My brother’s eyes opened wide. Forget it, he said. The old man went to hell, he’s probably getting drunk somewhere in Thailand, he doesn’t care about us, he can eat shit.
2.
A long time after Dad disappeared I stood in the living room of my house, holding a kitchen knife and pointing it at my boyfriend.
He knocked the knife out of my hand, kicked it into a corner, lifted me up and threw me across the room; I landed on the cocktail table.
Glass and bottles exploded, shards flew everywhere, and our neighbors called the police. They came fifteen minutes later. I was covered in blood and my boyfriend was winding a rag around a bad cut on my ankle.
As they were trying to decide what they would do with us, one of them snooped around in the kitchen cupboards and found a stash of Ketamine that we were keeping for a friend of ours who was serving a short jail sentence. We were arrested.
My boyfriend was found guilty for various minor infractions but I was ordered by the judge to enroll in an alcohol treatment program and I was still sober a few months later. The social service agency offered me a referral to a psychologist at a discount and I met with the woman once a week. I would begin crying as soon as I entered the waiting room and the first visit I did little more than sob unintelligibly, blowing my nose in the tissues she offered up immediately and with great sympathy.
She was very interested in Dad, the clues, my brother, Mom, and I laid it all out, telling her everything that I could remember.
I drank practically every day ever since I was thirteen and did a lot of bad things. According to the psychologist I was, at the time of my arrest, in some kind of shock and lacked the will to live.
I felt I didn’t know anything or couldn’t do anything and had nothing to live for.
The psychologist asked me to think this over and come up with a list of things that I was good at, but nothing occurred to me.
Finally I told her that I would make a good hooker, I was good at getting men to feel that they were important.
She didn’t reply. She only scribbled in her little book and continued talking about Dad. She had Dad on the brain, it was as if she believed that in the end the answer to all my problems lay in thinking about why my father left.
Slowly but surely I got better and with the help of the psychologist I developed an interest in photography. She told me that my language was full of imagery, that I had a unique way of looking at the world, and she proposed that I get myself a camera. She was absolutely right, I have a keen eye for light and color.
My brother and I began communicating again, after years of having no contact whatsoever. He lived in Denmark, was married, had children, and worked as a web designer. He was the exact opposite of me, he did well in school, was the responsible sort and full of ambition.
After two years of sobriety he encouraged me to apply to a photography school in Copenhagen.
I was accepted and moved in with my brother and his family, went to school, and looked after my nephews. Mom came for more and more visits, and finally rented herself a small apartment near my brother’s house. We became a family again.
We never spoke about Dad. After all this time we still couldn’t bring up the subject. The man-sized hole between us three.
I was the one who found him. Our meeting was one of those unexplainable, chance events, just like the time my fingers rooted around a hollow in the wall when I was little and found something that he had left behind him. A word or a camel the size of a grain of rice.
The camel stood half buried in chewing gum under one of the kitchen chairs and I came across it when I was dragging a chair nearer to the table a whole five years after he’d disappeared.
I walked aimlessly down to the harbor to take some photographs. A large ship was unloading cargo containers, on one of them was a picture of a camel and the ship was marked as sailing out of Casablanca, Morocco.
I photographed the container and the ship without thinking back to the Moroccan box and rice-sized camel. Then I saw the men on the dock open the container and cover their noses.
I crept closer and smelled it too.
It was the odor of a space that had been undisturbed for many months. Dad’s smell. I knew it right away.
The sailors stood at the container hatch and retched. I went over to them, covered my mouth and nose with my hand, and walked right in. They didn’t try to stop me, they probably were too surprised to react.
The container was outfitted like a house, full of cans, food wrappers, empty bottles, leftovers.
On the walls hung photos of naked women and newspaper clippings from all over the world. The body lay on a mattress in the corner of the container, the features had sloughed off and maggots covered every inch.
The funeral was in Copenhagen. We wanted to put him into the earth as quickly as possible, where he could continue to rot in peace.
When I saw the coffin in the ground it triggered something in my mind and I remembered the day before he disappeared, when he asked me to come outside with him into the garden and dig a hole.
