Private Novelist (28 page)

“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.

“And again you will dance?” he asked.

“Oh, yes, just wait until you see this dance. All the time I am practicing. This becomes the dance of the century. I am in the center of large exhibition about democracy or something. There I burn not cheese, only hair. This makes very special smell. Hair is extremely morbid. No one will be ready to criticize hair. Okay, I am lying. It is not hair. It is a surprise.”

David was indeed surprised when he saw Arkady standing in a circle of people that surrounded an inaudible group of apparent musicians. The murmur of hundreds of art fans milling around the floor of the huge four-story atrium was compounded not only by their heavy winter shoes but also by a series of electronic sound sources that included mechanized exhibit narrations, interactive audiovisual components, and many strange-looking conical loudspeakers that appeared to be glued to the floor and had no other function than to produce a deep, unsettling roar at intervals of two minutes. The general effect was bedlam. Under a spotlight, a soprano mouthed Tyutchev's text, accompanied by an industrious flute and piccolo. You could see that a triangle player occasionally touched his triangle, but there was nothing to be heard in the chaos. David's eyes rested gratefully on the brightly lit ensemble in their somber black outfits, since almost everything else was adorned with strobe lights or reams of vanishingly small text or wouldn't stand still. A film crew had two cameras trained on them, as well as, hung discreetly over their heads, a single stereo microphone. It was entirely possible that the video, if nothing else, would include music.

“Arkady!” he said. “Doesn't this make you crazy?”

“Dear David!” he said, kissing David on the cheek. “It's perfect!” he said. “All my life I am dreaming of this. First time, contact with my work is purely free. People are not sitting chained down to chairs. They are drinking, talking, living! This is real Schubertiade of Schubert, not private salon haute-bourgeois religious-event concert thing.”

“You think they hear anything? I cannot hear.”

“If they don't, they are themselves guilty! All are standing six, seven meters away! I hear everything. ‘Silentium'!” Next to them a cell phone suddenly played
Eine kleine Nachtmusik
.

David went looking for Jenny. He found her with Sloterdijk and the composer Wolfgang Rihm. She was explaining to them that she had no wish to study with either, and like any true artist she refused to write on commission or accept prizes. What she would like is a prize for Arkady, since he was a man and thus always in need of money. And not some little piss-ant prize either: a big prize, perhaps a Nobel.

“There is no Nobel Prize for music,” Rihm said. “Unfortunately.”

“Why not? I make one,” she said. “Nobel is dead for over seventy years. He has no copyright. There must be great deal of money in this prize, for the winner. I will create and award prize, and you will recognize it. This is like when state declares independence and other states recognize. We will have diplomatic relations.”

“Hello, everyone,” David said. “Come, Jenny, let's go and take a little walk outside. I buy you a drink.”

She smiled gallantly and took his arm. “Good-bye, Peter and Wolf! Ah, David, my art is truly not so bad. They are right. It is brilliant commentary on production of living art in universal mechanical context. I do nothing. I only turn on machine by introducing money into aperture for coins. Then
I am producer, artist, genius of work no one can hear!” She threw back her head and laughed.

“Are you drunk or insane?”

“No, I read too much in winter in Germany. This phase is not lasting forever. Let us go to hotel. You are so nice to me, David. Maybe I sleep with you.”

David thought it over. He liked the word “maybe,” since he wasn't sure it was a good idea, plus he was hungry, so he suggested they go out for dinner. They went to dinner, ate too much, and fell asleep early. He wondered how long it would take him to get over Eyal, and regretted that this was somehow his problem and not hers.