Night Music (40 page)

And if this is truly a surgeon, then why does he not wear the attire of a learned man? Why does he labor alone in some dank place and not in a hall or theater? Where are his peers? Why are there no other men of science, no assistants, no curious onlookers enjoying their pennyworth? This, it would appear, is secret work.

Look: there, in the corner, behind the anatomist, face tilted to stare down at the dissected man. Is that not the head and upper body of a woman? Her left hand is raised to her mouth, and her eyes are wide with grief and horror, but here, too, a rope is visible. She is also restrained, although not so firmly as the anatomist's victim. Yes, perhaps
victim
is the word, for the only conclusion to be drawn is that the man on the table is suffering under the knife. This is no corpse from the gallows, and this is not a dissection.

This is something much worse.

The question of attribution is always difficult in such circumstances. It resembles, one supposes, the investigation into the commission of a crime. There are clues left behind by the murderer, and it is the work of an astute and careful observer to connect such evidence to the man responsible. The use of a single source of light, shining from right to left, is typical of Mier. So, too, is the elongation of the faces, so that they resemble wraiths more than people, as though their journey into the next life has already begun. The hands, by contrast, are clumsily rendered, those of the anatomist excepted. It may be that they are the efforts of others, for Mier would not be alone among artists in allowing his students to complete his paintings. But then, it could also be the case that it is Mier's intention to draw our attention to the anatomist's hands. There is a grace, a subtlety to the scientist's calling, and Mier is perhaps suggesting that these are skilled fingers holding the blade.

To Mier, this is an artist at work.

I admit that I have never seen the painting in question. I have only a vision of it in my mind based upon my knowledge of such matters. But why should that concern us? Is not imagining the first step toward bringing something into being? One must envisage it, and then one can begin to make it a reality. All great art commences with a vision, and perhaps it may be that this vision is closer to God than that which is ultimately created by the artist's brush. There will always be human flaws in the execution. Only in the mind can the artist achieve true perfection.

It is possible that the painting called
The Anatomization of an Unknown Man
may not exist.

What is the identity of the woman? Why would someone force her to watch as a man is torn apart and compel her to listen to his screams as the blade takes him slowly, exquisitely apart? Surgeons and scientists do not torture in this way.

So, if we are not gazing upon a surgeon at work, then, for want of another word, perhaps we are looking at a murderer. He is older than the others in the picture, although not so ancient that his beard has turned gray. The woman, meanwhile, is beautiful; let there be no doubt of that. Mier was not a sentimental man and would not have portrayed her as other than she was. The victim, too, is closer in age to the woman than the surgeon. We can see it in his face, and in the once youthful perfection of his now ruined body.

Yes, it may be that he has the look of a Spaniard about him.

I admit that Frans Mier may not exist.

With this knowledge, gleaned from close examination of the work in question, let us now construct a narrative. The man with the knife is not a surgeon, although he might wish to be, but he has a curiosity about the nature of the human form that has led him to observe closely the actions of the anatomists. The woman? Let us say: his wife, lovely yet unfaithful, fickle in her affections, weary of the ageing body that shares her bed and hungry for firmer flesh.

And the man on the table, then, is, or was, her lover. What if we were to suppose that the husband has discovered his wife's infidelity? Perhaps the young man is his apprentice, one whom he has trusted and loved as a substitute for the child that has never blessed his marriage. Realizing the nature of his betrayal, the master lures his apprentice to the cellar, where the table is waiting. No, wait: he drugs him with tainted wine, for the apprentice is younger and stronger than he, and the master is unsure of his ability to overpower him. When the apprentice regains consciousness, woken by the cries of the woman trapped with him, he is powerless to move. He adds his voice to hers, but the walls are thick and the cellar deep. There is no one to hear.

A figure advances, the lamp catches the sharp blade, and the grim work begins.

