Private Novelist

by Nell Zink

  By Friday the stone structure was little more than a dusty ruin. The researchers had nearly finished the work of destruction begun by the Romans. Soon it would house a rivulet of hot animal fat dripping into the Arno, and soon after that, heavy earthmovers would cover it with fill. What had it been? No one knew.

  The trucks came early to take away the containers, and David had to rush to clear his lab into the bus. The archaeologists reached a consensus on which bar to celebrate in. David lugged the kayak to the water’s edge and paused, looking back. The sun, setting early on the winter solstice, shone through a number of gaps in the stones of the roof that they had taken for bad workmanship, since it leaked rain, and traced on the dirt the image of a woman whose oversized head had two conspicuous horns. He called out to the archaeologists, but by the time they came back down from the road, the image was gone. Still, standing where it had appeared, you could look up and see it in the roof.

  His boss yawned. “Okay, so it was a tophet for some kind of female Moloch. But she didn’t last long, right, David? There was next to no soot on the wall. Because who wants a female Moloch? It was just a fuckup in personnel. You can bet your ass she got fired.”

  “She got her pink slip on day three,” his assistant added. All the archaeologists snickered. “Either that or David’s discovered a new religion.”

  “What I mean is, she’s a one-shot deal, no historical interest, just like the rest of this shit. Are you ready for beer?”

  “And the trees?” David said. “All these baby bones? Artemis with her bow, the big horns on the head of this feminine Moloch you say, the destruction on a single day, the lint, is this not a little bit interesting?”

  His boss rolled his eyes. “You saw the ground under there. Fresh as a daisy. There’s nothing left to dig here and I, for one, am thirsty.” The archaeologists laughed. “You got to understand, Dave, the big-headed girl Moloch and fifty cents will get you a cup of coffee. So you publish it. So what? Who wants to see it? Right now she just looks like a clerical error. So let them cover her up with dirt and build a railroad over her head. By the next time they dig, maybe the science of archaeology will have advanced to where she fits right on in to some discursive context we never even thought about. Right now she hasn’t got a leg to stand on. Let it go, babe. Let some great-great-grandson of yours be the star and get the extra credit.” He turned and addressed the group as a whole. “You guys’ problem is, you always think everything you find is something you already know about. It never crosses your mind that something you find might have nothing to do with anything. You act like history is some kind of jigsaw puzzle! But what is it? It’s a bunch of stuff! And leave David alone! He’s a good man.”

  David turned away mournfully after asking again which bar. Then he pushed the kayak out into the river and glided gently around an oxbow for a good three hundred yards before he got stuck on rocks. He carried the kayak almost half a mile through stagnant mudholes swarming with bugs to where a dam formed a sort of narrow artificial lake upstream from Florence. After another mile he hid the kayak in some underbrush and walked up to the road to look for a bus stop.

  Sunday afternoon around the time he thought Jenny must be finalizing the crowd control arrangements for her performance, David heard the key turn in the lock and she came in. “You, here?” he said.

  “Yes, and I must go again soon,” she said. “My plan was perhaps not so realistic.” She sat down heavily on a kitchen chair. “Bad two days.”

  “The cheese does not burn?”

  She laughed. “Oh, my dear David, I think I must flee from Italy as a refugee. You go to Freiburg now?”

  “To my parents’ in Trossingen for the holidays.”

  “I go to Freiburg,” she said. “I will stay in your apartment there and do nothing. Now I tell you why. Yesterday I go with the garbage men to take the cheese. I am not thinking about this before. What kind of truck they use? Garbage truck. Not so clean. We drive to your work place. You know it is far down the hill to this house where you are researching. Truck is very big. I make this story short. One ton of ugly cheese is by the road, and from the truck it is so dirty, ripped open, smelling of bad amputations. I cannot describe it. Screaming and yelling at these men, it is no help. The cheese stands alone. Back to villa, there comes to me Siegfried, says reporters are calling him. I suppose this is because Ingo is telephoning the bitch Amy and she is telling all newspapers about my beautiful performance art. And all the time, my idea is not to burn cheese! I think, Burning will be a disaster of the environmental kind. My piece is for the future archaeologists. They will think, Wow, twenty-first-century culture of ugly cheese.”