The event was so fuzzy in my memory I wasn’t sure if it even happened. Mom stood between my brother and me, she cried but we were dry-eyed, held her, didn’t hear a word the minister said to us.
A few days later we went to the container. Mom refused to come along. She didn’t want to hear anything about Dad and I understood that, in her heart, Mom hoped that he wasn’t dead, the idea that he chose to disappear like he did was still too much for her.
In the cardboard boxes set along the wall were souvenirs. They were wrapped carefully in newspaper and sawdust.
We examined a shrunken head, ivory from Africa, Incan statues from Peru, geisha dolls from Japan and all sorts of strange relics whose origins were a complete mystery to us. We didn’t know if Dad bought these things as investments or collected them simply for his own enjoyment.
Alongside the mattress lay a stack of notebooks. We looked through them and saw that they were crammed full of his attempts at writing fiction. They were numbered from one to one hundred, some chapters he had rewritten many times, always in those awkward block letters.
The novel was titled Freedom and dealt with a man who cut himself loose from a gray, monotonous existence and traveled the world. The narrative was unsophisticated and concerned a certain protagonist, a tall and well-built Icelander who was known only as “The Viking” in every port, always getting into trouble but saving himself with his cunning.
Amid these escapades were accounts of sexual conquests. Stories of Congolese black girls with big asses, submissive Asian beauties, promiscuous Inuit girls, and teenage Ukrainian prostitutes.
We read one of these episodes and my brother threw the notebook down and grabbed his forehead.
I can’t do this, he groaned and got himself a beer.
It was the middle of the night and we sat in the dining room. I kept on reading and with each word I was grateful that I didn’t know the man who wrote them. I could tell from the narrative that he had an unbridled love for himself.
A love that destroyed everyone who came near him, and made him oblivious to its consequences. Blind love.
I asked myself why that was. Whether something at his core might really be beautiful, something that others couldn’t perceive but that he alone knew he possessed. Maybe this hidden something gave him his ever-renewed justification to seek out love and admiration.
My brother buried his head in his arms on the table. I stroked the back of his neck to comfort him but then realized that he was laughing.
TRANSLATED FROM ICELANDIC BY CHRISTOPHER BURAWA
[HUNGARY]
LÁSZLÓ KRASZNAHORKAI
The Bill
FOR PALMA VECCHIO, AT VENICE
You sent to us and we knew what you wanted so we sent Lucrecia and Flora, sent Leonora, sent Elena, followed by Cornelia, then Diana, and so it went on from January through to June, then from October through to December we sent Ophelia, sent Veronica, sen
t Adriana, sent Danae, then Venus, and, little by little, every plump, sweet whore and courtesan on our books turned up at your place, the important thing, as for every male Venetian, being that their brows should be clear and high, that their shoulders be broad and round, chests wide and deep, that their bodies should open out the way they would under a deep-cut chemise, and that your eyes should be able to dive, as from a cliff, from their tempting faces down to their fresh, sweet, desirable breasts, just as you described to Federico who brought us your order and who then described it to us in turn, saying yes, just as before, just as wide and deep as the valley, the valley of Val Seriana, where you yourself come from, Federico grinned, because, according to him, that was what you were really after, that valley in Bergamo where you were born, and he went on to tell us, and the others confirmed this, that nothing else concerned you, that you weren’t in the least interested in the dark secrets of the flesh, only in waves of blonde hair, sparkling eyes, and the slow opening of the lips, in other words in the head, and then in the prospect that opens from the chin down and spreads below the broad round shoulders to the landscape of the scented body, not the rest, and that you were always asking them to slip their straps to below the shoulder because, you told them, you had, as you put it, to see the shoulder utterly bare but at the same time to see the lacy white edge of the chemise on its concave arc from shoulder to shoulder, that arc just above the painted nipples of the breasts, which reminded you of the horizon above your village in that deep valley, the valley of Seriana, though you didn’t make that perfectly clear to them at the time, that idea being something that occurred to Federico, and only after a while, though he didn’t explain it either, and, in the end, it proved impossible to discover why it was you painted so many not exactly fat but extraordinarily large women in your pictures, because you wouldn’t answer a single question about that, and were, in any case, known for your lack of patience, and how, impatient, you would often expose their breasts entirely, so they said, only to cover them up again most of the