[61] Hushing the room enclosed

Emma says, here, this is his table. We’re twenty minutes early, which gives us half an hour before Emil is expected. When she’s looking her best, she’s a whip. You can soften her all you want, with all the frills you can sew on – her body is all suppleness and stare mongering, and she knows it now, in ways she didn’t when we met. We sit there and I’m on my best manners here because it’s dawning on me that I’m in love. And just as powerfully, that I like her. I never thought those two went together, but we’re turning into a pair, but of what … I look at her in one of Emilie’s dresses – which she’s supposed to wear on the street after hours, as part of her contract – and I see through it, I can’t help myself. And my tablet is out, and I’m doing a careful drawing of the room, the tweeting journalists around us, the succulents dripping on us, the hissing coffee machine on the granite bar and penguin waiters under the cathedral ceiling, and Emma sitting on a tabletop with one leg cocked out and dress open and head thrown back, her centre-of-the-universe look, when Emil comes in. By that time I’m enjoying myself, and I let them get reacquainted and catch up, and I’m working away. I move to red charcoal for the last minute or so. I haven’t looked at him yet. After a while, they stop catching up and wait for me to finish.

We make eye contact. First: He’s wearing a beige linen suit, a paler brown shirt, and a burnt-yellow tie (so Emma will tell me when she’s correcting my drawing of him), and his brown homburg is on the tabletop where I’d been drawing Emma at play. Second: Snake handler, no question. They all look at me, I tell you. What is it I promise those people? Third: This one doesn’t see humans. This one, everything refers back to himself. I wait for his curdled stare at me, which comes out as soon as he speaks.

‘Paul Karsch,’ he says. ‘A pleasure to meet one of your reputation.’

I turn the drawing around for him to see, thinking that he must have seen her naked sometime. He looks and doesn’t blink at all, and I tell myself, nothing comes out of this one.

‘You’re already known for your draughting skills,’ he says. ‘I’ve seen some of your efforts, shall we call them, posted at some of our mutual cafés. We had hoped you should be more respectful to my sister than that. I’m something of a photographer, myself. It has more of a social function than your métier, which is solely aesthetic.’

If that’s the ground where he wants to draw the line that day. But I won’t stand on it with him, so I just look at him.

‘Photography will be the next century’s pre-eminent means of cultural production,’ he says, trying again. ‘Plastic arts are about to lose their social function – at best they’ll be serving themselves. They’ll exist for the people who make them, and cede their power to the realism that the new technology will allow.’

‘Try again,’ I tell him. I’ve seen him talk now. Next I want to see him hesitate. I’m wondering what it will take to make words fail him. It seems that nothing does.

‘People like you have a deep distrust of the collective voice,’ he adds. ‘You of all people should know the threat that technology poses to the imagination. Don’t you fear that material progress is about to render your inner visions superfluous? When you look at a photograph, you must see the leap that material progress is soon to make without you.’

‘I’ll tell you once,’ Paul says. ‘How about that? Photographs are always copies of something else. That’s why they’ll never be artistic expressions. Art has power because it’s never been done before and can’t be repeated, because the copy can never reflect its original entire. Photographs will never show what’s truly real because filtering reality is the only purpose they can have. Lord …’ He leans back and stares. ‘Your facts are so neat, your reasoning so pretty. You’ve been gelded by your own reason. What do you look like when you come, Emil? What’s that a repetition of, and how would you photograph that?’

‘Thought so,’ Emil says. ‘You are a friend of Gustav’s crowd. You’re meant to be a shining star in a year or three. You’re being groomed.’

‘I don’t think about that much.’

‘You don’t have to think about it,’ he says. ‘It’s all opening in front of you. Two or three café walls, some portrait commissions, a pilgrimage to Dresden and Berlin –’

‘Been there.’

‘– a group show in the Annex Room in two years, and a few months at the Art Factory learning craft-based skills. You know how it works. In five more years the most, you’ll be famous.’

‘Possibly it’s that way for me because it should be that way.’

He shrugs with his mouth. ‘You can act as if none of it matters to you. If you didn’t have all the doors open, it would matter deeply to you that they were shut.’

‘But they aren’t shut,’ I tell him. ‘So I needn’t concern myself. Do you know what success is? It’s when you can sit alone in a dark room and don’t have any questions to torment yourself. The rest is noise, like here.’

‘But this season you’re pretending to be broke. Your sister inherited all your money.’

‘Everything is a situation.’

