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  I call Wexler, the new chief curator of the Clayland Museum in Montreal. Actually all I want to do is leave a message, but in spite of the time difference he answers right away. He says he’s switched his office line over onto his cell phone and no, he’s not asleep, he’s broken the habit.

  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 somet
hing 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.

  At the end of the show, which I couldn’t watch—I had wanted to rest on a park bench and had fallen asleep until the early evening—I was standing in front of the theater. The people were just coming out. I looked for the canteen. Lindemann was sitting hunched over a table eating soup, and looked up in irritation when I sat down with him.

  “My name is Ivan Friedland. Will you give me an interview? For the Oxford Quarterly?” I didn’t know if there was an Oxford Quarterly or not, but this was in the days before the Internet, it was hard to check things out.

  Physically he hadn’t changed, the lenses in his eyeglasses reflected back the world, and the green handkerchief protruded from his breast pocket. As I began to ask him questions, I noticed how shy he was. Minus the spotlights and an audience, he came off as lost and insecure. He straightened his glasses, smiled in a stilted way, and kept touching the top of his skull as if to reassure himself that the few remaining hairs were still in place.

  Hypnosis, he said, did not involve a single phenomenon but a cluster: the readiness to submit to an authority, a common vulnerability, a general openness to suggestion. Only occasionally were more mysterious operations of the conscious mind involved, but these had not yet been scientifically investigated because no one wanted to get involved in research of that kind. All of which led to the fact that a person could lose superficial control of their own will for short periods.

  He was seized by a fit of coughing, and soup ran down his chin.

  He used the word “superficial,” he then explained, because under normal circumstances nothing someone didn’t wish to experience or do could be induced in them through a trance. Only rarely was anything spiritually profound stirred into life.

  I asked what he meant by this, but he was already elsewhere in his thoughts and began to complain. He complained about the low fees, he complained about the arrogance of TV executives, he complained about a broadcast that had cut his appearance, he complained about the Stage Artists’ Union, and in particular he complained about their pension fund. He complained about the endless train journeys, the delays, the sloppily organized timetables. He complained about bad hotels. He complained about good hotels, because they were too expensive. He complained about stupid people in the audiences, he complained about drunks in the audiences, and aggressive people in the audiences, and children in the audiences, and people who were hard of hearing in the audiences, and psychopaths. It was astonishing, according to him, how many psychopaths would crop up in a single hypnosis show. Then he went back to complaining about fees. I asked if there was anything else he would like to eat, the Oxford Quarterly was paying, and he ordered the schnitzel and French fries.

  “To go back for a moment,” I said. “The operations of the conscious mind.”

  Right, he said. Mysterious operations, yes, that was what he had said. Mysterious to him too, even with everything he’d seen in his time. But of course he wasn’t an intellectual and so he was unqualified to offer explanations. He had not chosen to embark on this particular profession, he’d actually studied something quite different.

  “Such as? What did you study? What other things?”

  The waitress brought the schnitzel. He asked if I’d enjoyed the show.

  “Very impressive.”

  “You don’t have to lie.”

  “Very impressive!”

  Then he said, “Not big enough,” and it took me a moment to realize he was talking about the schnitzel. Too expensive, given the size. But everything was expensive these days, the little man was always being ripped off.

  I asked if the schnitzel tasted good, at least.

  Too thick, he said. Schnitzels should be pounded thin, why did nobody understand this anymore? He hesitated before asking where my tape recorder was.

  “I have a good memory.”

  Memory was an overvalued phenomenon, he said as he chewed. Simply astonishing how easy it was to seed it with false recollections, and how easy to erase other recollections without a trace. No tape recorder, really?

  To change the subject, I offered him dessert, and he ordered Sachertorte. Then he cocked his head and inquired if the Oxford Quarterly was a student newspaper.

  “It’s widely read.”

  “And what are you studying, young man?”

  “Art history. But I’m a painter.”

  He looked at the table. “Have we met before?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “No?”

  “I wouldn’t know where.”

  “Painter,” he repeated.

  I nodded.

  “Painter.” He smiled.

  I asked him how great an influence a hypnotist could have on people. Could you cause someone to change his life? To do things he’d never have done without being hypnotized?

  “Anyone can make someone change their life.”

  “But you can’t make people do things they don’t want to do?”

  He shrugged. Just between the two of us, what did “want to” really amount to? Who knew what he actually wanted, who was that clear with himself? People wanted so much, and it changed all the time. Of course at the beginning you told the audience that nobody could be made to do anything he wasn’t willing to do anyway, but the truth was that everyone was capable of everything. Humans had no boundaries, they were pure chaos, they had no fixed shape, and they had no limits. He looked around. Why in heaven’s name was the Sachertorte taking so long, what were they doing, baking it?

  I’m not just chaos without boundaries, I said.

  He laughed.

  The waitress brought the dessert, and I asked him to tell me some anecdotes. In such an illustrious career he must have had quite a few experiences.

  Illustrious? Well. In olden times, in the heyday of the Varieties, of Houdini and Hanussen, a hypnotist could still be illustrious. But nowadays! A life lived for art did not easily reduce itself to anecdotes.

  “Hypnosis is an art?”

  Perhaps it was even more. Perhaps it already achieved what art could only aim at. All great literature, all music, all … he smiled. All painting was trying to be hypnotic, wasn’t it? He pushed his plate away. He had to go to bed now, performances were a strain, they left you ready to collapse with exhaustion. He stood up and put his hand on my shoulder. “Painter?”

  “Excuse me?”

  His expression had changed, there was nothing friendly in it anymore. “Painter? Really?”

  “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 an
d 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.”