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  “That you’re not owed it in such a case.” He stood before me, self-righteous as only a loser can be. His narrow face, the fine lines of his nose, the flashing eyes, the gray hair, and the loden jacket with its silver buttons—it was all made to order for the magazines.

  “It would be a victimless crime,” I said. “Nobody loses anything.”

  “You yourself would be the loser.”

  “But what would you lose? Your soul?” I pointed at the farmhouses. “Your art?”

  “You’d lose both.”

  And neither of them exist, I wanted to reply, but I kept quiet. So that’s how it goes, I thought: with pride. When you’re proud, you can tolerate being average. “And if we—as a sort of experiment, if we try it—if we don’t take either of those things too seriously? Either ourselves or art?”

  We laughed, but we both knew, he just as much as I, that I was being serious.

  “And what,” I asked a week later, “what if we risk it? Paint a couple of pictures we know are likely to please the relevant people. And later we’ll announce it was a joke.”

  “It would be quite some joke,” he said thoughtfully.

  I’d already finished the first three. A boulevard in Málaga, disfigured with a Dalí sculpture, and painted in the wan naturalistic style of Zurbarán, a rain-soaked German pedestrian precinct in the heavily shaded manner of late Rembrandt, and Tristia 3, still one of his most famous works to this day—a surreally high-ceilinged museum gallery, with menacing sculptures made of grease and felt displayed in glass cases along the walls and in the center, disturbed and unhappy, a little boy next to a severely ecstatic art teacher: pasty brushwork interspersed with holes and cracks that let the white canvas show right through.

  “Heinrich Eulenboeck,” I explained as I showed him the paintings. “A reclusive aristocrat, a proud outsider, who pursues the art of his time with contempt and has missed not one of its developments. In many paintings, with subtle mockery, there are references to the works of this or that contemporary artist whom he considers to be utterly worthless. He’s seen everything, tallied everything, weighed it all, and finally found it wanting.”

  “But I’m not an aristocrat. My father had a small factory in Ulm. I sold it when I was twenty.”

  “Do you want to sign them yourself?”

  He said nothing for a long time. “You’re probably better at that too.”

  In fact his signature wasn’t hard to imitate. I put it on all three paintings, then I took photos and sent them, along with an essay about the willful outsider I’d discovered, to my former fellow student Barney Wesler, who was just in the throes of organizing a group exhibition in the Schirn Museum in Frankfurt: Realism at the Millennium. He immediately said he wanted to include them. Two days after the opening there were two long articles in the daily press ecstatically praising Eulenboeck’s paintings: one of them was written by a well-known specialist on Max Ernst, and the other one was by me, and both of us talked of the biggest discovery of the year. Soon after that a young man appeared in Heinrich’s studio who was a writer for Texte zur Kunst. His interview was published a month later under the title “Art, for Me, Is a Cathedral,” enhanced with a photograph of Heinrich looking incredibly aristocratic and condescending. Another interview appeared in Stern. Seven pages plus photos: Heinrich on the battlements of an ancient towered fortress, on board a yacht, at the wheel of a sports car, although he couldn’t even drive, and in a library, with the stem of a Chinese pipe between his teeth. No sign of his paintings.

  I’ve never seen anyone play a role better. “Warhol? A commercial artist!”—“Lichtenstein? The country or the charlatan?”—“The only thing kitschier than a Balthus is a cat calendar.”—“Klimt, the apotheosis of artistic handwork!” Such phrases pleased everyone. He repeated them in dozens of newspaper interviews, he repeated them on television, he repeated them at the openings of his exhibitions, he repeated them at the launch of Leroy Hallowan’s book Eulenboeck, or The Great Negation, and he repeated them, word for word, diligently and without variation, in Godard’s short documentary Moi, Eulenboeck, Maître.

  “And when do we break the whole thing up?” I asked.

  “Maybe not yet.”

  “Now would be a good moment.”

  “Possible, but …”

  I waited, but he didn’t say anything more. We were sitting in a restaurant in Paris, and as I often had recently, I saw that his hand was shaking; the soup spoon was always empty by the time it reached his mouth. He’d obviously forgotten what we’d just been talking about.

