Me and Kaminski (3 page)

“Excuse me?”

“Your perfume.”

“What? No.” She shook her head and moved away from me. “No!”

“You should leave while there’s still light,” said Bogovic.

“I’ll be fine.”

“You won’t be able to find your way back!”

“Do you know that from experience?”

Bogovic grinned. “I never go anywhere on foot.”

“The road isn’t lit,” said the banker.

“Someone could drive me,” I proposed.

There was silence for a few seconds.

“The road isn’t lit,” the banker said again.

“He’s right,” said Kaminski hoarsely. “You need to start down.”

“It’s much safer,” said Clure.

I held my glass tighter and looked from one to the next. They were silhouettes against the sunset. I cleared my throat, now was the moment when someone would have to ask me to stay. I cleared my throat again. “Well then . . . I’ll be going.”

“Follow the road,” said Miriam. “After a kilometer or so there’s a signpost, you go left and you’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

I glared at her, put the glass on the ground, buttoned my jacket, and set off. After a few steps, I heard them all burst out laughing behind me. I listened, but already I couldn’t catch what they were saying; the wind carried only snatches of words. I was cold. I walked faster. I was glad to be out of there. Disgusting little brownnoses, repellent the way they sucked up to you! I felt sorry for the old man.

It really was getting dark very quickly. I had to narrow my eyes and squint to see where the road was going; I felt grass under my feet, stopped, and groped my way very carefully back onto the asphalt. In the valley, the pinpricks of streetlights were already visible. And here was the signpost, though it was too dark to read, and that must be the path I had to take.

I lost my footing and fell flat. I was so furious I picked up a stone and flung it into the blackness of the valley. I rubbed my knee and imagined the stone collecting other stones as it fell, more and more of them until finally it turned into a rockslide that buried some innocent walker. The thought pleased me and I threw another stone. I wasn’t sure if I was still on the path, I could feel the shale shifting under my feet, and almost fell again. I was cold. I bent down, groped around on the ground, and felt the hard-packed earth of the path. Should I just sit down and wait for daybreak? I might freeze, though not before I’d died of boredom, but either way it wouldn’t be a fall that killed me.

No—out of the question! Blindly I set one foot in front of the other, inching forward by sheer willpower, clutching bushes as I went. Just as I was wondering whether I shouldn’t in fact call for help, I saw something that formed itself into the contours of the wall of a house, and a steep roof. And then I could see windows, light glowing through closed curtains, and I was on a regular lit street. I came around a corner and found myself on the village square. Two men in leather jackets looked at me curiously, and a woman in curlers on the balcony of a hotel clutched a whimpering poodle to her bosom.

I pushed open the door to the Belview boardinghouse and looked around for the proprietress, but she was nowhere to be seen, the reception area was empty. I took my key and went upstairs to my room. My suitcase was next to my bed, the walls were hung with watercolors of cows, an Edelweiss, and a farmer with a shaggy white beard. My pants were filthy from the fall I’d taken and I didn’t have another pair with me, but the mud could be brushed off. What I needed right now was a bath.

While the tub was filling, I unpacked my tape recorder, the satchel with the taped conversations, and the book with the complete images,
Manuel Kaminski, His Paintings.
I listened to the messages on my cell phone: Elke asked me to call back right away. The culture editor of the
Evening News
needed the Bahring hatchet job ASAP. Then Elke again: Sebastian, call me, it’s important! Then a third time: Sebastian,
please.
I nodded, though I really wasn’t paying attention, and switched off the phone.

In the bathroom mirror I eyed my naked self with a vague feeling of dissatisfaction. I set the book of collected Kaminski paintings down next to the tub. The foam made little popping sounds, and smelled pleasantly sweet. I slid slowly down into the water, lost my breath for a few moments because it was so hot, and felt I was swimming in a vast, motionless sea. Then I groped for the book.

