The Portrait (9 page)

When it seemed as if the story had come to an end, Lidewij asked, Is that the way he put it? Do you want to see me?

Creator nodded. You have to realise, he said, that Tijn was by far the shyest boy in the world.

You differed in that, too, then, Lidewij said.

Not really, Creator said. But I learned to live with it, thanks to drawing. Not that I was any better at drawing than Tijn, but he never really drew from life and he definitely didn't draw people. He preferred to draw banknotes. He designed them all day long: unforgeable banknotes. And then, one evening in May, at nine o'clock in the evening, at the halfwayest point, he asked me if I wanted to see him.

Creator was silent for a moment.

If I remember correctly, we were sitting in the light of the setting sun with our backs against a tree, a bit like us now. The sun was just above the edge of the Groeneveld Castle forest — that was our spot, on the side of a field behind the castle. There were two white Fjord horses, and I think, at that moment, they were grazing next to each other's rear hooves. What I mean to say is, I was still sitting and Tijn had stood up and I was doing my very best not to look to the side, because I knew that he had lowered his pants. I kept staring ahead as much as possible, at the sun, in the direction of the tree trunks and I noticed how, with his pants around his ankles, Tijn had started jumping around to get in front of me. I think I stood up. I didn't want to look. It was as if it would scorch my eyes. Did I suspect I would see what I would see? In that instant, I heard the bell from the level crossing around the edge of the forest that the sun was setting into. I just wanted to grab my bike as fast as I could, and as I looked around for the tree we had leant our bikes against — the tree we had carved our names into two years earlier — our eyes met. I must have seen the look in his eyes as it really was, because I have always remembered it. Sometimes I think that I owe my memory for expressions to that moment … and in the end it was the look in Tijn's eyes that I thought about when I was working on Singer, do you understand … and that's the answer to your question. I was thinking of Tijn, and Tijn alone, when I tried to capture Singer.

Only now did Lidewij look away from my face. Her smile was gone, but her mouth had become as calm as a pond on a windless day. Her eyes sought my middle. She closed them and sighed. Then she took Creator's hand.

I thought about Tijn all the weeks I was working on Singer, Creator said, and I thought about how I rode home without a word. And about the next day, when it was my turn to ride home from school with him and I didn't even try to come up with an excuse. And the day after that, and the day after that, and I kept it up until there was no longer any question of our riding home with each other.

Lidewij kissed the hand she was holding.

Hey, kid, she said. Where are you now?

I knew she meant Tijn. Tijn. And me. And Felix, too, I believe. And she must have been thinking the same thing as me: the story's not over yet. There is something else to come.

Creator was fighting an inexplicable rage — at least, that was what I thought I could see.

He turned his strangely angry expression away from Lidewij and sought me out with his eyes as if I could help him. Me: a piece of linen, some paint, four stretchers, and two crossbars.

Creator had pulled his hand away from Lidewij's.

I did look at Tijn when he was standing in front of me. Very quickly. Almost without looking, I saw very well, very clearly, that — down there — he had nothing. Nothing more than … a kind of nubble. As if half of the head of a baby's penis had been glued to the middle of his groin. And no testicles. A fingertip and nothing else — do you understand?

The sun had disappeared. The birch trunks had turned white again in the receding light.

At the word nubble, Lidewij's gaze had wandered back to my middle.

So that's why you did him like that, she said quietly.

Her hand moved imperceptibly towards me.

God, he must have loved you so much, Lidewij said, without taking her eyes off me. To want you to see him. He must have felt so safe with you.

Creator didn't answer.

Lidewij had stood up and was looking at me from straight ahead. Staring at my face. It was as if she was addressing me directly.

Fearless Fly, she said.

Specht is coming Saturday, Creator said. To pick him up.

And Lidewij said — as if it were the most logical mental leap she could make — that, as far as she was concerned, she was now perfectly certain. We're pregnant.

And she said, I never knew I could love you so terribly much, darling Felix.

As they walked out of the studio and into the house, I felt like throwing myself from the easel, tilting forwards and landing flat on the cold sunroom floor — that was how unprotected and abandoned I suddenly felt.

I wanted to shout out, What happened to Tijn?

What becomes of them? What happens to people who are no longer safe?

And I thought, Who am I? Who am I if I am Singer?

You can't let me go, Creator, not like this — not before I find out who I am. You can't dispatch me this naked. Even if he calls himself my father, the man who is coming for me on Saturday, you can't give me to him like this.

The next morning, there was a phone call from a man with a Rotterdam accent — that, at least, is what Creator told Lidewij afterwards — who had rung to pass on a message from Valery that, unfortunately, it would not be possible to pick up the painting
you have done on commission
on the agreed Saturday. Before Creator had a chance to ask why not, the voice explained that all would be clear in due course. Crystal clear.

Somehow or other, Creator had the impression he was talking to one of the shaven-headed men from the four-wheel drive.

Clear? he asked. Is something unclear?

Don't go worrying yourself, Mr Vincent. The balance will be paid in full as soon as the portrait has been picked up.

Creator hesitated. And when will that be?

Silence fell on the other end of the line. The voice seemed to be consulting with someone else, a woman, but there was mainly soughing, as if he was calling from a windy mountaintop or a yacht on the water.

We trust that you have fully kept your side of the agreement, the man said, in a tone that suggested he was answering Creator's question.

To the best of my ability, Creator replied, assuming the man was talking about the painting itself. But, he said, only Valery can know whether it's really Singer.

