The Golden Age

Dances in the fire

These last words were not those of the deceased woman on Mykonos; they were meant for Baumgarten. A pleasant torpor had indeed taken hold of his body; his eyes were closing, their lashes were wet with melted snow, and he was seeing the snowflakes as foam of the waves on the Aegean beach the thief had been telling him about. When the girl saw that the dozing aesthetician was swaying precariously on the tip of the a, she shook him. Baumgarten insisted he had not been asleep at all, that he had been listening to her attentively, but immediately afterwards his head began to sink towards her lap. The girl was not pleased to stop talking about her favourite topic but she concluded that Baumgarten was too sleepy to pay her any heed and it was time to go.

She took him by the hand and led him along what remained of the word Lafayette. When they reached the final “e,” she saw that he was a little more alert; on their way down she would attempt to tell him something more about the picture. Baumgarten, half-asleep and serene, was happy to be led; he skipped over the letters with the lightness of a somnambulist. The girl’s talk had the quality of snow-music and as such was no bother to him.

“I thought that the story of the wrecking of the Zephyrus was one of island treasure and heartache,” the thief said, giving Baumgarten a radiant smile. “But in the fine weave of the story these were only secondary motifs. The Berlin picture was full of such confusing signs and unexpected twists. Then it occurred to me to use the magnifying glass to look into the car which stood in front of the house of the sculptor’s unfaithful mistress. And I saw in the car four agents of the Chinese secret service.”

Baumgarten wished for a moment to sit on the short, horizontal line which intersected the second “t,” as this put him in mind of a seat. But the thief pulled him away.

“Just keep going, you’ll be home in a few minutes. One of the Chinese agents was aiming a rifle with a silencer and telescopic sights at the head of the man who was lying in the bed with the sculptor’s mistress. The muscles of the Chinese’s trigger finger were tensed. Then it came to me that the red spot I’d taken for the glowing end of a cigarette was in fact the light made by the gun’s sights, and it was wandering over the man’s face. The next moment he was likely to catch the full force of the Chinese’s rifle; had the painter shown the town a second later, one would probably have seen in the room a bloodied face and a pillow stained with red. And what’s the connection between all this and the Chinese characters on the strip of paper sticking out of the book on the bedside table? Is this merely a coincidence, or does the sculptor’s mistress know more than we think about the game the secret service is playing? And what of the revolver in her handbag? What does she intend to shoot at with that? Perhaps you’d be interested to know what happened.” The girl turned to face Baumgarten, who had not spoken, because at that very moment he was giving himself up to a dream in which the violet neon letters were changing into water nymphs with glowing bodies, dancing in a woodland glade.

“The picture didn’t show whether the mystery man in the bed escaped with his life. After all, the picture wove together thousands of story-lines, many of which went deep into the past, although all ended at the moment at which the town was captured. So it was unclear what would happen in the next fraction of a second in any of the stories. As you can see, we’ve reached the end of the word. Just a few steps along the roof of the building next door and we can climb down the fire escape and through the skylight to the staircase; I’ve tried it before. Oddly enough it was a torn poster I saw on a wall in the quarter around the harbour, a poster announcing a performance by a ballet company, that led me to answers to the questions I’d been asking myself. Among the things the sculptor had found in the cave-temple were two suits of clothing to wear during the performing of rituals. On religious festivals the priests would wear these to dance their sacred dances in the lake of red-hot lava which bubbled in the mouth of the volcano at the island’s centre. The suits were woven of special fibres which, so it seemed, were resistant to any degree of heat and insulated the body quite perfectly. Naturally certain international concerns became interested in the suits, as did the general staffs of the armies of many countries. The impractical sculptor had never imagined that the suits would become the subject of great interest, that he would be able to earn a vast sum of money by them. He gifted the suits to his friends, members of an avant-garde ballet troupe, and they wore them in the compelling final act of a ballet on the theme of Plotinus’s Enneads, the whole of which was set in the fire of the One, represented on stage by a real earthly fire.

“For a long time I racked my brains as I sought to work out who was the man lying in bed with the sculptor’s mistress. Who was the man on whom the Chinese had their weapons trained? I’d almost given up hope of finding out when I discovered a photograph of him in a newspaper folded into a hat and worn by a man spraying the body of a car with red paint in a car-repair shop on the edge of the town. The headline told me that the sculptor’s rival was a branch director for a giant weapons concern. Was the sculptor’s mistress in league with him, had she betrayed him to the Chinese agents, or was she playing a game of her own against them all?”

As he continued along the snow-covered roof Baumgarten became more alert, but still he did not pay much attention to what the girl was saying. He heard some words to the effect of “…at a secret meeting in Singapore in which all parties were involved, it emerged that…”, and “…next day they found the body of the Amsterdam diamond dealer in the bay at Villefranche-sur-Mer…”, and “…Doctor Xiang Liu’s number was circled in the telephone directory.” Once again Baumgarten’s drowsiness was chopping the whole which the girl had so painstakingly composed in Berlin into disconnected fragments. They reached a kind of shelf where the thief rummaged in the snow for a moment or two before lifting a metal hatch and pushing the half-sleeping aesthetician into a dark opening. Soon they were descending the unlit staircase of the silent building. There was a sound of snoring from behind one of the doors. Before long they reached the empty street. Baumgarten saw the display windows of the department store, how they illuminated the snowflakes dancing above the pavement, and behind them he saw the door of the building, which he passed through every day. He was surprised to see how close it was; on the roof, the breadth of the department store’s facade had seemed to him greater than the distance required by an expedition across Greenland.

He gathered his senses and said to the girl, “You should get some sleep. I need to put my head down, too. Tomorrow I’ll come to the gallery and lend you the money for the picture. And there’ll be no hurry for you to pay it back.”

The thief hesitated, then gave him the address of a gallery on the Left Bank of the Seine. She accompanied Baumgarten to the door of his building before waving down a taxi whose lights emerged from the swirling snow and disappeared. Back in his flat the aesthetician changed into dry pyjamas and set his alarm clock. Then he dropped onto the bed and fell asleep immediately. The next day at eleven o’clock he was at the gallery the girl had described to him. He learned that there would be no auction there that day, and no one knew anything about a picture of a harbour town. The thief did not come, nor did he ever see her again. Later he asked colleagues at the university who lectured on contemporary painting about the picture, but all they did was shrug their shoulders. He described it to some art critics from Berlin who were in Paris for a symposium, and they all listened with amazement to his tales of the statue of Leibniz, the crabs, the Chinese agents and the ballet-dancing Enneads. But none of them had seen the picture or knew of the drowned painter…When my Paris acquaintance finished his story, he checked his watch, made his apologies, and left me alone in the café with a story with no point and no moral.