The first days weren’t the worst, because everything was so new and happening so fast that it was hard to find a moment to think. The first march, the first trench, the first night beneath a sky lit up by star shells, the first attack, the first dead body. . All with my mind blank. But as the weeks passed, routine crept in like a germ, and fear and uncertainty turned the attempts to survive into some sort of horrifying inanity. I didn’t enlist voluntarily. If I had, I probably would have been able to choose which branch of the armed forces I would serve, but I didn’t really care. I preferred to leave it in the hands of fate to avoid any possible error on my part, so I wouldn’t have any reason to recriminate myself for anything later. Besides, I didn’t understand the enthusiasm of those who signed up. When I heard talk of the desire for new experiences and the exalting power of war, I wanted to laugh. The only positive consequence of being forced to go to war was that I saved myself the disappointment of those who expected to find something more there, something more than death, hunger, and stink.
Trench war has a very limited repertoire of colors: the brown of the mud, the black of the smoke columns, the white of the exploding star shells, the yellow of the observation balloons, the red of the blood, the green of the gas. When it was calm enough, I spent hours painting. Max Beckmann once told me that drawing protected him from death and danger. It’s not true, because nothing protects us from death and danger, but it sounds good coming from a painter. He was right when he said that while drawing he was more aware of the essence of things. The flight of a skylark, the elderflowers and the shape of a cloud are more powerful than a rain of fire. Sheltered behind a pile of dirt or a stack of ammunition boxes, I superimposed landscapes etched into my memory onto the monotony of the battlefield. Then, attracted by the white of the paper, the skylark would land on the trench wall, the elderflowers would bloom beside a crater, clouds would hide the scrolls of smoke. When they pulled me from the front, I left my sketchbook there, but a member of my company sent it to me at the end of the war. Some of the drawings are on Hofer’s list.
Cancer is another good mechanism of weakening and destruction. It’s almost as effective as Sergeant Forkel. My stomach hasn’t given me any good news in some time. Long before vomiting up feces for the first time, I had lost my appetite. Lately I force myself to eat often and in small quantities — a spoonful of rice, half an apple, a walnut — but I think that soon I’ll give it up. Resistance is futile. I’m not in pain, but I’m getting awfully weak. Perhaps, if I could lead a more or less normal life, it would be preferable to have pain. But I won’t swear to that. In fact, I’m less and less sure of anything these days. Everything crumbles. And if that weren’t enough, the disease has altered the value of my memories. It’s turned them into simple events, volatile and dispensable, or it’s pushed them to the surface so they can shine with their own light before disappearing forever. Why do Alma’s eyes persevere longer than a disemboweled man? Why is Hofer’s voice more powerful than any other? “You decide.” No, I can’t. Memory imposes the rules of the game. Just like the tumor does. Sometimes I smell my hands to make sure that the penetrating, rancid stench of putrefaction isn’t escaping through my pores. I wouldn’t want to stink of death before my time.
The landscape through the windows turns like the sheep in my zoetrope. Day and night; rain and sun; wind and calm. Like always, but soon it will do it without me. Sitting there in my studio, I contemplate the reproductions of Music and Dance. They are what Matisse wanted: a palliative, an armchair to rest in. I don’t know if I’ve ever achieved anything even similar. Perhaps I’ll have to settle for having tried. The rest is out of my hands. “He who does what he can is not obliged to anything more,” my father used to say. Phrases. Memories crystallize into isolated words and phrases, often used as bait to attract the past. My father and I had expressions we used like some sort of secret code. Our favorite was “lose sight of the orpiment.” We used it every chance we got: “I lost sight of the orpiment and tripped” or “I was so bored that I lost sight of the orpiment.” I heard it for the first time when he told me about reencountering my mother after eight months. “When I saw her sitting in the audience, I lost sight of the orpiment.” It was during a conference on Cranach’s colors. While he was explaining that, in addition to being a painter, Cranach was an apothecary, allowing him access to pigments unknown to the other German artists of his time, he noticed Mother and got hopelessly distracted. He must have imagined their reencounter in many different settings, but never while he was describing the fine qualities of the yellow made with orpiment, how similar its tone was to gold. At the end, my mother was waiting for him at the exit. My father was embarrassed, apologized for losing his train of thought, and insisted on extolling the characteristics of natural arsenic sulfide, but she interrupted him with a direct question: “Perhaps we’ve no need to let another eight months pass without seeing each other, don’t you think?”
They were married six months later. In one of the photographs, they are posing in front of the hotel where they celebrated the reception. My mother was very pretty. It’s no surprise that my father “lost sight of the orpiment.” It’s a shame I never got the chance to confirm what he always said about the color of her eyes. “Of the softest green, like malachite pigment.” Like mine. Even if it’s not true, I like to think it is. Of all the photographs, the last one is my favorite, with all three of us, in front of the cliffs on Rügen Island. My mother and father are smiling. I’m not. I’m four months old and a bit sulky. Sometimes I think that I could already sense the heartbreak that would soon befall us. Before she died, before her health really began to decline, my mother wanted to travel to Friedrich’s landscapes, which she was ever so fond of. I had always believed that the whole final wish thing was silly. Now I see it differently. If I could make one, since I can’t paint Alma’s body one last time, I would ask to go back to my river to add a few more colored stones.
I have no photographs of Erika. When I left her, I didn’t take anything with me. I didn’t want to. Now I regret that, because I have trouble remembering her face. Over the years, our memories fill with shadows, half-erased figures. I’ve known three Erikas, with enough time in between for me to forget that she wasn’t the right match for me. The first Erika was a spoiled, contemptuous girl, with no interest in painting, but with parents who didn’t want to accept that. Shortly after arriving in Berlin, at nineteen, I began to teach private drawing lessons and, thanks to my dad who insisted on helping me despite the distance, I met the Bürckels. If all my students had been like Erika, I would have just kept coloring postcards to survive. She never let pass an opportunity to make it clear that she didn’t give a fig for anything I might be able to teach her. I suppose her father realized it, but I don’t know to what extent his friendship with my father led him to turn a blind eye. In any case, I could only stand it for a couple of months. The second Erika was twenty years old and showed up, along with her family and my father, at my first group exhibition. The Hans Goltz Gallery was teeming with people, but I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She had become a beguiling woman. “I still remember your face that day when, after you kept insisting I add a little more water to the watercolors, I threw them into the garden fountain,” she said. I also remember that I smacked her and suspended the lessons. The Erika at the Hans Goltz Gallery and the weeks following, during which she came to my workshop two or three times to chat, had nothing in common with the girl I had known, but the rift between us was equally large. I found her too imposing. Both for her beauty and her dynamism. Erika was all over the place. She could spend hours talking about projects that never materialized. Her enthusiasm had no subtleties or shadings. It was either all black or all white. Then she disappeared again for two years. The third Erika, whom I married shortly after my first solo exhibition, where we met up again, was no longer an impulsive twenty-year-old, but her drive inadvertently became the perfect counterpoint to my inertia.