F

BEAUTY

“Have you seen Carrière’s new exhibition?”

“Yes, and I’m a bit stumped.”

“Oh?”

“People say he challenges our usual ways of seeing. He says it too. In every art magazine right now. But basically what it boils down to is him admitting that pictures are only pictures, not reality. He’s as proud of this as a child who’s just discovered there is no Easter Bunny.”

“That’s mean.”

“But I really admire him.”

“Quite right, too.”

We both smile. The situation is complicated. In my profession it’s not just a matter of selling paintings — you also have to sell them to the right people. Naturally I have to convince Eliza that her collection needs another Eulenboeck, but at the same time Eliza has to convince me that her collection is the right home for Eulenboeck. There won’t be many more Eulenboecks coming onto the market, and meanwhile the museums have become interested in him, and granted, they pay less, but they can raise the reputation of an artist enormously, which in turn causes auction prices in the secondary market to soar. You have to be careful: if prices rise too precipitously, they soon collapse again, and the result is all the art magazines pronouncing that the market has delivered its verdict, and the name of the artist never recovers. So Eliza has to convince me that she won’t dispose of the painting I’m going to sell her as soon as she can turn a profit on it; she has to convince me that she’s a serious collector, just as I have to convince her that Eulenboeck’s value will not decline in the long run.

But we don’t talk about any of this. We each sit in front of a plate of salad, sip our mineral water, smile a lot, and talk about anything and everything except what it’s actually all about. I’m a good artist’s executor, she’s a good collector, and we both know the game.

So we talk about the terraces in Venice. Eliza has an apartment in Venice with a view of the Grand Canal. I went to visit once and it never stopped raining; mist crawled over the water and the city seemed lethargic, dark, and stagnant. We laugh about the parties at the Biennale, we both think that they’re exhausting and loud and a big effort, but you still have to go, you have no choice. We agree that great beauty makes too many demands: you are helpless in front of it, it’s as if you have to react in some way, do something, respond to it, but it remains mute, and rejects you with sovereign equanimity. This of course leads to Rilke. We talk about his time with Rodin, we talk briefly about Rodin himself, then, it’s unavoidable, we talk about Nietzsche. We order coffee, neither of us has touched our salad, who has an appetite on a day as hot as this? And now, because time is running out, we get around to talking briefly about Eulenboeck.

Difficult, I say. There’s a lot of interest.

She can well imagine, says Eliza, but if you’re going to give a painting a home, it comes down to what neighborhood it will find itself in, and what company it will be keeping. She already has a number of Eulenboecks. Back home in Ghent she has works by Richter, Demand, and Dean, she has a few things by Kentridge and Wallinger, she has a Borremans, whose style is somewhat similar to Eulenboeck’s, and she has a John Currin. In addition to which she was lucky enough to know the master personally — not as well as I did, of course, but well enough all the same to know that he was no friend of the museum world. His work, she feels, belongs at the heart of the here-and-now, not in the storage rooms of galleries.

I nod vaguely.

Oh this heat, she says.

She fans air toward her, and although the restaurant has soundless ventilators, the gesture doesn’t look silly, coming from her. She has an effortless elegance. If women were my thing, I’d be in love with her.

Weather like this, she says, gives you a whole new respect for Moorish culture. How is it possible to build an Alhambra while exposed to such deadly heat?

In previous eras, I tell her, our species was more robust. Man’s constitution is not fixed, it develops over time. The road marches of the Roman legions achieved distances our world could only attribute to Olympic athletes.

A thought, she observes, that would have pleased Nietzsche.

But one, I reply, that only a healthy person should even formulate. The moment a tooth hurts, you are infinitely grateful for modernity and its alienations.

We stand up and embrace quickly with air kisses on both cheeks. She leaves, I stay and pay the bill. We’ll meet again, first at a dinner party, then perhaps a breakfast, then she’ll visit me in Heinrich’s studio, and then maybe the moment will come to actually talk about money.

I don’t have far to go to get home, I live next to the restaurant. In the hallway of my apartment, as always, I pause in front of the little Tiepolo drawing, happy to be able to call such a piece of perfection mine. Then I listen to the messages on my answering machine.

There’s only one. Weselbach, the auction house, informing me that a dealer from Paris has put up an Eulenboeck for auction the week after next. Old Death in Flanders, luckily a more or less minor work. No inquiries from potential buyers yet, but the dealer doesn’t want to withdraw the painting.

Not good! No inquiries up-front means that the interest driving the auction will be limited, and I’ll probably have to buy the picture myself to support Eulenboeck’s value. The opening bid is set at four hundred and twenty thousand — a lot of money, and all I’ll get for it is a painting I myself sold six years ago for two hundred and fifty. I’ve already had to buy three Eulenboecks this year, and it’s only August. I have to do something.

I call Wexler, the new chief curator of the Clayland Museum in Montreal. Actually all I want to do is leave a message, but in spite of the time difference he answers right away. He says he’s switched his office line over onto his cell phone and no, he’s not asleep, he’s broken the habit.

We chat for a while — the weather, intercontinental travel, restaurants we like in Manhattan, Lima, and Moscow. I wait for him to mention the Eulenboeck show he’s mounting the year after next and which will be very important for me, but of course he wants me to ask about it first, so we spend fifteen minutes talking about skiing, Haneke’s new movie, and places to eat in Paris, Berlin, and Buenos Aires. Finally he realizes that the cue isn’t going to come from me, and brings the conversation around to it himself.

“Let’s talk about it another time,” I reply.

He’ll be coming to Europe in a couple of months, he says, disappointed. Perhaps we could meet. For breakfast or maybe lunch.

Wonderful, I say.

How nice, he says.

Terrific, I say.

Good, he says.

I hang up. And suddenly, for no reason, I feel I have to call Eric. I hunt through my address book, I can never remember numbers, not even my brother’s.

“You?” His voice sounds even more tense than usual. “What?”

“I thought I should give you a call.”

“Why?”

“Just a feeling. Everything okay?”

He hesitates for a moment. “Of course.” It doesn’t sound as if everything’s okay, in fact it sounds as if he wants me to know he’s lying.

“So why do I have this feeling?”

“Maybe because today I hoped you and I … Ah!”

I hear horns and car engines and then there’s a sort of hiss: he’s laughing.

“I told my secretary to call you, but she … just think: she called Martin!”

“Martin!”

“We went to lunch. The whole time I was wondering why.”

I ask about business, and as always his answers are vague. Something’s not right, there’s some question he’d like to ask me, but he can’t get it out. Instead he focuses on my work, and although it doesn’t interest him, I say that you have to keep an eye on the auction houses and control prices. Immediately he interrupts me to ask about our mother, that tiresome subject, but I keep on digging.

“Something’s up with you. I can tell. You can deny it, but—”

“Have to go now!”

“Eric, you can tell me every—”

“Everything’s fine, honestly, got to go now.”

He’s already hung up. Talking with Eric is always strange, almost like talking to yourself, and suddenly I realize why I’ve been avoiding him for some time. It’s hard to keep secrets from him, he sees through me, just as I see through him, and I can’t be sure he’ll keep them to himself. The old rule: a secret only stays a secret if absolutely nobody knows about it. If you stick to that, they’re not so hard to keep as people think. You can know someone almost as well as you know yourself, and yet you still can’t read their thoughts.

Talking to Eric has reminded me that I have to call our mother. She’s left me three messages, so there’s no help for it. Hesitating, I dial her number.

“So finally!” she cries.

“I was busy. Sorry.”

“You were busy?”

“Yes, a lot of work.”

“With your pictures.”

“Yes, with the pictures.”

“Eating out.”

“That’s part of it. Meetings.”

“Meetings?”

“What’s the subtext?”

“I’m glad you have such an interesting job. It obviously feeds you. Whichever way you look at it.”

“What did you want, anyway?”

“The land in front of my house. You know, the big piece that reaches from my fence to the end of the slope, with all the birch trees. It’s for sale.”

“So.”

“Think about it, someone could build there. Because why else would anyone buy it! Whoever buys it is going to want to build on it.”

“Probably.”

“And my view? I mean, our view. You two will inherit the house, so the view matters to you too. Even if you decide to sell. And you will sell, because I take it neither of you is going to want to live here.”

“But that’s a long way off.”

“Oh, stop.”

“Stop what?”

“I wanted to propose that you buy the land before anyone else goes for it and starts building. That way you’ll protect the value of our house. And it’s a good investment.”

“How is it a good investment if I’m not supposed to build anything on it?”

“Don’t act as if you understand something about business, you’re … well, you’re whatever you are.”

“I’m someone who knows that a piece of land you can’t build on isn’t a good investment.”

“You could grow crops on it.”

“What would I do with crops?”

“Rapeseed or something.”

“I don’t even know what that is.”

“Cars can drive using it.”

“Talk to Eric. He has money, and he understands a lot more about investing.”

“But I asked you.”

“Talk to Eric, Mother. I’ve got stuff to do now.”

“Lunch?”

“Talk to Eric.”

