Private Novelist

by Nell Zink

  Eyal decided, all other things being equal, to initiate sex before it was too late, as he did many times in the course of the next three days. Then it was too late.

  David didn’t visit Freiburg. He had another three weeks of work left in Florence, and was eager to spend eighteen hours a day at the university grinding his brain to powder.

  He had lunch one day with his boss in the student cafeteria next to the cathedral. “I think a lot about what you said,” he said. “History is a bunch of stuff. You are right, especially now that I work with this lemur. No antecedents, and the law of causality looking over my shoulder and making fun of me.” He took a gulp of wine and added, “Forgive my bad ontology.”

  “Don’t sweat it,” his boss replied. “To you, it’s a lemur. To the guy who painted it, it was his little sister. It has no reason to be part of art history as we know it. You think those people had art? Did they even have authorship? Somebody digging in two thousand years, if he finds the face of Captain Crunch from a cereal box, all the art history in the world isn’t going to help him.”

  “So you mean it was pop, or folk culture?”

  “I wouldn’t even go that far. Maybe it was a neurotic symptom. You just don’t know! Stop beating yourself up for not knowing. What is it with you guys? You want to know everything, and what you can’t know you extrapolate, as if human history were some kind of climate model. You ever think seriously about this notion that everything is interconnected? That everything affects everything else? You know what I mean. Hegel and chaos theory and whatever.”

  “You mean as in Marxist economic analysis?”

  “I mean everything right up to and including Luhmann, as in every philosophical system that’s been advanced in the last two hundred years since the—the what? You tell me! This is a test!”

  David struggled to think of an answer.

  “The industrial revolution! You get a world knee-deep in identical products with identifiable supply chains and a limited number of producers, colonies feeding factories feeding railroads, and all of a sudden, everything is interconnected!”

  “Sure, yes,” David said, hesitating. “Freudian theory is an epiphenomenon of capitalist imperialism. Why not?”

  “Now it’s globalization, which is even worse. Now every idea is a global phenomenon, democracy or youth culture or whatever, like there’s one big universal mind. At least the de facto Platonism in modernity was limited to producing bazillions of identical artifacts, not bazillions of identical thoughts.”

  “You are right that there is a universal ideology which is crushing us like an insect. And since, as you have pointed out, rationality was a side effect of rationalization, there is no way to criticize it. This means, for example, that without division of labor it is hopeless to struggle against the Internet. It has the heads of Hydra. Like a field of identical flowers to which the identical bees go happily, thinking they bring home sweet nectar. But they are only pollinators making possible the seeds of more identical plants, which soon cover the earth like the triffids.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far, but there’s a real material leveling going on since maybe A.D. 1300, and the pace of cultural leveling is beyond anything anybody ever expected. But now think about the ancient world! It’s a patchwork of villages. Cultures and artifacts just come and go, like quantum anomalies. Every priest is a prophet and every craftsman is the Unabomber. People are always taking Occam’s razor the wrong way, trying to reduce the total number of objects in the world instead of reducing their complexity. Now they’re to the point where a butterfly flaps his wings on the other side of the world and I get up out of bed and shoot the president. I can’t just be a freak of nature anymore, or out of my mind. It’s one seamless web of causation, but you need all the silicon in the known universe to model it. That’s the theory. Care to prove it? Step right up, but don’t forget your unknowable quantity of silicon. Know what I’m saying?”

  “And what if it’s true? What if the butterfly is flapping right now?”

  “What good is uncovering a conspiracy if the guy pulling the strings is a butterfly?”

  “So there is just this one guy whose little sister looked like a dog, and no trade with Madagascar, and therefore no lemur picture in Italy?”

  “Of course there’s a lemur, if you can get somebody to buy it. Go ahead and try. You just might pull it off.”

  “Everything and nothing, just like always.” David sighed. “Why work? I am saddened. Although, what you say reminds me of the argument against evolution. Science depends from believing that no fossil is a freak. Without the imperialist dialectic, I am a mere taxonomist. Yet for personal reasons I resist determinism.”