  Then my dissertation appeared. I had switched themes; now the title was Heinrich Eulenboeck: From the Irony of Tradition to the Realism of Irony. Over 740 pages I unpacked the history of a lone satirist and late-born master of every technique in the repertory of Western painting who only achieved artistic expression in old age.

  Of course I was also obliged to laud the farmhouses. In the meantime these had also found their admirers: to some colleagues they represented proof that simple beauty was not yet passé, to others, enigmatic satire. I thoroughly explored both possibilities and avoided taking sides: the very richness was rooted in the ambivalence, which is to say that the artist was being ironic about irony itself and mocking mockery on the way to profound emotion in the sense of the Hegelian upward spiral.

  “When do we break it up?” I asked again.

  We were in a hotel room in London. Rain was pounding against the window, breakfast sat untouched on the cart from room service, and Saddam Hussein was reviewing a parade on television. Heinrich’s ivory cane was leaning against the wall next to the silver walking stick I had given him recently—by now he needed not just the one but both to walk.

  “You’re so young. You don’t understand a thing.”

  “What don’t I understand?”

  “Any of it—you can’t understand.”

  “But what?”

  I stared at him. I had never seen a grown man cry before, and I was stunned: I had never expected such a thing. Of course I had known that he would no longer be able to step back again, but what was so terrible about that? Try as I might, I just didn’t get it.

  He was right. I really was still very young.

  Six months after Heinrich had decided to remain the painter everyone believed him to be, to keep on exhibiting, giving interviews, selling pictures, and being famous, my father came to visit.

  We were working in the studio. I was sitting in front of my new PC writing my essay “Realism as a Critique of Ideology in the Work of Heinrich Eulenboeck,” while Heinrich was scratching away at his sketch pad with a shaky hand. He could do this for hours on end, and sometimes he even achieved some drawings. Then the phone rang, and Arthur, without explaining how he had got this number, announced that he was in the neighborhood and could come by.

  “Now?”

  “Yes.” As always, he sounded surprised that I should be surprised. “Not a good time?”

  Half an hour later, as he was standing on the doorstep, I thought he looked tired and unkempt; he was sweating and he hadn’t shaved. Heinrich greeted him in the fashion of a Grand Seigneur, saying “Welcome!” and “I have heard so much about you,” and “What an honor, what a pleasure,” to which my father reacted with restrained but ironic courtesy. We sat down at the table; the housekeeper served us with food she had hastily warmed up in the microwave. Arthur’s eyes flashed while Heinrich talked about Warhol—“a commercial artist!”—Lichtenstein, Beuys, and Kaminski. Unfortunately he’d become accustomed to trotting out the well-worn phrases from his interviews even when there was no microphone in the offing. He gave a lengthy description of his meeting with Picasso, and given that I knew he’d never met him, I had to get up and leave the room in order not to interrupt him.

  When I came back, he was just describing the vernissage that his New York gallerist Warsinsky had recently organized for him: who had been there, what the critics had written, which pictures had sold and for how much. His mus
tache bobbed up and down, his lower lip trembled, and whenever he wanted to emphasize what he was saying, he knocked on the table.

  To change the subject, I asked Arthur what he was working on right now. I knew he didn’t like the question, but it was better than listening to Heinrich.

  “Probably going to be another detective novel. A classic locked-room mystery. For people who like riddles.”

  “So is there a solution?”

  “Of course! But nobody will find it. It’s very well hidden.”

  “Is that the case with Family too?”

  “No. That’s a story in which the solution really is that there’s no hidden solution. No explanation, and no meaning. That’s the whole point.”

  “But that’s exactly what it’s not! Or rather it is, but only if you tell it in a way that makes it so. Every existence, if you look back on it, is made up of terror. Every life becomes a catastrophe if you summarize it in the way you do.”

  “Because that’s the truth.”

