I looked in my catalogue to see what it had to say about this dark wood painted by G. David. There was no mention of it whatever. I went to the man at the desk. ‘Those two panels by David,’ I said, ‘843a and 843b, they’re not in the catalogue.’
‘No,’ he said, shaking his head, ‘they’re not. They’re in the catalogue that’s in the shop.’
‘Where’s the shop?’
‘Through there.’
I went to the shop and bought the Mauritshuis Illustrated General Catalogue and a postcard of the Vermeer girl. Two French schoolgirls were buying the same postcard. ‘But where is this painting?’ one of them asked the man at the counter. ‘We can’t find it.’
‘It’s in America.’
‘When does it return?’
‘Next year.’
Turning in the catalogue to David, No. 843, I read:
David, Gerard
Born ca 1460 in Oudewater, died 1523 in Bruges. Worked in Bruges, where he was the most important artist after the death of Memling.
Two forest scenes
P. each 90 × 30·5. The versos of the wings of a triptych; the left one with a donkey, the right one with two oxen. Ox and donkey recur in the middle panel. The latter, depicting the Adoration of the child and the rectos of the wings are in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
I went back to Zaal A and stared at the two panels. A space suggested itself between them and I waited to see what would appear in the space.
Someone was looking over my shoulder. I turned and saw a tall thin man with a large light-bulb-shaped bald head and those drooping oldtime-gunfighter moustaches much favoured by American television actors. From the hang of his face however I guessed him to be European, possibly Scandinavian. He seemed to be drawing himself up into his head preparatory to speaking, and as I was the only other person in the room I waited to hear what he would say.
‘Rectos no,’ he said. ‘Mmnvs? Everything is metaphor and metaphor is the only actuality. Here we have the versos of the wings of a triptych, here we have only the other sides of the missing rectos that when folded shut covered the Adoration of the child. Mmnvs. Nnvsnu rrndu.’
‘Did I understand you to say nnvsnu rrndu?’ I said.
‘Mmnvs.’
‘You’re thinking of existing?’
His head seemed to grow larger and balder and more light-bulb-shaped. ‘You observe me, sir,’ he said. ‘You observe me consistently and three-dimensionally manifesting, with aplomb, myself both as picture and sound. Do you not?’
‘I do.’
‘I revert to the tremendour of this metaphor, the other-sideness of versos without rectos and the child gone missing, out of our sight, offering only its rejection of our potential adoration.’
‘“Tremendour.” I haven’t heard that before.’
‘Tsrungh. From its otherness of place it speaks the encrustation, the palimpsest, the ultimate dialectic of what Redon called “the deep health of the black”. This is where I get my jollies; I am a creature of the deeps.’
‘Says who?’
‘Says Sight and Sound for one. They did an eight-page piece about my work: “The Unslumbering Kraken”.’
‘I’ve stopped reading Sight and Sound, I don’t think film people should be allowed near words, it’s bad for everybody.’
‘I agree completely. I speak only in pictures. With me the image is everything, carrying within it as it does the protoimage, the after-image, and the anti-image. This is why here I have come to speak to the Vermeer girl and to hear what she will say to me but alas, she is gone over the water and here I stand looking at this enchanted wood with its missing rectos and its centre that could not be held. This utters to me most powerfully.’
‘What did you want with the Vermeer girl?’
‘I’m in love with her. She is that aspect of the Mother Goddess that dominates my being, my perception, my innermost and uttermost blackness, my seminal vesicles. She is the proto-image of the femaleness of things; always have I spoken to her in the whispering of the night, in that warm and creatureful darkness where the flickering of the here-and-gone shows its little uncertain flame.’
‘Have you no shame? How can you say such things in a public place to someone you’ve never seen before? You don’t even know my name.’
‘That signifies not at all; you know my name.’
‘No I don’t.’
