It wasn’t that I suddenly felt small. On the contrary, I was as wide as ever. I was myself in every detail, except I was no longer the canvas — I was the reproduction of myself, the only one, and I existed, yes, I did, I existed like the face on the shroud; torn in half as I was, I existed, like Lidewij’s mother on the rim of the last glass.
I was sure that I would be torn again in the other direction, and then again, and thrown in the wastepaper basket, but that didn’t happen. Creator looked at me, my minuscule eyes exchanged a glance with his, and he closed his eyes, as if hoping he was dreaming, and finally put me in the breast pocket of his shirt.
FIVE
What I’m going through now is indescribable. Besides the tear, which has turned me into two halves, slipped one behind the other in Creator’s left breast pocket, so that I’ve actually become two snippets, I now have to cope with a deep, regular beating sound as well. I have ended up with my picture against Creator’s body, in sweaty darkness, and it’s like my ear is pressed against a big drum. Every second I hear a boom, sometimes quickened, and there’s also a kind of bellows. That’s the word for it, bellows, and my world now moves up and down with heavy rustling.
To my astonishment, Creator took his bike rather than the van after running into the front garden. Later, I would understand why. Close to the gate of the track they call the drive, the storm had uprooted a tree, dumping it right across the garden and the path. While Creator dragged his bike over the tree, the rustling grew heavier, and the booming less regular and more desperate.
I had never been this close to a body before. It’s bizarre; I’ve had to lose my canvas and my entire frame to get close to someone’s skin. I start to understand it a little, what it’s like to be made of flesh and to breathe, to have a heart that harries you as if you were a ship riding a storm. How can people bear themselves? Besides sweat, I also caught the occasional smell of the woods. The wind died down, but now and then I clearly felt a chill on my outside back from the gusts of damp morning air.
I must have covered this route in the reverse direction when I was still a canvas and unpainted, in the van, but all I remember of that is bumping through a summery forest and having a stream of patches of light projected on my white surface through the leaves that were sliding by. Then, it was like being carried off by a lover. Now, I could only think one thing: This is not what I was made for, to move like a human. I’ll never survive it.
I don’t know how long the bicycle ride through the woods and suburbs lasted, but when we reached Lidewij in hospital she was already three centimetres dilated, and the contractions were coming every three minutes. It’s a question of hours now, a female voice said. She pronounced her Rs in the back of her throat and had a sing-song voice. The contractions are starting to really come now — it’s good you’ve made it.
Creator was still panting — he had started cycling faster and faster — and now tried to breathe along when a contraction came. He had, I presume, sat down next to the bed. I got the impression that a contraction was something that hurts.
There was someone hanging on the wall in the room; at least I heard Creator say something about a print of water lilies and a pond. That was after a while, when he’d got more or less used to the rhythm of the recurring contractions. He was looking for a subject with which to distract Lidewij in the intervening minutes.
That could have been me, I thought, feeling a gulf of regret. I could have been a glossy Monet print, and spent every day of my entire life attending human births in a regional hospital.
Immediately after entering the room, Creator had bent over to kiss Lidewij.
You smell of smoke, Lidewij said.
Creator said he had lit a fire.
Just like that, first thing in the morning, in your pyjamas?
Waste paper, old sketches, paint rags, Creator said.
Weird, he added, after a silence. I woke up this morning wanting to get rid of the junk.
You must have felt it coming, Lidewij said. Typical.
Then she started groaning, and Creator breathed demonstratively through his lips, and the rustling around me sounded like a judgement. When the contraction was over, a silence fell.
Baby’s presenting perfectly, said the voice with the throaty Rs. Head first, just like it’s supposed to be.
She left the room humming.
That was a whopper, Lidewij said. They’re getting stronger each time.
She grabbed Creator’s hand, but he said ouch.
Scorched, he said. It suddenly flared up, because of the wind.
A silence fell.
You’ve got a smear there, Lidewij said. It felt like she was trying to wipe Creator’s forehead with her sleeve.
Did that journalist call?
Minke Dupuis? He was playing for time, I realised that, as if his life depended on him doing his best to make everything that wasn’t happening here, in this room, at this moment, seem unimportant. He was hoping to make it to the next contraction without answering; he was hoping to keep the truth out of the birth of his child.
She’s still on my hand, Lidewij said. Look, the number of her mobile.
The next contraction was a long time coming. I heard a high-pitched hiss, presumably from a machine.
I had the weirdest dream last night, Lidewij said. That he was born.
He?
Yes, he was a he and he was born and I had to ride a trishaw to Withernot. You were already home and I rode through the potholes on the track and kept shouting out, hold on, and then there was a specially deep pothole and I thought, I’ve bounced him out, out of the trishaw behind me, and I looked back — here comes another one.
Lidewij started to groan, and Creator started to pant.
That was just a little one, Lidewij said. That’s no use to us.
In the darkness inside Creator’s pocket, her smile suddenly appeared before me.
And then? Creator paused. You looked back and then?
Then Singer was sitting there. In the trishaw. The size of a baby, but still absolutely Singer.