‘Cut off without a penny,’ he says. ‘Family scandal, somewhere on the Galician border. Something about a horse. When your uncle failed to hush it up, he disowned you and your sister got everything. That’s why mommy hasn’t had the police after you. She knows how much influence you can recruit if you have to.’

‘My luck,’ I tell him. ‘I use what I’ve got if I ever have to to. So far, no need.’

‘You should know that besides wanting to see Emma for myself, mommy sent me. We can get to that in a moment.’

‘Why don’t we get to it now?’

‘I’d prefer to order a coffee first,’ he says. He looks at a waiter and holds up three fingers. A pot of tea appears for him, and great brown ones for Emma and I, and a plate of madeleines. I watch while he dips one. His talk is a preconceived distraction – he doesn’t want to discuss anything with me. He’s here simply to look at me.

‘And I’ll want to speak to Emma alone,’ he says.

‘It’s only a message from mommy,’ Emma says, ‘I tell Paul everything anyway.’

‘Did you tell her to say that?’ Emil asks.

‘You should see half of what I tell her to do.’

‘That’s right,’ Emma says. ‘I pose naked for him, and then he fucks my brains out. And the next day, and the next. And I enjoy it, too – I can’t get enough of it. Emil, what can we talk about when I know you’re going to tell mommy everything I say?’

‘Let’s have our coffee,’ Emil says, sipping his tea, you rebel. ‘I’m the messenger, Emma, I’m not saying it’s what you should do. She’s probably wrong about what’s best for you, but here’s the message anyway. She wants you to move home again and stop seeing this one. Keep modelling at Emilie’s and get ready for a husband. She can think of plenty of young men for you to choose from. She would let you take some courses at the university if you like. They’re offering women degrees in law these days, German literature next year.’

‘It’s what I told you,’ she says. ‘Tonight Paul and I go home, and I’ll pose naked for him, and then he – ’

I’m about to say, ‘It isn’t quite that simple,’ but he lifts his hand, and she stops. She knows this doesn’t end it, but she’s desperate at that moment to tell herself it could. You look at Emil and you know this: he always knows what he’s meant to think. I won’t be allowed to exist outside of his calculations, and at that moment I’m the man whose mother thinks I’ve ruined his sister’s value. That’s the useful approach that’s been laid out for him. He smiles and tells her enough, which means enough for now. Perhaps there’s a side of him that cares what happens to her. I’m sure he wants me to think so. I’ve spent the past few minutes trying to look him in the eye, and once or twice he hasn’t been able to avoid it. I’m embarrassing him, but I’m also threatening him. This is someone who knows how to keep a monstrous secret. The secret is himself. He knows his life perfectly and that’s the last thing he wants people to see. And here I am, guessing accurately, because I’m pressing Emma’s hand into her lap while he talks.

‘So I’ll tell you what else mommy wants, knowing what you’ll say, but I’ll have met my obligation to her by saying it. She’s concerned about whether your recent adventures are an indication that perhaps you require some sort of help.’

‘She means medical help. Paul, we have this conversation three or four times a year.’

He purses his mouth when he hears her talk to me.

‘Perhaps talking to someone would help,’ Emil tells her.

‘Paul, she means Mister Professor again.’

‘Yes,’ her brother says, ‘that’s whom she’s thinking about.’

‘Paul knows,’ she says. ‘Paul knows everything. The hypnosis, the talking cure, the diabetic coma, the Heroic Institute. I don’t need it.’

Actually, I don’t know – it’s the first time she’s mentioned any of that. But if she wants him to think I know all about it, I’ll go along.

‘Mommy only would like to be sure you don’t need it. The professor’s reputation has grown since – ’

‘Emil, ask her who my real father is. Look at me, and then look at you and daddy, and then ask her that. And then she can call me a whore if she wants, but let’s both call her one too. If your judgment of me is the same as hers, what do we have left to say?’

Well this is interesting.

‘What good would asking her do, Emma? Where’s the use, Emma?’

‘Do you know what makes me feel better? Having a life. Learning that for once. Emil, if you don’t mind, could you tell mommy for me that I’ve had a cock inside me for six weeks now and that the cure’s beginning to take?’

When he doesn’t blush, she adds, ‘And if it’s competition she wants, you might add that I’m catching up real quick.’

That time he does blush. I cough just to get him to look at me, and the stare I get from him goes right through and tells me I don’t exist for him. Take everything human out of someone, that’s the look they have and the look you get from them. I’m someone to get rid of, on his mommy’s instructions, so the family can get back to its misery.