‘I’ve told you it: Kraken, Gösta Kraken as you know very well. Not for one moment do I believe that you’ve stopped reading Sight and Sound. From the faltering cadence of your stare I perceive that you recognize me from those many photographs of me in that publication and elsewhere. Fnss. The self-consuming antistrophe of your silence tells me that you resent my head of Orpheus swimming up the Thames.’
‘Faltering cadence of my stare! I’m not taking that from you, nor “self-consuming antistrophe” either. Don’t you come the deconstructionist with me, you ponce. I’ve never even seen your swimming head of Orpheus.’
‘Very well then, tell me your name. I can see that you will be fractally asymptotic in your resonances until we have spoken this out.’
‘My name is Herman Orff and you’ve never heard of me.’
‘Oh, but I have. Luise has mentioned you several times.’
There was an upholstered bench behind me. I sat down on it.’
‘Luise’, I said, ‘has mentioned.’
‘You. More than several times, reverberantly and with plangency.’
‘What is Luise to you?’
‘Lost. Gone. Two years only, then Znrvv! No more Luise. A note on the kitchen table like an unaccompanied cello in a studio with dusty windows.’
‘Don’t roll the credits over it; just tell me plangently when she left you.’
‘Seven years ago, with my sound man.’
‘What do you suppose she heard in him?’
‘Other music.’
‘And what did she ever see in you?’
‘Flickering images.’
‘Of what?’
‘It doesn’t matter, it’s the flickering that gives the excitement. Being is not a steady state but an occulting one: we are all of us a succession of stillnesses blurring into motion with the revolving of the wheel of action, and it is in those spaces of black between the pictures that we experience the heart of the mystery in which we are never allowed to rest. The flickering of a film interrupts the intolerable continuity of apparent world; subliminally it gives us those in-between spaces of black that we crave. The eye is hungry for this; eagerly it collaborates with the unwinding strip of celluloid that shows it twenty-four pictures per second, making real by an act of retinal retention the here-and-gone, the continual disappearing in which the lovers kiss, the shots are fired, the horses gallop, rrks?’
‘Luise saw all that in you, did she?’
‘It isn’t only that I make films, I am in myself a big flickerer and women respond to this. I’m so much there/not there/there/not there. Very exciting. It stimulates a woman’s natural holding-on reflex.’
‘And yet Luise seems to have let go of you.’
‘Nothing is for ever.’
‘Fallok composes electronic music; I write novels; you direct films; the one after you (whom she probably left five years ago) was a sound engineer. Before Fallok she was with a man who ran a restaurant.’
‘By now it’s a computer programmer or a doctor; into the arts she came and out of the arts she has gone, vnnvvzzz. What did we do wrong?’
‘You don’t know? You don’t know what you did wrong?’
‘My behaviour was impeccable. When she was with me she moved among top-class people - film stars, composers, painters, writers; we went to all the best restaurants, we had friends with yachts and villas on the Côte d’Azur and in the Greek islands: the whole thing was conducted in the style one would expect of me.’
‘Were you faithful to her?’
‘Faithful!’ His large face leapt back as if I had hit him with a pizza. ‘
Faithful! I can only be faithful to the flickering; more than that I don’t accept the moral authority of.’
‘Two years with you. I can’t understand it. I’m rotten but you’re a real creep.’
‘Were you faithful to her?’
‘No.’
‘Then why do you look at me as if you’ve just come down from the mountain with stone tablets in your hands?’
‘Because I know I’m rotten and you don’t know that you are.’
‘You make a virtue of necessity; being a self-confessed rotten you are aware of your rottenness. Being unrotten I have not such an awareness.’
‘Why don’t you flicker off and manifest your sound and picture somewhere else.’
‘You’re a very troubled person, znnzz?’
‘I can live with it.’
‘Are you certain of that?’
‘Don’t let me keep you; you must have many urgent demands on your time.’
‘I assure you that only a charitable impulse has kept me in your company this long; ordinarily I don’t like to get too close to obscurity, it’s like quicksand.’
