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“Hit it!” Georg handed her the bow. Over on the other side of the garden an arrow was embedded, quivering, in the target. “But careful, they’re very pointed!”
For a while they took turns shooting. Although it wasn’t a large bow, it was hard to pull; sometimes Marie hit the target, but more often it went wide. Georg had more practice. Her fingers were soon hurting from the bowstring.
Lena came by, climbed onto the fence, and watched. Her mother had let her go out for an hour. A man in an expensive leather jacket had come, she said, and had brought her chocolate.
Georg shot and scored. Marie shot and didn’t score. Georg shot and didn’t score, Marie shot and didn’t score, Georg shot and didn’t score, Marie shot and scored, a window was thrown open in the house next door, and a woman called over that she hoped these weren’t pointed arrows. All three of them swore they weren’t.
Gradually the gathering dusk made it hard to aim. The tree seemed bigger than before, but its contours were getting blurred, and it became more difficult to focus on it. Marie aimed one more time and the taut bow trembled, because her arm was already exhausted. She held her breath. The moment stretched out and stretched out, as if she could stop time with the bow. And still it stretched out. Then she shot. The arrow drew its path in the half-light, brushed the trunk, and vanished into the grass.
She said goodbye to Lena and Georg and went across the street. How come evenings smelled different from mornings? Even noon had its own particular smell. The shadow of a bird flew up out of a bush and she jerked back: a fluttering, a cawing and swirling, and it was above her head, already gone into the upper air. She tipped her head back. If Ivan was really dead, then he was up there too now, and the clouds wouldn’t obstruct his view, because the dead could see through everything.
The gravel path crunched under her shoes. Through the kitchen window she saw Ligurna stirring a pot, with the phone clamped between her cheek and her shoulder. The window was open, it would have been easy to listen in. But it usually wasn’t worth the effort; grown-ups rarely talked about anything interesting. Should she climb the tree again? Not as far as the roof, she didn’t dare do that on her own, but maybe as far as the study window? But then this seemed too dangerous as well. It was hard to see the branches in the dark, you could fall, and if unexpectedly a witch was sitting in the tree, you’d be helplessly in her power.
She went through the hall and up the stairs to the dining room. Her plate was already waiting for her: a piece of brown-red meat with some sauce, rice, a little mound of peas, and a glass bowl of pudding on the side. She touched the meat. It felt warm, squishy, and stringy, alive and dead at the same time. She opened the window and threw it out. She did that a lot. An animal would get it outside; at least it had never happened that food she’d thrown out in the evening was still there the next morning. She was never allowed to leave anything on her plate. If she failed to eat something twice in a row, Ligurna reported it to Mama, who then came and took her hand and asked if she was worried about something, or stressed, or if she had something she didn’t want to tell her.
Of course she had, because it felt good to have secrets. Mama knew nothing about the money that Marie had hidden in the nursery: three hundred and twenty euros, folded and squashed flat under the foot of her bed. Part of it was from her pocket money, and part of it from Grandfather’s wallet, which he always left lying around carelessly in the hall. It was important never to take too much, twenty at the most, never a fifty. As soon as a fifty went missing, the grown-ups noticed. They never missed smaller amounts. Mama also didn’t know that the brooch she’d been hunting for for so long was buried next to the apple tree; Marie and Lena had been playing Treasure Hunt and then couldn’t find the place again. Nor did she know that Marie had already forged her signature on excuse notes to her teacher twice, so that she could go fishing with Georg. Unfortunately they hadn’t caught any fish, because neither of them could bring themselves to stick a worm on the hook.
Besides there was so much Mama didn’t know about this house. Some things you just couldn’t explain to her.
Two months ago Marie had come home from school, set down her bag, and lain down on her back on the carpet, to listen to the rain—sometimes she’d lifted up her hands, closed one eye, and looked at the outlines of her fingers against the white of the ceiling. She had called Lena and Georg, but neither of them was at home, then she tried Natalie, who already had her own phone, but she hadn’t answered either. So she’d gone up to the top floor. There was a whole room full of empty suitcases up there; in earlier times Marie could spend hours just opening and closing them, loving being able to get into them and sit down, or climb from one into the next, but when you’d turned eleven, the excitement wore off.
In the room next door were cupboards with bed linens, hand towels, and all sorts of embroidered stuff; she’d locked herself in there and listened for some time to the drumming of the rain on the roof. Then she’d gone out into the hallway again and opened the door to the little bedroom next door. In it were a table and a chair; the wallpaper was ancient and had bleached-out brownish rectangles on it. The window was dirty; Ligurna obviously never cleaned in here. Marie had actually wanted to go in, but then she’d closed the door carefully and gone back downstairs.
Only when she was back in her room with the desk lamp switched on and her arithmetic notebook open did she turn ice cold with fright. There had been someone sitting at the table—hunched forward, his head turned toward the door and propped up on his elbows, hands pushed deep into his hair. She’d seen, but hadn’t been able to take it in at first; only in her memory did it become clear. The one thing she couldn’t recapture was the face. How could you explain something like that to your parents? Not even Ligurna would have believed it.
