The Model

by Lars Saabye Christensen

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

The painter Peter Wihl - a celebrated success early in his career - is about to turn fifty. The prospect is stifling his creativity and jeopardising his preparations for a major new exhibition intended to revive his reputation. In a cruel twist of fate, his concerns about his forthcoming birthday are rendered meaningless when he discovers that he has an incurable eye condition and will be completely blind within six months. What is a painter without his eyes? A chance encounter with an old classmate leads a vulnerable Peter into a sinister world which will haunt him for as long as he lives. The novel poses the question: How far is the artist willing to go in the pursuit of his art?

Release date: February 6, 2007

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 329

Sample

When I was finally given the chance to interview the artist Peter Wihl on the evening of his fiftieth birthday and the opening of his new exhibition, it would transpire that we would be unable to print it because of the terrible accident which occurred afterwards. We were sitting in the restaurant, directly opposite the gallery, where I could still hear people going to and fro. I almost had a bad conscience about laying claim to Peter Wihl, the evening’s honoured guest, in this way, but it was at his suggestion that we went there to talk. He seemed nervous and expectant; not so unusual perhaps, considering that his exhibition had just opened, and he had enough on his mind. I noticed he kept turning towards the window while he was talking. He even ordered champagne for me. And I had the feeling that most of what he had to say consisted of quotations, things he had read or heard, borrowed phrases, well, especially what he said about the devil, that the devil had liberated the colours from objects. Yet, it was as though he wanted to tell me something else, something more, something important; perhaps that was why he was also so impatient. He had said before that he wanted to tell me everything, although I didn’t know what that meant.

The tape recorder was on the table between us. I checked it was working. It was. Peter Wihl’s voice was everywhere. He went on speaking. I cannot say I understood every word, but of course I would have time to listen with greater care when I got home. After a while I interrupted, perhaps emboldened by the champagne, and went straight to the point.

‘Did you ever fear you wouldn’t finish?’ I asked.

I heard something fall to the floor – a fork perhaps; he was eating cake.

‘Finish?’

I’m sure he understood what I meant. Nevertheless, I had to say:

‘Finish in time for the exhibition while you still have your sight?’

His face was close to mine, his voice forced, intransigent.

‘You don’t finish a picture; you forsake it.’

He went quiet, turned away from me; I could hear it in his breathing and I was afraid I had ruined everything. I wanted to say something. I searched for the right words. I wanted to say something to the effect that forsaking a picture, not finishing it, was both a beautiful and terrible thought, but before I got that far he must have seen them through the window, because he stood up and said, in what was now a relieved, almost happy voice:

‘Please excuse me for a moment. My wife and daughter are here.’

Then Peter Wihl went out into the street to meet them.

Six months earlier he had lost his eyesight.

One October afternoon Peter Wihl was working in his studio on paintings for the anniversary exhibition; twelve large canvasses. He was wearing his uniform, ready to do battle: bare feet in shabby sandals, a long, stained smock, a scarf around his neck. He had finished the groundwork, the base. Now all that remained was the art. And he was in that effortless flow, which can happen now and again. It was almost like controlled inebriation. His hand was steady and obedient, his mind clear. He knew where he wanted to go. It was just a question of finding the way. He moved with ease from motif to motif. They began to take form: anatomical sections, muscles, a shoulder blade, a sinew, a finger joint. He could scarcely remember the last time he had experienced such control: he was now the master of his tools again, the master of his craft, at the very moment when the craft was to be elevated to art, when the workmanship, the toil, was to be made to shine, and it felt like happiness. It was happiness. But, all of a sudden, he experienced a terrible pain in his eyes, as if something had shattered inside them and burst, as if his eyes had been filled with noise. Colours merged, lines dissolved, all perspective was lost, everything went black and he sank to the floor. It did not last long. It was already over. All he heard was the echo of pain, the throbbing beat of his heart. Peter Wihl was on his knees and remained there for a long time, resting his forehead on his hands. He came round. Everything fell into place with the same swiftness it had fallen apart. By degrees, he rose to his feet and, turning to the tall windows, he could see Helene and Kaia at the bottom of the garden, framed by the bars and crosses of the windows in the fading October light, and this sight filled him with a joy, or relief, which was so deep, so vast, that he was on the verge of tears, because seconds before he had been plunged into darkness. Helene was sitting on the white bench beneath the apple tree thumbing through a manuscript. He had never seen her with greater clarity – short black hair, purple fingerless gloves, an ochre-coloured coat – while Kaia was scraping together fallen leaves with a rake that was much too big for her. And it occurred to Peter Wihl that he had never painted these two people, neither his wife nor his daughter.

