Red Heaven

by Nicolas Rothwell

  ‘Of course it would have been,’ broke in Daru: ‘And it was also invaluable publicity for the hotel.’

  ‘A hotel like this one is not in need of advertising,’ said Eppler, firmly: ‘Not then—not now. Caspar Badrutt merely wanted a public comparison of the two works to be made. That was enough for him. He was sure the painting itself would persuade the most celebrated experts—that it would win the day. And he had good reason to think that.’

  ‘What can you possibly mean?’ said Daru.

  Eppler turned to him with an air of triumph. ‘The canvases themselves tell the tale. You surely know Raphael took great care in the preparation of the portraits and the altarpieces he completed in his workshop. He preferred to paint on wood. When he made a work on canvas, he would select a single piece of material—and yet the Dresden Madonna is a poor, coarse patchwork of canvas pieces, sewn together along two crooked seams, while ours is on a single piece of linen damask, the finest of the day. Now: you answer me. Which is more likely to be the original, the genuine Madonna, from Raphael’s immortal hand: the misty painting in the Dresden Gallery, or this one, austere, and clear and soulful—as you can see with your own eyes?’

  He paused, and glanced round at his audience, and held up his hands in expressive, pleading fashion. ‘Caspar Badrutt was willing to put his ideas to the test. He travelled to Dresden to make his case. He took our painting with him. The comparison between the two canvases did take place, but in private: no outsiders. And the Dresden gallery director behaved as you would expect. He dismissed Badrutt’s painting out of hand. He dismissed Badrutt as well. The canvas was brought back to us—and how happy we are to have it here. Those of us who see it every day can feel its magic. It shows us something new each time we see it. Our guests admire it, our new visitors are struck with astonishment the first time they come face to face with it, and the Madonna still casts her calm light over us, and over the entire valley below.’

  ‘Admirable,’ exclaimed Ady: ‘Eppler gives such a good account of everything. Listening to you, we almost feel we were present as these events were unfolding. Quite remarkable.’

  ‘Too kind,’ said Eppler.

  ‘No, it’s the truth. But there’s something else about the painting. Something I wanted the boy to see.’

  She beckoned to me. ‘Come: sit, sit here with me, and look. What mood does the artist conjure up inside you? What feeling does he leave you with? Tell us!’

  ‘Is it a sad painting?’

  ‘In a sense,’ said Ady: ‘But it speaks to me of something else—it speaks of longing.’

  ‘Longing for what?’ asked Josette.

  ‘Longing itself. Pure longing. I saw the painting in the Dresden gallery when I was a child. In those days it was a rite of passage: you were without culture until you’d been taken on that pilgrimage. It was like a stamp in your passport, proclaiming that you had a tradition, and eyes with which to see the splendours of the past. You were following in the path of Goethe and Dostoyevsky—or you were downstream from them in a great flowing river. I remember that trip very well. There were people from all over Europe, East and West together, standing before the painting, as if they were inside a church at prayer.’

  ‘That time’s gone,’ said Daru: ‘Perhaps forever.’

  ‘But I long for it. I long for it so much the past still seems present for me.’

  ‘A natural reaction to these days we’re living through, when the whole world round us seems to be dissolving.’

  ‘You make it sound as if it’s just sentiment, and weakness,’ said Ady: ‘But that longing lies at the heart of everything. Sometimes I think all we are is longing. If we didn’t feel the loss of what we care for, we’d scarcely be alive. If we weren’t always longing for what’s vanished from us, what’s been taken from us, if we weren’t gazing back towards the past we’ve left in our wake, what would we be? The Madonna longs for the grace of heaven to be spread among us; the artist longs to recreate the original of his image; we long to know what he once knew. The circle of desire and longing goes on its great chase through the world.’

  ‘But you don’t find,’ said Daru, ‘that the work’s just a little—how can I put it tactfully—old-fashioned?’

  ‘You’re forgetting that I’m Viennese, and it’s been several decades since anyone in Viennese society had an appetite for art that calls itself new.’

  ‘I thought you were Hungarian,’ I said.