  David laughed sadly. “Probably so.”

  “But now cheese is dumping by the roadside. Dumping one ton of ugly cheese must be an illegal secret, not a news story. It is not permitted. I will pay and pay. I must hide myself. Help me, David, please.”

  He went to his bedroom and returned with a key. “This is the key to my place in Freiburg. You can go there and wait for me. But you must promise me you will do nothing strange or ridiculous. Just wait. Read a book. I give you the address.”

  “Oh, David!” she cried, getting up to hug him.

  “Stop that,” he replied. “I help you because you are cute. I do not trust you. One thing you must swear to me. You go alone to Freiburg. Tell no one. You understand? Do you have money for the train, and for some food?”

  “Oh, perfect David,” she said. “I will go alone, right now.” And she did. She climbed aboard, found a seat, and fell asleep.

  The doorbell rang. It was Eyal. “Is Jenny home?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Where is she?”

  “I don’t know,” David said. Strictly speaking, he was being precise, as he didn’t believe in her ability to go anywhere in particular and stay there.

  “You must help me,” Eyal said. “I am desperately in love with her. Even after the vile cheese disaster, I adore her.”

  “Have a beer,” David said. “I cannot help you. You must know that I, as well, have a certain interest in Jenny, but love is not enough to get a girl.”

  “It was not only love. It was amazing hot sex. I am crazy for her and she worships me. But I know nothing about her. Now I am afraid she is poor, because she is hiding from paying for dumping the cheese.”

  David drank beer and said, after a while, “I see.”

  “It is not so expensive, maybe eight hundred euros for the cleanup. Please tell her I can pay this. She can return to me. With all the stress, I think she forgets that I have money.”

  “Listen to me, Eyal,” David said. “Of course she has money. It is the police she doesn’t like. She is a thief. She has taken every work of art from this apartment, including a valuable Rops and the Master of the Three-Quarter Figures, and from the vault of the bank she has also stolen the key. I am nice to her, hoping I get this art back. I move out soon. The landlady will accuse me. You understand?”

  For a second Eyal felt guilty because he had the key to the vault in his pocket. Then he noticed that David’s gaze, while he told this story, was directed downward and to the right. From reading about police work he knew this meant David was lying. Possibly cohabitation had reduced David to regarding not only everything Jenny said, but also everything she did, as fiction. “Surely you are joking,” Eyal said, making direct eye contact. “This cannot be! The little slut!” They both shook their heads.

  “I like her too much,” David admitted. “Otherwise, I would betray her to the police.” His gaze rested on an uninteresting gouache by Tanguy in the upper left-hand corner of the opposite wall, indicating to Eyal that he was telling the truth. Eyal, confused, drank up his beer and went grocery shopping.

  Actually, David assumed it was the landlady who had run off with the art. Her having left the Redons in the drawer assured him that she had no notion of their authorship or value. He packed them up with a clean conscience and flew to Friedrichshafen on the twenty-four
th. His parents picked him up at the airport.

  His mother was a vocal teacher and mezzo-soprano with his father accompanying on piano. They had a concert on the twenty-sixth and were busy rehearsing, so he had plenty of time to drink eggnog and brood over his misfortune between phone calls to his apartment in Freiburg. He believed Eyal’s claims of hot sex, because he couldn’t remember Eyal’s ever having lied to him, and also because hot sex with Jenny had been Eyal’s main goal in life since before they had met, so it seemed only logical that he might, with a little luck and no competition other than a weird Russian and a bunch of guys who were convinced she was an unapproachable lesbian, eventually succeed in obtaining it. His conversations with Jenny were cheerful and superficial. She thought Freiburg at Christmas was lovely and begged him to come home early and share it with her. He heard such requests, it seemed to him, from an infinite distance, as if he were some kind of benign onlooker watching her through a telescope from another galaxy.

