The Painting on Auerperg's Wall

by Erika Rummel

  She opened her laptop and began typing an email: “Dear David, are you still in Vienna? Are you wondering about the woman you saw at the Dorotheum? You may have guessed it by now. Laura has an identical twin: me. My name is Cereta. The woman you visited in the hospital and with whom you read Brecht was me, impersonating Laura.”

  She wasn’t sure how to go on. David was the only one at hand — if he was still in Vienna — the only one to appreciate her new self. But perhaps he wasn’t the right man to start with. Her hand hovered over “cancel” and moved on to “save draft.” I’ll decide later, she thought. First, she needed to figure out, was David the right foil for her new self? He was pleasant. But what if mild pleasure was all he could give her? No, she thought, I want desire to run through my body and throb in my head. I haven’t had enough passion in my life. And now that I’m starting anew, why settle for mild pleasure? I should run risks, find someone core-shaking. Perhaps David is too tame for me, too gentle, too bookish. I need someone wild to start life over with, someone to add momentum to the next phase of my life.

  In the glow of the Viennese job offer, California was beginning to pale. The West Coast was no longer golden, and David moved to the periphery, a possibility if other things didn’t work out.

  She checked her watch. I’ll make a decision later, after talking to Zoltan, she thought, and picked up the phone again.

  V. ZOLTAN

  IN NANCY’S BACKYARD, Zoltan looked at the caller ID. Cereta. He picked up the phone. “Yes” he said with an extra breath, charging his voice with the energy needed to get through a conversation he feared would be difficult.

  “Zoltan,” she said and paused as if she wanted to make sure she was talking to the right person. “About the painting…”

  “How did the bidding go?” he said. He could hear the waver of bad conscience in his voice. Could she hear it too? Suddenly, he felt tired of playing games to keep everyone happy. It was a zero-sum equation. There was only so much happiness to go around. If you gave it to one person, you took it away from another.

  “There was no bidding,” Cereta said. “It turns out the painting is a copy. The people at the Dorotheum asked me to withdraw it from sale. If we want to go ahead, the painting will have to be relisted in their catalogue as a copy, in which case it won’t fetch much. A few hundred dollars, perhaps.”

  She is keeping her temper under control, he thought. She doesn’t sound angry. Maybe she doesn’t care, and it’s as I thought: Livia is behind the whole thing. Cereta only does what Livia tells her to do.

  “It’s a copy!” he said, trying to sound surprised. “Maybe that’s what Eva meant when she told me she got less money from Leo than expected. Perhaps he had doubts about the authenticity of the painting as well.”

  “Could be.”

  She still didn’t sound angry.

  “I guess we’ll never know,” Zoltan said carefully.

  There was a pause. Then she said: “I put the painting back where it was, above Opa Auerperg’s desk. It makes no sense selling it in the circumstances.”

  He didn’t know what to make of Cereta’s calmness. He had expected fireworks, furious explosions.

  “That’s the bad news,” she said. “The good news is that I got a job offer as an event organizer in Vienna.”

  “Congratulations,” he said. So that’s what took the sting out of the bad news. A job offer. “I’m sure you’ll make a go of it. As far as the Liebermann is concerned, I agree with you. No sense in putting it on the market if it’s a copy.” He felt relief that his gamble had paid off. “To tell you the truth,” he said. “I’m glad this whole business is over. It was a hassle.”

  “It may be over for you and me,” she said. “But I don’t know about anya. She won’t let go. She has made it her mission to set the record straight, whatever the record is in her head.”

  “She’ll want to carry on, I know.” He dreaded talking to Livia about the painting. “I’ll let you break the news to her,” he said, knowing that it was a cowardly thing to do, but Livia wouldn’t expect anything else from him. She knew he was a coward. She had told him so.

  “I told her already,” Cereta said. “I phoned her before I phoned you.”

  “And?”

  “She said she’d go back to writing her poems.”

  She won’t let it go, he thought.

  “Say hello to David from me,” Cereta said. “I’m thinking of writing him an email explaining….”

  “Leave him alone, Cereta.”