time so they never really knew what you wanted, and some were scared of you because they’d heard all kinds of rumors and were ready for anything, their chief fear being that you, in your bottega, might demand something of them that they were not able to do; but, as they went on to say, you didn’t really want anything anyway, and, what’s more, it often happened that you paid in advance, and, once you stopped painting for the day, sent them away immediately without even a bunch of grapes, never allowing those enormous women to take you to bed, they just had to stand there, or sit on a sofa, stand or sit for hours on end without moving, it being just a matter of the hourly rate and the fear of what might happen, because you pretty soon got a reputation, people said that the Bergamo man, as they called you, was not in the least interested in fucking, and wouldn’t even touch, merely instruct his models in his quiet polite way, how she should sit or stand, and then he’d just look, watching how she looked back at him, and then, after an age of waiting, would ask her to lower the left shoulder of her chemise a touch, or to ruffle up the folds of her dress a little more, or say that she should uncover one breast, though he was always standing a good distance away, beyond touching distance, and, so the ladies would tell us, you’d be sitting in an armchair as the two servants led them back to the pier so they might return by the waiting mascareta and that you never actually came anywhere near them nor would allow them to touch you, unlike those, they giggled, who just wanted to stare while they themselves mounted some man from behind; because you weren’t like that, the girls told us, that wasn’t why you hired them…you just looked at them and they had to stand there for hours, which was impossible, or sit, though of course they were fully prepared, there being painters enough in Venice able to pay for the visit of a whore or a cortigiana onesta, and they’d stood or sat for every kind of artist, some having served you before, and some, from time to time, even having posed for the great Bellini, only to face the universal ridicule of seeing themselves depicted as the Mater Dolorosa, or Mary Magdalene, or St. Catherine in S. Giovanni e Paolo or the Scuola di S. Marco, which gave everyone a good laugh and, boy, did they laugh! though in your case, Signor Bergamo or Seriana, whichever you prefer, when you’d finished with them they didn’t, for some reason, feel like laughing, and when one or the other of them told the others what it had been like with you after a couple of visits, they kept saying they had no idea what you were about, and, above all, couldn’t understand why you turned them into such vast mountains of flesh, since, said Danae, my shoulder is nowhere near as enormous as that, nor am I anywhere near as fat as that, said Flora pointing to her waist, and, to tell the truth, there was, after all, something incomprehensible about these disproportionate figures because, despite the exaggerations, they remained lovely and attractive, and no one could understand how you did it, nor, more importantly, why, but then your whole art was so peculiar, everyone said, that it seemed it wasn’t exactly art you were aiming for but for something about the women or in them, which led to ever greater confusion because the filthy way you looked at them was quite intolerable, they said, so even the most experienced whore felt nervous and looked away, but then you’d snap at them and tell them to look you straight in the eye, though otherwise you treated them well enough, it was just that you never laid a finger on them, that being something they could never understand, the reason they were scared of you, never looking forward to visiting you, although you paid them well enough, giving even the lowest of them at least a few miserable escudo, and as for the freshest youngest whore or cortigiana onesta, you paid well over the going rate for her, despite the fact that, for all your fame, you’re far from the wealthiest of them and, they say, all those pictures you painted of Lucrecia and Danae and Flora and Elena are still stacked up in your store, the religious paintings being the ones that sell, the ones in which Danae becomes Mary, and Flora becomes St. Catherine, one under some tree with the baby in her arm, the other in a pretty country scene, these all having been purchased, as we know, while the ones you painted for some lecher wanting a picture of his whore, well, you couldn’t always convince the customer that what you’d given them was exactly what they wanted, since their lovers remained stubbornly just Lucrecia, or Danae, or Flora, or Elena, so most of those pictures are still in the bottega, all stacked up on top of each other, because, despite having sold a few, you sometimes couldn’t hide your own dissatisfaction with them and went back to them time and again, which was why you occasionally sent word with Federico for the same woman, albeit in a different shape, and we could see why you’d want that because we’ve had a thousand, ten thousand, indeed a hundred thousand such requests in the Carampane, and