She hangs up and I set off. Down the stairs, across the square in the heat of the sun, then into the subway. The escalator takes me into the cool twilight of the tunnels.

The train pulls in immediately, and the compartment is half empty. I sit down.

“Friedland!”

I look up. Next to me, hanging onto the strap, is the art critic of the Evening News.

“You, here?” he cries. “You in the subway, of all people?”

I shrug.

“It’s not possible!”

I smile. The main thing is not to have him sit down next to me.

He slaps me on the shoulder. “Is this seat still free?”

His name was Willem and he was a Flemish student, eccentric, noisy, lovable, quick-tempered, and unfortunately not very talented. As an admirer of Nicolas de Staël, he was an abstract painter, which I held against him, I called it cowardly and imitative, because I was a Realist, an admirer of Freud and Hockney, which he held against me, calling it cowardly and imitative. We fought a lot, we drank a lot, we did drugs in moderation, we wore silk shirts and let our hair grow down to our shoulders. For a short time we shared a studio in Oxford, which was actually nothing more than a room above a laundry. He painted by the north-facing window, I painted by the west-facing window, there was a foldout bed that we used extensively, and we felt the future looking back at us, as if later art historians were observing us intently. When he broke off his studies, I told him he was lazy and didn’t break off mine, and he told me I was petit bourgeois.

During our vacation we explored the damp green expanses of Wales, climbed hills in the twilight, sought out cliffs and steep ravines, and once we made love on a stone slab covered with runes, which was even more uncomfortable than we’d imagined. We argued, we threatened each other, we screamed, we drank our way to reconciliation and then drank ourselves back into new quarrels. We filled our sketch pads, we hiked at night, we waited in the clammy dawn hours for the sun to rise over the wan gray-green of the water.

At the end of the vacation, I went back to Oxford and he went to Brussels to convince his father to keep giving him money. It was 1990, Eastern Europe had freed itself, and because nobody wrote emails yet, we sent each other postcards almost every day. Even today I worry that all my effusions — of philosophizing, of romance and hopes and rage — may still be stored in a drawer somewhere. Later, I destroyed his mail because it would have seemed too theatrical to send it all back to him.

For when I went to Brussels during the next vacation, I realized that something had changed. We looked just the way we did before, we did the things we’d always done, we had the same conversations, but something was different. Perhaps it was only that we were so young and were afraid of missing something, but we’d started to bore each other. To balance things out, we talked even louder and fought even more. We stayed awake for three nights in a row in the rhythmic din and flickering light of one club after another, drunk with exhaustion and excitement, until all of them formed a single blur and all faces melted into a single face. At some point we stood in the museum arguing about Magritte, then we were lying in the grass again, then we were in his apartment, and suddenly we’d split up, neither of us knew how or even apparently why. Willem threw a bottle at me, I ducked, it smashed against the wall above my head; luckily it was empty. I ran down the stairs, I had left my suitcase standing there, he yelled after me, his voice echoing through the stairwell, then he yelled out the window that I should come back, that I should never show my face again, that I should come back, and only when I could no longer hear his voice did I ask the way to the station. A woman gave me worried directions, I was in fact very pale, and suddenly I saw the poster. It was the same photograph, and it was also the same words: Lindemann will teach you to fear your dreams.

At the end of the show, which I couldn’t watch — I had wanted to rest on a park bench and had fallen asleep until the early evening — I was standing in front of the theater. The people were just coming out. I looked for the canteen. Lindemann was sitting hunched over a table eating soup, and looked up in irritation when I sat down with him.

“My name is Ivan Friedland. Will you give me an interview? For the Oxford Quarterly?” I didn’t know if there was an Oxford Quarterly or not, but this was in the days before the Internet, it was hard to check things out.

Physically he hadn’t changed, the lenses in his eyeglasses reflected back the world, and the green handkerchief protruded from his breast pocket. As I began to ask him questions, I noticed how shy he was. Minus the spotlights and an audience, he came off as lost and insecure. He straightened his glasses, smiled in a stilted way, and kept touching the top of his skull as if to reassure himself that the few remaining hairs were still in place.

Hypnosis, he said, did not involve a single phenomenon but a cluster: the readiness to submit to an authority, a common vulnerability, a general openness to suggestion. Only occasionally were more mysterious operations of the conscious mind involved, but these had not yet been scientifically investigated because no one wanted to get involved in research of that kind. All of which led to the fact that a person could lose superficial control of their own will for short periods.

He was seized by a fit of coughing, and soup ran down his chin.

He used the word “superficial,” he then explained, because under normal circumstances nothing someone didn’t wish to experience or do could be induced in them through a trance. Only rarely was anything spiritually profound stirred into life.

I asked what he meant by this, but he was already elsewhere in his thoughts and began to complain. He complained about the low fees, he complained about the arrogance of TV executives, he complained about a broadcast that had cut his appearance, he complained about the Stage Artists’ Union, and in particular he complained about their pension fund. He complained about the endless train journeys, the delays, the sloppily organized timetables. He complained about bad hotels. He complained about good hotels, because they were too expensive. He complained about stupid people in the audiences, he complained about drunks in the audiences, and aggressive people in the audiences, and children in the audiences, and people who were hard of hearing in the audiences, and psychopaths. It was astonishing, according to him, how many psychopaths would crop up in a single hypnosis show. Then he went back to complaining about fees. I asked if there was anything else he would like to eat, the Oxford Quarterly was paying, and he ordered the schnitzel and French fries.

“To go back for a moment,” I said. “The operations of the conscious mind.”

Right, he said. Mysterious operations, yes, that was what he had said. Mysterious to him too, even with everything he’d seen in his time. But of course he wasn’t an intellectual and so he was unqualified to offer explanations. He had not chosen to embark on this particular profession, he’d actually studied something quite different.

“Such as? What did you study? What other things?”

The waitress brought the schnitzel. He asked if I’d enjoyed the show.

“Very impressive.”

“You don’t have to lie.”

“Very impressive!”

Then he said, “Not big enough,” and it took me a moment to realize he was talking about the schnitzel. Too expensive, given the size. But everything was expensive these days, the little man was always being ripped off.

I asked if the schnitzel tasted good, at least.

Too thick, he said. Schnitzels should be pounded thin, why did nobody understand this anymore? He hesitated before asking where my tape recorder was.

“I have a good memory.”

Memory was an overvalued phenomenon, he said as he chewed. Simply astonishing how easy it was to seed it with false recollections, and how easy to erase other recollections without a trace. No tape recorder, really?

To change the subject, I offered him dessert, and he ordered Sachertorte. Then he cocked his head and inquired if the Oxford Quarterly was a student newspaper.

“It’s widely read.”

“And what are you studying, young man?”

“Art history. But I’m a painter.”

He looked at the table. “Have we met before?”

“I don’t think so.”

“No?”

“I wouldn’t know where.”

“Painter,” he repeated.

I nodded.

“Painter.” He smiled.

I asked him how great an influence a hypnotist could have on people. Could you cause someone to change his life? To do things he’d never have done without being hypnotized?

“Anyone can make someone change their life.”

“But you can’t make people do things they don’t want to do?”

He shrugged. Just between the two of us, what did “want to” really amount to? Who knew what he actually wanted, who was that clear with himself? People wanted so much, and it changed all the time. Of course at the beginning you told the audience that nobody could be made to do anything he wasn’t willing to do anyway, but the truth was that everyone was capable of everything. Humans had no boundaries, they were pure chaos, they had no fixed shape, and they had no limits. He looked around. Why in heaven’s name was the Sachertorte taking so long, what were they doing, baking it?

I’m not just chaos without boundaries, I said.

He laughed.

The waitress brought the dessert, and I asked him to tell me some anecdotes. In such an illustrious career he must have had quite a few experiences.

Illustrious? Well. In olden times, in the heyday of the Varieties, of Houdini and Hanussen, a hypnotist could still be illustrious. But nowadays! A life lived for art did not easily reduce itself to anecdotes.

“Hypnosis is an art?”

Perhaps it was even more. Perhaps it already achieved what art could only aim at. All great literature, all music, all … he smiled. All painting was trying to be hypnotic, wasn’t it? He pushed his plate away. He had to go to bed now, performances were a strain, they left you ready to collapse with exhaustion. He stood up and put his hand on my shoulder. “Painter?”

“Excuse me?”

His expression had changed, there was nothing friendly in it anymore. “Painter? Really?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Doesn’t matter. Not important. But are you serious? Painter?”

I asked what he meant.

Nothing. He was tired. He had to lie down. He looked around as if he’d just thought of something, then he murmured something I couldn’t make out. He looked small and puny, pale-faced, and his eyes were invisible behind the thick lenses. He raised a hand in farewell and walked with little steps toward the door.

It was only on the ferry across the English Channel that I realized I couldn’t get his voice out of my head. Painter, really? Never had I encountered such disbelief, never such intense skepticism and mockery.

