The Portrait (13 page)

Does Lidewij find it beautiful as well? So moving, so innocent? Her voice had turned to steel.

It's stupid that I always say sorry. Sorry. I'm even worse than —

With one gesture, she took in all of Withernot.

But I don't accept every job that's offered to me. Specht couldn't have asked me anything he liked, the way he apparently could with you.

She sounded triumphant.

That was all last night.

A half-hour ago, Creator built a pyre at the bottom of the garden, down by the reeds. It was still twilight. The sliding doors are open; I can hear the fire crackling. The wind is still blowing from the north. Sparks shoot up out of the smoke, drift towards the studio, and float in as flakes of ash. Creator grabbed the video of Singer and the snaps he got from Specht, and took them out to the fire. He came back without the video or snaps. Then he walked over to the basket with paint rags and pulled out the other videos. I don't really know what they've got to do with it, but he went and threw them on the fire, too. I can now smell the acrid, toxic smell of melting plastic. After that, I was sure he was going to walk up to me, with his bewildered expression and unruly hair.

I'm coming to a tragic end — that was, more or less literally, what I thought. And it was as if the world flashed before me: from the roll at Van Schendel's, past the day they carried me into the studio, Cindy and Specht and Tijn and Lidewij, up to and including Minke. I was aware of it all — not as a story, I don't think, more as a tightly bunched knot of time that suddenly, with an incredible tug, had come undone.

I don't know how long it kept dripping. Creator got dressed and they walked out of the studio, one after the other, with hardly another word.

Once she was out in the hall, I heard Minke say, You're sticking to your story, aren't you — that you haven't been paid for that boy?

Creator will have answered evasively; I know him inside out.

He's used to paying, Minke said. It's all he knows — he pays for everything. God knows what he pays for his slaves in that horrible fucking country.

Outside I heard the car start and drive off with the sound of splashing. There are potholes out there in the track they call the drive. Every time it rains, Creator resolves to really do something about them. The wind had come up. There was no doubt of that; I heard the gusts blow drops against the sliding doors.

Somehow or other, Creator had been sensible enough to slide a bucket under the leak. They wanted to cover themselves like Adam and Eve; they wanted to be invisible. And they didn't want to be a couple — anything but that.

It was an iron bucket, as old as Withernot itself. The handle rattled and the drops fell with shrill echoes until a layer of water had built up. After a while, the drops fell at intervals as long as a drawn-out thought. Plip. Plop.

On his way out, Creator had turned off the lamps. The presence of mind of people — it mystifies me. He looked at me for a moment, with Minke already out in the hall.

He cursed. I had the impression he was cursing me. He cursed again.

Specht dying — maybe already dead — the man who had wanted me to exist, who had commissioned Creator to make me. It was because of Specht that Creator had dredged Tijn up out of his memory. Because of Specht that I had my expression, and a nose that wasn't too flat, and a skin of burnt umber, caput mortuum, and cadmium yellow, a middle that tingled, and a hand without a thumb. Because of Specht that Lidewij, this very afternoon, had stared at my middle and unconsciously rubbed her big, round belly. It was because of Specht that that belly had grown big and round. Because of no one but Specht. It was for Specht that I existed.

Where was he? Where is a human who is dying?

Specht was the only one who could see the life in me, the life I was meant to have. I suddenly realised that. There was only one person who could locate me, by seeing me and saying, Ah, Singer, there you are, and now you're no longer as dead as always, you are what you are — and that was Specht.

I know that I should have felt abandoned. It would have made me seem human; people would have been able to identify with me, through my saying, Now I am all alone; Specht is dead and I am a canvas alone with Singer.

But there was something.

There was a presence.

Some part of me was being reflected. It had to be, I knew it had to be, somewhere across from me, in the now fully invisible mirror. I know that this thought calmed me. At least, I imagined that the world was full of completely invisible mirrors that retained a memory of what they had reflected.

I even thought, I am one of those mirrors.

I preserve someone's likeness.

I, the support.

It didn't really help. I'm no philosopher — my thoughts only ever calm me for a moment, and I simply don't have the strength to be my own creator. The questions, fears, and tremblings came rushing in from all sides.

I tried to tell myself that I was still alive.

Even if Specht is dying in the faraway EMC, there is still one person who will see me, sometime, and that one person knows who I am. I clung to Minke's words despite knowing better, because what could she know of Singer? Still, she had snapped at Creator, You going to stick to it — him being dead? You going to stick to those crocodile tears?

Nobody is going to believe him; I now understood that much. Soon, when Specht is dead, they will get to see me — people, strangers, individuals as derisive as Minke — and they will say, That's one of Specht's slaves. He paid big money for him in a ruined, war-ravaged country and brought him to Creator's studio and got him to paint him for him, here; he only ever works from life; he could never make something he couldn't see before him …

It's possible, I thought forcefully, as if my entire existence depended on that one thought. What Minke said could be true. Whatever else has happened to Singer — it could be true that he's not dead. God knows what kind of game Specht wanted to play with Creator … What does it matter, if
he
is still alive?

Creator came back three-quarters of an hour later. The dripping had stopped; a rising wind had swept the skies clean. Creator didn't show himself in the studio again, except to give in to an illogical craving for order by raising the venetians in the dark. The moon was out — you could tell from the pale, seething shadows in the garden.

I was able to look at myself again in the half-light of morning: I was a dark, unfathomable patch on a colourless background of folds. On the floor between me and my likeness was the mattress, close to the bucket, which was standing in a puddle of water. By now, the wind had become a real gale, blasting straight onto the sliding doors, but I could see that the sky was cloudless.

