by Nell Zink
“In general, I never walk. Kierkegaard either, or, you know it? Either I never walk and everyone knows I am old, or I walk and everyone knows I am old.”
The humid air seemed to be staining the marble a cool shade of electric blue, and the Israeli had no urge to enter the cathedral. He sat down next to the German. There was scattered applause from the church, then a monumental synthesizer chord that rose to a muffled wailing. “Let’s go,” Ingo said. They both stood up.
The church door opened and a woman of about fifty-three emerged. She stood facing them, wearing high heels, dark tights, and a short red overcoat, and said clearly, in English, “It’s unbearable. It’s awful. Don’t go in there.”
“We do not plan to do this. We only rest a short while on the veranda,” said Ingo. He stopped leaning on his walking stick and stood precariously upright. With great graciousness, he removed a cigarette case from his inside breast pocket and added, “Pleased to meet you. Cigarette?”
She waved off the cigarette and said, “The guy is so hairy. Jesus Christ. He looks like some kind of German left-wing nudist from the eighties. I always thought that was him in his other videos. It must have been a model. Good God.”
“I am German left-wing nudist in the eighties,” Ingo said. “I had long hair and a beard, but no more.”
“Ingo is right,” Eyal elucidated. “Body hair resists cultivation.”
“You don’t look that old,” the woman said to Ingo.
Ingo leaned on his cane and looked at the ground. His feet were clearly visible. “I never eat,” he explained. “I live for my art, the art of drinking well.”
“Ingo is a brilliant young prodigy, preparing to do his best work,” Eyal added. “Until now he has been overrated. One sees this only in retrospect, as there are no adjectives remaining to describe what he will soon accomplish.”
The woman was silent. “Do you need a ride somewhere?” she asked finally. “My car is in the garage right under here.” She pointed down at the cobblestones.
Eyal expressed sincere gratitude, and several minutes later, they were rolling quietly up the Via Senese in a red BMW.
She was from Bowling Green, Ohio, and her name was Amy. She knew the villa well and said she never missed an art opening there. She said she had studied art and got stuck in Florence because of a guy and got married and ended up as a real estate agent. Ingo compelled her to reveal that she was divorced. She assured them that she would attend the opening of the group exhibition at the villa on the coming Friday.
When Eyal came downstairs to the opening, Amy was already deep in conversation with David. Ingo was sitting on a high couch upholstered in silk, drinking coffee, and staring at her. A string quartet was playing something that could have been Franck or Ravel, very loudly, and there was an overwhelming odor of vomit. He turned around and went back up the stairs.
David was telling Amy that he would rather like to rent a small apartment somewhere other than the villa—perhaps something in a hip neighborhood with many attractive single women. She said, “I know something perfect for you. There’s this crazy retired sea captain with an apartment near the Boboli Gardens that I’m trying to sublet furnished month to month, but it’s just impossible because he was a compulsive collector. The place is totally jam-packed with junk, but his daughter doesn’t want me getting rid of any of it to make space, because he’s still alive. He’s in a nursing home, and when he gets out, he’s going to want things just the way they were. But the home is so expensive that she wants to rent the place out. It’s basically a beautiful apartment, and really cheap, for what it is.”
David was intrigued. “Boboli, very nice. Is there hot water?”
Upstairs, the lesbian was sitting cross-legged on her bed and Eyal was watching her from an armchair. “Jenny, I revere you,” he said.
“Hmm,” she replied. “Did I ever tell you why I am in Florence?” she asked. “Truly stupid story. We have family anecdote. My great-grandmother, princess from Voronezh, has small bronze copy of David of Donatello in her bedroom. She goes to Baden-Baden and tells another princess, from Spain, that this statue is not copy or souvenir but original of Donatello and worth money. When she gets home, her statue is stolen away, and her parents tell her it is true statue of Donatello. Her stupid boast is true. My cousins in Paris are always looking for this statue, but it never comes to the market. It is symbol of my family.”
“How is that?”