  ‘My treasure, no one truly Viennese was actually born or brought up there.’

  ‘I see,’ I said.

  ‘And what would count for you as modern, anyway?’ she said, then to Daru: ‘Today’s new will look older by tomorrow than what seems antique to your eyes now.’

  ‘But, madame, surely you’d agree the Renaissance has nothing new to say to us? Don’t we know its great truths already? Aren’t they commonplace, aren’t they familiar in every way?’

  ‘Stephane,’ said Josette: ‘Don’t be so contentious!’ She turned to Ady. ‘Forgive him. He always has to have the last word.’

  ‘No need to jump in to protect me,’ said Ady: ‘In cultural arguments, I can fend for myself. It may please your husband to see me as some kind of exotic from the backlands of Eastern Europe…’

  ‘But women like you are rarely what they seem?’

  ‘Exactly so!’

  ‘That’s not how I see you at all!’ said Daru: ‘But could there be anyone more strongly in the camp of modernism than you? Married to a champion of new paths in music: a Darmstadt modernist, no less.’

  ‘And this rules out any admiration for art made in centuries gone by? What is it you object to? Tell us truly. Is it the angels, the cherubs, the saints?’

  ‘It’s not the most socially engaged and committed work of art I’ve ever seen.’

  ‘You’d prefer a painting that addressed the horrors of the moment? Vietnam, perhaps, or Laos, and Cambodia?’

  ‘Naturally. It’s our duty to highlight what’s being done there.’

  ‘Your duty as a great power diplomat, or as a man of sophisticated European morality?’

  ‘Both, of course.’

  Ady leaned across, and took Daru’s hand for a second, then let it drop. ‘When you realise that everything you’re speaking of is addressed in this painting, and in fact it addresses nothing else, then think of me,’ she said: ‘And the same thing goes for you, my badly behaved treasure!’

  She tapped me lightly on the knee. ‘I brought you here to open your eyes: to show you this. It’s an important occasion. You reward me by joking about it, by not paying attention, by speaking ill of me to others, by looking bored. Don’t make light of the image here in front of you, and think you can fool me. Don’t be embarrassed. I can tell what you really feel.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Such defiance! Such inwardness. Your eyes, of course—they show what’s inside you—they give you away.’

  ‘It’s a special moment!’ said Daru: ‘The beginning of an education in the arts—and life.’

  ‘Maybe he’ll become a connoisseur,’ said Josette.

  ‘Maybe not,’ said Daru.

  ‘It might be so,’ said Ady: ‘I have an instinct for these things. The image will stay with him. It’ll haunt him, and he’ll haunt it, no matter what he thinks now.’

  ‘You mean I’ll come back here?’

  ‘Somehow, I don’t think the Palace Hotel and St. Moritz will be your natural environment in years to come, young man,’ said Daru.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘There’s a secret visa that you need to spend your days in places like this,’ he said, and laughed a little.

  ‘I was really thinking more of Dresden,’ said Ady, in a wistful voice, and gazed at me: ‘Dresden, in some future when all the walls and barriers come down. I was thinking of the Raphael that’s hanging there. I imagine you on the day you first go to see it. What agitation you’ll feel inside you! You’ll be happy and sad at once, for a hundred reasons. You’ll stare at i
t obediently, and admire it, because you’ve been taught to do so. You’ll think it holds great mysteries, but it’ll take a long time before you make out its depths: a long time—and then, perhaps, one grey morning, alone in the gallery, ages afterwards, half a lifetime afterwards, you’ll see: see the mother in the painting looking back at you.’

  *

  And though years have passed since that afternoon at Badrutt’s, it stays with me. Ady’s words stay with me. I can picture her still as she was then, her face set in a calm and serious mask, her eyes like bright lamps shining into mine, and I hear her voice, speaking gently, with its insistent rhythm: ‘Look back on this. Look back, and think of what I’m telling you.’

  My life took its course. I passed through schools; I travelled. I saw sights and met strangers. I plunged into traditions, I rejected them and returned to them. I wrote, I began stories and despaired of them. And all through this time I believed I was charting my own path through the world, and failed to see how much of my trajectory was already clear to those who set me on my way.