III

F
IRST THERE WERE
the botched drawings of a twelve-year-old: humans with wings, birds with human heads, snakes, and swords swooping through the air: absolutely zero evidence of talent. And yet the great Richard Rieming, who had lived with Manuel’s mother in Paris for two years, had used several of them to illustrate his volume of poetry
Roadside Words.
After war broke out, Rieming had to emigrate, found passage on a ship to America, and died of a lung infection during the voyage. Two childhood photographs of a chubby Manuel in a sailor suit, one of them showing him wearing glasses that grotesquely enlarged his eyes, the other one showing him blinking as if he couldn’t tolerate bright light. Not a good-looking child. I turned the page, the paper swelling in the damp.

Now came the exercises in symbolism. He had painted hundreds of them, soon after leaving school and his mother’s death, alone in a rented apartment, protected by his Swiss passport during the German occupation. Later he burned almost all of them, the few that survived were bad enough: gold backgrounds, clumsily painted falcons above trees with gloomy heads growing up out of them, a crudely rendered blowfly on a flower, looking as if it were made of cement. God knows what would have brought him to paint such a thing. For a moment, the book got away from me and sank into the foam; the glistening white seemed to climb up the paper, and I wiped it away. Taking a letter of recommendation from Rieming, he went to Nice to show his work to Matisse, but Matisse advised him to change his style, and, helpless, he went home again. A year after the end of the war, he visited the salt mines of Clairance, got separated from the guide, and wandered for hours through the empty passageways. After he’d been located and brought back out, he locked himself away for five days. Nobody knew what had gone on. But starting from then, he began to paint quite differently.

His friend and patron Dominik Silva paid for him to get a studio. There he worked, studied perspective, composition, and the theory of color, destroyed all his sketches, began again from scratch, destroyed, began again. Two years later Matisse arranged his first exhibition at the Théophraste Renoncourt Gallery in Saint-Denis. That was where he showed for the first time (I was thumbing my way further) a new series of paintings:
Reflections.

Today the series hung in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The paintings were of mirrors that faced one another at different angles. Silvery gray passageways opened into infinity, slightly crooked, filled with otherworldly, cold light. Details of the frames or impurities on the glass multiplied and formed rows of identical copies that shrank away into the distance until they disappeared altogether out of the field of vision. A few of the pictures contained, as if by oversight, traces of the painter himself, a hand holding a brush, the corner of an easel, captured accidentally in one of the mirrors and repeated endlessly. Once a candle sparked a fire of dozens of flames licking upward together, another time the surface of a table stretched away, strewn with papers, and in one corner a postcard reproduction of Velázquez’s
Las Meninas,
between two mirrors that met at right angles so that the reflection of one in the other produced a third mirror that instead of showing things in reverse showed them the right way around, creating a miraculously symmetrical chaos: the effect was of enormous complexity. André Breton wrote an ecstatic article, Picasso bought three of them, it looked as if Kaminski was going to become famous. But it didn’t happen. Nobody knew why; it just didn’t happen. After three weeks the exhibition ended, Kaminski took the paintings back home with him and was as unknown as he’d been before. Two photographs showed him with large glasses that gave him something of the air of an insect. He married Adrienne Nalle, the owner of a successful paper business, and lived for fourteen months in a certain comfort. Then Adrienne left him with the newborn Miriam, and the marriage was dissolved.

I turned on the hot-water tap; too much, I suppressed a cry, a little bit less, that’s it. I propped the book on the edge of the bath. There was a lot I needed to talk to him about. When did he learn about his eye disease? Why didn’t the marriage hold up? What had happened down in the mine? I had other people’s opinions on tape, but I needed quotes from him himself, things he hadn’t yet said to anyone. My book should not come out before his death and not too long afterward either, for a short time it would be at the center of all attention. I’d be invited to go on TV, I would talk about him and at the bottom of the screen it would show my name and
biographer of Kaminski.
This would get me a job with one of the big art magazines.

