The Portrait

by Willem Jan Otten

  Everything around Withernot rustled and shrieked. I think that was why I didn’t hear the sound of the car until it drove in through the garden gate. A car door shut, light hasty footsteps came down the drive, a woman’s footsteps sounded and, during a brief lull in the wind’s howling, a thud was audible in the hall. I knew that sound — I heard it every morning before Creator walked into the studio with the newspaper. But this wasn’t the newspaper. I heard the car door again. Almost immediately, the ignition sounded and the car raced off, to be drowned out by the storm a few seconds later. In the same instant, Creator stumbled around upstairs, he drummed down the staircase, and opened the front door.

  Minke! he shouted. Minke, come back!

  A strong draught had come up in the studio — the popping paper in the corner rustled and slid — like a cold breath blowing across my whole surface. The front door banged shut. The studio calmed instantly.

  Immediately afterwards, Creator came in holding an envelope.

  He had already torn it open and was reading the first lines of a letter out loud, as if on the stage: Felix, this is the article that will appear in Art & Facts as soon as Specht is dead. Everything has been checked and double-checked. I had it with me last night to show it to you, but nothing went the way I expected. I wanted to give it to you. I don’t understand what happened, either. Forgive me — suddenly you were so completely the Felix from the old days; no one looks at me the way you look at me. But when you said who it was in the painting — read it, please, and don’t be shocked, and forgive me. The article is the truth and nothing but.

  Creator was wearing the same clothes as a few hours earlier; he even still had his spattered shoes on. He must have flopped onto his bed without getting undressed. Standing between me and my reflection, he unfolded several sheets of typed paper. I could see clearly that there had been a few prints in the envelope — colour prints. One of them floated down to the floor. Creator was absorbed by what he was reading. More than ever, I realised that I was completely at the mercy of coincidence; there was no other way I could begin to understand the gist of Minke’s article. Creator ignored the print that had floated away.

  During one of the sittings with the charismatic hypnotherapist’s children, I had heard Creator discussing the Internet with the oldest of the three boys. You could be on it and you could download whatever you liked. This was one of those things — a print from the Internet, a photo, lying, from my perspective, upside down. I could see just enough to make out a human figure. But that was enough to send a mad chill to my heart. It was someone dark-skinned, there on the paper.

  When he had finished the letter, he spent a long time staring straight ahead, more or less at the popping paper, without seeing anything, without moving, seemingly without even breathing.

  So it’s true, he said. He groaned.

  I got the impression he wanted to vomit. His Adam’s apple seemed to have developed a life of its own — he swallowed frantically for a while, then disappeared into the living room.

  The wind he made turned the print on the floor around, giving me a better view.

  It was a boy, black — as I had thought — naked, and lying on a bed. His eyes were closed.

  Is he me? I thought.

  And I knew it. This was Singer. This was me.

  Now I heard the television; Creator had turned it on. Out of my sight, he walked from the living room to the toilet. I think he was trying to vomit, but that didn’t happen, and when he came back into the room the first news item had started.

  What was he expecting to hear? The Erasmus Medical Centre has just announced the death, after a long illness, of the Rotterdam dredging baron Valery Specht, reputedly the Netherlands’ richest man, a renowned art collector and connoisseur of underage boys, who leaves behind a global real-estate empire?

  It was only about a war that would be waged as soon as the rest of the world grasped how dangerous the dictator was.

  Creator switched off the TV.

  It came as no surprise to me that the first thing he thought of now was the cheque. He pulled it out of the drawer in the big table, from between the pencil stubs and the paperclips. I don’t know what he was staring at now — the signature perhaps, the only direct proof, here in the studio, of Specht’s existence? He laid the cheque on the table and picked the print up off the floor. I could see his face now: it was as if his hair was standing on end, as if he’d walked through the storm outside. His lips were pressed together, as if he was forcing himself to keep a cool head.

  He laid the envelope, the letter, and the prints — about five of them, by the look of it — on the table next to the cheque. Then he walked to the mirror opposite me, and turned it upright and around, so that its light-grey, crazed back was facing me again. Creator’s actions had become determined: he strode over to the video projector, which was on its stand just next to the popping paper, moved it over next to me, and turned it on. Then he pulled out a video. I recognised it immediately — it was Specht’s video of Singer. He put it into the VCR and aimed the lens at the greyish-white back of the mirror.

  It wasn’t my idea, becoming human. But one day I was taken away from Van Schendel’s, as from a distant continent, by a man who wanted to make me human. He paid money for me — I cost substantially more than double weave, and my stretchers are glued, all of three point six. I don’t know where it came from, the longing I started to feel here in Withernot. I don’t know, but it arose within me, not like a thought, but like a wind that starts to blow unnoticed. I had no choice but to want what Creator wanted; I had never longed for anything as intensely as I longed to be Singer, to live, and to feel the gaze of anyone at all who, seeing me, would say, He looks real — look, a person, Singer.

  None of this was my idea, and yet I must now feel what people feel. I am even fated to feel the last thing they feel — I must feel the out-of-control terror they feel, how irrationally desperate fear makes them.