Singer?

A rustling silence fell in which Creator — how could it be otherwise? — was struck by a bolt of panic. He had promised not to speak to a soul about the commission … and now he had blurted Singer's name out to a complete stranger.

Inadvertently his eyes went to the table drawer where he had stored away the Polaroid.

Suddenly the voice sounded again, and it was as if they had been carrying on a completely different conversation in the meantime.

It would be best if you prepared the painting for transportation. Packed up completely, I mean. Then we can pick it up at any time. The way things are looking now, it is extremely uncertain whether Mr Valery will be able to come in person. We will contact you the moment one of our people is in the neighbourhood.

The conversation ended without any form of goodbye, but not before the voice had said that it would be in
everyone's best interest
if Creator stuck to the agreement. To the letter.

When no one showed up on Holy Saturday, Creator wrapped me in popping paper. That's what he calls the plastic packaging material with cent-sized bubbles he uses to pack his pictures. But he couldn't bring himself to tape me up. The idea of handing Singer over not to Specht but to
one of his people
was unbearable, not just for me, but — and I was sure of this — for Creator, too.

He seemed restless and more determined than ever to adhere strictly to the terms of the agreement. I inferred this from the fact that he opened the drawer with the cheque and got out the Polaroid that he, despite the agreement, had taken of me just before Lidewij's return from skiing. He looked at it for a moment, as if it showed him something he couldn't see by looking at me, then wedged it in between my bottom stretcher and the back of my canvas. I had actually forgotten about it, the Polaroid, but now found it amusing to think that I existed a second time, wedged between canvas and stretcher, greatly reduced in size and as inaccessible to me as the far side of the moon. But still, I now existed twice, definitely.

Although I was standing with my back against a wall, the popping paper meant that all I saw for the next few months was the odd shadowy figure when someone came close in the daylight. Even listening was too much of a strain. More than anything else, my condition was one of drowsiness. In the daytime, I heard muffled sounds from the sittings, which continued uninterrupted through spring and summer. The only thing I could tell from the voices was whether the sitter was a man or a woman, and it was only towards the end of the afternoon, getting on for six, that I was able to judge from the intensity of the light whether or not the day had been sunny. Summer must have come, but the only thing I noticed was the lengthening of the days.
You have a rare skill: painting someone to life
. After the first month or two — I suspect from early June — an exceptionally long period of summery weather must have begun, because the heat became unbearable, especially after six when the sunlight started creeping slowly but surely towards me.

After the telephone conversation with the voice, Creator had applied a coat of retouching varnish and then, almost before it had dried, wrapped me up. Unsigned. I was very aware of that. It was something I had fantasised about a lot, especially the glory of it — the moment in which he would stride to my left side, from my perspective of course, to add his initials at the very bottom, in what I suspected would be a fold in the silky, pale-yellow sheet that Singer was lying on: F. V.

I had seen him do it several times on the ninety by seventies, and I admit that each time I had secretly thought, When I'm finished, he'll add more than just his initials; he'll write his name in full because, more than the others, I am the
one
thing he has dreamt of making. I am the one work in which Creator has surpassed himself — just as Specht said during that first conversation.
I realise full well that I am asking you to do something you have never done before
. These and other sentences Specht had said ran through my mind in those first weeks of my standing wrapped up to one side.
You have a rare skill: painting someone to life
. But after a while my thoughts began to die, like burnt-out embers in a fireplace. Even thoughts about the irony of my fate died — that I, who had begun as white as snow in the blackest depths of a roll and had become a dead boy, inspired by the memory of a guilty childhood memory, was again invisible, wrapped in a blind shroud, despite being bathed from wedge to wedge in the most viviparous light. Sure, I managed to prolong my consciousness for a few days by choosing colourful words like that for the few things that did run through my mind — but eventually I drowsed off on a cloud of unknowing.

To be seen is to be. I had heard Creator say that once, I think during a sitting with Cindy. I found it an arrogant thought and unphilosophical to boot — does a peacock exist more than an earthworm? — but somehow it now seemed truer to me than ever. I had existed inasmuch as Creator worked on me, and inasmuch as Lidewij was assuring herself of me. Now I started forgetting I even existed. No one had told me what an incredibly easy or smooth process that is. I tried with all my might to think about what Creator and Lidewij saw before them when they remembered me — thinking I might somehow still exist if others thought of me — but I simply couldn't imagine what they saw when they thought of me. I didn't see Tijn, I didn't see Singer, and I definitely didn't see the unborn child that had been conceived after Lidewij and Creator had stared at me with such incomprehensible delight. I didn't have the faintest notion, and my notions grew fainter and fainter.

Creator had kept to the agreement and had not shown me to a soul. My existence had been reduced to virtually nothing.

It was only last week that I woke with a start because I was being moved. For some as yet unknown reason, Creator was lifting me up on one side — I recognised his voice and Lidewij's, who was holding me on the other side. They were close enough for me to more or less understand what they were saying. Creator steered me across the studio to the cold wall, which they leant me against at a less sharp angle, so that my popping paper sagged a little and I was able to make out more of the conversation in the studio. From the words they were speaking, I gathered that Lidewij needed to be careful — easy does it, watch your back — from which I concluded not only that she was still pregnant but also, and more importantly, that there was someone else in the studio. Not another person, but another canvas. The newcomer wasn't a ninety by seventy; he had to be something bigger. I began to suspect what was going on when I heard Lidewij say that it was only now, seeing it near me, that she realised how huge it really was.