Chez Max (2 page)

And now this! They come rolling up in a TEF, causing an uproar. Over the next few weeks there'd be just one subject of conversation in the local streets and bars: could that cultivated, elegant, good-looking Leon, always ready with a joke, popular with women, be a murderer? A terrorist? A leading member of some fanatical group? Why else bring a TEF? Leon of all people, a man with so many natural advantages – everything about him was genuine, no cosmetic surgery on any part of his body, he hadn't even had his eyelashes lengthened – Leon, whose life seemed to consist solely of pleasure and amusement? On the other hand, what did he actually live on? He
said
he was a painter, and considering the number of women pretty enough to be artists' models who went in and out of his place, that could be true. But did we ever see him with a picture under his arm, or at least a blank canvas…?

I knew the story of Leon's artistic career. He had told me one night over our fourth bottle of Franconian wine. He had once been a painter – a real working painter, he still thought of himself as one, it was just that he couldn't get his pictures down on the canvas any more. I remembered being torn two ways that night. I'd never felt so close to Leon before, while at the same time I realised that I mustn't get too friendly. Because even at that time there was something about Leon to suggest that one day he'd come within the scope of the Ashcroft statutes, and then it would be the duty of the Ashcroft agent responsible for this part of the city to lay his conduct before the Examining Committee.

I looked from the TEF to the façades of the buildings to the right and left of it. Curtains were moving at the windows, faces disappeared and came into view again, families crowded together to look out, children pressed their noses to the window panes, old folk had drawn chairs up to their window sills, and they were all waiting to see what that TEF was about to do.

I shook my head: Leon had simply had bad luck. Or he hadn't been able to exploit his good luck – perhaps it came to the same thing. And yet at first, if you believed his story, everything had gone so well for him. In his mid-twenties he graduated from the famous Warsaw College of Art, he went to Sicily for the climate and the light, moved into a studio in a former warehouse on Palermo harbour, and launched into the standard notion of an artist's life: painting, seaside walks, drinking wine, girls. After six months he had painted about thirty pictures; he went to see various galleries in Palermo and held his own first small exhibition. Naples and Rome followed, he slowly worked his way up, met a rich woman who was an art dealer, fell in love with her, and had his work shown in a prestigious Zürich gallery. Meanwhile he kept on painting more pictures, clearly developing a style of his own, and he was soon considered a hot tip by those who knew his work.
Vodafone Art Magazine
described him as ‘the most retro of present-day artists, in the best sense of that term. He boldly and refreshingly tackles the age-old still life genre, which should really have been a thing of the past by now, but he paints his apples and pears in so natural and sensuous a manner, with such a lavish wealth of colour, that you cannot tear yourself away from his pictures.' Inspired by the reception of his work, Leon sent photographs of it to galleries in Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris, London, attended private viewings, made contacts, got drunk every evening with major or minor figures in the art trade, and in spite of all this he was still painting at least a picture a week.

‘I was sleeping only two or three hours a night, taking all the stimulants I could lay hands on – and at the time, as you know, it was still quite easy to get hold of synthetic cocaine. For a while those sods even thought of legalising it. Probably because they guessed that they couldn't keep people happy in the long run if there were no ways of having fun apart from
that
,' said Leon, nodding dismissively at the wine bottle.

I smiled. Leon's views and his way of expressing them amused me. But I automatically registered the fact that my neighbour had experience of drugs, and described the government as ‘those sods'.

‘Well, anyway, I all but killed myself. I took to the bottle like there was no tomorrow, I painted picture after picture – always those beautiful true-to-life pears, because that's what I was praised for, and I wasn't up for anything new, I didn't have the wherewithal for that – the wherewithal being peace and quiet, time, sobriety, and above all faith in myself.'

Leon glanced at me almost apologetically for a moment, then turned his head away and looked at the floor with distaste. As I watched him I felt a mixture of kindness and sympathy.

‘In fact I was a little pile of famous shit. I wasn't an artist at all except for the deadlines I had to meet. And just at that point came the invitation to exhibit in one of the most important London galleries, Junowicz & Kleber. They wanted me to paint them an entire series. Twenty pictures. It was my big chance.'

Leon broke off, looked absently into space for a moment, then picked up the bottle and poured more wine for both of us, splashing it on the table.