Perhaps that was the reason: they were too close to him and he did not dare.

He put on his windcheater and went out to join them.

Kaia continued raking; the leaves lay around her in a yellow circle.

The branch above Helene’s head was black; at its tip hung a frozen, red apple.

‘What are you reading?’

‘What am I reading? The
Wild

Duck, of course.’

‘Yes, of course. Is it going well?’

Helene put down the manuscript and looked up at him.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Nothing.’

She sat observing him for a while.

‘What’s the matter?’ she repeated.

‘Just a bit tired.’

A gust of wind swept all the leaves away and Kaia stood in the midst of a yellow storm. Peter went over to her and together they tried to catch the leaves; some were dried up and crumbled to dust between their fingers and disappeared while others were wet and just slipped through, landing somewhere else in the garden. It was impossible to get them all and in the end he went down on his haunches in front of his daughter.

Her eyes were green.

She had her mother’s eyes.

‘Let’s leave the leaves till next spring,’ he said.

‘Should we?’

‘Yes. Then they can have a rest under the snow.’

Kaia laughed and pointed at him.

‘You’ve got paint on your face again.’

‘Have I really? What colour?’

She dropped the rake and pressed her forefinger against his forehead.

‘Blue.’

‘Just blue?’

‘Black, too.’

‘No others?’

‘Yes. A bit of brown.’

‘Brown?’

‘Yes. There. And white. On your nose.’

‘What do I look like?’

Kaia thought about that as they looked into each other’s eyes, and Peter Wihl was once again overwhelmed by those green eyes, his child’s eyes, open, undaunted, so unsullied, as though they always saw everything for the first time.

But then a shadow flitted across her face.

‘I don’t know,’ she murmured.

‘You don’t know?’

Kaia lowered her eyes and shook her head.

And she said these strange words, her voice almost sounding frightened, and it scared Peter, too:

‘You don’t look like you.’

He tried to laugh, to laugh it off.

‘Don’t I look like me?’

Kaia shook her head again.

Helena rose from the bench – the wind blew open the pages of her manuscript – and went over to them. Peter slowly rose from his haunches. She put her hand on his shoulder.

It was already dark.

‘Go and have a rest before they come,’ she said.

‘Come? Who’s coming?’

Kaia shouted first:

‘Uncle Ben!’

Peter sighed.

‘Uncle Ben.’

Helene leaned against him.

‘Had you forgotten?’

‘Now I remember. Uncle Ben’s coming.’

‘With company.’

‘My God. With company again?’

Kaia laughed, as though relieved to be able to talk about something she was looking forward to.

‘Uncle Ben with company!’

‘And food,’ Helene added.

Peter did as she said; he went to the studio and rested on the mezzanine floor. Soon, to the smell of turpentine, he fell asleep, not into a profound sleep, but just beneath the surface, on the margins, enough to dream even so: he is standing alone in the schoolyard by the fountain; he is perhaps eleven years old; he is cold. Then another boy comes over to him. Peter, if that is what he is called in the dream too, is frightened and steps backwards, but the boy, who is bigger, or heavier, than him, keeps coming until he is very close, almost right up to him. The boy asks: ‘If you could choose, would you prefer to be blind or deaf?’ At that moment Peter wakes up, the answer to the question in the dream on the tip of his tongue: This is not a choice. This is a threat.

