by Nell Zink
“This is not too far from the truth,” she said, sitting down again.
David’s conversation with Ingo in the library returned to the subject of Schubert. Before long, David had promised to come to the next private concert of chamber music in Siegfried’s suite in the villa, and to bring the original of the Goethe letter with him. In honor of the occasion, the program would be all Schubert. The quartet playing the French music at the opening had been Japanese, and the Japanese, Ingo confided to David, should be kept at a safe distance from Schubert. The quartet qualified to play Schubert called itself Gli Derelitti, after an orphanage with an excellent all-female orchestra that had been active in Venice in the eighteenth century. The two original members were forty-five-ish twins, a former sex bomb on violin and her envious sister on cello. The first violin was the violinist’s ex-lover, a Romanian Gypsy in his seventies. Viola was supplied by a melancholy young Russian composer.
The musical salon gathered for the Schubertiade after dinner. Present was a cross-section of the local elite, both German and Italian. The hum of voices, the glow of candlelight, the elegant clothing, the yellow velvet wallpaper, the women who seemed stunning until you got close enough to see they were fifty-six—David felt deeply unsure of himself. It’s like a harem in the Vatican, he thought. He wore clothing that had cost a combined total of forty dollars and carried a plastic bag with the framed letter. Siegfried greeted him with an enthusiasm and friendliness he’d never suspected possible, and Ingo nodded benevolently. After the small talk wore down, they sat down on the Louis XVI chairs and listened. The music was wild, controlled, redolent with sincere feeling and irony, filled with inevitable and unexpected harmonies, just as Ingo had promised. The musicians were working hard. You could hear their heavy breathing and see them sweat. Ingo sat leaning forward expectantly, his mouth slightly open, while Siegfried leaned back, nipping at a glass of Scotch. The audience was attentive, and its final applause was heartfelt.
David felt a hand on his arm. “Jetzt lassen Sie Ihren Brief mal ansehen,” Siegfried said to David. He read the letter quickly, nodding. “Faszinierend, von großem akademischem Interesse,” and passed it to Ingo.
“Goethe ist immer genial,” Ingo agreed. He turned to the Gypsy, who had packed up his violin, and said, “Perhaps you are interested. Our friend has found a new letter from Goethe, very critical of Schubert’s songs. It’s all common knowledge, but the letter is perhaps quite interesting for scholarship, as you can see.”
The Gypsy agreed that it was quite wonderful and passed it to the Italian twins, who confirmed his opinion before passing it to the absent-minded violist, who alone among the musicians could read German.
He began to read and, simultaneously, to sway back and forth and turn red. He moved over to lean on the mantelpiece, wiped his eyes, and kept reading, then lowered the frame and bellowed to all and sundry, “This is shit!”
There was general silence as everyone stared at him.
“Arkady, what happens?” the cellist asked.
“It is—unbelievable!” Words failed him. “This stupid, stupid, no aesthetic sense, this false god of a godless Nazi barbarian, this son of—” At some point during the middle of the penultimate phrase, he had begun smashing the picture frame against the pale fawn of the firebricks and, alternately, on a rack of wrought-iron fireplace implements. Slivers of glass were flying down to the rug and clinging to the front of his suit. Everyone backed away. After prying the letter from its bed of splinters and cardboard with his fingernails, he tore it in half, smashed it into a ball, and dropped it into the fire with bleeding hands. “Philistine!” he said, addressing the fire. Trying then to wipe his hands on his suit, he cried out in surprise at the pain. “I must wash my hands,” he added with an air of great innocence, looking around for a glass of water, which he dumped unceremoniously on his hands, now pink with blood, to form a puddle on the rug.
“What is this paper they show us?” asked the Gypsy, eyeing Siegfried with suspicion. “What sort of place is this?”
“The greatest German,” the violist replied, “writes to Schubert, and I hope Schubert does not get this letter. It must kill him. How he loves Goethe, who hopes to destroy him like a worm!”