She ate the peas, the rice, and the pudding. Then went to Mama’s door, knocked, and walked in.
“Why don’t you knock?” Mama was lying on the bed learning her script. “Well, come here and sit down. Will you help me run lines?” She held out the sheets of paper to Marie.
There were only three pages. The first one went:
7/4, INTERIOR, DAYTIME–ELKE’S APARTMENT
Elke and Jens next to each other at the table.
ELKE
It can’t go on like this, Jens.
Jens, looking worried, shakes his head.
ELKE
You know it and I know it.
JENS
And Holger knows it too.
ELKE
Don’t talk about Holger.
JENS
How am I supposed not to talk about him? He’s between us.
ELKE
He’s my husband. The father of my children.
JENS
And what am I?
Elke looks him in the eye.
ELKE
You’re everything, Jens.
“Elke is full of contradictions,” said Mama. “Sometimes I feel close to her, then she’s a total stranger again.”
“Why does the world exist?” asked Marie.
“Elke wants to be free. That’s the most important thing to her. But she also knows she’s responsible. She’s trying to live this contradiction.”
“God made it, but where did God come from? Did He make Himself?”
“Did I already tell you who’s playing Jens?”
“When people say God made everything, that’s not an explanation. Why does something exist?”
“Why does something exist?”
“Yes, why?”
“Mirso Kapus.”
“What?”
“That should be ‘Excuse me?’ Mirso Kapus is playing the lead. You know him from TV.”
“I don’t watch TV. I watch DVDs. Lena’s cousin burned us a copy of Star Wars yesterday.”
“Nobody can say why the world exists, the world doesn’t need a reason. Mirso Kapus won the biggest TV award.”
“Things would be so much simpler if it didn’t exist.” Marie crawled under
the bedclothes. “All the people and cars and trees and stars. And all the ants and bears and the sand in the desert and the sand on other planets and the water and Georg and the Chinese and everything else. There’s so much of it!”
“Elke can grow and develop. The story can go in all sorts of directions.”
It wasn’t totally dark under the bedclothes; a little light could make its way in. “Can I sleep here?”
“Not today. I’ve got to learn this thing.”
“But it’s only three pages.” Marie tugged on the blanket a bit so as to be able to breathe better. Through the crack she could see Mama’s dressing table with the mirror, she saw the picture with the teddy bear that had hung until recently in her father’s study, and she saw one corner of the window.
“Three pages or twenty or a hundred—that’s not the point,” said Mama in irritation. “You have to come to grips with a role, find your way into it.”
Marie closed her eyes. Her limbs felt heavy. She heard Mama murmur, “He is my husband, the father of my children.” Then she must have gone to sleep for a while, because Mama shook her gently and then she was holding her hand and feeling her way along the hall. In the nursery Mama helped her off with her shirt, jeans, and underwear, pulled on her pajamas, put her into bed, covered her up, and gave her a kiss, so that her hair tickled her cheek. And all the time Marie was thinking that she hadn’t had to brush her teeth, Mama had forgotten, sometimes you got lucky. Then the door closed, and she was alone.
Pale spots of light from the streetlamps flickered on the blanket. She heard the apple tree scraping against the wall. She heard the wind. She pulled the covers over her head so that now all she heard was the rustle of the material, but if you lay still, really really still, and didn’t breathe, then you stopped hearing anything at all, there was no more world and there was almost no more Marie. This must be sort of what it was like to be a stone and lie there while time passed. A day, a year, a hundred years, a hundred thousand years. A hundred times a hundred thousand years.
All the same, a day was a long time. So many days still until the holidays came around, so many more until Christmas, and so many years until you were grown up. Every one of them full of days and every day full of hours, and every hour a whole hour long. How could they all go by, how had old people ever managed to get old? What did you do with all that time?
2
The trees were already a riot of color, but the leaves had not yet started to fall. Marie was coming home from school with her backpack slung over one shoulder and her cell phone in one hand when she saw that there was a man waiting at the garden gate.
“Marie?”
She nodded.
“Do you have some time?”
Arthur was tall and pale and stood leaning slightly to one side, as if he had back pain. His hair was a mess. He held the car door open for her; the seats smelled of new leather, and there was no dirt on the floor, not even the tiniest scrap of paper.
It had been two months since Marie had received his letter. It was the first proper letter she’d ever had in her life, and Ligurna had simply laid it next to her plate, as if it were nothing special. But Ligurna had given up being interested in what went on in the household: since Mama had given her her notice, the food tasted even worse than before and dust was collecting on the furniture. They weren’t going to be able to hold on to the house for very much longer either, said Mama, even with help from the grandparents it was too expensive. Mama was sad about this, but Marie was not. She had never liked it.
The envelope had held a single sheet, on which the handwriting was astoundingly legible. Unfortunately, wrote Arthur, they still didn’t know each other, but she could get in touch with him at any time. Under this was an email address, and under that was his signature.
Dear Arthur, she had replied, thank you for your letter, this is Marie, how are you? This is my email address. With warm regards, Marie.
