Private Novelist (27 page)

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.”

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 degrees.”

“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.