  I was at the end of my student years when I made my first trip to Dresden, as though in fulfilment of a promise. It was still an East German city, it had the atmospherics of a mausoleum, it was sombre, its streets were cloaked in brown coaldust and noxious fumes. Inside the famous gallery all was quiet. Visitors strolled here and there, and spoke in whispers. I found the Raphael hanging in its special alcove. I stood before it. I let my thoughts roam. People drifted in, and lingered, looking up: a school party, a group of Red Army soldiers, all Kazakhs, in uniform, clutching their wide-brimmed caps upon their chests. After some minutes a young man in an overcoat came in, and stood beside me. He had a light meter in his hand. He held it up and took readings from several angles, went closer, pressed the meter against the picture’s gilded frame, repeated the performance, frowned, nodded to himself and then glanced back at me.

  ‘You look disappointed,’ he said: ‘Don’t you like the painting? What were you expecting? To meet the mother of God in person? Where are you from?’

  I told him.

  ‘The decadent West! Exciting! I never met a westerner until I moved to Moscow. They still seem strange to me: always in a hurry, always unhappy, always on edge.’

  He came nearer, held out his hand, took mine, shook it very formally and gave a little bow.

  ‘Are you a photographer?’ I asked him.

  ‘A film-maker. Can’t you tell?’

  ‘Aren’t you quite young to be making films?’

  ‘Not at all. It’s a time for the new generation now. New thoughts, new approaches, in all fields of life. I’m making my graduation film: the true story of the Sistine Madonna. It’s a project that would only be possible in times like these—in Glasnost times. I have it on good authority that the General Secretary himself has been briefed about my proposal. I mean to tell the truth about the painting and its special role in Soviet life.’

  ‘Starting with Dostoyevsky, of course.’

  ‘So you know about the painting, and its place in Russia!’

  ‘A little.’

  ‘You must surely be a scholar—a worker with ideas?’

  ‘I wish I was,’ I said: ‘I just go here and there, and look for things to write about.’

  ‘And seek out the patterns and the clues in life; find ways to know yourself by studying the world. I understand! We’re on the same path, we two. And the nineteenth-century story of the painting and Dostoyevsky’s special feeling for it draws me in as well. In fact, I made a great discovery about Fyodor Mikhailovich the other day. Would you like me to tell you about it?’

  ‘By all means,’ I said.

  ‘You know the famous scene in Karamazov with the devil? When Ivan sees the devil in a nightmare—or someone he imagines is the devil—a man of modest property, middle-aged, shabbily dressed, wearing a brown jacket with a foulard at his neck. Do you remember it?’

  ‘Not really—but go on.’

  ‘Not really? Nothing in all Russian literature’s more vivid! For us, growing up in the provinces, the classics were everything, they were our breath and life, they gave us hope, they opened up the world. Even when I was a boy I knew the story of the Karamazovs by heart: I used to dream I was Alyosha. But there was one detail in that scene that troubled me: the ring—the devil’s ring. He wears a ring with an opal set in it. But how did he come by such a ring? The story’s from the 1870s, and the great new-world opal fields were only found years later. Where could the stone have come from, and why would he wear an opal? I asked, and found no answer. I read the great works of literary criticism: nothing. I asked professors at the academy: they had no idea. At last I went to the geological institute—and that’s where I learned about the old opal mines of Slovakia. I set out at once on a journey there.’

  ‘You don’t do things by halves, do you?’

