Schultz spent most of his days on the island. Many months went into laying the foundations. In my mind’s eye I see him amid the cranes, cement mixers and bulldozers, while shiploads of building materials keep coming in. He acted as the classic artist-builder, the way Daedalus had, bringing his dark vision to life with his own hands. The island is easy to see from the Corniche, the seaside boulevard that encircles the bay in a lazy curve. In bad weather one sees the sea rising high and dark behind it, while the calm surf in the harbor hardly changes.
After dark my father took the boat back with the last of the workers, arriving home only after I had been put to bed. My mother once made a home movie in the garden, perhaps with the idea of sending it to his family for Christmas — greetings from the outlands. I am sitting on a little orange tricycle with a sort of pickup bed at the back and staring the whole time at my mother, who is holding the camera. I forget to move the pedals. A hand against my back pushes me along, then we see the rest of the man, but only from behind, a bent figure. I look at my mother again, and the scene ends there.
The second part of the home movie must have been made that same day, I’m wearing the same clothes. I’m sitting on a swing at the back of the garden, behind me stands my father. He is wearing a white T-shirt, it fits tightly around his torso. He is strong, a Carinthian farmer.
He is built for adversity; if the ox dies, we’ll just pull the plow ourselves. Picasso had a body like that.
‘Are you having fun, Ludwig?’
My mother, operating the camera again, but I don’t answer, because the swing is going fast and high.
‘Bodo, it’s scaring him.’
My legs fly higher and higher, the little doll’s feet sweep helplessly.
‘Bodo, stop it, he’s frightened!’
The film stutters and goes black. Not suitable for sending to the family. The mysterious thing about those images is that his face is never seen, only that hand, that arm, that torso. Even during the swing scene, his face remains in shadow.
‘Now that you mention it,’ my mother said when we looked at the film many years later.
She told me how frustrated he was; he hadn’t counted on the conditions in Egypt, which were tough and resulted in messy delays. I imagine it as having been something like the Tower of Babel, by Pieter Brueghel the Elder: little men contributing stone by stone to an arrogant, godless project. He cursed the inefficiency and the leisurely way they lifted their hands to the heavens when the wrong building materials were delivered. He incurred the workers’ wrath with his brutish treatment, his frequent shouts of Scheiss doch auf Allah!
Winter came, a bitter west wind delayed the work, and two storms in rapid succession finally brought it to a standstill. People say he beat laborers, those little fellahin in their djellabahs who had come in from the countryside to earn a few piasters in the big city. In the light of later accounts, that is not unlikely. It is commonly known of disturbed, narcissistic characters that they regard all adversity, even when imposed by inanimate factors such as the weather or natural disasters, as a personal insult. These things provoke a deep, impotent rage, everything is conspiring against them, that is why they shake their fists at heaven and flail the waters of the Hellespont. Or, as Captain Ahab said: Speak not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.
I think my mother was deeply shocked by the dark storm clouds that gathered over her. She had never seen him like this, a tense and enraged Austrian out to build a tower in the harbor at Alexandria, a barbaric ruler over a ragged legion of day laborers, an obsequious throng, his subjects.
Wachturm sprang from the soil like a poison toadstool, decked out with an intricate network of wooden scaffolding on which countless little men made their way up and down. Medieval! Medieval in the sense of manual labor, bond service and feudalism, those same conditions — in other words — which still pertain in large parts of the world, so that medieval perhaps describes not just a historical era, but also a packet of conditions that floats around the world, regardless of time or position, and is unpacked here or there. Whatever the case, the Pandora’s box bearing the label MEDIEVAL had now been delivered to that elongated barrier island.
The tower was not completed. After three years my father went away and never came back. He left many things behind, unfinished, a tower, a marriage, an upbringing.
(Later, in Alburgh, I was eleven or twelve at the time, I was given a box of Playmobil. I built a castle with it. The good guys lived in that castle; the bad guys gathered in a black tower that was not made with plastic building blocks. Only much later did I realize that that black tower and Wachturm were one and the same; it was the scale model of Wachturm that I had played with all those years.)
It was a good two-hour walk to La Cienega Boulevard. The Steinson & Freeler Gallery, it turned out, was located in an old, single-storey commercial building, a bright orange oblong. Before the entrance, marked by a set of smoked-glass doors, a little crowd had gathered. These were not art lovers, it seemed to me; the dreadlocks and clothing daubed with political slogans were too much in evidence for that — the fashion statements of left-wing activists. They unrolled a banner, a girl was taking flyers from a shopping cart and handing them out to passers-by. Someone was toying around with a megaphone.
I crossed the street and took a flyer. Stop this maniac from desecrating holy mountains. The maniac portrayed was Bodo Schultz. I wormed my way through the activists to the entrance, but that wasn’t supposed to happen — they lined up between me and the door and began chanting, as if in a dream
‘IT AIN’T NO ART TO TAKE MOUNTAINS APART. IT AIN’T NO ART TO TAKE MOUNTAINS APART.’
As though by magic, their looks became combative — from a gaggle of freeloaders they had been transformed into a militant cell. Their arms were locked together, it looked like experimental theater, with me as the sole member of the audience. Behind me, two of the demonstrators raised the banner, you could read the words through the back of it: VIOLENCE AGAINST NATURE IS VIOLENCE AGAINST MANKIND. A voice beside me said, ‘Immoral art is a crime, that’s how we feel about it.’
It was the girl with the flyers, and her words were spoken in complete earnest. I had to bend over to hear her.
‘That’s what we’re trying to tell you. If you’d like more information, come with me.’
Her friends kept droning the same words, IT AIN’T NO ART TO TAKE MOUNTAINS APART. We walked over to the shopping cart.
‘What interests me,’ I said, ‘is exactly what you people have against Schultz.’
It looked like she was about to roll her eyes or start clucking with her tongue, but she restrained herself. She asked, ‘Are you familiar with the work of this Mr. Schultz?’
‘Not particularly. I mean, I don’t know much about it.’
‘There’s something very wrong with that man. And with a world that views him as an artist. . His work as art.’
The words were like bitter rinds in her mouth. Behind us the mechanical cadence of the chorus halted. She said, ‘Mr. Schultz acts out his vandalistic urges on nature, which can’t defend itself.’
From the cart she dug out a few photocopies, I saw a pile of folders marked PRESS — this kind of activism was, in its own way, highly organized. I pointed at the press kits.