The Portrait

by Willem Jan Otten

With her mouth still seeking his, Minke asked, Who?

  Him, Creator said, gesturing at me with his chin. When I painted him he was dead.

  He spoke slowly. He sounded somehow triumphant. As if saying dead would make Minke move even closer to him.

  What’s he called? she asked, as his mouth covered hers again.

  To my left, not far from the sliding door, a drop fell. I had heard it a few times earlier; there’s a leak there.

  Creator hadn’t answered.

  For a moment, it seemed as if Minke was about to disentangle herself, but she stopped the pushing movement — that was a decision, I saw that very clearly — and Creator grabbed the bottom hem of her top and peeled it up over her belly, her stomach, her breasts, her throat, her face, her long arms — a lightning movement she made possible by going down on her knees with arms raised. While Creator strode away from her to the mattress, which he dragged over to the middle of the room, exactly between me and the newcomer, she unhooked her bra, pushed down her skirt, and stepped out of her knickers. Red pumps, black nylon stockings, a shoelace around her neck: it was as if she’d been studying the cover of one of Creator’s videos. It was also as if she knew what the two of them had to do. How can I put it, I had the impression I was seeing something that had already taken place, something they were staging. Creator had lain down on his back on the mattress, with his head to the newcomer and his feet, still in his shoes, to me. He had slid his jeans and underpants down to his knees and held his head up to look at her while she, with her back to me, walked towards him.

  To my left, the drops fell every other second, but Creator didn’t do what he did otherwise; he didn’t slide a bucket under the leak.

  Where were we?

  Here, Minke said. In front of the mirror.

  She was now standing at Creator’s feet.

  I’m not free, remember. You always ask how much it costs.

  How much does it cost?

  They sounded like a couple of kids working out the rules of a game.

  That depends.

  On what?

  On what you want, you know that.

  And what do I want?

  You know very well what you want.

  And how much is that going to cost me?

  Minke took a breath and gestured backwards, meaning me.

  What do you say to … something like what you got for him.

  She laughed, kicked off her pumps, and knelt down beside him.

  Is that all? I could see that Creator was doing his best not to touch her.

  You haven’t changed a bit, she said. For God’s sake, what have we been doing in the meantime?

  If I had kept paying attention I would have undoubtedly understood exactly what they meant, where they had been, exactly what the game they were playing meant — once, and when, and now, at this actual moment — but it was as if a black haze had descended before my eyes. Absurd imagery for an Extra Fine Quadruple Universal Primed but, for quite a while, it really was as if I had been struck blind.

  Here. In front of the mirror.

  Those were Minke’s words.

  Mirror.

  In. Front. Of. The. Mirror.

  That was the newcomer.

  He was me.

  That, him, there, on the other side of the room, directly opposite me — he wasn’t looking at me. He was me. He was exactly who I was. This was it, that looking in.

  Between him and me, Minke straddled Creator’s thighs, blocking my view of my middle. I understood perfectly well what that meant: she was sitting opposite herself, she too was now looking in — and I imagined her expression as more or less the same as Fiona’s weighing-up look, On Fire — while making careful little movements with her hands down under her belly, as if stroking a small animal. I also realised that Creator was looking at her, just as she was looking at herself in the mirror. At least, my gaze grazed the side of Minke’s waist and caught a glimpse of Creator’s face, which was lost in looking at hers. I knew this expression: it was his discriminating look, the one that kept people at a distance. He was trying with all his might to keep watching and not disappear into bliss, and Minke was trying to do that, too, while watching her reflection from a distance, even while lowering her torso very firmly onto the part of Creator I had only seen once before — the time he’d left his mobile phone on the easel and got an unexpected call while watching the videos from the black bag.

  I hardly saw any of this because I was trying to see myself, my face that was staring at me to the right of Minke’s ribs, out of the semi-darkness of the mirror, which, as I now realised, really was swathed in mist — it was sown with golden-brown flakes — and, no matter how I try, I will not be able to describe my expression. Every time I felt I had composed myself enough to finally see it, restlessness overwhelmed me again. Close your eyes, I thought. Don’t see this. Listen to the drops instead, to the dark rain rustling outside. This isn’t meant for human eyes — we aren’t made to see what we are. Somehow or other I knew that this, finally, was my own expression — that Creator had wanted to capture me like this, so not yet knowing what I was seeing. He had laid me down on a womb of the greenest satin and outside, on Crete’s warmest pebble beach, he had imagined children’s voices, he had filled me with Tijn, with the memory of looking away and not wanting to see, of realising yet being unaware. Creator had wanted to capture me in that last solitary moment in which we look up from our innocence because we want to know who we are in the eyes of the world.

  Minke’s movements had grown more intense; she had planted her hands on Creator’s shoulders. They didn’t make a single noise, at least not with their voices — all I heard was the flapping splash of their bodies and the drops and the rain.

  Look, Creator said. Look as long as you can.

  Had Minke stopped looking?

  She interrupted her movement, swung her hair back, and turned around without raising her haunches off Creator.

