Rituals (13 page)

"She is hatching some sinister prophecy," said Bernard. "She has got rabbit ears, but that is probably the Libyan in her."

"It looks more like a woodcut," said Inni.

"Niello," replied Bernard, and when Inni did not react, "Niello is working in black enamel. That is where the technique comes from." And then suddenly, "It's not a bad little thing, really."

The pale head bore a crown of flowers out of which flowed a veil that, behind the body, suddenly described a strange curve that defied every law of nature. The wreathed head was crowned once more by a small pyramid-shaped, closed object, pierced on either side by three long thin leaves or feathers.

Partly because her own, no doubt tiny, ivory ears were invisible under the thick, un-Libyan blonde plaited coiffure, these did indeed give the Sibyl the appearance of an elegant female human rabbit.

"Let's get her record out, shall we," said Bernard. "Come upstairs with me. I am the beacon to light the path of the ignorant that wander in darkness." Corridors, and a great deal of fumbling with keys. Inni suddenly had to think of the girl again.

Bernard took a book out of a case and put it down in front of Inni.
Early Italian Engravings from the National Gallery of Art.
In alphabetical order.

Inni leafed through it and found his Sibyl. It gave him a feeling of pride, as if the etching had only just now begun to exist. He looked at his find with a little more respect.

"So it hangs in Washington," he said.

"Whether it hangs there I don't know. They've got plenty of other things to hang. But it's there all right. You'd better read all about it. But no, that's too much; it's a very thorough book. I'll have a photocopy made, and you can take that along with you when you go to Sotheby's."

"When you go to Sotheby's," said Inni.

"All right then. If I am going there anyway."

Bernard fetched another book. "Note this, my friend," he said. "Several solid kilograms of
love,
because this masterpiece was made with the ingredients of the exceptional: endless patience, vast knowledge, but most of all love. It's written by Frits Lugt, a very rich old man who turned his money into time, the quintessence of alchemy. Look. All the collectors' marks. Isn't that delightful. I don't suppose our little art dealer had noticed that, had he?"

"Noticed what?"

"That there was a collector's mark on your etching. What else do you imagine this is?" He pointed at a strange, small, graceful mark on the back of the etching.

"I wonder if we can find that anywhere."

Inni read the title of the book:
"Les marques de collections de dessins et d'éstampes,
Frits Lugt, Amsterdam 1921."

"Help me look for it," said Bernard.

Inni examined the mark. Two curious insect legs without a body, flanking three vertical lines that ended in a tiny circle.

"It looks rather like the sexual symbol of a Red Indian tribe."

"Go on," said Bernard. "The eye of the beholder. Red Indians never cared much for early Renaissance. If you try hard enough we'll find it in no time."

"Maybe it isn't in there."

"There speaks the contemptible generation. Everything is in Lugt."

He was right. Two insect legs were stylized R's set back to back, the initials of Freiherr C. Rolas du Rosey (1862),
general prussien, Dresde. "Estampes et dessins,
that tallies," said Bernard. "Those were the days." He read half aloud, ". . .
importante collection d'objets d'art, de curiosités... lui-même a dressé première catalogue raisonné . . .
well, well, those German Junkers! . . .
première vente 8 avril 1863 . . .
many engravings . . . not very remarkable . . . ha, ha . . . auctioned in Leipzig . . . prices not very high . . . and so by the mysterious roundabout way of all things, arrived in Rome,
cloaca mundi . . .
where the great connoisseur Wintrop . . . immediately recognizes an etching by Baldini... at an auction ... in a little shop ..."

"A little shop."

".. . and buys it for a song. Congratulations. You're bound to make something out of it. So you won't need to eat into your capital for a few months. "It'll give you the feeling you've done some work, too. And that other thing, what is that?"

"A Japanese print."

"My God."

"You can have a look at it, can't you?"

