第5章 First Attempt

His first attempt failed within four days, and it failed honorably, which made it worse. Viktor approached the wall the way any trained hand would, squaring the photograph into a grid of ten-centimeter squares, transferring coordinates to the linen in chalk, filling each cell with competent masonry. The result, viewed from three meters, was flawless. Viewed from one meter it was wallpaper. Every brick was accurate and no brick was alive, because transcription had flattened time out of the surface entirely, and a wall without time is a drawing of a wall, not a witness. He stood before the eight meters of dead surface for most of an evening, then took the scraper to it while the paint was still soft, working methodically from left to right like a man erasing his own name. The second attempt failed more slowly and more instructively. Having punished himself for mechanical copying, he swung to the opposite error and painted as a painter, letting the raking lamplight bloom, letting the splice-scar gather drama, giving the tower shadow a velvet depth that flattered the composition. It was handsome work and it was false, and this time he caught the falsehood himself before the canvas had dried, because the photograph kept correcting him with its flat, unimprovable truth whenever he glanced up. The picture in the sleeve had no style whatsoever. That absence, he began to understand, was its fingerprint, and matching an absence is the loneliest problem a craftsman can face. What finally worked was to stop thinking of the task as painting altogether. He rebuilt his process around the idea of deposition, of laying down evidence rather than image. He compiled a reference of forty-one tonal values mixed from lead white, ivory black, raw umber, and a trace of Egyptian blue, each value painted onto a stave and labeled in pencil, so that every patch of wall resolved to a number before it became color. He built a lamp cradle that held his light at the exact angle of illumination in the photograph, and worked only between dusk and dawn, when the studio's own shadows would not quarrel with the ones he was transcribing. For the worn arrises and the lime-scallop islands he abandoned brushes for tools of his own grinding, bits of felt, rubber, and rolled paper, which deposited pigment without describing it. The rhythm that emerged imposed itself like tide. Eleven nights of painting followed by two nights of drying and comparison, the canvas under a cloth, the photograph back inside its Vermeer fortress, the studio swept of every grain of evidence. By the end of the first cycle he had covered the left third of the linen, and the wall had begun to breathe under his hand, the scar-splice crossing the lower courses with its pale diagonal, the merlons shouldering the sky along the top edge. He had painted altarpieces with less concentration. When he stepped back on the eleventh night and looked at what stood on the stretcher, he felt the specific vertigo of a man who has done his best work for reasons he cannot examine. It was during those same eleven nights that the unease about details took root. A painter working at this magnification lives among coincidences the way farmers live among weeds, but certain features of the photograph declined to behave like weather. The lit windows, for one. Their brightnesses fell into a small vocabulary, full glow, half glow, curtain-dimmed, dark, and the sequence of states repeated along the building's face with variations that were almost, not quite, musical. He measured them once with a densitometer borrowed from a photographer in Vinohrady who asked no questions because Viktor paid for silence with a small seascape. The readings confirmed what his eye suspected: the differences between adjacent windows were too regular, too banded, to be the accident of separate households going to bed. The scaffolding argued the same case in a different dialect. Its poles cast clean parallel shadows, yet two groups of shadows ran at angles that no single arrangement of lamps could produce, as if the scene had been lit twice, once for the camera's benefit and once for whoever might study the camera's product. Even the stacked tarpaulins participated in his disquiet. They lay in three heaps whose outlines he reproduced faithfully night after night, and somewhere around the eighth night he admitted that their placement bothered his sense of composition precisely because it obeyed one, a triangle of covers anchored to the wall's base with the tidy imbalance of a still life arranged by someone who knew arrangements carry meaning. He did not yet permit himself the word message. Craft offered softer explanations and he clutched at them like railings on a stair. Security staging, perhaps, decoys laid out to confuse hostile lenses. Maintenance choreography, the fortress's bureaucracy expressed in tarps and scaffold permits. A painter's pareidolia, the occupational disease that finds faces in craquelure and conspiracies in varnish. Each explanation satisfied for a day and dissolved by morning, and through it all the commission continued, because whatever the wall carried, the carrying had been bought and paid for, and his hands answered to the contract now even when his mind filed objections. The first installment of payment arrived while the left third cured. It came, as instructed, through the mouth of the stone lion on the embankment, wrapped in oilcloth and weighted against the river wind: used notes of five currencies, none newer than a decade, smelling faintly of another life. No note accompanied the money except a slip of paper bearing a single typed line confirming receipt schedule and reminding him that inspection would judge fidelity to source, not artistry. Viktor burned the slip in the sink and divided the notes into hiding places that would have offended a professional and satisfied a pessimist. The sum confirmed what Tomas's retreat had already told him. His client feared nothing so much as being identified by appetite, and clients with anonymous money are the most identifiable men on earth. On the last night of the drying interval he sat across from the covered canvas with tea going cold beside him and conducted the audit he had been avoiding. Strip away craft, he told himself, and answer plainly: why does anyone pay a museum's ransom to own, at true scale, forty meters of fortress wall that cannot be hung, shown, or sold? Not for love of masonry. Not for decoration. The fee purchased accuracy beyond price, accuracy of cracks and shadows and the position of tarps, and accuracy is sought only where deviation matters. Somewhere a copy of this wall would stand next to the wall itself, and someone would read the difference, or the sameness, and act upon it. The thought entered quietly and sat down and refused to leave, and when sleep finally came near dawn, it came in the posture of a man keeping his clothes on. ---