“Well,” said Siegfried placidly, “there’s no evidence whatsoever that Schubert received the letter. That’s why I had rather assumed it was priceless, or at least worth several hundred thousand. I wonder who was the owner. David?”
“I made several facsimiles,” David said. “So I suppose I should thank our viola player for sparing the frame, more or less.”
“Surely someone must be compensated after a priceless artifact is willfully destroyed,” said Siegfried.
“But not you,” the Gypsy said. “Pay us. We go.”
“This is all my fault,” Ingo said.
David repaired the frame, inserted a copy of the letter, hung it on the wall over the bed, and thought, Well, no harm done. He was tempted to do the same with the Rops. There are good color copies of etchings by Dürer hanging in the Albertina in Vienna, after all, and no one seems to care that they’re not originals. Of course no one goes to see them anymore, or in other words, once they can be copied accurately, hares and praying hands are of no interest to anyone. The fading aura of the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, etc. A copy is like the naked emperor in the fairy tale. If there were some accurate way of reproducing the swirling, platitudinous, piebald paintings of van Gogh, no one would care about them either. But, David thought, if there were a way to re-create the luminous, pure, semitransparent colors of Redon, he would conquer the world.
Maybe photograph them with a soft-focus filter, the way soft-core pornographers photograph girls under the age of consent, he pondered, walking around the apartment with a cup of coffee in his hand. Accuracy is not everything. One must capture the spirit. He was glad to be out of the villa. He needed privacy to think, and the apartment seemed to expand his mind. It was filled with objects that had meaning to him and seemed to work in concert, like an elaborate riddle: an ivory statuette of an elephant, an ancient clay figure of Anubis, and a ballpoint pen from Las Vegas, all grouped carefully on a tiny Navajo rug. What does it mean? he thought. Nothing? Impossible. There are no coincidences.
His work at the dig intrigued and bored him at the same time. It was intrinsically spellbinding, but he didn’t much care for Etruscans. The stuff is dirty, fragmentary, nothing to look at until the restorers are done with it, but the restorers can’t sign their names or take credit. Nor can they do anything the customers don’t expect and want. Restorers could create whole new genres, if they had the nerve—polychrome Greek sculpture, for example, a historical fact on ice, its resurgence repressed by connoisseurs who fancy they have better taste than the Greeks. With a few weeks’ time and a mass spectrometer he could supply the pigments to repaint it all. Why not? You’d have to wash it first, or at least the beautiful figures of young people with that patina of waxy fat from eons of fondling, that secret habit of everyone with private access to a museum of feeling the muscle and bone under the smooth, cool skin of figures carved from marble 2,500 years ago. What makes everyone depict Pygmalion always falling in love with his creation by contemplating its perfect proportions from a distance? He imagined telling the restorers that these particular Etruscans had employed luminous pastel shades like Redon. He could say he was finding flakes of such color in the scum on the floor. Couldn’t he? Probably not.
The most interesting thing they had found so far was the holes in the walls. He guessed there had been tapestries hanging there. He was looking hard for lint, but not finding anything good. The Etruscan structure refused to give him what he wanted. In the apartment, on the other hand, everything seemed to have been lying in wait for him. He walked slowly, distracted, staring at whatever was hanging on the walls until he came to a small cabinet he had never opened. It was filled with little hooks on which were hanging a few keys with labels: “sous-sol,” “cave,” “tré
sor.” Something about the first two intrigued him. It sounded to him as if there might be wine lying around somewhere in the basement.
He took the keys and went down for the first time to the cellar. It was dry, and had electric light despite its earthen floor. It was certainly the sort of place where one might store wine. He began to feel very jolly and optimistic. After trying a few doors, he found one that fit the cave key. Unfortunately, the large wine rack was empty. From one corner of the floor to the other extended, of all things, a two-man kayak. It had been painted a dull shade of matte black. Two paddles in dark brown were leaning on the wall. Immediately he thought of Jenny. Jenny is so young and sportlich, he thought. Any lesbian would surely love a kayak trip. It is so easy to transport, tied to the roof of a taxi. He lifted it with one hand to confirm its lightness. I can take it to work, he thought. I work by the river. From there we can start. It is almost winter. There will be enough water. He regarded the kayak with a sense of passionate urgency.