"No. Take it to Riezenkamp. He's the expert. I know nothing about them. I can't
see
anything in those prints. As far as I am concerned, they come from Mars. All those stereotyped curved little noses, those ghasdy doll's faces, with too little or too much expression or none at all. Just up your street. Omnivore, omnifume, omniboit, omnivoit. You are incapable of selecting — a sure sign of lack of class. That's why you're nothing more than a dabbler. That is somebody who likes everything. Life's too short. The human condition does not allow it. You can only really find a thing beautiful if you know something about it. He who does not select will perish in the morass. Carelessness, lack of attention, not really knowing anything about anything, the muddy face of dilettantism. The second half of the twentieth century. More opportunities for everyone. More people knowing less about more. The spread of knowledge over as large an area as possible. He who wants to skate over the surface will fall through the ice. Thus spake Bernard Roozenboom."

They went down the stairs.

"You know where to find Riezenkamp?"

"Spiegelgracht."

"Give him my regards. He is an honourable man."

*       *

Outside, Inni tumbled into the sunlight again. Everything and everyone seemed to have been dipped in a layer of happiness. The city that in recent years had acquired the appearance of a fortress under demolition, seemed aglow. Light danced in the water of the Rokin Canal. He turned into the Spui and saw in the distance the light-green shimmer of the trees in front of the Beguinage. There the third dove appeared to him, and it did something he had never yet seen a dove do: it created a work of art, for which, as is fitting, it was prepared to make a great sacrifice. With tremendous force it flew straight at Bender's store window, behind which the grand pianos and harpsichords stood waiting motionless for future geniuses. It caused a loud bang. For a moment it looked as if the bird was stuck to the glass for good. But, to avoid crashing to the ground, it fluttered desperately in place and then flew off like an aeroplane out of control. What remained was a work of art, for just above head level on the windowpane, there appeared in street dirt and dust the perfect shape of a dove in flight, feather by feather, with outspread wings. The crash had imprinted the bird's incorporeal double on the glass.

What was it these doves were trying to tell him? He did not know, but decided that this latest sibyllic communication, prophecy, warning, could be no truly sinister portent. After all, unlike its dead colleague, this pigeon had, however unsteadily, flown away into the azure sky, leaving behind only its spirit, albeit in the form of dust.

At Riezenkamp's there reigned a different kind of dignity from that at Bernard's. A stock-still bronze Buddha, his right hand stretched out in a gesture seemingly expressing rebuff, which, as Inni learned later, was precisely not the case, stared across the Spiegelgracht into a total and everlasting nothingness. A faint smile played about his sensuous lips, but otherwise the expression was severe. The pyramid-shaped headdress he wore reminded Inni fleetingly of the Libyan Sibyl. Doves, oracles, preachers — it was obvious that higher powers were aiming at him today. He stared at the disproportionately long, black earlobe of the squat bronze statue. Someone who had been alive in the sixth century and whose image was now sitting comfortably in a shop window in a world that had not even existed during his lifetime.

Suddenly Inni felt his attention being drawn towards something else, so strongly that a natural law seemed to be at work, forcing his poor body to turn away from the Enlightened One and walk with leaden feet to the next window. There a small man of oriental appearance was staring into the showcase, oblivious of the world. Both the man and the object he was looking at were destined to play a role in his life. Since the one would never be thinkable without the other, he assumed that the bowl — for it was a bowl they were both looking at now — had at this significant moment drawn him, through the man, towards itself. It stood all on its own in the showcase, the floor of which was covered by silk of an indefinable shade of green. The small stand on which it stood was also green, as were the background and the side walls. A black bowl. But with that nothing had yet been said.