  ‘With obsessions, you have to go right to the end! I went deep into those mountains; I saw the mine workings; I saw the antique opal rings and stones in their museum. I even made a short film there. An experiment—a montage. I’d told myself I knew exactly what to expect. Legends, pagan superstitions: there were very few of them. In some south Slav folktales, opal stones can shield you against the evil eye, or make you invisible—but the devil’s ring in Karamazov comes from elsewhere. From a book, in fact. Can you guess? No? I was surprised myself. Dostoyevsky loved the works of Sir Walter Scott. He read through them all one summer, when he was twelve years old: they made a strong impression on him. One of the Waverley novels tells the story of a Swiss baroness who wears an opal in her hair. Holy water spills on the stone. Its colour fades at once. The woman who wears it sickens and dies. The book was a great bestseller across Europe: the idea of the opal as the devil’s jewel and bringer of bad luck took hold, and it lingers still. Extraordinary! Think of a book having such power today! Once you know, you can see Scott in Dostoyevsky, everywhere. In the unending tension, in the back and forth of voices, crowding round the reader, competing for attention, in that sense he gives of every single story taking place on a small, constricted stage. He even weaves Scott into his own stories—in The Double, in the “White Nights”. It’s a literary descent line. A secret one.’

  ‘So you’re going to be filming a biography. Of a writer as well as a painting.’

  ‘In a sense, but I’m not lost in looking back. Not at all. My script takes things forward—to our time. And you know the present’s much more troubling as a subject than the past.’

  ‘Go on!’

  ‘Come with me,’ he said then, in a conspiratorial way: ‘Of course Fyodor Mikhailovich stands at the heart of everything. Of course he’s the one who made this painting famous all through the Russian lands. But there’s a sequel. It’s important. Come. The time’s not right yet to talk about this where people can overhear.’

  We walked out to the Zwinger Gardens; we made our way around the lake. He became expansive. He told me the details of his plot: the fate of the Raphael in modern times: in war, when it was hidden away for safekeeping in a salt mine deep underground; in peace, when it was transported to the Soviet Union and kept in hidden storage for a decade.

  ‘And then came the great exhibition of the painting in Moscow—a profound event. Every theme in our history was brought together. War, sacrifice, the memory of our triumph, our yearning for and rivalry with the West. All the masterpieces from Dresden were there: it was the first time they’d gone on view. The crowds were overwhelming. They waited patiently to see those paintings, they queued all day long outside in the pale spring light.’

  ‘How do you know so much about it?’

  ‘It’s a well-known story. I’ve heard it told often by men and women who were there: that’s the only way the real truth of the past gets handed down. And it was something for them to remember, in those grey times. But it was an event for our great writers, too—for Shalamov, for Grossman. You know them? Our secret masters?’

  ‘Their names, of course,’ I said, but
he hurried on.

  ‘What they experienced made its way into their words—clandestine words. The little story Vasily Semyonovich wrote about that morning was passed from hand to hand in Moscow for years afterwards. People whispered to each other about it, they wept and wiped the tears from their eyes as they read through it. It was their own story, it was gold, it was a special treasure of the underground. When I found out it was to be published at long last—officially published—that’s when I knew the time had come to make my film. It’s all clear to me already, the structure—I can see it all so well. I begin with the writer’s own opening. Listen. I’ll recite: “And so, on the cold morning of the thirtieth of May, nineteen-fifty-five, I walked along the Volkhonka, past the lines of policemen controlling the crowds who wanted to see the works of the Old Masters. I entered the Pushkin Museum, climbed the stairs to the first floor and went up to the Sistine Madonna.” That’s the way he sets the scene: how direct he is, how stupendous, how unadorned. You can see at once, can’t you? It’s cinema—pure cinema—it’s a tracking shot! He describes his feelings then in simple fashion. No other work besides the Sistine Madonna has so conquered his heart and his mind. No other work’s immortal in the same way. No other work will continue to live for as long as people continue to live—and if mankind were to die out, then the creatures that inherit man’s place on earth, whether wolves, or rats, or bears or swallows, will also come to look upon the Madonna’s face. He leaves the exhibition. He walks back through the streets, through the cold sunshine, confused by his feelings, overcome.’

  ‘Another tracking shot?’

  ‘Precisely—and he travels further in his thoughts. He summons up the image of the holy mother, and her son: he sets them against the backdrop of modern times. He realises that he’s seen them, mother and child together—he’s seen them everywhere. On the frontline at Stalingrad, in war, in famine, in chaos. In his mind’s eye he even sees them in the darkest of all places: there they stand, alone, in death’s antechamber—his thoughts dissolve into an image-stream.’