  She laughed. It came over as a raw, threadbare sound. “Thanks for the advice, Zoltan. I’ll take it into consideration, but from now on I’ll make my own decisions.”

  “Has anyone ever kept you from making your own mistakes?” he said.

  “No,” she said. “Unfortunately not. You let me stay with anya. You should have taken me along to California.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “You have a heroic streak. You needed to stay with anya. You had to prove something, no?”

  “I cut off my nose to spite my face. Is that the correct idiom?”

  “It is,” he said. And you enjoyed your gesture of defiance and the unbelieving look on our faces, he thought. But he didn’t say that aloud. “Alright then. Talk to you later.”

  She said goodbye, allowing him to escape. That’s the feeling he had. She let him off the hook.

  He tucked the phone into his back pocket and did a synopsis. Liebermann back above Leo’s desk. Livia knows. More poems. Cereta has job offer. His need to recap a conversation was turning into a compulsion. I’ll have to work on that, he thought. What’s the purpose? To wind up. Wind up what? Cereta’s call. But in a way Vienna was still on the line. A line stretching back to 1956, he thought, memories without an “end conversation” button.

  He remembered Leo Auerperg picking him up at the refugee centre in Vienna and taking him home. Leo, he thought, with his lean commanding face, raw dents beside his nose when he took off his glasses and wiped them with a monogrammed handkerchief. His sharp appraising eyes took me in and held me fast.

  Leo drove a Mercedes. So that’s the type of car rich people own, I thought when he picked me up. And, as we drove into the city centre: so that’s what a Western city looks like, with a lot of traffic, late-model cars, store windows lit up and displaying an abundance of goods, well-dressed shoppers. There was a look of prosperity everywhere. When we got to the Herrengasse, I thought: So that’s where rich people live. And in Leo’s apartment when I saw the Liebermann and recognized it from Eva’s description: So that’s the painting she sold to Leo. What was I feeling at that moment, looking at a painting that used to belong to my parents? I must have felt something, but I didn’t know what to call it. I could only store up what I saw for later analysis. I was already doing the compulsory recap, a synopsis of my impressions: Mercedes, city centre, Herrengasse, Liebermann painting.

  Leo asked me about Eva. I told him she had died the day I fled Budapest. He didn’t say much. Sorry to hear it. Some polite phrase like that. He didn’t know she had cancer. His own wife had died of breast cancer, he said, but there was no empathy in his voice. He spoke coldly, as if he took only an academic interest in death. Then he asked me a series of precise, factual questions. Was I with Eva when she died? Was she conscious when I saw her last? Was she talking? I would have expected him to ask, Did she suffer a great deal? But then Eva hadn’t talked about suffering either. She talked about dying, and that her death might come too soon, before my eighteenth birthday. She was ready to die, but she fretted about a public guardian taking control of my life if I was a minor at the time of her death. What’s the law in Austria? I asked Leo. Do I need a guardian? I’m almost eighteen. My birthday is in May. I’ll look into it, he said. I was worried in case the Communists returned to power and demanded the repatriation of minors. Not to worry, he said. By the time the diplomatic haggling
is over, you’ll no longer be a minor. Then he came back to Eva again. Was that the last thing we talked about, the business of the public guardian? She mentioned your name, I said. Did she ever tell you about the night when your mother was arrested? he asked. What was he after? Gratitude? Admiration? Eva told me about that night many times, I said, but not at the hospital, when she was dying. She was too weak to say more than a few words. She said your name. And Livia’s. I think she was worried about her. That I would stop the support payments? he asked. I don’t know, I said. That Livia would be lonely, maybe. And you? he said. Will you be lonely here without friends? I’ll miss Livia, I said. I didn’t know how to tell him that I was in love with her, that I needed her, but he seemed to understand. I’ll see what I can do about bringing her to Vienna, he said. I asked her to come with me, I said, but she wanted to stay, to be part of the revolution, and she couldn’t do any writing in Vienna, she said, surrounded by German sounds. She is a poet, you know. A poet? he said. Ah, yes. She sent me a poem once, in Hungarian. I had it translated by someone here at the university, but I’m afraid it was rather obscure. I wish I could ask her about its meaning.