  “Not the whole truth. Not exclusively. Afternoons like today, places like this …” I gestured vaguely toward the window, the sea, our table, him, me, and Heinrich. “Everything passes, but that doesn’t mean that there’s no such thing as happiness, not by a long chalk. It’s a matter of moments, the good moments. They’re worth everything.”

  Arthur was preparing a retort, but Heinrich got there first. He had a question, he said. What was meant by that piece of lunacy that he himself didn’t exist? That’s what the book said. It said in it that one didn’t exist. But he did. He was sitting right here!

  “Undeniably,” said Arthur.

  But seriously, this was absurd!

  Heinrich’s outburst surprised me. I hadn’t known he’d read My Name Is No One, we’d never talked about it.

  “If it’s absurd, there’s no point in getting upset about it,” said Arthur. “It’s only a book.”

  “No excuses. Are you trying to say I don’t exist?”

  “And if I did?”

  “You can’t!”

  Arthur looked at me. “Is this really necessary?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  With a circular gesture he pointed, exactly as I had already done, to the window, the sea, and the table, to himself, to me, to Heinrich.

  For a few moments we were all silent. I heard Heinrich’s whistling breath and hoped that he hadn’t understood.

  “A life doesn’t last long, Ivan. If you’re not careful, you squander it in stupidities.”

  “You should know.”

  “Yes, I should.”

  “Leave my house!” said Heinrich.

  “Do you paint his pictures too?” asked Arthur.

  There was a long silence.

  Then: “Leave my house,” Heinrich whispered.

  Arthur laughed out loud. “It’s really unbelievable! You paint his pictures and nobody notices?”

  “Out!” Heinrich got to his feet. “Out!” His voice shook, but when he was determined, it still had both strength and authority. He pointed at the door. “Out!”

  As I accompanied my father to the hall, I was searching for some suitable remark, some sentence I could utter. “When will I see you again?” I asked finally.

  “Soon.” It didn’t sound very convincing. He laid his hand on my shoulder, and a moment later he was gone.

  I take off my overalls and wash my hands. The water runs bright and clear, collecting a swirl of colors as it falls. I feel a trace of sadness, a trace of pride, a trace of concern, as I always do when I finish a painting. But what could happen? Whenever it’s a question of the authenticity of a Eulenboeck, there’s one person who has the last word, and that person is the chairman of the Eulenboeck Trust, the sole heir of the artist, namely, me.

  The title of this picture has been listed among his works for years: Holiday Snap No. 9. I mentioned it already in an essay at the end of the nineties, and since five years ago there’s been a dossier in the archives of the National Gallery detailing the provenance of a painting depicting a French marketplace with a Niki de Saint Phalle sculpture. Archives take security precautions against people who want to steal things, but there’s nobody to stop someone smuggling something in. In another six months John Warsinsky’s gallery will offer Holiday Snap No. 9 for sale, but not before the chairman of the Eulenboeck Trust has alerted the most important collectors to it. They will all study the dossier to check the provenance, then the Eulenboeck Trust will be asked to make a statement as to its authenticity. Everyone knows the chairman of the Trust is also the seller, but this doesn’t bother anyone, it’s part of the game, and indeed who would be bothered by it anyway: nobody’s losing. After a thorough check, the Trust will give the painting its seal of authenticity—on the one hand an account of its impeccable provenance, as it passed directly from Eulenboeck to his heir, and on the other because the leading Eulenboeck expert, namely me, has already described it as a too-little-known masterpiece years ago.

  Nonetheless I am careful. I’ve twice refused a certificate of authenticity to paintings I’d done myself, and another time I said that an obvious fake by some hack was genuine. I’m considered a difficult and erratic authority. Collectors fear me as much as the gallery owners do, people often are up in arms over my unpredictable verdicts, and I’m not infrequently put down as incompetent. No one is going to get suspicious.

