Intimacies(25)

He shook his head and sighed. Of course, I don’t need to tell you this, he continued. This is your stock in trade, you deal with words. The others in the room were talking quietly or looking through their papers. He was waiting for me to respond. I hesitated and then said, My job is to make the space between languages as small as possible. This was not the rebuke I wished to make, as a statement it was abstract to the point of saying almost nothing at all. And yet it was true: I would not obfuscate the meaning of what he had done, of these words that he deemed so insufficient, my job was to ensure that there would be no escape route between languages.

The former president was still, he appeared to be waiting for me to continue. But I would not say anything more, and at last the former president looked at Kees and he said, reluctantly, wearily, Well. Shall we continue? And I finally understood that he was bored, bored by the recitation of his own crimes, bored by the fashioning of a legal strategy that might yet free him. He surveyed the lawyers around the table, he could not bear them because they were the physical manifestation of his culpability, of which I had little doubt. These men who hectored him about the specificities of his actions, he wished to be free of them, in the same way that he wished to be free of his guilt.

This was why he found my presence soothing. Not because he required my interpretation, not even because I was an amusing distraction, but because he wished for someone to be present during those long hours, someone who would not insist on examining the actions of his past, from which there could no longer be any escape. And I realized that for him I was pure instrument, someone without will or judgment, a consciousness-free zone into which he could escape, the only company he could now bear—that, that was the reason why he had requested my presence, that was the reason I was there. I wanted to get up and leave the room, to explain that there had been some mistake. I saw myself doing it. But that was only in my head. That was not what actually happened. What actually took place was that I remained in my seat, that I interpreted for the former president, that I remained there, in that room with those men, until they no longer wanted me.





10.


Jana’s opening at the Mauritshuis was more than usually crowded, perhaps due to the theme of the exhibition, one that was both serious and tongue in cheek. Jana had frequently spoken about the pressure to achieve better attendance numbers, to find ways of reframing the permanent collection so that it appealed to a younger and broader audience.

It was with this directive in mind that Jana had conceived the current exhibition, which was titled Slow Food and was the museum’s first exhibition devoted to still-life paintings of food. Jana admitted the concept and the title in particular were something of a gimmick, entirely different to the first two exhibitions she had overseen. But she insisted that she had found plenty of merit in the idea. It’s a clear theme in Golden Age painting, a definite genre, she said, even if titles like Still Life with Cheeses, Almonds and Pretzels do make you think of a Jeff Koons sculpture. I suppose that’s interesting in and of itself. There is a lot to be said about class and consumption and the culture of display.

I looked at the people gathered in the museum lobby, dressed in designer brands and playing ostentatiously with their smartphones. They drank their wine and stood around the bust of Johan Maurits, who founded the museum with a fortune built from the transatlantic slave trade and the expansion of Dutch Brazil, Jana had told me the history on a previous visit. She wished they would take the bust down, not only did it celebrate a slave trader and colonialist, it wasn’t even a good piece of art. I had to agree, I thought Maurits appeared particularly pompous in this rendering by Bartholomeus Eggers, with his jowls and pursed lips and ornate dress. He stared into space, one hand splayed across his front. Although the bust was surrounded by guests, no one seemed to pay it any mind, the history present but unconsidered. As I watched, a man in a suit yawned and brushed against the bust before lazily righting himself again.

I went upstairs, where I saw Jana on the far side of the gallery, deep in conversation with two women with perfectly coiffed blond hair, they were both wearing suits and high heels, as if they had arrived directly from the office. The quality of Jana’s attention seemed to suggest that they were donors, she was nodding enthusiastically but her smile was stiff and hollow. I didn’t want to interrupt and instead went into the next gallery, which housed the permanent collection. The room was empty, and I wandered undisturbed, the sounds of the crowd receding as I passed through.

The rooms at the Mauritshuis were small in scale, galleries that felt almost domestic compared to the exhibition spaces at some museums, their size so immense they seemed to force an experience of sublimity upon the visitor. I thought that I preferred the intimacy of these rooms, which were better suited to the paintings not only because of the size of the works—some were no bigger than a sheet of paper, the kind of paintings you wanted to approach, that could not be experienced at a distance—but also because of their subject matter. Unlike the paintings in Jana’s exhibition, the canvases in this room primarily featured figures, men and women and children.

The artifice of their poses was evident, but that did not detract from the intimacy of the paintings—in fact it was the very act of posing, the relationship that act implied, that created this sense of uncanny familiarity. In some cases they were clearly posing for the painter, they gazed into what I thought of as the lens or camera eye, although of course the concept was an anachronism, they would have been gazing not into an apparatus but directly at the painter himself. The idea was almost impossibly personal, and I realized the notion of such a sustained human gaze was outside the realm of experience today.