And he remembered Kaia’s strange, startling words: You don’t look like you.

He got up, showered, then leaned closer to the matt mirror, which began to clear, and his face loomed up as though coming out of fog and all he could see was that he was the person he was, Peter Wihl, on the cusp of fifty, one day older than yesterday and one night younger than tomorrow.

In his eyes, though, he could still see the vestiges of that sudden horror, the panic that overcame him when he went momentarily blind.

That was the difference.

Peter Wihl thought: Will I ever be free of it?

He returned to the studio and sat there in the dark among the pictures.

Then he put kindling in the stove, crumpled up some dirty old newspapers, lit them, opened the damper, and the heat soon began to radiate from the black iron, causing the glass doors to mist up.

Ben arrived at half past seven. He had a bottle of red wine with him and one glass. He sat down on the other chair – there were two in the studio, one which was good to sit on and one which was not. Peter was sitting on the good one. Ben poured and drank. He was the only person allowed in the studio while Peter was working; not even Helena or Kaia was allowed in; that was an agreement they had, Peter’s sole law, apart from alcohol, and it was absolute.

Peter drank water.

Ben drank wine and started the conversation in the way he always did:

‘You should get a lamp in here.’

‘You know I paint in natural light.’

‘Soon be working short days, Peter.’

‘Is that a problem for you?’

‘I hope the pictures won’t be as dark as the surroundings.’

Peter stood up and turned one of the canvasses to face the wall.

‘Where’s the friend?’ he asked.

‘The friend’s entertaining Helena and Kaia.’

‘And who is the current friend?’

Ben chuckled.

‘Do I detect a certain scepticism, or should I say, condescension in your simple question?’

‘Not at all.’

‘Or a monogamous, masculine criticism of my lifestyle?’

It was Peter’s turn to laugh.

‘Touchy tonight, Ben?’

‘His name’s Patrick and he’s twenty-nine years old.’

‘Where did you find him?’

‘At the swimming pool in the Grand on Sunday morning. Or to be more precise, in the sauna. Happy?’

Benjamin Rav had turned sixty-five last year. He was lean, fit, swam his thousand metres every morning in the Grand Hotel pool, could be ascetic for odd periods, always wore a double-breasted suit, had thick, grey hair. When he was eighteen he had a jewel put in his left earlobe, as gypsies, sailors and gay men tended to do. Eight years later he travelled to the Spanish fishing town of Cadaquez and bought a suitcase of lithographs by Salvador Dali – unsigned, it was true – for next to nothing and sold them on to the idle, nouveau-riche jet set along the Mediterranean coast, earning himself a fortune in the process. That was how he got started. Ben, as his closest friends called him – and there were not many of them – had been Peter Wihl’s gallery owner for twenty-five years, ever since Amputations, his  debut exhibition.

‘Helene is concerned about you,’ Ben said.

Peter sat down again.

‘Is she?’

‘And when Helene’s concerned, I become concerned.’

‘I’m just a bit tired.’

‘Tired? There are six months to the opening. The following day you have my permission to be tired. The following day you can die as far as I am concerned.’

Peter filled his glass and drank.

‘I’ll get over it,’ he said.

‘Do you realise what’s at stake?’

‘I know very well what’s at stake.’

‘You won’t get anything for nothing any more. Quite the contrary. They’re after you. They’ll chuck you on the scrapheap if they can.’

‘Thanks, Ben. That’s calmed my nerves a lot.’

‘I mean it, Peter. That’s why you have to show them pictures they’ve never seen the bloody like of before.’

‘That’s what I’m intending to do. Here they are.’

‘To be frank, you just can’t afford to repeat yourself any more.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean exactly what I say, Peter. Do you know what evil tongues are saying about you now?’

‘Tell me, Ben.’