The answer came a week later. He wanted to know what day her birthday was, what class she was in, and whether she liked school or not, who she sat next to, what the name was of her dumbest teacher, which TV programs she liked best and liked least, if she liked arithmetic, if she liked her father, if she liked her mother, what she thought of Ivan and Martin, what her favorite color was, if rain made her depressed, how often she thought about Ivan’s disappearance, if she thought people should be allowed to eat meat, if she thought Wednesdays were better than Mondays, and, if so, were they always better or only sometimes, and if she thought it was better to be subject to a king, a president, or no one at all. He asked about balloons, and books, he asked about teddy bears and dolls, he asked about her friends. He asked why she had answered his questions so far, he asked her not to feel compelled to answer them, he thanked her for answering him, and ended with a brief salute, without having given away a single thing about himself.
She had only recently been given her own phone. It lay in her hand, red, smooth, and cool to the touch, flat at the back, the entire front forming the screen, but she wasn’t yet used to typing without keys. You kept touching the wrong place, the spell-check program kept on replacing the words you’d written with others that made no sense, but she typed and she typed. She was thirteen now, questions weren’t a problem anymore. When two days had gone by without a reply, she wrote, Dear Arthur, did you get my email, how are you? Can we meet? With warm regards, Marie.
The car ran almost soundlessly as she looked around. She didn’t know this part of town and had no idea where her grandfather was taking her. Plaster was peeling off the walls and the street was littered with discarded cans.
“In the meantime, has there been any word?” asked Arthur.
She immediately realized he was talking about Ivan. “No, but there was an article recently.”
She began to search on her phone. Bookmarks, lists of links, ah, here it was: www.Art-Review-Online.com/sebastianzollnersopinion/eulenboeck. She cleared her throat. She liked reading aloud and was always pleased when her turn came in school, even if she pretended she found it embarrassing, because who wanted to be seen as a suck-up. She pronounced everything right, she rarely made mistakes and hardly even stuttered when she came to the hard words. She would never be as beautiful as Mama, or become an actress, but her voice was faultless.
What does it say about our fragmented society that Heinrich Eulenboeck of all people is our country’s artist of the hour? Are we in such need of a dandy for the middle classes, are we really so terrified of uncertainty, that we find it necessary to encase ourselves in the protective armor of irony? Obviously the answer is yes. Few artists in this crisis were able to maintain their prices; almost none of them were able to increase them. Scared collectors preferred to tread lightly and invested in bricks and mortar or gold nuggets they could keep in a safe in the cellar. Blue-chip painters became as rare as pink elephants. So how did this artisanal, rock-solid classical irony suddenly feel itself being snatched out of the hands of dealers and auction houses like hotcakes?
“Let’s face it,” says the chief curator of the Free Gallery in Bochum, Hans-Egon Eggert, “it’s all about the new estate executor and his battle plan: do a hard U-turn race to cash in.” The background: since August of last year, Ivan Friedland, the go-get-’em heir of the Old Master, has vanished without a trace. “Friedland’s main claim to fame was his tending of Eulenboeck’s reputation,” continued Eggert. “But now the focus of attention has shifted.” Karl Bankel, the director of Hamburg’s Koptman Museum, is even more critical: “Looking after the opus of an important artist is a highly complex task. Very few people are up to it. Ivan Friedland was not. His successor is even less so.”
In the art world it was always an open secret that Friedland owed his position not to any particular competence, but to an intimate relationship with the venerable old prince of painting. His controversial activities unsettled collectors, but kept prices within moderation. Under Eric Friedland, who was at first the provisional and t
hen the permanent successor of his brother, this policy has changed: suddenly Eulenboeck’s paintings are appearing in every possible exhibition of this-or-that private collection: Art Forum Rottweil, the Telefonica Art Center in Madrid, the Bingen Artists’ Union, the Project Space of the City Bank in Brussels, and the Ebersfeld Savings Bank Foundation, you name it. What was once an artificial shortage of paintings has become an absolute torrent, and even articles of merchandise—or, as we say, merch—have now been sighted in museum shops: cups, sheets, tea towels, all decorated with the beloved rural landscapes of Eulenboeck’s early period. For some time now the major museums on both sides of our beloved Atlantic have been retreating from this artist. But shame on anyone who sees a possible connection between all this and Eric Friedland’s supposedly precarious business circumstances. Already there’s word on the Rialto that prices are stagnating. One does not need to wear the mantle of a prophet to guess that he who flies high may plunge to disaster—and who can feel sympathy, when the body of work, in the opinion of connoisseurs, lacks all substance and is mere gruel? But once the vagaries of momentary fashion no longer cloud our eyes, perhaps we shall be ripe for another art, a delicate, more subtle, but nonetheless courageous art, an art that no longer looks back to the past but forward to the future. It will be the Hour of the Quiet Ones, far from hype, far from hysteria, the hour—to take but one example—of Krystian Malinovski. His work is not that of a profiteer in this crisis, it overcomes it. When asked how he imagines a time when …