Me and Kaminski Page 3

  Now came the exercises in symbolism. He had painted hundreds of them, soon after leaving school and his mother’s death, alone in a rented apartment, protected by his Swiss passport during the German occupation. Later he burned almost all of them, the few that survived were bad enough: gold backgrounds, clumsily painted falcons above trees with gloomy heads growing up out of them, a crudely rendered blowfly on a flower, looking as if it were made of cement. God knows what would have brought him to paint such a thing. For a moment, the book got away from me and sank into the foam; the glistening white seemed to climb up the paper, and I wiped it away. Taking a letter of recommendation from Rieming, he went to Nice to show his work to Matisse, but Matisse advised him to change his style, and, helpless, he went home again. A year after the end of the war, he visited the salt mines of Clairance, got separated from the guide, and wandered for hours through the empty passageways. After he’d been located and brought back out, he locked himself away for five days. Nobody knew what had gone on. But starting from then, he began to paint quite differently.

  His friend and patron Dominik Silva paid for him to get a studio. There he worked, studied perspective, composition, and the theory of color, destroyed all his sketches, began again from scratch, destroyed, began again. Two years later Matisse arranged his first exhibition at the Théophraste Renoncourt Gallery in Saint-Denis. That was where he showed for the first time (I was thumbing my way further) a new series of paintings: Reflections.

  Today the series hung in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The paintings were of mirrors that faced one another at different angles. Silvery gray passageways opened into infinity, slightly crooked, filled with otherworldly, cold light. Details of the frames or impurities on the glass multiplied and formed rows of identical copies that shrank away into the distance until they disappeared altogether out of the field of vision. A few of the pictures contained, as if by oversight, traces of the painter himself, a hand holding a brush, the corner of an easel, captured accidentally in one of the mirrors and repeated endlessly. Once a candle sparked a fire of dozens of flames licking upward together, another time the surface of a table stretched away, strewn with papers, and in one corner a postcard reproduction of Velázquez’s Las Meninas, between two mirrors that met at right angles so that the reflection of one in the other produced a third mirror that instead of showing things in reverse showed them the right way around, creating a miraculously symmetrical chaos: the effect was of enormous complexity. André Breton wrote an ecstatic article, Picasso bought three of them, it looked as if Kaminski was going to become famous. But it didn’t happen. Nobody knew why; it just didn’t happen. After three weeks the exhibition ended, Kaminski took the paintings back home with him and was as unknown as he’d been before. Two photographs showed him with large glasses that gave him something of the air of an insect. He married Adrienne Nalle, the owner of a successful paper business, and lived for fourteen months in a certain comfort. Then Adrienne left him with the newborn Miriam, and the marriage was dissolved.

  I turned on the hot-water tap; too much, I suppressed a cry, a little bit less, that’s it. I propped the book on the edge of the bath. There was a lot I needed to talk to him about. When did he learn about his eye disease? Why didn’t the marriage hold up? What had happened down in the mine? I had other people’s opinions on tape, but I needed quotes from him himself, things he hadn’t yet said to anyone. My book should not come out before his death and not too long afterward either, for a short time it would be at the center of all attention. I’d be invited to go on TV, I would talk about him and at the bottom of the screen it would show my name and biographer of Kaminski. This would get me a job with one of the big art magazines.

  The book was now getting quite wet. I skipped over the rest of the Reflections and leafed to the smaller oil and tempera paintings of the next decade. He had lived alone again, Dominik Silva gave him money regularly, sometimes he sold a few paintings. His palette brightened, his line got crisper. Pushing to the very boundaries of the recognizable, he painted abstract landscapes, cityscapes, scenes of busy streets that dissolved into a viscous mist. A man walked along, pulling his own dissolving contours behind him, mountains were swallowed up in a pulp of clouds, a tower seemed to turn transparent under the fierce pressure of the background; you struggled in vain to see it clearly, but what had been a window a moment ago turned out to be a trick of the light, what had looked like artfully decorated stonework turned out to be a strangely shaped cloud, and the longer you looked, the less of the tower you found. “It’s quite simple,” said Kaminski in his first interview, “and damned difficult. Basically I’m going blind. That’s what I paint. And that’s all.”

