by Nell Zink
“I too am quite fond of the sea. I work for a shipping company, and once I was on merchant ships.”
“You are not an art historian of the quattrocento?”
“Yes, I studied art history, and now I am the art historian of an historic shipping company.”
“You are perfect! I tell Amy, I need this art historian to help me with the inventory. So many things in this apartment! So many rare and wonderful things my father is collecting. I fear that some things may be valuable. You are exactly the perfect man!”
“I have noticed some interesting items here. Also some high-quality copies. Of course the copies are worthless, but very interesting as well.”
“Did you see this?” She pointed to a framed certificate in French. “My father is the last surviving captain of the Amicale Internationale des Capitaines au Long Cours Cap Horniers.”
“Impossible! Amazing!” He read the certificate and shook his head. “I would like to meet him. I must meet him. This is astounding.” He was sincere.
The woman was flattered. “How about Saturday? I will come here and take you to see him.”
“Monday is better.”
“Then Sunday perhaps?” They agreed on Friday.
Eyal was unaware that Friday was a holiday, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. David would not be working. But he knew all about the amicale. It was a professional society of merchant sea captains who had managed to get around Cape Horn under sail. The last time a commercial vessel had done this was not, as you might think, before the advent of steam and the Panama Canal, but rather in 1949, when the amicale still had two hundred members. Eyal was highly susceptible to the romance of sail. You could almost say he was susceptible to anything that floated, including air mattresses and pontoon bridges. His novel and most of his stories involved boats. He often considered trying to write for Mare and other upscale yachting magazines, but the stubborn pariah status of bad English gave him pause. Until bad English received official recognition, Hebrew was still his strongest language, and he would go on attempting great literature. It was this urge to turn away from the abysmal English that was engulfing the world, and from its metonym, the sea, that had led him to set his latest novel in Siberia. Again and again he was tempted to relocate his story ten years into the future and let global warming melt the polar ice so he could give Siberia a vibrant port city on the now fruitful delta of the river Lena, but he was determined not to write cheesy science fiction. His story, set in 1942, would be based in its entirety on real, actual incidents involving real human beings with real longings, routine misfortunes, and subtle character flaws.
So it was not without discouragement that he read that a Scottish journalist fluent in the worst English imaginable had sold in advance the film rights to a true-life adventure novel in which cocaine-addicted Czech partisans led by a sixteen-year-old female sadist, weary of fighting first the Hapsburgs and then the Whites, desert from the Russian civil war only to clash lethally with a band of religiously motivated castrati in a remote Siberian village. The events of the novel and any movies to be made and even the action figures were all drawn straight from life. It wouldn’t be expensive to film. Siberia is low-rent territory, and castrati are cheaper than aliens. There’s no makeup involved. You just point at them and say, “Castrati.” The viewer’s mind does the rest. Eyal sighed heavily.
Still, a recent Austrian road movie he had seen on TV offered a glimmer of hope: It had been outfitted with subtitles for Russian and German, but whenever the characters spoke bad English, it was apparently assumed that audiences everywhere would understand. Twenty years ago, he remembered, things had been different. Back then, it was French that was regarded as a universal language like music or mathematics. Plus ça change. The English of the castrati had surely been very poor. The script would reflect that and perhaps even capitalize on it, assuming they were cast as villains. He sighed again, and Jenny came out to see what was going on.
“She is gone?”
“Did you hear what was said? It’s really quite interesting. Want coffee?”
“Tea, please,” Jenny said.
“Russians are fabulously exotic and strange, as well as immensely perverse and odd,” said Eyal. “Imagine, in Italy and not drinking coffee! Tell me, are there really castrated fighting monks in Siberia?”
“Yes,” Jenny replied. “The Old Believers take baby boys and squeeze in hot bath water until they go away. It is not painful. Then they are priests, also good singers, with long dresses, long hair. Very aggressive fighters against evil. Not strong like men, but clever, and angry all the time.”
“Bitter, perhaps.”