‘You’d better back off then before you get swallowed up.’
‘Are you working on a novel now?’
‘Yes. Why?’
‘Good luck with it, I hope you resolve your difficulties.’
‘What makes you think I’m having difficulties?’
‘You seem to be falling into the spaces between the successive appearances of yourself. If you’re not careful you’ll disappear.’
‘If I stop thinking you it might well be you that disappears.’
‘I’m disappearing now,’ he said, ‘but you will continue to think of me,’ and he withdrew.
Thinking of him I went upstairs and stood in front of a painting by Frans Post (1612-80), Catalogue No. 915, Gezicht op het Eiland Tamaraca. It was a strange painting, a little on the naif side - as apparently artless in its composition as a snapshot, as if the painter had sat himself down on the beach, aimed himself at the island across the water, and painted whatever came between him and it: two black men; two white men; two horses; an expanse of pinky dawn-looking water; two small boats moored by the island; in the foliage of the island was a naked place that looked bitten out by a giant. One of the black men balanced a basket on his head with one hand. He wore nothing but a pair of short white trousers. The other black man, also in white shorts, had put down his basket of yellow fruit and stood holding the reins of a white horse. One of the burdensomely clothed white men stood on the beach waving at or pointing towards the island while the other sat his chestnut horse which had a white blaze on its face and a white sock on the offside hind leg. He did not look at the island.
Perhaps the actual time in the painting was not dawn. But here in the Johan de Witthuis the water across which the Island Tamaraca was seen was dawn water. I could feel in this dawn a presence looking out at me, I could feel in it the buzzing and the swarming of what was gathering itself. I could feel myself approaching the correct frequency, I held myself carefully tuned to it when it came.
Out of the pinky dawn water, naked and shining in the dawn, rose Luise, quivering like a mirage between the beach and the island seen across the water. Quivering, shimmering, her body becoming, becoming, becoming a face loosely grinning, with hissing snakes writhing round it in the shining dawn. Around me ceased the sounds of the day; the stone of me cracked and I came out of myself quite clean, like a snake out of an egg, nothing obscuring my sight or my hearing. The Gorgon’s head, the face of Medusa, shimmered luminous in a silence that crackled with its brilliance. Her mouth was moving.
What? I said. What are you saying?
You have found me, she said. I trust you with the idea of me.
You, I said.
Yes and yes and yes and yes, she said. Look and know me. Hold the idea of me in you by night and by day, never lose it.
Yes and yes and yes and yes, I said, I look and I know you. I will hold the idea of you in me by night and by day, I will never lose it.
She was gone in the pinky dawn water between the beach and the Island Tamaraca.
I went out of the Johan de Witthuis and looked all around at the unimpeachable objectivity of the Dutch daylight. One would be ashamed to draw badly in that light.
Moving carefully so as not to disturb the unknown idea I had lunch in some sunny windowed place that looked out on the street. Then I walked back to the station, noticed a little hotel opposite with its name in quotation marks, ‘Du Commerce’, took a room for the hours remaining until the departure of the boat train at 2200, was shown upstairs, lay down, fell asleep, and dreamed of a secret cave behind a waterfall.
It was between four and five in the afternoon when I woke up. Careful not to ask myself any questions, I had a shower, went down to the bar, drank beer, drank gin, brought a second beer up to my room and looked out of the window at the early evening. The light had gone a grainy purple-blue. Beyond the station stood white office blocks, fluorescent-lit against the sky, looking as if they belonged to memory and time long past. Yes, I thought, there were people then; they too were happy and sad, they too looked out upon just such a purple-blue evening. Through the glass sides of the Pieter de Hooch railway station I saw the yellow carriages slide in and out.