Shortly afterward, back in Oxford, he appeared to me so clearly in a dream that even today I feel I actually met him three times. Once again it was in a theater canteen, but in my dream this one was as big as a cathedral. Lindemann was standing on the table, and his smile was twisted into such a grimace that I could barely look at him.

“I forget nothing.” He sniggered. “Not a single face and not a single person who was ever on the stage with me. Did you really think I wouldn’t know anymore? Poor child. And you think you’ve got it in you? Art. Painting. The creative power? Do you really believe that?”

I took a step back, half angry and half fearful, but I couldn’t reply. His smile grew larger and larger until it filled my field of vision.

“You can do the essentials, but you’re empty. Hollow.” He gave a sharp, high-pitched snigger. “Go now. Go without peace. Go and create nothing. Go!”

When I came to, I was lying in half darkness in my bedroom and couldn’t understand what had terrified me so much. I pushed back the covers. Underneath, rolled up into a human ball, glasses glinting, Lindemann was cowering. And as he sniggered, I woke a second time, in the same room, and pushed the covers back with a pounding heart, but this time I was alone and I really was awake.

He was right. I knew. I’d never be a painter.

Now I remember his name, it’s Sebastian Zollner. I ask him where he’s headed. Not that it interests me, but if you know someone tangentially and find yourself sitting next to them in the subway, you have to have something to chat about.

“To Malinovski. In his studio.”

“Who’s Malinovski?”

“Yes, quite! Exactly! Who is he indeed! But Circle magazine is doing a story on him, and when it appears, Art Monthly will immediately do one too, and that same day my boss will call me in and ask why we’ve missed the boat again. So I’m taking the first step.”

“And if Circle magazine doesn’t?”

“They’ll certainly do something, because I will have done it already. And I’m going to write that it’s a disgrace if someone like Malinovski doesn’t get the attention he deserves. And that when it comes to us, sheer noise always triumphs over quality. That’s what I’m going to say, not bad, huh? Noise over quality. Not bad! That’ll make Humpner at Art Monthly really shit in his pants, and they’ll follow up right away, and I’m already established as the man who discovered Malinovski. That’s the advantage of writing for a daily paper instead of a magazine with a two-month lead time. You can figure out what they’re planning, and you can beat them.”

“What kind of artist is he?”

“Who?”

“Malinovski.”

“No idea. That’s why I’m going there. To find out.”

He sits there beside me, all bloated, unshaved, almost totally bald, his jacket so crumpled he looks as if he’s slept in it. In the Middle Ages, a person’s appearance mirrored their soul: evil people were ugly, good people beautiful. The nineteenth century taught us that this is nonsense. But all it takes is a little life experience and you realize it’s not so wrong.

“Did you go to the Khevenhüller opening?” he asks.

I shake my head. And because I read the papers too, I know with absolute certainty that now he’s going to say that Khevenhüller has done nothing but repeat himself for a long time now.

“He doesn’t do anything new anymore. Always the same, rehash after rehash. Between ’90 and ’98 he was original. He had something to say. Now it’s older than old hat.”

The train stops, the doors open, and a group of Japanese tourists pours in, about thirty of them, half of them wearing protective face masks. Silently squeezed together they fill the entire carriage.

Zollner leans over to me. “I wish I had your job.”

“You can have it,” I say in a drawl. “You’d be good at it.”

He turns away again, so self-absorbed that he doesn’t notice I’m being dishonest. “In fifteen years I’ll be jobless. No more newspapers. Only on the net. And I’m not even fifty. Too young to retire. Too old to change horses.”

I have an idea for an Eulenboeck painting. A portrait of Zollner, from really close up, the way he’s sitting next to me now, in the greenish artificial light of the carriage, in front of a background made up of the gaggle of Japanese, and the title The Arbiter of Art. But of course it won’t do, you’ve been dead too long, poor Heinrich, and nobody would believe it was genuine.

“All the young people! Fresh out of college, year by year, more and more of them. They work as interns, fetch coffee, ask if I want sugar, look over my shoulder, and brood about what it is I can do that they can’t. They all understand something about art, Friedland! They’re none of them stupid. They all want my job. And where do I go then? To Art Review Online? I’d rather hang myself.”

“Yes, well,” I say, embarrassed. He will remember this conversation, and he won’t forgive me.

“But they don’t have the feel for it. They don’t know when it’s time to praise Malinovski and when the time for that is already over. They allow themselves to be impressed, they like something or they don’t like something; that’s their mistake. They don’t know what’s required of them.”

“Required?”

“No one can fool me. Nothing impresses me. To know whether someone’s on the way up or on the way down takes experience, you have to have the instinct!” He rubs his face. “But the pressure, you have no idea! Molkner, for example. First he praised Spengrich, whom it’s impossible to like anymore, then he made a point of recommending Hähnel, two days before Lens on Culture unearthed the fact that Hähnel is anti-democratic, and then he named photorealism as the art form of the future. A pathetic attempt to position himself against Lümping and Karzel as the force of conservatism, but the idiot picked the exact moment when Karzel was using us in the Evening News to mount his attack on the New Realists. You remember, even Eulenboeck got handed his head on a platter. Totally lousy timing! And now? What do you think?”

“Yes?” I dimly remember Molkner: a little man, always sweating profusely, very nervous, balding, pointed beard.

“Now he’s nothing but a sort of freelancer,” Zollner whispers, as if at all costs to conceal this from the Japanese. “And Lanzberg, his former assistant and total piece of shit, is firmly ensconced as editor, overseeing the articles Molkner sends back from exhibition previews out in the sticks. Merciless! Believe me, this business is merciless.” He nods, listens to his own words, jumps up abruptly, and gives me another slap on the shoulder. “Sorry, I’m in a lousy mood. My mother died.”

“How terrible!”

He pushes his way through the Japanese to the door. “You’ll believe anything!”

“So she didn’t die?”

“Not today, at least.” He elbows aside a man with a face mask and leaps out. The doors close, the train moves on, for a moment I can still see him waving, then we’re traveling through the darkness again.

One of the Japanese sits down next to me and presses little buttons on his camera. This subway line is not a scenic route, the only thing up ahead is the industrial zone on the edge of town. The tour group is on the wrong train. Someone ought to tell them. I close my eyes and say nothing.

So I was never going to rank as a painter. This much I now knew. I worked the same way I had before, but there was no longer any point. I painted houses, I painted meadows, I painted mountains, I painted portraits that didn’t look bad, they showed skill, but so what? I did abstract paintings that were harmoniously composed, with careful juxtapositions of color, but so what?

What does it mean to be average — suddenly the question became a constant one. How do you live with that, why do you keep on going? What kind of people bet everything on a single card, dedicate their lives to the creative act, undertake the risk of the one big bet, and then fail year after year to produce anything of significance?

Of course, it is part of the nature of a bet that you can lose it. But when it actually happens to you, do you lie to yourself, or can you honestly come to terms with it? How do you proudly put together your little exhibitions, collect your scattered little reviews, and take it as a given that there’s an entire realm of achievement way above you in which you will never take part? How do you deal with that?

“Write about being average.” It was Martin’s idea back then, in the monastery garden at Eisenbrunn. And he was right: I could always become an art historian with an unusual field of research. So I wrote a letter to Heinrich Eulenboeck. I didn’t lie, but I also didn’t mention the title of my dissertation: Mediocrity as an Aesthetic Phenomenon. All I did was describe how I had come upon his paintings by chance in an old catalog: Flemish farmhouses, soft hills, welcoming riverbanks, friendly bales of hay, really well painted, with power and a certain soul. That, I’d thought, was what would have become of me. The stubborn expertise, the self-contained perfection. That would have been me.

He sent a delighted reply, and off I went. I was exhausted, because I had just ended a brief affair with a French choreographer, full of passion, fights, screaming and yelling, alcohol, a breakup, a reconciliation, another breakup, and a trip could not have come at a better time. A long stretch by train, then a long stretch with another train, then a crossing on the ferry, then a long stretch on a bus, until finally I was standing facing him in his bright studio. The sea shimmered in the windows with a cool, northerly light.

He was in his early sixties back then, more imposing than I had expected, an elegant gentleman with a white mustache, impeccable clothes, and an ivory cane, witty, relaxed, and cultivated. I had planned to leave again the next day, but I stayed. And I stayed the next day and the day after that, and then the whole week and the whole year, and the year after that. I stayed until he died.

The lights in the subway shrink, become a single patch, then disappear. Beauty has no need of art, it has no need of us, either, it has no need of witnesses, quite the opposite. Gaping observers detract from it, it blazes most brightly where no one can see it: broad landscapes devoid of houses, the changing shapes of clouds in the early evening, the washed-out grayish red of old brick walls, bare trees in winter mists, cathedrals, the reflection of the sun in a puddle of oil, the mirrored skyscrapers of Manhattan, the view out an airplane window right after it’s climbed through the layer of clouds, old people’s hands, the sea at any time of day, and empty subway stations like this one — the yellow light, the haphazard pattern of cigarette butts on the ground, the peeling advertisements, still fluttering in the slipstream of the train, although the train itself has just disappeared.

