“But you’ve forgotten that you don’t have the money for the picture. Or are we to resume our fight for the necklace?”
“Don’t worry, I’m finished on this roof. But it’s a long time till morning.” With this the girl fell silent; it seemed she was waiting for Baumgarten to invite her to tell him more about the picture. But because the aesthetician, too, was silent, she resumed of her own accord.
“If I were to describe to you everything I’ve seen in the picture, we’d freeze to death up here. Anyway, I don’t have much time — as you know, there’s still work for me to do tonight. But I would like to make up for the unpleasantness I’ve caused you. I’d like to give you at least a brief description of the picture.”
Accepting that he would have to hear the girl out, Baumgarten made himself more comfortable on the tip of the “a,” while cautiously the thief changed her position from the right-hand cap of the “y” to the left so as to be closer to him. The neon tubes hummed quietly; there was something about this sound that reminded Baumgarten of his past, but he did not wish to think about that now. The girl’s mouth gave out cloudlets of vapour as she spoke; these were coloured by the purple light before they dissolved in the dark.
“The picture was four metres long and a metre-and-a-half high. Three-quarters of its surface was covered by a gently rippling sea with a blue sky above it. In the other quarter, on the right, the artist had painted a town with a harbour. It looked like it was somewhere in the Mediterranean. It was the time of the afternoon siesta and the walls were sweltering in the sun. There were suntanned tourists walking along the pier, figures in shorts and colourful T-shirts sitting on the terraces of harbour-side restaurants in the shadow of outstretched sails, on the tables beside them glasses of iced coffee, broad-brimmed straw hats, glossy magazines and half-written postcards.”
“You said you were going to keep it brief,” Baumgarten interposed as the cold continued to bite.
“But that’s why I’m not telling you what was written on the menu cards, in the magazines, on the postcards and in the diary of a history of art student from America, which was lying next to her on a wickerwork chair on a café terrace, although these were all extremely important things. On one of the postcards, for instance, written in green ballpoint…”
“OK, I won’t interrupt you again,” said Baumgarten, who was afraid the thief would go into detail about all the things she wouldn’t be mentioning.
“In narrow streets leading up from the harbour to the ruins of mighty ramparts were women wearing black dresses, sitting on chairs in front of doors which gave straight on to living rooms. In the shadows of open taprooms the wrinkled, tanned skin of natives was visible as they sipped their coffee and their anisette. As I said, when one studies the scenes in the picture, one discovers connections among them which build up into stories.”
“I’m still having difficulty imagining it clearly,” said Baumgarten, who was beginning to be drawn in by the narration.
“It might be better if I were to give you some examples of the stories which I read in the picture. How about the one about the turbine, the peanut butter and the sordid dreams? In a window of one of the apartments you could see three men, the eldest of whom was sunk in a deep armchair showing the youngest something on a sheet of paper, while the third man was sitting by the window flicking through a notebook. In a mirror hanging on the wall in the background was the reflection of the corner of an adjacent room, which was flooded with sun and had a table in it on which was lying a metal part in the shape of a cylinder, which was smeared with honey…No, the story of the sordid dreams is too long and complicated — it’d be better if I told you the one about the golden helicopter. No, not that one — I’ll tell you about the wrecking of the Zephyrus. One of the yachts at anchor in the harbour had the name Zephyrus emblazoned on its side. The last letter of the name rested against a large, brick-red paint stain in the shape of a butterfly, or rather a moth…” (Baumgarten gave the thief a look of reproach, but apparently the girl did not consider her descriptions to be too long-winded.)
“It looked as if someone had painted the yacht as a temporary measure after some kind of accident. On the jetty there stood a sinewy, unshaven native in a checked shirt, one of whose hands was pointing at the yacht, the other making a sweeping gesture while he explained something excitedly to a soft, pink tourist in Bermuda shorts adorned with palm groves and surfers riding great blue waves.” (Baumgarten was relieved the girl did not describe the patterns on the surfers’ swim-wear.) “He appeared genuinely interested in what the old native was telling him. Which means…”
“Which probably means that not long before the yacht had been involved in some kind of adventure which had damaged its hull, and stories of this adventure were spreading across the town.” Baumgarten was trying to interpret the scene in the picture so that he could move the girl’s account forward. Watching the luminous, phantom-like purple snowflakes, it seemed to him for a moment that he knew their full repertoire of dances, which they repeated ad infinitum.
The wrecking of the Zephyrus
“That’s right,” said the thief, nodding enthusiastically. “In one of the streets above the harbour it was possible to look through an open window into a modestly-appointed room. On a shelf on the wall I could see a number of exotic sculptures. There was a suntanned, fair-haired man of about thirty sitting at a desk; he looked like a foreigner who had lived a long time in the south. On the right-hand side of the desk there was a typewriter with rounded keys and a black case on which ‘Underwood’ was written in ornamental gold letters, and beneath this, in smaller letters, ‘Standard Four Bank Keyboard.’ Towards the back of the desk there were several pots containing pencils and pens. Against one of these a plastic frame was resting; this contained a black-and-white photograph of a young woman, laughing, sitting on a deck chair next to a swimming pool. On the left-hand side of the desk there was a folder, out of which sheets of paper covered in dense writing were spilling from the top and bottom. The folder bore the legend ‘Journey,’ which was almost obscured by the kind of drawings people do unconsciously and abstractedly; these drawings were of elephants, crocodiles, and birds of paradise among a lot of grotesque shapes and some names and telephone numbers. All the spaces were filled in with a fancy, complicated net — rather like a spider’s web — and all the figures, letters and numbers were ensnared in this. Next to the scribbled-on folder there was a glass ball used as a paperweight, where one could read distorted letters of various sizes which made up the words ‘Black Hermaphrodite will be with you very soon…’
“All these objects created a kind of rampart along three sides of the desk. In the space this marked out, thirty-eight nine-by-thirteen colour photographs were laid out like cards in a game of patience. The man was bent over these in an attitude of contemplation. Many of the photographs showed the Zephyrus. In the one at the top left-hand corner she was at anchor in the town’s harbour and her paint, white and undamaged, was gleaming in the early-morning sun. Many of the other shots showed the surface of the sea in various guises — gleaming and dark, undulating and flat, whirling restlessly, languid and passive, broken into many small, sharp-spined waves, gathered in a stodgy, formless mass, neurotically tense, listlessly dormant. Regardless of the sea’s guise, in each of the photos it was scored through with the white lines of marine ropes. In some shots the figure of a man was visible on deck. It was the man sitting at the desk. Apparently he used a self-release mechanism. As far as I could tell, he journeyed in the boat alone.