  Now she was sitting opposite me.

  Who is he, Felix?

  She was looking at me from straight ahead, and her eyes glided over my entire surface, from toes to thighs to stomach to face.

  Singer, Creator groaned. Valery’s son.

  She froze.

  I am sure that, for an instant, I saw her smile. As if her face — grown glassy and hard from all that looking, with lips squeezed tight — had melted for a moment. It was perhaps the smallest imaginable change in her face, and yet it immediately made her indescribably sad.

  Don’t stop, for God’s sake, Creator said.

  He tried to keep the rhythm going with thrusting movements, but Minke grew more and more immobile.

  Creator thrust on, as if trying to keep time to the drops.

  What did you say he was called?

  What difference does it make?

  Singer, she said. You called him Singer.

  And to herself she said, voicelessly — I read her lips — Slave.

  She had pulled away from Creator. He took his penis in his left hand and kept moving in the same rhythm.

  Valery’s son, she said. That’s what you said. Valery’s son.

  And she whispered, Oh God, the deceit, the deceit. He buys a slave and calls him his son.

  Her voice had turned shrill.

  How much did you get for him?

  Only now did I see that Creator, while accelerating his movements, was looking at me and contracting strangely from neck to knees, as if trying to bunch his body into a fist. He groaned. I think at the word slave. His groan was the first cry of pleasure to come from his throat since it started, there on the mattress, and something sprayed out of his penis, which, it seemed to me, had turned an unnatural purple. Something milky and fluffy oozed up — a substance that was, more than anything, helplessly impotent.
/>   Creator fell backwards, both hands covering his penis.

  You don’t talk about that, do you? No, you never talk about money.

  She still hadn’t looked back.

  How did he die?

  Creator tried to pull her towards him by her ankle, but she stepped free of his grip. She was now avoiding my eyes; that was plain to see.

  I don’t know, Creator said. It was as if he had hardly heard a word of what she had just said. He was panting.

  What do you mean, you don’t know?

  Minke’s voice had got louder, shriller.

  You said he was dead — you said that yourself. You must know how he died.

  No, Creator said. Come on, please.

  He had stood up.

  God knows where he got him from. Now she was shouting, still looking at me. As if she didn’t want to know what had happened behind her.

  She shouted and sounded derisive.

  I thought he only got them from Morocco.

  I don’t know what you mean, Creator said. He was his son.

  Minke laughed out loud. Jeering, she sounded even hoarser and shriller.

  You’re not going to tell me you believed him — you’re not that naïve.

  Creator didn’t answer. He had released his penis and closed his knees.

  Whose son? For years, Valery has lived as lonely as a …

  She searched for a comparison.

  As a wolf, she said.

  She gestured at me.

  How many paintings like this do you think he’s had made over the years? … Always the latest boy. Always an artist he actually considered beneath him. Always the boy who was suddenly that little bit too old to get him going. But hell, this really was the last one, I presume.

  Her voice had grown tight with contempt.

  Defend me, I thought. Creator, why don’t you defend me? Why don’t you scream at her that I’m the only one, the son, the child who found and received Specht’s protection in the compound next to the swimming pool in Sierra Leone? Tell her about Tijn, about Lidewij, about the baby that’s on its way, about all the hours when you only wanted one thing — painting someone to life, making a person, making Singer, becoming a creator.

  But Creator held his tongue, like someone who knows he stinks.

  She gestured at her throat.

  It’s a question of hours, over there at the Erasmus Medical Centre.

  She strode through the room to gather up her clothes, and started dressing.

  Perverts, she said — not to Creator in particular, by the sound of it.

  I was the only one who had noticed that it had stopped raining and that only dripping was audible.

  What got into me? I’ve made a horrible mistake.

  She gave a grim smile.

  You going to stick to it — him being dead? You going to keep wallowing in those crocodile tears?

  Creator looked confused. A truth seemed to be dawning on him. Once again, I seemed to catch on faster than he did.

  I’m not dead, I thought. Surely not, surely not.

  I, Singer, lying here opposite my reflection, draped over a satin sheet, I am still alive.

  Nobody’s going to believe you, Minke said. That he was dead when you painted him. That’s not even possible — you only work from life, real Cindys, that’s what you work from … you yourself put it so beautifully: It’s only possible from life.

  She stepped into her pumps. She sounded scornful.

  Does Lidewij find it beautiful as well? So moving, so innocent? Her voice had turned to steel.

  It’s stupid that I always say sorry. Sorry. I’m even worse than —

  With one gesture, she took in all of Withernot.

  But I don’t accept every job that’s offered to me. Specht couldn’t have asked me anything he liked, the way he apparently could with you.

  She sounded triumphant.

  That was all last night.

  A half-hour ago, Creator built a pyre at the bottom of the garden, down by the reeds. It was still twilight. The sliding doors are open; I can hear the fire crackling. The wind is still blowing from the north. Sparks shoot up out of the smoke, drift towards the studio, and float in as flakes of ash. Creator grabbed the video of Singer and the snaps he got from Specht, and took them out to the fire. He came back without the video or snaps. Then he walked over to the basket with paint rags and pulled out the other videos. I don’t really know what they’ve got to do with it, but he went and threw them on the fire, too. I can now smell the acrid, toxic smell of melting plastic. After that, I was sure he was going to walk up to me, with his bewildered expression and unruly hair.

