The Portrait (8 page)

That is what she asked. And when no answer came, she asked again in different words.

Who were you thinking of, Felix, when you painted him?

Creator pulled away from her and mumbled, No one.

She grabbed his head with both hands. He answered the gesture by pulling her shoulders towards him.

I missed you, Lidewij said. Come on, okay?

Without another word, they disappeared to the right, out of the studio. I heard their feet drumming up the stairs. Above me, the washing machine was already on. I heard them in the bedroom, too, kicking off their shoes.

It had been a tear — that was what she, Lidewij, had wiped away with her fingertips — I was sure of it.

Who were you thinking of, Felix, when you painted him?

That was what she had asked, and when they came back into the studio a half-hour later — her in her red dressing-gown and apple-green sneakers, him with his T-shirt hanging out of his jeans and socks on his feet — she asked it again.

Creator realised that this time Lidewij would not be fobbed off with mumbles. He loved her, I think, because she was able to ask him questions he had to answer, even if he didn't know how.

Does it matter?

You must have been thinking of someone special, she said. Not just Singer. You must have been.

It's a strange question, he said. Is that what you'd ask the father of a newborn?

Yes, she said. That's exactly what I'd ask. If you ask me, it's an awfully good question. Who do you think of when you make a baby?

She had wrapped an arm around his waist, and his arm was draped over her shoulder. She closed her eyes to let him kiss her eyelids one after the other. Creator knew what her answer would be, but he still asked the question.

Who were you thinking of? Just then, upstairs?

Mum, she said. If I was thinking of anyone — just then, upstairs — it was at least partly Mum.

She was silent for a moment, then looked at me. My face, I mean.

And him, she said. I kept seeing Singer.

Upstairs, the washing machine started to spin, sending a shiver through the house.

She knew that for now she wouldn't be getting any more of an answer out of Creator, nothing more than an embrace. And to tell the truth, I don't really know whether it's an important part of my story who was on his mind while he was working on me. I mean, what difference would it make if we found out that, while painting the
Mona Lisa
, Leonardo da Vinci was constantly thinking of Gladys Grady?

But Creator still wanted to answer. And later — when Lidewij was overdue and had even bought a pregnancy test, which she then made a point of not using as she, as she put it, had already known for ages that it had caught, caught with a vengeance — Felix, there isn't a colour in the world that could indicate something like that — Creator told her about Tijn.

Lidewij had just asked him whether she shouldn't take the Polaroid. Of me. Traditionally, that was her job. When a picture was ready and she had
finished the thing off
by being the first to look at it, she would take a photo for the records.

No need, Creator said. I've already done it.

That was true, and it had been a peculiar moment — Creator gazing through a camera at me in order to transfer me to another support. Because that, at least, I had figured out. This was a device for moving the portrait I had become somewhere else — every last bit of it, but
in another format
. It worked by flash, an instantaneous explosion of light that came out of the device and made me feel as if I had been turned invisible, swallowed up entirely by brightness. For that one instant, I thought, Now I am a blank canvas again. That wasn't the case. A small support came sliding out of the camera, and a minute or two later, with Creator rubbing it on his right sleeve, I appeared on it. Not that I got to see myself. I deduced that I was there on the Polaroid from the way Creator looked from one to the other, from the Polaroid to me, and back again, comparing what he saw. He seemed satisfied with the result. Creator put the Polaroid away in the drawer in the large table, the one containing the cheque and his pencil stubs. A strange, nagging emptiness is what I had felt, as if the photo had been taken
from
me rather than
of
me.

I certainly had no sensation of being doubled or reborn. To be honest, I forgot the Polaroid soon enough, but later the Vatican calendar showed a painting of something called a shroud. The word meant nothing to me, but from Lidewij's conversation I deduced that long ago someone had pressed a cloth against the face of an unforgettable man who was either dying or had just died. Centuries later, people discovered that an imprint of his face was still visible on the cloth. It was as if the dead man existed again. Or had never stopped existing. I noticed that Lidewij's thoughts had turned to her mother and I was right, because a little later she said that she kept the last glass her mother had drunk out of in a cabinet and had never washed it. Her lips left a print on it, she said, and that's why that glass is Mum.

In a manner of speaking, Creator said.

No, Lidewij said, strangely passionate. Not at all in a manner of speaking. The glass is even more Mum's mouth now than when her mouth existed.

They were sitting in garden chairs pushed up against the sunroom wall on the right, positioned to catch the beam of sunlight that now shone into the studio for a quarter of an hour at a time, every afternoon around six. Since the day before yesterday, it has also lit my upper edge on the far right. They looked out into the garden, together with me, as it were. It was a Sunday, the Sunday that the strange calendar called Palm Sunday. Lidewij had told Creator about a childhood memory of marching to the sanatorium, which was deeper in the woods surrounding Withernot. That was something they used to do on Palm Sunday when she was a girl: marching in procession from the primary school on the edge of the village, carrying decorated bamboo crosses with bread rolls shaped like roosters on them. All the grade five and six kids. Why Palm Sunday? Why did they make us do something we didn't understand? We'd carry our crosses past a row of beds with pale, drowsy kids in them, and sing a song about eggs. They'd rolled the children out onto a terrace for the occasion. The sun was still totally wintry, and we walked past singing and holding up Palm Sunday crosses. Do you understand that, Felix? What kind of celebration is that?

