And she said, I never knew I could love you so terribly much, darling Felix.
As they walked out of the studio and into the house, I felt like throwing myself from the easel, tilting forwards and landing flat on the cold sunroom floor — that was how unprotected and abandoned I suddenly felt.
I wanted to shout out, What happened to Tijn?
What becomes of them? What happens to people who are no longer safe?
And I thought, Who am I? Who am I if I am Singer?
You can’t let me go, Creator, not like this — not before I find out who I am. You can’t dispatch me this naked. Even if he calls himself my father, the man who is coming for me on Saturday, you can’t give me to him like this.
The next morning, there was a phone call from a man with a Rotterdam accent — that, at least, is what Creator told Lidewij afterwards — who had rung to pass on a message from Valery that, unfortunately, it would not be possible to pick up the painting you have done on commission on the agreed Saturday. Before Creator had a chance to ask why not, the voice explained that all would be clear in due course. Crystal clear.
Somehow or other, Creator had the impression he was talking to one of the shaven-headed men from the four-wheel drive.
Clear? he asked. Is something unclear?
Don’t go worrying yourself, Mr Vincent. The balance will be paid in full as soon as the portrait has been picked up.
Creator hesitated. And when will that be?
Silence fell on the other end of the line. The voice seemed to be consulting with someone else, a woman, but there was mainly soughing, as if he was calling from a windy mountaintop or a yacht on the water.
We trust that you have fully kept your side of the agreement, the man said, in a tone that suggested he was answering Creator’s question.
To the best of my ability, Creator replied, assuming the man was talking about the painting itself. But, he said, only Valery can know whether it’s really Singer.
Singer?
A rustling silence fell in which Creator — how could it be otherwise? — was struck by a bolt of panic. He had promised not to speak to a soul about the commission … and now he had blurted Singer’s name out to a complete stranger.
Inadvertently his eyes went to the table drawer where he had stored away the Polaroid.
Suddenly the voice sounded again, and it was as if they had been carrying on a completely different conversation in the meantime.
It would be best if you prepared the painting for transportation. Packed up completely, I mean. Then we can pick it up at any time. The way things are looking now, it is extremely uncertain whether Mr Valery will be able to come in person. We will contact you the moment one of our people is in the neighbourhood.
The conversation ended without any form of goodbye, but not before the voice had said that it would be in everyone’s best interest if Creator stuck to the agreement. To the letter.
When no one showed up on Holy Saturday, Creator wrapped me in popping paper. That’s what he calls the plastic packaging material with cent-sized bubbles he uses to pack his pictures. But he couldn’t bring himself to tape me up. The idea of handing Singer over not to Specht but to one of his people was unbearable, not just for me, but — and I was sure of this — for Creator, too.
He seemed restless and more determined than ever to adhere strictly to the terms of the agreement. I inferred this from the fact that he opened the drawer with the cheque and got out the Polaroid that he, despite the agreement, had taken of me just before Lidewij’s return from skiing. He looked at it for a moment, as if it showed him something he couldn’t see by looking at me, then wedged it in between my bottom stretcher and the back of my canvas. I had actually forgotten about it, the Polaroid, but now found it amusing to think that I existed a second time, wedged between canvas and stretcher, greatly reduced in size and as inaccessible to me as the far side of the moon. But still, I now existed twice, definitely.
Although I was standing with my back against a wall, the popping paper meant that all I saw for the next few months was the odd shadowy figure when someone came close in the daylight. Even listening was too much of a strain. More than anything else, my condition was one of drowsiness. In the daytime, I heard muffled sounds from the sittings, which continued uninterrupted through spring and summer. The only thing I could tell from the voices was whether the sitter was a man or a woman, and it was only towards the end of the afternoon, getting on for six, that I was able to judge from the intensity of the light whether or not the day had been sunny. Summer must have come, but the only thing I noticed was the lengthening of the days. You have a rare skill: painting someone to life. After the first month or two — I suspect from early June — an exceptionally long period of summery weather must have begun, because the heat became unbearable, especially after six when the sunlight started creeping slowly but surely towards me.
After the telephone conversation with the voice, Creator had applied a coat of retouching varnish and then, almost before it had dried, wrapped me up. Unsigned. I was very aware of that. It was something I had fantasised about a lot, especially the glory of it — the moment in which he would stride to my left side, from my perspective of course, to add his initials at the very bottom, in what I suspected would be a fold in the silky, pale-yellow sheet that Singer was lying on: F. V.
I had seen him do it several times on the ninety by seventies, and I admit that each time I had secretly thought, When I’m finished, he’ll add more than just his initials; he’ll write his name in full because, more than the others, I am the one thing he has dreamt of making. I am the one work in which Creator has surpassed himself — just as Specht said during that first conversation. I realise full well that I am asking you to do something you have never done before. These and other sentences Specht had said ran through my mind in those first weeks of my standing wrapped up to one side. You have a rare skill: painting someone to life. But after a while my thoughts began to die, like burnt-out embers in a fireplace. Even thoughts about the irony of my fate died — that I, who had begun as white as snow in the blackest depths of a roll and had become a dead boy, inspired by the memory of a guilty childhood memory, was again invisible, wrapped in a blind shroud, despite being bathed from wedge to wedge in the most viviparous light. Sure, I managed to prolong my consciousness for a few days by choosing colourful words like that for the few things that did run through my mind — but eventually I drowsed off on a cloud of unknowing.
