Me and Kaminski (4 page)

“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

“W
HO
?”

“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 nothing. 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.”

“You paid his rent?”

“It happened.”

“And today you’re . . . no longer wealthy?”

“Times change.”

“Where did you get to know him from?”

“Matisse. I visited him in Nice, he said there’s a young painter in Paris, a protégé of Richard Rieming.”

“And his pictures?”

“Nothing earth-shattering. But I thought, this will change.”

“Why?”

“Because of him, really. He simply gave you the impression that he could go places. At the beginning, his stuff was fairly bad, overloaded Surrealism. That all changed with Therese.” His lips rubbed together; I wondered if he still had any teeth in his head. On the other hand, he’d just ordered a steak.

“You mean Adrienne,” I said.

“I know who I mean. Maybe this will surprise you, but I’m not senile. Adrienne came later.”

“Who was Therese?”

“My God, she was everything! She changed him completely, even if he would never admit it. You’ve certainly heard about his experience in the salt mine, he talks about it often enough.”

“That’s where I’m going the day after tomorrow.”

“Do whatever you want. But Therese was more important.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Then you need to start at the beginning again.”

“Let’s be candid. Do you consider him a great painter?”

“Yes, of course.” I returned Professor Komenev’s stare. “Within bounds.”

Komenev folded his hands behind his head, and his chair tipped right back in a single movement. His little fuzzy beard stuck out straight from his chin. “Okay, to take things in order. No need to waste words on the early pictures. Then the
Reflections.
Very unusual for that time. Technically brilliant. But still rather sterile. A good basic idea, too often worked through too exactly and too precisely, and the Old Master stuff with the tempera doesn’t make it any better. A little bit too much Piranesi. Then
Chromatic Light,
the
Walker,
the street scenes. At first sight, fabulous. But not exactly subtle, thematically speaking. And let’s be honest, if people didn’t know about him going blind . . .” He shrugged. “You’ve seen the pictures themselves?”

I hesitated. I had thought about flying to New York, but it was quite expensive and besides—what were art books for? “Of course.”

“Then you will have noticed the uncertain brushwork. He must have used strong magnifying glasses. No comparison to the earlier technical perfection. And after that? Oh God, the verdict is already in. Calendar art! Have you seen the hideous dog on the beach, the Goya knockoff?”

“So, first too much technique and too little feeling, then the reverse.”

“You could say that.” He lifted his hands from behind his neck, the chair tipped upright again. “Two years ago I discussed him again in a seminar. The kids were baffled. He had nothing to say to them anymore.”

“Did you ever meet him?”

“No, why would I? When my
Some Thoughts on Kaminski
came out, I sent him the book. He never responded. Didn’t think it mattered! As I say, he’s a good painter, and good painters are transient. Only great painters are not.”

“You should have gone there,” I said.

“Excuse me?”

“It’s pointless to write and then sit there waiting for an answer. You have to go there. You have to take him by surprise. When I wrote my portrait of Wernicke—you know Wernicke?”

He looked at me, puzzled.

“It had just happened and his family didn’t want to talk to me. But I didn’t leave. I stood at their front door and told them I was going to write about his suicide anyway, and the only choice they had was whether to talk to me or not. ‘If you choose not to,’ I said, ‘what that means is that your own views won’t be represented. But if you were prepared . . .’”

“Excuse me.” Komenev leaned forward and stared at me. “What exactly are you talking about?”

“It didn’t last that long. A year, and then the thing with Therese was over.”

The waiter brought the steak with roast potatoes, Silva grabbed his knife and fork and began to eat, his throat quivering as he swallowed. I ordered another Coca-Cola.

“She was really something special. She never saw him as he was, but as what he could become. And then that’s what she made him. I can still remember how she looked at one of his pictures and said, quite quietly, ‘Do those always have to be eagles?’ You should have heard the way she said ‘eagles.’ That was the end of his Symbolist phase. She was wonderful! The marriage to Adrienne was just a messed-up mirror image, she looked a little like Therese. Need I say more? If you ask me, he never got over her. If every life has one decisive catastrophe”—he shrugged his shoulders—“then that was his.”

“But his daughter is Adrienne’s?”

“When she was thirteen, her mother died.” He stared into nowhere, as if the memory were painful. “Then she came to him in this house at the end of the world, and since then she has taken care of everything.” He pushed a chunk of meat that was a bit too ambitious into his mouth, and there was a pause before he was able to speak again; I made an effort not to look. “Manuel always found the people he needed. He felt the world owed him.”

“Why did Therese leave him?”

He didn’t answer. Maybe he was hard of hearing. I pushed the recorder closer to him. “Why . . .?”

“How do I know? Mr. Zollner, there are always a thousand explanations, a thousand versions of every thing, and in the end, the truth is always the most banal. No one knows what happened, and no one has any idea of what someone else thinks of them! We should stop. I’m no longer accustomed to people listening to me.”

