Private Novelist (23 page)

“Excellent deal,” said Eyal.

“Thank you.” The composer began to unpack and Eyal left the room.

This is very bad, Eyal thought. Also shameful. This dingbat composer speaks Russian like Jenny, plus he's sort of cute in this lost-orphan-child way—no, face it, he's handsome,
probably, when he's asleep or otherwise failing to say something blatantly egomaniacal. Jenny will get a crush on him and then I am screwed, over, finished, unless I can get rid of him posthaste. What can I do? Help me, precious Lord! Eyal was not especially good-looking, and he tended to be insecure.

He went back and asked, “How long will you be wearing these bandages?”

“One week, maybe two weeks. Until then, you will not hear me play viola, also rest in peace.” He laughed at his own joke. “I still will not write. I will compose in my mind while I have the bandages, song cycle on texts of Fedor Tyutchev. ‘Silentium'!”

I have one week, Eyal thought. One week.

Late that afternoon Eyal walked out the door to go into town and saw Jenny and the composer sitting together on a bench in the garden, talking animatedly. He stood very still for a moment. Then he walked straight over to them and said, “Hello, Jenny! Arkady, I see you have met my special friend.” The Russian immediately moved a foot farther away from her and took his elbow down from the back of the bench.

Why didn't I think of that before? Eyal thought. I just spent seven hours plotting everything from death to maiming to discrediting him in the eyes of the world, seven hours nursing a gemlike flame of hatred that was slowly condensing to a kind of inner creosote that threatened to poison my entire existence, in the hope that this spiritual substance alone might suffice to kill him or me or both of us. But all I had to do was say, “Get your hands off my girlfriend,” and only once. Is it that easy?

The composer said something to Jenny in Russian, and she giggled. “You need anything from town?” he asked them both.

“Vodka!” said the composer.

In your dreams! thought Eyal, bouncing away in a youthful manner.

When he returned with a bottle of Frascati, Jenny was waiting for him in her room to inform him that she would be moving in with David. Her husband would soon think of looking for her in the villa, if he hadn't already, she said. “And the innocent David has a kayak at his top secret place of secret work. We will take this kayak to the river. Such great fun. And you will visit me always. Okay?”

“Okay. I will visit you. And this Russian guy?”

“No good for you. He knows nothing of Siberia, only Petersburg. Also, he is injured to the hands through spontaneous application of violence to expensive golden age relic not his own. Crazy man. I move to David to escape him.” She nestled up close to Eyal.

“This is the most beautiful sexual affair of my life,” he said. “I hope it is very shallow and meaningless. In any other case, I should not like to go home.”

“It is excessively trivial,” she assured him. “Please open this wine.”

There was a knock at the door. It was the English art historian, with whom no one mentioned in this story had as yet spoken a word voluntarily. He was apparently a hard worker, in libraries or something, from just after breakfast to late at night.

“Sorry to disturb you. Could I bother you for a glass of that?” he said. “I'm a bit shook up.” He sat down on a chair.

“So what's up?” Eyal asked.

“There's about eight feet of bloody bandages on the floor of my room.” They both laughed. “Stop laughing! I'm serious! I think it's that mad Russian, the one who's always charging
about like a singed rabbit. I have to get out of this place. It's driving me mad. No one here ever speaks to anyone. It's bloody eerie.”

“What?” said Jenny.

“I will explain,” said Eyal. “You believe that you speak English, but this is not an accurate estimate of your powers. I struggle most pitifully to understand your rapid, inflected speech. This is very hard work. You are a hard worker, but no one else here is a hard worker, except David. We are lazy artists of life.”

“David. That's the bloke with the
affreschi di Giotto
. We didn't hit it off. He told me about the Giotto and I thought, They're still giving stipends for Giotto? I should be German. I believe I looked a bit skeptical and he took it personally. Seems nice enough.”

“David is just brilliant,” said Jenny. “He's very innocent.”

“He may be a hard worker, but innocent? I suppose that's why he's robbing the library blind. Wandering about with letters of Goethe and belle epoque erotica in a shopping bag. Really! Where can he have got them? I've half a mind to call him on it.”

“Erotica? It's not possible. He's innocent,” Jenny said. “You admit you have never spoken to him. How can you call him a thief and a pornographer? Get out of my room. You are bored, but we are not your interactive television.”

The Englishman, who was making a great effort to overcome months of antisocial reticence, continued down the hall to chat, for the first time, with Ingo. Ingo quickly became very effusive about Giotto, Goethe, and the gifted young Russian composer who displayed all the behavioral eccentricities traditionally attendant on genius, short-circuiting everything
he had to say, so he gave up and never spoke to anyone in the villa ever again.

Compared with the other men in the neighborhood, David was virtually immune to Jenny. His work with symbolist drawings had given him a great deal of practice in looking at things he was not allowed to touch. An oil painting, you tap it with your finger just to make a point, and does anybody care? No. But a pastel is as delicate after a hundred years as fresh spray paint, and it's all painted with cans they're not selling anymore. Touch a field of solid color, and you'll be working for days to match the tint and build the surface back up to where no one sees the depression. Smudge charcoal into white paper, and you might as well have taken a knife to it. It will never look the same. David had in fact spent a lot more time with symbolist drawings than with girls, so he was conditioned to think anything attractive should be left alone. Probably that was the unconscious reason he had written his dissertation on Etruscan wall hangings: It didn't upset him to rip them apart, fiber by fiber, with tweezers.

David was always at work centrifuging slurries of our irreplaceable cultural heritage or whatever when Eyal came to his apartment to see Jenny. It was only the landlord's daughter who dropped by once while David was away.

Eyal came out in his shorts to see who was puttering around the living room. “You must be David,” she said. “Pleased to meet you.”

“Yes, I am David,” Eyal said.

“I will not stay long. I am here to pick up something. Ah, yes, I see it.” She stood on tiptoe and extricated a scrimshaw
seal from between two highball glasses on a shelf. She placed it carefully on a table, then reached up again for a cracked tortoiseshell hand mirror propped between Snoopy bookends. She blew the dust off the seal and mirror and tucked them into her handbag. “Cheerio!” she said.

“Can I please see this ivory?” said Eyal. She took it back out and handed it over. “Nice work,” he observed, turning it over and over in his hands. “Old.”

“My father is a great aficionado of the sea,” said the woman. “He ask me to bring things from the sea for his room.”

“Is he very ill?”

She laughed. “Of course he is ill. To be ninety-five is a sickness! But he refuses to be cured. He is only having the knees replaced, with titanium. In two, three months he will be playing football.”

“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.”