  Livia’s bleak and impenetrable poems.

  ZOLTAN POURED THE REST of the Dom Pérignon into his glass and watched a Coast Guard helicopter loop inland, hover noisily and sweep back out into the bay. In the pool house, he could see the Liebermann resting against the back of the sofa. So that’s done, he thought. A birthday present for Nancy, to level the playing field, because he couldn’t go on taking her money, letting her pay for things like the Nile cruise. He wasn’t sure why Nancy spent money on him, what she wanted to buy: pleasure, company, love? He was perfectly willing to give them to her free of charge, but apparently they all involved places he couldn’t afford. Nancy wanted her life gilded. She was happy only in a beautiful world made possible by the money she had inherited, the combined fortunes of the Goodwell and Auerperg families.

  Poverty must be hard on lovers of beauty, he thought. Unless they are relentless minimalists like Livia, who needed no tokens of existence, believed in the pristine beauty of absence, the austere grandeur of nothing, the divine beauty of plain ugliness.

  Lovers of conventional beauty who lacked the means of living in a beautiful world had to do the gilding in their heads. At least that’s how it was, he thought, before Hollywood took on the task of reconfiguring life for the needy, providing them with sweet love, passionate sex, action, suspense, and laughter, supplying whatever they needed, on screen, with the oral satisfaction of popcorn in a hushed room with the lights dimmed to keep the real world at bay. All that was required now was a mind receptive to fantasy. Nancy was receptive to fantasy, luckily, and she had Zoltan, stagehand extraordinaire, upping the reality quotient of her dreams, because sharing your dreams with a sympathetic listener makes them more real.

  The problem was that Nancy wanted more from him than a casual sharing of dreams. She wanted a formal arrangement: vows, rings, witnesses, signed registers, a change of name. So far, Zoltan had balked at marriage. He didn’t mean that marriage was out of the question. He could be persuaded to go ahead and indulge Nancy.But first he needed to clarify his own feelings, and that’s just what he couldn’t do, not even if he recapped their conversations, or pretended that the Nancy/Zoltan relationship was a case he had taken on as a therapist, not even if he applied the relevant factors into the object relations theory. Psychology failed to provide an answer to Zoltan’s most urgent question: Did he love Nancy?

  Throughout his childhood, this deficiency — his lack of emotional intelligence — had gone undetected and undiagnosed. It wasn’t obvious like nail-biting, or annoying like a facial tick, or boorish like reaching down to your crotch and rearranging your balls. It was an inconspicuous problem. No one ever pointed it out to Zoltan, no one questioned him about it. On the contrary, people thought he was cool. They admired his sang-froid, his nonchalance, his black humour.

  He first became aware of his blind spot as a teenager. Experiences didn’t register until someone played them back to him. It wasn’t a memory problem. He had no difficulty recalling faces, names, dates, events, but things just stayed things. They signified nothing. They didn’t generate love or hate, didn’t console or frighten him. His experiences were like the tiles of a Scrabble game. Someone had to assemble them for him and turn them into words: love, hate, desire, aversion, fear. It was as if he lacked the enzyme necessary to digest life, to boil it down to emotions. It wasn’t a lack of empathy either. Other people’s experiences weren’t a problem. He understood very well what his patients felt, for example. And he envied them. They had in excess what he lacked. They felt their emotions keenly.

  Zoltan needed someone like Livia, who could read a person’s eyes. She was the only one who understood his predicament. He remained her patient for years, trusted her to explain the inexplicable to him. She was his analyst until she crossed the line from inspiration to madness.

  Livia had noticed his blind spot at once and confronted him with his lack of understanding when they met at youth camp in the summer of ’54 — youth camp, that great initiative of the Communist regime, ostensibly all about health and hygiene, an ingenious way of getting young people to interact and betray their non-regulation, non-Communist thoughts, or just a way to discipline their bodies until they were too exhausted to think. That’s where he met Livia or rather found her again.