  The concert was a success and the inner circle landed, as usual, in the kitchen of his parents’ home for the postmortem. Several colleagues from the academy in Trossingen were there, along with a music theorist from Tübingen and a disaffected violinist, once a power monger in Moscow, who had ended up concertmaster of a provincial German freelance orchestra staffed with brawny Poles. After four glasses of vodka David told them all about Arkady, leaving out the Goethe letter. The musicologist, the concertmaster, and a horn teacher assured him that Arkady was a respected composer, the winner of several notable prizes. His parents declared an intention to premiere the Tyutchev songs, if possible.

  David went to bed with an acid feeling of despair. He felt how the small, small world was attempting to close in around him. All the loose ends were striving to connect. But life is not a jigsaw puzzle, he thought. It’s a bunch of stuff. Why then, if I am doing my best to avoid a composer, must my mother sing his songs? There is only one possible answer: I am to blame.

  He came back out to the kitchen in his pajamas and told his parents and the violinist, who was still there, that he’d remembered all wrong: the composer’s name was Kostya, the song texts were by Akhmatova, and he’d seen the first three songs, which were pathetic kitsch. His parents laughed, and the violinist named Arkady’s publisher. Back upstairs, he leaned far out the window and glared up at the stars. The windowsill was ice cold. He thought of Florence with longing and returned to bed.

  Ingo had finally begun to fall for the lamentably elderly Amy on that Sunday as she braked the convertible and lowered her window, randomly addressing a crowd of photographers and art maven friends that had formed on the shoulder of a greasy secondary road bordered by a long, low, rank wall of festering cheese adorned with tread marks and black gravel. Without a trace of embarrassment, she declaimed a welcome in several languages and that she would be right with them. Parking the car, she said to Ingo, “Thank God for digital installations. People are so used to everything crashing, they’ll cheer anything that doesn’t just freeze up and turn blue. But I’d say there’s been some kind of glitch if the cheese is up here by the road. Isn’t it supposed to be down in this like Etruscan granary?”

  “No problem, Jenny will reboot,” Ingo said.

  She got out of the car and announced loudly in Italian that the artist would require several minutes to reboot the cheese. There was a long silence, then sighs of deep insight as the photographers gathered, holding their breath, along the road to photograph the cheese in loving close-up. Then she led them, after a false start down the wrong ravine, past the old lab site and down to the building. Once a dank and fetid cave, it was now a bare half-cylinder of stone open on one side to the river. Jenny was nowhere to be seen, but a reporter announced his recollection that the site would be obliterated by the route of the new train.

  To say that the articles in the paper on Tuesday were laudatory would be a misleading understatement. Jenny, it turned out, had linked the “wet” automatons (gynecological models incorporating fluid masses, Frankenstein’s monster, the famous defecating duck) of the eighteenth century to the multivalent destructive power of technology in a stunningly original way. The cheese represented time, life itself, and our own weakness as threatening qualities that constantly threaten to engulf us. With the bare and symmetrical Etruscan structure, the past (and with it aesthetics) was shown as it was, bereft of relevance and vitality, yet possessing all the elegance of a machine. And through it all roared, by implication, the maglev train which, itself an invulnerable robotic phallus of steel, carried a soft, yet brittle, cargo and would reduce anything in its path to something resembling the cheese. With one brilliant stroke, she had illuminated three centuries of technological progress and horror like no one before her, despite being a mere nineteen years of age and from the wrong side of the tracks.

  I must meet her, thought the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk as he was catching up on Corriere della sera in his living room in Karlsruhe a week later. He resolved to invite her to perform something in the ZKM Center for Art and Media, where he had a comfy sinecure thinking up installations and letting his students build them. He called Siegfried, who was feeling a bit sensitive since the sculptor in cheese had stormed into his office claiming he’d been duped. He had donated his works to be burned on film during a dance performance, not to be crushed to pulp by passing buses, and Jenny was a ruthless and exploitative art-world star posing as a dated, deviant feminist minor. Siegfried managed to calm him down, but he couldn’t find Jenny and was a bit surprised to learn from Arkady that she had moved out weeks before. He told Sloterdijk he would give her the message.