The book was now getting quite wet. I skipped over the rest of the
Reflections
and leafed to the smaller oil and tempera paintings of the next decade. He had lived alone again, Dominik Silva gave him money regularly, sometimes he sold a few paintings. His palette brightened, his line got crisper. Pushing to the very boundaries of the recognizable, he painted abstract landscapes, cityscapes, scenes of busy streets that dissolved into a viscous mist. A man walked along, pulling his own dissolving contours behind him, mountains were swallowed up in a pulp of clouds, a tower seemed to turn transparent under the fierce pressure of the background; you struggled in vain to see it clearly, but what had been a window a moment ago turned out to be a trick of the light, what had looked like artfully decorated stonework turned out to be a strangely shaped cloud, and the longer you looked, the less of the tower you found. “It’s quite simple,” said Kaminski in his first interview, “and damned difficult. Basically I’m going blind. That’s what I paint. And that’s all.”

I leaned my head against the tiled wall and balanced the book on my chest.
Chromatic Light at Evening, Magdalena Daydreaming at Prayer,
and above all
Thoughts of a Sleepy Walker,
after Rieming’s most famous poem: an almost imperceptible human figure, wandering through a pewter-gray darkness. The
Walker,
apparently solely on the basis of Rieming’s poem, was included in an exhibition on the Surrealists, where by chance it caught the eye of Claes Oldenburg. Two years later Oldenburg arranged for one of Kaminski’s weakest works,
The Interrogation of St. Thomas,
to be shown in a Pop Art show at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York. The title was expanded to include the tagline
painted by a blind man,
and the picture was hung next to a photo of Kaminski in dark glasses. When he was told about this, he got so angry that he took to his bed and ran a fever for two weeks. When he was able to get up again, he was famous.

I stretched out both arms cautiously and shook first my right hand, then the left; the book was quite heavy. Looking through the open door, my eyes fell on the picture of the old farmer. He was holding a scythe in his hands, looking at it proudly. I liked the thing. Actually, I liked it better than the pictures I had to write about every day.

Because of the rumors about his blindness, Kaminski’s paintings suddenly went all around the world. And as his protests that he could still see gradually gained credence, it was too late. No way back. The Guggenheim Museum put on a retrospective, his prices shot up into the stratosphere, photos showed him with his fourteen-year- old daughter, a really pretty girl back then, at openings in New York, Montreal, and Paris. But his eyes were getting steadily worse. He bought a house in the Alps and disappeared from view.

Six years later Bogovic organized Kaminski’s last show in Paris. Twelve large-format paintings, once again in tempera. Almost all bright colors, yellow and light blue, a stinging green, transparent beiges; streams of color that tangled and merged into one another, yet, when you stepped back or narrowed your eyes, suddenly were sheltering wide landscapes: hills, trees, fresh grass under summer rain, a pale sun that dissolved the clouds into a milky haze. I leafed more slowly. I liked them. A couple of them kept me looking for a long time. The water slowly grew cold.

But it was better not to like them, because the critical reaction to them had been annihilating. They were called kitsch, a painful blunder, evidence of his illness. A last full-page photograph showed Kaminski with a cane, dark glasses, and a strangely cheerful expression, wandering through the rooms of the gallery. Shivering with cold, I shut the book and laid it down next to the tub. Only too late did I notice the big puddle. I cursed: I couldn’t sell it at the church flea market in a state like that. I stood up, pulled out the plug, and watched a little worm of water drain everything away. I looked in the mirror. Bald spot? No way.

Almost everyone I talked to about Kaminski reacted with astonishment that he was still alive. It seemed unbelievable that he should still exist, hidden in the mountains, in his large house, in the shadows of his blindness and his fame. That he should follow the same news that we did, listen to the same radio programs, was part of our world. I’d known for quite a while that it was time for me to write a book. My career had begun well, but now it was stagnating. First I had thought maybe I should do a polemic, an attack on a famous painter or movement; a total trashing of photorealism, maybe, or a defense of photorealism, but then suddenly photorealism was out of fashion. So why not write a biography? I hesitated between Balthus, Lucian Freud, and Kaminski, then the first of them died and the second was reported to be already in conversations with Bahring. I yawned, dried myself off, and put on my pajamas. The hotel telephone rang, I went into my bedroom, and picked up without thinking.