Everything around Withernot rustled and shrieked. I think that was why I didn't hear the sound of the car until it drove in through the garden gate. A car door shut, light hasty footsteps came down the drive, a woman's footsteps sounded and, during a brief lull in the wind's howling, a thud was audible in the hall. I knew that sound — I heard it every morning before Creator walked into the studio with the newspaper. But this wasn't the newspaper. I heard the car door again. Almost immediately, the ignition sounded and the car raced off, to be drowned out by the storm a few seconds later. In the same instant, Creator stumbled around upstairs, he drummed down the staircase, and opened the front door.

Minke! he shouted. Minke, come back!

A strong draught had come up in the studio — the popping paper in the corner rustled and slid — like a cold breath blowing across my whole surface. The front door banged shut. The studio calmed instantly.

Immediately afterwards, Creator came in holding an envelope.

He had already torn it open and was reading the first lines of a letter out loud, as if on the stage: Felix, this is the article that will appear in
Art & Facts
as soon as Specht is dead. Everything has been checked and double-checked. I had it with me last night to show it to you, but nothing went the way I expected. I wanted to give it to you. I don't understand what happened, either. Forgive me — suddenly you were so completely the Felix from the old days; no one looks at me the way you look at me. But when you said who it was in the painting — read it, please, and don't be shocked, and forgive me. The article is the truth and nothing but.

Creator was wearing the same clothes as a few hours earlier; he even still had his spattered shoes on. He must have flopped onto his bed without getting undressed. Standing between me and my reflection, he unfolded several sheets of typed paper. I could see clearly that there had been a few prints in the envelope — colour prints. One of them floated down to the floor. Creator was absorbed by what he was reading. More than ever, I realised that I was completely at the mercy of coincidence; there was no other way I could begin to understand the gist of Minke's article. Creator ignored the print that had floated away.

During one of the sittings with the charismatic hypnotherapist's children, I had heard Creator discussing the Internet with the oldest of the three boys. You could be
on
it and you could download whatever you liked. This was one of those things — a print from the Internet, a photo, lying, from my perspective, upside down. I could see just enough to make out a human figure. But that was enough to send a mad chill to my heart. It was someone dark-skinned, there on the paper.

When he had finished the letter, he spent a long time staring straight ahead, more or less at the popping paper, without seeing anything, without moving, seemingly without even breathing.

So it's true, he said. He groaned.

I got the impression he wanted to vomit. His Adam's apple seemed to have developed a life of its own — he swallowed frantically for a while, then disappeared into the living room.

The wind he made turned the print on the floor around, giving me a better view.

It was a boy, black — as I had thought — naked, and lying on a bed. His eyes were closed.

Is he me? I thought.

And I knew it. This was Singer. This was me.

Now I heard the television; Creator had turned it on. Out of my sight, he walked from the living room to the toilet. I think he was trying to vomit, but that didn't happen, and when he came back into the room the first news item had started.

What was he expecting to hear? The Erasmus Medical Centre has just announced the death, after a long illness, of the Rotterdam dredging baron Valery Specht, reputedly the Netherlands' richest man, a renowned art collector and connoisseur of underage boys, who leaves behind a global real-estate empire?

It was only about a war that would be waged as soon as the rest of the world grasped how dangerous the dictator was.

Creator switched off the TV.

It came as no surprise to me that the first thing he thought of now was the cheque. He pulled it out of the drawer in the big table, from between the pencil stubs and the paperclips. I don't know what he was staring at now — the signature perhaps, the only direct proof, here in the studio, of Specht's existence? He laid the cheque on the table and picked the print up off the floor. I could see his face now: it was as if his hair was standing on end, as if he'd walked through the storm outside. His lips were pressed together, as if he was forcing himself to keep a cool head.

He laid the envelope, the letter, and the prints — about five of them, by the look of it — on the table next to the cheque. Then he walked to the mirror opposite me, and turned it upright and around, so that its light-grey, crazed back was facing me again. Creator's actions had become determined: he strode over to the video projector, which was on its stand just next to the popping paper, moved it over next to me, and turned it on. Then he pulled out a video. I recognised it immediately — it was Specht's video of Singer. He put it into the VCR and aimed the lens at the greyish-white back of the mirror.

It wasn't my idea, becoming human. But one day I was taken away from Van Schendel's, as from a distant continent, by a man who wanted to make me human. He paid money for me — I cost substantially more than double weave, and my stretchers are glued, all of three point six. I don't know where it came from, the longing I started to feel here in Withernot. I don't know, but it arose within me, not like a thought, but like a wind that starts to blow unnoticed. I had no choice but to want what Creator wanted; I had never longed for anything as intensely as I longed to be Singer, to live, and to feel the gaze of anyone at all who, seeing me, would say, He looks real — look, a person, Singer.

None of this was my idea, and yet I must now feel what people feel. I am even fated to feel the last thing they feel — I must feel the out-of-control terror they feel, how irrationally desperate fear makes them.

Creator was completely overcome by fear. I'm dead, he thought. If the world sees what I now see, everyone will think I'm the biggest sleazebag imaginable … The outrage, the outrage … No one will ever sit for me again … Withernot, Withernot will never be ours … Lidewij, I heard him whispering — if Lidewij sees this … But still he projected the video of Singer on the back of the mirror. He already knew everything, but he still wanted to see it.