A while back, the possibility of dying alone would have kept me up at night. Now that I have so little time, it doesn’t seem so bad. When you take a closer look, it’s not such a big deal. Maybe it’s that, once again, my father was right. I’ve always tended to imagine everything more convoluted than it really is.“You make a mountain out of every molehill. Why not cross that bridge when you come to it?” he would say when I got worked up too soon about things. Despite everything, if I could choose, I’d like death to come while I’m sleeping. It seems less disturbing. Like just another evening, I’d play a game of solitaire, get into bed to listen to music and just not ever wake up. . As simple as that. But I’m afraid that, unless something changes, my wishes are completely beside the point.
My mother didn’t die alone. My father told me on several occasions that, even though it was one of the most painful moments of his life, he was glad to have shared it with her. Together until the final breath. Mother, in bed; he, sitting by her side, doing his best to keep her from suffering any more than was strictly necessary. What made him saddest of all was that, shortly before the end, he took me to her bedroom so she could say goodbye to me and when she squeezed me in her arms I started to wail like a lost soul. My mother’s eyes filled with tears, but she didn’t complain. She gave me a kiss on the forehead and handed me back to my father.“Luckily he won’t remember me looking like this,” she said, forcing a smile.
Little more than two years passed from the day my parents first saw each other in front of the Cranach to the day she died.“It wasn’t much time, but we made the most of it,” my father assured me. And it must have been true because, even though his family and friends insisted, he never remarried. He was convinced that no one could give him more than he’d gotten from my mother. That probably wasn’t true but if that was how he felt, there was nothing more to be said about it. Besides, he seemed happy. Even though he had trouble expressing his emotions and occasionally seemed quite absent, I never had the feeling that I was growing up with someone sad or bitter. And my father was convinced that I would do fine without a mother. In his own way, and surely not always how he would have wanted it, because he often had to be in too many places at the same time, he managed to ensure that I never lacked for anything.
Luckily we had memories. But unfortunately he lived such a short time with my mother that there weren’t many to choose from. He more or less always talked about the same ones. The confrontation between their respective families when they decided to marry just two months after the lecture about orpiment; the honeymoon in Paris, with a memorable stroll through the Luxembourg Gardens covered in snow; my birth, which, going against the custom of the time, my mother didn’t want him to miss; the stays in Moritzburg and on Rügen Island; the first Christmas meal, which burned right before the guests arrived because “Eros decided to intrude,” which was the circumlocution he employed to avoid having to explicitly admit — in his prudishness — that they were left without the meal because of a roll in the hay; or the only time they’d argued, about a lost photograph. That was about it.
He would also tell me what Mother had told him about her childhood. And curiously, her favorite memory was a dream. Grandpa Klaus, the only of my four grandparents whom I never met, was a concierge at the Gemäldegalerie in Dresden, which meant my mother spent a lot of time there. She liked to walk through the rooms and lose herself in contemplation of the paintings. My father said that she’d spent so much time looking at them that she could describe them in minute detail, except for the works that scared her, like the ones by Ribera and Giordano, filled with skulls and saints with their ribs showing. And since she couldn’t understand many of the scenes depicted, she would make up adventures for the characters she didn’t know, like the love story for one of her favorite paintings, Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window by Vermeer. One day she explained to my father how she had dreamed about it many times. The thread was pretty much always the same. My mother walks through one of the museum’s galleries, filled with visitors, and she slowly approaches the Vermeer and observes the girl with the letter. Since the girl can’t read in peace with so many people watching her, she draws the curtain to keep them from bothering her. A little while later, when the visitors have already left, she goes back in secret and, curious, pulls back the curtain to find out what the letter says, but the girl is no longer there.“Incredible, isn’t it?” my father would ask me, his eyes wide as saucers. And here he would take the opportunity to explain one of his favorite anecdotes, the one about the painting duel between Zeuxis and Parrhasius that he had learned about in Pliny the Elder’s The Natural History. To show that he was the superior artist, Zeuxis offered up some grapes that looked so real they even attracted birds. However, Parrhasius displayed a curtain that was so skillfully painted that Zeuxis impatiently asked him to draw it aside so he could see the painting he thought was behind it. Later I remember him telling me the second part of the story, when Zeuxis painted a boy with a bunch of grapes and the birds also flew over to it. Yet this time he wasn’t satisfied because, as he naively admitted, if he had painted the boy successfully, the birds would have been too afraid to approach the grapes. It’s not surprising that my father marked those two episodes in his copy of The Natural History. I find them fascinating as well because, even though I’ve never been seduced by the quest for absolute fidelity, I can completely understand Zeuxis and Parrhasius’s longing for perfection.
Life is a web of coincidences. Even though my mother never knew it, Göring was intent on adding a Vermeer to his collection. But I would have liked to see his face when he realized that, despite Hofer acting as a consultant, they were duped, and he paid a fortune for a forgery. The only hitch in the perfect irony is that, as usual, the money must have been stolen too.
As she wandered around the museum, my mother would watch the copyists as they worked. She would sit beside them and search for the differences between the original and the copy. She could spend hours, playing at being “the all-seeing eye,” even though more than once they’d boxed her ears for coming home late. When she was older one of the copyists even became her first romantic disappointment, since she couldn’t get him to give her the attention she desired. But once she had gotten over her frustration and was no longer expecting anything more, they ended up becoming quite good friends, at least enough for my father to feel a bit jealous over it at one point. He admitted that, sometimes, especially during her last few months, my mother would talk about him so often that he had trouble taking it in stride. I don’t remember his name, or maybe I’ve never known it, because when my father mentioned him, he called him “the famous copyist, you know the one I mean.” But it never really caused a fight between them. It seems it was hard to argue with Mother, not because she avoided confrontation but because she had the rare ability of turning things on their head so they came out in her favor.