So: this is our version of the truth, our answer to the question of attribution. I, Nicolaes Deyman, did kill my apprentice Mantegna. I anatomized him in my cellar, slowly taking him apart as though, like the physicians of old, I might be able to find some as yet unsuspected fifth humor within him, the black and malignant thing responsible for his betrayal. I did force my wife, my beloved Judith, to watch as I removed skin from flesh, and flesh from bone. When her lover was dead, I strangled her with a rope, and I wept as I did so.

I accept the wisdom and justice of the court's verdict: that my name should be struck from all titles and records and never uttered again; that I should be taken from this place and hanged in secret and then, while still breathing, be handed over to the anatomists and carried to their great temple of learning, there to be taken apart while my heart beats so that the slow manner of my dying might contribute to the greater sum of human knowledge, and thereby make some recompense for my crimes.

I ask only this: that an artist, a man of some small talent, might be permitted to observe and record all that transpires so the painting called
The Anatomization of an Unknown Man
might at last come into existence. After all, I have begun the work for him. I have imagined it. I have described it. I have given him his subject and willed it into being.

For I, too, am an artist, in my way.

T
he world had grown passing strange. Even the hotel felt different, as though all of the furniture had been shifted slightly in his absence: the reception desk moved a foot or two forward from its previous position, making the lobby appear smaller; the lights adjusted so that they were always either too dim or too bright. It was wrong. It was not as it had once been. All had changed.

Yet how could it be otherwise when she was no longer with him? He had never stayed here alone before. She had always been by his side, standing at his left hand as he checked them in, watching in silent approval as he signed the register, her fingers tightening on his arm as he wrote the words
Mr. & Mrs.
, just as he had done on that first night when they had arrived for their honeymoon. She had repeated that small, impossibly intimate gesture on their annual return thereafter, telling him, in her silent way, that she would not take for granted this coupling, this yoking together of their diverse aspects under a single name. She was his as he was hers, and she had never regretted that fact, and would never grow weary of it.

But now there was no Mrs., only Mr. He looked up at the young woman behind the desk. He had not seen her before, and assumed that she was new. There were always new people here, but, in the past, enough of the old had remained to give a sense of comforting familiarity when they stayed. Now, as his electronic key was prepared and his credit card swiped, he took time to take in the faces of the staff and saw none that he recognized. Even the concierge was no longer the same. Everything had been altered, it seemed, by her departure from this life. Her death had tilted the globe on its axis, displacing furniture, light fixtures, even people. They had died with her, and all had been quietly replaced without a single objection.

But he had not replaced her with another, and never would.

He bent down to pick up his bag, and the pain shot through him again, the impact so sharp and brutal that he lost his breath and had to lean for a moment on the reception desk. The young woman asked him if he was all right and he lied and told her that he was. A bellhop came and offered to bring his bag to the room, leaving him with a vague sense of shame that he could not accomplish even this simple task alone: to carry a small leather valise from reception to elevator, from elevator to room. He knew that nobody was looking, that nobody cared, that this was the bellhop's purpose, but it was the fact that the element of choice had been taken from him which troubled him so. He could not have carried the bag, not at that moment, even had he wanted to. His body ached, and his every movement spoke of weakness. He sometimes imagined his insides as a honeycomb, riddled with spaces where cells had collapsed and decayed, a fragile construction that would disintegrate entirely under pressure. He was coming to the end of his life, and his body was in terminal decline.

He caressed the key card in the ascending elevator, noting the room number on the little paper wallet. He had been in that same room so many times before, but always with her, and once more he was reminded of how alone he was without her. Yet he had not wanted to spend this, the first wedding anniversary since her death, in the house that they had once shared. He wanted to do as they had always done, to commemorate her in this way, and so he made the call and booked the suite that was most familiar to him.

After a brief struggle with the electronic lock—what was so wrong with metal keys, he wondered, that they had to be replaced by unappealing pieces of plastic?—he entered the room. All was clean and neat, anonymous without being alienating. He had always liked hotel rooms, appreciating the fact that he could impose elements of his own personality upon them through the simple act of placing a book on a nightstand, or leaving his shoes by the foot of the bed.