I looked at him in astonishment. His nose was trembling, he’d laid down his knife and fork, and was looking at me with swollen eyes. What had upset him? “I had a few more questions,” I said cautiously.

“Don’t you understand? We’re talking about him as if he were already dead.”

“One time a new piece was being put on.” He sat up straight, rubbed his bald spot, then ran a hand over his double chin and rumpled his forehead. Start up one more time with your compositions, I thought, and I’m going to shove this recorder straight down your throat!

“He came to the opening night with Therese Lessing. An exceptionally intelligent woman, God knows what she saw in him . . . it was the best sort of avant-garde, a sort of Black Mass, blood-smeared performers, dumb show under an upturned cross, but the two of them laughed the whole time. First they tittered and destroyed everyone else’s concentration, then they started laughing out loud. Until they got thrown out. The atmosphere was all gone to hell, or rather
not
gone to hell, if you see what I mean, anyhow, the whole thing was over. After Therese’s death he got married, and after his wife, not unnaturally, went off with Dominik, I didn’t see him again.”

“With Dominik?”

“You don’t know that?” He frowned, his eyebrows shot up in a thicket, his chin twitched. “What kind of research are you doing? He never came to my concerts, they didn’t interest him. A time like that never comes twice. Ansermet wanted to conduct my symphonic
Suite,
but it never happened, because . . .what, already? Stay, I have a couple of interesting LPs. You’ll never hear them anywhere else!”

“What do you think of his pictures?” Professor Mehring looked at me watchfully over the frames of his glasses.

“First, too much technique and too little feeling,” I said. “Then the reverse.”

“That’s what Komenev says too. But I think it’s wrong.”

“So do I,” I said hastily. “A prejudice, and a bad one.”

“And Komenev talked completely differently twenty years ago. But Kaminski was in fashion back then. I discussed him in class a year ago. The students were riveted. I also think his late work is being misjudged. That will correct itself in time.”

“You were his assistant?”

“Only briefly. I was nineteen, my father knew Bogovic, he arranged things. I was responsible for grinding the pigments. He had the idea that he’d get more intense colors if we did it ourselves. If you ask me, pure chutzpah. But I was allowed to live upstairs in his house, and if you want to know the truth, I was sort of in love with his daughter. She was so beautiful, and basically she never saw anybody aside from him. But she wasn’t very interested in me.”

“Were you with him when he was painting?”

“He needed to use big magnifying glasses, he fastened them to his head like a jeweler. He was pretty high-strung, sometimes he broke his brush in sheer rage, and when he felt I was being too slow . . . well, it’s hard for us to imagine what he had to go through. He had planned every painting in detail, made whole series of sketches, but when it came time to mix the paints, he couldn’t get things to come out the way he wanted. After a month I quit.”

“Are you still in touch with him?”

“I send Christmas cards.”

“Does he reply?”

“Miriam replies. I assume that’s as far as I’ll ever get.”

“I’ve only got ten minutes.” Bogovic stroked his beard uneasily. The window looked onto the walls of the Palais Royal, a sketch by David Hockney of a California villa hung over the desk. “All I can say is I love him like a father. Go ahead, make sure you’ve got that on tape. A father. I got to know him at the end of the sixties, Papa was still running the gallery, he was so proud that Kaminski had become one of his artists. In those days, Manuel came by train, he didn’t fly. But he loves to take trips. He’s gone on long journeys, of course he needs someone to drive him. He likes adventures! We handled his great landscape paintings. Probably the best things he ever did. The Pompidou almost bought two of them.”

“What went wrong?”

“Nothing, they just didn’t buy them. Mr. Zellner, I have . . .”

“Zollner!”

“. . . known many creative people in my lifetime. Good people. But only one genius.”

The door opened, an assistant wearing a tight blouse came in and laid a message in front of him; Bogovic looked at it for a few seconds, then set it aside. I looked at her and smiled, she looked away, but still I could tell she liked me. She was adorably shy. As she went out, I leaned unobtrusively to one side, so that she had to brush against me as she passed, but she evaded me. I winked at Bogovic, he frowned. He must be gay.

“I go see him twice a year,” he said, “next week is when I’m due to go again. Strange that he really took himself out of circulation. Papa would have gotten him an apartment here or in London. But that’s not what he wanted.”

“Is he totally blind?”

“If you find out, do let me know! He hasn’t been doing so well recently, major bypass operation. I was there myself, at the hospital . . . no, that’s not right, I was there when Papa had the same thing. But I’d have done the same for him. As I said, I love this man. I didn’t love my father. Manuel Kaminski is the greatest. Sometimes I think”—he pointed to the picture of the villa—“David is the greatest. Or Lucian or whoever. Sometimes I even think I’m the greatest. But then I think of him, and I know we’re nothing.” He pointed to a painting on the opposite wall: a bowed figure sat on the coast of a dark ocean, beside it stood a huge dog, twisted peculiarly out of perspective. “You know this one, don’t you?
Death by the Faded Sea.
This I will never sell.”