Private Novelist

by Nell Zink

  He could tell he was on thin ice because he hadn’t been able to bring himself to copy the Redons he had found in the drawer. It’s a lot easier to burn a copy of something that’s already reproduced in thousands of books. His Redons were both unique and unusual. Neither were they lost, stolen, or strayed, if the registries could be trusted. They were free to begin a new life as the propellant that would take his career to the high castles of the stratosphere. In the meantime it was chilly, and his down jacket was collecting dew.

  “The air is wet,” Jenny said. “Good.” She held up a picture by one corner and said, “Good-bye, take one.” Incidentally, they were pretty drunk, so that when David then attempted to come closer and kiss her without disturbing her arm or the sodden picture, which refused to catch fire, he knocked her over. “Pay attention!” she said, propping herself up on the arm holding the cigarette lighter. “Take two!”

  “It’s no use,” he said. “Too wet. Also, I am in love with you, but I am too stupid to do anything about it.”

  “Good,” she said. “I am in love with you as well, and slowly we come together, like innocent children.”

  “Nice idea,” David said, “but for you it’s easy to wait because you are sleeping with the Russian Arkady, I think. I am not jealous, but it is getting on my nerves.”

  “Stop! We have only one pointless one-night stand, sentimental about Petersburg. Nothing important. He is a catastrophe, in bed as well. I am sorry. It is over. And not to worry, he will still deliver song cycle of Tyutchev for good-bye to Etruscans.”

  David sat looking for a moment mournfully at the clumsy and lightly singed reproduction of a work whose memory he treasured, then got to his feet and went upstairs singing “Gute Nacht” from the Winterreise. If she had bothered to ask how he knew she was sleeping with Arkady, which of course she wasn’t, he would have replied that it was a random guess. Although an art historian, he was still a man, and not really much for noticing trivia. So he never counted towels or coffee cups when he got home from work, nor did he see Eyal’s hair in the drain, nor think she would sleep with a guy like Eyal if he were the last man on earth. An art historian learns a certain tunnel vision: to see past details to the essence. So he had no idea what was going on. His powers of observation had been schooled and channeled into near uselessness. But he was old enough to know Jenny was too cute to be alone.

  Eyal knocked and entered the old man’s room. “Bonjour,” he said. “Ça va?” He knew that was supposed to be the French version of “kak dila.”

  “Thank God you’re here, David,” the old man replied. “Sorry about the other day. It takes some explaining, but I don’t trust that woman.”

  Eyal wanted to say yes, or no, and then decided to limit his response to a noncommittal nod.

  He sat down on a chair and put his hands on his knees. “She’s my wife’s daughter, not mine. Wartime and all that.”

  Eyal nodded.

  “I neglected her education, deliberately, I suppose. I didn’t want her knowing too much and stealing. There’s a reason you’re in the apartment, you know. That’s to keep her out. She likes to poke around. Her mother had a habit of telling her I was a collector. Horrible woman. She may have told you I’m here for a new knee. Not true, I’m dying. I need some help with a little business matter, and I think you might be just the man.”

  “Me?”

  “You’re an art historian and something to do with shipping, she tells me. I do have quite a bit of experience with shipping myself. Not as a sailing captain, good Lord no. There are things one doesn’t tell one’s family. What one did in the war, or before it, for example. But I can see you’re an educated, respectable sort. You’re German?”

  “Not only. Also Poland.”

  “Yes, they call it Poland now. Well then, you’ll understand the situation. I’d been in Bilbao since the summer of ’37, just doing some import-export. After you boys marched into Paris, there were quite a lot of communists and so on wanting to get to America, some fairly well-off, but on their last legs where cash was concerned. Well, I helped quite a few of them find a spot on a ship going somewhere or other. I was never much for ships, but in the import-export business you do get to know people. In the end I had quite a little collection of European art and manuscripts.”

  “And now you want to return the lost Jewish treasures to their rightful owners?”