“We have to talk,” said Elke.

“How did you get this number?”

“Who cares? We have to talk.”

It must be really urgent. She was on a business trip for her advertising agency, and normally she never called when she was on the road.

“Not a good time. I’m very busy.”

“Now!”

“Of course,” I said, “hang on.” I put down the receiver. In the darkness outside the window, I could make out the mountaintops and a pale half-moon. I breathed deeply in and out. “What is it?”

“I wanted to talk to you yesterday, but once again you managed to fix things so that you didn’t get home till after I’d left. And now . . .”

I blew into the receiver. “There seems to be a bad connection.”

“Sebastian, it’s not a cell phone. There’s nothing the matter with the connection.”

“Excuse me,” I said. “Just a moment.”

I let the receiver sink down. I could feel the soft panic rising. I could guess what she wanted to say to me, and I absolutely must not allow myself to hear it. Just hang up? But I’d done that three times already. Hesitantly I raised the receiver again. “Yes?”

“It’s about the apartment.”

“Can I call you tomorrow? I’ve got a lot to do, I’ll be back next week, then we can . . .”

“No you won’t.”

“What?”

“Come back. Not here. Sebastian, you don’t live here anymore.”

I cleared my throat. Now was the moment I needed an idea. Something simple and convincing. Now! But I couldn’t think of anything.

“Back then you said it was only temporary. Just a few days, till you found something.”

“And?”

“That was three months ago.”

“There aren’t many apartments.”

“There are enough, and it can’t go on like this.”

I said nothing. Maybe that was the most effective tactic.

“Besides, I’ve been getting to know somebody.”

I said nothing. What was she expecting? Should I cry, scream, plead? I was perfectly prepared to do all three. I thought of her apartment: the leather armchair, the marble table, the expensive couch. The wet bar, the stereo setup, and the big flat-screen TV. She’d really met someone who was willing to listen to her carrying on about the agency, vegetarian food, politics, and Japanese movies?

“I know it isn’t easy,” she said with a break in her voice. “I didn’t want . . . to tell you over the phone. But there’s no other way.”

I said nothing.

“And you know it can’t go on like this.”

She’d said that already. But why not? I could see the living room in front of me: four hundred square feet, soft carpets, views of the park. On summer afternoons a gentle southern light played on the walls.

“I can’t believe it,” I said, “and I don’t believe it.”

“You have to. I’ve packed your things.”

“What?”

“You can collect your suitcases. Or actually when I get back I’ll have them delivered to you at the
Evening News.
”

“Not in the newsroom!” I cried. That was all I needed. “Elke, I’m going to forget this conversation. You didn’t call and I haven’t heard a word. We’ll talk about it all next week.”

“Walter says if you come back one more time, he’s going to throw you out himself.”

“Walter?”

She didn’t reply. Did he have to be called Walter?

“He’s moving in on Sunday,” she said quietly.

Ah, now I got it: the apartment shortage was driving people to do the most astonishing things. “And where am I supposed to go?”

“I don’t know. To a hotel. Or a friend.”

A friend? The face of my tax accountant rose in front of me, followed by the face of someone I’d been at school with, and whom I’d bumped into on the street the previous week. We’d shared a beer and hadn’t known what to talk about. I spent the whole time racking my brains for his name.

“Elke, it’s our apartment!”

“It isn’t ours. Have you ever paid anything toward the rent?”

“I painted the bathroom.”

“No, painters painted the bathroom. You just called them up. I paid.”

“You’re keeping count now?”

“Why not?”

“I can’t believe it.” Had I said that already? “I would never have believed you were capable of it.”

“Yes, I know,” she said. “Me neither. Me neither. How are you getting on with Kaminski?”

“We hit it off right away. I think he likes me. The daughter’s a problem. She shields him from everything. I have to get rid of her somehow.”

“I wish you all the best, Sebastian. Maybe you still have a chance.”