“Yes, very bitter, and with swords. Soviet animation is selling them to Japan, now Japanese to Russia. Old Believers do wonderful magic.”
“I am certain Old Believers are a schismatic sect that separated from the Orthodox because they want to cross themselves with two fingers, not three.”
“And so? Their anime is cool. They rule Siberia with an iron fist!”
Amy and Ingo sat in a chichi bar near the villa and drank vividly colored aperitifs. Ingo had been telling her about his experiences ca. 1968. He had helped found one of Germany’s first communes. The founders had hoped that their well-publicized liberal notions about free love and psychedelic drugs would attract people who could provide such things, but mostly they were left to themselves, drinking beer. “The name is commune ‘Morning Dew,’ but soon we call it commune ‘Always Drunk.’ In German, this is a rhyme.”
“I’m not that much younger than you are, but I missed all that stuff,” Amy said. “I knew some weirdos in grad school at NYU, but you couldn’t found a commune in Manhattan, not in 1985. The real estate was too expensive. The closest you could get was maybe refuse to move out of the dorm.”
Ingo nodded.
“You’re the first lefty I ever ran into in the villa, you know? They’re all pretty straight. The guy who makes the sculptures out of cheese, I’m not sure about him. I mean, is that political? Obviously the European Union is producing a lot of surplus cheese. In America we call it government cheese. They pay the farmers to make too much of it, and then poor people that are on like food stamps come and pick it up by the kilo.”
“I never talk to him. Also he is Swiss, not European. But I’m afraid you will not like my politics now, or even then. We were not political. We only wanted to get laid.”
“But getting laid was a political act in 1968!”
Ingo laughed like a seal barking, shifted his weight, and coughed. “Oh, I don’t think so. Sex is a constant of human life. When unattractive men rise up in revolution and say, ‘We too will sleep with beautiful young students in free love if volunteers can be found,’ this is not political, but merely sad. The sexual revolution is a mass hallucination suggested by a revolution in women’s clothing.”
“I don’t see it that way. When I was coming up, girls still had reputations to protect, and by the time I was twenty-five, everybody was living with a guy.”
“Everybody, everybody,” Ingo said. “No matter. I marry my revolutionary comrade. We do not have sex. Always everybody is naked, but never make love. I start to write because to work is reactionary. Nothing to do but drink coffee every day, then beer, then maybe move, take over an empty house and sit there drinking coffee and beer. In winter we freeze almost to death. Then comes the German autumn, 1978. The police always search through our houses. They overhear the telephone. It is hell. Always fighting to release people from jail, and always they are imprisoned for idiocy. They go to the atomic power works with a sign saying no to atomic power. They climb over the fence. Then for half a year we work to make money for lawyers so this person can come out and do this again, and this we call political action, not self-slavery. Then twenty years ago I inherit a little money, so good-bye. Lucky my wife is a radical feminist. She does not think for requesting half of the money, does not want to depend from me. Very lucky!”
“There was one squat on East
Seventh Street,” Amy said. “But the scene was pretty much in Jersey. The problem was, this was way later than ’68. Nobody had a political thought in their heads. Everybody was just a runaway. I mean, there were like five of them that had positive goals, like to build up something different, like a commune. The rest was just misfit kids calling themselves anarchists. I remember this one kid said his name was Adolf, and I was like, ‘Adolf! Hitler is so not an anarchist!’ And he says, ‘Hitler was radical and an outsider and nobody liked him, so he’s my role model.’”
Ingo laughed. “And he is not a neo-Nazi?”
“How can you put that label on somebody who knows nothing about anything? He hooked up with these neo-Nazis because they’re like his role models, and he gets a swastika tattoo and starts writing in gothic script, but he’s a chatterbox and drives his new best friends up the wall, so they kill him with a hammer, roll him up in a rug, and stick him out on their front porch in Morristown, and then—”
“Stop, enough about Adolf,” said Ingo.
