‘Johannes.’
‘Yes, mother?’
‘Promise me you won’t destroy yourself.’
‘I promise, mother. I want to sell a lot more fruit and buy a lot more art.’
Johannes Vettermann, fifty-one years of age, is lying in his suite on the twenty-seventh floor and he can tell he’s dying and he’s trying to reach the telephone; the doctors have brought him back a couple of times before. A long signal and a short one. He’s only creeping a centimetre at a time, although he knows he must be there any moment now. A long signal and a short one. He thinks of all the pictures he bought, of the celebrated exhibitions he put on with his collection, thinks of his own exhibitions in the past few years since he started painting again.
‘Slit-eyed Charlie was the end and the beginning, right, Johnny?’
‘Get out of here,’ he whispers.
‘The Vietcong is everywhere, right, Johnny?’
‘Leave me alone,’ he whispers, ‘or help me.’ He’s not scared, even though the man standing in front of him looks like he’s always imagined Mephisto. But this man is really his best friend, a painter he discovered and promoted and bought, and whom he once painted so that he looked like the devil himself.
‘Start again, Johnny, you have to paint, paint, Johnny. Art, only art you make yourself can save you.’ And Johannes Vettermann painted, even though he hadn’t picked up a brush for almost twenty years. And now his friend Mephisto, the man who wanted to save him, is standing in front of him, blocking the last fifty centimetres to the telephone and saying things about the Viets. ‘They were the end and the beginning, right, Johnny?’
And he’s right; a couple of years after 1989 the Vietnamese started taking over the fruit market. They brought the prices down but he and his father didn’t give up that quickly; they stood up on the bridge of the wholesale fruit market, swaying in the storm, gripping each other by the shoulders, and they were fearless and they knew they could be victorious, but the competition grew and grew — ‘Vietnamese, Johnny, as if they came from China’ — and the prices fell and fell, and Vettermann’s wholesale fruit market went bust, and his father, who’d started out with a weekly market stall over fifty years ago, turned into a broken old man, and they sat in banks and financial institutions and watched the red grow and grow. ‘The colours, Johnny, never forget the colours …’
‘And another painting from the Vettermann Collection, ladies and gentlemen, at a starting price of …’ Johannes Vettermann had paid far less for the picture. It’s his favourite picture and he sorely misses it. A man standing in a boat, fishing. The colours of the water and the sky are very pale, violet and blue, mist on the water, and the man stands dark like a shadow, and behind him on the banks the shadow of the forest. Neo-romantic, almost kitsch, Johannes Vettermann thought at first, but then after a while he was still standing in front of the picture and he began to feel the loneliness and the beauty.
Now it belongs to a Parisian collector, and once when Johannes Vettermann was in Paris he visited him and stood a long time looking at the angler and the forest and the water.
Almost all the pictures in his collection were auctioned off for a lot of money; Berlin, London, New York; the wholesale fruit market and the bridge where he’d stood for so many years were gone but so were the debts, and Johannes Vettermann gave up eating fruit.
‘Paint, you have to paint again, Johnny …’ And he painted. The end and the beginning. It took quite a long time until he managed to get the pictures out of his head and onto canvas. And it took quite a long time until the critics, the collectors and the other painters started celebrating him.
‘Hell on canvas. The genius nightmares of Johannes Vettermann.’
And now here’s his friend, the man he painted to look like Mephisto, like the devil himself in human form, standing in front of him and saying, ‘Johnny Superstar’ and ‘At the end, Johnny, everything goes very fast,’ and then he’s gone. And Johannes Vettermann finally reaches for the receiver and presses it to his ear. But all he can hear is a very loud and never-ending beep, beep, beep, beep …
A TRIP TO THE RIVER
We called him ‘The Boxer’ because his nose was beaten so flat it almost disappeared into his face.
Sometimes when I sat with him by the window in the evening and we smoked in the floodlights and waited for the night, he laid his big hand across his battered face and left it there until we got up and went to our beds.
We had plenty of beaten-up guys. I saw them at work, I saw them in the corridors and the yard; there were some who came in with really pretty faces and went out mashed up, but in all my time I never saw a nose flat as the Boxer’s.
At night, when I lay awake and he was asleep, his nose made whistling sounds, and when I listened for a while and thought about things, they’d turn into real little tunes.
‘Hey, Boxer, play something else,’ I said quietly, but he stopped whistling altogether — he’d woken up and started tossing and turning above me. ‘You know,’ he whispered in his hoarse night voice, ‘you know, I really used to … back then …’
‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘that’s what they’re all saying. This guy came in last week, short guy, going a bit grey …’
‘Wolfgang,’ he whispered.
‘Yeah,’ I nodded a couple of times, even though he couldn’t see me.
‘Always was a big-mouth,’ he whispered.
He turned over above me. I saw his foot for a moment in the light of the prison moon; we hung our towels over the window, but the floodlights were in the yard and outside the walls, and we never managed to completely cover it. I heard him breathing, and a few minutes later he started up his whistling again.
‘He weren’t bad,’ Wolfgang had said, passing round cigarettes, he was shit-scared, ‘back in the East. Not right at the top, but a couple of times he nearly made it to the Olympics a couple of times.’
The Boxer had never told me that, even though we’d been sharing a cell for more than two years. The Boxer didn’t talk much, and once he did get started, because the Russkis had brought us some samogon, he used to tell me about his daughter. She must have been seventeen, eighteen.
He still had a few years to go. They said he’d knocked some guy out and he hadn’t got up again, in the pub, a fight, money, women, no one knew exactly and of course he’d never told anyone anything.
One of the old dossers, who came and went, and were all back inside again for the winter, even told me once the Boxer was a lifer, on a long stretch. Apparently he hadn’t just knocked out that one guy but beat a security man into a coma too when he tried to hold him down, and he slept so deep he never woke.
‘The Boxer lost it; it was the drink,’ the dosser said and shook his head and rolled his eyes enough to make me dizzy. ‘They got him down to ten or eleven years; it was the drink, you know.’
‘I know,’ I said, and the old guy licked his lips and I gave him a bit of tobacco. But I didn’t believe the Boxer was carrying two cold ones round with him, and the tramps talked a lot of shit when they were coming down.
‘They should have built it by the river,’ the Boxer said. We were sitting at the table, like every morning. It was slowly getting light outside; the window was open although it was cold and it had snowed. We were eating and looking out across the walls at the bare trees and the city. ‘What?’ I asked, although I knew what he meant. He tapped one of the bars, and I nodded. ‘Might have been better.’