“A lie. What part of this story is the lie? It is simply not Donatello. It is plaster. Or it is Donatello, they wait until she is on holiday, then they sell it. Probably there is no statue. Probably it is teapot of Meissen, maid breaks it, and then it becomes teapot of Sèvres, then vase, then statue, and maid becomes princess of Spain. And is my great-grandmother truly a princess?”
“You are a radical critic.”
“I am radical.” She narrowed her eyes and leaned back on her arms. “Now tell me, Israeli writer, what you are doing in Florence.”
“I’m not sure,” he said. “I was fully intending to write a novel about Siberia in 1942, but something about you makes me think I should write a tale of hopeless unrequited love.”
She seemed pleased. Girls like flattery, he thought. He was getting ready to pour it on when she said, “I am not true lesbian. I am married to impotent billionaire.”
David had rented the retired sea captain’s apartment without showing any particular signs of excitement. It had been difficult. Now he removed a framed picture from the wall, slit open the back with a pocketknife, held the paper up in the dim sunlight, and squinted at it through a jeweler’s loupe. It was a fantastically precise small gouache of a man receiving mild discipline from a naked lady in black stockings that came up just over the knee, presumably executed by Félicien Rops. In a broad, flat drawer of the kitchen table between sheets of wax paper were four unknown pastels by Odilon Redon, and framed on the wall facing the bed was a letter from Goethe to Franz Schubert.
“Dear Mr. Schubert,” one might have paraphrased it, “I received your settings of my poems and found them to be the reprehensible, abysmal, heinous moltings and preenings of a would-be peacock at the expense of literary jewels which have done nothing to deserve abuse of any kind. For your information, a song should put the text first and foremost. Melodies should be simple, with two or maybe three notes at the absolute outside, with no modulations and not too high or too low so that anybody can sing them and so everybody understands every word in real time as it is declaimed without having to read along. But my views on song are well known, so I’m surprised you had the gall to defy them, and frankly shocked at your effrontery in sending me the rotten, dangling fruits of your entirely superfluous labors. Also, may you rot in hell for leaving out verses. I wrote them all for a reason, and you can bet your buttons it wasn’t so bootlicking wannabes like you could decide that only the first and last verses are keepers. But it would be churlish of me,” etc.
Understandably, David had visions of a professional breakthrough. No longer will I scrape lint in an echoing biscuit tin from faded relics of the homely dead, miraculous as its survival might be, he said to himself. In truth, beauty is an absolute, and these works of Redon are eons advanced beyond—go on, dare to say it out loud, he thought: Redon leaves art in the dirt. He laughed bitterly, drunk with excitement.
The Rops interested him only slightly. He had seen many such drawings; it was pretty generic, as Ropses go. The letter from Goethe was certainly worth some money to a library somewhere. But he needed to bring home some lab equipment somehow, to authenticate the Redons. He resolved not to say anything to Amy, then not to anyone, and suddenly he was gripped by fear: Of course the daughter knows these things are here, and she will sell them all. But on the other hand she can’t possibly know, or she wouldn’t rent them to a penniless art historian. He walked slowly around the apartment, examining things, picking them up, putting them down, and musing vaguely. The beer cans displayed in the china cabinet were clearly Amer
ican, 1980s. The plastic models of songbirds on the bottom shelf had been painted and varnished with great care. The top of the buffet was taken up with collections, sorted by color, of glass marbles and cocktail stirrers. He opened the buffet’s wooden doors and saw a perfectly preserved wooden panel by the Master of the Three-Quarter Figures depicting, in meticulous perfection of line and radiant color, girls playing virginals, contrabass, and viole bastarde. He sighed. He had found the Redons by accident, just looking for a fork. He suspected that if he searched the apartment systematically, he might find all sorts of things.
He called Amy and said, “I want to tell you only that the place here is also full of nice art, not only junk. So be careful that the owner does not ask for a company to come and take away rummage. Even if the old man is dead. I am an art historian, I will help you.”
