perfect as you say then it means the same thing. Anyway it’s not as interesting as you think it is.’ He smiled to signal he thought exactly the opposite. He could see she was pleased by this insulting line; it meant he felt at ease with her. Having let this sink in, he continued. ‘It’s too easy to get lost in impossible hypotheses. There’s a saying where I come from, “If Uncle Bob had tits he’d be your Auntie.” ’ They both laughed and he let it settle before catching one of the waiters as he passed. ‘Could I have some water?’

  ‘Actually, it isn’t an impossible hypothesis,’ she said. ‘It’s going to happen, and quite soon too, and everyone will be able to have one.’

  ‘How?’ he said, disbelieving.

  ‘They’ll be perfect copies, and I mean perfect right down to the depths of the troughs caused by the distances between the bristles in the brush; but there won’t be a forger, just an imaging system breaking down everything in the original into numbers and feeding it into a computer. Then, maybe, it will just etch the lot on to a metal sheet, or use laser printers or another process we haven’t thought of yet. At any rate, the number’s up, authenticity is on the way out.’

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘All this obsession with status will have to go. I can hardly wait.’

  ‘I wouldn’t start celebrating yet. Paradoxically enough, authenticity is going to be the next big thing.’

  ‘Go on then,’ he said, intrigued.

  ‘Now that everyone can afford compact discs, the purists, the audiophiles, have invented something called the envelope of sound. According to them there’s a space around sounds that digital recording just chops out. If you were to record the conversation we’re having now on a compact disc our voices would be very clear . . . but all those other little micro-sounds that creep in around our voices, that give them life . . . depth, they’ll disappear. For them, the pure listener, a person who loves the sound of a piano or a violin or a human voice, will absolutely be able to identify the absence of that envelope. CD is a way of playing sounds, not music. Tape or vinyl reproduce the world in the envelope of sound, digital recording just turns it into code.’

  ‘Does it exist, this envelope?’

  ‘Only if you belie
ve in souls.’

  They talked on and drank two glasses of brandy each. Then he took her home.

  They stood on the steps outside her flat, facing each other.

  ‘Give me your hand,’ he said. She held it up slowly until he reached for it with friendly impatience, hooking a finger in one of his own. ‘I’d like you to come to my flat and have dinner with me.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Eight?’

  ‘Eight it is.’

  He let her hand fall and gave her his card. She bent her head down to put it in her handbag and as she looked up, he moved towards her. It was so fluid and graceful a movement that by the time she was aware of it he was kissing her. She enjoyed the kiss, the way his lips touched hers. Then she stopped thinking and began to give way. It was not just his touch but the intensity of his concentration. It was as if he were measuring her with his lips and in the careful touch of his hand on her waist. He felt the tip of her tongue flick briefly, barely, into his mouth, and then she ended it. There was an awkwardness in the way she suddenly pulled back. He felt she was worried, but it did not seem to be about him. Separating herself with a reassuring smile, she moved up a step towards the stained-glass door. They regarded each other with pleasure.

  ‘Good night,’ she said, affection already in her voice.

  ‘Three, two, one. The tape is running.’ Gary Epper pressed the record button and spoke into a microphone. ‘This is departmental conference number one on the preliminary results of NEMO’s interview with subject A417: a middle-aged woman suffering severe marital difficulties.’ Epper looked around nervously. ‘This is NEMO’s analysis of her problem, as well as his . . . its . . . suggested course of action. These were not given to the subject on the day and will not be given to her before being scrutinised by the Relationship Guidance Council. In my view they are unlikely to be sent to the Council.’

  There was a general stirring of interest at this and Anne, irritable after an early morning flight from Edinburgh, asked why.