I said I knew roughly where it was.
It's a land of black mountains, he said, and desolate valleys populated by farmers, wine-growers and the occasional shepherd. Sometimes, in those valleys, you come across a town with mosques, minarets and souks. In one such place, in the former royal palace, they'd established a big art gallery. 'I went in just because I had some time to kill and it was terribly hot outside, and when I go through the halls I can't believe what I'm seeing. At a glance there is Braque, Rouait, Munch and Ernst, and over there — I can't believe it — Pollock, Hartung and Reinhardt. They've got Andy Warhol! I look again and I see some of our painters too. From a distance I can see Rada, Filla, a late Muzika. They've given over a whole wall to Medek at
the top of his form. Then I put my glasses on to look at the signatures. And you know who had signed them? Some guys called Cvetkovič and Stankovič and Toškovič, one Mrdjan, a Danice. And suddenly, the thing I was most afraid of happened: I found myself hanging there. I couldn't remember when I'd painted this picture, but it was me about five years ago. However, I'd signed my name Kavurič-Kurtovič. I've seen it before,' he complained, 'in Munich and Warsaw and Budapest, everyone hanging there, except they'd confused the signatures. But the tragedy didn't hit me until I was down there in Montenegro. I tell you, my friend, it's all over with painting. There's nothing new to invent. Everyone is ripping off somebody else. A hundred people line up for every idea, and even then they haven't a clue the idea's a hundred years old. A single Mondrian or a single Newman: fantastic — you fall to your knees in wonder; two are OK, and you can even take three, but when you see a hundred of those monochrome canvasses that look like a housepainter did them, each crossed with a white or maybe a black horizontal line, you feel like throwing up, or throwing yourself out of a thirteenth-storey window. It's the end of art. There's nothing behind it: no ideas, no experience, no invention — forget authenticity, that's a joke anyway. These guys are pure con artists, and the only people who call it art are the critics who are just as dishonest.'
That evening, when he'd left, I got out the book of Ecclesiastes which, as I've discovered many times, has everything in it. Sure enough, there it was:
All things are full of labour; man cannot utter it… Is there anything whereof it may be said, See, this is new?
It has already been of old time, which was before us.
But so many had written in the same vein, both before and after Ecclesiastes. I admire them for it — Seneca and Suetonius, Chekhov, Wilder, Boll, Dürrenmatt, Greene and Demi — even though they've deprived me of my last crumb of hope that I might still find a story to tell that no one else has told. I admire them for not giving up, for searching the grey tide of words and constantly reiterated tales for undiscovered droplets in that sea in which they stood, as I do, on their toes from dawn to dusk, keeping their eyes and noses, at least, above the surface.
At first, though, I did not care for stories; I was convinced I would become a painter. I had oils, an easel, frames and a roll of canvas. I tried to draw everything that I saw, or even imagined. By now, I had seen the work of real masters, in reproductions and even in the original, but their achievements did not trouble me; the fact that the face I painted was at least a distant reminder of a real face, that my alley of birch trees might have been recognizable as such, filled me with so much satisfaction that I felt myself a companion of the greats.
The girl I was going with at the time loved poetry, white water, quiet corners in parks and Van Gogh, especially his sunflowers. A day before her eighteenth birthday I had a wonderful idea. I had a reproduction of 'The Sunflowers' at home: what if I made her a copy in real oils?
I stretched a canvas and set to work. There wasn't much time, so I decided not to bother with a sketch or an outline, but to start right in painting a flower. I worked my way down towards the vase. Before I started, I had felt there would be nothing simpler than to imitate the energetic, expansive strokes of Van Gogh's brush. Oddly enough,
however, my sunflower did not want to look like the one in the reproduction, and the vase refused to fit into the space I had left for it. Shortly before midnight, my brother peered into the kitchen, which I had turned into a studio. He was seven years younger than me and, as a future scholar of the exact sciences, he had a contempt for art. When he saw my desperate attempt to force the vase on to the canvas, he pushed me aside, drew a grid of squares over both the canvas and the reproduction, and then began, mechanically, to fill them in with the appropriate colours and shapes.
The next day, it was his copy of the sunflowers that I gave to my girl-friend. I reaped the praise that did not belong to me and was crushed by the experience. Suddenly, my paintings did not have enough space, enough movement. I wasn't able to say exactly what it was I lacked — perhaps it was narrative. I put the box of paints away in the cellar and, until this spring, I never painted another picture.
Although it was only Friday morning, the train was full of young men and women in army surplus overalls or dirty jeans, off for a weekend ramble in the country. Eventually, I found a seat. Across from me sat three young men who, together, were holding a girl on their laps. A fourth was cradling a guitar. On the overhead racks bottles of beer poked out of worn rucksacks. When they got to their shack, if they had one, the girl would make goulash, and they'd all start to drink the beer. They'd play the guitar and sing songs as they got drunk. Those who got tired of the beer would then make love to the girl. The girl had dishevelled, peroxided hair that half covered her expressionless face. That morning, or more probably the night before, she had outlined her lips with vulgar red
lipstick; the red varnish was chipping off her finger-nails. Her hands were dirty, and so was her denim dress. The boys were talking big, tough-guy talk, while she giggled. When one of them touched her breasts, she slapped his hand. But she did not get off their knees.
Twenty years ago, I would have wanted to get to know them. By then, I had stopped painting, but my longing to capture the world around me remained. I began to write. I was obsessed with a desire to know new people, and everywhere I sensed the presence of fresh and exciting stories. I trembled with eagerness to add to the sea that is threatening to engulf us all.
Ecclesiastes talks about this kind of obsession:
The words of a wise man's mouth are gracious; but the lips of a fool will swallow up himself. The beginning of the words of his mouth is foolishness: and the end of his talk is mischievous madness. A fool is also full of words. . Of making many books there is no end.
If only he had known. .
Of course there are people who probably don't even have time to observe the sea that is preparing to sweep our humanity away. This occurred to me when, on Saturdays or Sundays I would see Mr Vondrák moving about his house in blue overalls. The overalls had gradually faded as the house grew. Sometimes I heard him whistling somewhere inside the building. It seemed enormous, and I wanted to ask him how it felt to build something that large all by himself, but I was too shy. It wasn't until last month that, for no apparent reason, he suddenly invited me inside and showed me his work. The floor of the entrance hall was covered with smooth, carefully laid linoleum. The radiators
were impeccably installed, the windows closed with exemplary precision. The walls were straight and the corners right-angled. I wanted to know where he had learned all these skills. He replied that he worked as a graphic designer in advertising. I asked him about his work, but he avoided giving me an answer. I don't think he was trying to hide anything from me; it was more that he didn't seem to know what to say about it. He had poured his life into building this house. He talked to me about pipes of different dimensions and the difficulties of getting the right tiles. I noticed that not a single window looked out on to the street; they all opened out on the garden. As soon as we reached the attic, he asked me to wait at the top stair. Then he ran downstairs, I heard a door opening and suddenly the house was filled with cathedral-like tones. I looked in vain for its source. When Mr Vondrák didn't return, I went to look for him so I could compliment him on his fine sound system. As I walked down the stairs, I realized that the music was coming from somewhere in the basement. So I went down, and there, on the concrete floor, was a harmonium, and behind it, in his now faded overalls, sat Mr Vondrák the advertising designer, his head tossed back, playing Bach. 'I'm practising for the house-warming,' he said.