  I leaned my head against the tiled wall and balanced the book on my chest. Chromatic Light at Evening, Magdalena Daydreaming at Prayer, and above all Thoughts of a Sleepy Walker, after Rieming’s most famous poem: an almost imperceptible human figure, wandering through a pewter-gray darkness. The Walker, apparently solely on the basis of Rieming’s poem, was included in an exhibition on the Surrealists, where by chance it caught the eye of Claes Oldenburg. Two years later Oldenburg arranged for one of Kaminski’s weakest works, The Interrogation of St. Thomas, to be shown in a Pop Art show at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York. The title was expanded to include the tagline painted by a blind man, and the picture was hung next to a photo of Kaminski in dark glasses. When he was told about this, he got so angry that he took to his bed and ran a fever for two weeks. When he was able to get up again, he was famous.

  I stretched out both arms cautiously and shook first my right hand, then the left; the book was quite heavy. Looking through the open door, my eyes fell on the picture of the old farmer. He was holding a scythe in his hands, looking at it proudly. I liked the thing. Actually, I liked it better than the pictures I had to write about every day.

  Because of the rumors about his blindness, Kaminski’s paintings suddenly went all around the world. And as his protests that he could still see gradually gained credence, it was too late. No way back. The Guggenheim Museum put on a retrospective, his prices shot up into the stratosphere, photos showed him with his fourteen-year- old daughter, a really pretty girl back then, at openings in New York, Montreal, and Paris. But his eyes were getting steadily worse. He bought a house in the Alps and disappeared from view.

  Six years later Bogovic organized Kaminski’s last show in Paris. Twelve large-format paintings, once again in tempera. Almost all bright colors, yellow and light blue, a stinging green, transparent beiges; streams of color that tangled and merged into one another, yet, when you stepped back or narrowed your eyes, suddenly were sheltering wide landscapes: hills, trees, fresh grass under summer rain, a pale sun that dissolved the clouds into a milky haze. I leafed more slowly. I liked them. A couple of them kept me looking for a long time. The water slowly grew cold.

  But it was better not to like them, because the critical reaction to them had been annihilating. They were called kitsch, a painful blunder, evidence of his illness. A last full-page photograph showed Kaminski with a cane, dark glasses, and a strangely cheerful expression, wandering through the rooms of the gallery. Shivering with cold, I shut the book and laid it down next to the tub. Only too late did I notice the big puddle. I cursed: I couldn’t sell it at the church flea market in a state like that. I stood up, pulled out the plug, and watched a little worm of water drain everything away. I looked in the mirror. Bald spot? No way.

  Almost everyone I talked to about Kaminski reacted with astonishment that he was still alive. It seemed unbelievable that he should still exist, hidden in the mountains, in his large house, in the shadows of his blindness and his fame. That he should follow the same news that we did, listen to the same radio programs, was part of our world. I’d known for quite a while that it was time for me to write a book. My career had begun well, but now it was stagnating. First I had thought maybe I should do a polemic, an attack on a famous painter or movement; a total trashing of photoreali
sm, maybe, or a defense of photorealism, but then suddenly photorealism was out of fashion. So why not write a biography? I hesitated between Balthus, Lucian Freud, and Kaminski, then the first of them died and the second was reported to be already in conversations with Bahring. I yawned, dried myself off, and put on my pajamas. The hotel telephone rang, I went into my bedroom, and picked up without thinking.

  “We have to talk,” said Elke.

  “How did you get this number?”

  “Who cares? We have to talk.”

  It must be really urgent. She was on a business trip for her advertising agency, and normally she never called when she was on the road.