  They had met before, when he was twelve and his aunt took him to visit the Orbans, Livia’s foster family. Until Eva took him along, “spending an afternoon with the Orbans” was a phrase without content, words with a vague association, something women did privately, like buying underwear or having their hair dyed. The Orbans stayed on the periphery of Zoltan’s awareness, although something in Eva’s voice when she spoke of them, a glassy, skeletal quality caught his attention and suggested that there was a hidden meaning to those “afternoons with the Orbans.” Eva visited them once a month. It was a charitable errand, Zoltan concluded, because she always took gifts, and perhaps he was a gift too the time she took him along as an afternoon companion for Livia, a playmate, someone on offer. He remembered feeling uneasy, or that’s what Livia told him when they met again at camp. You were uneasy, she said, when you came to visit. Eva had had her first intimation of mortality, had been diagnosed with cancer and felt vulnerable. She was afraid of death, Livia said, and you sensed that.You thought she was lining you up with a foster family. You were afraid your aunt was going to leave you behind and you would have to stay with the Orbans.

  That is how it began, Zoltan thought, with Livia telling him what he felt, and as soon as the words were out of her mouth, those feelings suddenly came up from his core, and he became conscious of them. Livia was a year younger than he. How could she be so wise? They had sneaked out of their tents at night and met by the edge of the water. A wind had blown up. The waves travelled across the dark water, white crested, fast moving as if they were carrying an urgent message. Or perhaps the urgency was inside Zoltan’s head. He wasn’t in the mood for reminiscences. He was there for the present, for Livia, her lips, her breasts, the nipples visible under her T-shirt, which was imprinted with the slogan Mens sana in corpore sano, A Healthy Mind In A Healthy Body. All he wanted was to feel her healthy body, thin with wiry strength. He had to satisfy the animal before he could ascend to the anima and drift into memories. She was there by the dock for the same thing, to slake her thirst, to cool the fever. She led him along the narrow, pebbled beach into the darkness of the pine forest. There was no coyness or pretense about her. She walked ahead purposefully, knowing exactly what she wanted, what he wanted, an expert in intimate knowledge even then, a genius at reading emotion.

  When Livia told Zoltan about himself, about what he had felt that time when they first met at the Orbans, her description was quiet, systematic, intricately detailed, like her love-making later on. Don’t you remember, she said and repeated to him what he s
aid that afternoon at the Orbans, and what she herself said in reply, and what they did when they were alone, on the balcony. He asked her a lot of questions, she said, questions she too had asked her foster parents: Why was Eva visiting so often? Was she a friend, a relative? They compared the answers they got. They differed. A distant relative, Eva told Zoltan. A friend, the Orbans told Livia. Clearly one party was lying. You have no relatives, the Orbans told her. You were a foundling.

  A foundling like Moses in the basket, hidden in the reeds, Livia said to Zoltan. She laughed when she said it. “Foundling” was such an old-fashioned word, he thought. It belonged in a holy book or a fairy tale, but it suited Livia, who seemed to him a mythical creature with the power of extrasensory perception.

  “So who found you?” he asked.

  “Eva. On the steps of a shuttered house pocked by grenades, a wartime ruin, where someone had left me bundled up in a blanket. Eva took me to the foster agency. Later, she came to visit the Orbans, out of a bad conscience.”

  “Why did she have a bad conscience?”

  “Because she had not kept me herself.”

  Livia had a perfect ear for emotions. She needed to hear the tune only once to play it back without a single mistake, fingering all the right keys. That’s why Eva kept visiting, Livia said. She felt guilty about giving me away. She felt guilty enough, Livia said, to find me a sponsor in Austria, a friend of hers, Leo Auerperg, who pays the Orbans a monthly stipend or salary or something. I am supposed to get a lump sum from him when I turn eighteen, she said, to set me up in life. The Orbans don’t know what to make of that. They are so ignorant, so dull. That’s why they treat me the way they do, she said. That’s why they keep their distance from me because they know I’ll be gone the day I turn eighteen and I won’t look back. They’ll never be my parents in any sense, I’m too different from them. They can’t figure me out, so they keep their distance from me.