“I thought you were a writer. Aren’t you people always looking for material?”
“Adolf is too interesting for me. If I did not inherit this money twenty years ago, I will be taking notes now. But I am a literati. My writing is obligated to be intensely boring. Only in this way can my excellent style and form be seen by everyone. If I bring interesting, funny content, I am over as a writer, finished. Tell this story to the Israeli writer, Eyal.”
“Are you kidding? Not in a million years, with Adolf and all that. Is he really a writer?”
“He has published a novel about boats once, and works as a literary critic and PR agent, so you could say he is a writer. But sadly, he is wasting all his strength on an affair with a nineteen-year-old bisexual.”
Amy frowned.
“I myself prefer a woman with wisdom and experience. Also mature beauty.”
Amy smiled. Maybe it was because she liked Ingo. Maybe it was because any woman, generally speaking, will flirt with anyone at all, regardless, just for the feeling of power she’s going to have later when she’s making fun of him for misunderstanding her.
On Friday the weather was good, and David invited Jenny to go kayaking. On the bus to the archaeological site where he had the kayak stashed inside the fence, they got to talking about their lives. Jenny told a touching story about her difficult initial emigration via Riga and Macau to Hawaii in 1989 and the nondescript existence as a hotel bartender that had preceded her full-throttle transition to the international jet-set.
“There’s something I don’t understand,” said David. “Now we have the year 2006. You are nineteen years old, right?”
“Who tells you I am nineteen?”
“Eyal.”
“Probably he is also saying I am lesbian from Yalta.”
“You are not?” David was very intrigued.
“Why should I tell him what is true? Writers hate all stories. Private stories are only competition for their special public stories. In people, they interest themselves only for character. This is their raw material. They are imperialists of the interpersonal. We are their third world. So I tell him I am innocent virgin, also married, also lesbian, and he is very happy all the time. He asks no questions. To believe impossible exotic mysteries is religion. The essence of religion! It is just the same. Happiness is same as not caring. Indifference is joy. Details, he will be disappointed. To invent details by himself, this is his profession.”
“So you are not lesbian? Are you Russian?”
“Shall I tell you the truth? I could tell you the truth.”
“Please!”
She was silent and thoughtful for a long time, and then the bus driver accelerated through one last curve, shifting down, double-clutching, and grinding to a halt at their bus stop. David led her through some underbrush and down an eroded gully to the site by the river, camouflaged with green nylon netting and an opaque plastic fence. “My place of work,” he said. “I get the kayak.” She insisted on coming inside.
The stone building was now freestanding. Its foundations had been uncovered, and the floor inside was down to a fourth-century mosaic of the risen Christ wielding a sickle against goats with breasts, Abraham sacrificing a male figure clearly labeled “Ishmael” in Greek, Adam and Eve in flagrante delicto, and any number of fly agaric mushrooms. An artist was making detailed drawings that would allow the mosaic to be reassembled for viewing, should such a project turn out to be in the public interest. Under it were at least two more layers of mosaic. No relevant lint had been found as yet, but from among the wall and floor scrapings David had been given quite a few wooden splinters with remnants of brightly colored wax. He had succeeded in piecing five or six of them together to create something that suggested half of a prosimian face—something along the lines of a lemur, with round, nubby ears. But there was nothing for Jenny to see. The floor was covered by a tarp, and the lemur was in the lab.
“Not much here,” Jenny said. “Before the railroad comes, we make radical, secret art event. Invite graffiti artists to decorate this ugly thing. I will make video.”
“Please no. This is big trouble. I have something like a career. I will not like to lose it.”
“Shame,” she said.
