Private Novelist (22 page)

“Not really. He wrote hundreds—”

“I can see him now, extruding great works like a sausage grinder in a nonstop monologue from day to night. Probably he spends his whole life drinking only espresso straight from the thermos.” Ingo tapped the floor with his cane. David laughed nervously. “I'm drunk, I think I'll go to bed,” Eyal added.

“I'm never drunk,” Ingo replied, pouring himself another glass of brandy.

Eyal went upstairs to David's old room. It had been cleaned and tidied in preparation for the next tenant. Eyal's own room was a bit of a mess, with dirty laundry on the chairs.
He lay down on the white coverlet with his shoes on, then sat up and took them off. They dropped to the floor with a thud. Jenny appeared in the doorway.

“But soft, what light in yonder doorway breaks,” he said. “It is the east, and Jenny is the sun.”

“As you like,” said Jenny. “I hear this clanging and think someone new has come to live in David's room, but it's only you.” She sat down next to him on the bed. “I miss David. He is only innocent man.”

“This is because he has a very literal mind. He is a chemist. He thinks, Combine me, David, and a lesbian, this will produce no reaction whatsoever. The lesbian is inert, like the noble gases.”

“You are not a chemist.”

“Even if I were a chemist, I would not see you as a single element. Perhaps one of these rare diamonds possessing an odd color through impurities.” He put his arm around her. “Or inclusions, like the insects in amber. Don't flatter yourself that I am a famous writer. In actuality, I am a zero. I work in public relations.”

“Fame is a matter of no interest whatsoever. My husband is film director who is worshipped by everyone. Big stars are kissing my ass.”

“Then I propose a deal with him,” said Eyal. “I sleep with his wife, and in return, he films a script, which I will write, to immortalize the affair for general delectation, starring all your ass-kissing stars.”

“That is difficult. To make any deal I must contact him, and now he does not know where I am. Soon I will go to him for money, but not yet. Also, you ignore what is central. Who would marry an impotent man?”

“A lesbian, maybe?”

“Wrong, wrong, wrong,” she said. “A bitch greedy for money. I will not last long in this poor place of stone cells with a kilometer to walk to the shower. Watch me, Israeli writer, I go now, and tomorrow, I am gone.”

“But I am your savior,” Eyal called, closing his eyes as she stood up and backed away.

“What? My savior?”

“I offer you redemption,” he said, opening his eyes. “And nothing more. What can I give you? I am poor and ugly, and I am entirely certain that I am impotent as we speak, if only for the alcohol. Listen to me, Jenny! If you abandon your husband for a rich and good-looking young man or for some ass-kissing star, the world will say you are a venal tramp and a whore! You will be defaced with base motives of lust and cupidity. But on the contrary, when I assist you in destroying your marriage, no one sees any motive other than the purest and most respectable hatred for your husband! They will think, What a monster that billionaire must be, if his Jenny leaves him for this miserable writer.”

“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,
” “
trésor
.” 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.”