The Girl Who Wasn't There (5 page)

Four years after Eschburg’s move to Linienstrasse, a woman called his studio and asked if he had time to see her. She was quite close, she said, and would like to look in. She gave the name of a French energy company to which she was adviser. Half an hour later she rang his doorbell. She was wearing a thin yellow dress and had pinned her hair up on top of her head.

‘Just call me Sofia, my surname’s far too complicated.’ Her hand was warm. Her business card told him that she was managing director of a public relations firm. She said that the energy company she was advising wanted to launch an advertising campaign with the face of a woman, and asked whether he would care to take the photographs for it.

‘How did you find me?’ asked Eschburg.

She smiled. ‘Not by way of your famous portraits. Years ago I saw one of your photos in the office of your former employer. You weren’t there yourself that day. It was hanging in your office. A small black and white photo of a woman.’

Eschburg had kept the pictures of the naked woman that he took in the photographer’s bread-and-butter studio. One of them hung over the desk where he worked.

‘Yes, that’s the one I mean,’ she said, pointing to the picture. She went over to the desk and looked at it. Eschburg stationed himself beside her. Sofia leaned forward; the nape of her neck was slim.

‘I like that picture; it’s honest. Just the kind of thing we could use in the campaign,’ said Sofia. She turned to him too quickly, so that their faces almost touched. They stood like that for a moment.

‘Show me some more of your photos, would you?’ she said.

Eschburg placed the pictures that he had taken over the last few years on the desk. She picked up each in turn. Sometimes she said, ‘That’s good.’ She sounded very sure of her judgement.

‘Would you like a coffee?’ he asked.

She shook her head; she was concentrating so intently that she seemed to perceive nothing else. After half an hour she had made a selection.

‘Can I take these photos with me? You’ll get them back,’ she said. Light fell on her face through the high windows.

‘May I take a photograph of you?’ asked Eschburg.

She laughed. ‘I’d have to put something else on. I look terrible.’

‘No, please don’t; we can do it now. It will be good, you’ll see.’

He brought the 10 x 15 centimetre baseboard camera down from his apartment; its casing was made of wood, and he had bought it in a flea market years ago. Sometimes he took photos with it; he liked its weight, the complicated mechanism, the elaborate development of the photos in the darkroom. He had converted the camera to use modern flat film.

‘You mustn’t move,’ he said as he screwed the camera to the tripod and prepared the cassette. ‘Only a second. This camera has no depth of focus; if you move the picture will be lost.’

Sofia stood in front of the back wall of the studio. Suddenly she pulled the zip fastener of her dress down and let it slip to the floor. She kicked it off and stood naked in front of the bare bricks of the wall. Although she was in her mid-thirties, she had the body of a young girl. She folded her hands behind her back.

When he had taken the picture she said that she would like something to drink now. He went to get a bottle of water out of the fridge. When he came back, she had dressed again. She closed her eyes as she drank, swallowed the wrong way, and water ran down her throat. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

Half an hour later she went away, leaving the agreement for the energy company’s photographs and her business card lying on the desk. She had written her mobile number on the back of the card.

There had been many women in Eschburg’s life during the last few years. Women liked him, and he never had a particularly difficult time. He slept with them, but that never really moved him. Usually he couldn’t even remember their names a few days later. If he happened to meet them again he was courteous, but was not to be pinned down. Twice he had thought he was fond of a woman, but the feeling had worn off a week later.

That night he developed the picture of Sofia. He enlarged but did not retouch it. He hung the print on a wall in the studio. The background was blurred and dark, a strand of hair fell over her forehead, her face was pale and intent.

Her arms were outside the picture; she was only a torso.

Sofia called Eschburg a few days later. She said she would be spending the weekend in Paris, where her agency was organizing a dinner. He really must come; the electricity company would pay for everything. Eschburg packed his travelling bag, and placed her photo on top of his shirts.

When he came out of the arrivals hall at Charles de Gaulle airport, he couldn’t see her. He stood outside the automatic doors. Men and women on business were hurrying out. Someone pulled a wheelie case over his foot, and a child’s scream rang through the hall.

Eschburg sat down on a metal bench. He opened his bag and looked at the photo.

‘It came out well,’ she said. He hadn’t noticed her sitting down beside him. She kissed him on the cheek.

She had hired a car. Paris was unbearable in summer, she said, but the seaside resort of Deauville was wonderful at this time of year. The dinner given by her agency was not, in fact, for another two days.

She drove the little car too fast, phoning her clients on the way. She had two phones; she spoke French, English, Arabic and German. He looked out of the window. A point came when he stopped listening to her. This was a mistake, he thought, and he couldn’t now think why he was sitting in a car beside this woman.

Sofia wanted to drive along the coastal road. Thirty kilometres from Deauville it began raining so hard that they had to stop. Sofia parked the car under a tree. She bent down to him, kissed him, and opened his trousers. He had an almost painful erection. She sat on top of him. Through the rear window, he saw a cyclist who had taken shelter under the same tree. The man’s hair was hanging over his face; he stared at Eschburg and Sofia. Eschburg closed his eyes. Sofia was lying on him now, her face close to his. Her movements, her aroma were strange to him. The car windows were steaming up. After half an hour the rain slackened, and they drove on.