She scoffed. “If you mean the Depression glass candy dish, it’s the last of eight or ten they had in there. The daughter’s had to sell off some stuff. Don’t be surprised if there’s a little something missing every time you come home from work. This home they’ve got him in is pricey. But trust me, with that much junk you’ll never notice.”
“She comes in while I am at work?”
“She’s the landlady, she’s got a key.”
David unzipped his portfolio and tucked the Redons inside very gingerly. He was not going to bring home lab equipment for the daughter to see; he would take them along to work. As a sort of deliberate afterthought, saying to himself that it didn’t really count, he put the Rops and the letter from Goethe, still in their frames, in a plastic sack from the grocery store. The next morning before going to the containers to do the molecular analysis that would bring him international renown, he made a few high-quality color copies at a copy shop.
It was late. Ingo and Eyal were drinking brandy in the library after dinner.
Eyal said, “I have not written since I arrived. Everything is too interesting for me, and I have no wish to concentrate. I am terminally distracted.”
“Often a great genius never succeeds to write one single word,” Ingo replied.
“You apply for a fellowship and win, and always it is to live the lifestyle of a young student with artistic types in some artist colony where everyone is bored and randy, or it is a university, with thousands of women all twenty-one. Only if you are already very famous, then you get the really big cash prize, so you can stay at home with your wife to write out of loneliness.”
“These young women, I don’t give a fuck about them anymore, as they say. Or is it the opposite? I have become invisible.”
“I looked you up in the Internet,” Eyal said. “You published five novels before you were thirty. And me, one novel with thirty-seven. You are industrious and devoted, and I am not.” Ingo demurred, but Eyal insisted. “You know Price’s law describing the distribution of success in the natural sciences? In a field of scientists numbering n, half the papers will be published by the square root of n. You have twenty-five scientists doing work on a subject; five of them will publish half the papers. One hundred, then only ten. But in science there is a big difference to literature, in theory. A scientist writes many papers he has never seen. His admirers invite him to add his name, so a top physicist publishes a word every two seconds, twenty-four hours a day his entire life. Now compare a composer. Bach is discovered after his death, and they find he has written twenty pages of music every day from birth. Isn’t this a little bit like the True Cross? Tens of thousands of little bits of the True Cross, enough to make a good-sized forest?”
“Eyal, my dear, I must disappoint you. I wrote my novels myself, even when I was a hippie and totally crazy after women. And Bach is truly a great genius.”
“Sorry, that was not my intention. I intend to apply Price’s law to myself alone. That is, if there is only one writer working on a certain aspect of literature, he will publish in his lifetime a grand total of one-half of one book.”
“Is this Price’s law true for literature? I doubt it.”
“No, strangely enough. For literature, the curve is even more hyperbolic than for composers and painters. Top famous writers hundreds of years ago, they have an output that is completely unbelievable. Of course, they all dictate to some amanuensis, some fan scribbles down their plays during the performance, students are taking shorthand in the lectures. They never write themselves. Some are blind. They can’t type. But no problem, they have secretaries. Even now. Borges is blind. Nabokov also is dictating to his wife.”
“What’s your point?”
“Maybe this thing that I attempt, this lonely sitting at my computer staring at the metaphor of blank paper, is a perversion born of poverty and isolation. Before, only women write this way, between housekeeping duties, secretly, in silence, for a maximum two, maybe three novels in a lifetime.” He sighed heavily.
“You are breaking my heart, Eyal. What do you want me to do? Invite you to live in a villa in Florence, so you have time to write? I have worked hard in my life, always writing every morning, drinking every afternoon.”
“Not only women, perhaps also the insane and prisoners. Your Hölderlin—”
They were interrupted by the entrance of David. He showed Ingo a copy of the letter from Goethe to Schubert.
Ingo said, “Yes, very interesting. This letter is well known.” He was confused by the fact that Goethe’s views on song really are well known, and it is also well known that Schubert sent him some songs at one point, neatly copied in his own hand. We know this because Goethe saved them. But he is not known to have replied to the young upstart in any way, so the letter was in fact priceless.
“Well, I find it and I just think I show it you. I know you admire the great heroes of our discredited German bourgeois culture.”
