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.