  The old man laughed, and Eyal laughed along with him. “An amusing sort, you are! Very funny. It was all payment for services rendered and perfectly legal, but I’ve kept it quiet all this time, thinking prices had nowhere to go but up. Which is true enough, but I’d forgotten the little matter of my mortality. And now that I’m ready to do something about it, I’m stuck here in bed with a greedy, conniving bastard for a daughter! I fob her off with ashtrays and knickknacks, but at some point she’s going to start opening cupboards, and when I’m gone she’ll clear out my bank vault without batting an eyelash, and what’s worse, she’s sure to find the really valuable stuff sooner or later. Which would be all very well if I wanted her to inherit, but my plan is a bit different. It has been all along. I want to sell the items at auction, a prominent house like Sotheby’s because it’s some very good stuff, and start a scholarship fund for young people from the Channel Islands to study in Japan.”

  Eyal twitched, but said nothing.

  “I’m from Jersey myself, and my one regret in life is that I never made it to Japan.”

  “I will help you,” Eyal said. “I have excellent connections at Sotheby’s and other great auction houses through my academic work, and we will get a mind-blowing sum for every piece in your collection. The auction will be a huge news story, and the scholarship foundation will foster international understanding and peace between the island nations. I am your humble servant, proud to become involved in this worthy operation.”

  The old man relaxed, smiling peacefully. He reached over to turn up his morphine drip. “Can you give me a hand with this?” he asked. Eyal obliged. “Thank you so much. By the way, I don’t want a lawyer skimming off percentages every time money changes hands. Vultures. Can you organize one who’s discreet? Maybe offshore somewhere.”

  “Certainly. One thing. If you are not a sailing captain, how do you get this certificate of the Amicale des Capitaines au Long Cours—”

  He laughed weakly. “For a historian, you don’t know much about shipping! But how could you? The Cape Horn was a bar on the road to Laibach. Very spoiled boys, midshipmen so to speak, from all over. You know, Ljubljana, Yugoslavia, near Trieste. The East Bloc Taormina. I don’t think it survived the war.”

  “Ah, yes,” Eyal said. He could see that the old man was lost in thought. Nostalgia, he supposed. He excused himself, promising to come again soon with a lawyer, then bounced off down the hall and straight to David’s apartment.

  Time was running short and David’s team had picked up the pace. The next layer of mosaic was, to David’s relief, scattered with bits of really good lint. They documented it with especial care but destroyed it like the layer above, since it stemmed from a historical period—the height of the Roman Empire—when not really a lot was going on that we don’t already know about. The only exception was a motif that a few of the archaeologists were quite excited about: Cain, depicted as a stooped and beetle-browed Neanderthal, turns away from the dead Abel.

  “This explains the story of the mark of Cain, on Cain’s forehead,” one of the archaeologists explained to David. “The mark was that he didn’t have a forehead. Get it? Homo sapiens settled down and learned agriculture, but his black sheep brother kept on hunting and didn’t make it through the Neolithic, even though it was forbidden to kill him. Of course no law bothers forbidding something that isn’t common practice. Neanderthal man dies out. So this is the first graphic example we have of a story as ancient as the Flood. I mean, it’s plain that the competition with Neanderthals was going to be reproduced culturally.”

  “But Cain is not the hunter. Abel is
keeping sheep. Cain is the farmer, and children of Cain become musicians, nomads, and makers of iron tools. This is more like tinkers than Neanderthalers. And why is your Abel blue like Krishna?”

  “Asphyxiation,” the archaeologist replied. “Cain strangled him with his hands, because he didn’t have any tools, so he’s blue from lack of oxygen. Really, David! Krishna in Florence in A.D. 30? I thought you were a historian!”

  “Cain and Abel are no more belonging here in the western Roman Empire than Zarathustra. This picture is something else.” He was convinced of it. He rather thought it might be a scene from a comedy by Plautus, especially since the revoltingly vulgar and banal scenes they had already disassembled and packed into crates appeared to depict scenes from Plautus. He figured that quizzing a single scholar by phone for two minutes would tell him who turns blue in which comedy and why. But the archaeologists on the site were convinced they had a trendy breakthrough that would get them TV time and better funding, once the maglev train was up and running and the gag order was lifted. “Look, your Cain’s head is pretty close to the edge here,” David added. “Maybe when they take away some of his head because of this border decoration, now he looks like a gorilla.” The archaeologist snorted in contempt and they parted in open disagreement.

