The Portrait (16 page)

He sat there like that and pulled me out.

One after the other, us, the two halves of his making. And he laid us on his lap. Very carefully, he slid us up against each other and made us whole by looking at us.

Tijn, he said.

Where are you, Tijn?

I knew very well how incomprehensibly small I was, how minuscule the face he had worked on, picking his nose, for weeks, how minuscule my middle, millimetres to the right of the tear. I was as minuscule as a thought, and yet I looked up out of Singer and was as wide as I had always been. I think I'm expressing it properly. I looked up from Creator's artefact and was as wide as I could be, and I saw Creator's face and how he was beyond consolation. Once I had gone so far as to call it a countenance, but my face was now so small that one of Creator's tears was enough to drown it — and he wiped me dry again with his left thumb.

Singer, he said.

Where are you, Singer?

Creator looked up and around, as if we were there — Singer and Tijn and the newborn son who was going to be called Stijn.

He said all this out loud, not to me, but it was meant for me.

In the distance, the chainsaws sounded: short bursts at long intervals. There must have been a farm closer by; at least I heard a cow, once, between two chainsaws — a cow, one distinct moo, muffled, in a shed.

He stayed sitting there like that, and I suspected that the sun had sunk lower in the sky. I remembered him once telling Lidewij that two Fjord horses grazed there, in this spot close to Groeneveld Castle, with their heads at each other's rear hooves. That must have been the tearing noise I heard. And I also heard, further away, the bells of a level crossing.

What possessed him? Why did he call himself your father? Why did he want me to make you?

Another giant tear spattered my surface, this time near my feet.

The bastard, the filthy sick bastard. What am I supposed to do now? How can I go on if the world finds out what I've done? What did he do to you? Why did you have to die?

I knew what he saw when, after wiping his eyes, he looked at me again.

Me, dead.

That was what he had worked from. Death. And he hadn't seen it; he had thought me alive, even in that last Polaroid, the one Specht had given him at the last moment, trembling with an uncomprehended emotion. Even in that Polaroid, Creator hadn't seen it.

Forgive me.

He didn't say that. I thought it. I thought, How can I tell him? How can I, two halves of a Polaroid, an artefact of an artefact, tell him he didn't know what he was doing? And I realised that it didn't matter; nothing I might say if I could speak mattered. Not to him, not in this instant. I was Tijn, I was his son, I was Lidewij, I was Minke, I was everyone he hadn't seen when they were standing before him, everyone who had ever sat for him, and he should have seen how small and incomprehensibly vulnerable we are and a hair's breadth from being nothing at all.

He must have loved you so terribly much.

That's something else I don't know — whether Creator thought Lidewij's words. He looked around, and he was exactly there where Tijn had hobbled over to him with his pants around his ankles.

Not having looked.

I tried to understand it.

Not having looked, not really, not with eyes that can see. That was what his fate came down to. Having accepted the job, solemnly — Yes, really, I'll bring him to life, I'll save, I'll save … But what had he known about it, about what it takes to be up to that task? Who are we if we look but do not see?

Stijn, he said. But he wasn't addressing the words to his son; at least, I suspected that he wasn't.

Trust me, he said. Please. I want to be worth your trust.

Understanding who people talk to when they have something really urgent to say is beyond a support.

They think there is a father — that's what it seems like to me. Even though they can't be sure he's there, they think he is. That must be it. They need someone who never ever lets them down.

There was visiting that evening, and Lidewij might have come round from the anaesthetic, but Creator rode home first, along the whole of his endless half of the path between him and Tijn and further still, to Withernot. He hummed and whistled the
Marseillaise
and
Yesterday
by turns, sometimes sounding cheerful, then fierce, and in between he shouted, Bastard, dirty, sick bastard! and so approached the gate across the track they called a drive. The tree was still lying there. I had been slid back into his breast pocket. The sun was halfway down the trunks of the birch forest on the left.

I felt an intense warmth, almost heat, take charge of Creator's body. Things started pounding and thudding around me again. Creator gasped.

He told Lidewij about it two weeks later, the day before she was allowed home with Stijn. That's why I can finish my story.

A car was parked with its nose against the tree.

The police, Creator thought instantly.

The police have read Minke's article and found Singer on the Internet on a site where you can rent boys, and now they've come to get me. I'll have to explain myself, and no one will believe me.

But it was a four-wheel drive.

It seemed to be empty. When Creator got off his bike, the driver's side window buzzed down. A bald man with an earpiece cleared his throat and said, Just in time.

Just in time, Creator repeated. He was lost for words of his own. His throat was parched.

We were about to turn back, the man said. Empty-handed.

Creator recognised the voice from the Rotterdam accent. This was the person he'd spoken to a week before Easter, more than six months before.

Mr Valery would like to speak to you.

Valery, Creator repeated. He's in the EMC, he's …

He was about to say dying, but the man with the earpiece got out and walked around the car. He pressed the boot lock, and with one sure movement pulled out a kind of rack with wheels that folded out into a wheelchair. Then he opened the car door on the other side and helped someone out. Which is to say, he bent down and carefully slid a figure out of the car and lifted him into the wheelchair.

If you would be so kind as to open the gate, the bald man said.

Baffled, Creator laid his bike down and opened the gate to Withernot.

With his chin, the bald man indicated that Creator should come over behind the wheelchair.

