Me Kaminski

  “You paid his rent?”

  “It happened.”

  “And today you’re . . . no longer wealthy?”

  “Times change.”

  “Where did you get to know him from?”

  “Matisse. I visited him in Nice, he said there’s a young painter in Paris, a protégé of Richard Rieming.”

  “And his pictures?”

  “Nothing earth-shattering. But I thought, this will change.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of him, really. He simply gave you the impression that he could go places. At the beginning, his stuff was fairly bad, overloaded Surrealism. That all changed with Therese.” His lips rubbed together; I wondered if he still had any teeth in his head. On the other hand, he’d just ordered a steak.

  “You mean Adrienne,” I said.

  “I know who I mean. Maybe this will surprise you, but I’m not senile. Adrienne came later.”

  “Who was Therese?”

  “My God, she was everything! She changed him completely, even if he would never admit it. You’ve certainly heard about his experience in the salt mine, he talks about it often enough.”

  “That’s where I’m going the day after tomorrow.”

  “Do whatever you want. But Therese was more important.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Then you need to start at the beginning again.”

  “Let’s be candid. Do you consider him a great painter?”

  “Yes, of course.” I returned Professor Komenev’s stare. “Within bounds.”

  Komenev folded his hands behind his head, and his chair tipped right back in a single movement. His little fuzzy beard stuck out straight from his chin. “Okay, to take things in order. No need to waste words on the early pictures. Then the Reflections. Very unusual for that time. Technically brilliant. But still rather sterile. A good basic idea, too often worked through too exactly and too precisely, and the Old Master stuff with the tempera doesn’t make it any better. A little bit too much Piranesi. Then Chromatic Light, the Walker, the street scenes. At first sight, fabulous. But not exactly subtle, thematically speaking. And let’s be honest, if people didn’t know about him going blind . . .” He shrugged. “You’ve seen the pictures themselves?”

  I hesitated. I had thought about flying to New York, but it was quite expensive and besides—what were art books for? “Of course.”

  “Then you will have noticed the uncertain brushwork. He must have used strong magnifying glasses. No comparison to the earlier technical perfection. And after that? Oh God, the verdict is already in. Calendar art! Have you seen the hideous dog on the beach, the Goya knockoff?”

  “So, first too much technique and too little feeling, then the reverse.”

  “You could say that.” He lifted his hands from behind his neck, the chair tipped upright again. “Two years ago I discussed him again in a seminar. The kids were baffled. He had nothing to say to them anymore.”

  “Did you ever meet him?”

  “No, why would I? When my Some Thoughts on Kaminski came out, I sent him the book. He never responded. Didn’t think it mattered! As I say, he’s a good painter, and good painters are transient. Only great painters are not.”

  “You should have gone there,” I said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “It’s pointless to write and then sit there waiting for an answer. You have to go there. You have to take him by surprise. When I wrote my portrait of Wernicke—you know Wernicke?”

  He looked at me, puzzled.

  “It had just happened and his family didn’t want to talk to me. But I didn’t leave. I stood at their front door and told them I was going to write about his suicide anyway, and the only choice they had was whether to talk to me or not. ‘If you choose not to,’ I said, ‘what that means is that your own views won’t be represented. But if you were prepared . . .’”

  “Excuse me.” Komenev leaned forward and stared at me. “What exactly are you talking about?”

  “It didn’t last that long. A year, and then the thing with Therese was over.”

  The waiter brought the steak with roast potatoes, Silva grabbed his knife and fork and began to eat, his throat quivering as he swallowed. I ordered another Coca-Cola.

  “She was really something special. She never saw him as he was, but as what he could become. And then that’s what she made him. I can still remember how she looked at one of his pictures and said, quite quietly, ‘Do those always have to be eagles?’ You should have heard the way she said ‘eagles.’ That was the end of his Symbolist phase. She was wonderful! The marriage to Adrienne was just a messed-up mirror image, she looked a little like Therese. Need I say more? If you ask me, he never got over her. If every life has one decisive catastrophe”—he shrugged his shoulders—“then that was his.”

  “But his daughter is Adrienne’s?”

  “When she was thirteen, her mother died.” He stared into nowhere, as if the memory were painful. “Then she came to him in this house at the end of the world, and since then she has taken care of everything.” He pushed a chunk of meat that was a bit too ambitious into his mouth, and there was a pause before he was able to speak again; I made an effort not to look. “Manuel always found the people he needed. He felt the world owed him.”

  “Why did Therese leave him?”

  He didn’t answer. Maybe he was hard of hearing. I pushed the recorder closer to him. “Why . . .?”

  “How do I know? Mr. Zollner, there are always a thousand explanations, a thousand versions of every thing, and in the end, the truth is always the most banal. No one knows what happened, and no one has any idea of what someone else thinks of them! We should stop. I’m no longer accustomed to people listening to me.”

  I looked at him in astonishment. His nose was trembling, he’d laid down his knife and fork, and was looking at me with swollen eyes. What had upset him? “I had a few more questions,” I said cautiously.

  “Don’t you understand? We’re talking about him as if he were already dead.”

