Clemens Meyer - All the Lights

No one knows he’s lying up here, twenty-seventh floor. Perhaps it’s reception, room service or the hotel manager himself. Johannes Vettermann crawls slowly, one eye opened slightly, but everything around him is blurred and unfocused. All he knows is that he has to crawl towards the ringing. How often has he thought he was going to die, knew it and waited for it? But he survived every time. The good healthy fruit, he thinks, all the vitamins protected me all those years. And suddenly he’s very warm, although he was freezing and shivering a moment ago, and he feels as if the hundreds and thousands of peaches, apples, bananas and kiwis he’s eaten ever since he could eat, so for almost fifty years (and he ate them puréed too when he was a wee thing with no teeth), he feels as if now they were warming him and protecting him; their concentrate, or their souls, he thinks with a smile, he feels himself smiling, their souls are still inside him, and when one day in many years he’s rotting in the ground the worms will come across a man made of vitamins, and they’ll live a very healthy life down under the ground with him. Johannes Vettermann crawls across the five-star suite, he’s crawled across so many five-star suites in his time, he’s lain on the floor or in the bathtub, with water or without, he’s looked out of the window, walls of glass, New York, London, Paris, Los Angeles, Mexico City. 1989 brought big money. Bananas and kiwis and oranges for the East. They had to buy new trucks to take the fruit to all the new places. We supplied the whole of the East, he thinks and now he feels that the telephone must be very near by, even though he can barely feel anything now and the ringing has stopped. It’s perfectly silent in his suite; he doesn’t even hear his own breathing.

‘We’re rich, Johannes.’

‘Haven’t we always been rich, father?’

‘If you want to buy that house by the sea now, a villa for two million, we’ll still have more than enough.’ His father, who had started out over fifty years ago with a weekly market stall, is happy, standing with his son Johannes Vettermann, who hasn’t painted a picture for over fifteen years, up on the bridge of the wholesale fruit market, and they watch the fruit flowing and they both laugh very loudly at the great flow of cash, holding each other by the shoulders. But Johannes Vettermann doesn’t buy a house by the sea or a villa either. Johannes Vettermann buys pictures; suddenly he sees that there are pictures in art again, even if they’re not his pictures. He buys pictures, pictures he doesn’t understand at first, which he stands in front of and looks at for so long that he feels, it’s coming to get me now.

And then Johannes Vettermann buys pictures, photographs, sculptures, installations; travels the world, dines out with artists in the finest restaurants, attends art auctions in tailor-made suits — ‘Sculpture “Bunny”… going once … going twice … does anyone bid more than number thirteen, the gentleman in the blue suit … and sold, “Bunny” goes to number thirteen for …’ — and Johannes Vettermann sits in his spacious home, surrounded by pictures and photographs, and looks at ‘Bunny’, a white female torso sitting on a chair, no head, one long thin arm that looks very dead hanging down at the side of the chair, and her legs are as long and thin as locust legs. Two bent over, white sausages in the place where her head ought to be, bunny’s ears, protruding behind the back of the chair like the handless arms of a strange puppeteer, someone and something , thinks Johannes Vettermann and strokes Bunny’s black fishnet stockings on her thin legs. He sits with the woman who created her in a hotel room, wearing a vest and sweating and sweating and he feels the irregular beat of his heart. First he injected something to come up, a party, a reception and lots of people and lots of art, then he took something to come down, to find some kind of calm again, a long signal and a short one, no good for your ticker, it can be all over like a shot, that’s how the film maker died who he admired so much, over ten years ago now. She’s sitting by him on the bed, fully dressed, he puts his arm around her and presses his head against her shoulder, and she talks to him in a quiet voice, as if to a little child. ‘All right, Johnny, it’s all right.’

He had a girlfriend, he met her in Italy. He’s a well-known art collector now, he’s well-known for discovering young talents, and sometimes he wonders whether he’d have bought his own pictures, the ones he painted when he was young. ‘You have extraordinary talent, Mr Vettermann.’ He strokes Bunny and wonders whether he loved her, his Italian girlfriend, wonders whether he’s ever loved anyone. He doesn’t have children. He thinks of the sculpture of a pregnant woman he saw a few years ago. I have to meet the artist, he thought back then, and later he did meet him and bought other sculptures by him. The pregnant woman had one hand on her bump, one half of her body was grey, the other half exposed, without skin, so that you could see her yellowish skull, her muscle cords, the brownish tissue of her breast and the foetus and the umbilical cord inside her. Could I have had children? Could I have loved your mother, Bunny? He thinks of his mother; she died not long ago.

‘Johannes.’

‘Yes, mother?’

‘Promise me you won’t destroy yourself.’

‘I promise, mother. I want to sell a lot more fruit and buy a lot more art.’

Johannes Vettermann, fifty-one years of age, is lying in his suite on the twenty-seventh floor and he can tell he’s dying and he’s trying to reach the telephone; the doctors have brought him back a couple of times before. A long signal and a short one. He’s only creeping a centimetre at a time, although he knows he must be there any moment now. A long signal and a short one. He thinks of all the pictures he bought, of the celebrated exhibitions he put on with his collection, thinks of his own exhibitions in the past few years since he started painting again.

‘Slit-eyed Charlie was the end and the beginning, right, Johnny?’

‘Get out of here,’ he whispers.

‘The Vietcong is everywhere, right, Johnny?’

‘Leave me alone,’ he whispers, ‘or help me.’ He’s not scared, even though the man standing in front of him looks like he’s always imagined Mephisto. But this man is really his best friend, a painter he discovered and promoted and bought, and whom he once painted so that he looked like the devil himself.

‘Start again, Johnny, you have to paint, paint, Johnny. Art, only art you make yourself can save you.’ And Johannes Vettermann painted, even though he hadn’t picked up a brush for almost twenty years. And now his friend Mephisto, the man who wanted to save him, is standing in front of him, blocking the last fifty centimetres to the telephone and saying things about the Viets. ‘They were the end and the beginning, right, Johnny?’

And he’s right; a couple of years after 1989 the Vietnamese started taking over the fruit market. They brought the prices down but he and his father didn’t give up that quickly; they stood up on the bridge of the wholesale fruit market, swaying in the storm, gripping each other by the shoulders, and they were fearless and they knew they could be victorious, but the competition grew and grew — ‘Vietnamese, Johnny, as if they came from China’ — and the prices fell and fell, and Vettermann’s wholesale fruit market went bust, and his father, who’d started out with a weekly market stall over fifty years ago, turned into a broken old man, and they sat in banks and financial institutions and watched the red grow and grow. ‘The colours, Johnny, never forget the colours …’

‘And another painting from the Vettermann Collection, ladies and gentlemen, at a starting price of …’ Johannes Vettermann had paid far less for the picture. It’s his favourite picture and he sorely misses it. A man standing in a boat, fishing. The colours of the water and the sky are very pale, violet and blue, mist on the water, and the man stands dark like a shadow, and behind him on the banks the shadow of the forest. Neo-romantic, almost kitsch, Johannes Vettermann thought at first, but then after a while he was still standing in front of the picture and he began to feel the loneliness and the beauty.