‘But I wasn't yet so washed up that I didn't know it. On the contrary: I knew perfectly well that here was one of the two or three moments in your life when the door opens briefly to show you a new, better, richer world. You have to run, you have to hurry to make the most of those moments, you have to stake everything. The main thing is to get in through that doorway, come what may – or out of it, as the case may be. But because I knew that so well, my chance very soon died on me. They'd given me six months to finish the series. I was drunk more or less round the clock for the first month, and in my few sober moments I threw away everything I'd done in my alcoholic delusions. Not that Junowicz & Kleber wanted anything special, just more apples and pears. But I suddenly thought it was time not simply to strike out in a new direction but to give them something out of the ordinary. I thought I had to reinvent myself from scratch. Because what was I at that time? A twenty-first century artist still painting fruit. And for all my arrogant mockery of the so-called avant-garde, the sculptors who worked with gas, the designers of volcanic eruptions, the builders of fountains running with piss, God knows what else, I suddenly felt very insignificant beside them. They'd at least struck out in new directions, hadn't they? Tried to find new forms of expression, new levels of perception – or any pretentious way you like to put it. While there was I with oil paints, canvases, still lifes!'

Leon spat out the last words as if speaking of an enemy he hated. Then he picked up his glass, took a gulp, slammed it down on the table and stayed there, leaning forward, shoulders hunched, while his eyes wandered around the restaurant.

For a while I hardly dared to move. I watched Leon's motionless profile and waited for some sign from him. Finally I pulled myself together and said, cautiously, ‘Well, personally I… I mean, I don't know much about art… but I like still lifes.'

‘Oh yes?' said Leon slowly, sounding bored but also almost challenging as he turned to look at me. Under his gaze I felt I'd been caught in the act of something, though I didn't know what.

‘Yes, really, I like them a lot,' I assured him, wondering if he thought I was making it up. ‘I mean, look round this place.' And I indicated the room where we were sitting. ‘This is my restaurant, I designed it myself, and what do you see on the walls?'

Leon briefly examined the pictures to left and right, framed posters of works by Matisse and Cézanne, and then looked at me incredulously for a moment.

‘Yes,' he said then, nodded at me, and smiled faintly. ‘Well, thanks.'

I almost said, ‘Don't mention it,' purely as a reflex.

‘I know my opinions aren't particularly…'

‘That's all right,' Leon interrupted me. ‘Sorry.' After a moment he added, ‘And I've always said that's what art is all about.' Without looking up, he gestured vaguely from the posters to me. ‘But probably I'm just one of the many who are secretly pining to be famous in the colour supplements for fountains running with piss and all that.'

I had no idea what Leon was talking about. Once again I looked at his profile and didn't move a muscle myself. Not for fear of saying something wrong this time, however, but out of respect. Obviously Leon was fighting his own inner demons.

After a while I asked, ‘So how did those six months go?'

Leon looked up as if he wasn't sure where he was. ‘What?'

‘The six months Junowicz & Kleber gave you to paint their series – what did you do?'

‘Oh, that.' Leon picked up his glass of wine and drained it. As he poured more, he said, ‘After a month I stopped drinking, just like that, not another drop and then…' he smiled sardonically, ‘then I reinvented myself. Painted my fruit as if painting fruit was the biggest joke in the world. Exaggerated the colours until they were sheer kitsch, put the fruit in rubbish bins or on paintings in galleries with visitors eating the fruit off the canvas, that sort of thing. I still had this mental picture of myself sitting with the Junowicz & Kleber people in the room behind the gallery, drinking champagne and making brilliant conversation. In my mind I was already so famous, my work was so highly thought of, that it struck me as extremely clever to make fun of my own stuff.'

He paused, and I took my chance to say quickly, ‘Well, I can imagine it was very funny to have people eating the fruit.'

‘Yes, exactly,' agreed Leon, nodding slightly, and I couldn't guess from his expression just how he really meant his ‘Yes, exactly'. Then he added, ‘But that doesn't matter. After another month I came to, and then I finally began working properly.'

Leon stopped and took a deep breath, as if he had to steel himself before he went on. ‘And it worked. They wanted twenty pictures, three weeks later I had the first ten finished, and if I'm not much mistaken they were the best still lifes I ever painted. It was as if I had new eyes, as if I were suddenly seeing strong, living, startling colours again, and the arrangements and perspectives were so easy, it all came as naturally as if there wasn't any other way to put flowers or fruit down on the canvas. Friends who came to my studio couldn't take their eyes off those pictures. As if the fruit on my canvas had more juice in it, more magic about it, than the real fruit in their kitchens. Or as if my pictures showed them, for the first time, what marvels Nature or God or whatever you like to call it creates. I had the feeling I'd found my way to the heart of it all. My pictures were the truth. So yes, they were only fruit and flowers, but the good Lord didn't start out with human desperation or couples locked in amorous frenzy, he began with single-cell organisms and photosynthesis – fish and leaves.'

