“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 souclass="underline" 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.