  Down on the street a man is pushing a wheelbarrow full of sand. Three young men in baseball caps are coming toward him. They stop and look back at the wheelbarrow, as if sand were something interesting, then they lean against the wall with that curiously casual nervousness that only the under-twenties have, and light cigarettes for one another. Two cars drive past, then one, then another two—at precise intervals, like Morse code. What if you could read the universe? Perhaps that’s what is behind the terrifying beauty of things: we are aware that something is speaking to us. We know the language. And yet we understand not one word.

  How sad that you don’t hear me, poor Heinrich. People who communicate with the dead like to assert that they could feel there was someone there. I never had this feeling. Even in the unlikely event that you have an afterlife, invisible, freed from your body and all earthly burdens, our concerns are a matter of indifference to you. You’re not standing next to me at this window, you’re not looking over my shoulder, and if I talk to you, you don’t answer.

  So why am I speaking to you?

  He already didn’t understand me anymore while he was still alive. In the final six months he was almost always in bed; sometimes he would be seized by rage for no reason at all, and then he would have to laugh quietly. Along the way I painted A French Film Is Being Shot, Great Day of Judgment, and Market Scene in Barcelona. From time to time he would appear behind me and watch. Market Scene didn’t interest him: a dramatic moment in an auction house, the audience staring raptly at the auctioneer, who is in the process of lowering the hammer on a monochrome blue canvas by Yves Klein. Day of Judgment made him grin to himself: a crumpled page of newsprint, apparently ripped out of the Arts section of the New York Times, every detail rendered realistically, on the right a hymn of praise for a biography of Billy Joel, and on the left a hatchet job on a book of poems by Joseph Brodsky. Only A French Film Is Being Shot made him cluck with pleasure: an altarpiece, way at the bottom the lighting technicians, the grips, and the extras, on the step above them a semicircle of camera people, then above them the actors, transfixed in worship, and right at the top, flanked by two mighty producers doing double duty as archangels, the director in his dark glasses. I never liked it, even while I was working on it I found it dull, and even technically it held no attraction, being far too close to simple caricature, but it became by far his best-known picture among the general public—not least because the director looked like Godard. Warsinsky sold it for a million, four years later I bought it back for a million five, in order to sell it under the table to a collector from Turkmenistan for three million. I hope I never see it
again.

  At some point he never got up again. The television stayed on, he stayed in bed and kept talking quietly to himself. Mostly he was telling a story that dated from his youth, over and over again: there was a drinking session in it, a test of courage among soldiers, and a game of Russian roulette. I heard it every day while I fed him chicken soup, while I helped him on the toilet, while I plumped up his pillows and covered him up like a child. He became thin, his eyes clouded, and all of a sudden he had also forgotten his stories. I often sat by his bed and wondered if the man I’d known was really still hiding in this crumpled, shrunken body.

  For there were still some moments of clarity. Once I found him sitting up; his head turned toward me, he seemed to recognize me, and he asked when we were flying to Paris. He advised me to dedicate myself to my own painting again too. He actually said that: my own painting again too. Then he sank back into himself with his deceptively wise tortoise smile, a little trickle of spit ran down his chin, and when I changed the sheets, the look on his face was so blank it was as if he hadn’t uttered a word in ages.

  Another time he suddenly asked for his bank account number. I had to write it down on a piece of paper, because he wanted to call the bank, and when I said that it was impossible at two o’clock in the morning, he began to scream and beg and threaten me. When I did bring him the phone, he had no idea what to do with it.

  I often heard his voice in my dreams. When I woke up and heard him snoring beside me, I would be certain that he really had spoken to me, but whenever I tried to remember what it was he’d said, all I knew was that he’d asked for something and I’d said yes. But to what, I no longer knew.

  As he lay dying, I sat at his side uneasily, painfully moved, and asked myself what this moment demanded. I wiped his brow, not because it was necessary but because wiping someone’s brow in this situation seemed the right thing to do, and again there was something he wanted to tell me: his lips formed words, but his voice would not obey, and by the time paper and pencil had been located, he was too weak to write anything. For a while his eyes stared at me as if he were trying to transmit thoughts by sheer willpower, but it failed, his eyes broke contact, his chest sank, and I thought, This is what it looks like, this is how it is, this is what happens. This.