And then? I could feel Creator’s heart pounding. I felt the passion with which he wished the dream had ended there.
Lidewij hesitated, then said quickly, Then I woke up with the first contraction. Not as strong as now, but still. Weird.
Yes, weird.
I think Creator went to kiss her, but Lidewij said something else.
Do you know what I thought when I was awake — I relaxed through the first contraction and I thought, If this is a job someone has given me and I’ve been crazy enough to accept it, then I can’t give it back anymore, not even if I wanted to, not now.
The woman with the voice had come back; silently, she checked the machines Lidewij was hooked up to.
Look, she said to Creator, that line’s its heart. Just fine. But it mustn’t come under here.
She disappeared out of the room again, evidently having shown Creator where the line had to stay above.
I could tell from his breathing that Creator wanted to say something. It was as if, on hearing Lidewij use the word job, he had made a bold decision, complete with a deep sigh and a suck of air into his lungs.
Lidewij, he said, in a voice that seemed deeper. It’s a strange thing, by the way, how a voice resonates in a chest and makes it all tremble. These mortals are made of unusual material.
Lidewij, Creator said, there is no Singer anymore.
He jumped, his heart missing a beat, from her reaction. She’d said, Oh God, and it had come out as a groan. Oh God, I knew it, I dreamt it.
Creator took another deep breath.
Singer’s been picked up, he said.
Picked up? Why didn’t you say so? Lidewij was relieved; I could hear that in every word. Picked up, she repeated.
Who b
y?
The guy from the phone call, Creator said. From the four-wheel drive. You know, the one who rang six months ago, when they didn’t come to pick him up.
And?
And what?
What was his reaction?
Oh. I don’t know. Beautiful — he thought it was beautiful. And looked just like him.
And Specht?
Creator hesitated. Somehow he couldn’t bring himself to say what he had heard from Minke that night — that Specht was dying.
Specht will be satisfied. That’s what the four-wheel-drive guy said. More than satisfied. Specht couldn’t come. Apparently he’s ill.
Seriously?
No idea.
Poor Singer, Lidewij said. If only he’s not too late.
He’s only paint.
Don’t say that. You put your heart and soul into it.
Another contraction was on its way. Lidewij waited it out in total silence, and Creator hardly breathed along. When it was over, I heard nothing for a while and then sobbing.
Hold me, Lidewij said.
Creator bent forward and laid his right arm over Lidewij’s chest.
Hush.
Lidewij’s sobbing sounded insanely close, as if her breath was fanning me inside Creator’s breast pocket. But it wasn’t sorrow I could hear. It was something else. More frightening than sorrow.
It was such a horrible dream, she said. Horrible. I looked into the back of the trishaw, and Singer was sitting there and Singer was dead. I’d been riding through the forest for hours and he’d been dead the whole time.
Now she was crying with long, howling gasps.
Hush, Creator kept saying. Hush now.
In that instant, the voice of the woman broke in, swearing and sounding high and shrill.
I told you! If the line comes under here, you have to tell me!
Somewhere down the corridor a buzzer went off. Creator had let go of Lidewij, footsteps approached, the door to the room swung open.
A man asked, How long since we’ve had a signal?
No signal? Creator said in a monotone.
What is it? asked Lidewij. Is something wrong?
Page Verdurmen, said a male voice. He’s still in the building.
Footsteps went off, others came in, Creator was pushed back to a corner of the room, machines were disconnected. I don’t know if Lidewij had another contraction during the consternation, but they wheeled her off, and Creator started moving, out into the corridor, following the bed, his heart banging like a hammer.
I was there through those last anxious hours before an exhausted surgeon came to tell Creator the outcome and stammered while trying to decide what to explain first — about Lidewij or about the child — but I only remember the pounding of Creator’s heart and the uncontrollable waves of his panicked breathing. It was obvious that Lidewij had disappeared through the double doors of the operating theatre. Now and then, Creator left the hospital for a short walk through a wood. He talked to himself. It was like the way he talked when he was working on me — How long ago now? — but he wasn’t talking to me, and it sounded like he was constantly asking questions. Why? Why? Why? I heard him say, almost roaring, and suddenly I even thought I heard him shout out Mercy or Spare me. Goodness, how could I think of anyone other than Specht, but I didn’t have the slightest impression that Creator was still capable of making any kind of connection. It was actually a mystery to me where his words, when he actually spoke them, were going. What on earth are they doing, people, when they call out things like that — stand by me? Who are they addressing?
Only a few thoughts were pounding through my head. I didn’t exist anymore; that much was clear. But I was still the last person in Lidewij’s thoughts before she disappeared into the operating theatre. I rode through the forest and the whole time Singer had been dead. I repeated the words as a kind of mantra. I had been torn in half and I was still Singer; I sat in the back of the dreamt trishaw and my mother looked back. I had no choice. What else could I do but cling to that possible backward glance? Mummy, Mummy, look back, for God’s sake, look back, let me exist — I’m here after all, even if only in Lidewij’s sedated head, even if I’m being torn and blacked out of my creator’s thoughts, even if I’m a rattling corpse in the back of the dream of a woman under anaesthetic — look back, look back …
Who am I when she sees me?