ever since you first moved into Venice it was obvious to us that it was always the same woman you wanted, and so we supplied you with Lucrecia and Flora and Leonora and Elena and Cornelia and Diana from January through June, and Ophelia and Veronica and Adriana and Danae and finally Venus from October through December, though all you wanted from January through June, and from October through December, was the same woman, and only after giving considerable thought to the question of why you painted our ladies as fat as you did, did we at last figure out the secret of why these enormous women looked so fiendishly beautiful on your canvases, or at least one of us figured it out, meaning me, figured out that what you wanted, beyond any doubt, was precisely the same thing each time, which is to say, that valley in Seriana, you filthy reprobate, that is to say the valley between a whore’s shoulders and her breasts, that is, the valley where you were born and which might perhaps remind you of your mother’s breasts, which is not to deny that you’re a handsome man with a fine figure, though the most attractive part of you is your face as everyone who’s met you knows, because all the whores notice that and they would have done it for you for nothing but you didn’t want them, no, all you wanted was to stare at their chins, their necks, and their chests, and they quickly got to hate you because they hadn’t the least idea what you wanted and we had to tell them to calm down and jus
t go along with it if you asked for them because they’d never make an easier escudo and, what’s more, you’d dress them up in fine clothes as always, which, by the way, makes us all the more suspicious that you really are searching for something, and, as the years passed, there were new Floras and Lucrecias and Veronicas and Ophelias, and they were all different, but all the same to you, and they had to take their high-heeled shoes off as soon as they got to the door, in fact had to take off all the clothes they’d arrived in, because you had them strip naked down to their underwear and you had your two servants give them a lacy chemise and anything else necessary, inevitably some gorgeous robe embroidered with gold thread, or a dress or sometimes just a blue or green velvet jacket, then you gently asked if they would expose one breast, to pull chemise down a little, and then gazed for hours at those soft, wide, round shoulders, the innocent-corrupt smiles on their faces, and it was as if you hadn’t even noticed the hot perspiration on the fresh skin of those naked breasts, took no notice at all of what they had to offer you, because you had no use for narrow waists, milk-white bellies, those ample hips and the soft hair between their legs, were uninterested in the ways their lips, knees, and thighs might open, in their warm laps and those clouds of intoxicating perfume, and however one or the other tried with words and looks and sighs, with everything she knew of the thousand different ways to seduce a man, it all left you cold, you just waved them away, told them to stop all that nonsense and that all you wanted them to do was to stay absolutely still, to sit quietly on the sofa and look at you, to keep their eyes on you and not look away, not even for a moment, and insisted on this to the point that all of them, every single one from Lucrecia through to Venus, became quite annoyed at this idiotic and pointless game of you-look-at-me-I-look-at-you, because what after all are we, they complained, raising their voices, looking furious, child-virgins from the lace factory? though we, of course, knew that what you needed was not them, not as people, but what you could get at through them, and I, personally, always thought we should stop talking in terms of any specific model and concentrate on what lay behind the model, some idea like the female figure being La Serenissima, and the male being Le Carampane, though from all I’ve said so far it will have been clear to you for some time now where I’m coming from, I mean who it is telling you what an unusual man you are, a man uninterested in women as such, more in what might be found by way of a woman, someone who is looking to perfect the most scandalously refined, satanic sensation, to whom, from that point of view, a woman is just a body, a notion I can understand and agree with, because I myself think we’re all nothing but bodies, end of story, though there’s so much you can tell from these bodies, if you catch one in a moment of desire, at the moment when the body is most alive and burning with lust, how deep and mysterious and irresistible is the desire that forces you to want—to demand—possession of some object for which you are willing to sacrifice everything, even though it’s nothing more than a small patch of skin, or a faint flush on that skin, or just a sad little smile, maybe the way she drops a shoulder, or bows her head, or slowly raises it, when a tiny blonde curl, a maddening strand of hair accidentally falls across her temple and this strand promises something, you have no idea what, but whatever it is you’re willing to give your whole life for it, and