The escalator carries me upward, the street organizes itself around me, the summer sky forms an arch high over my head. I look in all directions — not just out of caution, because this is a dangerous neighborhood, but because we’re put here on earth to see. The garbage cans are casting their short midday shadows, a child whips past on a skateboard, arms outstretched, simultaneously swaying and in perpetual risk of falling. The same beam of sunlight flashes high up in a window and down here in the rearview mirror of a parked car. The dark rectangle of a drain cover, all geometrical, and way above it, as if set against it deliberately, the vague trail of a vanishing cloud. I open a door quickly, go inside, and shut it behind me. An ancient elevator carries me jerkily from floor to floor up to the top. Only on the third floor is there a seldom-used warehouse; the rest of the building is empty. The elevator grinds noisily to a halt, I get out and unlock a steel door. I’m immediately surrounded by the smell of acrylic, wood, and lime, and the rich aroma of pigments. How good it is to be able to work. Sometimes I get the suspicion I’m actually a happy man.

No one knows about this studio, no one can connect me to it. It wasn’t me who bought it, but a firm that belongs to another firm that is based in the Cayman Islands and in turn belongs to me. If anyone were to inspect the land registers, they wouldn’t find my name. It would take a great deal of time and effort to keep digging until they found me. The property taxes, heating, water and electricity bills are handled automatically by a numbered account in Liechtenstein. Whistling to myself, I hang up my jacket, roll up my sleeves, and put on my overalls. A dozen paintings are leaning against the wall, covered by a cloth, and in front of them is one that’s almost finished on the easel.

Luckily I have no need of glasses; my eyesight is as sharp as it ever was. Born to see, appointed to look. So I stand in front of the picture and contemplate it. A village square in a little French town. In the center a gaudy sculpture, clearly by Niki de Saint Phalle: an outsized, brightly colored female figure holding her arms in the air. The sky is cloudless. At the edge of the square, children with bicycles are clustered around a small boy who is holding his head in his hands and crying. A woman is looking out a window. Her mouth is wide open — she’s calling someone. A man in a parked car is looking up at her threateningly. There’s a dark puddle at the edge of the square that may or may not be blood. A dachshund is drinking from it. Something terrible has happened and the people seem to be wanting to cover it up. If you were to look a little longer, hunt a little better for clues, you’d be able to figure it out, or at least you think so. But if you step back, the details disappear and all that remains is a colorful street scene: bright, cheerful, full of life. Large posters advertise beer, cheese spread, and various brands of cigarettes in the style of the early seventies.

I work in silence, sometimes aware of my own whistling. Only a few details are still missing. The quiet of the studio surrounds me like a solid substance. The noise of the city doesn’t penetrate up here, and even the heat is blocked. It can continue like that for long stretches. When I think back on the hours of work, I can barely remember them — it’s as if they had been extinguished by my concentration.

Up here a couple of points of light to add, and down there a shadow to blur the features of the child. The number plate needs a fleck of rust. People need to be able to see the brushstrokes, thick, in the style of the Old Masters! And then the last point of light, an accent made up of white, ocher, and orange. I step back, lift the palette, take a little bit of black, and with a quick stroke add the date and signature in the corner: Heinrich Eulenboeck, 1974.

When I was young, vain, and lacking all experience, I thought the art world was corrupt. Today I know that’s not true. The art world is full of lovable people, full of enthusiasts, full of longing and truth. It is art itself as a sacred principle that unfortunately doesn’t exist.

It doesn’t exist any more than God does, or the End of Days, or eternity, or the Heavenly Host. All that exists are works, different in style, in form, and in essence, and the whispered hurricane of opinions about them. And the changing names of these artists that with the passage of time get attached to the selfsame objects. There are not a few Rembrandts that were once considered to be the apogee of painting and that we now know to have been painted by hands other than his. Does this lessen them?

“Of course not!” the laymen cry zealously, but it’s not that simple. A picture is not that selfsame picture if it was made by someone else. A work is very closely linked with our image of who brought it into the world when, why, and driven by what impulse? A pupil who has acquired all his master’s skills and now paints like him still remains a pupil, and if van Gogh’s paintings had been made by an affluent gentleman a generation later, the same rank would not be accorded to them. Or would it?

Things really do get even more complicated. Who has heard of Emile Schuffenecker? And yet he painted numerous pictures for which we worship van Gogh. We’ve known this for some time, but has van Gogh’s reputation suffered as a result? Lots of van Goghs are not by van Gogh, Rembrandt’s paintings are not all by Rembrandt, and I’d be very surprised if every Picasso was a Picasso. I don’t know if I’m a forger; it depends, like everything in life, on how you define it. Nonetheless Eulenboeck’s most famous paintings, all the ones on which his reputation rests, were created by the same person, namely me. But I’m not proud of that. I haven’t changed my opinion: I’m not a painter. That my paintings are hanging in museums says nothing against the museums and nothing in favor of my pictures.

All museums are full of fakes. So what? The provenance of each and every thing in this world is uncertain; there’s no particular magic involved in art, and the works that are ranked as great have not been brushed by an angel’s wings. Art objects are objects just like everything else: some are extraordinarily accomplished, but none of them springs from a higher universe. That some are linked with the name of this or that person, that some of them fetch high prices and others don’t, that some are world-famous and most are not, is due to a number of different forces, but none of these is otherworldly. Nor do forgeries have to be successful to fulfill their purpose: perfect imitations can be unmasked while imperfect ones are hung on walls and admired. Forgers who are proud of their work overestimate the importance of well-grounded skill in exactly the same way as laypeople do: anyone who isn’t totally inept and makes the effort can learn a craft. It’s quite right that craft lost its importance within art, it makes sense that the idea behind a work became more important than the work itself; museums are sacred institutions that have outlived themselves, as the avant-garde has been saying for a long time now, with good reason.

But visitors to cities want somewhere to go when the afternoons are long, and without museums there would be a lot of blank pages in the travel guides. Because there have to be museums, they also have to exhibit things, and these things have to be objects, not ideas, just as collectors want to hang things, and pictures are better to hang on walls than ideas. Admittedly, an ironic free spirit once displayed a urinal in a museum to mock the institution and all its holy affectations and artistic pieties, but he also wanted money and honors and, above all, he wanted to be admired in the traditional way, and so a replica of the original still stands on its plinth, surrounded by holy affectations and artistic pieties. Although the theory that the museum has outlived itself is correct, the museum has in fact won, the urinal is exclaimed over, and as for the theory behind it, only students in their second semester still wonder about it.

I often think about the artists of the Middle Ages. They didn’t sign things, they were craftsmen who belonged to guilds, they were spared the disease that we call ambition. Can it still be done that way, can you still do the work without taking yourself seriously — can you still paint without being “a painter”? Anonymity is no help, it’s merely a clever hiding place, another form of vanity. But painting in the name of someone else is a possibility; it works. And what amazes me all over again every day is: it makes me happy.

The idea came to me already on the third day. Heinrich was asleep next to me, the sea was casting its reflections on the ceiling, and I suddenly realized how I could make him a famous painter. What distinguished him, what he lacked, what I had to do were all quite clear to me. He would be good on television and in magazine photos, and he would give wonderful interviews. The only drawback was those farmhouses. It was going to take diplomacy.

A few weeks later I raised it for the first time. We had just been looking at his most recent work: a farmhouse with barn, a farmhouse with farmers mowing, a farmhouse with surly, arrayed farm family, plus cockerel, manure pile, and clouds.

“Let’s agree that it’s possible to become famous by fulfilling all the requirements and doing what’s opportune. Then what? You would be mocking a world that deserves it and simultaneously collecting what you’re owed. What’s bad about that?”

“That you’re not owed it in such a case.” He stood before me, self-righteous as only a loser can be. His narrow face, the fine lines of his nose, the flashing eyes, the gray hair, and the loden jacket with its silver buttons — it was all made to order for the magazines.

“It would be a victimless crime,” I said. “Nobody loses anything.”

“You yourself would be the loser.”

“But what would you lose? Your soul?” I pointed at the farmhouses. “Your art?”

“You’d lose both.”

And neither of them exist, I wanted to reply, but I kept quiet. So that’s how it goes, I thought: with pride. When you’re proud, you can tolerate being average. “And if we — as a sort of experiment, if we try it — if we don’t take either of those things too seriously? Either ourselves or art?”

We laughed, but we both knew, he just as much as I, that I was being serious.

“And what,” I asked a week later, “what if we risk it? Paint a couple of pictures we know are likely to please the relevant people. And later we’ll announce it was a joke.”

“It would be quite some joke,” he said thoughtfully.

I’d already finished the first three. A boulevard in Málaga, disfigured with a Dalí sculpture, and painted in the wan naturalistic style of Zurbarán, a rain-soaked German pedestrian precinct in the heavily shaded manner of late Rembrandt, and Tristia 3, still one of his most famous works to this day — a surreally high-ceilinged museum gallery, with menacing sculptures made of grease and felt displayed in glass cases along the walls and in the center, disturbed and unhappy, a little boy next to a severely ecstatic art teacher: pasty brushwork interspersed with holes and cracks that let the white canvas show right through.