  His boss swore to himself to avoid postdoc art historians in the future and to stick to humble artifact artists who would faithfully catalog and reproduce the finds and shut up. That reminded him to ask David if by any chance he knew the artist who had done the critically acclaimed but disgusting thing with the cheese on the bluff above the dig. “They said she lives in the villa where you were living for a while. What’s she like? Is she cute?”

  “She is cute,” David said. “I catch her one time in my room. Probably then she sees the map marked with the site. Then I move away. She is a perfervid lesbian.” The boss suggested that David was putting in too many late, lonely nights. He agreed to take the afternoon off.

  David rode the bus out to the villa and found Arkady and Ingo sitting in the library drinking sherry. “Have a sherry,” Arkady said. “I invite.”

  “What’s the occasion?” David asked. He noticed that Arkady’s hands had healed.

  “I am rich,” Arkady said. “In 1985 I am little child. I write ballet-opera of Finnegans Wake for fifty singers, two orchestras, one of them baroque with period instruments, also two pianos and organ in the best Soviet style and with great sincerity. To perform this work takes eleven hours. Now I receive tantième of thirteen thousand euros.”

  “Why?”

  “It is performed! Nothing else. So many musicians, even one movement is making big tantième. And they perform this not in a hall. It is outside, big park, place for many thousands! Even more tantième! And I am so happy. Now I can pay for premiere of songs of Tyutchev.”

  “My mother—” David said, before pausing to remember that he had resolved to cease functioning as an informational node forging actual contact among things he had hoped to link in his mind alone and by distant association if at all.

  “What about your mother?” said Ingo.

  “My mother is interested. She knows your work. She is a mezzo-soprano, teaching in Trossingen.”

  “Songs are for coloratura, flute, piccolo, and muted triangle,” Arkady said. “Like cries of mice. Pianissimo.”

  “Well, then.”

  “You want to read them? I hear that you are musician. You are singer.”

  David denied it and poured himself another glass of sherry. “Sherry glasses are very small,” he remarked.

  “I agree,” said Ingo.

  “The director has message for Jenny. She should call philosopher Sloterdijk.”

  Ingo and David looked fixedly at Arkady. “What?” Ingo said. “Peter Sloterdijk?”

  Arkady assured him that this was the case.

  “Small world. I spent a weekend with him once at a conference.”

  “Stop now,” David said. “Because you had a coffee with him does not make the world small. He is a famous man, always traveling. Many people meet him.”

  “Many people of a certain class,” Ingo said. “Not so many if you take an average. You don’t know him. But your mother knows Arkady, it seems, because they are musicians.”

  “They say if you follow the chain of people knowing people, there are only six people to separate you from any person on earth,” said David.

  “This is called in English six degrees of separation,” Ingo added.

  “Probably an old idea. Now everybody knows someone knowing famous people, so it’s three degree
s.”

  “Since the Reformation there is only one degree, since God knows everyone and everyone knows God,” Ingo said. “A flat hierarchy, basing on a team structure. No chain of command, also no individual responsibility. There is one boss for all, and He forgives everything. So you see why the world is going to hell.”

  “I don’t know famous people,” David admitted. “And I do not wish it. I have decided to stop making new synapses for this cybernetic universe.”

  “Well said,” said Ingo.

  “My method will be to speak to each person only about himself. For example, if I find another letter of Goethe, I do not rush to find someone who is interested. This was only a way I was trying to make myself more interesting, by borrowing the famousness of others. An art historian knows many famous people, but they are all dead.”

  “But this is the only solution,” Arkady said. “James Joyce is my friendly helper, gaining for me gratis attention and thirteen thousand euros. I never get this money by myself. Tyutchev will help me also, I hope. The dead artist holds the ladder to money.”

  “Who is Tyutchev?” Ingo asked.

  David was distracted by sudden thoughts of the Redons in his closet in Trossingen and interrupted with a different question. “Where’s Eyal?” he asked.