‘They’re saying that if Peter Wihl paints any more body parts, he’ll soon have to start on entrails.’

Peter looked away and laughed.

‘And who are these evil tongues?’

‘Whoever.’

‘Whoever? Who the hell is whoever?’

‘Forget it, Peter. What I’m trying to tell you is that you can’t allow yourself to be tired now. Do you hear what I’m saying? Are you listening to me?’

‘I’ll get over it,’ Peter repeated.

But Ben would not let go.

‘Helene said you looked shaken when you came out of the studio this afternoon.’

‘Shaken? Is that what she said?’

‘Yes. Shaken. That was the word she used. Had anything happened?’

Peter got to his feet and stood by the tall windows, with his back to Ben. Darkness was drawing in; all he could see was a few lights some distance away, from the houses in the suburb where he had grown up. Rain was falling, but he did not see it.

‘Have you heard what’s happened to Beckers’ titanium white?’ he asked.

‘No, tell me.’

‘The chemist died and the formula was sold to China. Damned if they didn’t mix it with soya oil! Now it’s unusable. It’s lost all its brilliance.’

‘Is that why these pictures are so dark?’

Peter swivelled round and could hardly distinguish Ben in the shadow between the pictures.

‘You own the walls. I paint the pictures. Shall we leave it at that?’

Ben walked towards him, from a different angle than expected, and raised his glass.

‘I’ll get you some white from London,’ he said.

They drank and Peter knew of course that Ben had not been taken in by this explanation: that Peter was shaken because the chemist, the inventor of his favourite colour, the white base, was dead. Should he not tell him the truth – that he had gone blind for a few moments, even though now he could see again, and this one incident had shaken him in a way he did not have the words, nor even the imagination, to express, that death had sent out feelers six months before the opening, six months before he turned fifty. Should he tell him that?

Helene called them.

They walked through the garden, through the leaves, to the kitchen in the main building.

Kaia helped to set the table. It was covered in small bowls and dishes, containing all that new-fangled food, finger food, which Peter loathed. He did not want to use his fingers; there were implements for that kind of thing.

‘Have you made everything yourself, Uncle Ben?’ Kaia asked.

Uncle Ben laughed and lifted her in the air.

‘I don’t make anything, my princess. Everything I have, I buy.’

Ben’s friend was already sitting at the table and the moment he saw Peter, he got up, held out both arms and grasped his hand.

‘It’s an honour to be allowed to come here and meet you, sir.’

‘Now, now,’ Ben interrupted. ‘We use normal forms of address here please, even though we are in the presence of a genius.’

The man, or boy, would not let go of his hand.

‘My name’s Patrick.’

With his round child’s cheeks, he seemed younger than his twenty-nine years, but perhaps it was mostly because of his clothes: wide trousers, large shoes, T-shirt with Russian letters on the front. Country cousin in town was Peter’s immediate thought. Anyway, he did not look like a swimmer, that was clear, but Peter also knew that when Ben picked this boy out, thereby vouching for him, investing in him, so to speak, Peter Wihl became the one on the outside. He would soon be fifty and was not conversant with the codes; the signals were meaningless to him; he no longer knew the difference between the victor’s roar and a cry for help; he was, in other words, out of step, a foreign player on home ground and he was fine with that.

Was that what Ben meant by the scrapheap?

‘Peter Wihl,’ Peter said.

Patrick smiled.

‘I’m a great admirer.’

‘That’s a relief.’

At length Peter got the whole of his hand back from Patrick and they were able to take their places. Helene poured wine or water into the glasses, Kaia drank cider and they ate with their fingers for a while in silence. It was food that required heaps of serviettes and large rolls of paper towels. Indeed, by rights, baths and showers should have followed, and Peter wondered whether to go and get himself a knife and fork as a little joke at the expense of Ben’s affected modernism – these exotic dishes that are no more than homely fare where they come from – or perhaps he should just start drinking instead. Of course he did neither. He turned to the boy.