“Heinrich Eulenboeck,” I explained as I showed him the paintings. “A reclusive aristocrat, a proud outsider, who pursues the art of his time with contempt and has missed not one of its developments. In many paintings, with subtle mockery, there are references to the works of this or that contemporary artist whom he considers to be utterly worthless. He’s seen everything, tallied everything, weighed it all, and finally found it wanting.”

“But I’m not an aristocrat. My father had a small factory in Ulm. I sold it when I was twenty.”

“Do you want to sign them yourself?”

He said nothing for a long time. “You’re probably better at that too.”

In fact his signature wasn’t hard to imitate. I put it on all three paintings, then I took photos and sent them, along with an essay about the willful outsider I’d discovered, to my former fellow student Barney Wesler, who was just in the throes of organizing a group exhibition in the Schirn Museum in Frankfurt: Realism at the Millennium. He immediately said he wanted to include them. Two days after the opening there were two long articles in the daily press ecstatically praising Eulenboeck’s paintings: one of them was written by a well-known specialist on Max Ernst, and the other one was by me, and both of us talked of the biggest discovery of the year. Soon after that a young man appeared in Heinrich’s studio who was a writer for Texte zur Kunst. His interview was published a month later under the title “Art, for Me, Is a Cathedral,” enhanced with a photograph of Heinrich looking incredibly aristocratic and condescending. Another interview appeared in Stern. Seven pages plus photos: Heinrich on the battlements of an ancient towered fortress, on board a yacht, at the wheel of a sports car, although he couldn’t even drive, and in a library, with the stem of a Chinese pipe between his teeth. No sign of his paintings.

I’ve never seen anyone play a role better. “Warhol? A commercial artist!”—“Lichtenstein? The country or the charlatan?”—“The only thing kitschier than a Balthus is a cat calendar.”—“Klimt, the apotheosis of artistic handwork!” Such phrases pleased everyone. He repeated them in dozens of newspaper interviews, he repeated them on television, he repeated them at the openings of his exhibitions, he repeated them at the launch of Leroy Hallowan’s book Eulenboeck, or The Great Negation, and he repeated them, word for word, diligently and without variation, in Godard’s short documentary Moi, Eulenboeck, Maître.

“And when do we break the whole thing up?” I asked.

“Maybe not yet.”

“Now would be a good moment.”

“Possible, but …”

I waited, but he didn’t say anything more. We were sitting in a restaurant in Paris, and as I often had recently, I saw that his hand was shaking; the soup spoon was always empty by the time it reached his mouth. He’d obviously forgotten what we’d just been talking about.

Then my dissertation appeared. I had switched themes; now the title was Heinrich Eulenboeck: From the Irony of Tradition to the Realism of Irony. Over 740 pages I unpacked the history of a lone satirist and late-born master of every technique in the repertory of Western painting who only achieved artistic expression in old age.

Of course I was also obliged to laud the farmhouses. In the meantime these had also found their admirers: to some colleagues they represented proof that simple beauty was not yet passé, to others, enigmatic satire. I thoroughly explored both possibilities and avoided taking sides: the very richness was rooted in the ambivalence, which is to say that the artist was being ironic about irony itself and mocking mockery on the way to profound emotion in the sense of the Hegelian upward spiral.

“When do we break it up?” I asked again.

We were in a hotel room in London. Rain was pounding against the window, breakfast sat untouched on the cart from room service, and Saddam Hussein was reviewing a parade on television. Heinrich’s ivory cane was leaning against the wall next to the silver walking stick I had given him recently — by now he needed not just the one but both to walk.

“You’re so young. You don’t understand a thing.”

“What don’t I understand?”

“Any of it — you can’t understand.”

“But what?”

I stared at him. I had never seen a grown man cry before, and I was stunned: I had never expected such a thing. Of course I had known that he would no longer be able to step back again, but what was so terrible about that? Try as I might, I just didn’t get it.

He was right. I really was still very young.

Six months after Heinrich had decided to remain the painter everyone believed him to be, to keep on exhibiting, giving interviews, selling pictures, and being famous, my father came to visit.

We were working in the studio. I was sitting in front of my new PC writing my essay “Realism as a Critique of Ideology in the Work of Heinrich Eulenboeck,” while Heinrich was scratching away at his sketch pad with a shaky hand. He could do this for hours on end, and sometimes he even achieved some drawings. Then the phone rang, and Arthur, without explaining how he had got this number, announced that he was in the neighborhood and could come by.

“Now?”

“Yes.” As always, he sounded surprised that I should be surprised. “Not a good time?”

Half an hour later, as he was standing on the doorstep, I thought he looked tired and unkempt; he was sweating and he hadn’t shaved. Heinrich greeted him in the fashion of a Grand Seigneur, saying “Welcome!” and “I have heard so much about you,” and “What an honor, what a pleasure,” to which my father reacted with restrained but ironic courtesy. We sat down at the table; the housekeeper served us with food she had hastily warmed up in the microwave. Arthur’s eyes flashed while Heinrich talked about Warhol—“a commercial artist!”—Lichtenstein, Beuys, and Kaminski. Unfortunately he’d become accustomed to trotting out the well-worn phrases from his interviews even when there was no microphone in the offing. He gave a lengthy description of his meeting with Picasso, and given that I knew he’d never met him, I had to get up and leave the room in order not to interrupt him.

When I came back, he was just describing the vernissage that his New York gallerist Warsinsky had recently organized for him: who had been there, what the critics had written, which pictures had sold and for how much. His mustache bobbed up and down, his lower lip trembled, and whenever he wanted to emphasize what he was saying, he knocked on the table.

To change the subject, I asked Arthur what he was working on right now. I knew he didn’t like the question, but it was better than listening to Heinrich.

“Probably going to be another detective novel. A classic locked-room mystery. For people who like riddles.”

“So is there a solution?”

“Of course! But nobody will find it. It’s very well hidden.”

“Is that the case with Family too?”

“No. That’s a story in which the solution really is that there’s no hidden solution. No explanation, and no meaning. That’s the whole point.”

“But that’s exactly what it’s not! Or rather it is, but only if you tell it in a way that makes it so. Every existence, if you look back on it, is made up of terror. Every life becomes a catastrophe if you summarize it in the way you do.”

“Because that’s the truth.”

“Not the whole truth. Not exclusively. Afternoons like today, places like this …” I gestured vaguely toward the window, the sea, our table, him, me, and Heinrich. “Everything passes, but that doesn’t mean that there’s no such thing as happiness, not by a long chalk. It’s a matter of moments, the good moments. They’re worth everything.”

Arthur was preparing a retort, but Heinrich got there first. He had a question, he said. What was meant by that piece of lunacy that he himself didn’t exist? That’s what the book said. It said in it that one didn’t exist. But he did. He was sitting right here!

“Undeniably,” said Arthur.

But seriously, this was absurd!

Heinrich’s outburst surprised me. I hadn’t known he’d read My Name Is No One, we’d never talked about it.

“If it’s absurd, there’s no point in getting upset about it,” said Arthur. “It’s only a book.”

“No excuses. Are you trying to say I don’t exist?”

“And if I did?”

“You can’t!”

Arthur looked at me. “Is this really necessary?”

“What are you talking about?”

With a circular gesture he pointed, exactly as I had already done, to the window, the sea, and the table, to himself, to me, to Heinrich.

For a few moments we were all silent. I heard Heinrich’s whistling breath and hoped that he hadn’t understood.

“A life doesn’t last long, Ivan. If you’re not careful, you squander it in stupidities.”

“You should know.”

“Yes, I should.”

“Leave my house!” said Heinrich.

“Do you paint his pictures too?” asked Arthur.

There was a long silence.

Then: “Leave my house,” Heinrich whispered.

Arthur laughed out loud. “It’s really unbelievable! You paint his pictures and nobody notices?”

“Out!” Heinrich got to his feet. “Out!” His voice shook, but when he was determined, it still had both strength and authority. He pointed at the door. “Out!”

As I accompanied my father to the hall, I was searching for some suitable remark, some sentence I could utter. “When will I see you again?” I asked finally.

“Soon.” It didn’t sound very convincing. He laid his hand on my shoulder, and a moment later he was gone.

I take off my overalls and wash my hands. The water runs bright and clear, collecting a swirl of colors as it falls. I feel a trace of sadness, a trace of pride, a trace of concern, as I always do when I finish a painting. But what could happen? Whenever it’s a question of the authenticity of a Eulenboeck, there’s one person who has the last word, and that person is the chairman of the Eulenboeck Trust, the sole heir of the artist, namely, me.