  “Writing in the hills alone,” Ingo said. “Now that his time runs out, he remembers his novel about Siberia in 1942.”

  “You see?” Arkady said. “He is same like me. Without Stalin, he is nothing.”

  When Eyal got back to Florence, he went to see David. He confessed to everything he hadn’t confessed to already that didn’t involve Freiburg. It had occurred to him that there were probably records in the apartment that pertained to the bank vault, or possibly an inventory, and that these might be found when the old man died, and that there might be trouble.

  His actions were not strictly justified by logic. Mostly, he wanted to include David in the plan, or at least get David’s attention, perhaps only because of Jenny, or perhaps for reasons unknown to anyone including himself. It may have been that he merely wanted to tell the story. After all, he couldn’t fit it into a novel about Siberia in 1942, and he preferred not to tell coworkers anything he wouldn’t tell his wife. He had no compunctions about serving as a data node. Any novelist habitually walks the slack rope over the boiling oil of David’s deepest anxiety. More than a data node, he is a virus-infected file server, churning out intimacies at random to an audience whose size and attributes remain objects of the loftiest indifference.

  David was amused by the idea that Jenny had stolen everything on principle without even going to the trouble to sell it or take it along. He and Eyal searched the apartment as it had never been searched before. They leafed through every book. They dismantled every framed print. In the end they had hundreds of millions of (devalued) lire, a woodcut by Emil Nolde, an almost complete set of the plates to Diderot’s Encyclopédia masquerading as three decades of Jane’s Fighting Ships, several old passbooks to empty savings accounts, and a hand-drawn map that marked a spot on an island in the Arno with an X.

  “This explains the kayak,” David said.

  Eyal vaguely remembered Jenny’s having mentioned a kayak at some point.

  “I hid it on the river with a small tree. Maybe it’s still there.”

  They went out together for coffee on a windy plaza and to a bookstore to buy a detailed hiking map with landmarks and all the best rollerblading routes and so on. They found where the island must be. It was too small to be on the map, but the site was unmistakable.

  Then they rode out of town on the bus. The kayak was still there.

  The cabdriver who showed up refused to have anything to do with it, so they paddled downstream. Eyal kept track of their progress on the map. The banks became increasingly built up, but it was a nice day to be on the river. After an hour and a half and two portages, they were still solidly outside town, but approaching it through a suburb. There was plenty of water, often enough to fill the walled-in riverbed from one side to the other. The children playing on the banks were only mildly curious. Occasionally they would come out onto a bridge and try to hit them with a gob of spit. Otherwise, they were ignored.

  It gradually became clear that something was missing. Eyal showed David the maps. “Look. Here is the stream coming into the river. Here is this church tower. Everything is here, and we are past it now. Where is the island?”

  David paddled slowly, looking down through the water. It was not, to say the least, transparent. He poked down with his paddle and eventually, just about where the island was supposed to be, he hit a ridge of gravel. “There’s something here.”

  Eyal said, “Then I suppose I shall search. This is so sad.” He took off his pants without taking off his shoes.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I go waddling.”

  “Wading,” David corrected him.

  Eyal, having served for years on the Dead Sea and in Egyptian lagoons, was unafraid of murk. Sliding on sharp stones, up to his chest in water, he poked, kicked, and trampled his way back and forth across the unseen river bottom, screaming only once as he tripped and went under. “A grocery wagon,” he remarked. “I believe this box”—he gasped as if to himself—“for it is certainly a box, is heavy and watertight. It stays where it is, even if the sand of this island is vanishing in flood of 1967 or whenever along with trees and landing places and all other features of this precious map. To date, no one has found it, and I will find it. Who will venture into such a desolated place? Not even the stupidest, most ornery child would play here. Yet here I am. But I will not find this improbable and lyrical lost treasure. And not only that. I will not even succeed to sell the story to newspapers, because I am too embarrassed by it. And that’s not all. I will never publish an account of my time in Europe, nor will I even be empowered to draw on it for literary material. It will resist my every inroad, like the green hell of the Amazon which can only be explored through harvesting, burning, and grading to a flat immensity resembling the lunar seas. It is not only the little photons. It is absolutely everything that cannot be perceived. Especially not with the feet, with shoes on, in one and one-quarter meters of this filthy water. Still, I am afraid of tetanus. How good that I have shoes.”