What kind of fate is this, never being able to know who I am unless someone is looking at me?
Who will see me, please? Who will make me exist?
It must have been late in the morning when Creator saw the double doors opening in the hospital corridor and heard that he was the father of a son.
An eighth-month son.
Details of size and weight followed, but Creator didn’t hear them. He only asked, My wife, how is my wife?
We’ve got your son in the incubator now — we’ll have to monitor him for the time being, said the surgeon. You can see him in about a quarter of an hour; unfortunately, it will be through glass for a little while yet.
Only then did he answer the question.
Your wife.
The surgeon took a deep breath and wiped his forehead.
Still unconscious, but out of danger.
You could hear that it was a sentence he’d said before.
A groan welled up in Creator, and I heard it coming from very close quarters, rumbling deep inside before it rose up and left me shaking.
He had seen Lidewij lying there, unconscious, as the surgeon had said, in a room full of equipment.
He had whispered, Fearless Fly, while kissing her on the forehead.
He had gone to the maternity ward where the incubators were and stared through a window at a stark-naked baby. It breathed as if drinking slugs of liquid air.
A boy — that was very, very obvious.
Stijn, he whispered.
I didn’t comprehend any of this until later, when Lidewij had returned to Withernot with Stijn, which was indeed the name they were going to give their son. Whopping great balls, Creator then said.
He left the hospital mid-afternoon, but didn’t ride home — at least, not straight home. He rode in the opposite direction, through Laren, to the endless bicycle path that separates Utrecht and North Holland. He cycled calmly, and his heart and breathing were calm, too. The wind had died down. Branches that had been torn off in the night were scattered over the path. Past the White Mountains, workmen were cutting up a fallen beech; I heard the roar of chainsaws.
They were still audible in the distance when Creator got off his bike. He knew this place. He leant his bike against a tree and walked to another tree. He did something very strange to that tree, which I felt very clearly. He pressed himself against the trunk, first his head, as if pressing his ear against someone’s chest, and then his whole body, as if hugging the tree. It felt rough and barky.
Only then did I realise that the big jolts I was feeling weren’t coming from outside, from the tree, as I had thought for a moment. They were rising up in Creator himself, from his diaphragm. Creator was crying. And while crying, he let himself slide down the tree he was holding tight, bending his knees and finally rolling over on one side. He lay there like that until the jolting lessened. Then he got up and sat down right in the middle of a mass of damp leaves with his back against the tree.
He sat there like that and pulled me out.
One after the other, us, the two halves of his making. And he laid us on his lap. Very carefully, he slid us up against each other and made us whole by looking at us.
Tijn, he said.
Where are you, Tijn?
I knew very well how incomprehensibly small I was, how minuscule the face he had worked on, picking his nose, for weeks, how minuscule my middle, millimetres to the
right of the tear. I was as minuscule as a thought, and yet I looked up out of Singer and was as wide as I had always been. I think I’m expressing it properly. I looked up from Creator’s artefact and was as wide as I could be, and I saw Creator’s face and how he was beyond consolation. Once I had gone so far as to call it a countenance, but my face was now so small that one of Creator’s tears was enough to drown it — and he wiped me dry again with his left thumb.
Singer, he said.
Where are you, Singer?
Creator looked up and around, as if we were there — Singer and Tijn and the newborn son who was going to be called Stijn.
He said all this out loud, not to me, but it was meant for me.
In the distance, the chainsaws sounded: short bursts at long intervals. There must have been a farm closer by; at least I heard a cow, once, between two chainsaws — a cow, one distinct moo, muffled, in a shed.
He stayed sitting there like that, and I suspected that the sun had sunk lower in the sky. I remembered him once telling Lidewij that two Fjord horses grazed there, in this spot close to Groeneveld Castle, with their heads at each other’s rear hooves. That must have been the tearing noise I heard. And I also heard, further away, the bells of a level crossing.
What possessed him? Why did he call himself your father? Why did he want me to make you?
Another giant tear spattered my surface, this time near my feet.
The bastard, the filthy sick bastard. What am I supposed to do now? How can I go on if the world finds out what I’ve done? What did he do to you? Why did you have to die?
I knew what he saw when, after wiping his eyes, he looked at me again.
Me, dead.
That was what he had worked from. Death. And he hadn’t seen it; he had thought me alive, even in that last Polaroid, the one Specht had given him at the last moment, trembling with an uncomprehended emotion. Even in that Polaroid, Creator hadn’t seen it.
Forgive me.
He didn’t say that. I thought it. I thought, How can I tell him? How can I, two halves of a Polaroid, an artefact of an artefact, tell him he didn’t know what he was doing? And I realised that it didn’t matter; nothing I might say if I could speak mattered. Not to him, not in this instant. I was Tijn, I was his son, I was Lidewij, I was Minke, I was everyone he hadn’t seen when they were standing before him, everyone who had ever sat for him, and he should have seen how small and incomprehensibly vulnerable we are and a hair’s breadth from being nothing at all.
The Portrait Page 11