The title of this picture has been listed among his works for years: Holiday Snap No. 9. I mentioned it already in an essay at the end of the nineties, and since five years ago there’s been a dossier in the archives of the National Gallery detailing the provenance of a painting depicting a French marketplace with a Niki de Saint Phalle sculpture. Archives take security precautions against people who want to steal things, but there’s nobody to stop someone smuggling something in. In another six months John Warsinsky’s gallery will offer Holiday Snap No. 9 for sale, but not before the chairman of the Eulenboeck Trust has alerted the most important collectors to it. They will all study the dossier to check the provenance, then the Eulenboeck Trust will be asked to make a statement as to its authenticity. Everyone knows the chairman of the Trust is also the seller, but this doesn’t bother anyone, it’s part of the game, and indeed who would be bothered by it anyway: nobody’s losing. After a thorough check, the Trust will give the painting its seal of authenticity — on the one hand an account of its impeccable provenance, as it passed directly from Eulenboeck to his heir, and on the other because the leading Eulenboeck expert, namely me, has already described it as a too-little-known masterpiece years ago.

Nonetheless I am careful. I’ve twice refused a certificate of authenticity to paintings I’d done myself, and another time I said that an obvious fake by some hack was genuine. I’m considered a difficult and erratic authority. Collectors fear me as much as the gallery owners do, people often are up in arms over my unpredictable verdicts, and I’m not infrequently put down as incompetent. No one is going to get suspicious.

Down on the street a man is pushing a wheelbarrow full of sand. Three young men in baseball caps are coming toward him. They stop and look back at the wheelbarrow, as if sand were something interesting, then they lean against the wall with that curiously casual nervousness that only the under-twenties have, and light cigarettes for one another. Two cars drive past, then one, then another two — at precise intervals, like Morse code. What if you could read the universe? Perhaps that’s what is behind the terrifying beauty of things: we are aware that something is speaking to us. We know the language. And yet we understand not one word.

How sad that you don’t hear me, poor Heinrich. People who communicate with the dead like to assert that they could feel there was someone there. I never had this feeling. Even in the unlikely event that you have an afterlife, invisible, freed from your body and all earthly burdens, our concerns are a matter of indifference to you. You’re not standing next to me at this window, you’re not looking over my shoulder, and if I talk to you, you don’t answer.

So why am I speaking to you?

He already didn’t understand me anymore while he was still alive. In the final six months he was almost always in bed; sometimes he would be seized by rage for no reason at all, and then he would have to laugh quietly. Along the way I painted A French Film Is Being Shot, Great Day of Judgment, and Market Scene in Barcelona. From time to time he would appear behind me and watch. Market Scene didn’t interest him: a dramatic moment in an auction house, the audience staring raptly at the auctioneer, who is in the process of lowering the hammer on a monochrome blue canvas by Yves Klein. Day of Judgment made him grin to himself: a crumpled page of newsprint, apparently ripped out of the Arts section of the New York Times, every detail rendered realistically, on the right a hymn of praise for a biography of Billy Joel, and on the left a hatchet job on a book of poems by Joseph Brodsky. Only A French Film Is Being Shot made him cluck with pleasure: an altarpiece, way at the bottom the lighting technicians, the grips, and the extras, on the step above them a semicircle of camera people, then above them the actors, transfixed in worship, and right at the top, flanked by two mighty producers doing double duty as archangels, the director in his dark glasses. I never liked it, even while I was working on it I found it dull, and even technically it held no attraction, being far too close to simple caricature, but it became by far his best-known picture among the general public — not least because the director looked like Godard. Warsinsky sold it for a million, four years later I bought it back for a million five, in order to sell it under the table to a collector from Turkmenistan for three million. I hope I never see it again.

At some point he never got up again. The television stayed on, he stayed in bed and kept talking quietly to himself. Mostly he was telling a story that dated from his youth, over and over again: there was a drinking session in it, a test of courage among soldiers, and a game of Russian roulette. I heard it every day while I fed him chicken soup, while I helped him on the toilet, while I plumped up his pillows and covered him up like a child. He became thin, his eyes clouded, and all of a sudden he had also forgotten his stories. I often sat by his bed and wondered if the man I’d known was really still hiding in this crumpled, shrunken body.

For there were still some moments of clarity. Once I found him sitting up; his head turned toward me, he seemed to recognize me, and he asked when we were flying to Paris. He advised me to dedicate myself to my own painting again too. He actually said that: my own painting again too. Then he sank back into himself with his deceptively wise tortoise smile, a little trickle of spit ran down his chin, and when I changed the sheets, the look on his face was so blank it was as if he hadn’t uttered a word in ages.

Another time he suddenly asked for his bank account number. I had to write it down on a piece of paper, because he wanted to call the bank, and when I said that it was impossible at two o’clock in the morning, he began to scream and beg and threaten me. When I did bring him the phone, he had no idea what to do with it.

I often heard his voice in my dreams. When I woke up and heard him snoring beside me, I would be certain that he really had spoken to me, but whenever I tried to remember what it was he’d said, all I knew was that he’d asked for something and I’d said yes. But to what, I no longer knew.

As he lay dying, I sat at his side uneasily, painfully moved, and asked myself what this moment demanded. I wiped his brow, not because it was necessary but because wiping someone’s brow in this situation seemed the right thing to do, and again there was something he wanted to tell me: his lips formed words, but his voice would not obey, and by the time paper and pencil had been located, he was too weak to write anything. For a while his eyes stared at me as if he were trying to transmit thoughts by sheer willpower, but it failed, his eyes broke contact, his chest sank, and I thought, This is what it looks like, this is how it is, this is what happens. This.

Since then, unknown paintings by Eulenboeck come onto the market quite regularly. In the hands of another heir, things could have taken a bad turn, but he had no family. No aunt from overseas and no distant cousin surfaced; luckily there was only me.

I must be on my way, looking after an estate is a full-time job. Today I still have a date for coffee, a dinner, and then a second dinner: conferences, projects, more conferences. I look down at the street again doubtfully, where the three young men are just starting to move. A fourth, blond, wearing a red shirt, is coming toward them, and the three of them surround him.

I turn away from the window and look at Holiday Snap No. 9 as if I were seeing it for the first time. The colors I used are more than thirty years old, as is the canvas: one of several I bought during Heinrich’s lifetime and set aside in his studio. He handled them at the time: if a forensic expert ever examines them, he’ll find the master’s fingerprints.

I unlock the door, go out, and lock it again behind me. The better part of the day is already over, the rest will consist of administration and talk. The elevator grinds its way down toward the bottom.

I step out onto the street. It’s hot. The four young men up ahead are no more than silhouettes, the brightness makes it hard to get a clear look at any of them. I just have to make it to the subway, and it’ll be cooler down inside. I wish I could call a taxi, but unfortunately there are no phone kiosks anymore. Sometimes it would be an advantage to have a cell phone.

Something’s not right. They’re fighting. The three of them have got the fourth in the middle, and now one of them is grabbing his shoulder and giving him a shove while another catches him and shoves him back again. He’s surrounded. And I have to get past them.

Meanwhile I can hear what they’re saying, but I don’t understand it, the words make no sense. My heart is thumping in an odd way: suddenly I no longer feel hot, and my head is clear. It must be the atavistic responses triggered by the proximity of violence. Should I go back the other way or keep going as if nothing were happening? It looks as if they’ll pay no attention to me, so I keep walking toward them. “I’ll kill you!” one of them yells quite openly and shoves the one in the middle again, and one of the others yells something as he shoves him back, like “I’m going to kill you,” but it could be something else too, and I want to call out to the one in the middle that he should pack it in, there are three of them, there’s only one of you, give up, but he’s big and strong and has a large chin, and — I give him a sideways glance as I go past — oxlike, empty eyes. And because it can’t just stay that way, with a shove and then another shove and no escalation from there, one of the three lashes out with his fist and hits the one in the middle on the head.

But he doesn’t fall down. That’s not the way things happen in reality, someone doesn’t fall down right away. He just bends over and covers his face with his hand while the one who hit him whimpers and clutches his fist. It could look quite funny, but it doesn’t.

I’m already past them. They’ve paid no attention to me. I hear a scream behind me. I keep going. Don’t turn around. Another scream. Just keep going. And then I do turn around.

My pathetic curiosity. See, see everything, so see this too. Now it’s only the three of them standing there, the one in the middle has disappeared, like some magic trick, I think. They seem to be dancing, one of them forward, the other one backward, and it takes a few seconds for me to understand that the one in the middle hasn’t disappeared, he’s lying on the ground, and they’re kicking him and kicking him and kicking him.

I stand still.

Why are you standing still, I ask myself. Vanish, so that they don’t realize you’re a witness. That’s exactly what shoots through my brain: Don’t be a witness! As if I were dealing with the Mafia and not with some adolescents. I check the time, it’s shortly before four, and I tell myself that I must move on quickly, this kind of thing must happen all the time, as you can see if you have a secret studio in the worst neighborhood in the city.

They’re still kicking the one who’s on the ground. From here, he’s just a huddled shadow, a bundle with legs. Keep going, I command myself, don’t get curious, disappear! So I keep walking, step by step — fast, but not at a run.