  Meanwhile, David had seen something like a jug of fabric softener half buried in plain view on a nearby sandbank. He paddled over to it, parked the kayak on the sand, and retrieved it. “Okay, I open this now,” he called out. He looked inside. In the relatively clear water that filled the dripping bottle, something could be seen glinting through a black mass. He poured the buried treasure out on the sand, spooking a swarm of fleas.

  Eyal waded over to peer down at their meager haul. He was tired. “You tell me,” he said.

  “These are settings for pearls, French, sixteenth century. This is a cheap Victorian ring. And this”—David extricated something resembling the hair that collects in a shower drain, something he had never voluntarily touched—“was a brooch of hair.”

  “Where are the pearls?” Eyal asked.

  “They dissolve in acid rain.” He poured off the water. “Yes, they are gone.”

  “Pity.”

  “You expect diamonds or emeralds. But these stable stones, nobody has them before. Pearls are the jewel of history. And what is a pearl? Chalk. The touch of skin destroys it.”

  “An excellent investment.”

  “You know these modern stones, they are all industry products anyway. They change the colors. This is why old jewels look so boring.”

  “Gold would be all right.”

  David rearranged the forlorn necklace and earrings on the rock and flung the hairball into the water. “The ring may have some platinum.” He held up a dark green bead. “What is this? Ivory?”

  “My eyes hurt,” said Eyal. “Also my legs, and my ass itches like crazy.”

  “I hope it is only the fleas,” David said.

  As they marched to the Ponte Vecchio, Eyal
said, “Why didn’t the old man put this stuff in the vault and save me the elaborate self-torture?”

  “What is in the vault? You are telling me before.”

  “Cracked and dirty paintings rolled up like carpets.”

  “And the key is labeled ‘trésor.’ This is the answer. The vault is for the daughter, filled with garbage.”

  “He connives to humble me. He is the puppet master to my willing marionette.”

  Back at the villa, Eyal showered until the hot water was gone. His eyes and the cuts on his legs kept itching. When he got to the bank the next morning, the vault was empty. He tried to call the old man. He knew enough Italian to understand the relevant part of the answer he got: morto.

  David got a call from Amy, praising his timely plan to leave at the end of January. The old man had died of complications from knee surgery. “It’s best to lose the weight while you’re young and save the surgery later. Trust me on this one.”

  When it came time for Eyal to fly home, Ingo and Amy drove him to the airport. Ingo allowed that he looked forward to staying in Florence for a while yet. They gratefully received Eyal’s best wishes. Eyal was still swollen and slathered in antibiotic cream and cortisone. He told his wife it was frostbite.

  Jenny called Sloterdijk. He wondered politely if she might not be interested in coming up for a performance on very short notice at a weekend vernissage in mid-February. The exhibition was something about democracy. She said she had no technical requirements beyond thirty square meters of space, a hotel for six people, and a thousand euros an hour. She prepared for her performance by reaching Arkady on the communal villa telephone just before he moved into a two-star hotel with a private bath.

  David stayed wrapped up in his work each day, then took the train home to bask in Jenny’s radiant presence. That was about all he got from her. She was preoccupied with reading Verlaine. It was his fault (they were his books), but she did little else. Occasionally she took some money from the jar where he kept money and went grocery shopping, or just walked around Freiburg. It had a Gothic cathedral and little brooks in the streets, but it was freezing cold and damp outside, and he lived on the edge of town in leftover temporary student housing from the 1960s. Occasionally she worked on her stringently formal Russian poetry. She looked forward to the trip to Karlsruhe, and eventually she told David about it.