But Creator didn't know either. I doubt they do it these days, he said. Procter Poldermol own the sanatorium now; Fokke Ponsen wants to go live there; TB has been eradicated in the Free World; there's no call for things like that anymore.

He's picking him up next week, he said suddenly, pointing at me with his chin.

I know, Lidewij said.

And then, as if he was still talking about the same subject, Creator told her about Tijn.

He kept looking out into the garden, where the sun was sinking between the birch trunks so that, with the light coming from behind, the trunks grew blacker and blacker. Lidewij had turned on her chair to look at me — at an angle. Creator's words seemed to shed light on me, and at the same time they made me all the more aware of the absurd one-sidedness of my existence. They were talking about me and nothing but me, yet I would never know what exactly they were talking about.

How can a creature like me ever get to see itself? I was as unknowable to myself as the soul to a newborn babe: sometimes it even occurred to me that I should question whether I actually existed. Whether there was such a thing as a me. A him or a her. An it. The thing that everyone except us can see in one lightning glance. Our countenance.

When I started on Singer, Creator explained, at least fifteen years had gone by without my giving Tijn a second thought. But that very first day, I mean, after the imprimatura, when I started sketching, doing his outline to work out how to arrange him on the canvas — Singer, I mean — I realised that his penis was going to end up right in the middle. At least, twenty centimetres to the right of the middle, but optically that would become the centre of the piece. And I knew immediately that I would either paint it first before anything else or leave it until everything else was finished. I ended up leaving it till last, two days before you came back from skiing. You could say I kept putting the most difficult thing off, like always, whereas of course I still didn't have any idea why it should be difficult at all. A boy's penis isn't difficult; there's hardly a shortage of them. I could have worked from hundreds of Greek statues and even more Renaissance things and, if I'd really wanted to play it safe, I could have asked your sister for the holiday snaps of her kids — Annelise is always taking photos of the twins at the beach. And Singer's being black wasn't really the problem either; you can see that yourself.

Anyway, when all was said and done, I still hadn't come close to deciding how visible it would be, and the sheet was always there as a last resort if it proved beyond me, so … you get the idea. I was in trouble: I was postponing Singer's middle, because there was something I found troublesome, not technically, but … something else. I didn't understand it, but it became more and more clear to me that the middle of the piece was just as important to me as the expression usually is, although you mustn't underestimate that either. It was immensely difficult to get Singer's eyes so that they're just the way they've turned out — so … how can I put it …?

So almost not looking, Lidewij said.

That, at least, was what I was hoping for, Creator said — that they would end up like that. Almost not looking. Or almost looking. But when I had more or less managed that, the day came for me to start on the middle with everything else completely finished — and then, in a flash, I knew what I should have known straightaway, from the moment I started sketching him three weeks earlier —

Creator broke off. He's no storyteller. It was obvious to me that he thought he was exaggerating it beyond redemption. He felt like shouting, Fuck psychology!

After a long silence, Lidewij asked, Does this Tijn still exist?

She had heard the name mentioned for the first time just ten minutes before and now, as she spoke it, it was as if she was touching Creator's lips.

I lost him and he lost me, Creator said. A long time ago. There's not actually anything to tell.

No? Why did you start then?

It's not what you think, Creator said. It's not something I can explain.

If you've lost someone, Lidewij said, and you still have to think about them, then it's always worth telling.

While saying this, she looked at me and smiled. Her gaze had rested momentarily on my middle, a smile had come to her lips, and then she had looked at me, at my eyes, which I now knew to be almost not looking. Or almost looking. And she winked.

Creator hadn't noticed; he was still brooding on his story and staring out at the birch wood, behind which the sun now glowed like a burning bush.

We were inseparable, Creator said, Tijn and I, for the first two years of secondary school. We found each other at lunch on the first day, immediately. We both saw immediately that we were the only ones who hadn't automatically ended up at a table with friends, and Tijn rode home with me after the last period on that very first afternoon, the way you do at that age, jumping on your bikes together and riding next to each other for a while until it's time for you to turn right for your own house, and then you keep going a bit, until there's another right, and because you're talking away and listening, you end up at the other one's house, where you decide to do your homework together, and they ask you to stay for dinner, and then you finally go home after the eight o'clock news, and then the other one rides part of the way with you, through the August evening, and every time you reach a landmark where it would make sense for him to turn around and go back home, he rides on, until the next landmark and then, somewhere exactly halfway, you reach the true point of farewell — where you have to cut the big knot, severing the strand of the newfound friendship — and you both stay standing there until you really can't stay any longer, it's getting dark, parents are worrying, they're phoning each other … there at the halfwayest point you really are together and apart from everyone and everything else … But, Lidewij, you have to realise that Tijn lived a full hour's bike ride from school and I lived a full hour away as well, but in the other direction, me to the west and Tijn to the east, and that we also lived a full hour away from each other — you see, our friendship was completely equilateral, and of course the next day I rode with Tijn and did my homework at his house, and I was allowed to stay for dinner, and I was happy to have Tijn ride part of the way home with me, until exactly halfway on the endless bicycle path that hugged the border between the province of Utrecht and the province of North Holland and connected my house to Tijn's.

I'm telling you this so you can understand what kind of friends we were. We wanted to be just like each other. We got the same marks, we spent the same hours in each other's company, we talked constantly — just like you and me when we're together — and we both loved drawing. There was one difference. And that was that, after almost two years, on an evening in May, in the spot halfway between our two houses, on the border of Utrecht and North Holland, Tijn suddenly asked me if I wanted to see him.