To be seen is to be. I had heard Creator say that once, I think during a sitting with Cindy. I found it an arrogant thought and unphilosophical to boot — does a peacock exist more than an earthworm? — but somehow it now seemed truer to me than ever. I had existed inasmuch as Creator worked on me, and inasmuch as Lidewij was assuring herself of me. Now I started forgetting I even existed. No one had told me what an incredibly easy or smooth process that is. I tried with all my might to think about what Creator and Lidewij saw before them when they remembered me — thinking I might somehow still exist if others thought of me — but I simply couldn’t imagine what they saw when they thought of me. I didn’t see Tijn, I didn’t see Singer, and I definitely didn’t see the unborn child that had been conceived after Lidewij and Creator had stared at me with such incomprehensible delight. I didn’t have the faintest notion, and my notions grew fainter and fainter.
Creator had kept to the agreement and had not shown me to a soul. My existence had been reduced to virtually nothing.
It was only last week that I woke with a start because I was being moved. For some as yet unknown reason, Creator was lifting me up on one side — I recognised his voice and Lidewij’s, who was holding me on the other side. They were close enough for me to more or less understand what they were saying. Creator steered me across the studio to the cold wall, which they leant me against at a less sharp angle, so that my popping paper sa
gged a little and I was able to make out more of the conversation in the studio. From the words they were speaking, I gathered that Lidewij needed to be careful — easy does it, watch your back — from which I concluded not only that she was still pregnant but also, and more importantly, that there was someone else in the studio. Not another person, but another canvas. The newcomer wasn’t a ninety by seventy; he had to be something bigger. I began to suspect what was going on when I heard Lidewij say that it was only now, seeing it near me, that she realised how huge it really was.
Hey, Felix, I heard Lidewij say.
She must have been on the other side of the studio, in my original location, where a huge silence now emanated from the other canvas.
Felix, when was the last time you saw Singer?
No answer came.
Don’t you want to see him anymore, or is it something else?
Creator sounded testy. He was hard to understand, but I thought I heard him say that the moment had passed.
He should have been picked up, he said. That’s the only way to really finish something you’re making.
I heard Creator’s footsteps approaching. Lidewij came closer, too.
Can I have another look at him? Just a quick one?
I felt a pang of fear, and realised that I had become a suspicious creature. What could her question mean if not that something was about to happen? My removal from the studio? My replacement by the newcomer? The arrival of two shaven-headed men with an indifferent cheque for fifty thousand euros? After so many months of indignant obscurity, I found it impossible to imagine fate smiling on me in any way at all.
Creator had pulled me towards him; my upper edge was now resting against his stomach. Carefully he peeled back the popping paper. Lidewij had come over to help unwrap me. Creator lifted me up and she jerked the paper out from under me. Then Creator used a foot to slide me closer to the wall.
There they stood, right in front of me. I blinked with what felt like Singer’s eyes and, no exaggeration, felt something tingling about twenty centimetres to the left of my middle.
I don’t know whether Creator looked at me. By the time I had recovered from the sudden light, he had turned his back. Demonstratively, it seemed.
Still without looking, he asked, Is it okay?
Lidewij didn’t answer but nodded. She pressed her right hand against the side of her belly, which — I could see this very clearly — had grown round.
It’s kicking like crazy, she said. Feel this.
Creator turned and went down on his knees before her. He pressed an ear against the spot on her belly she was pointing to.
Bloody hell, he said. It’s going berserk in there.
But he didn’t so much as look at me, not even later when he crossed over right in front of me to lay the popping paper in a corner of the studio.
After Creator had detached himself from her belly, Lidewij asked, Shouldn’t we wrap him up again?
Leave it, Creator said. I’ll do it when I get back tomorrow. Maybe I’ll even leave him like that till you’re back home. I won’t be having any sitters for a while — not a soul will see him.
Lidewij’s gaze left me. But, walking away, she turned back one last time and said, Hang in there, kid.
I remember that very well. I mean, it’s not something I’m imagining because a fire is roaring outside and I’m realising that that was the last time she saw me. She said, Hang in there, kid, and it was like she was talking to herself. And she stuck up both thumbs. The gesture was new to me. Two thumbs pointing up into the air.
It will all turn out fine.
Creator had walked over to the other side of the studio and was pulling on the newcomer, as if to test its weight. Only now did I notice how strange its back was — it didn’t have any crossbars, but … What did it have? What kind of material was that? Did the newcomer have no wedges at all? I couldn’t believe my eyes — it didn’t even have stretchers … How was it possible? A canvas without a frame?