Ingo said apologetically to Eyal, “He laughs at me a little, but he is young. Everyone with a love for art, regardless of politics, must adore Goethe and Schubert. How not to admire Goethe? His language, impossible to imitate, impossible to translate. And Schubert, the antinomies of rhythm and song, ultimate joy and ultimate tragedy walking together hand in hand! Ah, Schubert is divine! And you must know Goethe’s translation of Hafez, West-östlicher Divan?”
“There is an orchestra in Ramallah of Daniel Barenboim’s by this name,” Eyal said. “The Brit Kipling says, ‘East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.’ Probably Goethe forgets Mesopotamia is the start of Western civilization, not Eastern. But this way of thinking is how they make now Jewish studies section of Oriental studies in universities. Germany is a Celtic forest outlying district of Lapland that must fight to resist the foreign threat of monotheism coming from Jews and Turks and Voltaire and so on, such as Hafez. Goethe’s literary output was very big, wasn’t it? His secretary is always taking notes. Isn’t it true that the most famous aphorisms of Goethe are all from the memoirs of his secretary, Herr Eckermann?”
“Not really. He wrote hundreds—”
“I can see him now, extruding great works like a sausage grinder in a nonstop monologue from day to night. Probably he spends his whole life drinking only espresso straight from the thermos.” Ingo tapped the floor with his cane. David laughed nervously. “I’m drunk, I think I’ll go to bed,” Eyal added.
“I’m never drunk,” Ingo replied, pouring himself another glass of brandy.
Eyal went upstairs to David’s old room. It had been cleaned and tidied in preparation for the next tenant. Eyal’s own room was a bit of a mess, with dirty laundry on the chairs. He lay down on the white coverlet with his shoes on, then sat up and took them off. They dropped to the floor with a thud. Jenny appeared in the doorway.
“But soft, what light in yonder doorway breaks,” he said. “It is the east, and Jenny is the sun.”
“As you like,” said Jenny. “I hear this clanging and think someone new has come to live in David’s room, but it’s only you.” She sat down next to him on the bed. “I miss David. He is only innocent man.”
“This
is because he has a very literal mind. He is a chemist. He thinks, Combine me, David, and a lesbian, this will produce no reaction whatsoever. The lesbian is inert, like the noble gases.”
“You are not a chemist.”
“Even if I were a chemist, I would not see you as a single element. Perhaps one of these rare diamonds possessing an odd color through impurities.” He put his arm around her. “Or inclusions, like the insects in amber. Don’t flatter yourself that I am a famous writer. In actuality, I am a zero. I work in public relations.”
“Fame is a matter of no interest whatsoever. My husband is film director who is worshipped by everyone. Big stars are kissing my ass.”
“Then I propose a deal with him,” said Eyal. “I sleep with his wife, and in return, he films a script, which I will write, to immortalize the affair for general delectation, starring all your ass-kissing stars.”
“That is difficult. To make any deal I must contact him, and now he does not know where I am. Soon I will go to him for money, but not yet. Also, you ignore what is central. Who would marry an impotent man?”
“A lesbian, maybe?”
“Wrong, wrong, wrong,” she said. “A bitch greedy for money. I will not last long in this poor place of stone cells with a kilometer to walk to the shower. Watch me, Israeli writer, I go now, and tomorrow, I am gone.”
“But I am your savior,” Eyal called, closing his eyes as she stood up and backed away.
“What? My savior?”
“I offer you redemption,” he said, opening his eyes. “And nothing more. What can I give you? I am poor and ugly, and I am entirely certain that I am impotent as we speak, if only for the alcohol. Listen to me, Jenny! If you abandon your husband for a rich and good-looking young man or for some ass-kissing star, the world will say you are a venal tramp and a whore! You will be defaced with base motives of lust and cupidity. But on the contrary, when I assist you in destroying your marriage, no one sees any motive other than the purest and most respectable hatred for your husband! They will think, What a monster that billionaire must be, if his Jenny leaves him for this miserable writer.”