For a moment Leon looked as if his words were little living creatures and he was watching them go, waiting expectantly to see if they'd be walking upright after this speech or slinking away, ashamed. Then his face suddenly changed, he cried angrily, ‘Yes, I felt like God Almighty! Except that God didn't collapse after three days out of sheer terror that he couldn't keep the standard up. Or else he simply didn't realize what amazing stuff he was creating. As for me, I stood looking at my ten pictures, ten out of the twenty, I could already see the delighted faces of visitors to the gallery, I heard the critics' praise – and then suddenly, literally, I could hardly move any more. It began with numbness, first in my shoulders, then in my arms, and a few days later the shaking began. To this day the doctors haven't found out what's wrong. My muscles, my sinews, my brain – apparently they're all fine, but as soon as I pick up a brush or a pencil and get in front of a canvas, or just sit down with a pad of paper…' He raised his arm and mimed an uncontrollable tremor. ‘No kidding. It's been like that for over fifteen years. I can write letters by hand, I can even thread a needle, but the moment I so much as think of drawing or painting… Oh, I still have my studio in Palermo, sometimes I fly there for an evening, sit by the sea, drink a couple of glasses of wine, act as if everything was normal, try to relax, to dream, I talk to a waiter I've known for the last fifteen years, I listen to the waves, and when the wine and the salty sea air have made me feel strong enough I pay the bill, and the waiter, who doesn't know anything about my block, wishes me good luck with my painting in his usual way. Then I go over to the studio in the old warehouse, just to sit with my easels and canvases for a while, breathing in the smell of paint and turpentine and smoking a cigarette or two. I have a cleaning lady who comes in once a month, there's no dust lying around, and it looks as if I'd painted my last picture only yesterday. So I sit there, I look around me, I smoke – everything's fine. Until I suddenly think of a flower or something like that. Usually it's flowers, always something really simple like daisies. And I see the flower more and more clearly in my mind's eye, I know just where to position it, how the shadow will fall, how I'll use the colours, and then I tell myself: no, just a simple sketch. No colours, no background, no shadowing. A quick drawing of a flower, the sort of thing you'd doodle while you're talking on the phone. After all, when I made a note of something yesterday I could still use a pencil…'

 

I looked at the TEF and sighed. What a disaster! What Leon had told me that evening still seemed to me total proof of his artistic vocation, even more so at this moment, when he was probably already in handcuffs. The honesty of his description of his torments and his megalomania, his contempt for his own corrupt nature, the intensity he devoted to everything. And of course the pictures. I'd looked on the Internet the next day, and through various roundabout links I'd finally tracked down two reproductions of works by Leon Chechik in a Budapest gallery: ‘Apples In Front of a Blue Sofa', and ‘Almond Blossom Ecstasy'. I downloaded them to my smart three-by-three metres BTL original-reflection wall, and was fascinated. Sure enough, I'd never seen such fantastic almond blossom in real life. It positively exploded into the room out of a blue, sunny sky; it seemed as if I could touch the sea of flowers bathing me in a clear, pale pink light. I automatically thought of springtime, youth, being in love. I seemed to smell the sweet scent of the blossom. To think that an oil painting could do something like that! And because of the zero per cent additional lighting of the original-reflection wall, I could be sure that the colours in Budapest were at least as bright as those I saw here. How I would have liked to tell Leon the next day what an impression his pictures had made on me! I even left ‘Apples In Front of a Blue Sofa' as a permanent wall-saver; the sight of those apples rolling out of the basket as it tipped over, scattering apparently at random over the tiled floor and around the legs of the sofa, made me feel so calm and happy. But when Leon came into Chez Max that evening with a girlfriend, greeted the waiters as cheerfully as usual and joked about my Teutonic dive and German dumplings, I instantly dismissed the idea. For I knew what pain was hidden behind that façade. Any compliment paid to Leon, however heartfelt, would only remind him of fifteen years of artist's block. And a cheerful façade, I said to myself, is better than no cheerfulness at all.