All the Deauville hotels were fully booked, but they found a room in a run-down boarding house. They went down to the sea, and sat on a bench in the drizzling rain, not touching.

Long after they had fallen asleep in the boarding house, he woke and went out on the tiny balcony, closing the door behind him. The sky was black and merged with the sea. It would soon start raining again. The neon advertisement on the boarding house shone on the wall above him. He wondered whether there would be a train back to Paris at this time of night; he could go down to the station now and find out. He went back into the room, looked for his clothes in the dim light and put them on.

‘Don’t go,’ she said.

‘It’s too complicated,’ he replied. He had his shoes in his hand.

‘It always is,’ she said. ‘Come here.’

He lay down on the bed beside her fully dressed. He looked at the dust on the slats of the wooden Venetian blinds. Sofia’s breath was calm and steady. He gradually relaxed.

She turned over on her stomach and propped her chin in her hands. ‘Are you always so serious?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said.

‘Your photos are serious. You’re doing something that I don’t yet understand with those pictures. My father was like that, but he died long ago,’ she said. ‘Did you know that the colour of your photographs, that sepia colour, is the ink of the squid? Many doctors prescribe it for depression, to cure loneliness and a sense of the void. They say it can heal a human being’s wounded dignity.’

He heard the wind and the rain, which had begun to fall again and was beating against the window panes.

‘What about your parents?’ she asked.

‘I’m not in touch with my mother any more.’ His mouth was dry.

‘And your father?’

He did not reply. He thought of the house by the lake, far away now, and then he was glad of Sofia’s voice, her mouth, her hair and her skin that was warm and the colour of bronze.

‘Did seeing that cyclist arouse you?’ she asked after a while.

‘You noticed him?’ he asked.

She nodded. Then she stood up and opened the door out into the corridor. She came back to bed, pushed up his shirt and unzipped his trousers. She kissed his chest and belly, and slipped between his legs. He wanted to pull her down to him, but she pressed him back on the bed. He felt her breasts on his thighs. She pushed her hair away from her face so that he could see her.

He wondered whether all this meant anything, if the room meant anything, or the picture over the sofa, or the balcony with its iron railing. It must mean something, but he didn’t know what.

It took him a long time to reach climax.

As soon as it was lighter outside, he got up and fetched croissants and coffee from the breakfast room. Sofia had gone back to sleep with her mouth open; she looked like a child. He sat on the balcony with his coffee. The beach was dark with rain.

Two weeks later, the model for the advertising campaign was sitting on a stool in front of the brick wall in Eschburg’s studio. It was going to be a good photograph, like all the photos he took. Eschburg looked through the viewfinder. He didn’t know how often he had taken this picture already. The woman’s head and breasts were thrust forward, her throat was taut, she was smiling. Her face was perfectly symmetrical. The links of her necklace will be visible in the picture as an oval, they’ll have the brightness of her teeth, Eschburg thought. He saw it all even before he pressed the shutter. It felt wrong to take the picture. He could no longer distinguish between the people in front of the camera.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said quietly to the woman. ‘You’re very pretty, but I can’t photograph you.’

The model stayed sitting where she was. She looked at the manager of the advertising agency, and then stopped smiling. The manager began talking, his voice rose, he said something about payment and deadlines, he threatened damages and lawyers. Eschburg carefully put the camera back in its wooden case.

That afternoon he went to the Old National Gallery. The picture he had come to see hung on the second floor. It was smaller than he remembered it, 1.70 metres wide, with a label beside it:
Caspar David Friedrich,
Monk By The Sea
, 1810.
The painter had never signed it, nor given it a date or a title. The construction was simple: sky, sea, rock. Nothing else, no houses, no trees, no bushes. Nothing but a tiny figure standing left of centre, with its back to the viewer, the only vertical in the composition. Friedrich had worked on it for two years; he had been suffering from depression while he painted it.

The picture was first exhibited in 1810. Heinrich von Kleist wrote, at the time, that in looking at it you felt as if your eyelids had been cut away.

Sofia and Eschburg were spending every weekend together now. Eschburg told her that he couldn’t go on taking those photographs. She suggested a visit to Madrid; there was something she wanted to show him there, she said. At the airport, they took a taxi to the museum. Sofia had spent time here once; she showed Eschburg the buildings where she had lived, she mentioned names he didn’t know, squares, cafés, her voice low and quiet. She told him that she had been in love with an older man at the time. Their relationship had lasted three years, and then he went back to his wife and children. She herself had moved to Paris to begin a new life.

They went into the Prado through the visitors’
Goya
entrance, crossed the halls of Italian and Flemish painting, passed pictures by Titian, Tintoretto and Rubens, making straight for Goya’s picture of the royal family. To the right, in Room 36, hung the two pictures numbered 72. Both showed the same young woman lying on a sofa. In the left-hand picture she was clothed, in the right-hand picture naked. Seen from any angle, the tip of the clothed Maja’s shoe pointed at the observer.