  I’m coming to a tragic end — that was, more or less literally, what I thought. And it was as if the world flashed before me: from the roll at Van Schendel’s, past the day they carried me into the studio, Cindy and Specht and Tijn and Lidewij, up to and including Minke. I was aware of it all — not as a story, I don’t think, more as a tightly bunched knot of time that suddenly, with an incredible tug, had come undone.

  I don’t know how long it kept dripping. Creator got dressed and they walked out of the studio, one after the other, with hardly another word.

  Once she was out in the hall, I heard Minke say, You’re sticking to your story, aren’t you — that you haven’t been paid for that boy?

  Creator will have answered evasively; I know him inside out.

  He’s used to paying, Minke said. It’s all he knows — he pays for everything. God knows what he pays for his slaves in that horrible fucking country.

  Outside I heard the car start and drive off with the sound of splashing. There are potholes out there in the track they call the drive. Every time it rains, Creator resolves to really do something about them. The wind had come up. There was no doubt of that; I heard the gusts blow drops against the sliding doors.

  Somehow or other, Creator had been sensible enough to slide a bucket under the leak. They wanted to cover themselves like Adam and Eve; they wanted to be invisible. And they didn’t want to be a couple — anything but that.

  It was an iron bucket, as old as Withernot itself. The handle rattled and the drops fell with shrill echoes until a layer of water had built up. After a while, the drops fell at intervals as long as a drawn-out thought. Plip. Plop.

  On his way out, Creator had turned off the lamps. The presence of mind of people — it mystifies me. He looked at me for a moment, with Minke already out in the hall.

  He cursed. I had the impression he was cursing me. He cursed again.

  Specht dying — maybe already dead — the man who had wanted me to exist, who had commissioned Creator to make me. It was because of Specht that Creator had dredged Tijn up out of his memory. Because of Specht that I had my expression, and a nose that wasn’t too flat, and a skin of burnt umber, caput mortuum, and cadmium yellow, a middle that tingled, and a hand without a thumb. Because of Specht that Lidewij, this very afternoon, had stared at my middle and unconsciously rubbed her big, round belly. It was because of Specht that that belly had grown big and round. Because of no one but Specht. It was for Specht that I existed.

  Where was he? Where is a human who is dying?

  Specht was the only one who could see the life in me, the life I was meant to have. I suddenly realised that. There was only one person who could locate me, by seeing me and saying, Ah, Singer, there you are, and now you’re no longer as dead as always, you are what you are — and that was Specht.

  I know that I should have felt abandoned. It would have made me seem human; people would have been able to identify with me, through my saying, Now I am all alone; Specht is dead and I am a canvas alone with Singer.

  But there was something.

  There was a presence.

  Some part of me
was being reflected. It had to be, I knew it had to be, somewhere across from me, in the now fully invisible mirror. I know that this thought calmed me. At least, I imagined that the world was full of completely invisible mirrors that retained a memory of what they had reflected.

  I even thought, I am one of those mirrors.

  I preserve someone’s likeness.

  I, the support.

  It didn’t really help. I’m no philosopher — my thoughts only ever calm me for a moment, and I simply don’t have the strength to be my own creator. The questions, fears, and tremblings came rushing in from all sides.

  I tried to tell myself that I was still alive.

  Even if Specht is dying in the faraway EMC, there is still one person who will see me, sometime, and that one person knows who I am. I clung to Minke’s words despite knowing better, because what could she know of Singer? Still, she had snapped at Creator, You going to stick to it — him being dead? You going to stick to those crocodile tears?

  Nobody is going to believe him; I now understood that much. Soon, when Specht is dead, they will get to see me — people, strangers, individuals as derisive as Minke — and they will say, That’s one of Specht’s slaves. He paid big money for him in a ruined, war-ravaged country and brought him to Creator’s studio and got him to paint him for him, here; he only ever works from life; he could never make something he couldn’t see before him …

  It’s possible, I thought forcefully, as if my entire existence depended on that one thought. What Minke said could be true. Whatever else has happened to Singer — it could be true that he’s not dead. God knows what kind of game Specht wanted to play with Creator … What does it matter, if he is still alive?

  Creator came back three-quarters of an hour later. The dripping had stopped; a rising wind had swept the skies clean. Creator didn’t show himself in the studio again, except to give in to an illogical craving for order by raising the venetians in the dark. The moon was out — you could tell from the pale, seething shadows in the garden.

  I was able to look at myself again in the half-light of morning: I was a dark, unfathomable patch on a colourless background of folds. On the floor between me and my likeness was the mattress, close to the bucket, which was standing in a puddle of water. By now, the wind had become a real gale, blasting straight onto the sliding doors, but I could see that the sky was cloudless.