‘What do you do, Patrick?’

‘Communication,’ Ben answered.

Peter filled his glass with water.

‘Can’t Patrick answer for himself?’

‘Communication,’ Patrick said.

‘Well, don’t we all do that?’

Peter noticed that Helene and Ben were constantly exchanging fleeting glances; in other words, they were concerned about him, they had been talking about him and had him under observation.

‘What does communication mean?’

It was Kaia asking.

Helene leaned towards her.

‘It means understanding each other.’

Kaia gave solemn nods while continuing to look at Peter.

‘I asked Daddy,’ she whispered.

‘It means that soon, when I say you have to go to bed, you have to do it,’ he said.

‘No!’ Kaia shouted.

‘Yes, you do,’ Peter insisted. ‘In simple terms, communication means that I’m right!’

Everyone laughed. A little too much, thought Peter; Helene in particular. After all, he had not been that funny. The dishes were passed round again, past him, always past him, in much the same way as the conversation passed him by, and Peter could not be bothered to follow. He had been uncoupled: he seemed to be in a carriage that was slowing and in time would grind to a halt, in a siding, on the scrapheap, and he had an intense sensation of being on the outside, and that which could be depended on to give him a certain pleasure, his voluntary exile, as it were, where he could do his own thing in peace, wherever he was, which some took to be a charming distraction, gave him no satisfaction, nor any peace, since on this evening he was not master of his own absence; this time it went deeper, down into the terrible darkness that had swept his legs away earlier that day and set him back on his feet with the same rapidity.

‘Amputation.’

Peter looked up with a start to see everyone staring at him.

‘What?’

Helene placed her hand over his without saying anything.

Patrick bent closer.

‘Amputation,’ he repeated.

Peter still could not follow.

‘Amputation?’

Now they looked at each other, although Kaia continued to look at him; she seemed sad and impatient at seeing her father this way, so out of it, so out of place.

Ben recharged his wine glass.

‘Patrick is referring to your debut, my dear friend. Your first exhibition in my gallery. The exhibition which made you what you are. Do you remember it, Peter? It’s a mere twenty-five years ago.’

‘Is it the wine or this revolting finger food which is making you sentimental?’

Ben laughed.

‘And, if you pay careful attention, you’ll hear he’s very enthusiastic.’

Ben was already loud, as he tended to become at a certain point, by nine o’clock as a rule, not because he was drunk, he was never that, he just wanted to be sure everyone could hear him. It was a bad habit from his youth when most people in his circle whispered, remained silent or lied.

Peter looked at the clock. It was three minutes past nine and he could not remember the time passing; so quick, so long. Had he had a blackout again?

He was terrified, and he laughed.

‘How old were you then, Patrick? Three? Or perhaps you hadn’t even been born?’

Helene pulled a sheet off the kitchen roll and put it on Kaia’s lap.

‘Two of the paintings are still in my bedroom,’ Ben said.

Patrick looked straight into Peter’s eyes.

‘Exquisite.’

‘Exquisite?’

‘Yes. Parts of the body bereft of their functions. Brutal and beautiful. Why don’t you paint like that any more?’

There was a moment’s silence; the criticism was so apparent, so thinly disguised in the language of polite conversation, in the backhanded compliment, that even Ben looked down, abashed, embarrassed, and he took his time wiping his fingers on what remained of a blue serviette.

Peter looked straight at Patrick.

‘Because I’ve already done it.’

Ben raised his glass and said, in acknowledgement of Peter and as a reprimand to his young, modern friend:

‘The answer was a great deal better than the question.’

They toasted, after which there was another silence. By good chance, Kaia broke it; the silence.

‘What does amputation mean?’ she asked.

Peter set down his glass.

‘If, for example, one of your toes hurts and it becomes infected, and there is a risk the infection will spread to the rest of your leg, then they cut off the toe. That’s an amputation.’

Helene laughed.

‘Don’t listen. . .