School students were sitting in a semi-circle on the floor in front of their teacher. Some of the girls were already wearing lipstick. The teacher asked her students to describe the differences between the two paintings. Sofia interpreted for him. One girl said that the clothed Maja in the picture was blushing because she was ashamed, but the naked Maja was pale and did not look at anyone. She didn’t understand that, said the student, surely it ought to be the other way around? The teacher explained that Goya had painted the two pictures,
The Naked Maja
and
The Clothed Maja
, for the prime minister of Spain. They had been linked by a folding mechanism that allowed you to see either one or the other version, either the naked or the clothed woman. The minister had hung them in his ‘Erotic Cabinet’ of works of art. At a later date, the Inquisition had the two paintings locked away.

The girl asked what an erotic cabinet was, and her teacher tried to explain. She said that
The Naked Maja
had been the first Spanish picture to show a woman’s pubic hair. One of the boys dug the boy next to him in the ribs and grinned. The teacher said something that Sofia didn’t understand to the boys, whereupon the first boy grinned even more and went red in the face, and one of the lipstick-wearing girls told him he was still a baby. The teacher stood up and led her students into the next hall.

For a moment Sofia and Eschburg were left alone with the pictures. Sofia said that before that painting of the Maja, artists had portrayed naked women only as angels, nymphs, goddesses, or in historical scenes. Men could look at such images without feeling ashamed. ‘The Maja is different. She has large breasts, a narrow waist, lips painted red. She knows how beautiful she is, and she knows what she’s doing,’ said Sofia.

Eschburg thought of the other man with whom Sofia had slept in this city. He thought of that other man touching her body, her skin under the summer dress, and the pale scar above the left eyebrow.

‘Goya was exposing the men of his time with that picture, if you see what I mean, Sebastian: they were staring at a naked woman, not an angel or a goddess. They had no excuses left. It was those men, not the Maja, who were shown naked,’ said Sofia.

The wording on a panel beside the pictures told visitors, in both Spanish and English, that it was not certain whether the Maja was the Duchess of Alba or some other woman.

‘Who was the Duchess of Alba?’ asked Eschburg.

‘Probably Goya’s lover,’ Sofia told him. ‘Goya spent a summer on her estate after her husband had died. He painted a picture for her – it was a declaration of love. The duchess, all in black, is pointing to the ground, where lettering in the sand says
solo Goya
, “Goya alone”. But of course solo also means “only”. The duchess’s lover was “only Goya”, only the painter, a nobody. Many people do think that this duchess modelled for the Maja. Maybe they’re right, or then again maybe not.’

They stayed standing in the small room in front of the two pictures for some time longer. It was warm. Sofia stood beside him, living and breathing and, here, belonging entirely to him. And then he felt afraid of losing her, because of the way he was.

‘Yes, the Maja is the right picture,’ he said.

Later, they went into every antiques dealer’s shop they passed. At last she found what she was looking for: an old tin cigar box with a reproduction of the naked Maja on its lid. The colours were faded. She said these little tins used to be very common, and the cigars they contained were a brand known as ‘Goya’. The antiques dealer said they were still made on the Canary Islands.

Out in the street again, Sofia took his arm.

‘Do you like children?’ she asked suddenly. She put the question as if that were all it was, just a question.

Eschburg didn’t look at her.

An old woman was pushing a shopping trolley along the pavement; it was rusty, one wheel was faulty and she couldn’t keep the trolley going straight. It was full of bags, plastic and fabric bags. All the old lady’s possessions, thought Eschburg.

He put an arm round Sofia and drew her close. He was going to answer her, but she turned to him and shook her head.

‘That was too soon,’ she said, and kissed him.

He felt awkward and stupid.

The old woman with the shopping trolley stopped. She spat on the ground.

Eschburg searched his pocket for cigarettes. Sofia said she was hungry. They went to a restaurant that she knew in the Calle Toledo. Pictures of Spanish film stars hung on the first floor. They ate green peppers in hot olive oil, with coarse sea salt.

In their hotel, the dry heat of the city came in through the open windows.

‘You’re never entirely with me,’ she said. ‘There’s always only part of you here, while another part is somewhere else.’

They had undressed, and were lying on the bed.

‘I like it that you’re different, but I often think part of you is missing. You’re not in a good way,’ she said.

‘You must help me,’ he replied.

‘What with?’ she asked.

‘Everything,’ he said, not knowing what else to say.

He couldn’t explain that he thought in images and colours, not in words. He couldn’t tell her about the gunshot in the house by the lake, or the knife cutting into the belly of the deer. Not yet.

‘What are you looking for, Sebastian? Can you tell me?’ she asked.

He shook his head. No one can understand another person, he reflected.

‘You’re difficult to live with,’ she said wearily.

Suddenly he felt sure that it would be all right with her. A time would come when she did understand it all: the mists, the void, the deafness. Next moment he wanted to be alone, waiting until things rearranged themselves and calmed down.

They heard the tourists in the square outside the hotel. She was lying on his arm, which had gone to sleep, but Eschburg didn’t trust himself to move. He felt her skin on his, and thought of the colour of hollyhocks. She was full of life, and he was a stranger to himself. He no longer knew whether what he was seeing was real.

All he knew was that he would hurt her.