Eyal, deeply absorbed in an online chat, was very surprised a few mornings later to hear luggage being kicked. Someone was clearly pushing a very heavy box down the hall with his feet. He opened the door and looked out. A man with large, fluffy bandages instead of hands was frowning furiously, clutching a viola case like a little girl clutching a teddy bear close to his chest with both arms, and pushing a cardboard box in the general direction of David’s old room. “Hello,” the man said. “I am composer from Florence, Arkady. I do not play viola.”
“They call me Eyal. I can see that you cannot play viola at this time. Let me help.” He carried the box into the room.
The composer took a look at the bed and cried out, “They tell me this is my room, my new room, clean! This is very bad and shameful!”
“Sorry,” Eyal said. “I have a special friend and we think perhaps it is better to meet on neutral territory. I will organize new sheets.”
“Thank you, friend. Perhaps you hear about my accident.”
Eyal shook his head.
“String quartet, big soiree with director down in salon. I hurt my hands. Now I live here. I write a bagatelle for him, so I pay my rent. I cannot work. This is very bad. Also very good. I hate to play the viola. Except German romantic music. I write this bagatelle, stay one month. For the bagatelle I need maybe one hour.”
“Excellent deal,” said Eyal.
“Thank you.” The composer began to unpack and Eyal left the room.
This is very bad, Eyal thought. Also shameful. This dingbat composer speaks Russian like Jenny, plus he’s sort of cute in this lost-orphan-child way—no, face it, he’s handsome, probably, when he’s asleep or otherwise failing to say something blatantly egomaniacal. Jenny will get a crush on him and then I am screwed, over, finished, unless I can get rid of him posthaste. What can I do? Help me, precious Lord! Eyal was not especially good-looking, and he tended to be insecure.
He went back and asked, “How long will you be wearing these bandages?”
“One week, maybe two weeks. Until then, you will not hear me play viola, also rest in peace.” He laughed at his own joke. “I still will not write. I will compose in my mind while I have the bandages, song cycle on texts of Fedor Tyutchev. ‘Silentium’!”
I have one week, Eyal thought. One week.
Late that afternoon Eyal walked out the door to go into town and saw Jenny and the composer sitting together on a bench in the garden, talking animatedly. He stood very still for a moment. Then he walked straight over to them and said, “Hello, Jenny! Arkady, I see you have met my special friend.” The Russian immediately moved a foot farther away from her and took his elbow down from the back of the bench.
Why didn’t I think of that before? Eyal thought. I just spent seven hours plotting everything from death to maiming to discrediting him in the eyes of the world, seven hours nursing a gemlike flame of hatred that was slowly condensing to a kind of inner creosote that threatened to poison my entire existence, in the hope that this spiritual substance alone might suffice to kill him or me or both of us. But all I had to do was say, “Get your hands off my girlfriend,” and only once. Is it that easy?
The composer said something to Jenny in Russian, and she giggled. “You need anything from town?” he asked them both.
“Vodka!” said the composer.
In your dreams! thought Eyal, bouncing away in a youthful manner.
When he returned with a bottle of Frascati, Jenny was waiting for him in her room to inform him that she would be moving in with David. Her husband would soon think of looking for her in the villa, if he hadn’t already, she said. “And the innocent David has a kayak at his top secret place of secret work. We will take this kayak to the river. Such great fun. And you will visit me always. Okay?”
“Okay. I will visit you. And this Russian guy?”
“No good for you. He knows nothing of Siberia, only Petersburg. Also, he is injured to the hands through spontaneous application of violence to expensive golden age relic not his own. Crazy man. I move to David to escape him.” She nestled up close to Eyal.
“This is the most beautiful sexual affair of my life,” he said. “I hope it is very shallow and meaningless. In any other case, I should not like to go home.”
“It is excessively trivial,” she assured him. “Please open this wine.”
