The Portrait (10 page)

Hey, Felix, I heard Lidewij say.

She must have been on the other side of the studio, in my original location, where a huge silence now emanated from the other canvas.

Felix, when was the last time you saw Singer?

No answer came.

Don't you want to see him anymore, or is it something else?

Creator sounded testy. He was hard to understand, but I thought I heard him say that the moment had passed.

He should have been picked up, he said. That's the only way to really finish something you're making.

I heard Creator's footsteps approaching. Lidewij came closer, too.

Can I have another look at him? Just a quick one?

I felt a pang of fear, and realised that I had become a suspicious creature. What could her question mean if not that something was about to happen? My removal from the studio? My replacement by the newcomer? The arrival of two shaven-headed men with an indifferent cheque for fifty thousand euros? After so many months of indignant obscurity, I found it impossible to imagine fate smiling on me in any way at all.

Creator had pulled me towards him; my upper edge was now resting against his stomach. Carefully he peeled back the popping paper. Lidewij had come over to help unwrap me. Creator lifted me up and she jerked the paper out from under me. Then Creator used a foot to slide me closer to the wall.

There they stood, right in front of me. I blinked with what felt like Singer's eyes and, no exaggeration, felt something tingling about twenty centimetres to the left of my middle.

I don't know whether Creator looked at me. By the time I had recovered from the sudden light, he had turned his back. Demonstratively, it seemed.

Still without looking, he asked, Is it okay?

Lidewij didn't answer but nodded. She pressed her right hand against the side of her belly, which — I could see this very clearly — had grown round.

It's kicking like crazy, she said. Feel this.

Creator turned and went down on his knees before her. He pressed an ear against the spot on her belly she was pointing to.

Bloody hell, he said. It's going berserk in there.

But he didn't so much as look at me, not even later when he crossed over right in front of me to lay the popping paper in a corner of the studio.

After Creator had detached himself from her belly, Lidewij asked, Shouldn't we wrap him up again?

Leave it, Creator said. I'll do it when I get back tomorrow. Maybe I'll even leave him like that till you're back home. I won't be having any sitters for a while — not a soul will see him.

Lidewij's gaze left me. But, walking away, she turned back one last time and said, Hang in there, kid.

I remember that very well. I mean, it's not something I'm imagining because a fire is roaring outside and I'm realising that that was the last time she saw me. She said, Hang in there, kid, and it was like she was talking to herself. And she stuck up both thumbs. The gesture was new to me. Two thumbs pointing up into the air.

It will all turn out fine.

Creator had walked over to the other side of the studio and was pulling on the newcomer, as if to test its weight. Only now did I notice how strange its back was — it didn't have any crossbars, but … What did it have? What kind of material was that? Did the newcomer have no wedges at all? I couldn't believe my eyes — it didn't even have stretchers … How was it possible? A canvas without a frame?

It was standing; that much, I understood. Two metres tall at least; maybe two fifty. Huge.

It was painfully obvious. My successor had arrived — the new canvas on which everything would be possible, all the things Creator had not yet dared to do. And it was huger than me. It was of another order. It was ready for anything.

Oh yeah, Lidewij said, walking slowly out of the studio. I keep forgetting to tell you, someone called. I wrote her number on the back of my hand.

Who?

Minke Dupuis. She's working on a big article for
Art & Facts
.

What about?

How should I know? You, maybe. She wants you to call her, otherwise she'll try again some other time.

Even before Creator and Lidewij left for the hospital, I had more or less worked out what was going on by combining the scraps of conversation that had drifted into the studio now and then. Lidewij was well into her seventh month, everything had gone smoothly, but that morning she had been in for an antenatal, at the hospital, where they had told her that, unfortunately, it would be best to play it safe. Lidewij had understood immediately which complication they were referring to; but when she tried to explain it to Creator, it remained very obscure, to me at least. What it came down to was that she would have to stay lying down until the birth, hooked up to a drip and monitored closely, and that was why they wanted to admit her to hospital. But the child was fine; that wasn't the problem.

I concluded from all of this that it must have been late October. More than half a year had passed since I had disappeared into the popping paper! And all that time, as I deduced from the conversation, there hadn't been a single sign of life from Specht or his minions. And it had been a week or two since Creator had bought the newcomer, since he'd
snapped it up
, as he put it. This was a strange expression, which he'd never used when ordering me at Van Schendel's.

FOUR

Minke on the phone: that was the first thing to happen when Creator came home from having taken Lidewij to hospital. It was getting on for five that same afternoon — it seemed an incredible coincidence.

Creator said so as well.

You calling now, that's an incredible coincidence.

She must have asked why.

Because Y is a crooked letter, Creator said.

He was wearing his dark-blue army-disposals coat. I remembered his voracious restlessness from more than six months before when, left alone in Withernot while Lidewij was off skiing, he was about to start on me.

No, I'm here by myself, he said. No, I'm not busy. Why?

Standing on the floor and leaning against the side wall of the studio, I had been able to look sideways into the garden the whole day long. The trees and shrubs were almost completely bare, which was nice for me, because it allowed me to see further into the world than usual. Between the birch trunks on the far left I could even make out a glimmer from the lake, there where the sunset would be just visible to the right of the wall opposite. While the sun was going down, long oblique shadows teemed across the yellowing lawn. The reeds at the end of the garden had turned rusty and were topped with plumes that, in this light, looked almost lilac. I felt like I was looking with Creator's eyes — by which I mean, slurping it all up as if my eyes were digesting everything they could see, as if I had become some kind of visual maw.