Some things expressed tranquillity; others manifested power. But it was not always clear what this power was based on. Beauty, perhaps, but this word had an ethereal connotation that seemed to contradict power. Perfection, but this evoked, wrongly perhaps, an idea of symmetry and logic that was decisively absent here. It was a bowl, so of course it was round, but you could certainly not say that it was perfectly round. Its height was not the same everywhere. The walls — no, that was not the right way to put it — the inside and the outside gleamed and yet had a certain roughness. If it had stood in a different place or among several other objects, you might have taken it for the work of a not untalented Danish potter. But in this solitary position of strength, that was out of the question. There it was, on its little stand, black, faintly lustrous yet rough, on a foot that seemed too slender for its
poids,
which of course meant weight, though if you had said
weight,
you would not have expressed it precisely. It stood there and existed. Semantics, this, but how else could you say it? That it lived? That, too, was a weak bid. Perhaps the best way to put it would be that this pot, bowl, or whatever you cared to call the solitary object, looked as if it had come into being spontaneously instead of having been made by man. It was literally
sui generis.
It had created itself and ruled over itself and over anyone who looked at it. One could quite easily be afraid of this bowl.

Inni had a feeling as if the man beside him wanted to say something to him. This, or else the idea that he might be disturbing the man in his trance, made him go inside. A short staircase led up to the shop. Here he was in Asia, or rather, in a rarefied, lofty abstraction of Asia. The tall man in chalk-stripe suit who came up to him formed a contrast with the place, but in such a way as to lend to the sparse but cleverly arranged objects an air of banal realism that made it seem plausible that they might actually be sold. For the first time it struck Inni how very strange was the job of an art dealer.

"Mr Wintrop," said the man, "I have heard about you already. Bernard Roozenboom phoned me just now."

And had no doubt given him a perfect description, thought Inni. How would he have described him? He would have to ask him. So like Bernard, to phone. Inni would never know whether this was in order to help him or in order to claim part of the credit in the event that he really had hit on something special.

"I gather you make splendid discoveries from time to time."

"I have been lucky once or twice," said Inni, "but in your field I am blind and deaf. You may laugh at me if you like."

Inni unwrapped the print and handed it to the man, who looked at it in silence for a moment and then put it down.

"I am certainly not going to laugh at you. You have come very close to greatness here. This print, this woodcut, can be regarded as belonging to the ukiyoe period. I don't know whether the term means anything to you. Transient life, a concept in Japanese art history. If you like, I will explain it to you some day. But the man who made this is certainly not one of the great ones, as, for instance, an Utamaro. If he had been, and you had bought it, let us say, by accident and therefore for very little money — but frankly, that would have been quite impossible, although you never know — you would have been able to live in luxury on Capri for a long, long time."

Capri of all places! But never mind.

"What is it then?"

Riezenkamp's large, white face hung briefly over the print as if he wanted to nibble the female figure off the paper. His eyes went from right to left, from top to bottom.

"It's a pleasant little thing but rather crude. I hope you didn't pay much for it?"

"Not a lot."

"Good. Look, I'll show you the difference." He went away and returned with a large book.

How many books have I seen today? thought Inni.

"This is a famous print by Utamaro. Even if you aren't trained in looking at these things, you ought to feel something."

It was a portrait of a woman. Riezenkamp's hand made a few sketching movements and then came to rest on the margin of the page.

"When you look at it consciously for the first time, you won't find many points of contact. With the things you're accustomed to looking at, I mean."

He was right. In the large, light-coloured area of her face, there were no shadows, no nuances. Sensuous it most certainly was, but far away, unapproachable. The tiny mouth stood slightly open, the eyes without lashes were also very small and seemed to express nothing, and the nose was a single curved line. Without any change in colour the area of the face ran down into the decollete, which with the most minimal of lines suggested the swell of the right breast, strangely in the lower left-hand corner of the print. The way in which the green kimono bulged forward and up at the left shoulder did not seem logical to Inni, but neither had that peculiar backward billow of the Sibyl's veil been logical, except that there it had looked clumsy and here it possessed an indefinable dramatic force.

"What do those characters mean in the top left-hand corner?"

"That is the courtesan's name, and the name of her brothel."

He looked again. The only lewd thing about the print was that minimal breast line. The face remained abstract. There was no reason to touch her. Perhaps that was forbidden anyway. You weren't supposed to kiss Amsterdam whores either. But geishas weren't whores.

"And down here?"