  “One time a new piece was being put on.” He sat up straight, rubbed his bald spot, then ran a hand over his double chin and rumpled his forehead. Start up one more time with your compositions, I thought, and I’m going to shove this recorder straight down your throat!

  “He came to the opening night with Therese Lessing. An exceptionally intelligent woman, God knows what she saw in him . . . it was the best sort of avant-garde, a sort of Black Mass, blood-smeared performers, dumb show under an upturned cross, but the two of them laughed the whole time. First they tittered and destroyed everyone else’s concentration, then they started laughing out loud. Until they got thrown out. The atmosphere was all gone to hell, or rather not gone to hell, if you see what I mean, anyhow, the whole thing was over. After Therese’s death he got married, and after his wife, not unnaturally, went off with Dominik, I didn’t see him again.”

  “With Dominik?”

  “You don’t know that?” He frowned, his eyebrows shot up in a thicket, his chin twitched. “What kind of research are you doing? He never came to my concerts, they didn’t interest him. A time like that never comes twice. Ansermet wanted to conduct my symphonic Suite, but it never happened, because . . .what, already? Stay, I have a couple of interesting LPs. You’ll never hear them anywhere else!”

  “What do you think of his pictures?” Professor Mehring looked at me watchfully over the frames of his glasses.

  “First, too much technique and too little feeling,” I said. “Then the reverse.”

  “That’s what Komenev says too. But I think it’s wrong.”

  “So do I,” I said hastily. “A prejudice, and a bad one.”

  “And Komenev talked completely differently twenty years ago. But Kaminski was in fashion back then. I discussed him in class a year ago. The students were riveted. I also think his late work is being misjudged. That will correct itself in time.”

  “You were his assistant?”

  “O
nly briefly. I was nineteen, my father knew Bogovic, he arranged things. I was responsible for grinding the pigments. He had the idea that he’d get more intense colors if we did it ourselves. If you ask me, pure chutzpah. But I was allowed to live upstairs in his house, and if you want to know the truth, I was sort of in love with his daughter. She was so beautiful, and basically she never saw anybody aside from him. But she wasn’t very interested in me.”

  “Were you with him when he was painting?”

  “He needed to use big magnifying glasses, he fastened them to his head like a jeweler. He was pretty high-strung, sometimes he broke his brush in sheer rage, and when he felt I was being too slow . . . well, it’s hard for us to imagine what he had to go through. He had planned every painting in detail, made whole series of sketches, but when it came time to mix the paints, he couldn’t get things to come out the way he wanted. After a month I quit.”

  “Are you still in touch with him?”

  “I send Christmas cards.”

  “Does he reply?”

  “Miriam replies. I assume that’s as far as I’ll ever get.”

  “I’ve only got ten minutes.” Bogovic stroked his beard uneasily. The window looked onto the walls of the Palais Royal, a sketch by David Hockney of a California villa hung over the desk. “All I can say is I love him like a father. Go ahead, make sure you’ve got that on tape. A father. I got to know him at the end of the sixties, Papa was still running the gallery, he was so proud that Kaminski had become one of his artists. In those days, Manuel came by train, he didn’t fly. But he loves to take trips. He’s gone on long journeys, of course he needs someone to drive him. He likes adventures! We handled his great landscape paintings. Probably the best things he ever did. The Pompidou almost bought two of them.”

  “What went wrong?”

  “Nothing, they just didn’t buy them. Mr. Zellner, I have . . .”

  “Zollner!”

  “. . . known many creative people in my lifetime. Good people. But only one genius.”

  The door opened, an assistant wearing a tight blouse came in and laid a message in front of him; Bogovic looked at it for a few seconds, then set it aside. I looked at her and smiled, she looked away, but still I could tell she liked me. She was adorably shy. As she went out, I leaned unobtrusively to one side, so that she had to brush against me as she passed, but she evaded me. I winked at Bogovic, he frowned. He must be gay.

  “I go see him twice a year,” he said, “next week is when I’m due to go again. Strange that he really took himself out of circulation. Papa would have gotten him an apartment here or in London. But that’s not what he wanted.”

  “Is he totally blind?”

  “If you find out, do let me know! He hasn’t been doing so well recently, major bypass operation. I was there myself, at the hospital . . . no, that’s not right, I was there when Papa had the same thing. But I’d have done the same for him. As I said, I love this man. I didn’t love my father. Manuel Kaminski is the greatest. Sometimes I think”—he pointed to the picture of the villa—“David is the greatest. Or Lucian or whoever. Sometimes I even think I’m the greatest. But then I think of him, and I know we’re nothing.” He pointed to a painting on the opposite wall: a bowed figure sat on the coast of a dark ocean, beside it stood a huge dog, twisted peculiarly out of perspective. “You know this one, don’t you? Death by the Faded Sea. This I will never sell.”

  I realized Komenev had mentioned this painting. Or was it Mehring? I couldn’t remember what had been said and if I was supposed to like the thing or not. “Doesn’t look like Kaminski,” I said before I had time to think.

  “In what way?”

  “Because he . . . because . . .” I stared at the palms of my hands. “Because . . . of the brushwork. You know, the brushwork. What do you know about Therese Lessing?”