  “Not a good time. I’m very busy.”

  “Now!”

  “Of course,” I said, “hang on.” I put down the receiver. In the darkness outside the window, I could make out the mountaintops and a pale half-moon. I breathed deeply in and out. “What is it?”

  “I wanted to talk to you yesterday, but once again you managed to fix things so that you didn’t get home till after I’d left. And now . . .”

  I blew into the receiver. “There seems to be a bad connection.”

  “Sebastian, it’s not a cell phone. There’s nothing the matter with the connection.”

  “Excuse me,” I said. “Just a moment.”

  I let the receiver sink down. I could feel the soft panic rising. I could guess what she wanted to say to me, and I absolutely must not allow myself to hear it. Just hang up? But I’d done that three times already. Hesitantly I raised the receiver again. “Yes?”

  “It’s about the apartment.”

  “Can I call you tomorrow? I’ve got a lot to do, I’ll be back next week, then we can . . .”

  “No you won’t.”

  “What?”

  “Come back. Not here. Sebastian, you don’t live here anymore.”

  I cleared my throat. Now was the moment I needed an idea. Something simple and convincing. Now! But I couldn’t think of anything.

  “Back then you said it was only temporary. Just a few days, till you found something.”

  “And?”

  “That was three months ago.”

  “There aren’t many apartments.”

  “There are enough, and it can’t go on like this.”

  I said nothing. Maybe that was the most effective tactic.

  “Besides, I’ve been getting to know somebody.”

  I said nothing. What was she expecting? Should I cry, scream, plead? I was perfectly prepared to do all three. I thought of her apartment: the leather armchair, the marble table, the expensive couch. The wet bar, the stereo setup, and the big flat-screen TV. She’d really met someone who was willing to listen to her carrying on about the agency, vegetarian food, politics, and Japanese movies?

  “I know it isn’t easy,” she said with a break in her voice. “I didn’t want . . . to tell you over the phone. But there’s no other way.”

  I said nothing.

  “And you know it can’t go on like this.”

  She’d said that already. But why not? I could see the living room in front of me: four hundred square feet, soft carpets, views of the park. On summer afternoons a gentle southern light played on the walls.

  “I can’t believe it,” I said, “and I don’t believe it.”

  “You have to. I’ve packed your things.”

  “What?”

  “You can collect your suitcases. Or actually when I get back I’ll have them delivered to you at the Evening News.”

  “Not in the newsroom!” I cried. That was all I needed. “Elke, I’m going to forget this conversation. You didn’t call and I haven’t heard a word. We’ll talk about it all next week.”

  “Walter says if you come back one more time, he’s going to throw you out himself.”

  “Walter?”

  She didn’t reply. Did he have to be called Walter?

  “He’s moving in on Sunday,” she said quietly.

  Ah, now I got it: the apartment shortage was driving people to do the most astonishing things. “And where am I supposed to go?”

  “I don’t know. To a hotel. Or a friend.”

  A friend? The face of my tax accountant rose in front of me, followed by the face of someone I’d been at school with, and whom I’d bumped into on the street the previous week. We’d shared a beer and hadn’t known what to talk about. I spent the whole time racking my brains for his name.

  “Elke, it’s our apartment!”

  “It isn’t ours. Have you ever paid anything toward the rent?”

  “I painted the bathroom.”

  “No, painters painted the bathroom. You just called them up. I paid.”

  “You’re keeping count now?”

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t believe it.” Had I said that already? “I would never have believed you were capable of it.”

  “Yes, I know,” she said. “Me neither. Me neither. How are you getting on with Kaminski?”

  “We hit it off right away. I think he likes me. The daughter’s a problem. She shields him from everything. I have to get rid of her somehow.”

  “I wish you all the best, Sebastian. Maybe you still have a chance.”

  “What does that mean?”

  She didn’t reply.

  “Hang on. I want to know. What do you mean?”