Last year, Lord Peacock had appeared here, the day that I came within a hair's breadth of becoming Cindy. I realised suddenly that it had been months since I had heard his cry or his scratching in the bowl of chicken feed.

I say I, but of course I mean we: Singer and I. But it was as if Singer had never existed. I remembered things he had never seen — things like Lord Peacock, from before his existence. I remembered the things he couldn't possibly know. It was strange to be there in deathly quiet Withernot like that, and forgetting that I was painted. Yes, in that hour, I felt like I was blank, a novice on whom anything could happen.

It was because of the other canvas; I realised that clearly.

So this is what people mean when they say they are shy.

There was nothing I wanted more than to have the other look at me, and at the same time I feared his gaze.

I did my very best not to look at him, not even the back of him, for all that he was standing there directly opposite me, strange and stretcherless.

It was so quiet that I heard Creator's car coming from a long way away — the approaching drone of the engine on the narrow, twisting cart track through the woods between Huizen and Old Valkeveen. He must have felt strange. I tried to imagine it: suddenly wifeless, anxiously awaiting the birth of his child, facing an unexpected period of several weeks' solitude, with a new huge canvas, and no appointments with sitters or clients … How could he be in anything other than his now-or-never mood? It was the same as when he made me, Lidewij had been away then, too.

He came into the studio with a black plastic bag. I recognised the bag because it didn't have anything printed on it. All the bags of the Free World have a coloured logo. Only bags like this — the kind he had come back with seven months ago as well, after taking Lidewij to Schiphol — are unprinted and black. I knew what would emerge from it: carefully packaged videotapes. Creator would remove the videotapes and throw away the covers — quickly, as if he found them unpleasant. Last time, I was able to look at one of the covers for most of a minute out of the corner of one of my eyes, curious as I am about supports, whether they are made of linen, like me, or plastic. The video cover was called
Fiona on Fire
and showed a frontal view of a naked blonde woman straddling a naked man. Her mouth was half open so that somehow you looked deep into it, and she was weighing me up. I think that's how you put it. There was a weighing-up look in her eyes. I wondered whether Creator thought she looked like Lidewij. I didn't — she was more like Cindy. Still, there was something forthright about her expression that could make you think of Lidewij.

That might have been why Creator didn't throw her away immediately, because of that expression. For the rest he hid the videos, now coverless, at the bottom of the wicker basket where he dumped his old paint rags. Now and then he would get them out at night to play them in the adjoining room. I was never really a party to it. Looking through the doorway, I knew that Creator was sitting there to the left of one jamb, while, to the right of the other, a television screen must have been showing more or less what was promised by the cover. That, at least, was what I assumed. In time I was able to predict from certain noises, basically groaning and straining, when Creator's viewing would end. I always noticed that he never deigned to look at me when, still hoisting up his jeans, he came to hide the videos at the bottom of the wicker basket afterwards. It could be my imagination, but I'm pretty sure he was even trying to avoid my gaze.

Minke had called while the black plastic bag was still dangling from his wrist. When it became clear that she would be coming that same evening, Creator buried the bag under the rags in the basket without inspecting its contents. It had grown dark: an enormous, night-black cloud had slid down from the direct north to cover the sky. For the first time in my existence, Creator lowered the venetians in front of the sliding doors. A few of the slats were bent; he clicked them straight. Then he collected a few lamps from other rooms and very carefully placed them in strategic positions around the studio. I noticed that he was keeping me in the shadows. He disappeared again, upstairs this time — I heard him bumping around in one of the rooms I would never see as long as I lived — and came back with a mattress, which he put down close to the newcomer and covered with a plaid blanket. Now and then he looked at me, while bustling around, and it was almost as if he was winking. Laidback, huh? We're making it tremendously atmospheric.

Creator covered the lamps with scarfs and cloths so that the room was awash with a dim glow, then went to fetch an apple-green silk shawl from the hall of Withernot, where they hung up the coats. He opened it out completely, turning it into a wide, flimsy veil, and draped it over me, hiding the darkened sunroom from my view. I had a strong impression that, in this light, I too was completely hidden. All I could see of Creator at this stage was a greenish shadow.

Creator is, as he puts it, not so much someone who looks as someone who arranges. Before I can see what I want to paint, he sometimes tells his sitters, I have to arrange the world I see before me like a film director. I have seen him arranging people like that many times, putting them in the pose he wants to capture on canvas — and I know how much his desire to create something is spurred by his directing. Watching the video of Singer, he had paused him in just the same way. And I have often wondered what exactly happens in the neighbouring room when he watches his videos. I have heard him pausing the picture with the magical device he calls the remote control and often loses, the same device he also uses to fast-forward or switch to slow motion. What kind of power does he have in moments like this? Which orders does he give? Does Creator only really feel that he is a creator when he is freezing naked people with his remote control? What does this desire want from him?

I'll pick you up at the station, Creator had told Minke. After dark, Withernot is completely impossible to find.

If they made small talk, they did it in the car, because when they came into the studio they were talking about
Palazzo
.

If I'd known you were going to find it so horribly embarrassing, that bit about the Piet`a, I would have dropped it, I heard the low husky voice say, suddenly remembering it perfectly.

I thought it actually says something, about you, about how you see your work, and —