But it’s in the wrong direction. I’m walking toward them again. Never have I felt so strongly that I’m not one person but several. One person who’s walking and one who’s giving futile orders to the one who’s walking, telling him to turn around. And I realize that it’s not just that I’m curious. I’m going to interfere.

I’m just reaching them. It’s taken longer than I expected because with every step I take, time stretches out longer: I cover half the distance that separates me from them, then half of the distance that remains, and then half of that again, like the tortoise in the old story — and suddenly I’m almost certain I’ll never get there at all. I see their legs and heavy shoes flashing forward and backward, I see their arms rising and falling. I see their faces clenched with exertion, I see a television antenna glinting high above them, I see a plane way above that, I see a colorless beetle running its tiny way along a crack in the asphalt, but I see neither cars nor other pedestrians, the five of us are alone, and if I don’t interfere, no one else is going to do it.

Now would be a really good time to have a phone. I keep walking. The half of the distance still remaining will have its own half, and that half yet another one, and I grasp that time is not only endlessly long but also endlessly dense, between one moment and the next lie an infinite number of moments; how can they possibly pass?

They’re paying no attention to me, I could still turn around. The boy on the ground is holding his arms over his head, his legs are bent, and his torso is hunched. I realize that this may be the last moment I could actually steer clear of this thing. I stand still and croak, “Leave him alone!”

They pay no attention. I could still turn back. Instead of a reply, what I hear is the person inside me, the one who’s not listening to the other one who’s begging him to keep quiet, again saying loudly, “Leave him alone! Stop that!”

They pay no attention. What do I do? Interposing myself between them is out of the question, absolutely no one could expect that of me. Relieved, I’m on the point of turning around, but at that very moment they stop. All three, simultaneously, as if they’ve rehearsed it. They stare at me.

“What?” says the biggest of them. His face is shadowed with stubble, he has a thin ring in his nose, and his T-shirt says Bubbletea is not a drink I like. He’s panting as if he’d just finished a heavy workout.

The one next to him — this one’s T-shirt says Morning Tower—also says “What?” in a shaky drawl.

The third one just stares. His T-shirt displays a screaming red Y.

The one on the ground lies motionless, breathing hard.

It’s the critical moment. Now I have to say the right thing, find the right words, a sentence that will ease the tension, make things better, break them up, clear the air. Fear is supposed to make you think faster, but that’s not happening here. My heart is thumping, there’s a roaring in my ears, and the street seems to be turning slowly on its own axis. I didn’t know it was possible to be this afraid, it feels as if I’d never in my life been frightened before, and I’m just learning what fear is right now. Things were all fine just a moment ago, I was upstairs, behind a steel door, surrounded by safety. Can the switch happen at such speed, can the worst be so close at hand? And I think, Stop asking yourself things like this, you don’t have time, you have to say the right thing! And I think, Maybe there are moments when there are no right words anymore, moments when words have no meaning anymore, when they fall apart, when they lead nowhere, because whatever you say is simply irrelevant. And I think, Just stop thinking! And I think …

Now Bubbletea is not a drink I like is coming at me, repeating “What!” but not the way it sounded before, not as a question and not in surprise, but as a naked threat.

“He’s done,” I say. “He can’t even move anymore. He’s finished.” Not bad, I think, so I did actually manage to find something to say. “You guys are much stronger. He doesn’t have a chance, there’s no point anymore.”

“And who are you?”

That didn’t come from Bubbletea is not a drink I like, it came from Y. I hadn’t expected that of him. He’d struck me as harmless, a hanger-on, a bystander, almost a friend.

“I’m …” But my voice is inaudible. I clear my throat, now it’s better. “… no one.” The ancient response given by Odysseus, tried and well tested in situations like this one. “I’m no one!”

They stare.

“If he dies, you’ll get sentenced to life.”

I realize immediately that this was a mistake. First, he’s not going to die, and second, nobody under twenty gets sentenced to life. An entire army of juvenile lawyers, juvenile judges, and juvenile counselors makes that impossible, nobody’s life gets ruined that young anymore, as I know from my brother the priest. But if I’m in luck, they won’t know this.

“The police are certainly already on their …”

Things come together again: street, sky, voices, shadowy figures above me, and me on the ground, leaning against the wall of a house. My head hurts. I must have fainted.

Stay sitting down! You’ve done enough. In the name of all the saints and all the devils and all that is beautiful in the world, stay sitting down!

I get to my feet.

How strange: usually people in danger turn out to be smaller, more gutless, more pitiful than they thought they were. That’s normal, that’s usual, that’s what you expect of yourself. You’re convinced you’ll be revealed as a coward at the first opportunity. And now this. Ivan Friedland, aesthete, curator, wearer of expensive suits, is a hero. I could have done without it.

I’m up on my legs. With one hand I’m supporting myself against the wall, with the other I’m struggling to find my balance. This time I don’t have to say a word — the sheer effrontery of my getting up at all is enough: they don’t back off.

“So who are you?” Y asks again.

“If only I knew.” People have used jokes to get themselves out of bad spots like this.

“Are you nuts?” asks Y.

And Bubbletea is not a drink I like, as if surprised by this realization, says, “Knock it off, Ron. The guy’s nuts.”

Then I notice that something has opened in Morning Tower’s hand, something small and silvery and wicked. Things have turned serious. Even if I’d thought they were serious already — I was wrong, they weren’t. They are now. “Do you want to kill him?” I ask. But it’s not about him anymore.

“Ron!” says Morning Tower to Bubbletea is not a drink I like. “Shut up!”

“No, Ron!” says Y. “You shut up.”

It must be me who’s confused, they can’t all be called Ron. To cover up the pounding of my heart, I ask exaggeratedly loudly if it’s money they want.

But they just stare and say nothing, and I get the feeling I’ve made another mistake. The pain throbs in my forehead. Maybe I should show them some cash. My jacket, its thin fabric tailored by Kilgour in London, is so wet I might have just climbed out of the water. I move my hand toward the wallet in my inner pocket, realize that their looks have changed, try to complete the gesture so that there won’t be any misunderstanding, and know, even as my fingertips brush the leather, that this was yet another mistake: Y ducks away, Bubbletea is not a drink I like takes a step back, Morning Tower’s hand shoots out and touches me, and as I am pulling out the wallet, pain shoots through my chest, my head, and my arms, flames outward, piercing through asphalt, parked cars, houses, sky, and sun, filling the world, becoming the world, then turns back on itself and is inside me again. My wallet lands on the ground, but I flap my arms, and keep my balance, and don’t fall.

I look at the three of them. They look at me: calmly, almost as if they’re curious, and their rage had suddenly dissipated. Not dumb, not angry, just confused. I think Bubbletea may even be trying to smile at me. I try to smile back, but I don’t manage it, I’m feeling very weak.

Y picks up my wallet, looks at it in a questioning way, and drops it again. Then they run. I look after them until they disappear around the corner.

The boy at my feet moves. He stretches, moves softly, holds out his arms, turns around, and tries to stand up. His face is swollen and bloody, but still he doesn’t seem to be that badly hurt. No, he’s not going to die. He probably won’t even have to go to the hospital. He rolls forward, gets his elbows on the ground, and pushes himself shakily onto his feet.

“Everything’s okay,” I say. “Don’t get upset. Everything’s good.”

He blinks at me.

“Everything’s good,” I say. “Everything’s good.”

He takes a few wobbling steps toward my wallet, picks it up, and looks inside. His right eye is closed, the eyelid is twitching, blood is running out of one ear. There’s absolutely nothing written on his red T-shirt.

“Shit,” he says.

“Yes,” I say.

“I really gave it to Ron last week, and now they caught up with me when I was alone.”

“Yes,” I say.

“They’re coming back,” he says. “They’re coming, they’re coming back, they’re on their way here already. They’re coming back.” Deep in thought, he pockets my wallet, then turns away and wobbles off.

Did he say they’re going to come back, did he really say that? Cautiously, step by step, I cross the street. I must not fall down. Once I lie down, I won’t be able to get up again. Every breath I take is like a jab, and each time I extend my leg, bolts of pain shoot through me. There in front of me is the door, that’s where I have to go, behind it the elevator is waiting, up there is my studio, secure behind its secure steel door, they can’t get in there, it’s safe in there, I’ll be safe if they come back.

The street is so wide. I must not faint, it’s only a few more steps.

On I go. He took my wallet!

And on I go. If they really are all called Ron, it won’t be hard to find them. But maybe they were just doing it to confuse me.

And on I go. Can the heat be melting the asphalt, is that possible? My shoes are sinking in, and little waves are running across the sticky mass.

And on I go. There, the door, the key in my trouser pocket, the key has to go in the door, the door needs the key, but I still am not there yet. Why is there no one here? No car, no one at a window, but perhaps this is good, because if someone were here, it could be the three of them again, he said they’d come back. The door. The key. It must be the right one, the one for the front door, not the one for the studio, and not the one for my apartment, because that’s not where I am, where I am is here.

And on I go. Just a few more steps. A few. And again a few. Keep going. A few more. A few steps. The key. The door. Here.