  She hung up.

  I immediately dialed her cell phone, but she didn’t answer. I tried again. A calm computer voice invited me to leave a message. I tried again. And again. After the ninth attempt I gave up.

  Suddenly the room didn’t look so comfortable anymore. The pictures of the Edelweiss, the cows, and the wild-haired old farmer were vaguely threatening, the night outside too close and unsettling. Was this my future? Boardinghouses and sublet rooms, spying landladies, cooking smells at lunch-time, and the early-morning racket of unknown vacuum cleaners? It must not come to that!

  The poor girl was completely off the wall, I almost felt sorry for her. If I knew her, she’d be regretting it already; by tomorrow at the latest she’d be calling me in tears to say she was sorry. She couldn’t fool me. Already feeling a little calmer, I picked up the recorder, stuck in the first tape, and closed my eyes so as to be able to remember things better.

  IV

  “WHO?”

  “Kaminski. Manuel K-A-M-I-N-S-K-I. Did you know him?”

  “Manuel. Yes, yes, yes.” The old lady smiled expressionlessly.

  “When was that?”

  “Was what?”

  She turned a waxy shriveled ear toward me. I leaned forward and screamed, “When!”

  “My God! Thirty years.”

  “It must be over fifty.”

  “Not that many.”

  “Yes it is. You can count!”

  “He was very serious. Dark. Always in the shadows, somehow. Dominik introduced us.”

  “Madam, what I actually wanted to ask . . .”

  “Have you heard Pauli?” She pointed to a birdcage. “He sings so beautifully. You’re writing about all that?”

  “Yes.”

  Her head drooped of its own accord, for a moment I thought she’d fallen asleep, but then she twitched and straightened herself up again. “He always said he’d be unknown for a long time. Then famous, then forgotten again. You’re writing about all that? Then you should also write . . . that we had no idea.”

  “About what?”

  “That you can get so old.”

  “What was your name again?”

  “Sebastian Zollner.”

  “From the university?”

  “Yes . . . from the university.”

  He sniffed audibly, his hand was heavy as he ran it over his bald spot. “Let me think. Got to know him? I asked Dominik who the arrogant guy was, he said Kaminski, as if it meant something. Maybe you know there had already been public performances of my compositions.”

  “Interesting,” I said wearily.

  “For the most part he just smiled away at noth
ing. Pompous ass. We all know people like that, who think they’re so important before they’ve ever done a thing . . . and then it all comes true, mundus vult decipi. I have worked on a symphony. I composed a quartet that was performed in Donaueschingen, and Ansermet said it was . . .”

  I cleared my throat.

  “Oh, Kaminski. That’s why you’re here. You’re not here about me, you’re here about him, I know. Once we were invited to look at his paintings, the ones Dominik Silva had at home, he had this apartment on the rue Verneuil. Kaminski himself used to sit in the corner and yawn, as if the whole thing were a bore. Maybe it was to him, I couldn’t blame him. Tell me, what university are you actually from?”

  “Did I understand correctly,” asked Dominik Silva, “that you’re paying for lunch?”

  “Order whatever you like!” I said, surprised. Behind us, cars roared past heading toward the Place des Vosges, and waiters neatly snaked their way between the wicker chairs.

  “Your French is good.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “Manuel’s French was always dreadful. I never met anyone with so little gift for languages.”

  “You weren’t easy to find.” He looked scrawny and fragile, his nose jutting out against a face that was curiously collapsed in on itself.

  “I live in different circumstances from the old days.”

  “You did a lot for Kaminski,” I said carefully.

  “Don’t overestimate it. If I hadn’t, someone else would. People like him always find people like me. He wasn’t born rich. His father, who was Swiss of Polish parentage, or vice versa, I don’t remember anymore, went into bankruptcy before Kaminski was born, and died, his mother was supported by Rieming later on, but Rieming didn’t have much money either. Manuel always needed money.”