Private Novelist (29 page)
Authors: Nell Zink
David's life was one of perfect peace and harmony. He spent most days in his office at the university in acerbic preparation for a seminar on symbolist drawings that he planned to add to the curriculum in April. Changing the theme of his
Habilitation
(a sort of postdoctoral thesis Germans have to write before they can become professors) to symbolist drawings was a potential act of fatal hubris entailing the abandonment of years of promising work on Etruscan tapestries, but he wasn't really worried. He saw that he would be compelled to leave Freiburg for Paris, and started shopping around for a stipend. In his evenings at home, he cooked, cleaned, and read the newspaper to relax.
Etruscan tapestries had always been a frustratingly meta-analytical exercise. A diligently acquired expertise on motifs and color preferences, in combination with precise chemical analyses, had allowed him to make highly sophisticated guesses about what might or might not have been the original themes of the putative pictorial sources of certain pieces
of lint. Those results were accepted with enthusiasm by the scientific community. Whereas every time he had the pleasure of producing some concrete evidence of a particular motif that wasn't just lint (e.g., a stray lemur), he was not encouraged to present a paper at every leading conference but rather shot down in flames. He saw that with little effort he would soon be the world's leading expert on Etruscan tapestries (in a sense, he was establishing the field), but he wanted more. If, as Arkady said, the dead artist holds the ladder to money, then no one was more dead than the Etruscans. But as he looked across the room at Jenny where she sat silently reading Bourdieu on photography with her legs tucked up under her, he felt that he was not interested in leading a stable, predictable life. He felt like doing something wild. “Jenny,” he said. “We could go see a film.”
She put her feet down and said, “We could have sex.”
“No,” he said. “I have no sexual feelings for you. I know this now. My feelings are those of a father. I like you to live here quietly, giving you food and rent. You eat nearly nothing. You are looking thinner all the time, like a little boy. I worry about you. This is paternal feeling. So I wish only to care for you like a child, not like an incestuous pederast.”
“Absurd liar,” she said. She came over and kissed him. “I write many poems about you,” she whispered. “They are Russian, very formalist with short lines, totally impossible to translate, sorry. Always about you, the innocent with eyes closed.” He closed his eyes.
Later he was forced to admit that he had, as was often his wont, made a virtue of necessity. His false consciousness collapsed like a house of cards, and he began observing Jenny with more attention. She seemed less contradictory than
before, possibly because she spoke much less. She was too busy reading. Eventually she began borrowing his university library card and taking out books in Russian. She began cooking, greasy things like fried patties of flour and cottage cheese, and gained a little weight. She dyed her hair auburn, pointing out that all the girls in Freiburg were doing it. When David suggested they visit his parents on Easter weekend, she agreed immediately. A week later she opined that her life had become so stable and conventional that it might be time to send for her son, who was living with her parents in Novgorod, but before David even had a chance to ask how old he was, she admitted he didn't exist.
On Holy Saturday the family gathered around the piano, where David's mother performed
Frauenliebe und Leben
. Slightly high on a frizzy local wine, David sang his favorites from
Die schöne Müllerin
. His mother said that as always he was terribly lazy, and that despite his near-perfect taste and intonation, a lack of resonance condemned him to mannerism. His father kept quiet. Jenny said, “This is nice music. What's it about?”
“This journeyman has one friend, the stream. Following this stream, he meets a girl. But the girl soon likes a hunter instead and leaves him alone.”
“Bitch,” Jenny said.
David contradicted her. “She is no bitch! He is always happy with his friend the stream. Also the stream has better music than this innocent girl who likes aggressive hunters. It is not her fault. She is only a young girl. The stream is flowing since the last ice age, and she is maybe sixteen.”
David's father said, “You are trying to flatter the older woman your mother. Of course the young girl is more
interesting, even if she is a bitch. She takes everything this miller has got and leaves him to die in the brook. The brook cannot save him. But it is always singing nice singing-piano songs, archetypes of Schubert.” He played a few measures. “You see?”
“Arkady is always telling me of Schubert.”
“The same Arkady that David knows, the composer?” David's mother asked. “Tell me, Jenny, you know him also?”
“Yes, we are together in villa with David.”
“Did you know him before?”
“He is my brother.”