  David left work very frustrated. Idiots, he thought. But he was happy to have his few scraps of lint. They confirmed the presence of tapestries, as suggested by the holes in the walls. There was only about a week more of work to do, and then he could spend some time off with Jenny. She didn’t seem to have any other plans.

  Eyal had arrived that afternoon more or less intending to ransack the place, steal everything that wasn’t tied down, and find the key to the vault. No one knows what’s there but the old man, he reasoned; it’s just a bunch of random stuff; finders keepers, property is the whole of the law, etc.

  Jenny, who was taking a nap when he arrived, had other ideas. She suggested that David was the one who would know both which things could be sold without causing trouble, and what they might be worth. “He will help us,” she said. “Only innocent person like David can steal in way that no one will discover.” Eyal saw immediately that she had a point. So they stuck to looking for the key. Since it was labeled trésor and hanging in a special cabinet for keys, they ended up having sex and drinking a pungent south German white (Pfefferle) from the exceptional 2003 vintage instead. They cleared out before David got home, but Jenny left him a note saying she was visiting in the villa garden and that he should stop by.

  When he arrived, he saw Jenny with Eyal, Ingo, Arkady, and the sculptor in cheese, all sitting on benches around a mirror ball in the center of the garden. Arkady was berating the sculptor for filthiness, and everyone else was smiling.

  “Cosa succede?” David asked Jenny.

  “Arkady says he can’t go on making art always with the same cheese. He must buy new cheese.”

  “He must leave this place!” Arkady added. “With the cheese is impossible for me to write. Look at him! Covered with fat, with fat hands.” The sculptor wiped his hands on his shiny pants.

  “It’s brilliantly insidious,” said Eyal. “His studio is air-conditioned. He always works to the opening. By the time the cheese is an affront to the senses, he has said good-bye to it forever. Only our atrium bears the aesthetic weight of this extremely ripe cheese. You should see it. Around each piece is a lake of grease. The artworks are blue-green fuzzy with fur, and shrinking every day.”

  “I am a guest of the villa myself, do not forget,” the sculptor said. “I never before live with the display of my works. I am also surprised from its revolting character. I have seen it before only in photographs. But I will not buy new cheese!” he added, addressing himself to Arkady. “I have no plan to duplicate these works. First, the expense. Each piece is almost one hundred kilos from the French Jura.”

  “Sad,” Arkady remarked. “All my life, I never taste such fine cheese, and now a kiloton tortures me like a martyr who is burning alive!”

  “My current work is very cheap,” the sculptor reassured him. “I make it of saffron-color factory cheese slices contained in plastic. It resembles the Christo and Jean-Claude Gates of Central Park. Environmentally doubtful, yet, at the least, demanding no refrigerator. Eternal art for temporary installation, not for sale. Then a mountain of garbage.” He laughed. “This is a pointed and massive irony. You get it?”

  “And my songs?” Arkady demanded to know. “Are they to become a mountain of garbage to your irony? I cannot work in this smell. I have no money to be always writing in cafés or changing to personal apartments like a German.”

  “Arkasha,” Jenny said, “stop worrying. The finissage is Saturday. Your trouble is over. The cheese goes and the nice smell of oil paints returns to your life.”

  “A shame about the cheese,” said Ingo. “You could see it was the delicious one from the Franche-Comté with the ashes.” There was a long silence.

  Then Jenny said, “Ashes makes me think of my own art. I never speak of it until now.”

  Suddenly everyone was paying close attention.

  “You are a poet!” Eyal cried. “I knew it!”

  “I am performance artist,” she corrected him. “Outside Florence is old Etruscan house to be destroyed next week, when archaeology is finished. I hope one time to destroy it, but no chance. It is heavy stone, all of it. But now I think to burn the cheese there, to film it, of course, also to dance to songs of Tyutchev. Name of project is Good-bye.”