It slips, scrapes across the metal, the keyhole is dodging me, to the right then to the left, my hand is shaking but I can feel it, get the key in, turn it, the door opens, into the house, the elevator, I push the button for the fifth floor, the elevator jerks.

A man is standing next to me, a moment ago he wasn’t here. He has a hideous gap between his teeth, and a battered hat. He says, “Jaegerstrasse 15b.”

“Yes,” I say. “That’s here. That’s the address of this house. Jaegerstrasse 15b.”

“Jaegerstrasse 15b,” he repeats. “Fifth floor.”

“Yes,” I say. “We’re going to the fifth floor.”

We’ve already gotten there, the elevator stops, the door opens, the man is no longer there, I get out; now everything depends on getting the second key into the lock. I’m in luck, the door opens, I go in and lock it behind me. Then I take hold of the bolt — for a moment it doesn’t seem to want to move, but then it does slide sideways with a squeak, and the door is blocked. I’ve done it, I’ve reached safety.

I want to sit down. The chair is over against the opposite wall, but relief gives me strength. I walk and I walk, and eventually I get there. What I really want to do is sleep, long and deep, until everything is better.

I touch my stomach. My hand comes away wet, my jacket is wet, my pants are wet too, I cannot remember when I ever sweated this much. I hold my hand in front of my eyes. It’s red.

And there he is again, with his hat and the gap between his teeth, and even as I’m looking at him, I guess that he’s about to disappear again.

“Go to your brother,” he says, “help him. Jaegerstrasse 15b, fifth floor. Go!”

Instead of answering that it isn’t my brother here, it’s me, I blink in the direction of Holiday Snap No. 9, and there he is again, looking in from outside, no mean trick to keep his balance on the window ledge up on the fifth floor! I can read his lips: Jaegerstrasse 15b, fifth floor, and I want to cry, “You there, I know where I am!” but it’s too much of an effort and now he’s already disappeared again.

I’m cold.

In fact, I’m shivering. My teeth are chattering, and when I hold my hand up in front of my eyes, I see it’s trembling. Heinrich comes in with his mustache and his stick and his cane, and goes over to the window. Behind his head an airplane moves through the streaks on the windowpane like a little fish swimming through water, and already we’re in a meadow, and I’m smaller than I was a moment ago, and Papa and Mama are saying that I should drink water, and I ask Papa if he wasn’t Heinrich just now, and he wants to know if I’m really not thirsty, and I say, Yes, I’m really thirsty and a little way off Eric is sitting in the grass looking so exactly like me that I feel I’m him. I dig around in the blades of grass, find a worm, and pick it up, it coils itself across my palm, Papa bends over my shoulder, and the feeling of safety remains even as I look around the studio. The worm on my hand isn’t a worm, it’s blood, and Heinrich says, You have to get out of here, or it’ll be too late.

Do you remember Eric’s call, I ask. He said his secretary had mixed up Martin and me, and she called the wrong person. Do you remember?

You really have to get out of here, Ivan.

If she hadn’t mixed us up, then I would have met him for lunch today and I wouldn’t have come here and none of this would have happened, isn’t that curious?

Very curious, but you’ve got to get out of here. Otherwise it’ll be too late.

Too late … so why didn’t I give him my watch? A TAG Heuer, four thousand euros, bought in Geneva two years ago. If I’d given it to him, I wouldn’t have had to reach into my inner pocket. I look at the watch hands. Ten past four. Ten past four. Ten past four. Eleven past four.

All well and good, says Heinrich, but I’m advising you to get out of here.

Where to?

Out.

But where to?

The main thing is out.

Out there?

Out anywhere.

It’s easy for him to say, but it’s true, it was a mistake to come back here. This building is empty except for one floor, the warehouse, but I’ve never seen a soul even there. I’ll have to crawl to the door, past Holiday Snap No. 9 and the sniggering children, across the rectangle of light the sun is casting on the floor, the door is several yards farther on, that’s where I’ll have to straighten up to reach the bolt and the handle, and then I’ll be out.

So I push myself out of the chair, sink to the floor, and start to crawl. I’ve still got the strength, I’m managing, I’ll be able to reach the door. First I have to get past the chest of drawers; the bottom drawer, which is partway open, holds my brushes, all my brushes, but I don’t know at this particular moment how I’m going to find the right one. It’s not easy, there are a lot of them, and besides I’m not looking for a brush!

But what am I looking for, then?

It’ll come to me. Past the chest of drawers. Cold floor against my cold hands, cracked floor against my cracked hands, rough floor against my rough hands, keep going. I must not look at the painting, so that I don’t attract the attention of the children, and I have to stay clear of the rectangle of light.

But what was that about? The thing with the rectangle of light, what was that?

I no longer know. Help me, open the door, I can’t manage the thing with the bolt. Someone will find me down on the street, someone will call a doctor. And what if the doctor asks what I was doing in a neighborhood like this? But why would he ask, what does he care about my studio and a handful of forged paintings that you can’t even call fakes, they’re genuine, you’re the fake, poor Heinrich, help me with the door! I have to get out before I faint.

If you know this, you also know that you’re alone here.

Yes, I know this. And?

Ivan.

Yes?

If you’re alone here.

Yes?

Then I can’t help you with the bolt.

No?

Ivan.

Yes, I understand. Yes. So I have to. Keep going. But when I’m downstairs and the three of them come back, what do I do? Is there some way they can get in, do they have a key? Maybe when they took my wallet, they took my keys too.

If they’d taken them, then they’d be here now, not you.

How so?

Because you’d have no key.

But what would they want here?

Good question. Maybe you should keep on crawling.

But—

It’s urgent.

But—

It’s really urgent, Ivan.

I’ve never noticed how big this studio is. Looking at the window from down here, there’s much more sky, much more blue than usual. I assume it’s still hot outside, but I don’t feel it, I’m cold. Now it hurts a lot again. If you don’t have to breathe in, things would be easier, you can limit it but you still do have to breathe a little bit, and it burns like fire. It’s the pain that’s keeping me conscious. I’m so tired and things keep going dark for a moment, but then I breathe in again and in that moment it hurts so much that I’m awake again, do you understand?

Ivan, I’m not here.

You never were. Since that afternoon we went to the hypnotist. Always somewhere else. But aren’t you impressed? Your son, the hero.

I’ll never hear about it, Ivan. No one will, if you don’t make it to the door and outside. Keep crawling, don’t get stuck in the grass.

Do you remember the two of us in the sandbox? You built towers and I knocked them over, and then you weren’t the one who cried, I was, until Papa came and said, “Eric, stop that!” and it wasn’t even you who’d done it.

The grass is so high. But what if they do come back? The thin man is standing there again, pulling at his hat and saying, “Jaegerstrasse 15b, fifth floor!” He raises his hands as if to command a hearing, and bobs up and down nervously. “That’s where you’ll find him, that’s where your brother is.”

No, I say, that’s where I am, and there is here.

But he’s not listening to me, he’s in such a hurry to impart the information all over again: “Jaegerstrasse 15b, fifth floor!” He hops and waves, all trace of calm has evaporated, he’s actually fading already and I know I won’t see him again.

It’s freezing cold, but I’m safe. The three of them won’t find me. The door is barred, and even if they have the key, the grass is too thick. Everything rises and falls, forward and backward, all of it in waves, to and fro. This building will not be here forever, and even the blue out there won’t always be blue. Only I will always be here, I have to be here, there has to be me, because without me all this wouldn’t exist because there’d be nobody to see it. The cold floor, hard beneath my temple. And a rocking, as if I were on a boat again.

Do you remember when we went to Tangiers, you and I and Mama and Papa, and the evening ferry took us across the straits? We were six years old and when we left Algeciras the air was redolent with the smell of flowers and sweetish gasoline, the stars shimmered around a coppery moon, and Papa is carrying both of us in his arms, and Mama is following along behind, and there’s a fat man, all unshaven, asleep on the deck, his mouth wide open, and I have an intuition that I’m going to remember him all my life, but then the ferry stabbed its way out to the open sea, and the coast became a flicker of light, and next to us were pale cliffs and the sounds of the waves. The four of us belong together, it will always be like this, and I know, as I lay my head on his shoulder, that I’m about to fall asleep although I don’t want to, it’s night everywhere, nothing but stars close above our heads, more of them than ever, Africa will soon appear, only the pain when I breathe in reminds me how hard the ground is, and it’s cold again, everything keeps going up and down, and think about how excited the two of us were the first day, naturally they sat us next to each other so that everyone would notice that we look exactly alike, and our parents stand behind us against the wall, and the teacher says is there one of you or are there two, and the question strikes me as so hard that I turn around to Papa and Mama, but they smile and say nothing, as if to make clear to us that from now on we have to be the ones to answer, and look, there’s a bird fluttering past the window, I don’t see it, just its shadow in the rectangle of light, I’ve never seen a bird fly so slowly, we’ll be in Africa soon, and then it’s morning again, I could go after it, I’d really love to know