It was standing; that much, I understood. Two metres tall at least; maybe two fifty. Huge.
It was painfully obvious. My successor had arrived — the new canvas on which everything would be possible, all the things Creator had not yet dared to do. And it was huger than me. It was of another order. It was ready for anything.
Oh yeah, Lidewij said, walking slowly out of the studio. I keep forgetting to tell you, someone called. I wrote her number on the back of my hand.
Who?
Minke Dupuis. She’s working on a big article for Art & Facts.
What about?
How should I know? You, maybe. She wants you to call her, otherwise she’ll try again some other time.
Even before Creator and Lidewij left for the hospital, I had more or less worked out what was going on by combining the scraps of conversation that had drifted into the studio now and then. Lidewij was well into her seventh month, everything had gone smoothly, but that morning she had been in for an antenatal, at the hospital, where they had told her that, unfortunately, it would be best to play it safe. Lidewij had understood immediately which complication they were referring to; but when she tried to explain it to Creator, it remained very obscure, to me at least. What it came down to was that she would have to stay lying down until the birth, hooked up to a drip and monitored closely, and that was why they wanted to admit her to hospital. But the child was fine; that wasn’t the problem.
I concluded from all of this that it must have been late October. More than half a year had passed since I had disappeared into the popping paper! And all that time, as I deduced from the conversation, there hadn’t been a single sign of life from Specht or his minions. And it had been a week or two since Creator had bought the newcomer, since he’d snapped it up, as he put it. This was a strange expression, which he’d never used when ordering me at Van Schendel’s.
FOUR
Minke on the phone: that was the first thing to happen when Creator came home from having taken Lidewij to hospital. It was getting on for five that same afternoon — it seemed an incredible coincidence.
Creator said so as well.
You calling now, that’s an incredible coincidence.
She must have asked why.
Because Y is a crooked letter, Creator said.
He was wearing his dark-blue army-disposals coat. I remembered his voracious restlessness from more than six months before when, left alone in Withernot while Lidewij was off skiing, he was about to start on me.
No, I’m here by myself, he said. No, I’m not busy. Why?
Standing on the floor and leaning against the side wall of the studio, I had been able to look sideways into the garden the whole day long. The trees and shrubs were almost completely bare, which was nice for me, because it allowed me to see further into the world than usual. Between the birch trunks on the far left I could even make out a glimmer from the lake, there where the sunset would be just visible to the right of the wall opposite. While the sun was going down, long oblique shadows teemed across the yellowing lawn. The reeds at the end of the garden had turned rusty and were topped with plumes that, in this light, looked almost lilac. I felt like I was looking with Creator’s eyes — by which I mean, slurping it all up as if my eyes were digesting everything they could see, as if I had become some kind of visual maw.
Last year, Lord Peacock had appeared here, the day that I came within a hair’s breadth of becoming Cindy. I realised suddenly that it had been months since I had heard his cry or his scratching in the bowl of chicken feed.
I say I, but of course I mean we: Singer and I. But it was as if Singer had never existed. I remembered things he had never seen — things like Lord Peacock, from before his existence. I remembered the things he couldn’t possibly know. It was strange to be there in deathly quiet Withernot like that, and forgetting that I w
as painted. Yes, in that hour, I felt like I was blank, a novice on whom anything could happen.
It was because of the other canvas; I realised that clearly.
So this is what people mean when they say they are shy.
There was nothing I wanted more than to have the other look at me, and at the same time I feared his gaze.
I did my very best not to look at him, not even the back of him, for all that he was standing there directly opposite me, strange and stretcherless.
It was so quiet that I heard Creator’s car coming from a long way away — the approaching drone of the engine on the narrow, twisting cart track through the woods between Huizen and Old Valkeveen. He must have felt strange. I tried to imagine it: suddenly wifeless, anxiously awaiting the birth of his child, facing an unexpected period of several weeks’ solitude, with a new huge canvas, and no appointments with sitters or clients … How could he be in anything other than his now-or-never mood? It was the same as when he made me, Lidewij had been away then, too.
He came into the studio with a black plastic bag. I recognised the bag because it didn’t have anything printed on it. All the bags of the Free World have a coloured logo. Only bags like this — the kind he had come back with seven months ago as well, after taking Lidewij to Schiphol — are unprinted and black. I knew what would emerge from it: carefully packaged videotapes. Creator would remove the videotapes and throw away the covers — quickly, as if he found them unpleasant. Last time, I was able to look at one of the covers for most of a minute out of the corner of one of my eyes, curious as I am about supports, whether they are made of linen, like me, or plastic. The video cover was called Fiona on Fire and showed a frontal view of a naked blonde woman straddling a naked man. Her mouth was half open so that somehow you looked deep into it, and she was weighing me up. I think that’s how you put it. There was a weighing-up look in her eyes. I wondered whether Creator thought she looked like Lidewij. I didn’t — she was more like Cindy. Still, there was something forthright about her expression that could make you think of Lidewij.
The Portrait Page 7