As they paddled back and forth across the Arno in the cool sunshine, David brought up the subject of Jenny’s background again. She swore him to secrecy, then informed him that she was the love child of Ali MacGraw and the Dalai Lama. Her vain and uncaring parents had abandoned her at a young age to the tender mercies of the Chinese, who hid her by secret arrangement in an underground Anglican convent in Prague, where she was sexually abused by the nuns and forced to practice the piano nine hours a day. Escaping via Cuba to Texas, she had met Quentin Tarantino on his ranch and married him at sixteen to keep her parents from having her committed to an insane asylum. But the relationship was on the skids. “It will not last,” she concluded. “He must give me a divorce. We are Muslim, and now no sex for four, five months. It is written. He must set me free.”
David thought it over, then asked, “Will you someday become god-queen of Tibet in exile?”
She shook her head. “No. A lama is my father’s spiritual follower only, always a small boy. But I reject it. In my ideas there is equality and classless society, also no sex discrimination.” She rested her paddle, looking peacefully downstream. “What a nice day.”
“Are you playing sometimes as corepetitor?”
“What?”
“Accompanist for singing. I sing baritone. Schubert.”
“No!”
“And Schumann, Dichterliebe.”
“You are completely insane! Who is doing this in twenty-first century? Are you bananas?” She laughed.
David felt absurdly happy. Of course, he still hadn’t found out anything about her, but as someone who was very tired of priceless antiquities, he appreciated anything at all that could be valued for something other than its authenticity. In her case, he had no choice.
“I tell you what, David. I talk to Arkady. We get his songs of Tyutchev. Perform them in the villa. Behind you is seen video of destruction of Etruscan house by skater punks, then petrol fire. I will dance. This is the fucked-up art event of the century.”
“Only if you invite your husband and your parents.”
“A deal!” She offered him her hand. They shook hands with vigorous solemnity, looking straight into each other’s eyes for about a minute. David thought that he would like to kiss her, but as the idea was quite impracticable in the kayak, which confined them to two separate little holes, he decided against it.
“I like my idea,” she added. “Art event series, name is Good-bye. We buy unique works of art, then on video we destroy them. Good-bye! Then video is sold for same price we pay for artwork. One work replaces another.”
“The artifact is replaced by information of equivalent monetary value. This is a highly postmodern, fabulous idea,” said David.
With David and Jenny away
, Eyal was able to meet the landlord’s daughter in David’s apartment as planned. She drove him to the nursing home.
The old man was sitting up in a wheelchair by his bed. After a few abortive attempts at communication, it became clear that he and Eyal had no common language. The old man dated from the French generation, and Eyal’s French was limited to greetings, integers, and pop songs. “Moi Lolita,” he hummed disconsolately. The daughter agreed to act as interpreter.
She didn’t seem to translate everything. Once, for example, when he heard the old man say the words “ivoire” and “Esquimaux,” she turned to Eyal and asked how he was enjoying Florence. Actually there were quite a few sentences she seemed to ignore, as if she were using Eyal’s presence to pump her father for information without passing it along.
But generally the old man seemed pleased to meet the art historian of a shipping company, or to have a visitor—Eyal wasn’t sure. He claimed, the daughter translated, that he had been around the Horn sixty times under sail before 1935, though not always as captain, and began to list the ships by name. Eyal tried to write down all the names. In the end, bored of repeating herself and spelling things out, the daughter asked the old man to write them down himself.
The name of the eleventh ship, between “Anne Shirley, Prince Edward Island,” and “Netochka Nezvanova, Vladivostok,” caught Eyal’s eye. It was “Come Back Alone, Tuesday.”
David and Jenny sat in the evening twilight in a park near the apartment with a cigarette lighter and two heavy sheets of paper. Jenny wanted to rehearse, so David had made her rough copies of two famous Redons from memory, with pastel and charcoal on heavy watercolor paper, just to see how they would burn. Would it be slow enough to look dramatic?
He thought, This is very forbidden, though I’m not burning anything of value, not even information. Of course, if the originals were gone—but I drew these from memory, so you see, the information would remain, even if every exemplar were to vanish. With sufficient training, the most perfect picture can be something like those short poems which everyone knows by heart, or music. Still, to burn a Bible or Koran is a small thrill even today, and how many Bibles are there in the world? Lots.