There was an easy chair in a corner beside the window, and he sank into it and closed his eyes. The bed had tempted him, but he was afraid that if he lay down he might not be able to rise again. The journey had exhausted him. It was the first time that he had traveled by plane since her death, and he had forgotten what a chore it had become. He was old enough to remember a time when it had not always been so, and an element of glamour and excitement remained. On the flight down he had dined off paper, and everything that he ate and drank tasted of cardboard and plastic. He lived in a world composed of disposable things: cups, plates, marriages, people.

He must have slept, for when he opened his eyes the light had changed and there was a sour taste in his mouth. He looked at his watch and was surprised to see that an hour had passed. There was also, he noticed, a bag in the corner, perhaps brought by a bellhop while he was napping, but it was not his. Silently he cursed the young man. How difficult could it be to bring up the correct piece of baggage? It wasn't even as if the lobby had been very busy when he checked in. He got to his feet and approached the offending item. It was an unopened red suitcase, and lay on a stand beside the closet. It struck him that perhaps he might have missed it when he entered the room, wearied by his trip, and it had been there all along. He examined it. It was locked, with a green scarf tied around the handle to help distinguish it from similar items on airport carousels. There was no name apparent, although the handle was slightly tacky to the touch where the airline label had been removed. He glanced in the trash can, but it was empty, so he could not even use a discarded tag to identify its owner. And yet the case seemed oddly familiar to him. . . .

The telephone in the bathroom was closer than the phone on the other side of the bed. He decided to use this one, before pausing and looking again at the bag. He experienced a brief surge of fear. This was a big hotel in a large American city, and was it not possible that someone might deliberately have abandoned this case in one of its rooms? He wondered if he might suddenly find himself at the epicenter of a massive terrorist explosion, and saw his body not disintegrating or vaporizing, but instead shattering into countless pieces like a china statue dropped on a stone floor, fragments of his being littering the remains of the suite: a section of cheek here, an eye, still blinking, there. He had been rendered fundamentally flawed by grief; there were cracks in his being.

Did bombs still tick? He could not say. He supposed that some—the old-fashioned kind—probably did. Just as he had relied upon his windup alarm clock to wake him for his flight that morning (he lived in fear of power cuts when he had a plane to catch, or a meeting to make), perhaps there were times when only a straightforward, ticktock timepiece with a little keyhole in the back would do the trick if failure was not an option.

Carefully he approached the bag, then leaned in close to it and listened, holding his breath so that any telltale sounds would not be masked by his wheezing. He heard nothing, and instantly felt silly. It was a misplaced case, and nothing more. He would call reception and have it taken away.

He stepped into the bathroom, hit the light switch, and stopped, his hand poised over the telephone. An array of toiletries and cosmetics was carefully lined up beside the sink, along with a hairbrush, a comb, and a small vanity case. He saw moisturizers, and lipsticks, and in the shower stall a bottle of green apple shampoo alongside a container of jojoba conditioner. Blond hairs were caught in the hairbrush.

They had given him an occupied room, one that was already temporarily home to a woman. He felt anger and embarrassment, both on her behalf and his own. How would she have reacted had she returned to her suite to find an elderly man snoozing in an armchair by her bed? Would she have screamed? He thought that the shock of a woman yelling at him in a strange bedroom might have been enough to hasten his mortality, and he was momentarily grateful that it had not come to such a pass.

He was already composing a tirade in his head when he heard the main door open, and a woman stepped into the room. She was wearing a red hat and cream mac, both of which she discarded on the bed along with two shopping bags from a pair of chichi clothing stores. Her back was to him, and her blond hair was tied up loosely at the back of her head, held in place by a leather clip. Now that the coat was gone, he saw her lemon sweater and her white skirt, her bare legs and the tan sandals on her feet.