There was a knock at the door. It was the English art historian, with whom no one mentioned in this story had as yet spoken a word voluntarily. He was apparently a hard worker, in libraries or something, from just after breakfast to late at night.
“Sorry to disturb you. Could I bother you for a glass of that?” he said. “I’m a bit shook up.” He sat down on a chair.
“So what’s up?” Eyal asked.
“There’s about eight feet of bloody bandages on the floor of my room.” They both laughed. “Stop laughing! I’m serious! I think it’s that mad Russian, the one who’s always charging about like a singed rabbit. I have to get out of this place. It’s driving me mad. No one here ever speaks to anyone. It’s bloody eerie.”
“What?” said Jenny.
“I will explain,” said Eyal. “You believe that you speak English, but this is not an accurate estimate of your powers. I struggle most pitifully to understand your rapid, inflected speech. This is very hard work. You are a hard worker, but no one else here is a hard worker, except David. We are lazy artists of life.”
“David. That’s the bloke with the affreschi di Giotto. We didn’t hit it off. He told me about the Giotto and I thought, They’re still giving stipends for Giotto? I should be German. I believe I looked a bit skeptical and he took it personally. Seems nice enough.”
“David is just brilliant,” said Jenny. “He’s very innocent.”
“He may be a hard worker, but innocent? I suppose that’s why he’s robbing the library blind. Wandering about with letters of Goethe and belle epoque erotica in a shopping bag. Really! Where can he have got them? I’ve half a mind to call him on it.”
“Erotica? It’s not possible. He’s innocent,” Jenny said. “You admit you have never spoken to him. How can you call him a thief and a pornographer? Get out of my room. You are bored, but we are not your interactive television.”
The Englishman, who was making a great effort to overcome months of antisocial reticence, continued down the hall to chat, for the first time, with Ingo. Ingo quickly became very effusive about Giotto, Goethe, and the gifted young Russian composer who displayed all the behavioral eccentricities traditionally attendant on genius, short-circuiting everything he had to say, so he gave up and never spoke to anyone in the villa ever again.
Compared with the other men in the neighborhood, David was virtually immune to Jenny. His work with symbolist drawings had given him a great deal of practice in looking at things he was not allowed to touch. An oil painting, you tap it with your finger just to make a point, and does anybody care? No. But a pastel is as delicate after a hundred years as fresh spray paint, and it’s all painted wi
th cans they’re not selling anymore. Touch a field of solid color, and you’ll be working for days to match the tint and build the surface back up to where no one sees the depression. Smudge charcoal into white paper, and you might as well have taken a knife to it. It will never look the same. David had in fact spent a lot more time with symbolist drawings than with girls, so he was conditioned to think anything attractive should be left alone. Probably that was the unconscious reason he had written his dissertation on Etruscan wall hangings: It didn’t upset him to rip them apart, fiber by fiber, with tweezers.
David was always at work centrifuging slurries of our irreplaceable cultural heritage or whatever when Eyal came to his apartment to see Jenny. It was only the landlord’s daughter who dropped by once while David was away.
Eyal came out in his shorts to see who was puttering around the living room. “You must be David,” she said. “Pleased to meet you.”
“Yes, I am David,” Eyal said.
“I will not stay long. I am here to pick up something. Ah, yes, I see it.” She stood on tiptoe and extricated a scrimshaw seal from between two highball glasses on a shelf. She placed it carefully on a table, then reached up again for a cracked tortoiseshell hand mirror propped between Snoopy bookends. She blew the dust off the seal and mirror and tucked them into her handbag. “Cheerio!” she said.
“Can I please see this ivory?” said Eyal. She took it back out and handed it over. “Nice work,” he observed, turning it over and over in his hands. “Old.”
“My father is a great aficionado of the sea,” said the woman. “He ask me to bring things from the sea for his room.”
“Is he very ill?”
She laughed. “Of course he is ill. To be ninety-five is a sickness! But he refuses to be cured. He is only having the knees replaced, with titanium. In two, three months he will be playing football.”