David's parents were delighted. David was mildly annoyed, since he didn't believe her and was sure he would never know the truth. When she went on to tell a thrilling tale of a familial exodus from the imploding Soviet Union via reindeer sled through the taiga, he felt relieved. It was obviously a lie. He resolved to challenge her on it later, on the way home.
His mother was not quite so shy around beautiful women. “You are inventing this, are you not?” she asked, turning her head to one side to glare at Jenny with one eye like a hungry bird.
Jenny laughed. “Of course! I am only trying to frighten David.” She looked at him fondly, suddenly seeming to be really a member of the family as she laughed aloud at him and was joined by both his parents. “I like you people,” she said. “In truth, I have no family. My parents are dead of illness when I am teenager. This is sad, but it happens sometimes. Only in Paris I have some cousins. I never meet them. Maybe we go there. David will study French symbolist painting in Paris, I think.”
She went upstairs to bed while David's mother was still berating him for abandoning his
Habilitation
. She fell asleep
to the sound of his father playing Schumann's
Kinderszenen,
though she didn't know what it was.
On the train David declared that he would not change the focus of his work. Consequently, he would not be going to Paris. Instead he would continue the pioneering studies of ancient lint that would gain him wide respect and a secure academic position.
Jenny said she would go to Paris anyway for two days to meet her cousins. The cousins were surprised and delighted to see her, seeing as how they had been looking for her ever since her mother died and she left home with a woman and started living under an assumed name. She refused their invitation to move in, saying she was quite content in Freiburg, but was happy to accept her share of the proceeds of the sale of the Donatello, which had turned up on the market in 1997 and been declared their property in 2002.
Try as he might, David couldn't think of a way to publicize the Redons without getting into trouble. Ten years earlier maybe, but not nowâinstitutions were under too much pressure to know where their collections came from.
The next time he visited Trossingen, he discovered all four of them framed on the living room wall. His mother explained that she had found them in his room. She thought they were beautiful. He could see that she was proud of him, perhaps for the first time. Her son the embarrassingly boring academic and lousy singer had turned out to be an exceptionally gifted painter. He thanked her and resolved right there never to tell anyone of the pastels' true provenance, except maybe his heirs.
Siegfried invited Ingo and Amy to the premiere of Arkady's bagatelle. Arkady never played his own works in public, so he
had enlisted the former twin sex bomb to slum by playing the viola for a change. After a Beethoven piano trio and Prokofiev's Violin Sonata op. 80, the stage was set. The audience drew closer with a sense of special anticipation.
She began to play. Then she stopped. Arkady looked around expectantly. She bowed, and a few people applauded. “Encore!” Amy shouted. She played it again.
“It is very short,” Ingo remarked.
“Very short indeed,” replied Siegfried.
Arkady stepped forward to accept a bouquet of flowers.
“I like it that way,” Amy said. “Sink or swim, you know? I don't like people beating me over the head.”
I WISH TO THANK AVNER SHATS FOR
writing this book's foreword; the still untranslated novel
Lashut el Ha-Shkiah,
which inspired
Sailing Toward the Sunset by Avner Shats;
and the specifications to which I wrote
European Story for Avner Shats:
“I would go for Florence, with a fifty-three-year-old real estate agent and a young art history student. She is rich but hates her job; the student is young and thinks he is sophisticated. Some piece of art should be involved, as well as a kayak, the last living member of the Amicale Internationale des Capitaines au Long Cours Cap Horniers, and, of course, a 19b [nineteen-year-old bisexual] who is desperately in love with an obscure middle-aged Israeli author.” Now I'm the one pushing fifty-three, and Avner is old enough to find androgynous women of nineteen disturbingly childlike, but it's still extremely fun publishing these things. My sincere thanks to Megan Lynch and Dan Halpern of Ecco Press for being so brave about it.
NELL ZINK
grew up in rural Virginia. She has worked in a variety of trades, including masonry and technical writing. In the early 1990s, she edited an indie rock fanzine. Her books include
The Wallcreeper, Mislaid,
and
Nicotine,
and her writing has appeared in
n+1
. She lives near Berlin, Germany.
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The Wallcreeper
Cover design by Sara Wood
Cover art © Evgenia Loli
PRIVATE NOVELIST.
Copyright © 2016 by Nell Zink. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
ISBN 978-0-06-245830-8
EPub Edition October 2016 ISBN 9780062458315
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*
One chapter per day in December 1998. New spell-checked edition, including all the egregious weaknesses of the original and its many errors of taste, prepared in 2011.