  “There is no way to film the pestilential smell that will arise from this horror,” Eyal said.

  “The songs are not finished,” Arkady said. “Only the bagatelle for solo viola.”

  “Why the project is called Good-bye?” Ingo asked.

  Jenny turned to him with a smile and said, “Because I wish to draw attention to transient nature of nonliterary art. More exactly, I believe all art is forgotten immediately, except for poets with many rhymes such as Heine and Mandelstam.”

  “I give you all my old cheese for this idea,” the sculptor said. “Unless a piece will sell before Saturday. Sometimes one is selling on the last day.”

  “The idea is very bad,” David said. “The art historians and others who hope to delay the destruction of the Etruscan house will be angry. Cheese will not burn without a great addition of wood or benzene.”

  “I don’t care,” said Jenny.

  “There will be great damage to the deepest layer of the mosaic floor from this fire.”

  “And bulldozers do not make damage?” she countered. “Dreamer!”

  “You are joking with this idea.”

  “I am earnest and determined,” Jenny said resolutely.

  “She is correct and very brilliant,” Ingo added. “The concept functions on many levels. My highest respect to you as an artist, Jenny.”

  “The concept sucks,” David said. “Now I am crying inside, that I ever showed you my workplace.”

  “Sunday night,” Jenny said.

  “I call the police,” David replied.

  “Stop it now!” Arkady said. “Let the beautiful poet work, you rich German freak! You call the police, I rip out your heart!” He brandished his bandaged hands.

  David went home. Ingo called Amy to retail the story. Eyal went upstairs with Jenny, and Arkady stayed in the garden, humming. He was hard put to compose without a piano, but without hands it might not have helped.

  David was putting in long hours, so Eyal and Jenny could take their time plundering the apartment. They decided to move things to the vault, since it was large and not full and they had the only key.

  The vault contained a number of canvases that they couldn’t identify beyond that they looked old, cracked, and discolored, rather as if they had never really dried out after the 1966 flood. They found the Master of the Three-Quarter Figures in the buffet right away, along with a Ribera of the beloved disciple, something like a Constable or a Corot with cows, and a packet of love letters from H
enri Matisse. The Rops (still the original) was right in plain view on the wall. Under the bed was a plaster bas-relief of the calling of Martin Luther in the outhouse in Wittenberg by Rodin. Eyal dropped it and it broke into nine pieces and a little hill of dust, but as Jenny pointed out, it was a worthless copy.

  They missed the Redons. That is, they found them, but Jenny said they were things David had drawn to rehearse for the performance from which he had now distanced himself so decisively, so they put them back in the drawer. They also missed the epic manuscript in Sappho’s own hand sealed with wax into a tall glass jar under a floorboard along with nearly $60,000 in U.S. dollars and British pounds, much reduced by inflation, but you can’t have everything. The old man had forgotten it completely. After a lifetime of light drinking, he was suffering from progressive atrophy of the cerebral cortex and had fallen into a habit of making poor decisions.

  Eyal was somewhat surprised that Jenny saw no need to rehearse, but he didn’t say anything. The glamour of her illegal undertaking thrilled him. With perfect aplomb, she identified, contacted, and persuaded the waste disposal firm scheduled to remove the cheese from the villa on Saturday afternoon to transport it to the remote site on the river. No bribe was necessary, since the company would save the municipal dump’s substantial fee for accepting a ton of cheese.

  David would have pleaded with her, but was silent and huffy and spent his evenings at the villa. He felt unhappy. The deepest layer of mosaic had been revealed to be plain gray, without even a decorative border. The archaeologists claimed this might be one of the earliest known monotheistic depictions of God, but David found it merely disappointing. To save time, they ripped it out with a backhoe. Underneath it was nothing in particular. The soil was undisturbed. They knocked the remaining stucco off the walls with geologists’ hammers, but there was nothing hidden behind it. David sat in his lab, looking at 1,700-year-old rat shit through a microscope with sodden eyes.