  “Never heard the name.”

  “How good a negotiator is he?”

  “Miriam does all that. She started when she was seventeen. She’s better than a lawyer and a wife combined.”

  “She never married.”

  “And?”

  “She’s been living with him for such a long time. Up there in the mountains, cut off from everything. Right?”

  “Mmmm,” he said coolly. “Now you must excuse me. Maybe next time you should make an appointment instead of just . . .”

  “Of course!” I got to my feet. “I’ll be there next week too. He’s invited me.” Bogovic’s handshake was soft and a little damp. “To Arcadia!”

  “To where?”

  “When I’m rich, I’m going to buy Death by the Faded Sea from you. No matter what the price is.”

  He looked at me wordlessly.

  “Just kidding!” I said happily. “No harm intended. It was a joke.”

  “Haven’t a clue what the old idiot said to you. I never lived with Adrienne.”

  It hadn’t been easy to persuade Silva to meet me again; I’d had to emphasize repeatedly that he could choose where we were to eat. He shook his head, his lips were smeared all brown with chocolate ice cream, not a pretty sight.

  “I liked her and I felt sorry for her. I took care of her and the child, because Manuel didn’t want to anymore. Maybe he took it badly. But that’s all that happened.”

  “Who am I supposed to believe now?”

  “That’s your problem, nobody owes you an accounting!” He looked up at me. “You’ll meet Manuel quite soon. But you won’t be able to imagine what he was back then. He managed to convince everyone that he was going to be great one day. One had to give him what he wanted. Therese was the only one who didn’t . . .” He scraped the last drops of ice cream out of the glass and licked both sides of the spoon. “Only Therese.” He thought for a bit, but seemed to have forgotten what it was he wanted to say.

  “Would you like a coffee?” I asked uneasily. The whole thing was already way over my own spending limit; I hadn’t yet had a conversation with Megelbach about expenses.

  “Mr. Zollner, this is all old history! In reality, none of us exists anymore. Old age is absurd. You’re here and you’re not here, like a ghost.” For a few seconds he stared past me out at the roofs, and the other side of the street. His neck was so thin that the veins stood out clearly. “Miriam was very gifted, alive, a little hot-tempered. When she was twenty, she had a fiancé. He came to visit, stayed for two days, left, and never came back. It’s not easy to have him for a father. I would like to see her again.”

  “I’ll tell her.”

  “Better not.” He smiled softly.

  “I’d like to ask another few questions.”

  “Believe me, so would I.”

  “That we didn’t know anyone could get so old—write that! You have to write that!” She pointed at the birdcage. “Do you hear Pauli?”

  “Did you know Therese well?”

  “When she died, he wanted to kill himself.”

  “Really?” I sat up straight.

  Her eyes closed for a moment: even her eyelids were wrinkled, I’d never seen such wrinkles before. “That’s what Dominik said. I would never have asked Manuel about it. Nobody would. But he was completely beside himself. It was only when Dominik told him she was dead that he stopped searching for her. Would you like tea?”

  “No. Yes. Yes please. Do you have a photo of her?”

  She lifted the teapot and poured shakily. “Ask her, maybe she’ll send you one.”

  “Who should I ask?”

  “Therese.”

  “But she’s dead!”

  “No, no, she lives up north, on the coast.”

  “She didn’t die?”

  “No, that’s just what Dominik said. Manuel would never have stopped trying to find her. I liked her husband, Bruno, very much. He was such a fine human being, quite different from . . . do you take sugar? He’s been dead a long time now. Most everybody’s dead.” She put down the teapot. “Milk?”

  “No! Do you have her address?”

  “I think I do. Li
sten, do you hear him? He sings so beautifully. Canaries don’t often sing. Pauli’s an exception.”

  “Please give me her address!” She didn’t answer, she seemed not to have understood me.

  “To be honest,” I said slowly, “I don’t hear a thing.”

  “What?”

  “He’s not singing, he’s not moving, and I don’t think he’s actually doing that well. Please would you give me the address?”

  V

  SHORTLY AFTER TEN I was woken by the sun shining in through the window. I was lying on top of the bedclothes, surrounded by a dozen audio cassettes, the tape recorder had landed on the floor. In the distance I could hear church bells. I dragged myself out of bed.

  I had breakfast under the same stag’s head I’d seen through the window the day before. The coffee tasted like water, at the next table a father was being mean to his son, and the little boy let his head drop, closed his eyes, and pretended he wasn’t there. Hugo crawled over the carpet with his ears held flat against his head. I called the proprietress over and said the coffee was undrinkable. She nodded indifferently and brought a new pot. I should think so, I said. She shrugged. The coffee was actually stronger, three cups of it and my heart was pounding. I shouldered my bag and set out.

  The path I had come down last night seemed fairly broad and harmless by light of day, and the steep slope had turned itself into a gently slanting meadow full of flowers. Two cows looked at me mournfully, a man with a scythe, who looked like the old farmer in the picture, called out something incomprehensible, I nodded at him, he laughed and made a gesture as if he were throwing something away. The air was cool, and yesterday’s sultriness had dissipated. When I reached the signpost I was barely out of breath.