  Creator was completely overcome by fear. I’m dead, he thought. If the world sees what I now see, everyone will think I’m the biggest sleazebag imaginable … The outrage, the outrage … No one will ever sit for me again … Withernot, Withernot will never be ours … Lidewij, I heard him whispering — if Lidewij sees this … But still he projected the video of Singer on the back of the mirror. He already knew everything, but he still wanted to see it.

  That was how I came to see him in full before me for the first time, the video of Singer, with the children playing just outside the sunny window, with the boat from Chora Sfakion blowing its horn, with the motionless dark body that started it all. Creator froze the picture, and the sound of summer died. Creator clicked ahead a couple of times until the stripes disappeared from the picture, and then he looked at the prints. One after the other, he compared the prints to what he saw in front of him in the studio, and his gaze lingered the longest on one of the prints — the one that had floated down to the floor.

  Fuck, he said.

  He dumped the papers on the table and ran out of the studio.

  By the sound of it, the vomiting was successful this time; I heard an infernal hawking sound and the flush of the toilet.

  All that time I stared at Singer — frozen, crackled Singer, lying on the bed of a bygone summer.

  After returning, Creator adjusted the projector to bring Singer’s face closer and closer. I don’t know if Creator could already see what he wanted to see. Singer’s enlargement took on monstrous proportions, and then Creator let the picture go. That’s the word — he pressed a button that somehow interrupted the freezing of the magnified face. The picture moved, but it wasn’t Singer who was moving; it was the person who was watching, the camera itself. Singer didn’t even seem to be breathing.

  Oh, God, Creator said.

  Dead.

  Did he say it out loud?

  Generally, I was the first to u
nderstand what Creator needed to understand, but this time he was very obviously ahead of me. He was capable of considering a possibility that was somehow beyond my comprehension.

  He was capable of thinking Singer dead.

  That was it.

  He saw Singer dead.

  He had already understood, and now he saw. With his own two eyes.

  All those weeks he’d spent looking at the video footage while preparing for the painting, he hadn’t been able to. He hadn’t needed to, either. He hadn’t wanted to.

  But now he could clearly think it.

  This, this video recording, is Singer dead.

  I’ve worked from death.

  He couldn’t think anything else; I realised that. Everything he had read in Minke’s article seemed to bring him to one thought. I wonder whether I understand enough about people to comprehend what they mean by death and dead. Creator looked at Singer and could only think, Here, in this one fraction of a second of this video, he is already dead. God knows how or why, but he is dead. And I’ve done exactly what Specht asked, the very first thing he asked, here in the studio.

  Do you also work from death?

  Creator switched off the projector and ejected the video. Fuck you, Specht. What have you done to me? I heard Creator say that now, hissing. What kind of sick dirty game were you playing with me?

  At that moment, his phone tinkled; it was lying on the big table as well.

  Hello, he said, terrible quietly.

  Whoever it was on the other end of the line, their voice came from another universe; that was obvious.

  Hi, sweetheart.

  For a moment, he lowered the phone as if he could hardly hold it, then clamped it against his chest.

  No, he said, pressing it against his ear again. I’m already up. No, nothing. Nothing’s going on. It’s just terribly windy. You’re incredibly early. It’s — oh, is it that late already? Is something wrong?

  I could see that Creator was, at this moment, making the greatest effort he’d made in his whole life.

  He started listening. If I’d listened very closely, I might have been able to hear Lidewij’s voice, but I could never have made out her words, not with this storm raging around Withernot.

  Induced, I heard him say.

  Lidewij explained what that was, as if that was necessary — he’d already understood. The child had to be born now, today, soon. Lidewij had had contractions in the night; she hadn’t gone into real labour, but even though she had more than a month to go, they had to play it safe — that was what the doctor said. The contractions were being artificially stimulated right now — they were inducing labour. It was definitely best for the birth to be as natural as possible, but if complications arose they’d have to operate.

  A caesarean? I heard Creator ask.

  Lidewij was obviously trying to reassure him; she was getting them every ten minutes now, massive contractions.

  A centimetre, Creator repeated. One centimetre dilated.

  Now I heard, right through Creator’s eardrum, a cry.

  Breathe, Creator shouted. Just breathe calmly.

  He took elaborately audible calm breaths for at least a minute.

  When that was over, he said, Honey, I’m going to get dressed straightaway.

  I don’t know why he said that. I think for a moment he really imagined that he was just up, in his pyjamas, in a life in which only this one birth would take place.

  Hang in there, honey. I’m on my way.

  And he clicked off the phone.

  That was ten minutes ago.