Do you have the cheque with you?

The figure in the wheelchair nodded.

The bald man helped Creator lift the wheelchair over the tree. No one spoke. The bald man walked back to the car and lit a cigarette. Then Creator pushed Specht onto the track with the potholes that badly needed filling. The bald man stayed behind at the car. Creator rolled Specht into the sunroom, which still reeked of smoke.

He must have had enough time while pushing the chair to take charge of the situation, but he had only stared at the back of Specht's head. More exactly: the neck as skinny as a child's wrist, the smooth head with the odd tuft of matted hair, the sharp bumps where the neck joined the skull, the downy, purple-veined ears as thin as bat's wings, the liver-spotted scalp and the distinct yellowish lump beneath it, in the place where Stijn had his fontanel.

If I as much as blew on him, I'd have killed him, he said later to Lidewij. At the moment itself, he was confused, and felt, despite the pitiable shape that Specht was in, an irrepressible nausea rising within him. Death, that was more or less what he thought. I'm pushing Death himself into Withernot; filthy, sick Death.

He put Specht in the middle of the sunroom, which was dusky and strewn with traces of the previous night.

It was as if I'd pushed him into hell, Creator said. Ash everywhere, and your green cloth and the popping paper and the bucket and the mattress.

Spare me the details, Lidewij said.

Creator definitely hadn't told her everything. From the preceding events, he had mainly left out the videos and a lot of Minke. And of — I could see right through him.

So there he sat, facing the sliding doors, next to the bucket, in a puddle of water, Creator said. The great Valery Specht.

What was the puddle doing there?

That's another story, Creator said. Specht sat in his wheelchair and I stood opposite him. And I told him that he was too late. Specht hadn't understood at first. Initially, Creator even wondered whether Specht was all there. Sometimes he seemed to doze off.

But when he spoke, his voice was still unexpectedly firm.

You violated the agreement.

Creator didn't answer.

You showed Singer to Ms Dupuis. There's no doubt of that.

Creator might have been thinking of protesting.

I presume at least that Ms Dupuis also gave you her article to read.

He still had his Rotterdam accent and the high voice of someone whose voice never broke.

Creator was surprised.

She faxed it to me. At least, it arrived at my office early this morning; my secretary brought it to me in hospital, Specht continued. The article about me. She still had that much decency. Letting me read it before it appeared in the newspaper.

Creator was still speechless.

Otherwise this wouldn't have happened, Specht said. His gesture took in the whole studio with all the flakes of ash.

Otherwise you wouldn't have burnt Singer. Would you?

How do you know about that?

My secretary walked around the house and found what was left of the fire. It wasn't hard to guess what it was for.

A silence fell.

I really am too late, Specht said. Only now did his voice sound as weak as he looked.

You believed her. You showed her Singer, and then you believed everything she told you.

It was starting to get dark in the studio. Upstairs, the central heating turned on. All over Withernot, pipes started clicking.

In the end, you believed her. Not me.

He gestured. Outside, past the site of the fire, past the reeds and past the lake, you could see the twinkling lights of the new buildings in Almere.

That's Lord Peacock, Creator said. A scraping sound had come from outside: pecking in a metal bowl.

Is it so difficult to believe? asked Specht. Was I so terribly difficult to believe? I thought …

He gestured and let his hand, which was infinitely skinny, drop back down onto his lap. I heard the flop.

I thought I'd done it the right way. That I'd given you the commission in a way that allowed you to believe in yourself, in your great talent for bringing your portraits to life.

The last words sounded bitter.

To life! I thought you understood me. You'll be saving a life! Singer! My son!

The silence that now fell was so deep that outside, from the channel halfway across the lake, the drone of a barge was audible.

It wasn't believable anyway, Specht said. Him. Alive. That was why I told you he was dead. I shouldn't have said that. Ever. But if I'd told you what he really is, you wouldn't have accepted the commission. You would have started by asking where he was now.

Absolutely.

And I couldn't. I couldn't answer that question. That Singer had gone to, back to …

Again, he let his hand drop to his lap.

Back to The Hague.

The Hague?

Back to his slow suicide. Back to his filthy room. Back to his life. His lies. His hustling. His heroin. His Internet site, the one he wants to blackmail me with. I really believed it, that he … that this time he'd manage it. But he didn't trust me. He couldn't — he despised me, just like all the others, always, and he was right. I bought him. Whatever I did, it was as if I bought him. Buying was all I've ever been capable of.

I heard these words when Specht said them. I was still in Creator's breast pocket and later, when Creator repeated what Specht had said for Lidewij, I knew that they were the same sentences, word for word.

It was as if I bought him. Buying was all I've ever been capable of.

Of course, I thought of Specht's gesture here in the studio, a lifetime ago, on the feast of the Epiphany — the thin hand in the inside pocket of the far-too-baggy expensive suit, the cheque, the five figures.

And you all let yourselves be bought, Specht said. Of course you do. How could it be any other way? You, too, Felix — you only accepted the job after I'd named the price.

Creator had turned and was looking at Lord Peacock, who had turned around and was dragging his tail into the garden, heading for the site of the fire.

Innocence is the most difficult. And the most scandalous, Specht had once said.

So Singer's not dead?

Specht shook his head.

Not in the video either?

You mean Loutro.

It seemed as if each thought slipped away from Specht the moment he spoke it.