maybe it’s precisely because of this that I feel convinced—and you too will be aware of this—that it’s not at all the way they peel off their clothes that drives men crazy, oh no, quite the opposite, the way a breast pops out, the revelation of a belly or a lap or an ass or pair of thighs, because any such revelation means the end of unfettered illusion, no, it’s the moment when the faint flickering candlelight reveals the animal in their eyes, because it’s this look that drives us crazy, crazy for that beautiful animal, this animal that is nothing but body, that’s what people die for, for the moment, that splinter of time, when the animal appears, beautiful beyond comprehension—and that’s the light you sometimes catch in the eyes of Cornelia and Flora and Elena and Venus, while all the time being fully aware, since you’ve lived long enough, of the fact that this is just how Cornelia, Flora, Elena, and Venus happen to look today, that they are already old and wrinkly inside and out and that nothing interests them except their bellies and their purses, though most of the time both are empty, and so you call them again and again, and we keep sending them in new and different shapes, so off they go: Cornelia and Flora and Elena and Venus and their eyes might do the trick and hit the perfect spot, because clearly that’s what you yourself want and that’s why you forbid them to do anything that otherwise you would probably indulge in, so you don’t let them take off their clothes and completely reveal their breasts or anything else they’ve got because you know that the animal essence is a matter of deferred pleasure, it exists only in the act of deferral, that the promise in their eyes is just that, a promise, a promise that something will happen later, or maybe sooner, or indeed in the very next moment, just as we are unbuckling our belt, when all our clothes drop away at once, the way their eyes promise, which is the look you are searching for and which you clearly want to immortalize in your painting, and, on a good day, you find that look right away, and it perhaps promises satisfaction now, yes, right now, but only perhaps, for deferred pleasure is the very essence of this essentially infernal arrangement, the cage in which you too are imprisoned, as is every man in Venice—in the world at large—and though you might always be wanting to paint the moment pending, the moment the promise is fulfilled with all that this entails, the whole process recorded in color and line on your canvas, you can buy the whole process inherent in her look for one escudo, if you get what you paid for anyway; this painting you so desire to paint is, in fact, about something else that no one could ever paint, because that would be a picture of stillness, of stasis, an Eden of Fulfilled Promises where nothing moves and nothing happens and—what is more difficult to explain—where there’s nothing to say about this immobility, permanence, and absence of change, because, in fulfilling the promise you have lost the thing promised, it’s what vanishes in the fulfillment of itself, the light in the desired object goes out, its flame quenched—and so desire limits itself, for however much you may desire there’s nothing more to be done, because there is nothing at all real about the desire, desire consists entirely of anticipation, that is to say the future, because, strange as it is, you can’t go back in time, there’s no returning from the future, from the thing that happens next, no way of getting back to it from the other side, the side of memory, it’s absolutely impossible, because the road back from memory inevitably takes you to the wrong place, and perhaps its whole purpose is to make you believe that there once was a real event, something that actually happened, that the thing once desired did indeed exist, and all the while your memory is shepherding you away from this object and offering you its counterfeit instead, because it never could give you the real object, the fact being that this object doesn’t exist, though that’s not exactly your way of perceiving it, since you’re a painter, meaning someone who inhabits desire but can reject it in advance, consoling yourself with the thought that there will come a moment when the chemise drops away, though believing the promise of that thought makes you a guilty man, a miserable sinner, a man condemned to sinning miserably until the Day of Judgment arrives, though that day is still far off for you; so, for now, you can carry on believing and desiring, and you need not think, you can go crazy, you can rage and thirst until you can hardly breathe—and then you can remember Federico and send him over to us, and we can send you Danae, Veronica, Adriana, and Venus, the lot of them, and we can carry on sending them as long as Federico arrives to tell us what you need…but there will come a day when we draw a line under it all, the day when we call it a day, adding up everything you ordered, and then, there will be no more Palma Vecchio, no more Jacopo Negretti, then it will all be over and we’ll send you the bill, you can be sure of that.
Best European Fiction 2011 Page 29