  After that, I didn’t see him look left or right. He was all go. He opened the sliding doors and ran out into the garden. A wave of air rushed in, the popping paper flew up, and the print and the photos blew off the table. He grabbed some wood from the lean-to next to the sunroom — dry brushwood that Lidewij had collected in the birch wood in autumn. At the end of the garden, by the reed border, he built a pile. He got a plastic bottle of turps from the studio and poured it over the branches, but after that he couldn’t find matches anywhere in Withernot, until he found a box in the drawer with the pencil stubs and ran back out with it. The fire flared up like an explosion, spraying sparks with what sounded like an enormous sigh. Creator threw another armful of branches on the flames and ran back into the studio. From everywhere he grabbed the prints, photos, videos, and even the cheque for fifty thousand euros to throw on the fire, which was now as tall as him. For a moment, his body was silhouetted black in front of the roaring flames.

  From where I am now standing, I can see him out of the corner of my eye. For a second, I even thought he would throw himself in the flames — it was blazing so high, and he is that small. My God, what a nondescript figure he cuts, and now he’s turning around … not for me, but to rummage through the basket with the paint rags, getting out the black plastic bag with the untouched videos — what have they got to do with it? — but he still takes them back out into the garden. As he walks back again, there is a stench of poison, the flames consuming the videotapes take on a garish, green colour … he’s still going to go back one more time …

  That’s it then, this is what my presence in the world comes down to. Supporting the image of someone I will never know, who will never see me. Being made on commission for someone who died before he could come to pick me up. Never seeing anything more of myself than my reflection — the strangest, least fathomable picture to come my way, yet nothing more or less than what I was.

  I, an artefact, shaped by human hands, made for human eyes.

  People are more scared of death than we artefacts. That has become very clear to me. If you add a thousand fears to my fear, you’ll come close to understanding human fear. I don’t know what I owe this realisation to — I’m not human, and I’m about to go up in smoke. Why did I have to know? That it’s beyond them, people, the thing that is about to happen to me? Having disappeared is beyond them.

  Whoever Specht was, he hadn’t been able to accept that Singer had disappeared — and he went to Creator and asked him to do the impossible. Bring him to life. And he called the boy his son, God knows why.

  And Creator went to work, on me, on me, on maxima me.

  They think they create, but they make something that can’t be grasped. It eludes them; they don’t know what they are creating. They bring monsters into the world, they turn us into Singers, they make a person, and then get terrified. Singer, why you, why did you exist?

  Now he’s standing opposite me. Creator. He smells of smoke. A capillary has burst in his left eye. He has burnt the ball of his left hand; he sucks on it. He has brushed a hand over his forehead, leaving a black smear, a streak of charcoal.

  Why? Why do I have to be destroyed?

  What kind of incomprehensible danger is Creator in because of me?

  Everything that referred to me, everything on which I could be seen, everything that could prove that I existed, everything has to go …

  So this is it, here in front of me — the man who doesn’t want me to exist. I mustn’t exist; I must never have existed. If I exist, he is in danger. I can see him thinking that; it’s him or me, me or him … how can this be possible? How can Creator possibly want to kill me? Will the hand that made me be the hand that kills me?

  He spreads his arms, but isn’t wide enough to reach from right to left. He bends, grabs my upper and lower stretchers and, lifting, turns me on my side. Now I am standing — but head down. He clamps me against his body. He can’t see a thing with me up against him like this; he wobbles like a dancer with a dead partner slumped over him.

  Something happens that Creator, with me blinding him like this, can’t know. But I feel it. Something behind me, something clamped between my linen and my frame, lets go of me. It was only just perceptible: something let go and floated irre
vocably away from me.

  And so he wobbles out of the sunroom, hugging me, stumbling over the step of the sliding doors. I fall back-first onto the cold grass. Swearing, he picks me up and manhandles me over the lawn, and I feel the approaching heat on my back. His mouth presses against my stomach, or is it my middle, twenty centimetres to the right? He stumbles on, two more steps, and lets me go …

  It didn’t hurt; that’s not it. When it comes to suffering like a human, there are other stories that go deeper and are immeasurably truer. There was just as much fire as is necessary to make an Extra Fine Quadruple Universal Primed of two by one twenty go up in smoke. I toppled backwards into the heat. My canvas caught fire before the stretchers, the wedges, the cross. I crackled because I was as dry as a bone. I thought one flimsy thought: He hasn’t even signed me. And I became, yes, a shower of sparks, I imagined that clearly while feeling the paint melt and seeing Creator stare, upside-down, for just a couple of seconds before turning away. My frame was glued, all of three point six, the wood of the cross, too, that must have burnt for quite a while, but I became a shower of sparks and my sparks became flakes of ash, a large spark becoming an especially large flake, which floated over Creator who was walking slowly back to his studio. It drifted through the garden like a snowflake that has lost its flurry, and I descended, on a strangely calm gust of wind, back into Withernot. I think Creator saw me. He followed me with his eyes and must have seen me coming down — all things considered, almost like a feather — a good distance inside the studio, and I landed on the back of a Polaroid.

  Hurrying again, he walked over and picked me up.

  Not as a flake.

  That was something I was immediately incapable of imagining anymore.

  Fuck, he said, and looked. More to the point, I felt myself being picked up and turned over and torn in two. Then he looked at me, and I looked back, and I realised what I had felt when something had let go of me so mysteriously. The Polaroid! The Polaroid of me.