I switched on the overhead room light, it was a little flame-shaped bulb in an electrified oil-lamp. Somewhere such bulbs are manufactured; what does it say on the box? 10 w ETERNA-FLAME DEPRESSION perhaps. Outside the window a double street lamp stood up like a luminous pinky-orange hibiscus. Beyond the lamps the yellow trains arrived and departed with a soft and rapid dinging of bells in the grainy purple-blue evening. Passing under my window was Luise walking slowly away towards the station in a yellow mac the same colour as the trains.
I ran down the stairs and out into the road. She was still there, manifesting herself as ordinary reality and not disappearing. She paused at the sound of my footsteps and turned. ‘Herman,’ she said. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I came to see the Vermeer girl but she’s gone to America. What about you?’
‘I’m here with my husband, he’s installing a computer system.’
Time ceased to be an automatic progression: the present moment exploded into millions of sharp-edged fragments and nothing followed. The bells dinged softly, the yellow trains moved in and out, the purple-blue darkened but the next moment did not come. It seemed so little to ask, that the next moment should come. Perhaps if I moved my mouth. I moved my mouth, it said, ‘You’re married then, you finally found the right one.’
‘Yes, I found the right one.’
I had a piece of folded-up paper in my pocket, I always do: yellow A4. ‘Luise,’ I said, giving her the paper and a pen, ‘please write your name and the date on this for me.’
‘Why?’
‘Because all of a sudden it’ll be some other time and I want to have something from this time.’
She wrote her name and the date, the piece of paper is stuck on the edge of the monitor screen along with the Vermeer-girl postcard. I was right, all of a sudden it was some other time and the engines of the St Nicholas were throbbing as they drew a line across the night from Hook of Holland to Harwich. In my hand were the postcard and the folded yellow paper on which was written Luise Nilsen and the date. She lived in Oslo now, her husband’s name was Lars, he was forty-two, tall and bearded, they did a lot of skiing, they did a lot of sailing, they owned a forty-foot ketch named Eurydike, they had a daughter named Ursula who was almost a year old, they called her Ursel, Luise thought of me sometimes, she’d read Slope of Hell and World of Shadows and recognized herself and incidents from our two years together, that time seemed very far away now. We sat in the bar at the ‘Du Commerce’ and talked as if it was a possible thing to do: there she was, I could have reached out and touched her, and she was gone out of my life for ever. I had no part in her days and nights, she would continue without me as if I were dead.
I went ou
t on deck and walked aft to look at the white wake widening astern in the night. Seeing the actuality of Luise married and gone for ever, was that what the stone had cracked and freed me for? I could feel that something had happened, I could feel the Hermes of it, could feel myself on a night road to somewhere else. One couldn’t ask more than that - to be sometimes on a night road to somewhere else. ‘I have no name but the one you give me,’ I said, ‘no face but the one you see.’
Cleaving the foam like a periscope was a telephone in which crouched the telephonist Lucretia, bellowing above the sound of the engines and the hiss of the sea along the ship’s sides that she had a call for me from Sol Mazzaroth.
14 No Balls
Ring, ring, said the telephone when I got home.
‘Hello,’ I said.
‘Herman Orff?’ said Lucretia, flicking her whip against her boot.
‘Yes.’
‘I have a call for you from Sol Mazzaroth.’
‘Thank you.’
A little advance silence came out of the telephone like ground meat out of a meat-grinder. I wrapped it neatly in white paper and tied it with string.
‘Herman?’ said the voice of Sol Mazzaroth.
‘That’s me.’
Sol’s hands came out of the telephone and rubbed themselves together briskly. I offered them the neatly wrapped silence.
‘Herman,’ said Sol, ‘tomorrow’s the editorial meeting for Vol. One, Number One. Where are we with Orpheus?’
I saw my current account rolling its eyes like a steer in the slaughterhouse. If you had balls you wouldn’t be a steer, I said as I lifted the hammer.
Look who’s talking, said the current account. If you had balls I’d have been dead long ago. Go on, kill me, let’s see you do it.