  Eyal liked David’s apartment in Freiburg. It was modern and spare, easy to keep clean. He saw that the clutter in the apartment in Florence was none of David’s doing. David’s own place was as efficient as a space capsule.

  It hadn’t taken him more than a week of brooding hostility and wandering the streets inwardly calling her name to think of looking for Jenny there. David was in the phone book, so once he got started, his metaphysical redemption took a matter of seconds. He was surprised not to find David there as well, but after all he had gone to the trouble of impressing the animality of their relationship on him, so he figured it would be at least two weeks before David got over it enough to make a move, which gave him a week to work with. He also figured a week was the most he could persuade his wife to accept as the duration of a little holiday tour away from the telephone at the villa. He had told her he felt inspired to rent a lonely ski hut in the mountains where it was quiet and he could write and chop wood. She had approved, and he had taken a night train to Freiburg.

  He knew that David might appear at any moment, but he didn’t care. His apathy toward David was truly complete. Jenny treated him with the utmost consideration while he counted down the days. He knew that David would inherit her. He was torn between two metaphors: that she would be his castoff, i.e., that whoever had her first was better off; and that he was losing her to a better-looking, younger, more single man, i.e., that whoever got her in the end was better off. He knew there was only one way out of the double bind: He had to go on having an affair with her after she was with David and preferably married to him. Then David would never have anything more than his leavings as he skimmed the cream of her youth, beauty, etc.

  As his family’s being in Israel rendered such a satisfactory solution impossible, he took refuge in denial. He brought her a plate of small pears, neatly cut and cored, poured her a glass of chilled white wine, and said, “David tells me you are afraid of the police. Don’t you expect me to keep a secret with our little art heist?”

  “I must keep always underground. I am wanted! And you know why? I am material witness to huge gray-market crime ring, smuggling overpriced shampoo of major American producer from Chinese market to Italy. In China, four cents. In Italy, three euros fifty-nine. Siegfried, he is the ringleader and financier. Now I am also guilty of blackmail—”

  He interrupted her for a change. “My love
, tell me the truth, just one time. Be kind to me. We will be separated soon. Is my solitary future to contain nothing but memories of fantasies?”

  “Okay, I tell the truth.” She paused. “I am turning tricks with my girlfriend. She is blowing cop and I am watching street, then comes his friend mister guardia and says he rapes me or takes me under arrest. I fight against this. My friend helps, but she is shot in head by her trick. Then I run. I am shot here.” She raised one knee and pointed to a small, pitted scar on the back of her thigh. He had never noticed it before. “Management of whorehouse has my passport, but I do not go back there. They are friends of police. I will be arrested and they will beat me to death, before or after or sometime. So no passport!”

  “If you have invented this story, it is in very poor taste.”

  “And if not? Is it then good story?”

  “If you mean what is more horrible, nature or naturalism, then clearly fiction is worse. It shows not only the shortcomings of life itself, but also the depravity of the human mind.” He ate a piece of pear.

  “This is very cerebral thinking,” she protested. “In reality my friend dies and I get shot in the leg and bleed like a pig. In fiction, I am lying in soft bed eating pear and thinking thoughts in poor taste.”

  “Let me see your leg again.” He drew it close, but all his many years of service in the somewhat irrelevant Israeli navy had not taught him what a gunshot wound looks like. “When was this?”

  “In 1998. But, Eyal! It didn’t happen. I lied. I show you my passport.” She wrested her leg from his grasp and got up to take her backpack off the dresser. “See? My passport.”

  “Your name is Alla Bauer?”

  “So what? But something small is missing with this passport. You see? My tourist visa is long time expiring. So police are not my favorites. Lucky Switzerland stops checking the passports last year.” She lay back down. “So nice here. So clean and tidy in this apartment, like Switzerland. I really like David’s way of living.”